The Copernicus Archives #2 (5 page)

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“I need this book. I have to have it,” I said.

“Oh, Becca, I hope it works,” said Sara.

“It will,” said Lily. “This is Becca we're talking about.”

Using the Ackroyd credit card, we bought
Utopia
and a copy of More's
Selected Writings
that Darrell found in the English history section, which happily included a bio written by More's son-in-law William Roper, who eventually married Meg, which was fun to know. It also had some of Thomas's letters.

After paying the sneezing guy, we ducked out and slipped into the Pret A Manger next door and pushed two tables together. I got an egg sandwich and a bottle of water and set them on the table to block Copernicus's diary from view. It was covered in a now-tattered copy of the London
Times
, but was still strange enough to draw attention if people saw it too closely. I put
Utopia
and my notebook next to it.

“Thomas More made up an alphabet for the people on his fictional island of Utopia,” I said. “It's basically a substitution code of”—I counted—“twenty-two characters, which means that it probably translates to Latin, with some of the characters serving as two letters, like
I
for
J
or
V
for
U
and no
Z
.”

I didn't want to read the words Copernicus had written for me in the diary before I remembered the four words he had written for Meg. Because of all the other junk zooming around my head, however, I was pretty astonished that the words were actually still there, as if waiting for me.

I translated the symbols into letters. The code did turn out to be in Latin.

“The first of Elizabeth's words is
caestv
, the second is
horologivm
, which, after you change each
v
to a
u
, are Latin for ‘glove' and ‘clock.' Meg's words are
ocvlos
or
oculos
, which means ‘eyes,' and
citharae
, which means ‘lutes.'”

“What did he mean by giving each daughter different words?” asked Wade.

I tried to read a tone into his question but couldn't. “I don't know yet. It has to do with a portrait of them.”

“
Glove, clock, eyes,
and
lutes
,” said Lily, “There aren't any clocks or gloves in the constellations, are there?”