Its first known owner is believed to be Dr John Dee, Elizabethan scientist and notorious magician. He added page numbering to its folios, before selling it to the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf II (1552–1612).
Emperor Rudolf then gave it to his pharmacist, who had cured him of an illness. Fifty years later, it appeared in the hands of an undistinguished alchemist in Prague, before passing via the rector of the city’s Charles University to Athanasius Kircher—the most curious and brilliant mind of the age. Kircher spoke twelve languages, including Aramaic, Persian and Coptic, and was the leading authority on hieroglyphs, as well as author of an encyclopedia on China. He was fascinated by everything from music to botany and geography to engineering. He has been described as ‘the last man who knew everything’.
Yet even Kircher failed to make any progress with the inscrutable manuscript, and on his death it was handed around a number of Church libraries, until in 1912 the Jesuit college at the Villa Mondragone near Frascati sold it to an ex-Russian-revolutionary turned antiquarian book dealer named Wilfrid Voynich, after whom the tantalizing manuscript has ever since been named.
“I still find it hard to believe a text from the 1400s can really be so complicated that modern experts and computers can’t crack it.” Cordingly sounded doubtful.
“Maybe if it seems like nonsense, perhaps it is?” Ferguson suggested. “Who’s to say it isn’t just an elaborate hoax?”
“Most experts believe it’s real,” Ava countered. “Sophisticated analysis of the patterns and frequency of the characters, syllables, and words shows that the text has all the characteristics of a genuine language. It’s highly unlikely a fifteenth-century forger would want to, or be able to, create a hoax of this technical linguistic skill and complexity.”
“So people have tried absolutely everything?” Ferguson was shaking his head, mystified.
Ava nodded. “Pretty much every known theory—from a new language or alphabet to simple and complex substitution ciphers, one-time pads, and steganographic codes. But despite the hundreds of thousands of hours of effort, it has never yielded up a single recognizable word.”
“I’ve never heard of anything like it,” Cordingly looked bemused. “Why would someone go to all this effort?”
“In medieval times, knowledge could be dangerous,” Ava explained. “Sometimes people had to hide away their learning. So perhaps it relates to a forbidden subject like alchemy. Or maybe even one of the more occult branches of medicine—some of which were linked to forbidden subjects such as astrology, like when to harvest pharmaceutical plants, or the best time to administer particular remedies.”
Ferguson caught Ava’s eye, interrupting her thoughts. He nodded towards a flat square briefcase on the table by the window. In it, she could just make out what looked like a white robe, emblazoned with a large red cross patty. Rolled up beside it was a leather belt with a looped frog to hang a sword.
Cordingly glanced up from the manuscript and noticed where she was looking. He stood up immediately, and walked across to the case, shutting it hastily.
“I thought it was all aprons and badges, not crusader knights’ uniforms?” Ferguson pointed to the rows of framed photographs on the walls displaying groups of men in dark suits sporting a seemingly infinite variety of elaborate aprons and medals.
Cordingly shook his head. “As we’re all friends, I can tell you that this building,” he nodded towards the photographs, “is the headquarters of traditional freemasonry. But let’s just say that a lot of things happen beyond these walls. You could say this building is a gateway.”
“That was the cross of the Knights Templar in your briefcase,” Ava pressed him. “If you’ll forgive me for raising it again, you seemed a little reluctant to talk about them earlier.”
He gazed solemnly at her. “Some things are better left unsaid, Dr Curzon.”
The Templars again, and another brick wall.
Ava turned back to the pile of books he had brought from the library. Aside from the colour facsimile, the others were an assortment of studies and theories about the mysterious manuscript.
“Do you mind if I keep these for a few days?” she asked, scooping up the pile.
“Of course not,” Cordingly smiled. “I’m glad to be able to do something for you.”
Ferguson stood up, and as he did so, Ava saw him slip something into his pocket from a pile of stationery on a side table.
Cordingly ushered her and Ferguson to the door. “And maybe,” he added with a twinkle, “one day you’ll be able to do something for us.” He paused as he turned the brass handle and showed them back into the elegant shiny corridor. “Who knows,” he smiled enigmatically, “perhaps you already are.”
——————— ◆ ———————
The University of Oxford Botanic Gardens
Rose Lane
Oxford OX1
England
The United Kingdom
Malchus headed purposefully down the ancient university city’s High Street.
It was a warm evening, and young people were beginning to fill the pubs along the narrow side alleys radiating off the medieval thoroughfare.
He had nothing but disdain for them. At their age, he had already set out on his chosen path.
Walking briskly, he passed the high-windowed Victorian Examination Schools, and continued on to where he knew the elderly man would be.
The old professor’s routine was as regular as clockwork.
As the jumbled architecture became more uniform and the crowds of tourists calmed and thinned out, he drew level with the austere Tudor frontage of Magdalen College.
Turning right, he passed through a small gate and down a short flight of steps into a tree-covered area. Ahead of him loomed an imposing triumphal stone archway, its bays housing the figures of King Charles I and II implausibly draped in togas.
He ducked under a doorway in the high wall, and said nothing as he quickly paid his entrance fee.
Once into the lush green Botanic Gardens, one of the oldest and most varied in the world, he headed down its central path, past the fountains and wooden box-wheelbarrows parked up beside the acres of flowerbeds. He made straight for the end of the ancient ornamental Walled Garden, where he knew the elderly man would be.
He assumed the ageing professor came here for the tranquil atmosphere—to be surrounded by the wonders of nature’s calming beauty.
Today would be different
, Malchus mused.
Nature had its dark side, too.
He carried on to the garden’s far end, passing a vast stone urn set on a pedestal in the middle of the path. It was decorated with large malevolent rams carved on either side, their diabolical horns folding back to serve as handles.
He smiled to himself.
It seemed oddly fitting.
Beyond it, he spotted the professor gazing thoughtfully into the distance, sitting alone on one of a pair of wooden benches in the shade of the spreading trees.
Malchus could see he had once been a powerfully built man. But now age had rounded his shoulders, and his face had sagged.
He was wearing a cream linen jacket over a black shirt and trousers. An overly-wide white circular collar announced he was one of Oxford’s many priests of the high tradition in the Church of England.
Malchus sat down next to him and looked around. Directly ahead was a small pond sheltering an island overtaken by a vast plant with unfurled leaves several yards across. Behind him, the river flowed past lazily.
Ahead in the distance he could see a tall square bell-tower with delicate octagonal turrets dominating the other side of the river. But he had no interest in what it was. The only thing he wanted in this city was locked inside a different tower.
“Professor Stone?” he asked, breaking the silence.
“Do I know you?” The man was softly spoken. There was no suspicion in his voice—just a warm curiosity.
“I’ve been watching you,” Malchus answered.
The elderly man was still gazing into the middle distance. “If you’re selling something, I’m afraid you’re wasting your time.” His voice was gentle. There was no reproach.
“You’ve caused me a lot of trouble,” Malchus continued.
“Oh?” The elderly man’s voice betrayed only the faintest hint of his childhood Polish.
“You don’t drink, gamble, whore, or have any vices to blackmail you with. And you don’t have any children to threaten. All of which leaves me with limited options.”
He had the priest’s attention now. The white-haired man was looking at him in confusion.
“But what you do have,” Malchus spoke slowly, dropping his voice, “is a sister—whom you visit every Tuesday afternoon at the St Aldate’s nursing home.”
The old professor was gazing at him in bewilderment.
“Let me make it simple.” Malchus pulled a photograph out of his pocket, and handed it across.
The priest’s elderly eyes crinkled as he looked at the image, attempting to make sense of it.
Malchus glanced around impatiently. He could hear the birds singing, but doubted the old man was listening to them any more. His watery eyes were staring at the photograph, the skin on his face now pale and tight.
Malchus looked down at the photograph.
It was rather good, even if he said so himself.
It showed an elderly woman lying in what appeared to be a raised hospital bed. It was plainly after lights-out in the facility, as the woman was asleep and the room was in shadow.
The photograph was normal in every way, except for the rough noose of rope looped around the old woman’s neck, with its bulky hangman’s knot lying over her frail chest.
“I was a little amazed,” Malchus confided, “at the lack of security. But these private care homes watch their profit margins, and I imagine it would be a luxury to have staff supervising each room all night.”
Malchus took the photograph back, watching as the old man placed his hands on his knees to steady the visible trembling.
“What do you want?” His soft voice was choked. “Please God, don’t hurt her.” He looked about wildly—fear evident behind his eyes. When he spoke again, his voice was a whisper. “I’ve no money. I’m nobody.”
Malchus sneered. “There’s no need for such modesty, professor. Not with me. Others may not share our interests, but your work on the
Dead Sea Scrolls
, especially the final battle in the
War Scroll
, is unparalleled.”
“She’s a good person.” His voice was hoarse.
“Then this is exactly what you will do.” Malchus handed him an envelope.
The priest opened it slowly, his hands shaking as he removed the word-processed piece of paper inside.
Taking a pair of large tortoiseshell reading glasses from his jacket’s outside breast pocket, he read the note slowly.
When he spoke, his voice was frail. “What makes you think the deity would favour a man like you?”
Anger exploded inside Malchus with a searing ferocity.
He thrust his face into the priest’s, and spat out an answer. “You think you’re chosen? Do you suppose the God who led armies in triumphant conquests of bloodletting and skull-crushing cares anything for lace-wearing sycophants like you? Do you imagine the God who slashed and ripped his way through his enemies’ jugulars with a flaming sword of vengeance and retribution is in any way interested in eunuchs bleating hymns?”
“You’re an obscenity.” The old man’s body shook.
“Read your Bible,” Malchus snapped. “Didn’t the God of Israel punish those who failed to follow as he commanded? Didn’t he instruct armed men to slaughter the unfaithful, to go throughout Jerusalem and ‘Kill, without showing pity or compassion. Slaughter the old men, the young men and women, the mothers and children. Defile the temple and fill the courts with the slain.’ Ezekiel, chapter nine.”
The priest shook his head. “That’s the Old Testament. God is love and our redemption. His gift of Christ and the new covenant changed everything.”
Malchus sneered. “And God said, ‘The people of Samaria must bear their guilt, because they have rebelled against their God. They will fall by the sword; their little ones will be dashed to the ground, their pregnant women ripped open.’ Hosea, chapter thirteen. You are ignorant of your own God, priest. You have made your religion as you want it, not how it is.”
“You’re an abomination,” the priest whispered.
“
You’re
the abomination,” Malchus spat back, his eyes blazing. “You were made in God’s image, yet you suppress the strength and power he gave you, and twist his hard creed into the shrill whining of stricken women. You and your kind disgust me.”
Malchus held out the photograph showing the sinister image of the old woman. “If you fail me, you will fail her.”
Removing a lighter from his pocket, he took back the envelope. Holding it together with the photograph, he lit the corners. The curling yellow flames took quickly, lapping up the paper hungrily. As the images of his sister began to char and disintegrate, the old man turned a shade paler.
Malchus stood up. “I’ll be back for it tomorrow.”
He turned the burning paper the other way up and watched as the flames consumed the last of the picture and envelope.
Dropping the charred remains, he ground them into the grass with his heel.
The bells from two nearby steeples began to chime loudly, one after the other.
“
Finis, cinis, vermes, lapis oblivio
,”
15
Malchus quoted, standing and brushing himself down as he turned to leave. “I’m sure a man of your learning understands well.”
——————— ◆ ———————
The Freemasons Arms
Covent Garden
London WC2
England
The United Kingdom
Back on the pavement outside Freemasons’ Hall, Ava looked about. “We need somewhere quiet to think.”
She crossed the street and ducked into the porchway of a high-fronted pub.
“Seriously? In here?” Ferguson was looking at the large lettering above the hanging flowerpots over the doorway. It read simply,
The Freemasons Arms
. “Aren’t we trying to avoid the police? It’s probably full of them.”
“I doubt it,” Ava pushed open the left-hand door, noticing the same Ark and cherub crest on the swinging pub sign. “They like to keep their membership under the radar.”
The interior was a typical Victorian London pub, complete with large wooden tables and long leather-backed benches. Etched mirrors advertised the pub’s brewery, leaving the remainder of the walls free for a range of football memorabilia and the mandatory widescreen plasma televisions. The bar itself stretched the length of the room, adorned by the obligatory polished brass foot rail.
The room was largely empty. They were served quickly, and took their drinks to a nearby table.
Ava spread Malchus’s cryptic letter out onto the battered but highly polished wooden tabletop between them, and contemplated it quietly.
It clearly had three distinct sections, all in Malchus’s hand—the first line in vermillion red Voynich, the next three in emerald green Voynich, and the last in emerald green ordinary letters.
“What does that mean?” Ferguson asked, putting his finger on the fifth line. “‘FRATER PERDURABO’. I can only remember that
frater
is Latin for brother.”
Ava had been turning it over in her mind since she first saw the words. She knew their literal translation—that was straightforward. But the phrase was vaguely familiar, and she had a frustrating feeling she had come across it somewhere before. Still, the plain meaning of the words was simple enough. “
Perduro
means to go on forever,” she explained, “or to endure. So it simply means ‘Brother, I will go on forever’.”
Ferguson looked grim. “Another madman dreaming of a thousand-year
Reich.
”
She took a sip of her cider, enjoying the punchy aroma of apples. “Did you find anything on De Molay?” She was conscious they had not had a chance to discuss what he had been researching while she had been chasing after Prince’s SD memory card. “Did you get anything to confirm whether the Templars still exist, or if he’s their leader? Any leaks or rumours?”
He sighed with resignation. “Unfortunately, Olivier De Molay turns out to be as much of an enigma as the Order he claims to lead.”
He leant forward across the table so as not to be overheard. “I couldn’t find any public records on him anywhere. And I’m not at all clear how he could even be descended from the last Templar Grand Master, Jacques de Molay.”
“Because the Templars took vows of chastity?” Ava asked. “I had been wondering about that.”
Ferguson nodded. “But who knows. It’s possible Jacques may have had a child before joining the Order. It happened. No less a person than the founder and first Grand Master, Hugh de Payns, was married and had a son before he felt the call to create the Templars.”
Ava turned the idea over in her mind. It was an intriguing possibility. “In those days, a married man could only join a monastic order if his wife had left this world—either through a grave or the gateway of a nunnery.” She paused, aware the answer to her next question could kill off any claim Olivier De Molay had to be legitimately directly descended from the last Grand Master. “Did you find any evidence Jacques married young, before giving it all up for the Templars?”
Ferguson rubbed a hand across his face in consternation. “It’s bizarre. No one knows anything about Jacques’ early life. Nothing at all. It’s a complete blank until he was elected Grand Master in his fifties. In fact,” he shrugged, “there’s so little material available, it’s almost as if someone didn’t
want
the world to know about his early life. It’s like it’s been systematically erased.”
Ava sat back against the buttoned leather cushion of the bench.
Another dead end.
They seemed to be everywhere when it came to the Templars.
She had been hoping Ferguson’s research would have uncovered something—anything—that would help throw some perspective onto the story Saxby and De Molay had told them on the coach in Rome.
She was increasingly aware that she still had no real idea who Saxby and De Molay were. They plainly had significant influence of the sort usually reserved to clandestine government departments—but she had no real sense whether the Templar claim was true or a cover for something more sinister.
It made the urgency of solving Malchus’s letter even more acute.
With every passing hour she was drifting further from her chance of recovering the Ark and the Menorah. And although they were making progress, at times it felt as if they were taking two steps back for every one forward.
She looked down at the strange letter lying on the table, and then up at Ferguson, who was flicking through the small pile of books on the Voynich manuscript she had borrowed from Cordingly.
“There seem to be a lot of theories about what the Voynich manuscript is—all by eminent experts in their different fields.” He read off the back covers. “Alchemy. Pharmacy. Botany. Cosmology. Astrology. Medicine. Magic. They can’t all be right.”
Ava could see where he was going. “You still think it’s a hoax?”
He tapped his beer glass gently on the table, preoccupied. “A couple of things are bothering me. For a start, the text doesn’t have any punctuation. Doesn’t that seem odd to you, if it really is a genuine language?”
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,” Ava answered with a smile, “and the earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”
“I didn’t take you for the type who got religious at moments of tension?” He looked at her uneasily.
She tried to keep the amusement off her face. “The Hebrew scriptures, which they call the
Tanakh,
make up most of the Bible. They include the well-loved tales of the creation, the garden of Eden, Noah’s ark, the tower of Babel, Jacob’s multicoloured coat, and a hundred other familiar stories. We call it the Old Testament. But, just like the Voynich manuscript, none of it has any punctuation.”
“You mean someone added it later?” Ferguson looked incredulous.
She nodded. “Standardized punctuation is a relatively recent thing. None of the original ancient biblical texts had it. People have refined it in the last five hundred years. Basically, they had to make it up.”
He put his glass down, staring at her. “You enjoy doing this, don’t you?”
“In fact,” Ava continued, “if you want to get technical, the lack of punctuation is the least of the Old Testament’s problems. A much more challenging difficulty is the fact that it was written in biblical Hebrew and Aramaic—two dead languages that did not even have alphabets.”
Ferguson raised an eyebrow. “I don’t know how you sleep at night.”
She smiled. “Dead languages have words whose subtleties or meanings we often don’t know. And both languages are written with abjads—a uniquely Semitic system in which you only write consonants, with no vowels. So if I write ‘bnd’, you have to put in the vowels. You need to decide whether I meant ‘band’, ‘bind’, ‘bond’, ‘boned’, ‘u-bend’, or anything else you think of that fits. As you can imagine, it’s easy to guess incorrectly and create totally different words and meanings. In the case of the Old Testament, you have to do it for six hundred thousand unvowelled and unpunctuated words which frequently don’t have any spaces between the words either, as they often wrote texts in one continuous stream of letters. There are similar problems with the Greek of the New Testament, too. Although it does have vowels, it was also usually written without any spaces or punctuation.”
Ferguson looked horrified. “So how on earth do people know what the real Bible says? Who decides? How does anyone choose which version is reliable?”
Ava looked over at a sign on the wall proclaiming: ‘The Football Association was founded here in 1863’. “I suspect most people are largely unaware there are different versions of the Bible’s core texts. They probably imagine there’s one original old Bible locked away in a vault somewhere, like the official French metal metre ruler from which all others in the world were once measured. But the truth is the opposite. There’s no template copy of the Bible, just many hundreds of differing manuscripts and fragments for theologians to argue over. There’s the Alexandrian Septuagint, the Masoretic from Babylon or Tiberias, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and a load of others. But it’s not something people talk about a lot. For instance, in the English-speaking world, most people only really know the 1611 King James Bible, frozen in the language and limited textual scholarship of Shakespeare’s time. It’s an amazing work, a milestone in western thought, but no one could seriously say that reading it gives anything like the same experiences or meanings as the various ancient Hebrew and Aramaic texts.”
Ferguson took another sip of his drink, shaking his head. “You’re a very dangerous lady to know. I’m not sure the world is ready for you.”
Not dangerous, she reflected. She had just always had a fascination for the questions other people did not ask. It was one of the things that had driven her to archaeology in the first place. She had never been satisfied with the explanation that an object was ‘old’ or ‘historical’. She wanted to take things out of the numbing fog that blurred the centuries into a misty ‘olden times’, and find the details that connected them to real people who made, needed, or used them.
Of course, she knew the Bible was a collection of treasured and sacred texts for billions of people, revered for over two thousand years. But she could also see it with professional eyes as an unruly family of physical manuscripts—copied and translated thousands of times over the millennia, in and out of a variety of languages, with all the errors involved in those delicate processes.
The thought of scribes scratching away at their vellum and parchment brought her back to the Voynich manuscript, and something she had noticed in Cordingly’s office.
She opened the large Voynich facsimile book again at a random page and turned it round so Ferguson could see it. “Another remarkable thing about the manuscript is the handwriting itself—the
ductus
, or flow of the author’s pen. Do you see it’s not broken or blotchy at all?”
Ferguson nodded.
“That means the scribe was happy writing the alphabet. It suggests he had done it many times before. Because normally if someone writes unfamiliar characters, the writing is hesitant and choppy as they stop regularly to check its accuracy.”
“So whether he was writing or copying, he knew the letters intimately.” Ferguson finished the thought for her.
“Exactly,” Ava took another sip of her cider and sat back, feeling her energy coming back, “which makes a one-off fraud seem less likely.”
“There’s another thing bothering me,” Ferguson flicked through the pages of the large facsimile book deep in thought. “People write to communicate. So unless the Voynich manuscript is a private journal, the readers would’ve needed a key. What if that key was once part of the manuscript?”
“Here,” he pointed to a descriptive table in the book he had open in front of him. “It says the manuscript has lost a number of individual pages and two whole quires, whatever they are.”
Ava sat forward—more alert now.
She had missed that.
She quickly took two napkins out of the small chrome box in the middle of the table. “If you want eight sides to write on, you take two large sheets of paper.” She laid the napkins on top of each other, and folded them down the middle, creating a small booklet of four pages with eight sides. “Each section like this is a quire. Newspapers are still made this way, but with more pages. To build an old book, you simply stitch a group of quires together.” Peering at the descriptive table he had found, she could see that the Voynich quires were mainly made of four sheets. “So if Voynich is missing two whole quires, that’s potentially thirty-two sides of writing.”
“And here,” Ferguson pointed at the table again, “it says the manuscript contains a stub where one page has been hacked out.”
“If you’re right, and it came with a key,” Ava tucked Drewitt’s letter back into her pocket, “then we have to find Malchus or Drewitt’s copy of that key. We may’ve missed it at Stockbridge House. Or maybe in Drewitt’s rooms up at All Hallows College.”
“What I don’t get,” Ferguson looked pensive, “is if it’s not a hoax, why would anyone still need the original key? Why can’t they just crack it? It simply doesn’t make sense to me that modern computers can’t break it. They can perform ten thousand trillion operations a second. It’s not like Bletchley Park any more—you don’t have to put everything onto binary punch-cards and feed them into a wheezing computer the size of two rooms.”
The words hit Ava like a blow in the solar plexus.
She stared at him.
“What?” He looked unsure what he had said.
“That’s it!” she answered breathlessly.
Ferguson looked at her in confusion.
“Don’t you see?” She could feel the fog lifting. “We don’t need to crack Voynich,
because Malchus hasn
’
t either
. He may be shrewd, but he’s not cleverer than a supercomputer. And I don’t believe he found an ancient key either—it would be in a medieval language, and I don’t imagine that’s his strong point.”
“Then what?” Ferguson looked uncertain. “How did he send a letter to Drewitt in Voynich?”
“He didn’t.” She struggled to keep the elation from her voice. “All he’s doing is using its characters. Blindly. You just said it. At Bletchley Park they turned unreadable codes into readable punch-cards—an ‘alphabet’ that made codes intelligible to computers.”