The Cloisters(46)

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“I need to show you something,” I said. I was running a towel over my hair, and had spent what felt like an hour in the shower scrubbing the dirt and grit out of my hands and knees.

Rachel was sitting on the bed in my room, having started a fire in the fireplace while I was in the bathroom. It was well past midnight, and the only noise in the house came from the popping of sap as it was licked by the flames.

If I could pinpoint the moment that my loyalty to Rachel became stronger than my loyalty to Patrick, it was then, that night. The moment when I decided I needed her to confirm what I had already begun to work out in the forest. From my bag, I produced the card and its old fake front. I set them down on the bed next to her where the word on the card, trixcaccia, stood out. It seemed, in so many ways, to be nonsense. A collection of consonants and vowels, but already I could see the way the suffix had been turned into a prefix, the word cut up and reassembled. It was a code. One I had already seen. I returned to my bag and felt around until I found the folder that contained the transcription from Lingraf, the passage neither my father nor I had been able to decipher, and set it down next to the cards.

Rachel didn’t say anything, picking up the card and turning it over to look at the back before turning her attention to me. “These were what Patrick was picking up the other day?”

I couldn’t miss the accusation, the implication in her question—that he hadn’t told her what we were picking up at Ketch’s, and then again, that this might be why he had been so angry.

“Not exactly,” I said. I placed the old false front on top of the card. “All the cards Patrick picked up looked like this. While they were in the upstairs room, I was looking at this card, the Popess, and just flexed it in my hand. I knew I shouldn’t, because it could crack the paint, but the stiffness had always, like you said, felt wrong. Like it was manufactured. When I did, the top corner of the card came loose. I could see something else underneath but didn’t want to damage it. So I separated it with my fingernail. It was held together with flour and water, and this is what was revealed.” I removed the false front as I spoke.

“Diana,” said Rachel, looking down at the card. “The huntress.”

I nodded.

“And the others?”

“I didn’t have a chance to get to them.”

Rachel kept her eyes focused on the card, as if she were committing it to memory.

“Does he know?” she asked, finally looking up to meet my gaze.

“No. Only you.”

“Good. If he hasn’t figured it out by now—” She shook her head. “It only took you minutes of feeling the card to notice. How could he have them for this long and still not know?”

“Do you think he already knows one of the cards from Stephen is missing?”

Rachel shrugged. “He told me Stephen was working on getting him a complete deck. And that Stephen had located a few loose cards that matched the descriptions of the deck he had sold to us. They would be coming in over the next few days. So I don’t know if this is all of them, or if there are more still coming. When I went in to talk to him on Friday and let him know we were leaving, it didn’t sound like Stephen on the phone. At least not that I could tell.”

I was grateful, then, that Patrick had passed off the receipt to me. He had no record of what Stephen had sold him, although, no doubt, Stephen would know. Stephen with his ledgers and his records.

“The huntress,” Rachel said again, this time more softly. “Diana Venatrix.”

I looked down at the card, Rachel’s words echoing in my ears. Venatrix was Latin for huntress, while cacciatrice was the Italian word. I had always, when looking at the transcription written out by my advisor, thought I could see bits of Latin here or there. But translations without a key were impossible. The card, I realized, was that key—an image of Diana as the huntress, and the word, spelled out in the same strange way, was something we could use.

I reached into my bag and pulled out a notepad, on which I wrote the word on the card: trixcaccia. And then the Latin, venatrix, and the Italian, cacciatrice. There, in the word on the card, I could see the way the Latin suffix, the ending of the word—trix—had been combined with the prefix of the Italian—caccia. In order to translate Lingraf’s transcription, all I needed was to watch for standard Italian and Latin prefixes and suffixes.

This kind of parsing wasn’t mine; it was my father’s. It was how he had pieced together other languages for years. By finding an original text and then working his way out, starting with only a single word and painstakingly building sentence by sentence. And here I was, using the same method to translate a language that had eluded him, eluded Lingraf too.

“The huntress,” Rachel said again, picking up my notepad.

I turned to the transcription and got to work. Even collaborating, it took us until the morning to translate the one page. We sat next to each other on the floor, progressing word by word, just as my father and I had done. We assumed throughout that the grammar was romance-language-based in origin and the code had been crafted by a Renaissance aristocrat interested in secrecy. And we were right. Between Rachel’s superior Latin skills and my strong Italian, we finished translating the document—a brief letter from someone, probably a member of a ruling family, to his daughter—which read: