The Sixth Day (A Brit in the FBI #5)(26)
“It’s very exciting, very exciting indeed. As many of you know, we are sometimes very lucky in our discoveries, and today’s news is no different. I am talking about an inestimable treasure, one we will be spending a significant amount of time and energy on going forward. And so, I present to you Dr. Isabella Marin, our very own Oxford doctor of cryptology and our foremost expert in the Voynich manuscript. She will present our most exciting discovery. Dr. Marin? The floor is yours.” And he gave her a royal bow.
The Voynich? Roger couldn’t believe it. He stared at the young woman he’d believed of no importance. Well, she was as beautiful as a bloody foreign princess, dark sloe eyes, gold complexion. She had something to do with the Voynich? What had she found? Roger couldn’t believe his luck.
Dr. Isabella Marin squared her shoulders, took a deep breath, and told her heaving stomach to calm down, it wouldn’t do to honk all over the mass of reporters staring up at her. She knew her boss was having the time of his life—put him in front of a microphone and an audience, and he positively bloomed. It was said, not within his hearing, of course, that he’d never met a microphone he didn’t like. But now he was giving her a chance to make her name in both the cryptology and antique manuscript world. Granted, she was presenting the find, but his presence beside her showed substance and gravitas to the world.
Still, there were so many cameras. Had any of these reporters ever even heard of the Voynich?
I hope this works, mixing truth and lies.
Her boss waved her to the mic. She walked out onto the stage, her laptop still clutched as tight as a newborn to her chest, and wondered for the twentieth time if she should have worn panty hose as a sign of respect. But then the mic was in her hand and the people in the front row were staring at her and she started to talk.
“Good morning. As many of you know, last year, the Voynich manuscript was stolen from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University in the United States. Despite worldwide efforts, the Voynich is still lost. Not its contents, of course. Yale published the manuscript in its entirety online. But losing the precious original pages is a tragedy.
“All is not lost, though.” She leaned close in to the microphone, ready to share a secret. “Last month I found a quire of papers stuffed inside a manuscript in the upstairs library loft of the British Museum. This is not an unusual occurrence. It is a library, after all, and old paper is our business.”
Laughs, chuckles, and she relaxed a fraction. It was her boss’s phrasing—old paper is our business—something he was fond of saying all the time. He beamed at her, and she knew she’d pleased him, using his joke in her press-conference debut. She cleared her throat, continued in the same confiding voice.
“The quire, like the rest of the Voynich, is written in a language or a code that hasn’t yet been translated, even by experts in the cryptology field. Alas, that includes me.”
A few laughs, and she was tempted to tell the truth, but no, she had to keep to her script, mix the lies and truth.
She said, “When I found the pages, I immediately set out to determine if they were real.”
The reporters leaned forward as one. But one, a dark-haired gent in the middle, was staring at her as if she was about to announce the secrets of creation.
Isabella placed her laptop on a chair, hit a button, and the lights dimmed a bit. The huge screen behind her lit up with a series of photographs of the discovered pages.
“After extensive testing using radiocarbon dating, we have determined the papers I found are indeed a part of Beinecke manuscript 408—known colloquially as the Voynich manuscript, because of its rediscovery in 1912 at the Jesuit college of Frascati near Rome, by Wilfred Voynich. The quire in question is labeled as pages fifty-nine to sixty-four of the manuscript. These pages have been lost for centuries. And that, my friends, is not all.”
The reporters knew immediately Dr. Isabella Marin was about to drop a bomb on them. Roger sat forward now along with the rest of them, never taking his eyes off her.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Isabella paused another moment for effect, then said, “Being able to study these pages in-depth for the past few weeks has reinforced my belief that the indecipherable language in which the Voynich is written in is not unbreakable, as scholars before me believe.
“It is now my opinion the Voynich is written in an idioglossic language, that is, a language common to areas where only a few people live, where, in isolation, they develop their own language and words. But I believe the Voynich’s idioglossic language is even more specific. It is cryptophasic, that is, a language developed between twins, commonly known as twin talk. This is why, so far, no one had been able to read the Voynich. Over the years, it has been approached as a code, when in fact, it is a unique language.
“Are we to believe the person or persons who wrote the Voynich were twins who communicated in twin talk? That they wrote and shared the Voynich between themselves, their own private book? Very possible. And I wonder, can any set of twins read the Voynich? The answer is obviously no, or the manuscript would, over time, have been seen by twins and read. But this hasn’t happened. So very special twins only.
“Which twins? From a specific place? From a unique line? I don’t know. In any case, this is my working theory.
“It’s been speculated in the past that the book is some sort of herbal. If this is the case, perhaps these twins wrote experiments in it. Why did they write in a language no one but they themselves could understand? An excellent question to which we have no answers. Yet.