“But I’m supposed to interview . . .” Chris began. “Who did you say you are?”
“Miriam Shephard. And HR waived the interview after I showed them this.” Miriam pulled her cell phone out of her waistband. “I quote: ‘Have your ass in my lab at nine A.M., and be prepared to explain my mistakes in two hours—no excuses.’” Miriam removed two sheets of paper from her messenger bag, which was stuffed with laptops and paper files. “Who is Tina?”
“I am.” A smiling Tina stepped forward. “Hello, Dr. Shephard.”
“Hello. I’ve got my hiring manifest or health-insurance waiver or something for you. And this is Roberts’s formal reprimand for his inappropriate text message. File it.” Miriam handed over the papers. She slung the bag from her shoulder and tossed it to Matthew. “I brought everything you asked for, Matthew.”
The entire lab watched, openmouthed, as the bag full of computers sailed through the air. Matthew caught it without damaging a single laptop, and Chris looked at Miriam’s throwing arm with naked admiration.
“Thank you, Miriam,” Matthew murmured. “I trust you had an uneventful journey.” His tone and choice of words were formal, but there was no disguising his relief at seeing her.
“I’m here, aren’t I?” she said caustically. Miriam pulled another piece of paper out of the back pocket on her miniskirt. After examining it she looked up. “Which one of you is Beaker?”
“Here.” Beaker walked toward Miriam, her hand extended. “Joy Connelly.”
“Oh. Sorry. All I have is a ridiculous list of nicknames drawn from the dregs of popular culture, along with some acronyms.” Miriam shook Beaker’s hand, drew a pen out of her boot, and crossed something out. She scribbled something next to it. “Nice to meet you. I like your RNA work. Sound stuff. Very helpful. Let’s go get coffee and figure out what needs to be done to whip this place into compliance.”
“The closest decent coffee is a bit of a hike,” Beaker said apologetically.
“Unacceptable.” Miriam made another note on her paper. “We need a café in the basement as soon as possible. I toured the building on my way up here, and that space is wasted now.”
“Should I come with you?” Chris asked, shifting on his feet.
“Not now,” Miriam told him. “Surely you have something more important to do. I’ll be back at one o’clock. That’s when I want to see”—she paused and scrutinized her list—“Sherlock, Game Boy, and Scully.”
“What about me, Miriam?” Shotgun asked.
“We’ll catch up later, Richard. Nice to see a familiar face.” She looked down at her list. “What does Roberts call you?”
“Shotgun.” Richard’s mouth twitched.
“I trust it’s because of your speedy sequencing, not because you’ve taken to hunting like humans.” Miriam’s eyes narrowed. “Is what we’re doing here going to be a problem, Richard?”
“Can’t imagine why,” Richard said with a small shrug. “The Congregation and its concerns are way above my pay grade.”
“Good.” Miriam surveyed her openly curious new charges. “Well? What are you waiting for? If you want something to do, you can always run some gels. Or unpack supply boxes. There are plenty of them stacked up in the corridor.”
Everyone in the lab scattered.
“Thought so.” She smiled at Chris. He looked nervous. “As for you, Roberts, I’ll see you at two o’clock. We have your article to discuss. And your protocols to review. After that, you can take me to dinner. Somewhere nice, with steak and a good wine list.”
Chris looked dazed but nodded.
“Could you give us a minute?” I asked Chris and Beaker. They moved off to the side, Beaker grinning from ear to ear and Chris pinching the bridge of his nose. Matthew joined us.
“You look surprisingly well for someone who’s been to the sixteenth century and back, Matthew. And Diana’s obviously enceinte,” Miriam said, using the French word for “pregnant.”
“Thanks. Are you at Marcus’s place?” Matthew asked.
“That monstrosity on Orange Street? No chance. It’s a convenient location, but it gives me the creeps.” Miriam shivered. “Too much mahogany.”
“You’re welcome to stay with us on Court Street,” I offered. “There’s a spare bedroom on the third floor. You’d have privacy.”
“Thanks, but I’m around the corner. At Gallowglass’s condo,” Miriam replied.
“What condo?” Matthew frowned.
“The one he bought on Wooster Square. Some converted church. It’s very nice—a bit too Danish in decor, but far preferable to Marcus’s dark-and-gloomy period.” Miriam looked at Matthew sharply. “Gallowglass did tell you he was coming with me?”
“No, he did not.” Matthew ran his fingers through his hair.
I knew just how my husband felt: The de Clermonts had switched into overprotective mode. Only now they weren’t protecting just me. They were protecting Matthew as well.
Bad news, I’m afraid.” Lucy Meriweather’s lips twisted in a sympathetic grimace. She was one of the Beinecke librarians, and she’d helped me for years, both with my own research and on the occasions when I brought my students to the library to use the rare books there. “If you want to look at Manuscript 408, you’ll have to go into a private room with a curator. And there’s a limit of thirty minutes. They won’t let you sit in the reading room with it.”
“Thirty minutes? With a curator?” I was stunned by the restrictions, having spent the last ten months with Matthew, who never paid any attention to rules and regulations. “I’m a Yale professor. Why does a curator have to babysit me?”
“Those are the rules for everybody—even our own faculty. The whole thing is online,” Lucy reminded me.
But a computer image, no matter how high the resolution, wasn’t going to give me the information I needed. I’d last seen the Voynich manuscript—now Beinecke Library MS 408—in 1591, when Matthew had carried the book from Dr. Dee’s library to the court of Emperor Rudolf in Prague, hoping that we could swap it for the Book of Life. Now I hoped it would shed light on what Edward Kelley might have done with the Book of Life’s missing pages.
I’d been searching for clues to their whereabouts since we went to Madison. One missing page had an image of two scaly, long-tailed creatures bleeding into a round vessel. The other image was a splendid rendering of a tree, its branches bearing an impossible combination of flowers, fruit, and leaves and its trunk made up of writhing human shapes. I’d hoped that locating the two pages would be fairly straightforward in the age of Internet searches and digitized images. So far that had not been the case.