That brief contact set off another explosion of faces, one morphing into another: Emperor Rudolf’s avaricious expression; a series of unknown men dressed in clothing from different periods, two of them clerics; a woman taking careful notes; another woman packing up a box of books. And the daemon Edward Kelley, furtively tucking something into the Voynich’s cover.
“There is a lot of damage on the bottom edge, too, where the manuscript would have rested against the body if you were carrying it.” Ignorant of the slide show playing before my witch’s third eye, Lucy peered down at the page. “The clothes of the time were probably pretty oily. Didn’t most people wear wool?”
“Wool and silk.” I hesitated, then decided to risk everything—my library card, my reputation, perhaps even my job. “Can I ask a favor, Lucy?”
She looked at me warily. “That depends.”
“I want to rest my hand flat on the page. It will be only for a moment.” I watched her carefully to gauge whether she was planning to call in the security guards for reinforcement.
“You can’t touch the pages, Diana. You know that. If I let you, I would be fired.”
I nodded. “I know. I’m sorry to put you in such a tough spot.”
“Why do you need to touch it?” Lucy asked after a moment of silence, her curiosity aroused.
“I have a sixth sense when it comes to old books. Sometimes I can detect information about them that’s not visible to the naked eye.” That sounded weirder than I’d anticipated.
“Are you some kind of book witch?” Lucy’s eyes narrowed.
“That’s exactly what I am,” I said with a laugh.
“I’d like to help you, Diana, but we’re on camera—though there’s no sound, thank God. Everything that happens in this room is taped, and someone is supposed to be watching the monitor whenever the room is occupied.” She shook her head. “It’s too risky.”
“What if nobody could see what I was doing?”
“If you cut off the camera or put chewing gum on the lens—and yes, someone did try that—security will be here in five seconds,” Lucy replied.
“I wasn’t going to use chewing gum, but something like this.” I pulled my familiar disguising spell around me. It would make any magic I worked all but invisible. Then I turned my right hand over and touched the tip of my ring finger to my thumb, pinching the green and yellow threads that filled the room into a tiny bundle. Together the two colors blended into the unnatural yellow-green that was good for disorientation and deception spells. I planned on tying them up in the fifth knot—since the security cameras definitely qualified as a challenge. The fifth knot’s image burned at my right wrist in anticipation.
“Nice tats,” Lucy commented, peering at my hands. “Why did you choose gray ink?”
Gray? When magic was in the air, my hands were every color of the rainbow. My disguising spell must be working.
“Because gray goes with everything.” It was the first thing to cross my mind.
“Oh. Good thinking.” She still looked puzzled.
I returned to my spell. It needed some black in it, as well as the yellow and green. I snagged the fine black threads that surrounded me on my left thumb and then slid them through a loop made by my right thumb and ring finger. The result looked like an unorthodox mudra—one of the hand positions in yoga.
“With knot of five, the spell will thrive,” I murmured, envisioning the completed weaving with my third eye. The twist of yellow-green and black tied itself into an unbreakable knot with five crossings.
“Did you just bewitch the Voynich?” Lucy whispered with alarm.
“Of course not.” After my experiences with bewitched manuscripts, I wouldn’t do such a thing lightly. “I bewitched the air around it.”
To show Lucy what I meant, I moved my hand over the first page, hovering about two inches above the surface. The spell made it appear that my fingers stopped at the bottom of the book.
“Um, Diana? Whatever you were trying to do didn’t work. You’re just touching the edge of the page like you’re supposed to,” Lucy said.
“Actually my hand is over here.” I wiggled my fingers so that they peeked out over the top edge of the book. It was a bit like the old magician’s trick where a woman was put in a box and the box was sawed in half. “Try it. Don’t touch the page yet—just move your hand so that it covers the text.”
I slid my hand out to give Lucy room. She followed my directions and slid her hand between the Voynich and the deception spell. Her hand appeared to stop when it reached the edge of the book, but if you looked carefully, you could see that her forearm was getting shorter. She withdrew quickly, as though she’d touched a hot pan. She turned to me and stared.
“You are a witch.” Lucy swallowed, then smiled. “What a relief. I always suspected you were hiding something, and I was afraid it might be something unsavory—or even illegal.” Like Chris, she didn’t seem remotely surprised to discover that there really were witches.
“Will you let me break the rules?” I glanced down at the Voynich.
“Only if you tell me what you learn. This damned manuscript is the bane of our existence. We get ten requests a day to see it and turn down almost every one.” Lucy returned to her seat and adopted a watchful position. “But be careful. If someone sees you, you’ll lose your library privileges. And I don’t think you would survive if you were banned from the Beinecke.”
I took a deep breath and stared down at the open book. The key to activating my magic was curiosity. But if I wanted more than a dizzying display of faces, I would need to formulate a careful question before putting hand to parchment. I was more certain than ever that the Voynich held important clues about the Book of Life and its missing pages. But I was only going to get one chance to find out what they were.
“What did Edward Kelley place inside the Voynich, and what happened to it?” I whispered before looking down and gently resting my hand on the first folio of the manuscript.
One of the missing pages from the Book of Life appeared before my eyes: the illumination of the tree with its trunk full of writhing, human shapes. It was gray and ghostly, transparent enough that I could see through it to my hand and the writing on the Voynich’s first folio.
A second shadowy page appeared atop the first: two dragons shedding their blood so that it fell into a vessel below.
A third insubstantial page layered over the previous two: the illumination of the alchemical wedding.
For a moment the layers of text and image remained stacked in a magical palimpsest atop the Voynich’s stained parchment. Then, the alchemical wedding dissolved, followed by the picture of the two dragons. But the page with the tree remained.