‘Not at all,’ Luc insisted, whispering. ‘The manuscript is part of this. When it’s time to tell the story to the world, we’ll have to understand its role. There’s some kind of important historical context that can’t be ignored. The book must be decoded,’ he whispered.
‘I suppose I can make some enquiries,’ Hugo sighed.
‘To whom?’
‘Ever hear of the Voynich manuscript?’
Luc shook his head.
‘Well, to make a very long story a very short story, it’s a bizarre, possibly fifteenth-century manuscript that was acquired by a Polish rare-books dealer named Voynich in 1910 or thereabouts. It’s a fabulous thing, really, the craziest collection of fanciful illustrations of herbals, astronomical signs, biological processes, medicinal concoctions, even recipes, and it’s all written in a beautifully weird script and language that’s defied a century of deciphering efforts. Some think it was written by Roger Bacon or John Dee, both mathematical geniuses of their day who dabbled in alchemy circles, others think it’s a giant fifteenth- or sixteenth-century hoax. Anyway, I bring it up because, to this day, amateur and professional cryptographers have tried to break the code. I’ve met some of these people at seminars and conferences. They’re real characters with their own language. You should hear them go on about Beaufort ciphers and Zipf’s law and other crap, but I can contact one of the less loony ones and see if he’ll look at our book.’
‘Okay,’ Luc nodded. ‘Do it. But be very discreet.’
The couple at the other table got up to leave without any attempting to pay. The young man pushed through the door first. Following behind, the woman glanced over her shoulder, looked directly at Hugo, and repeated that fleeting almost-a-smile before the door closed and she was gone.
‘Did you see that?’ Hugo asked Luc. ‘Maybe the countryside isn’t so bad after all.’
Three men came in, two of them farm hands from the look, their hands dirty, shoes crusted with dirt. The third, an older man, was clean and well dressed in a suit without the tie. The café owner nodded to them from behind the bar and addressed the older man loudly by name. ‘Good day, Pelay. How are you?’
‘The same as I was at breakfast,’ he said gruffly, but while he was answering, he gawked unselfconsciously at Luc and Hugo.
The trio occupied a rear corner table, talking among themselves.
Luc felt distinctly uncomfortable. Since the café owner seemed to be communicating with the men behind them with his eyes, Luc felt as if he was in the children’s game, piggy in the middle. Every time Luc turned his head to look behind, the men glanced away and resumed their chat. Hugo seemed oblivious to the little drama, or perhaps, Luc, thought, he was being overly sensitive.
The owner called over their heads. ‘Hey, Pelay, do you want some bacon later?’
‘Only if it’s from Duval,’ the man answered. ‘I only eat bacon from Duval.’
‘Don’t worry, it’ll be from Duval.’
Luc noticed the owner flip the Open sign in the window to Closed.
He heard a chair sliding, wood on wood.
He had the vivid sense of hard stares on his back.
The owner started clattering glasses, arranging them noisily on a shelf.
Luc didn’t like the prickly way he was feeling and was about to turn to confront the imagined stares when he heard the squeal of brakes.
A blue and white gendarmerie van jerked to a stop behind his Land Rover and Luc gladly sprang to his feet. ‘I called them about my car,’ he told Hugo. ‘Come out when you’re done.’ He took the opportunity to glower at the men in the corner but they refused to meet his gaze.
The owner stepped around the bar and gruffly slapped down the bill. ‘I’m closing now anyway.’
Luc glanced at it contemptuously, threw some euros on the table and said to Hugo, ‘Don’t be so quick to change your mind about the countryside.’
EIGHT
Luc stared at the phone long and hard before lifting the handset and punching the number he had found on her web page.
It wasn’t easy making the call, in fact it was entirely out of character, but this was, after all, an extraordinary circumstance.
He needed the best people and in her field there was no one better. He simply refused to compromise.
He was in his office on the Bordeaux campus, watching a fast-moving Atlantic storm soak the quadrangle. The familiar, insistent UK dial-tone blared into his ear and then, just like that, he heard the soft roundness of her voice.
‘Hello, Sara?’
‘Luc?’
‘Yes, it’s me.’
There was silence on the line, prompting him to ask if she was still there.
‘I’m here. I’m just trying to decide whether to hang up on you.’
It had been two years since they first met.
She’d spent that summer in Paris working on her book, A Palynological Perspective of the Magdalenian to Mesolithic Transition, which hadn’t been destined for the bestseller lists, but would further cement her growing credentials.
He was at Les Eyzies, doing survey work and opening the first tranche of what would become a multi-year campaign.
They’d been an ‘item’ as she called it, for two years. He’d heard her lecturing in her bad French at a Pleistocene conference at the University of Paris and afterwards he had sidled up to her at the drinks reception. Later, she would tell friends she saw him coming, smoothly manoeuvring through the assembly like an assassin, and hoped the darkly handsome guy was heading her way. He disarmed her with effusive compliments about her work in perfect American English. They had dinner that night. Dinner the next night too.
She’d told her friends, even told her mother back in California, that she’d fallen; she’d drunk the Kool-Aid and gone back for more. That they spoke the same language professionally was nice though hardly the basis for her attraction. She knew his reputation but beyond that, there was something wild and untamable about him which she took as a challenge. He was almost ten years older than her and she wanted to believe he’d sown enough wild oats to be able to settle into something resembling monogamy. She poured energy into the relationship like a boiler-operator on an old coal-fired steamer, shovelling, constantly shovelling. He’d announced so many times in his taunting way that this was the longest affair of his life that she was sick of hearing it. She bridged the geographic gap between her position in Paris and his in Bordeaux by living on the train. She’d been expecting an invitation to join him on his dig that summer but it never materialised and she heard through the rumour-mill about a special friendship with a comely Hungarian geologist on his team.
So, out of mounting concern over the paucity of texts and calls, she hired a car and one Friday afternoon, arrived unannounced at his dig. Judging from the strained expression of pleasure on his face at seeing her, and the sidelong glances from the Hungarian who, regrettably for Sara, was a real stunner, the rumours were true. Her visit only lasted until early the next day. Sometime around three in the morning she angrily broke it off, spent the rest of the night at the furthest edges of his bed and let him sleep when she slipped away at dawn. Within months she had accepted a faculty appointment at the Institute of Archaeology in London and there she completely faded from his life.
‘Please don’t hang up. This is important.’
She sounded concerned. ‘Are you all right?’
‘No, no, I’m fine, but I need to talk to you about something. Are you in front of a computer?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can I send you some material to look at while I hold the line?’
She hesitated then gave him her email address.
He heard her breathing into the mouthpiece as he attached some files and sent them on the way. ‘Got it?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Open photo 93 first.’
He waited, staring at his copy of the picture, still mesmerised by it, and tried to imagine her at the moment of download. Two years wasn’t such a long time. She couldn’t have changed much. He was glad he finally had an excuse to call.