The high point came when we discovered the wobbly chess table, hidden in a corner behind a mangy sofa.
“I told you, didn’t I?” Janice beamed, rocking it gently, just to make sure. “It was right here all along.”
By sunset, we had made so much progress mucking out that we decided to move our camp upstairs to what had once been an office. Sitting across from each other at an old writing desk, we had a candlelit dinner consisting of bread, cheese, and red wine, while we tried to figure out what to do next. Neither of us had any desire to return to Siena just yet, but at the same time, we both knew that our current situation was not sustainable. In order to get the house back in some kind of livable shape, we would need to invest a lot of time and money in red tape and handymen, and even if we succeeded, how would we live? We would be like fugitives, digging ourselves further and further into debt, and we would always be wondering when our past would catch up with us.
“The way I see it,” said Janice, pouring more wine, “we either stay here-which we can’t-or we go back to the States-which would be pathetic-or we go treasure hunting and see what happens.”
“I think you’re forgetting that the book in itself is useless,” I pointed out. “We need Mom’s sketchbook to figure out the secret code.”
“Which is precisely,” said Janice, reaching into her handbag, “why I brought it. Ta-daa!” She put the sketchbook on the desk in front of me. “Any further questions?”
I laughed out loud. “You know, I think I love you.”
Janice worked hard not to smile. “Easy now. We don’t want you to pull something.”
Once we had the two books side by side, it did not take us long to crack the code, which was, in fact, not even really a code, merely a cunningly hidden list of page, line, and word numbers. While Janice read out the numbers scribbled in the margins of the sketchbook, I leafed through the volume of Romeo and Juliet and read out the bits and pieces of the message our mother had wanted us to find. It went like this:
MY LOVE
THIS PRECIOUS BOOK
LOCKS IN THE GOLDEN STORY
OF
THE DEAREST
STONE
AS FAR AS THE VAST SHORE WASH’D WITH THE FARTHEST SEA
I SHOULD ADVENTURE FOR SUCH MERCHANDISE
GO WITH
ROMEO’S
GHOSTLY CONFESSOR
SACRIFIC’D SOME HOUR BEFORE HIS TIME
SEARCH, SEEK
WITH INSTRUMENTS
FIT TO OPEN THESE DEAD MEN’S TOMBS
IT NEEDS MUST BE BY STEALTH
HERE LIES JULIET
LIKE A POOR PRISONER
MANY HUNDRED YEARS
UNDER
QUEEN
MARIA
WHERE
LITTLE STARS
MAKE THE FACE OF HEAVEN SO FINE
GET THEE HENCE TO
SAINT
MARIA
LADDER
AMONG A SISTERHOOD OF HOLY NUNS
A HOUSE WHERE THE INFECTIOUS PESTILENCE DID REIGN
SEAL’D UP THE DOORS
MISTRESS
SAINT
GOOSE
VISITING THE SICK
CHAMBER
BED
THIS HOLY SHRINE
IS
THE STONY ENTRANCE
TO THE
ANCIENT VAULT
O LET US HENCE
GET ME AN IRON CROW
AWAY WITH THE
CROSS
AND FOOT IT GIRLS!
When we had come to the end of the long message, we sat back and looked at each other in bewilderment, our initial enthusiasm on hold.
“Okay, so I have two questions,” said Janice. “One: Why the hell didn’t we do this before? And two: What was Mom smoking?” She glared at me and reached out for her wineglass. “Sure, I get that she hid her secret code in ‘this precious book,’ and that it is somehow a treasure map to find Juliet’s grave and ‘the dearest stone,’ but… where are we supposed to go digging? What’s up with the pestilence and the crowbar?”
“I have a feeling,” I said, leafing back and forth to reread a few passages, “that she is talking about the Siena Cathedral. ‘Queen Maria’… that can only mean the Virgin Mary. And the bit about the little stars making the face of heaven so fine sounds to me like the inside of the cathedral dome. It is painted blue with little golden stars on it.” I looked up at her, suddenly excited. “Suppose that’s where the grave is? Remember, Maestro Lippi said that Salimbeni buried Romeo and Giulietta in a ‘most holy place’; what could be more holy than a cathedral?”
“Makes sense to me,” agreed Janice, “but what about the whole pestilence thing and the ‘sisterhood of holy nuns’? That doesn’t sound like it has anything to do with the cathedral.”
“‘Saint Maria, ladder’-” I mumbled, riffling through the book once more, “‘a house where the infectious pestilence did reign… seal’d up the doors… mistress saint… goose… visiting the sick’… and blah-blah-blah.” I let the book fall shut and leaned back on the chair, trying to remember the story Alessandro had told me about Comandante Marescotti and the Plague. “Okay, I know it sounds crazy, but”-I hesitated and looked at Janice, whose eyes were wide and full of faith in my riddle-solving skills-“during the bubonic plague, which was only a few years after Romeo and Giulietta died, they had so many corpses lying around that they couldn’t bury them all. So, in Santa Maria della Scala-I think scala means ladder-the enormous hospital facing the cathedral, where ‘a sisterhood of holy nuns’ took care of the sick during the ‘infectious pestilence’… well, they simply stuffed the dead into a wall and sealed it off.”
Janice made a face. “Eek.”
“So,” I went on, “it seems to me that we’re looking for a ‘chamber’ with a ‘bed’ inside that hospital, Santa Maria della Scala-”
“… in which slept the ‘mistress’ of the ‘saint’ of geese,” proposed Janice. “Whoever he is.”
“Or,” I said, “the ‘mistress saint’ of Siena, born in the contrada of the ‘goose,’ Saint Catherine-”
Janice whistled. “Go, girl!”
“… who, incidentally, had a bedroom in Santa Maria della Scala, where she slept when she worked late hours ‘visiting the sick.’ Don’t you remember? It was in the story Maestro Lippi read to us. I’ll bet you a sapphire and an emerald that this is where we’ll find the ‘stony entrance to the ancient vault.’”
“Whoa, wait!” said Janice. “Now I’m confused. First, it’s the cathedral, then it’s Saint Catherine’s room at the hospital, but now it’s an ‘ancient vault’? Which is it?”
I pondered the question for a moment, trying to recall the voice of the sensationalist British tour guide I had overheard in the Siena Cathedral a few days earlier. “Apparently,” I finally said, “in the Middle Ages there used to be a crypt underneath the cathedral. But it disappeared during the time of the Plague, and they’ve never been able to find it since. Of course, it’s hard for the archaeologists to do anything around here, since all the buildings are protected. Anyway, some people think it’s just a legend-”
“I don’t!” said Janice, jumping at the idea. “This has to be it. Romeo and Giulietta are buried in the crypt underneath the cathedral. It makes sense. If you were Salimbeni, isn’t that exactly where you would have put the shrine? And since the whole place-I assume-is consecrated to the Virgin Mary… Voilà!”
“Voilà what?”
Janice held out her arms as if she was going to bless me. “If you kneel in the cathedral crypt, you ‘kneel before the Virgin,’ just like the curse says! Don’t you see? It has to be the place!”
“But if that’s the case,” I said, “we’ll need to do a lot of digging to get there. People have been looking everywhere for this crypt.”
“Not,” said Janice, pushing the book towards me again, “if Mom has found a secret entrance from that old hospital, Santa Maria della Scala. Read it again, I’m sure I’m right.”
We went through the message once more, and this time, the whole thing suddenly made sense. Yes, we were definitely talking about an ‘ancient vault’ underneath the cathedral, and yes, the ‘stony entrance’ was to be found in Saint Catherine’s room at Santa Maria della Scala, right across the piazza from the church.