“You never mentioned why your father involved you in all this. Did you work with him?” Steven asked, filling up the uncomfortable silence with chatter, the warmth of her hand still tingling on his.
“I was the only one he trusted. He led a solitary life, and other than a few close friends, I’m the only one he had. My mom passed away eleven years ago. I was a large part of his support system.”
“Did you live with him?” Steven inquired.
“No.”
There was no further explanation. Steven figured she was drawing a line beyond which she didn’t want to go. He made a mental note not to delve into her personal life.
Her cell warbled. She listened for a moment, then hung up.
“All’s well. Let’s go inside. Are you hungry? The place is loaded with every kind of delicacy you can imagine,” Natalie offered.
“No, I’m good. Maybe in a few hours.” He hesitated. “Why don’t you tell me a little more about this threat while I look over the Scroll? I’m still fuzzy on parts of it…”
“Come on in and I’ll break it down for you,” she responded over her shoulder as she made her way to the front door.
Steven followed dutifully after her, admiring the view.
The interior of the villa was the usual rustic Tuscan finish so popular in the area, all terracotta flooring and exposed wooden beams on the ceiling. Natalie moved into the dining area and opened the satchel, extracting the cylinder and carefully removing the Scroll before spreading the pages on the dining table.
“Do you have a magnifying glass?” he asked. “And can we get some more light in here? Maybe a desktop lamp, or worst case, a flashlight?” He looked around the room. “Oh, and do you have a computer with internet access? I’ll need it for research.”
Natalie nodded and pointed at a laptop that was on the kitchen bar counter. Steven walked over and was soon online, typing rapidly. He pulled up a site and was reading intently when Natalie returned after a few minutes with a hinged desk lamp and a rectangular magnifying glass. She plugged in the lamp, watched it flicker to life, and turned on the overhead lights for good measure. Steven noticed she didn’t open the curtains on the dining room window. She apparently valued her privacy, especially while sorting through stolen parchments. Which reminded him.
“So, who exactly stole these for your father? Maybe that’s a good place to pick up the story…” he started, as he closed the web browser and moved to the dining table and the quire.
“Liberate. My father had someone liberate the Scroll from where it was being kept by those to which it no more belonged than to me. Let me just start at the beginning and you’ll realize why I’m so cautious about everything,” Natalie protested.
“Why don’t you? I hope you don’t mind if I interrupt you occasionally with a question or three,” Steven countered.
“No problem. All right. First, you have to understand that my father would have never, ever engaged in the theft of anything. Liberating an article of historical significance from a group which had itself liberated the item in order to come into possession of it is a different matter. The lost quire was removed from the Voynich centuries ago, only a few years after the document was created. It was stolen and locked away from prying eyes by a faction of the Catholic Church,” Natalie explained.
“Ah, yes, the mystery sect. You know, it’s strange, because I’ve never heard of this ‘Order of the Holy Relic’ even though I’m more than passingly familiar with every medieval secret society that ever existed,” Steven protested.
“Nobody has heard of it. That’s its whole objective. It’s a top secret splinter faction with tremendous resources, supported at the highest level of the Church — the first director of the group, who is always known as the ‘Sentinel’, was handpicked by Pope Nicholas V after he’d crushed a plot to displace him from the Papacy. After Constantinople fell to the Turks, he created the Order and dedicated a stipend to its ongoing operations,” Natalie continued.
“That would be around 1453 or 54. Fair enough. Although how do you know this?” Steven probed.
She looked at him with thinly-veiled annoyance. “As I already explained, Morbius Frank co-opted a member of the Order and put him in touch with my father. He filled in the group’s history, or as much as he knew of it. Almost everything about the Order is shrouded in mystery, even to members. Besides its origins, my father discovered that its charter was to keep the Scroll in its possession, hidden forever.”
“Now out of its possession, technically speaking,” Steven observed. Natalie glared at him. He ignored it and continued. “You’re telling me that this parchment will not only drive Morbius Frank’s minions to hunt us down, but will also bring the full weight of the wealthiest organization in the world to bear in order to recover it?”
“Exactly.”
“If you’re right about even half of this, you’ll never be safe as long as you have the Scroll. Am I missing anything?” Steven asked.
Natalie walked around the table and stood next to Steven, studying the pages intently.
“Where are you going to start?” she asked.
He considered the question.
“I think the first thing we need to do after I have a chance to examine it thoroughly is to make copies and store the original someplace safe. It’s not a good idea to be handling vellum that’s almost six hundred years old. It will degrade in no time — the chemicals from our skin and the atmosphere will start eating away at it. We shouldn’t really be handling it at all, and ideally it should be stored in a humidity and temperature-controlled unit,” Steven explained.
“I know all that. I already made copies of the Scroll — super high-resolution color copies, which I printed out and also have on disk. But I wanted you to see the actual pages, in case there’s something the copies didn’t pick up, or there’s some telltale only the originals show.”
Natalie’s father had probably given her all the same admonishments about handling the originals, so he let that one lie.
“Good. Then I’ll just need some time to look these over. There’s something about the grouping and illustrations that I find strange, but I can’t put my finger on it. Give me some time and maybe it’ll come to me,” he said.
“You’re here for the duration, so take as long as you like, Dr. Cross.”
“Steven. Please, Natalie, call me Steven. But I’m not sure what you mean by the duration…”
She stared at him like he was an idiot. “Steven, I thought this was clear. You’re not safe. Frank’s people, the Order, and anyone helping them will be looking not only for me, but also for you. The visit to your office was just the start. Whether it’s fair or not, or even makes sense or not, you’re in danger because your name was on that letter, and there’s nothing you can say or do that will change that. I’m sorry, but the way I see it is we’re going to be spending a lot of time with each other, for the duration, until we either solve the puzzle and can figure a way out of this mess, or they find us and put an end to it all.” Natalie didn’t need to expound on what she meant by putting an end to it all. Her implication was clear.
Steven hadn’t fully considered the ramifications of their predicament, but he did so now. If, and that was a big if, she was correct about a shadowy sect hunting for them both, not to mention a billionaire’s murderous henchmen, they were in an impossible situation.
He rubbed his chin. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but aside from your say-so, do you have any proof that what you’ve said is true? I’m not questioning your veracity, so don’t take it the wrong way, but is there anything else you haven’t told me that might be more solid than rumors of a secret group and speculation about your father’s death?”