guilt. The woman was right. She had neglected her father-set him a task that was always going to be beyond his powers, and then left him to it. Alone in a cold attic room with no coal for the fire and no food in the fridge. She’d pretended that her search for the codex and the cross was for his benefit, but that had been a lie, an excuse for neglecting him when he was too old and sick to look after himself. The search was a curse. She’d sacrificed Stephen and now perhaps her father to its demands, and all it had given her in return was an old painted book and a dead man’s list of meaningless numbers.
All these thoughts and more rushed through Sasha’s mind as she headed across Oxford in the back of a taxi. And then at the hospital she had to sit in a cavernous reception area on the ground floor, crossing and uncrossing her legs for what seemed like hours, before a young Indian doctor appeared as if out of nowhere and told her that, yes, her father was still alive but that he couldn’t offer her what she wanted to hear. He couldn’t offer her any hope at all.
He said it was something called a hemorrhagic stroke. A blood vessel had burst somewhere in her father’s brain some time during the previous night and now the blood was seeping slowly but surely through the cerebral lobes, shutting her father down little by little, like he was a machine. He was still conscious, but for how much longer the doctor couldn’t say.
A strange calm descended over Sasha as she followed the doctor down the hospital corridors, turning this way and that until they arrived at a door marked “intensive care.” Perhaps it was a reaction to the roller-coaster of emotions that she had been riding during the previous hour, but now she felt a soft sadness settling down on her like an invisible dust.
Her father was lying in the hollow of two hospital pillows, connected to a myriad of tubes and machines, and his slow death was being charted on two grey screens positioned on trolleys behind his head. He smiled when he saw his daughter and reached out his right hand for her to hold. His left hand and arm lay stretched out motionless on the white sheet, and Sasha knew without being told that he wouldn’t be moving them anymore.
“How are you, Dad?” she asked, regretting the inane question as soon as it was out of her mouth.
“Dying,” he answered succinctly, with a trace of a smile hovering around his pale lips. “Apparently it all started on the right side of my brain, but it’s my left side I can’t move. Mysteries of the organism, Sasha. Incomprehensible to the likes of you and me.”
“Yes, Dad,” said Sasha, trying her best to return her father’s smile. She’d read somewhere that humour was the language of the brave. Only now did she realise the essential truth of the observation.
“They’ve been very kind, you know,” Andrew Blayne went on after a moment. “One of the doctors explained it all to me when I asked. I’m like a submarine after the water’s come in. The crew are battening down the hatches, but there are no iron walls in my brain, I’m afraid. And blood is thicker than water. Unfortunately.”
Sasha understood her father’s need for irony to face his situation, but try as she might, she could no longer keep her emotions in check. “I’m so sorry, Dad,” she said through her tears. “I’m just so sorry.”
“About what?” Andrew Blayne sounded genuinely puzzled.
“About everything. About leaving you alone. About not looking after you properly all these years.” The words caught in Sasha’s throat, and she turned her head away.
“It’s not true, Sasha. Do you hear me? You mustn’t blame yourself.” Suddenly there was urgency in Andrew Blayne’s weakened voice, and he squeezed his daughter’s hand, commanding her attention. “You’re everything I could’ve asked for. I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.”
“I shouldn’t have given you that book,” cried Sasha, refusing to listen to her father. “It’s cursed. It’s all my own bloody fault.”
“No, it’s not. It’s a beautiful book. One of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen. And I’m happy that I lived to see it. I never thought I would. But I did. And that’s down to you, Sasha.”
The effort to speak obviously cost Blayne a great deal, and he laid his head back on the pillow as soon as he had finished and half closed his eyes.
“I should go,” said Sasha, uncertain of what to do. “They said you had to rest, and I’m not helping.” But her father kept hold of her hand, and she stayed where she was.
Neither of them said anything for a little while, and Sasha fought hard to control herself. She hadn’t cried for years, and these tears had been torn from her body, leaving her with a sense of rupture that she couldn’t erase. She didn’t hear her father the first time that he spoke, and he had to squeeze her hand to get her attention.
“I solved it, Sasha,” he said in a whisper. “It was last night I understood. Just before all this happened. It was so simple. I should have seen it straightaway. But that’s always the way of it, isn’t it? Everything is easy once you have the answer.”
Sasha’s heart raced. She felt excited and guilty about being excited all at the same time. She remembered how she had stood wavering outside her father’s door less than two hours earlier, uncertain of whether to go back for the codex, before she’d turned away and made for the hospital. And she remembered the years she had spent searching for St. Peter’s cross while she took instructions from the man she hated most in the whole world or sat in cold deserted libraries searching through the lumber rooms of the past, looking for the key that her father now held in the palm of his hand.
“I don’t know whether to tell you,” he said. “I don’t know what will happen to you if I do. I don’t know what is right.”
Sasha heard the uncertainty in her father’s voice, but she was tongue-tied, unable to help him make up his mind. Irrationally it seemed to her that demanding to know the secret from her father on his deathbed would be to acknowledge that the codex mattered more to her than he did. And yet telling him to stay silent meant giving up all that she had worked for and dreamt about. Unable to make a choice, she said nothing, leaving it to her father to decide.
“You’ll carry on searching whatever I do, won’t you, Sasha?” he said sadly. It was almost as if he was talking to himself. “It’s in your blood, just like it’s in mine. Looking backward, searching for secrets in dusty places. It’s no life for a beautiful young woman.”
“I don’t care about being beautiful or young or a woman,” said Sasha passionately, and then stopped, biting her tongue. She had no right thinking of herself while her father was dying in front of her eyes.
“I care about secrets,” she said quietly after a moment. “And about the past. You taught me that. I suppose I believe that dead men sometimes still speak.”
“Like the monks of Marjean spoke to me last night, you mean,” said Blayne. “Yes, you’re right. In the end that is what matters. The voices of the dead. And the soon-to-be dead,” he added with a weak smile.
Sasha smiled back at her father through her tears, and for a moment there was a complete understanding between them. Then, when the moment was over, he told her what he knew, pausing to muster his failing strength at the end of almost every short sentence.
“The codex is unusual,” he said, “and not just because it’s beautiful. In one way it’s almost unique.”
“In what way?” asked Sasha when her father didn’t go on.
“Well, you know that generally only the first letter of the chapter headings is decorated in medieval Gospels, but in the Marjean codex it’s different. The beginning letters of certain other paragraphs are embellished as well. I counted how many times it happens. The answer’s twenty-six.”
“And there are twenty-six numbers on Cade’s list,” cried Sasha. “You count from the start of each paragraph and that gives you the letters. Is that how it works?”
“Almost, but not quite. Cade encoded his own numbers. But that wasn’t too difficult to break. And then I had the answer without knowing how I’d got there, which wasn’t good for my vanity.” Andrew Blayne laughed, which brought on a coughing fit. His face was momentarily twisted by a spasm of violent pain, but he fought it down and carried on where he had left off. “In the end I made the connection by thinking about the codex itself. The Gospel of St. Luke. One of the books of the New Testament. And without Revelation, but counting all the letters of St. Paul, there are twenty-six books in the New Testament. And the number of letters in each book is how far you go from each decorated initial. It’s as simple as that.”
“So what do the letters say? What is the message?” asked Sasha, unable to contain her impatience any longer.
But her father didn’t answer her question. “I’m so tired, Sasha,” he said after a moment. “I have to sleep a little. Just a little. And then we can talk some more.” His voice was faint and seemed to come from far away. He closed his eyes, and in the silence Sasha noticed the shallowness of his breathing. There was a tremor too in his right cheek. The lines on the screens behind her father’s head rose and fell as before, but she couldn’t remember if
