He went back to the book and carefully turned the pages. The first few were covered with drawings that made him take a sharp breath. They were crude but familiar: an oval flower unlike anything in nature and a drawing of an oddly shaped naked woman, similar to the illustrations in the Voynich. Even the neat Spanish script had echoes of its text.
He flicked to the end, to the mismatched pages: the translation of the impossible section of the Voynich that Lauren had delayed their holiday to solve. It was also in Spanish, with many instances of 'el origen' – the source. The more he studied the book, the more his eyes told him what his head couldn't accept: that Orlando Falcon's garden might be genuine. The implications made his heart beat faster and filled him with questions: 'Where did you get this? Who gave it to you?'
'The last Keeper.'
'How long have you had it?'
Again those unsettling eyes locked on his. 'Whatever I tell you won't change what you believe. Let the book be my proof. Just accept that if your wife saw it she'd know it was genuine.'
'You want Lauren to take over as the Keeper? Is that it? How long have you been the Keeper? How many were there before you? How were you chosen?'
She gave him a weary smile. 'No more questions. You'll discover everything for yourself in due course. But I promised to protect Father Orlando's legacy and I can't rest until I hand over his notebook to the translator of the Voynich – your wife, Lauren. Now that his prophecy has come to pass, Lauren's destiny is to be the new Keeper, but before she can fulfil her role the garden's miraculous powers must first cure her. Only then can she take over my burden and protect his legacy. Don't you see, Ross? We have no choice. We have to get back to the garden.' She reached across the table to place her hand on his. 'Ross, you and I need the same thing. You want your wife to wake. And I can't sleep until she does.'
18
Now, sitting in Lauren's office, Ross stared at the opaque plastic bag he had taken from the sleeping Sister Chantal and reflected on how she had hidden it when Torino, an officer of Rome, had appeared in the kitchen. It was clear that, whatever Ross thought, they both believed the Voynich was more than a fairytale.
He unsealed the bag and re-examined the ancient notebook. Apart from a few damaged pages it was in remarkable condition. He retrieved a Spanish/English dictionary from Lauren's bookshelf, and studied the neat Spanish text. For some minutes he pored over the last mismatched pages, fascinated by the vague references to el origen. Father General Leonardo Torino had also mentioned the term, using the Latin radix.
He turned his attention to the main part of the notebook. It contained a set of directions, including landmarks, compass settings and astronomical data with charts that showed which stars to follow at different times of the year. There were pages and pages of instructions detailing how to find the garden, but no map, and there was no way of drawing a useful one from the contents: only one place was mentioned by name, the town from which the quest had started. All subsequent directions related to that point and relied on compass settings, the position of the stars and key landmarks. It was as though Father Orlando Falcon had viewed his quest into the jungle as a voyage on an uncharted green ocean and navigated accordingly. One would have to go to the starting point and follow the directions wherever they led. Though they were detailed, the few physical landmarks had vague, poetic names, including the endpoint, which Falcon called El Jardin del Dios, the Garden of God. Even if they were genuine, and the garden existed, the chance of finding it was dauntingly slim.
Ross referred back to the Voynich translation in Lauren's notes, and compared the beginning of the story, which described the journey to the garden, with Falcon's notebook. When he looked at the general sequence of events in conjunction with the more detailed stages mentioned in Falcon's notebook they tallied.
He went on the Internet and researched the Inquisition. Just as Sister Chantal had told him, three Grand Inquisitors had become popes in the late sixteenth century, and the second had indeed been Pius V. He searched for Orlando Falcon and found nothing, but when he checked historical references to Pizarro's conquest of the New World the chronology tallied with when Sister Chantal claimed that Falcon had undertaken his quest.
Yet however much he wanted to believe in Orlando Falcon's Garden of God, he couldn't. Ross was a scientist, a geologist. How could such a place exist? It was too fanciful to be credible. His head ached. He was too close to this. He needed perspective, to speak to someone he could trust, and who knew something about the subject. What had Sister Chantal said? Let the book be my proof. If your wife saw it she'd know it was genuine. Lauren couldn't read it, but he knew someone who could.
He picked up the phone and dialled.
19
Many people misunderstood Elizabeth Quinn. Some called her a dyke because she didn't have a boyfriend, but she wasn't a lesbian. She just found most men uninteresting. In fact, though she professed to love mankind, she often found people uninteresting. Her lens on the world had two settings: wide angle and close-up, with little between. She cared passionately about big-picture issues, such as the fate of the planet, and she loved the honesty and purity of a detailed mathematical problem, but for an expert in linguistics and the daughter of a diplomat who had travelled the world, she cared little for the small talk of day-to-day life.
Lean and statuesque, she looked like a warrior queen. Even when you factored in the thick glasses, second-hand jeans, hemp jacket and T-shirts proclaiming her outspoken views on saving the planet. Beneath the red curls, however, was a first-class analytical brain. And beneath her Save Gaia! T-shirts there beat a passionate heart. For all her impatience with people there was one person she did care about – idolized, even: the brilliant, compassionate, articulate and beautiful Lauren Kelly. She even forgave her for marrying an oilman.
'This is amazing. It's definitely genuine,' she pronounced, after flipping through a few pages of Orlando Falcon's book. She had come over immediately Ross called, and had listened avidly while he told her about Torino and Sister Chantal.
'How do you know?'
'I helped Lauren with the computer and mathematical stuff, but I'm a specialist in linguistics and literary forensics, and I've spent a lot of time studying the Voynich. This is by the same hand. I'm certain of it. Look at the i and the tail on the g. Lauren and I often wondered if this garden could exist.'
Ross stopped pacing. 'Even though it's impossible?'
'Why's it impossible? Are you saying you geologists have discovered everything on the planet? Guys are finding new things all the time. Remember a couple of years ago when they found a new species of gorilla in the Congo, and those pigmy humans in Indonesia? Not to mention the countless new plants and animals being discovered in jungles all the time. Why couldn't a garden like this be hidden away somewhere?'
'A garden of miracles? Don't you think someone would have found it by now?'
She tapped the notebook. 'Hello. Someone did, apparently, four and half centuries ago. Orlando Falcon.'
'But I'm a scientist.'
'So am I. And our job's to unravel mysteries, not dismiss them. Use the scientific method, Ross. Develop a hypothesis. Here's a challenge. Let's assume the garden does exist. Can you, as a geologist, build a hypothesis to explain it?'
'Some of it, of course.'
'Okay, go for it.' She reached for the computer mouse and, as she scrolled through the beginning of Lauren's translation, Ross sat down beside her and together they read what was on the screen:
… Our quest was ill fated from the outset. We began in the cloud forests high in the mountains. The mist was so dense we could not see our feet. In the first week, seven soldiers fell to their deaths, disappearing into the ghostly white void. When we eventually descended to the plain, an impenetrable jungle awaited us, pierced only by a mighty river. We built rafts and let the current carry us deep into the green unknown.
