by Manda Scott
‘… the river rooms, which appear suspended over the River Cam, a unique example of this kind of extreme Tudor architecture. They were home for a while to Dr Cedric Owen, the college’s foremost benefactor and author of the Owen ledgers. The rooms were later occupied temporarily by the playwright and spy, Christopher Marlowe, and there is a rumour that King Charles I was hidden here for eight nights during the latter stages of the Civil War. From here, we can walk on round to the small stone at the outer gate to the Great Court which marks the spot where Owen died on Christmas Day in 1588. His body was buried in a pauper’s grave somewhere near the plague pits, but before his death he …’
The voice faded into the background murmur of the afternoon. Stella propped her elbows on her knees and her chin on the hammock of her laced-up fingers and brought her eyes level with the skull’s.
‘Before his death, Cedric Owen hid you in a place where time and hard water could have kept you secret for ever. But someone wanted us to find you so badly that they usurped Owen’s manuscripts to plant their own code. That which you seek lies hidden in white water. Why did they do that?’
Why?
Kit had asked it first, when he had analysed the ledgers and found them written by two different hands. It was the only time in a year of knowing that she had seen him un-calm, pacing the length of the big window, raking his fingers through his hair.
Why? Everything we know about Cedric Owen says he was a decent, honourable man. He planned everything else so carefully; he hid the money and the ledgers, and left a letter with a lawyer, to be opened a century after his death so there was no way the Crown could confiscate his estate. Once it was safe for them to be found and brought to the college, he left orders that the ledgers be kept available to the public at all times, ‘preserved against all harme, and made free to alle as may wysh to view them for the purposes of personal or academic studie.’ He knew exactly how much they would enhance the college’s academic status. If they’re all fakes, there has to be a reason.
It had been raining that day with a dense mist lying over the Cam. The river room balanced on the shelf of it, a place of grey-green light and the hypnotic drumming of water on water.
Without undue thought, Stella had said, ‘There must be something else hidden in the text. You’re the cryptographer. You’ve got the whole lot on disc – why not crunch the numbers and see what comes out?’
He had loped across the room and kissed her on the forehead; the dry warmth of his lips had stayed with her longer than the laughing Irish voice. You’re a genius, did I mention?
Stella had known him a year by then, and loved him for half of that, but she was only just beginning to know the man beneath the voice, and the mind behind the eyes. She had offered to help with the search for a code as much for an excuse to study Kit as out of curiosity for his hidden text.
She was an astronomer. She knew nothing of history, but she had submitted her thesis and was waiting for the summons to her viva and time was weighing heavy on her hands. In the weeks that followed, she learned more of English history than during any amount of half-heard lessons at school, and found she enjoyed it. While Kit had crunched the numbers in the columns of the accounts, Stella had taken the printed copies of the original text and learned to read the difficult looping manuscript.
Weeks later, after the endless – and fruitless – round of numeric analyses of the integers, when she was beginning to dream of cramped, crabbed Elizabethan handwriting every time she closed her eyes, Stella had seen in the last pages of the last ledger the smears and errors on the page that were not, as had always been said, the result of writing on board ship, but the deliberate masking of a known shorthand.
It had taken her less than two hours to transcribe it and half of that was spent in the library finding notes that led her to the contemporary translations of John Dee’s shorthand.
That which you seek lies hidden in white water …
Stella had found the text. Kit was the one who had understood that it directed them to Cedric Owen’s lost heart-stone, Kit who had spent his days reading the biographies of Cedric Owen to find the places to which the cryptic lines might refer, who had unearthed maps and the earliest ordnance surveys, who had cruised Google Maps until his eyes were square; and Kit who had cared enough to plan the trip and make it happen and had shouldered the responsibility now, when death stalked them both.
But it was Stella who had dived into the white water and picked up the ugly mass of white lime, Stella who had come to care for it and was left with unanswered questions that ate at her sleep and shadowed her day. She stared at it emptily.
‘What am I missing?’
Kit’s laptop lay under the low ash table; repository of the entire Owen archive, plus the hundreds of files of failed cryptography, and the single one that had succeeded. Pulling the file on to the screen, she skipped down to the stanza that Kit had remembered.
I am your hope at the end of time. Hold me as you would hold your child. Listen to me as you would listen to your lover. Trust me as you would trust your god, whosoever that may be.
Follow the path that is herein shewn and be with me at the time and place appointed. Do then as the guardians of the night foretell. Thereafter, follow your heart and mine, for these are one and the same. Do not fail me, for in doing so, you fail yourself and all the worlds of waiting.
She chewed on the end of a pen. ‘I have held you as I would hold a child. I am listening in all the ways I know how. I am prepared to trust you, if you’ll give me something to trust, and I didn’t throw you into Gaping Ghyll, which must count for something between us. I would follow the path that is herein shewn if I had the slightest clue where you might shew me anything usef—’
It was not blue that lit her mind, then, only a sudden slamming thought. ‘Stella Cody, you’re an idiot. And a blind one at that.’
She pushed herself to her feet and ran for the desk in the far corner of the room, to where Kit kept all his files, with a neatness bordering on pathology that nevertheless meant she could find anything as long as she knew what it was that she needed.
She knew exactly what she needed now; she pulled out a box file full of printed copies of the first three ledgers, a pad and a new pen and took it all back to her space by the window, pausing to kiss the back of Kit’s hand as she passed.
‘If I ever again accuse you of being scarily, certifiably anal, please remind me of this.’
She said it quietly and did not see him wake then, nor apparently in any part of the afternoon, while she sat in a messy cascade of papers and scanned images and asked of herself the question she had not asked before, and found, perhaps, the beginning of an answer.
‘Hello? Anyone at home?’
The sun was leaning far to the west, sending amber light to glance off the river. The breeze was cooler and less laden with water. The tour guide and the visiting scholars had gone. The ducks had all moved upriver, to be fed by tourists at the cafés on Magdalene Bridge. Stella sat cross-legged in the evening’s quiet light chewing a pen and making notes on her A4 pad.
‘Am I not welcome?’ A stocky figure stepped in through the doorway, letting in a draught that lifted the paper’s edge.
‘Gordon! Of course you’re welcome. Come on in …’
Professor Gordon Fraser BSc, MSc, CGeol, FRS and prime contender for the Master of Bede’s in the unlikely event that Tony Bookless ever renounced the post, was a sedimentary geologist and caver of international renown; he was also one of Stella’s closest friends in Cambridge.
A short, wide man, he bore a carroty beard that jutted ledge-like from the angle of his lower lip and gridiron sinews that stood out along his shoulders like lanyards. His hair ranged across his head in wild curls that would have been the envy of any woman and he wore a Cambridge Climbing and Caving Club T-shirt that proclaimed a list of first descents that would have been implausible except that Stella had been with him on the latest of them and knew the rest to be genuine.
> He spoke his English from the north-west of Scotland and had been known to wear a kilt, although Stella had only seen evidence of that once, three weeks before, when Gordon the Dwarf had been the second witness at her wedding.
He stood awkwardly on the threshold now, holding a bunch of freesias, peering in round the edge of the door. The skull-stone was not in his line of sight. Stella slid her pack over it before she stood.
‘I’m sorry, I was lost in the ledgers. Let me make you coffee and then we’ll see if Kit wants to wake up. He’d be sorry to miss you.’
From his wheelchair by the window, Kit said, ‘Kit’s awake.’
He spoke in the lazy slur that made it impossible to know if he were still half asleep or had been awake for the past three hours. A whine of batteried wheels turned the chair. He shrugged his better shoulder.
‘I’m sorry.’ He answered the look on her face. ‘I should have said something sooner. It was good to watch you work.’
His cluttered gaze met hers, saying more: that he, too, enjoyed his solitude; that he needed the freedom simply to sit; that there were parts of him that he needed to keep private, but was sorry for it.
Lightly, he said, ‘I need to pee. If you make coffee, I might be done by the time it’s ready and then you can show the two of us what you’ve made of Cedric Owen’s ledgers.’
The kitchen was a galley in the corner of the room; a remnant of Tudor planning that had seen no reason to keep the heat of a cooking fire away from the bedroom or study.
While he was gone, Stella made coffee the slow way, setting Gordon to grind the beans while she boiled the milk in a thick-bottomed pan. They talked of caves they both knew, and not of the accident; all of that talking had been done at Kit’s bedside in the three weeks before he came home.
In that time, other cavers had repeated their route in both directions and mapped it; pictures on the web showed the cathedral of the earth with its chandeliers of dripping stone. Anthropologists were already studying the cave paintings, naming them, classifying them, dissolving their mystery.
Kit’s wheelchair whined back from the bedroom and lavatory beyond. He had changed his T-shirt and dashed water over his hair, leaving it rumpled, and more brown than gold. Stella noticed these things as she would have done a month ago, but with a different kind of care.
‘And so?’ He found his space by the three-sided window and moved the low table with his foot. ‘You’ve spent three uninterrupted hours studying Cedric Owen’s ledgers. What did you find?’
She was not ready. The part of her trained to science wanted to finish the search, to quantify the results, possibly even to decipher their message.
They waited, kindly; two of the three men she trusted most in the world. She said, ‘I hate to say this, and I’m not sure I can bring myself to face him again, but Tony Bookless should be here.’
Knowing her a liar, he had none the less confirmed the funding for her fellowship within a week of coming home. Her conscience was a needle in the back of her mind that would not go away.
‘He’s stuck in a meeting at the Old Schools,’ Gordon said. ‘He’ll not be finished till after formal dinner.’ He wrapped his thick fingers round the mug Stella gave him and jutted his beard at her notes. ‘I watched you in the window all the way across Jesus Green. You were way lost in something that didn’t look as if it’ll wait until then.’ Then, when she did not answer, ‘What have you found, lass?’
She swirled her coffee and looked at Kit and tried to forget Tony Bookless. ‘I found the second cipher in the ledgers. The one “that is herein shewn”.’
It should have been said with flashing lights and a fanfare of trumpets. She had a chorus of mallard drakes assaulting a duck, and the thin, high cry of a lost child on the river bank.
And Kit, smiling broadly with the half of his mouth that could manage it, said, ‘Which is why there are thirty-two volumes, not just one. You clever, clever girl. I thought it was an awful lot of work for two men just to leave us a single page of poorly cadenced poetry. What does it tell us?’
‘I don’t know. It’s a hieroglyph. I’ve spent half the afternoon on the web trying to find out what it is. Look—’
She made a stack of her notes and set them on the table.
‘It’s like the shorthand: each page has half a dozen marks that look like random slips of the pen, except these ones are better hidden and the end result is more convoluted. It’s there in all of the books. See here near the bottom of the page …’ She picked up a volume at random and ran her finger under a line.
21 August 1573, To Imagio, son of Diego, For: 2 brayce hunted fowl: 2d
‘If you look closely under the figure 3 of the year, and again in the s of son and the y of brayce, there are curls and lines. If I copy these across the page …’ She laid a sheet of thin tracing paper on top and copied them through to it. ‘And then repeat again for the next line …’
22 August 1573, To Father Calderón, For: rent for 2 persons, viz, myselfe & don Fernandez
As she spoke, Stella picked out marks and copied them. ‘That finishes this page. It’s not very coherent yet.’
‘It’s gibberish.’ Kit picked up the sheet and held it at arm’s length, frowning. ‘It hasn’t got any of the hallmarks of a shorthand script.’ His speech was less slurred after sleep.
‘That’s because it isn’t a shorthand script.’ Stella took the page back and picked up three others. ‘It’s a composite. If we fit the pages together in groups of four, and match these dots down in the bottom left-hand corners …’ She caught her tongue between her teeth and fitted the pages together. ‘We have the magic of human communication. See?’
Four pages of tracing paper came together to make an array of strange curling glyphs, of half-seen goggle-eyed men and animals, of gaping mouths and suns and trees and moons and coiled snakes and jaguars and none of it intelligible.
‘Christ.’
Stella had not often known Gordon rendered speechless. It was good to see it now.
She said, ‘There are marks and alignment dots on every page from the first volume to the last. I can’t think why we didn’t see them before.’
‘We weren’t looking,’ Kit said, ‘and now we are. You are, at any rate.’ He was bending over dangerously far, fumbling with the pages on the low coffee table. ‘Although I, clearly, am too befuddled to see the obvious; I can’t understand a bit of it. Gordon, who is wise and sage and hasn’t had his brains knocked to dust, will doubtless succeed where I am failing. Gordon?’
Quite dexterously, he flicked a set of four pages to the blunt Scot, who studied them, one after the other.
‘Maybe. Maybe not.’ Gordon passed the pages to Stella. ‘Could you show me that again?’
She chose different pages, with different marks, all very clear to her eyes. Taking a thick fibre pen, she marked them rapidly on each page, traced them, matched them and drew out the final glyphs.
‘They come in blocks of twelve by twelve,’ she said. ‘I scanned them into the laptop and ran some web matches and I think they’re old Mayan glyphs. Maybe Olmec if we’re splitting hairs, but Cedric Owen was in the Mayan lands for thirty-two years of his life, so I’d bet on that.’
‘Can you read them?’ Gordon asked.
‘Are you kidding? Not a chance. I could learn to, perhaps, but it could take me years. We need someone who’s already steeped in this stuff.’
‘Of which I imagine there are very few, and fewer still in England whom we could trust not to shout this to the whole world before we’re ready.’ Kit was looking at her, in the way she remembered. ‘But you’ve found the one who knows it all?’
She grinned. ‘Maybe. I Googled “skull” and “Mayan” and got half a million hits of flaky nonsense about the end of the world. Then I added “Cedric Owen” and got down to two pages, all of which eventually linked through to Professor Ursula Walker of the Institute of Mayan Studies, which is part of Oxford University. This woman’s amazing; the Institute is
based at her home, which is a Tudor farmhouse in the Oxfordshire countryside. Her family have owned land there since the Domesday Book and it happens to be the place where the Owen ledgers were found so you could say she has something of a family interest. She got a first in anthropology—’
‘From Bede’s?’ Kit said.
‘Of course, and then, if Google’s telling the truth, she spent four post-graduate years writing the definitive biography of Cedric Owen – with Tony Bookless.’
Gordon smacked his hand on his head. ‘I thought I’d heard the name before.’
‘Exactly. But she didn’t stick around so everyone has forgotten her. The pair of them got their PhDs together and then went their separate ways: he joined the army and became a military historian; she became a field anthropologist. From her output, I’d say she’s spent a lot longer than we have looking for the skull-stone and trying to work out what it’s for. The only problem is that it looks like she’s gone native in the process.’
Kit rolled his eyes. ‘What kind of native?’
‘Every kind there is. You name a native, she’s gone it. As far as I can tell, she spends at least half her life in the field. Have a look …’
Stella lifted the lid of the laptop and turned the screen so they could both see it. A brisk-eyed, wind-tanned woman in her mid-sixties glanced out at them. Behind her, the scenery was densely green.
Gordon twisted the screen round to get a better look. ‘Looks more like jungle than field.’
‘That’s the last trip to the Yucatán in June 2005,’ Stella said. ‘Sadly I can’t find a picture of winter 2006 which was spent in the frozen wastes of the Arctic tundra getting stoned on reindeer urine with the Sami Laplanders.’
‘Stella?’ For the first time since the cave, Stella saw Kit laugh. Her heart danced.
Straight-faced, she said, ‘It’s a well-known procedure in modern cultural anthropology, apparently. The reindeer eat hallucinogenic mushrooms and piss out high-octane urine. The reindeer herders eat the yellow snow and then their shamans do whatever it is they do to keep everyone happy.’ She let go and felt a grin stretch her ears apart. ‘What else do you do when there’s thirty seconds of daylight every twenty-four hours and the ambient temperature’s cold enough to freeze the balls off a cat?’