The Source - Michael Cordy [34]
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century, and the second had indeed been Pius V. He searched for Orlando Falcon and found nothing, but when he checked historical references to Pizarro's conquest of the New World the chronology tallied with when Sister Chantal claimed that Falcon had undertaken his quest.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,