Page 6 of The Beloved Escapade

But he was not working. There was no work to do. That was the trouble.

The journals were spread across the long oak table. Three of them. The oldest was bound in vellum going brown at the edges, the second in dark red leather with the corners rubbed white; the third was smaller than the others and bound in something Lorenzo suspected was pig’s skin, though he would not have staked coin on it. All three were open. All three showed him the same thing they had been showing him since the day they came into his hands.

Nothing.

Pages and pages and pages of nothing.

He looked at the page in front of him. The axe. The vertical sword. The wave crest. A circle with a dot in the middle. A horned helmet. A box with a pointed top like a house or a throne. A broken chain. An X.

The pictograms marched across the page in tidy rows, spaced like sentences, punctuated like sentences. There was no doubt they were meant to convey something. Matteo had gone to considerable trouble to make them look like sense.

Lorenzo could not make them mean anything.

There was nothing left to try. He was an art historian. He knew what to do with a painting he did not understand. He examined it. He cataloged the iconography. He compared it to other works of the same hand, the same school, the same period. He consulted a specialist. And, eventually, he arrived somewhere.

He did not sit before a page of pictograms that he could not read and stare it into surrender.

He had tried, in the first days after the journals came to him, to catalog the pictograms as iconography. The axe appeared in The Martyrdom of Saint Matthias in the Santa Croce sacristy. The wave crest was in the border of the Madonna del Mare in Genoa. The horned helmet Lorenzo had once seen sketched in the margin of a Matteo letter to a patron in Ferrara. He had made a table. He had filled a page.

He had realized the table led nowhere. The pictograms in the journals were not iconography. They were smaller. They were regular. They were rowed out like writing. They were writing. An alphabet. That meant they were not his subject at all. That meant the tools he had were the wrong tools.

He had put the notebook away and gone to bed exasperated. He hoped Nicholas was learning something in Oxford that would help.

The next morning, Lorenzo opened the journals again and stared at them for an hour and put them away again.

Nicholas, who had left Grimsfell some weeks ago, still limping from his childhood injury, had looked at those pages and said, in a tone that declared it self-evident, “A substitution alphabet. Nothing more clever than that.” Lorenzo had stared at him. Nicholas had said the axe was E and the underlying language was English.

English because Matteo had been here, working with Englishmen. He would have thought in their tongue eventually.

Lorenzo had not been able to credit it. But he had known, in a corner of his mind he had not previously permitted himself to look into, that Nicholas was right.

It was one of the hollow things he had been carrying since that afternoon. That Matteo, who had painted the Madonna del Mare in Genoese sunlight, who had signed his letters Matteo di Bianchi, Fiorentino, had spent the last of his working life, however long that had been, and whenever and however it had ended, thinking in a language that was not his own.

Lorenzo did not know when. He did not know how. He did not know where.

That was the point. That had always been the point. Three centuries of di Bianchi intrigue about what had become of Matteo, and Lorenzo had come to Cornwall to break the silence and had found himself in a library, staring at his ancestral journals written in pictograms that he could not read and could not learn to read and could do nothing about at all.

Nicholas had gone to Oxford to uncover what he could about the cipher.

Nearly two weeks earlier.

Lorenzo looked down at the axe on the page in front of him. He traced at the vertical sword. He scowled at the wave crest.

E, he thought. Then blank. Then blank. Then blank.

He turned the page. Not to read it, but to feel that he was doing something useful.

The library door opened.

He did not look up. He had heard footsteps in the passage a moment before. It would be Mrs. Roskelly, who always brought the coffee at this hour.

“Grazie, signora,” he said absently, without looking up. “Sul tavolo, per favore.”

There was a pause.

Mrs. Roskelly, Lorenzo remembered, did not speak Italian.

“Signor di Bianchi, sir.” Not Mrs. Roskelly. One of the maids, whose name Lorenzo could never remember, and whose voice was pitched high with excitement.