Timeline. Part 13

"Why? What is it?"

"Just come. Now. Now."

The generator chugged loudly, and the farmhouse seemed brilliantly lit in the dark field, under a sky of stars.

They all crowded into the farmhouse. Elsie was sitting at her desk in the center, staring at them. Her eyes seemed distant.

"Elsie?"

"It's impossible," she said.

"What's impossible? What happened here?"

Marek looked over at David Stern, but he was still working at some a.n.a.lysis in the corner of the room.

Elsie sighed. "I don't know, I don't know...."

"Well," Marek said, "start at the beginning."

"Okay," she said. "The beginning." She stood up and crossed the room, where she pointed to a stack of parchments resting on a piece of plastic tarp on the floor. "This is the beginning. The doc.u.ment bundle I designated M-031, dug up from the monastery earlier today. David asked me to do it as soon as possible."

n.o.body said anything. They just watched her.

"Okay," she said. "I've been going through the bundle. This is how I do it. I take about ten parchments at a time and bring them over here to my desk." She brought ten over. "Now, I sit down at the desk, and I go through them, one by one. Then, after I've summarized the contents of one sheet, and entered the summary into the computer, I take the sheet to be photographed, over here." She went to the next table, slipped a parchment under the camera.

Marek said, "We're familiar with-"

"No, you're not," she said sharply. "You're not familiar at all." Elsie went back to her table, took the next parchment off the stack. "Okay. So I go through them one by one. This particular stack consists of all kinds of doc.u.ments: bills, copies of letters, replies to orders from the bishop, records of crop yields, lists of monastery a.s.sets. All dating from about the year 1357."

She took the parchments from the stack, one after the other.

"And then"-she removed the last one-"I see this."

They stared.

n.o.body said anything.

The parchment was identical in size to the others in the stack, but instead of dense writing in Latin or Old French, this one had only two words, scrawled in plain English: HELP ME.

4/7/1357.

"In case you're wondering," she said, "that's the Professor's handwriting."

The room was silent. No one moved or shifted. They all just stared in complete silence.

Marek was thinking very fast, running through the possibilities. Because of his detailed, encyclopedic knowledge of the medieval period, for many years he had served as an outside consultant on medieval artifacts to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. As a result, Marek had considerable experience with fakes of all kinds. It was true that he was rarely shown faked doc.u.ments from the medieval period-the fakes were usually precious stones set in a bracelet that was ten years old, or a suit of armor that turned out to have been made in Brooklyn-but his experience had given him a clear way to think it through.

Marek said, "Okay. Begin at the beginning. Are you sure that's his handwriting?"

"Yes," Elsie said. "Without question."

"How do you know?"

She sniffed. "I'm a graphologist, Andre. But here. See for yourself."

She brought out a note that Johnston had scrawled a few days earlier, a note written in block letters, attached to a bill: "PLS CHK THIS CHARGE." She set it beside the parchment signature. "Block letters are actually easier to a.n.a.lyze. His H H, for example, has a faint diagonal beneath. He draws one vertical line, lifts his pen, draws the second vertical, then drags his pen back to draw the crossbar, making the diagonal below. Or look at the P P. He makes a downward stroke, then goes up and back to position to make the semicircle. Or the E E, which he draws as an L L and then zigzags back up to make the two added lines. There's no question. It's his handwriting." and then zigzags back up to make the two added lines. There's no question. It's his handwriting."

"Someone couldn't have forged it?"

"No. Forgery, you have pen lifts and other signs. This writing is his."

Kate said, "Would he play a joke on us?"

"If he did, it isn't funny."

"What about this parchment it's written on?" Marek said. "Is it as old as the other sheets in the stack?"

"Yes," David Stern said, coming over. "Short of carbon dating, I'd say yes-it's the same age as the others."

Marek thought: How can that be? How can that be? He said, "Are you sure? This parchment looks different. The surface looks rougher to me." He said, "Are you sure? This parchment looks different. The surface looks rougher to me."

"It is rougher," Stern said. "Because it's been poorly sc.r.a.ped. Parchment was valuable material in medieval times. Generally it was used, sc.r.a.ped clean, and then used again. But if we look at this parchment under ultraviolet.... Would somebody get the lights?" Kate turned them off, and in the darkness Stern swung a purple lamp over the table.

Marek immediately saw more writing, faint but clearly there on the parchment.

"This was originally a bill for lodging," Elsie said. "It's been sc.r.a.ped clean, quickly and crudely, as if somebody was in a hurry."

Chris said, "Are you saying the Professor sc.r.a.ped it?"

"I have no idea who sc.r.a.ped it. But it's not expertly done."

"All right," Marek said. "There's one definitive way to decide this, once and for all." He turned to Stern. "What about the ink, David? Is it genuine?"

Stern hesitated. "I'm not sure."

"Not sure? Why not?"

"Chemically speaking," Stern said, "it's exactly what you'd expect: iron in the form of ferrous oxide, mixed with gall as an organic binder. Some added carbon for blackness, and five percent sucrose. In those days, they used sugar to give the inks a shiny surface. So it's ordinary iron-gall ink, correct for the period. But that in itself doesn't mean much."

"Right." Stern was saying it could be faked.

"So I ran gall and iron t.i.ters," Stern said, "which I usually do in questionable cases. They tell us the exact amounts present in the ink. The t.i.ters indicate that this particular ink is similar but not identical to the ink on the other doc.u.ments."

"Similar but not identical," Marek said. "How similar?"

"As you know, medieval inks were mixed by hand before use, because they didn't keep. Gall is organic-it's the ground-up nuts of an oak tree-which means the inks would eventually go bad. Sometimes they added wine to the ink as a preservative. Anyway, there's usually a fairly large variation in gall and iron content from one doc.u.ment to another. You find as much as twenty or thirty percent difference between doc.u.ments. It's reliable enough that we can use these percentages to tell if two doc.u.ments were written on the same day, from the same ink supply. This particular ink is about twenty-nine percent different from the doc.u.ments on either side of it."

"Meaningless," Marek said. "Those numbers don't confirm either authenticity or forgery. Did you do a spectrographic a.n.a.lysis?"

"Yes. Just finished it. Here's the spectra for three doc.u.ments, with the Professor's in the middle." Three lines, a series of spikes and dips. "Again, similar but not identical."

"Not that that similar," Marek said, looking at the pattern of spikes. "Because along with the percentage difference in iron content, you've got lots of trace elements in the Professor's ink, including-what's this spike, for instance?" similar," Marek said, looking at the pattern of spikes. "Because along with the percentage difference in iron content, you've got lots of trace elements in the Professor's ink, including-what's this spike, for instance?"

"Chromium."

Marek sighed. "Which means it's modern."

"Not necessarily, no."

"There's no chromium in the inks before and after."

"That's true. But chromium is is found in ma.n.u.script inks. Fairly commonly." found in ma.n.u.script inks. Fairly commonly."

"Is there chromium in this valley?"

"No," Stern said, "but chromium was imported all over Europe, because it was used for fabric dyes as well as inks."

"But what about all these other contaminants?" Marek said, pointing to the other spikes. He shook his head. "I'm sorry. I'm just not buying this."

Stern said, "I agree. This has to be a joke."

"But we're not going to know for sure without a carbon date," Marek said. Carbon-14 would enable them to date both ink and parchment within about fifty years. That would be good enough to settle the question of forgery.

"I'd also like to do thermoluminescence, and maybe a laser activation while we're at it," Stern said.

"You can't do that here."

"No, I'll take it over to Les Eyzies." Les Eyzies, the town in the next valley that was the center of prehistoric studies in southern France, had a well-equipped lab that did carbon-14 and pota.s.sium-argon dating, as well as neutron activation and other difficult tests. The field results weren't as accurate as the labs in Paris or Toulouse, but scientists could get an answer in a few hours.

"Any chance you can run it tonight?" Marek said.

"I'll try."

Chris came back to join the group; he had been telephoning the Professor on a cell phone. "Nothing," he said. "I just got his voicemail."

"All right," Marek said. "There's nothing more we can do right now. I a.s.sume this message is a bizarre joke. I can't imagine who played it on us-but somebody did. Tomorrow we'll run carbon and date the message. I have no doubt it will prove to be recent. And with all due respect to Elsie, it's probably a forgery."

Elsie started to sputter.

"But in any case," Marek continued, "the Professor is due to call in tomorrow, and we'll ask him. In the meantime, I suggest we all go to bed and get a good night's rest."

In the farmhouse, Marek closed the door softly behind him before turning on the lights. Then he looked around.

The room was immaculate, as he would have expected. It had the tidiness of a monk's cell. Beside the bed stood five or six research papers, neatly stacked. On a desk to the right, more research papers sat beside a closed laptop computer. The desk had a drawer, which he opened and rummaged through quickly.

But he didn't find what he was looking for.

He went next to the armoire. The Professor's clothes were neatly arranged inside, with s.p.a.ce between each hanging garment. Marek went from one to the next, patting the pockets, but he still did not find it. Perhaps it wasn't here, he thought. Perhaps he had taken it with him to New Mexico.

There was a bureau opposite the door. He opened the top drawer: coins in a small shallow dish, American dollar bills wrapped in a rubber band, and a few personal objects, including a knife, a pen and a spare watch-nothing out of the ordinary.

Then he saw a plastic case, tucked over to one side.

He brought the case out, opened it up. The case contained eyegla.s.ses. He set the gla.s.ses out on the counter.

The lenses were bifocals, oval in shape.

He reached into his shirt pocket and brought out a plastic bag. He heard a creak behind him, and turned to see Kate Erickson coming in through the door.

"Going through his underwear?" she said, raising her eyebrows. "I saw the light under the door. So I had a look."

"Without knocking?" Marek said.

"What are you doing in here?" she said. Then she saw the plastic. "Is that what I think it is?"

"Yes."

Marek took the single bifocal lens out of the plastic bag, holding it with a pair of tweezers, and placed it on top of the bureau, beside the Professor's eyegla.s.ses.

"Not identical," she said. "But I'd say the lens is his."

"So would I."

"But isn't that what you always thought? I mean, he's the only one on the site who wears bifocals. The contamination has to be from his eyegla.s.ses."

"But there isn't any contamination," Marek said. "This lens is old."

"What?"

"David says that white edge is bacterial growth. This lens is not modern, Kate. It's old."

She looked closely. "It can't be," she said. "Look at the way the lenses are cut. It's the same in the Professor's gla.s.ses and this lens. It must be modern."

"I know, but David insists it's old."