The Cadence of Gypsies

by Barbara Casey

  “Dr. Harcourt has to get rid of them,” said one of the graduating high school seniors who had thrived in the strict environment of Wood Rose and would continue her advanced studies in religion. “They are weird, and all they do is cause trouble.”

  Another girl—Lynda spelled with a “y” Corgill—who had entered Wood Rose a couple of years after Dara and Mackenzie and was now a sophomore secretly admired the FIGs and didn’t wish to see them get punished. She also wished she had the nerve to do some of the things they did—well, maybe not. But still…

  “But what is it?” asked one of the 10-year-old middle-grade girls who had noticed the neatly pruned cylinder shape earlier that morning. The older girls nearby giggled.

  The youngest Wood Rose girls, ages 5 through 9, sat together at one long table in the center of the dining room. They didn’t know what was going on; only that something terrible must have happened since all of the big girls were whispering. Usually, the older girls didn’t whisper so much.

  Separated from the long tables where the girls ate, at smaller, individual tables positioned in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows which provided scenic views of the beautifully landscaped lawn, the faculty ate in intimate groups of two, three, or four, their conversations kept to low, hushed tones.

  “What do you think they used for a model?” Even though the others at the table were thinking it, Dr. Rankin, head of the biology department, boldly blurted out this question first. The other three faculty members seated at the table, all teachers at the elementary school level, only shook their heads.

  At a table across the way in front of another window the conversation took on a different twist. “Maybe the FIGs didn’t do it; maybe it is like one of those crop circles.” Clyde Benson, head of the physical education department, laughed out loud at this suggestion and then quickly sobered so as not to insult his colleague, the pretty Dr. Catherine Sullivan, head of the history department, whom he had been seeing with some regularity in their off hours.

  As soon as Dara, Mackenzie, and Jennifer walked into the dining room, everything became quiet. Not even a dish rattled. The FIGs were accustomed to being made the prime subjects of gossip and chose to ignore it. They got their plates, filled them with food, and picked out one of the tables normally reserved for faculty, apart from everyone else, where they could talk without being overheard.

  “Look,” said Dara, scooping up some scrambled eggs onto her fork and cramming them into her mouth. “He wouldn’t dare fire Carolina. For one thing, she hasn’t done anything wrong. And another thing, who else would even want to teach us?”

  “Yeah, but what if he holds her responsible?” asked Mackenzie, all of her problem-solving abilities suddenly consumed by concern and her lisp quite noticeable. She looked at Jennifer who was creating a picture by scattering the food around on her plate with a fork. “Are you going to eat that toast?” Mackenzie always ate more whenever something was bothering her.

  Jennifer forked over her toast to Mackenzie, too worried to eat. The last thing she wanted was for Carolina to lose her job over something silly she and the other FIGs had done.

  “I’ll tell you what,” said Dara, her dark eyes flashing, “If Thurgood fires Carolina, we will chop down his Photinia frasen, Peni erecti, and be damned with it. After all, if it weren’t for Carolina, we would have run away a long time ago.”

  Mackenzie and Jennifer nodded in silent agreement. They would fight this to the bitter end.

  As soon as the FIGs left the cafeteria, new, more energized discussions erupted among students and faculty alike, amplifying the noise level around the large room by several decimals amidst the normal clatter of dishes and silverware being washed in the kitchen.

  This went unnoticed, however, by the three females of intellectual genius; for after leaving the cafeteria, they hurried across the lawn to another single-story stone building. There they entered the ornate doors of Alcott Chapel, walked past the two large portraits painted in oils and the crystal vase of fresh pink roses, and sat next to each other in the front pew, alone, pensive, and consumed with anxiety-produced repentance twenty minutes before services were to commence.

  * * *

  Carolina placed the notebooks, which held her hand-written notes and materials that included a copy of the Voynich Manuscript itself, and the box that contained the parik-til and her birth certificate and other documents on the table centered in front of the sofa. Then she brought the photograph, which she kept displayed in a silver frame on her chest of drawers, from her bedroom and placed it on the table with the other things. She checked her watch. It was a few minutes before eleven. Services would be ending shortly.

  Carolina prepared her coffee maker for eight cups, brought out the sugar bowl—for Mackenzie, and filled the creamer—for Jennifer and Dara. Then she fixed herself a piece of whole-wheat toast with a little orange marmalade. She wasn’t hungry, but she knew she shouldn’t drink coffee—especially black coffee, the way she liked it—on an empty stomach. Everything was ready, and in a few minutes she heard a determined rap on the door. The FIGs had come.

  Carolina opened the door and the three girls rushed in, all at once.

  “We won’t let him do it, Carolina,” said Dara because she always spoke first.

  “It just isn’t fair,” said Mackenzie, stumbling slightly over the contraction, “isn’t.”

  Jennifer merely stood quietly just inside the door of Carolina’s bungalow, tried to flip her ponytail, but her large blue eyes brimmed with tears instead.

  “What are you talking about?” Carolina led the girls into the kitchen where she poured each one a cup of coffee. She handed the sugar bowl to Mackenzie, and the creamer first to Dara and then Jennifer who was trying to wipe away her tears with one hand while balancing the coffee cup in the other. With the cups filled with coffee, and the desired amounts of sugar and cream added, Carolina led her guests into the living room and motioned for them to sit on the sofa.

  Dara once again took the lead. “We won’t let Thurgood fire you. If he does, we’re out of here!”

  “Fire me! No one is getting fired. In fact, something really good has come out of this. But first…you do know that you shouldn’t have done that to Dr. Harcourt’s bush, don’t you?”

  All three FIGs looked down in the vicinity of their feet. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I think it would be nice if each of you wrote him a note of apology.”

  All three girls jerked their heads up and stared at Carolina.

  “Don’t you?” she asked, this time with a little more emphasis.

  “Okay,” said Dara finally.

  Carolina looked at Mackenzie and Jennifer. They both nodded.

  “All right. Enough said on that subject.” She knew they would be true to their word and follow through. “Now I want to talk about something else.”

  It was then that the girls noticed the notebooks on the table in front of them, the small wooden box, and the photograph.

  “I want to tell you a story,” began Carolina.

  The story she knew so well was a fascinating one, wrapped in mystery, adventure, and romance. It was her priceless treasure. Now, as she told the story to them out loud, however, she wondered if it didn’t sound a little ridiculous—like a young child’s fantasy of finding a rare jewel. She needn’t have worried. The FIGs were caught up in Carolina’s special project from the moment she said the word story. And from that moment on, they would follow her to the ends of the earth.

  Chapter 7

  Frascati, less than 10 kilometers south of Rome, was the nearest of the Castelli towns. As in times past, the gypsies camped on a hill nearby, once called Tusculum by the ancients, in the shadows of the Villa Mondragone, so named because of the many dragons carved in its brown stone edifice. The gypsies simply called it the Old Villa. Originally built on Roman ruins in the sixteenth century, it had survived through the centuries as home to various Catholic cardinals and periods of abandonment until most recently when i
t had been sold by the college of the Jesuits to the Second University of Rome. From their camp, it was an easy walk into Frascati, a rural village not yet marred by tourism. The villagers still held on to some of the old beliefs, making it easier for the gypsies to sell their wares. But even in Frascati, there was the foul scent of change. Lyuba noticed it; the others who had been there before did as well. Soon it would become a destination for tourists, with its fancy wine and its historical villa.

  Lyuba strolled the streets, remembering the familiar and noting the unfamiliar. The building which housed the many government offices was still there. She reached into the folds of her skirt to feel for her lucky charm—the stone that she always carried with her. It comforted her. Unseen, she stood quietly in the shade of a large red maple tree, little more than a sapling all those many years ago, and remembered. Just when she thought she could no longer bear the pain and must leave, two women came out of the ornate door, talking and laughing. They were probably going somewhere to eat lunch. Lyuba stepped from the shade into the sunlight.

  “Would the pretty lady like to have her fortune told?” she asked the younger of the two. The young ones usually liked to have their fortunes told. Both women stopped, and it was then that Lyuba recognized the older woman. Stunned, she couldn’t say anything. Instead, she reached into her basket and pulled out the small pouch she had brought with her. “Keep this with you, and you will have many blessings,” she said handing it to the older woman.

  She didn’t wait to get paid; she simply left. For a moment, the two women wondered if they had even seen the gypsy, but they knew they had because Signora De Rossa had the parik-til the gypsy woman had given her.

  “How strange,” said the younger woman. “What do you suppose that was all about?”

  The older woman remained quiet, staring into the shadows where the gypsy had been.

  Lyuba hadn’t been prepared to see her so soon, but she quickly recovered. After all, it was the reason she had returned to that place. She hadn’t even known if the woman would still be there and, strangely enough, it gave her a feeling of happiness to know that she was. It was good that she had brought the special parik-til she had prepared for her—the kind one who had tried to help her all those many years ago. It was a good omen

  Lyuba returned to camp just before dusk, when the last of the sun’s rays—the crown of thorns she called it—were all that was visible on the western horizon. The basket on her arm was empty except for the crystal wrapped in a soft black cloth and her Tarot cards. She had done well, but she always did. Maybe the Bandoleer had been right; it was time to face the negative forces from the past, and then move on.

  * * *

  The FIGs were familiar with part of the story—that part where Carolina was taken from a foster home when she was three years old and adopted by a family named Branson. She had revealed that much to them on one of their outings off campus.

  “I had just turned eighteen when they told me I was adopted,” Carolina said.

  “That must have been hard,” said Mackenzie who didn’t know what it was like to have parents, real or otherwise.

  “Not really. You see, I had always suspected something wasn’t quite right. The peculiar way people looked at me when I was introduced as Carolina Branson; I looked nothing like my adoptive parents. I don’t look anything like my real parents either, as far as that goes, but I just never felt totally comfortable around my adoptive parents, at least not in the way my friends did with their parents. It was almost a relief when they told me. It somehow all made sense then.” She sipped her coffee and picked up the wooden box on the table. “Anyway, a few weeks before I was to start college, they gave me this box. In it were my birth certificate and some other documents having to do with the adoption, a photograph of a man and woman whom I assume are my birth parents, and some money—things my birth parents had wanted me to have.”

  “Wow,” said Dara. “Your birth parents must have really loved you.”

  Carolina smiled at the FIGs, knowing each of them had buried deep within them their own dreams and fantasies of what their parents were like had they known them, or, in Jennifer’s case, if they had lived. She did the same thing. It was a way of coping with knowing you were alone in the world; it was a way of making something wrong right. “Naturally I cherished these things simply because they were things my real parents wanted me to have; but then, a short time later, just a week before I was to attend orientation at the university, I stumbled across something that has completely changed my life.”

  By this time all three girls were sitting on the edge of the sofa.

  “I had been given a list of books to read over the summer prior to starting my freshman year by my academic advisor, and on that list was a book about the Voynich Manuscript that also had several photographs of some of the actual manuscript pages.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Jennifer. “What’s the Voynich Manuscript?”

  “The Voynich Manuscript is the most mysterious of all the texts in the world,” answered Carolina.

  “Didn’t some top military code-breakers try to decipher it during World War II, but failed?” asked Dara.

  “Yeah, and then some professor at the University of Pennsylvania went insane trying to figure it out,” added Mackenzie.

  “So why haven’t I heard of it?”

  “A lot of people have never heard of the Voynich Manuscript.” Carolina opened one of her notebooks on the table and pulled out a sheaf of papers. “This is a copy of it.” She handed it to Jennifer. “The original is seven by ten inches, about 235 pages long, and it’s made of soft, light-brown vellum. Small, but thick.”

  “Where is the original?” asked Jennifer.

  “Now it is in the Beinecke Library at Yale University. A rare book expert in New York named H.P. Kraus donated it when he couldn’t find a buyer for it. Before that, in 1912, a book collector by the name of Wilfrid M. Voynich discovered the manuscript in a chest with some other ancient manuscripts kept in the Jesuit College at the Villa Mondragone in Frascati, near Rome.”

  Carolina had the girls’ full attention. “There was a piece of paper attached to the Voynich Manuscript when Wilfrid Voynich found it which revealed that the manuscript was once part of the private library of Petrus Beckx S.J., 22nd general of the Society of Jesus. There are a lot of theories as to the origins of it, but other notable people who seem to have been involved with the manuscript at various times are Rudolph II, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire in the mid-1500s and early 1600s, Athanasius Kircher in the 1600s, who was considered one of the most learned men of his day, and Roger Bacon in the 1200s who was a Franciscan friar.”

  Jennifer had moved onto the floor with several sheets of the manuscript spread out in front of her. “There are a lot of drawings,” she commented, immediately drawn to the artwork in colors of red, blue, brown, yellow, and green since one of her specialties was art.

  “The contents of the manuscript appear to be divided up into five categories. What you are looking at, Jennifer, is called the botanical section—plant drawings. There is also the astrological or astronomical section, the biological section, the pharmaceutical section, and then the last section which is 23 pages of text arranged in short paragraphs, each beginning with a star. The last page in this section appears to be a Key of some sort.”

  Dara and Mackenzie picked out more pages of the manuscript and joined Jennifer on the floor.

  “There seem to be word repetitions—like a code,” said Mackenzie, who specialized in computers, math, and calculus—and problem-solving.

  “Maybe even two different languages,” added Dara, whose knowledge of foreign languages included the ancient language of Sanskrit.

  Not surprising, the girls had immediately picked up on some of the crucial findings about the manuscript. “No one knows what it means. It is written from left to right, and the lines—they scan from the top of the page to the bottom. The style is a flowing cursive script in an alphabet that has never b
een seen elsewhere…” Carolina hesitated…”until now.”

  Engrossed in the manuscript pages spread out before them, and comfortable in their surroundings of brightly-colored, hand-sewn cushions, slip covers and draperies, Carolina’s admission first went unnoticed by the FIGs. Then everything became still. Dara was the first to grasp the meaning of Carolina’s words—or maybe it was the tone of her voice that she picked up on.

  “What do you mean, Carolina?”

  Carolina removed an old and creased single sheet of paper, yellowed with age, that was now carefully protected in clear, acid-free paper. She handed it to Dara. “This was folded up in a parik-til, in the box with my birth certificate.”

  “A parik-til?” asked Jennifer.

  “It is a small pouch that is filled with things to bring good luck or blessings.” She held up the cloth bag and opened it for the girls to see. “Gypsies use them, but so do Native Americans as well as people from Central and South America and other parts of the world. When I got it, I had no idea what it was or what it meant. I knew the folded piece of paper was old and somehow had to be important to me since my birth parents had included it with the other things they wanted me to have.” Carolina stood up and walked over to the window. How well she remembered the overwhelming emotions she felt when she first saw those pages of the Voynich Manuscript in the book she was reading, and then realizing that the ancient script was the same as what was on the piece of paper that had been preserved in the parik-til—her parik-til. “Anyway, as soon as I saw the photographs of some of the manuscript pages in the book I was reading, I made the connection immediately. It was the same script as what was on this sheet of paper that I had been given.”

  All three FIGs crowded closely together to look at Carolina’s treasure.

  “Even more amazing is the fact that according to my birth certificate, I was born in Frascati, Italy, the same place where the Voynich Manuscript was originally discovered.”