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word of your studies. My mind is afire with imaginings of your life at Ingolstadt. To live without a care but the cares of the mind, is there a truer heaven on earth? Send word, and perhaps you may also send your prayers and your strength. If I am to fulfill my Father’s final wish, I will need them both .
Farewell .
30 September 1598 Prague .
    I liked the fact that she didn’t whine. Psychotic father demanding help with some psychotic escape plan; mother who seemed to have abdicated all adult responsibility and, at least in my imagination, spent her days gazing out the window, twirling her hair, twiddling her thumbs, and reminding Elizabeth to marry rich; big brother who was apparently the Little Prince incarnate, too good for the menial labor of family life—she took it all in stride. Less impressive was the fact that she seemed to take it as her due. No feminists in the 1500s, I got that, but did she have to unquestioningly service her father’s every whim, even once hewas in the ground? He wasn’t even her father, not technically, and however much she claimed him as her blood, I couldn’t help noticing: She’d kept her own name.

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    I started looking forward to the afternoons in the Hoff’s office, to Chris and Max and the hours of quiet. It mattered less than studying for APs or finishing applications, less even than the nights Chris and Adriane and I filled the hours till dawn with movies, midnight drives, urban spelunking investigations of abandoned tunnels and forgotten roofs, even, when we got desperate, the dusty board games in Adriane’s basement, anything to avoid talking about the ticking clock and the day, sometime after graduation, when the rest of our lives would separately begin. The letters mattered less than all of that, but because they did, because they were an escape from anything that mattered—or had mattered to anyone in four centuries—they somehow mattered more.
E. J. Weston, to her dearest brother John Fr. Weston, greetings .
You know I would tell you anything, but despite your persistent questioning, I cannot reveal the promise I made to our Father. You cannot understand what he was like in those final days, consumed by that infernal book, determined to finish his greatest work before death stole him away. There were nights when he raved with such fever I feared he might burn before my eyes. I mopped his fiery brow as he raged at the heavens, at the angels, at the Emperor, at me. Forces conspired against him, he alleged, both in this world and beyond. Was he so wrong? There are whispers that his assassin was on a mission from the Emperor himself. Of course, no loyal subject could ever suspect the Emperor of such a crime. And no one can question my loyalty .
    The “infernal book” might have been the Hoff’s precious Voynich manuscript, but even if he’d been around to tell—which he hadn’t in nearly a week—I would have kept it to myself. If Elizabeth was writing about the Book, that meant her letters weren’t so useless after all, and I wasn’t about to invite the Hoff to take them away from me.
It is loyalty that drives me now. Our Father’s last, greatest work awaits me, and I have finally summoned the courage to complete it. There is a man whose help I must enlist, whose name I cannot divulge. I shudder at things they say about him, the strange mechanical creatures with which he surrounds himself, their eyes glowing with demonic life. But our Father trusted him. I can only hope it is a trust this man will not betray .
It pains me to hear of your recent illness, and I urge you to tend to your health. I know your childish fear of the leeches, but you must take the advice of your physicians. Only once was I forced to endure the creatures, but their slime on my skin, and that exquisite pain as my blood drained into their engorged bodies, is an experience I will not soon forget. We all do what we must to survive .
24 October 1598 Prague .

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    “ ‘We all do what we must to