Surely no coincidence. Click for source. The trip to Rouen took slightly under an hour, and they were both absorbed in their own thoughts as they sped through the countryside.
West kept glancing in the rearview mirror, as though afraid they might be pursued. Why is he still worried about Mazarin? And where did you get the key? Having extra pages with new word and character combinations would increase the odds of success dramatically.
He looks on them as his destiny, his great contribution to world scholarship. He was silent for longer than she expected. She was interested in the Voynich manuscript. More than interested. After her love for my father, it was her ruling passion.
I used to work with her, trying out different solutions to the cipher and debating whether it was a real cipher or an artificial language. She heard that Mazarin owned missing pages from the document and was keeping them secret. There was nothing in the world she wanted more than to see those pages, to possess them, to touch them. She paused, understanding well that this was a turning point. If she said no, she would return to Paris and likely never see West again.
Perhaps they would continue their old pattern of exchanges on the Voynich listserv, or perhaps they would both fall silent. But she would always wonder exactly what sort of man he really was. A cynical, opportunistic predator? A romantic, given to risky, outlandish gestures? Or something else entirely? If she said yes, there was a definite possibility that they would sleep together during the next couple of days.
