Newton Cipher—Excerpt #2
For the next week or so, at the request of the publisher, I'll be posting short excerpts from my new supernatural thriller, The Newton Cipher. Enjoy! And if they whet your appetite an you want to read the entire book, you can find it here: The Newton Cipher

EXCERPT #2
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SEMINAR
University of Notre Dame South Bend, Indiana
One Week before Thanksgiving
Present Day

“We have a few minutes left,” Trina Piper said, eyeing the fifteen undergrads sitting around the large table in front of her. Their mostly bored faces were bathed in the wan glow of the fluorescent bulbs that illumined all thirteen floors of Notre Dame’s Hesburgh Library, including the seminar room on the seventh floor, the home of the University’s Medieval Institute.
Bookshelves lined three of the room’s walls, filled with dusty books and runs of specialized journals that almost no one read. The fourth wall contained a series of locked display cases, each filled with objects so old and obscure that no one seemed to remember their original purpose. Even the department secretaries couldn’t locate the keys anymore.
As if Trina’s comment was some sort of Pavlovian trigger, one of the students, a bearded hipster named Greg Beaufort, opened his trendy organic-cotton messenger bag/man-purse and began to stuff his laptop inside.
“Which,” Trina said, in a tone that stopped Greg in mid-stuff, “means we have time for one more inspection.”
Greg’s shoulders slumped as he reopened his laptop. He was what Trina thought of as a “collateral student”—not at all interested in her seminar on Medieval and Early-Modern Manuscripts, but only there because he needed some liberal arts credits to graduate and hers was the only class that fit his schedule.
And he wasn’t the only one.
However, the response from Sammy—Samantha Klein, one of only three female students in the seminar this semester—was truly satisfying. “Is it that one, Professor Piper?” Sammy asked, pointing to the volume that Trina had kept mysteriously covered with a cloth for the
past two hours.
“Yep,” Trina said, tugging thin cotton gloves over her hands. “Been wondering,” Sammy grinned, brushing a loose strand of red hair from her eyes. “It’s been sitting there like an unwrapped Christmas present since today’s seminar started.”
Sammy was the kind of student professors longed for: eager to learn, enthusiastic, and just generally pleasant to be around.
“This,” Trina pulled the cloth off with a dramatic flourish, a magician revealing the rabbit, “is one of my favorite volumes from the Medieval Institute’s collection. Notre Dame’s own copy of Ars Medicinae. The Art of Medicine, a collection of five of the most influential medical texts from antiquity through the first millennium, A.D. It was the standard medical text during much of the Middle Ages. This particular copy dates from the late fourteenth century.”
The book rested on a soft pillow, the kind placed under fragile books to mold to their shape and hold them firmly. She pushed it toward the center of the table, and despite their practiced apathy, even the most jaded of her students leaned forward to have a look.
“This is one of the jewels of Notre Dame’s collection, purchased from an auction in Europe decades ago. You can thank our football team. All those national championships bring in money, and some of that money finds its way to our own humble Medieval Institute.”
Trina always thought that the “Medieval Institute” was a silly name. It’s not like they worked by oil lamps and walked around in heavy robes, speaking to each other in high Latin. “Institute for Medieval Studies” was more accurate.
Whatever. It wasn’t her call. She loved being there all the same.
Trina positioned the book so all the students could see it and began to carefully turn the stiff vellum pages.
“This is a great example of an illuminated manuscript,” Trina said. “Check out these incredible, painstakingly hand-inked images, all surrounded by Latin text. Like this one, of a doctor taking a patient’s pulse ... or this one, showing a rudimentary map of the human venous system ... and this, of a surgeon setting bones.”
“So,” she said, when all the students had had a look. “What do you think made this stain?”
She touched a dark blotch in the margin of the page opposite the image of the bone-setter.
“A scribe’s fingerprint?” ventured one student.
“Good thought, but no. Anyone else?”
“Un-scraped iron gall ink?” asked Sammy.
“A great guess, Sammy, as these sheepskin pages would certainly
hold up to heavy scraping to remove such a smudge. But again, no.” Sammy sat back, arms folded, a scowl of mock defeat on her face. After a minute of silence, Trina spilled the beans.
“It’s a bloodstain, proving that this very copy of Ars Medicinae was
actually used on a battlefield. You’re looking at a spatter of blood left by some wounded archer, maybe even a lordly knight, as they were operated on in a medieval medical tent. Maybe during the famous battle of Agincourt, or one of the many conflicts of the Hundred Years’ War. Heck, maybe it’s blood from Joan of Arc herself.”
Trina grinned at the oohs and aahs coming from most of her students’ mouths. As a mere adjunct professor, she lived for this sort of thing: getting at least some of her students to understand that there was a bigger world than what they experienced on their smartphone screens. She certainly didn’t do this for the meager salary.
Greg had hardly moved. His eyes still flicked back and forth at the clock on the wall.
“I take it you aren’t that impressed with centuries-old bloodstains in a book used by a long-dead surgeon on a medieval battlefield, Mr. Beaufort?” Trina teased. “I would have thought you boys would be totally into that kind of thing.”
Greg huffed but at least had the maturity to realize he was being goaded. “It’s just not my kind of thing, I guess. I’m in business school. I want to open a craft brewery, not read about dead people. Much less see their old bloodstains. I just don’t get excited sitting around, studying all this ...” he waved his smartphone around at the books and artifacts that lined the room “ ... old musty stuff.”
“Touché, Mr. Beaufort,” Trina said. “Yes, academics can be a little musty. But even from within our stuffy offices we can help change the world.”
“Oh yeah? How?”
Trina grimaced. The stock answer was to say that professors train young students to think critically, to learn to write analytically, and then send them out in the world to do ... what? Start craft breweries? Damnit, the kid had a point. How, indeed? Refusing to go down without a fight, however, Trina remembered something she’d seen recently in one of those popular scientific magazines.
“Well, I read that a group of scholars that study ancient medicine recently found a recipe for a potent antibiotic in a thousand-year-old English medical textbook called Bald’s Leechbook.”
Oh God. That had sounded far less lame in her head. “Of course,” she stammered, “Modern doctors still have to confirm ...”
A chime sounded, dismissing class. Trina was literally saved by the bell.
“All right,” she said to the backs of the escaping undergrads. “I’ve set out three monastic palimpsests in the Rare Books room. I want five pages from each of you, comparing and contrasting them, by the start of next week’s class.”