A Richer Dust Concealed: A gripping historical mystery thriller you won’t be able to put down!

by R P Nathan

  “Hey,” said Sarah, “apart from almost being killed a couple of times, it’s not been so bad. I mean, look where we’ve ended up. On a beach. A beautiful day.” She had her knees drawn up to her chin and she looked happy as she sat there, pretty with the sun shining on her. “I’ve been working so hard I haven’t been on holiday for two years. Two years.”

  “I haven’t been on holiday for seven,” I said shaking my head. “Can you imagine that?”

  “I can imagine that.” She laughed at my look of surprise; but she put out a hand and stroked it against my shoulder and then gently away again. She smiled at me almost shyly and then lay back on the sand. “It’s so peaceful here,” she said. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, blissfully. “I need to do more of this.”

  “Well I think I’ve had enough time off,” said Patrick.

  “What will you do when you get back?” I asked him.

  “I’m not sure yet…”

  “Not back to the firm?”

  “No. Probably not that.”

  “A charity maybe?” asked Sarah. “If you help somebody...”

  Patrick grinned at her. “Maybe. Or maybe something exciting.”

  “But not too exciting…” said Sarah. “And whatever happens, you’ll go and see your doctor again?”

  “I will.”

  There was a big sigh from Julius. He was staring forlornly out to sea.

  “What?” said Patrick.

  “Oh. I was just thinking about Francesca.” He looked wistful. “Wasn’t she amazing.” He looked at us seriously and we collapsed into helpless laughter. “What? What?”

  “Oh don’t,” I groaned, sitting up again. “My face hurts.”

  “Let me take a look.” Sarah knelt down beside me and I turned my face to her. She winced as she saw my bruised cheek and swollen lip in close-up. “You definitely got the worst of it.” Her face was only inches from mine; so close that I could see every fleck in her eyes and every long lash. “I’ve got a tissue,” she said. She sat back on her haunches and poured some bottled water on the paper and then knelt back up to me and delicately dabbed my cheek and lip with it. It felt cool and delicious and kind.

  “Thank you,” I said. She was so close that I could see the soft down on her cheek illuminated by the sun and the specks of sand in her hair.

  “You’re welcome,” she said softly. She blinked and each lash seemed to move separately in infinite slo-mo.

  “No, you’re welcome,” said Patrick.

  “No, you’re welcome,” said Julius. We looked over and the two of them were pouring water over each others’ heads, cackling with laughter. Sarah looked at me and shrugged and then leaning forwards she kissed me on the lips in a movement so deft and sudden that it had me gasping with surprise.

  “I still think you’re kind of strange,” she said arching an eyebrow; but then she grinned the most gorgeous, sexy grin imaginable and I pulled her to me and we kissed for an everlasting instant.

  Apart once more I was aware of the continued laughter from down the beach, Julius and Patrick still horsing around. We exchanged a glance.

  “Let’s get those bastards,” she said and we raced over to them and pushed them over and sat on them until they submitted. Then we rolled out onto the sand again and lay there warming ourselves through our gradually subsiding giggles.

  “You’ve got to wonder, haven’t you,” said Julius eventually, staring up at the sky.

  “Wonder what?” said Patrick.

  “Well... I mean what did happen to the cross? Who took it?”

  Sarah shrugged her shoulders against the soft sand. “Four hundred years is a long time...”

  “But who else knew about it? Polidoro went to live in Verona with his brother after he came back with Bragadino’s skin. And never left again.”

  “Well maybe his brother went and got it?” said Patrick. “Or maybe his son Gianni, Polidoro’s nephew, the one he liked so much?”

  “That would have been nice,” said Sarah.

  “But...” Julius sat up. “I don’t see how a farmer from Verona could have organised such a difficult expedition. Venice’s sea power was failing anyway and Cyprus was in the hands of the Ottomans until the Twentieth Century.”

  “Who took over after the Turks?” asked Patrick.

  “The British,” I said. “We annexed Cyprus in 1914 when the Turks came out in support of Germany.”

  “Was there fighting on Cyprus?”

  “No, but wounded soldiers from the Dardanelles were taken there. To Famagusta.”

  “Dardanelles? As in Gallipoli?” Patrick looked suddenly excited. “Then Shaeffer, dying at Gallipoli, could have told another soldier about it. And he could have been brought to Famagusta and found the treasure—”

  “Maybe,” I interrupted. “But it would have been a hell of a deathbed message.”

  “I agree,” said Julius. “We have to face facts, Patrick. Polidoro didn’t get it. Shaeffer was killed at Gallipoli. So at some point, someone else dug up the cross.”

  Patrick made a face but then sighed. “I guess you’re right,” he said, resigned, and picking up a flat pebble he threw it hard at the water so that it skipped and bounced three times before it sank. One, two, three, and before the stone disappeared beneath the surface I understood. I looked up and found Sarah blinking at me and I knew in that instant of synchronicity that she was thinking exactly the same thing.

  “We got it wrong,” she said softly.

  We’d had it wrong from the start.

  Received knowledge taken as fact colouring all we had heard and seen.

  Assumption transmuting to reality, steering us the wrong course, further and further from the essential truth.

  “What if Henry Shaeffer wasn’t killed at Gallipoli?” she said.

  “But he was,” said Patrick.

  “But how do we know?”

  “Because everyone says he was.”

  “Who everyone? The people who sold you the book? The Ten? Maybe they’d just thought he was dead too. Maybe he wanted them to think that.”

  “But we spoke to Frances,” insisted Patrick. “She said he died in the First World War. She said—”

  “What did she say?” said Sarah her eyes shining. “She never said he died in the War. We said that to her. She said her father died fifteen years before her mum. That would have been 1961.”

  “But she was confused—”

  “No. We were. We were so certain that we didn’t listen to her. She was trying to tell us but we just assumed she was talking nonsense; and in the end that’s what she thought too. Poor Frances.” She looked like she was about to cry. “Poor dear Frances.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Julius. “Are you saying—”

  “I’m saying that Henry Shaeffer didn’t die at Gallipoli. He came home from the war after all.”

  “But then...”

  But then… Slow blink, a look from face to face, wheels turning, inexorable motion, the truth approached, close now, so close.

  A thought occurring to us all together, a joint epiphany.

  The collective realisation glistening like gold before us.

  “The letter,” I said; but she knew it before the words were out of my mouth and was already on her feet sprinting to their car.

  “I’ve got it with me,” she called back. “I’m sure it’s still in my bag.”

  “What letter?” asked Julius.

  The letter from Frances, Patrick explained. I watched his mouth moving but heard nothing save for the blood in my head and the sound of the sea. I looked from him to Sarah running back to us, a brown envelope in her hand. She was in T-shirt and shorts, sand spilling up and down her bare legs as she cantered across the beach, her movements youthful and beautiful, reminding me of a girl I had once loved; reminding me of her.

  She knelt down on the sand before us and tore the end off the envelope and slipped out the smaller ivory coloured one inside. She held it up to us. The last letter tha
t Shaeffer had written his wife from the War. The last piece of the jigsaw dropping in place, snapping tight with its mates. “Look at the postmark,” she said.

  Cyprus 1915.

  The last piece.

  What if he wasn’t killed at Gallipoli?

  What if he was only injured there. What if he was brought to Famagusta.

  Click.

  With trembling fingers she took the letter from its envelope and carefully unfolded the four handwritten pages of yellowed paper within. She skimmed through it for a minute, two, and I saw tears forming in her eyes. She looked up and saw me watching her and smiled and nodded and I wanted to say a million things to her, then and after, but she silenced me with a finger from her coral lips to mine; there was time, for us, and said, to all of us, “Listen.”

  10 October 1915

  My darling Anna.

  I am coming home to you. Our sentence of separation is ended at last. I was told by the doctors and my commanding officer this morning that I am to return to England on the next ship. It departs in a matter of days. So at most it will be but another month before I see you again. Before I can take you in my arms and hold you as I have longed to do in the year since I last saw you. This longest of years.

  Oh how I have missed you. You know this for I have written of it in every letter I have sent you. But my longing has not grown less with time and has indeed been sharpened by the thought that I really will see you again. And this time when I return to you it will be forever.

  I have written already of what you should expect of me bodily, of my catalogue of wounds which have left me scarred and physically lessened. I am not the man whom you waved off a year ago. I am reduced.

  But my mind is changed too and you will need to be patient with me. Be kind to me, my love, even if I am not so to you and be gentle even if my mood seems hard. For I am changed in other ways as well as physical. I am gripped with bouts of anger which shake me at times, and my manner is unsettled and unpredictable. On occasion I feel a hate in me which knows no bounds and leaves room for nothing else. I am changed by the war my love. I am burdened with dark thoughts and try as I might they will not leave me.

  I am visited every day by thoughts of Rupert and the wasted way in which he died, felled by such a petty assassin, a mosquito, a nothing. And my heart rages that one so strong, so magnificent, so beautiful as he could die in such a way, before I could even be reunited with him. How can it be that the light of our heroes can be extinguished in such a careless manner? What have we done that the fates should so conspire against us?

  And what of Hargreaves? Poor Hargreaves. I still cannot commit to paper the details of that day at Bulair. I cannot though they are burned into my mind forever. I shall not forget the way in which he died nor how he held tight to my hand at the last. Dear, gentle, Hargreaves. What harm had he ever done to anyone? And what future good will he be able to do lying cold in the ground. Oh my love! The horror and the pity of it. The memories that do not fade, that will not release me from their grasp.

  Oh my darling, I am sorry to spill my anguish upon you again. This letter was meant to be joyous yet it turns to tears so quickly. This is how I am now. This is how events and my absence from you have weathered me, turned me misshapen and ugly, awkward in company, and prone to melancholy. How I long to see you! So that in your arms and your breast I can take full refuge from the endless night thoughts which pursue me through the day; so that your kindness can dilute the fear and the hurt and the guilt I feel. The guilt above all. That I am alive when they are not. Only you will be able to make sense of these feelings. Only your love will make me whole again.

  ◆◆◆

  I shall write no more of such matters to you for it disguises the true joy I feel that soon I will be with you once more. So let me instead finish this letter by lightening your heart – and mine – with the telling of the final part of the tale I began in Venice regarding the journal I found there.

  You will already be acquainted with the story from reading my notebook which you would have received some six months ago. You may recall that on the night I left for the Dardanelles I had finally understood how to break the book’s coded message. It was a Vigenère cipher and the key phrase as I hinted in my journal was Terraferma. No doubt, you will have decoded and translated the letter already my dear with your superior intellect and understanding of the Italian language. (Oh, what a capital school mistress you will make; and I do approve of the idea: passionately!) For me the process took me such time as I would have been ashamed to admit to you. But of course time was what I had.

  I have already written to tell you that for long weeks I lay in my hospital bed in Cyprus not knowing whether I was entirely alive or entirely dead. I lay there and when I was not dreaming of you and Frances my sole amusement was to work through the copy of the coded letter I had made when I left Italy. To work through it, to decode and translate it. And when I had succeeded in my task and I finally read Polidoro’s words I felt a sympathy for him that was wholly unexpected. For here was a man separated from me by over three hundred years and yet I understood his mind entirely. His words struck a resonance in me. He spoke of loss and torment and regret. He spoke of the bitter emptiness of defeat when victories are still being won. He spoke of feeling like a ghost. Well I was a ghost as were so many of my brothers who lay there in the hospital with me. I understood Polidoro. I was Polidoro.

  ◆◆◆

  And then one day I was better and though still weak I was allowed to walk about. I was shown around the compound and I asked the nurse what place this was as I had not cared to know before and she said Famagusta. I stopped still for a moment in silent surprise and breathed in the same air that Polidoro had done.

  Then one afternoon they took us on a trip, a few miles south of Famagusta to the monastery of Agia Napa. We went up into the courtyard and, it being a hot day, we all drank from the well. And at that moment I felt a shiver of realisation down my spine. I was within touching distance of Polidoro’s beach I realised, and I had all the instructions of how to find it.

  Later that week I spoke to my nurse. She let me slip out and I made my way back to the monastery and from there through the woods and then finally to the beach. And it was just as he had described it. There was the golden sand. There were the three boulders. I ran over to the largest and dug down as Polidoro had instructed and eventually struck something in the sand. I pulled out a box flat and wide and opened it excitedly, yet immediately felt a wave of disappointment close to nausea on looking inside.

  For the cross was there. By all that is still beautiful the cross was there. Yet incomprehensibly, sacrilegiously, it was broken into four pieces and the centre of it, the stone that Polidoro had described with such longing, the sapphire of deepest blue, was missing.

  I sat back, trying desperately to make sense of what I saw, those shards of beauty arrayed before me; and gradually it came to me. All became clear that should have been obvious from the start. A truth which had escaped even the vigilant gaze of the Ten. That Polidoro had recovered the treasure he wanted after all.

  My belief is that on his way back from Constantinople, freed at last from his Ottoman prison, Polidoro made the perilous trip to Cyprus. And, somehow evading the Turks, he returned to this very beach where he knew the treasure had been buried. Perhaps waiting for nightfall, he unearthed it and looked upon the great jewel entire in its moonlit splendour.

  But only for a moment and then, taking a knife from his pocket, he prised the sapphire from the centre of the cross. It was for this incomparable stone and this alone that he had risked all. Polidoro had never coveted the cross itself, nor its body of gold and rubies and relics. For he had wanted only peace; and some find that in the love of our wives or children and others in a blue fist-sized stone in which a broken man can begin to see a future again.

  So Polidoro removed the sapphire. And he brought it back to Venice concealed so that not even the Ten would find it. The Turks had cut him cruelly d
uring the years of his torture and, into a flap of skin in his neck which had never closed or healed, he secreted the stone. And then he set off for Venice. It took him several weeks journey in an open boat and when the authorities found him they were not surprised to see him ill. He’d eaten nothing but seaweed for days and was half-starved and disfigured with a goitre. Yet how could we have been so foolish, the Ten and I? How could he had developed a goitre when seaweed is so rich in the iodine which is used to treat it? How indeed. It was with a ruse as simple as this that Girolamo Polidoro outwitted the mighty Council of Ten.

  So he returned with the stone hidden in him. And Veronese painted him with it; perhaps he knew the truth as well and enjoyed the joke against the authorities. Afterwards Polidoro retired into obscurity in Verona, living out his days on his brother’s farm, watching his favourite nephew grow to a man. And whenever he was torn or bitter or filled with the emptiness and dark tears of war’s aftermath, he knew he could look into the sapphire and believe in himself once more.

  Of course this is no more than conjecture. All I knew was what lay before me, the contents of the box. But seeing them and having divined as far as I could Polidoro’s mind and deeds, I laughed aloud, my disappointment gone, my spirits soaring, and I shouted his name around the cove so that for a moment he might live again.

  I busied myself for a time after that and when I was done the box was replaced in its hole, and the pit refilled with sand. I returned to the hospital, a sackcloth bundle containing the shards of the cross held tight under my arm. And then I slept as though I had never slept before; and for that while I too was at peace.

  That is the end of my story, my darling, and this will be my last letter for I shall see you again soon and my heart beats so at the promise of it. Give little Frances a hug from me and tell her I will be bringing her a worthy souvenir of my adventure. But for you my darling Anna, I shall simply bring myself.

  Your ever loving husband