His opponent was startled. Timon took advantage of the man’s momentary pause, swinging the chair wide like a headman’s ax. He chopped into the killer’s side and the man flew backward, gasping.
Discarding the chair, Timon leapt toward his victim, grabbing the man’s ankle. The killer kicked out with his other foot. Timon dodged it and twisted the ankle so that the man rolled. Drawing his knife, Timon cut through the man’s boot. Feeling the knife’s edge slice his flesh, unable to break Timon’s grip, the killer threw himself forward. Timon barely saw him raise his pistol high. In the next instant it came crashing down directly onto Timon’s skull. A searing pain momentarily blinded Timon, and he dropped his knife.
The killer scrambled away, crawling at first, then staggering to his feet. In the dim light, as his eyes barely focused, Timon could see the man pause at Lively’s desk. Even then he appeared reluctant to flee. With one final glance at the documents on the desk, the killer finally roared away, through the main entrance, and into the night.
10
Timon clutched the top of the desk next to him, struggling to remain conscious. He took in deep breaths, held them as he prayed, then let them go. Just as his head began to clear, he heard voices. Fearing that the killer was returning with reinforcements, his eyes locked on the dark entrance to the hall. He felt his way along the floor with his feet until they found the musket. He dipped, clutched it, and crouched low behind the nearest desk, checking to make certain the musket was still ready to fire.
He could see tongues of orange and golden light through the open entrance. Men with torches drew near. He aimed the musket, glancing to make certain it was still cocked, and steadied his finger on the trigger.
Just as he was about to fire, Marbury’s face appeared in the doorway. Torches aloft, others followed immediately.
“Who’s there?” Marbury demanded.
Timon lowered the musket.
Torchlight did not fully illuminate the room from the doorway. Marbury strained to see in the shadows.
“Is anyone among you a doctor of medicine?” Timon asked calmly. “Mr. Lively may be dying.”
“Timon?” Marbury’s pace quickened.
The others remained behind him and slowed when they realized that Timon was holding a musket.
“What has he done?” one of the men whispered, terrified.
Timon laid the musket on the desk next to him. Retrieving his knife he moved toward the fallen Lively.
“Stay where you are!” an anonymous voice commanded.
“Please do not move, Brother Timon,” Marbury echoed in steadier tones.
Marbury took a few steps forward. In the candlelight, Timon could see that Marbury held a blade of his own. It was longer than most, polished to mirrored perfection; thin—deadly.
Timon was momentarily perplexed by the thought that he would not like to kill Marbury. It was an inexplicable concept. He would not have minded killing anyone else in the room.
Something must be done quickly, however, Timon thought. There is a dead scholar at my feet and I have been discovered holding a musket.
From the muttering that filled the air, clearly the men behind Marbury had already judged Timon a murderer.
“We heard the gunshot,” Marbury rasped. “It is not a common sound in our Cambridge nights, but one which is easy enough to identify—and to cause alarm.”
As Timon opened his mouth to begin an explanation, he heard a groaning behind him.
“Brothers,” Lively croaked, “will no one help me stand?”
Timon turned at once, without thinking, and offered his hand to Lively, marveling at the man’s strength considering the pistol shot in his chest.
“Pray God,” Lively continued, struggling to his feet, turning immediately to his desk in utter desperation, “nothing has happened to the pages—”
“Mr. Lively,” Marbury ventured, moving quickly toward him, “are you shot?”
“God, God, God,” Lively whispered violently, raking through the papers on his desk.
At first Timon supposed that he was trying to hide the secret text of St. Luke in his last moments of life. Then he began to realize what had actually happened.
Marbury arrived at Lively’s desk, a kerchief in hand, intent on stanching the man’s wound.
“Ah!” Lively shouted exuberantly. “His Name be praised!”
He held a single page up for all to see.
His colleagues gaped, blinking.
“Do you not need attention to your—?” Marbury began.
“It is undamaged!” Lively exalted. “I would never have forgiven myself if it had survived fifteen hundred years only to be destroyed in my care.”
While others stared at Lively, Timon examined the desktop. The glow of the candles made it clear that the desk had been covered in ink, and several of the papers there had been ruined.
“I think you will find, Deacon Marbury,” Timon announced, “that the stain on Mr. Lively’s chest is not blood, but ink.”
“Indeed.” Lively exhaled noisily and sat. “The villain’s shot failed to damage me, but instead performed its foul deed upon my workplace.”
“The pistol seems to have put a hole in Mr. Lively’s desk and upset his inkwell,” Timon explained.
“Timon did not shoot you?” one of the men stammered slowly.
“Timon?” Lively glared. “He shot no one, though I nearly shot him.”
A gaggle of astonished questions erupted in the room. Marbury put away his knife, and clearly hoping to avert chaos, he pounded his fist upon Lively’s desk.
“Gentlemen, please,” he insisted, “let us determine what has happened here in a coherent fashion!”
The room fell silent.
Lively’s eyes met Timon’s, silently imploring him not to reveal everything that had transpired. Timon took a moment, deciding what to disclose and what to conceal, a conundrum that often plagued him.
“We believe that Harrison’s killer returned to his hall,” Lively began, before Timon could speak. “Brother Timon was clever enough to have been waiting for him—how or why I do not know. I came to the hall after my dinner to do a bit of work in solitude, heard voices, retrieved my hunting musket, and nearly shot Brother Timon.”
“In the ensuing moments,” Timon interrupted, “the killer and I fought, he fired his pistol, causing the damage to Mr. Lively’s desk; then used said pistol to crack my head, causing similar damage there. He escaped an instant before you came into the hall.”
“The killer has returned?” someone whispered.
“He came to kill Lively,” Marbury surmised, “the head of our project, hoping to further harm our work.”
“I do not believe that the man’s intent was murder tonight,” Timon said slowly. “I believe he discovered something when he killed Harrison. It so astonished him that he returned to steal evidence of that discovery. I had bested him when Mr. Lively came in with his musket, and the man got away. But he did not then leave the hall, even with the two of us and a musket present. He wanted something in this room so badly that he was willing to risk all, despite being discovered and outnumbered. He attacked us hoping to get something.”
The room was absolutely silent, which told Timon what he had hoped to learn. Every man in the room did, indeed, know the secrets that Lively had revealed to him. Each of them knew that those secrets were the killer’s true motive.
“Deacon Marbury,” Timon said suddenly, deliberately breaking the silence, startling everyone, “I believe it would be appropriate to pursue further inquiry a bit more privately. Perhaps you and I might—”
The others began to interrupt, voicing unorganized objections.
“Please,” Marbury implored, “I think we would all be safer in our beds this night. Allow me to question Brother Timon further.”
Lively sucked in a tense breath, but said nothing. The other men seemed to slowly absorb what had happened, mumbling to each other.
“May I remind you, gentlemen,” Ma
rbury insisted, “that there is still a killer loose in the night.”
That was enough to propel the men, however reluctantly, toward the door.
Marbury indicated that Timon should precede him in the same direction. Timon acquiesced and started out of the hall. He did, however, manage to notice, out of the corner of his eye, that Lively was slipping the text from St. Luke into his coat. He made a noisy show of locking up some other piece of paper in his desk drawer, but he had stolen the secret document for himself.
11
After everyone else had gone, Timon and Marbury lingered just outside the door to the hall.
“I am certain that the killer has, at last, fled,” Timon said softly, “but we ought to at least take a look around out here, would you not agree? It will give me the opportunity to ask you some questions which you shall answer fully and with complete truth.”
“Do you imagine for the slightest moment,” Marbury said softly, “that you intimidate me?”
I should, Timon thought.
“Although,” Marbury continued, “I suppose I have hired you to investigate this—situation. If you’ve paid the devil, you may as well get a day’s work from him. Please, ask whatever questions you like.” Marbury moved away from the door. “Shall we?”
Again Timon had the uncomfortable sensation of liking Marbury. He fought it, concentrating on the greater issue at hand.
“I would like to see if we could find any sort of trail the killer might have left,” Timon said quickly. “But Lively revealed to me some startling information that I feel would qualify as a motive for Harrison’s murder.”
“Yes?” Marbury’s face gave nothing away.
The night, Timon thought, seemed determined to be as black as it possibly could. The moon was obscured by low rain clouds that tumbled in the sky like great waves in a storm. It was the perfect night for dark revelations and escaped murderers.
“Are you aware that Mr. Lively is in possession of a document that is the original manuscript of the Gospel of St. Luke?” Begin with the most shocking point, Timon thought; see what it stabs.
“I surmised,” Marbury said, scratching the inside of his ear with his little finger, “that Lively had showed you a page from some ancient text. I saw it in his hand.”
“That document proves that a great error was made in all subsequent renderings of the Gospel.” Timon moved slowly away from the Great Hall, looking for footprints in the grass.
“This great error is the motive of which you spoke?” Marbury asked, not bothering to hide his derision. “Are you not aware that these men discover twenty such errors a day?”
“I see.” Timon tilted his head, deciding to change the subject; let Marbury feel for a moment he had the upper hand. “Shall we look off the path, Deacon? I am trying to find any hint of the killer, perhaps in the wet grass—a footprint, a torn leaf, a bit of blood. I think the killer would have avoided the stone path—it clatters when anyone runs upon it. Our man would prefer silence, would he not?”
Marbury moved off the stone path distractedly. “But about these errors in translation—”
“Ah,” Timon interrupted. Good, he thought, Marbury is thinking, he has not dismissed my suggestions quite yet.
“I—I mean to say that if you refer to the mistakes from older texts—”
“My concern hinges on a single word in the secret text,” Timon snapped impatiently, “which is our current concern.”
“No,” Marbury insisted. “I must persuade you, Brother, that your discovery, whatever it is, is not current. It is hundreds of years old, most likely; exhausted by age. It is not remotely pertinent to our problem here in Cambridge in the year of Our Lord 1605.”
Timon came to a halt in the dark night. “If you believe that, then you have not seen the text to which I refer.”
“Perhaps I have not,” Marbury admitted, glancing quickly in Timon’s direction.
“The problem is not hundreds of years old, it is more than a thousand years old. The full revelation of the work these men are doing here in Cambridge would corrupt the very foundation of our religion. That is why Lively is frightened. That is why Harrison has been killed.”
“Rubbish!” Marbury growled. “How could it possibly matter if Second Corinthians six: two should say ‘a day of salvation,’ instead of ‘the day of salvation,’ or where the comma rightly belongs in Mark sixteen: nine. The spirit of God’s Word is unchanged.”
“Yes.” Timon bit his upper lip. Marbury’s words confirmed that he did not know the magnitude of the secret kept in the Great Hall. How much to discuss and how much to conceal? Had the scholars deliberately kept Marbury in the dark? Were they afraid to share what they were learning with anyone but one another? It would not be an unfounded fear. The history of writing the Bible was, in fact, filled with stories of men who had discovered secrets far less dire and paid for the knowledge dearly, even with their lives.
In 1382, when John Wycliffe produced the first English Bible, the Catholic Church expelled him from his teaching position at Oxford and burned all his Bibles.
And when William Tyndale translated the New Testament into English in 1525, he was forced to flee to Germany. The Inquisition dogged his trail, out for his blood. Tyndale was caught, tried, strangled, then burned at the stake.
Timon attempted to untangle the knot of his thoughts and begin again. “Deacon Marbury,” he said calmly, “shall I alter the course of your thinking?”
“What are you talking about?” Marbury asked hesitantly.
“Allow me to begin by asking you a question about the document that Lively showed me, the one you saw in his hand tonight. Was that document already here in Cambridge when the scholars arrived, or did Lively bring it with him?”
“That document, if I am correct, was delivered to us here by a courier from King James himself—an armed courier, to make matters more dramatic.” Marbury cast his eyes downward. “I admit I did find that somewhat troublesome at the time.”
“Yes, Lively seemed to indicate that there was much drama surrounding the manuscript.” Timon had stopped looking for clues in the grass. “Would it surprise you to know that all eight scholars, before Harrison’s death, examined the text and declared it authentic?”
“It would surprise me that those men would agree upon any matter, yes.” Marbury’s lips thinned.
“Lively showed me but a single sentence from this Gospel of St. Luke,” Timon said plainly. “But it was a sentence that could wrack Christendom with chaos.”
Marbury tried to see Timon’s expression in the darkness. “You seem to have a flair for the theatre yourself.”
“No, this is God’s play,” Timon said softly, “not mine. The sentence I read tonight named our Savior Joshua. The name Jesus does not appear on the page.”
Marbury blinked, but did not otherwise move.
“The scope of our problem, you see,” Timon went on, “goes beyond the placement of a comma.”
“How could . . . how did . . . the document is a forgery.” Marbury leaned forward, the cold wind chilling his cheek.
“All eight of your scholars agreed it was not.”
“All eight,” Marbury repeated, whispering.
“There is more,” Timon hastened to say. “Your scholars here in Cambridge have in their possession many such documents containing many more secrets. Lively admitted to fifty-seven such texts.”
“God in heaven.” Marbury swallowed.
“I see that the enormity of the situation begins to sink in.” Timon nodded. “Now, could all fifty-seven of these secret documents have come from the armed courier you mentioned? Did he bring such a large package, or make several deliveries?”
Marbury’s brow twitched, and his eyes concentrated on a space somewhere between himself and Timon.
“No,” Marbury said at last. “That courier came but once. He could certainly have delivered more than one document—dozens, in fact—but not fifty-seven.”
“Well.”
&nb
sp; The high wind momentarily shoved aside the charcoal clouds that obscured the moon, and Timon was able to see Marbury’s face.
Most men would not accept this news, Timon thought. Either the mind would be too small to encompass it, or the faith would be to weak to withstand it.
Marbury’s face betrayed neither such thought. He seemed to stare at nothing. He was, Timon thought, weighing this new information against everything else he knew.
In that silence, Timon fought against that same impetus.
“I must know more,” Marbury muttered at length, nearly to himself. “I must see all these documents. I must hear more of these translation errors, if, indeed, that is even the word that applies.”
Timon smiled, an expression of kindred compassion. “Exactly my thought.”
Before Timon could explore the warmth he felt toward Marbury, he was seized with a blood-drenched vision so violent that it silenced him. It was an old conditioning, something Timon had practiced over and over as a younger man: whenever he felt kindly inclined toward a man he might have to kill, he forced himself to imagine that man dead. That practice had become a reflex. Without even trying, Timon saw himself carving a hole in Marbury’s chest, watching the heart beat there. Timon’s training had combined with his great wariness of all men. It was a compulsion stronger than any fact or belief and was often triggered by any compassionate impulse he might have had. The vision passed quickly, its work done, and Timon eyed Marbury coldly once more.
Timon could see that Marbury had been studying his face.
“Brother Timon,” Marbury began, obviously misinterpreting Timon’s expression, “I see that you are as unhinged by these revelations as am I.”
“No,” Timon said, exhaling. “I am in the process of realizing that King James already knows what you and I have only now discovered.”
“Yes, of course.” Marbury glanced about in the darkness. “He sent Lively the documents.”
The King James Conspiracy Page 6
