“Right,” said Hargreaves. “Well then. That’s all right.”
It didn’t seem entirely all right, Deborah thought. She seemed to unnerve the little man, which—given her safari attire—was hardly surprising. He blinked behind the lenses of his glasses.
“Step this way, please,” he said, and she noticed that his gruff, earthy accent belied his meek demeanor. “Now, first off, I’ve got to say for legal reasons that a lot of the castle is still a working court and a prison, which means no photographs. There are closed-circuit cameras everywhere, so you will be caught if you try it. The penalty for violating that particular law is two years in prison, which you probably wouldn’t like very much.”
He smiled suddenly, revealing the bleak understatement as a kind of joke, and she smiled back, taken off guard, and liking him for it.
“The earliest surviving parts of the castle are Norman,” said Hargreaves as he led her through, “the keep being built around 1150, but there was a Roman fort on this site a thousand year earlier. The gate house at the front of the building—the main prison entrance—did you see it?”
“I did. I rang the bell,” said Deborah ruefully.
“Did you, by God?” said Hargreaves, amused. “They won’t have liked that. You’re lucky you made it round to me. Go in the front door and who knows when you’d have made it out. Anyway, the gatehouse was built in the first decade or so of the fifteenth century by ‘enry the Fourth, the first king of England who was also duke of Lancaster as the present queen is today.”
Hargreaves, so mousy and nondescript when he was silent, became a character as he spoke, his guttural Lancashire accent with its broad, flat vowels crisply bitten off, stretching his face. She had to listen carefully to catch every word but she liked the sound, which was not remotely like the stereotypical restraint she thought of as English. It made her think of Nick Reese, and she frowned, wondering how she was going to turn the castle tour into something productive.
“Mr. Hargreaves?” she said without preamble as they moved through a great stone arch and down a narrow corridor, “did you write an article about a small gemstone found somewhere close by?”
The color of blood and tears...
The little man, who had been addressing some aspect of the castle’s role in the English Civil War, stopped midsentence and turned abruptly to her, his eyes bright with suspicion.
“Seems you have the advantage of me, Miss...?”
“Miller,” she said promptly, extending her hand. “Deborah Miller.”
He took her hand and shook it, but his eyes held hers.
“Frank ‘argreaves,” he said. “So you’re not just here for the tour,” he said, pronouncing the last word too-er.
“Not just the tour, no,” she conceded. She gave him a wry “got me” smile, knowing but not apologetic. “I’m an archaeologist,” she said. “I found a similar stone and wanted to find out as much as I could about yours.”
“Where did you find yours?” he demanded.
“Mexico,” she said.
“Mexico?” he echoed. His looked baffled and repeated the word. “Mexico. What makes you think your stone was related to the one found here?”
“The mineralogical signature,” she answered. “They were unusual stones.”
“Aye,” he said, turning and leading her through a door. “They were that.”
“I was wondering if I could see the stone you found so that I might compare it...”
He gave a snort of derisive laughter.
“Nothing to see,” he said. “It’s gone.”
“Gone? Gone where?”
“Not to Mexico,” he said, another half joke, “but maybe not so far from there.”
“The States?”
“It was bought by a private collector for more than the owners could refuse, though the precise figure was undisclosed.”
He said it bitterly, like it still left an aftertaste.
“And that was legal?” she asked.
“There was no reason to suggest any great historical significance, and the gem was—in a manner of speaking—unremarkable.”
“In a manner of speaking?”
“It was certainly unusual. Very clear for a colored stone—flawless is the best word. When you held it up to your eye it changed the texture of the whole world. The sky went pale red.”
He mimed the action, finger and thumb up to his glasses as if he still had the stone.
“Beautiful thing,” he said, snapping back to her. “But without the depth of color prized in rubies, so not especially valuable. Curious, the jeweler called it, even unique, but not worth much. The bloke who owned the land nearly gave it to the castle for nothing. Then he gets this offer, from America—or so the rumor went—and that’s the last anyone sees of it. The land where it was found has changed hands since then and it seems the gem did too. Whoever bought it first sold it on, quietly, supposedly to some collector.”
“Of gems?”
“Of occult objects.”
“Occult objects?” Deborah repeated. “Meaning what?”
“Oh, you know,” said Hargreaves with a dismissive gesture. “Magic crystals. Bunch of New Age rubbish.”
“Why would anyone think it was magic?” she said, almost stumbling on the absurdity of the last word.
He shrugged.
“People with more money than sense,” he said. “Who knows what goes on in their heads. And now you’ve got one. A magic gemstone, I mean. Or have you?”
He fixed her with that look of his again, and she flushed.
“Actually,” she said, “it’s been stolen.”
“Has it indeed?” he said, giving his half-joking smile again. “Isn’t that interesting? Now, if you’ll step this way, I’ll show you the Shire Hall.”
For a moment Deborah just stood there, watching the man, but then she saw what was in the next room, and she strode quickly after him, her heart in her mouth.
Chapter Thirty-Five
James closed his eyes against the sun, pushed his toes into the sand, and sipped from his piña colada. It was perfect and served exactly how he liked it, the rum and pineapple served in an actual coconut with the top sliced off. The coconut was green, which surprised him, and didn’t taste quite as—well, not quite as coconutty—as he had figured it would, but it was perfect all the same. The waves were crashing rhythmically on the white beach, and right next to him, wearing this little bikini with perky yellow and green penguins on it, was Alice, pale as the sand and pinking on her back and shoulders. Soon he’d offer to rub some sunscreen on her and she would lazily agree, like it was no big deal—him touching her in that weirdly intimate but public way, massaging the cream into her rose tattoo with the barbed-wire thorns—and he would smile and sip from his drink and wait to see what happened when the sun went down. Considering where they had been a couple of days before, thought James, pushing his glasses up his nose, things had worked out pretty well.
They had taken a bus from Valladolid to Cancun, where they spent one night in a generic hotel, and then hitched a ride down the coast with some Swedes who had been making for the biosphere at Sian Ka’an. With their earnest environmentalism and habit of playing loud, chattering techno music, they proved dour company. When Alice had announced that she wanted to get off in Tulum and go to the beach instead of the bio reserve, James had been delighted.
After the smog and concrete and crowds of Cancun, Tulum was positively Edenic, particularly outside the hotel zone where accommodations were what Alice called “tropical chic”: thatched cabanas on the beach with excellent plumbing, patio restaurants serving local fish, and little tourist shops stuffed with masks and beads. There was a Mayan ruin sitting right there on the cliffs, but they hadn’t checked that out yet. It was all a bit more pricey than Cancun, but it felt like he imagined Tahiti would: exotic and a little bit exclusive.
James didn’t really like the water, so he spent a lot of his time sitting under the palm-thatched shade on the sand whi
le Alice waded and swam in the ocean. It was on one of these water excursions, while Alice was splashing about and chatting to some sun-blackened local fisherman in a dinghy, that James’s cell phone first rang. It was the first call he had gotten since arriving in Mexico, and though he kept it charged, he had not even noticed that the resort got a signal.
“James?”
“Professor Bowerdale? I thought you were...”
“In jail?” said Bowerdale. “I am. But the upside of a corrupt police service is that your money always counts, even in prison. That money has also bought a little information about the location of our stolen grave goods.”
“How did you—”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Bowerdale, cutting him off. “Let’s just say that for some of our Mayan villagers, blood may be thicker than water, but it amounts to less than the price of a flat-screen TV. James, I don’t have a lot of time, so listen carefully. I have a proposition for you.”
And James listened, watching Alice plunge in and out of the waves. When Bowerdale was done, James paused and said, “That it?”
“That’s it.”
“OK,” said James. “How much?”
And then they had haggled, and James—knowing he was talking to a man who was used to being in charge but who was now a little desperate and willing to spend some of the money he had in considerable amounts—felt powerful and important. And secret.
Yes, that too.
And, he thought, as Alice came wading out toward him, breasts bouncing, that was what he liked best.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Hargreaves moved out of her way and Deborah stared. The Shire Hall was a vast, semicircular chamber, its walls hung with shields of varying sizes—hundreds of them—all adorned with coats of arms. Deborah moved directly toward them and started scanning, picturing the crest from the ring and trying to find a match.
It will be here, she thought, ignoring Hargreaves. It has to be.
But the more she looked, the less certain she became. Hargreaves was talking about the room, which was a court of law, and its famous trials, but he was also watching her. She could sense it, but couldn’t stop looking at the shields.
“The smallest shields belong to the high sheriffs of the county, as appointed by the monarch,” he said blandly. “The medium ones belong to the constables of the castle, again by royal appointment. The largest are the shields of the monarchs. The castle has always had ties to the monarch, but since 1399, it’s been one of the king or queen’s official properties as seat of the duchy of Lancaster. Is there a particular one you’re looking for?”
Deborah was two-thirds of the way round the room and had seen nothing resembling the symbols on the ring.
“A crest,” she said. “I had relatives from this area.”
“Oh?” said Hargreaves, not believing her. “Miller, right? Isn’t that one of those names often adopted by Jewish immigrants in America?”
“That’s right,” she said, just enough challenge in her voice so that he would know he’d have a fight on his hands if he wasn’t careful.
He smiled, and some of the tension in her neck and shoulders eased.
“There were Jews in medieval England,” he said. “But it wasn’t what you’d call a welcoming country. In 1190, the Jews of York were rounded up, locked in the castle, and massacred by Christian zealots, many of whom—surprise, surprise—owed them a lot of money. A hundred years later, Edward the First threw all Jews out of the country on pain of execution. It was four hundred years before they could come back. I’m guessing you won’t find your coat of arms here.”
Deborah considered him for a long moment, and the great vaulted chamber where countless men and women had been sentenced to imprisonment, deportation, and death was utterly silent.
“It’s not my family crest I’m looking for,” she admitted, turning back to the shields so he wouldn’t see her face. “It’s connected to the site I’ve been working on.”
“In Mexico?”
“Yes. It has an arrangement of rings and a checkerboard. But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t seem to be here.”
“I know all these,” said Hargreaves. “Rings and a checkerboard? You won’t find that design here. Did you expect to?”
“No, not really,” she said, turning back to him, despondent. “That massacre in York,” she said. “I’ve never heard of it.”
“Not the kind of thing we advertise,” said Hargreaves. “The original castle was wood. The round keep that’s there now was built later. Thirteenth century, I think. It’s called Clifford’s Tower because—”
His voice trailed off.
“What?” Deborah asked.
“Come with me,” he said.
He marched her from the Shire Hall and along the silent castle galleries until he came to a small library, cluttered and untidy, stuffed with books and papers.
“‘Scuse the mess,” he said, pushing his way through and pulling a heavy volume down. He thumbed through it quickly till he found a picture of a round stone tower on a conical green hill with a steep flight of steps up the side.
“I take it this isn’t usually on the tour,” she said.
“Hardly,” he answered, but he shot her a broad grin and she guessed he was glad of the change.
“I like playing tour guide, generally,” he said, his eyes back on the book, “but sometimes it gets wearisome, and the bits that the visitors get most excited about aren’t the parts I like talking about.”
“Like what?”
“Oh you know,” he said. “The ghoulish stuff. There’s a chair in the Drop Room,” he said. “With wheels on it.”
“The Drop Room?”
“The hanging room,” he said. “Where the condemned waited to be executed.”
“And what’s the chair with wheels?” she asked.
“Like I said,” Hargreaves answered. “I don’t like talking about it.”
He kept his eyes on the book and said no more, and though she was curious to see what seemed to so rattle the man, she said nothing.
Hargreaves turned to a glossy close-up of a tower door with two carvings of coats of arms. He set the book on a precarious pile on the desk, bustled round to the other side, and rooted in a drawer, emerging after a moment brandishing a large magnifying glass. He thrust it at Deborah, and she took it.
“Well?” he said.
She peered through the glass at the crests in the picture and took a sharp breath as the image sharpened. The stone was eroded by time but there was no question.
“This one,” she said, putting her finger on the crest. “It’s not exactly the same as the one I saw—mine had a kind of oval at the bottom—but the rings and checkerboard are identical.”
“Coats of arms varied from generation to generation,” said Hargreaves, “modified by marriage and new titles. This is Clifford’s Tower in York, site of the Jewish massacre I was telling you about, so called because of either Roger de Clifford, who was hanged there in 1322, or—more likely—because of Henry Clifford, last earl of Cumberland, who garrisoned the town for the royalist cause during the Civil War. The other coat of arms belongs to King Charles the Second. I could be wrong, but I’d say that your missing crest belonged to the Clifford family.”
“But York is a long way from here, isn’t it?” said Deborah, who was trying to connect the dots.
“Does this have something to do with the gem you were asking about?” said Hargreaves, shrewd and interested. “Well, yes. But the Cliffords had several houses and the ancestral seat was in Skipton, halfway between here and York.”
“And the place where you found the gem?”
“Malkin Tower Farm, about twenty miles from here on Pendle Hill.”
“How far is that from Skipton?”
“No more than ten miles,” said Hargreaves.
Deborah stared at him.
“How do I get there?” she said.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Nick Reese drummed his fingers on t
he edge of the old wooden table, then got up and walked the length of the room twice. There was a single leaded window and he stood at it for a moment, looking out over the lawn to the entrance where a gaggle of tourists in pastel anoraks drifted aimlessly. Skipton Castle remained a perennial draw, apparently. He checked his watch then returned to the table, awoke his laptop, and checked his e-mail. Still nothing.
He rose and strode over to the great fireplace, gazing up at the age-darkened oil painting of Lady Anne in her austere finery. She wore a delicate ruff whose stiffened lace covered her neck, though not in the old Tudor fashion that made it look like someone was serving your head on a plate. She had dark, intelligent eyes but a plain, fairly nondescript face, and her dark hair was almost aggressively unadorned, swept roughly back under more lace. Clustered around her, gazing implacably out of the frame but all slightly smaller in scale, were her servants and children, though it wasn’t always easy to tell which were adults. There was no sign of an obvious husband, and she was painted larger than the rest: a seventeenth-century snapshot of a domestic but distinctly hierarchical scene. It was not a painting from life so much as a statement of her status, which was hardly surprising, he supposed, given her achievements in life. Without her, the castle in which he now stood probably wouldn’t exist at all.
He considered the coat of arms that hovered above her right shoulder: a gold shield and crown divided into quadrants, two showing six rings arranged as an inverted pyramid, the others a checkerboard bisected by a stripe of red. It was, unmistakably, the same crest as had been on the ring found at the Ek Balam tomb, except that it was missing the elliptical shape beneath.
He smiled to himself, momentarily forgetting his impatience, and drew from his pocket the photocopy of a Privy Council record dated 1633 announcing the arrival of a thirteen-year-old page boy by the name of Edward de Clifford “to wait upon his Majesty the King.” There seemed to have been some uncertainty about the “de” prefix, because it was heavily scored out. There was no mistaking the carefully etched heraldic crest that stood by Edward’s name, however, nor the curious elliptical eye shape that had been added to the Clifford coat of arms.
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