It took hard debate, but we at last prevailed upon the commander to spare the Indians, yet on one thing he would not be moved. I had assaulted a captain of the Spanish nation, and that could not be excused. It was determined that the blow I struck be returned upon me, and the following day at first light the commander struck off my right hand just below the elbow in imitation of the blow I had given the captain. At my request, he used my own sword because I would not be defeated by an enemy blade.
This is the reason for my poor penmanship for I have had to use my left hand for all things since and I have little skill at it. A further penalty I must endure was to leave the people with whom I had lived, banished to another part of the peninsula never to return. The remains of my right hand will lie here, at their request, in an ancient tomb, but the rest of me, and all I brought with me from England—yea, even that for which I first did flee—will travel west to places where I am known to neither Spaniard nor Indian. One of the Indians (properly called Maya) will go with me, for my health is poor, and I fear that the loss of blood allowed some other infection in and that leaves me weak and sweating. When I first came here I might have survived both hurt and illness, but now I fear they will o’ercome me.
I have spoken to my Mayan friend about my past, what I carry, its great value and significance, and he has agreed to lay a small part of it here in Ek Balam with the hand I gave for the village. The rest will come with me to a great, forgotten place he has named to me called Uxmal where, he says, it is fitting for me live out what time remains to me, and there or thereabouts to die. From what he says I see a tale which smacks of heavenly purposes, for there I may measure out my poor length upon the earth like an old hero returning—though in another land—to his birthplace. It is strange and fitting that my life should come to this almost circle, where that which made me once despised now makes me most admired and binds me once again to kings.
And so farewell, Mother. I fear I will not write to you again, nor do I expect you will ever read these words. The precious stones and metal I once hoped to bring triumphant back to the land of my birth will lie with me here, but that, methinks, is not so bad a thing. Man is man, it seems to me now, despite of race, creed, or nationality. I have lived with those who had all and those who had nothing, indeed, I end where I began. The skin and language of those who will lay me in the earth is different from she who took me first to church, but their poverty is the same. I have found as much good grace, kindness, and dignity in the poor as I have in nobles, princes, and kings. I loved the King for what he did for me and mine, but it no longer seems a treason to imagine a world where none wears a crown. As such it will lie with me in tribute to she who bore me and who lived most despised and dejected even of the poor who knew her. My last letter will be to her though we both know she is long past reading it.
Do not blame me for this, dear Mother. I have a little changed is all, as experience will make a man change. Pray for me still and know that I die.
Your ever-loving and most grateful son,
Edward
Alice turned to him and her eyes were wide with such excitement that James almost forgot his newly discovered wariness.
“James,” she exclaimed, “this is amazing! It sounds like we have only part of the treasure!” Her eyes flickered from the duffel bag back to the letter. “See! ‘Only a small part’ was left in Ek Balam. The rest has to be in Uxmal. It can’t have been found during excavation or we’d know about it, so it’s still there, waiting to be found!”
“Uxmal is a big place,” said James. “And he doesn’t even say he’ll die there exactly. Look,” he said, stabbing a finger at the relevant paragraph. “‘There or thereabouts.’ Not much to go on, is it?”
“Sure it is,” said Alice. “We just have to find which parts of the city haven’t been excavated. Maybe we could take a metal detector.”
“Dream on,” he said. “A metal detector would never have found the small amounts of gold under the massive stone pyramid in Ek Balam,” he said. “We need more information.”
“Maybe there’s something in a Spanish codex or something,” she said, refusing to let go of her enthusiasm. “Colonial records of this guy Edward. Maybe the Spanish army knew where he went. Or maybe his death is recorded in a parish registry over there. It may even give his grave site. He was a Christian, right? It sounds like he got kinda eclectic in his religion, so maybe he was buried in a Spanish cemetery in some mission church. It might be as easy as finding a headstone and opening the grave.”
She looked thrilled by the idea.
“Man,” she said, sitting back on her haunches, still unabashedly naked. “This shit could be worth a fortune.”
James frowned and started to put the letter away.
“So when we heading over to Uxmal?” she said.
“I don’t know,” said James, evasive. “Even if you’re right, there’s research to be done before we get there.”
“Research?” she said, her old scorn returning abruptly. “I’m not going to sit in a pile of books while someone beats us to it, James. Don’t be so lame.”
“I’m not wandering around Uxmal with a spade in my hand,” said James. “It’s a waste of time.”
“So we’ll stop off a few places on the way and you can poke around in your precious books,” said Alice, “then we’ll arrive ready to dig. Sound like a compromise?”
“I guess,” said James, feeling again the old impulse to please her.
“Excellent,” she said, delighted. She kissed him again, grinning as she did so, thrusting her body at him and laughing so that he wasn’t sure if she was making fun of how easily she controlled him, or if she was genuinely happy.
Chapter Fifty-Four
Deborah, still staring at the eye on the tower, pressed the phone to her ear.
“When will he be back?” she asked. She knew she sounded impatient, but she needed Hargreaves’s expertise now.
“I don’t know,” said the boy. “Maybe not at all.”
“Sorry?” said Deborah. “Is this Barry? I did a tour with Professor Hargreaves yesterday. He was doing some research for me.”
“He’s in hospital,” Barry blurted suddenly. He sounded distraught, close to tears. “He got attacked.”
“Attacked? Is he OK?”
“No,” said Barry. “It’s all my fault. I was leading the tour and this woman went off by herself. The police say it was her who stabbed him.”
“Stabbed him?” said Deborah. “Where is he?”
“Hospital,” said Barry. “They took him, but they didn’t know if he would...”
“Survive?”
“Right.”
“Did he say anything about the woman who attacked him?”
“He was crazy!” said Barry, sounding more unnerved than ever. “He was babbling about Jane Scott coming to get him.”
“Jane Scott?”
“The murderess who was hanged at the castle in 1828,” he said, falling back on his tour patter. “She was too weak to stand so they had to make a chair on wheels to get her to the scaffold...”
The wheeled chair in the Drop Room.
Deborah recoiled from the thought, baffled and horrified.
“A ghost couldn’t have attacked him,” said Deborah, her voice hushed.
“That’s what he thought,” said Barry. “The police say he sat there and let this person stab him with the point of a branding iron she took from a case. Right in the chest. There was blood everywhere.”
Deborah’s head swam. Hargreaves, who had been so kind, so helpful.
Her fault.
She forced herself to calm down.
“Barry, can you tell me what he was doing when he was attacked?”
“He was in the archive room—the library—downstairs,” he said. “He had just made himself a cuppa. He was sitting at the desk with his back to the computer.”
“Were there books on the desk, or notes?”
“No. Nothing.”
“Wa
s the computer on?”
“No,” said Barry. “But it was warm. I touched it as I tried to...help him, and I could feel it was warm.”
So either he had just turned it off, or his attacker had. If she had, perhaps she was trying to hide something. She could have reshelved books or taken them with her.
“Barry,” she said. “I want you to go back down there and turn on the computer.”
“I can’t,” he said. “The police closed the room.”
“It’s important, Barry,” she said, “and if the police are still there, you can have me talk to them.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Open whichever web browser Mr. Hargreaves would have used and see if you can figure out what last appeared in the search window.”
“How do I do that?” He sounded steadily more clueless, more childlike.
“Just work through the alphabet, one letter at a time, and see if the window prompts you with a recent search. If it doesn’t, move on to the next letter. Write down or copy anything it prompts you with, OK?”
“I don’t know,” he said again. “The police might not like it.”
“I’ll deal with the police,” she said. “Have them call me. Tell them my name is Deborah Miller.”
As she waited for him—or the police—to call back, she tried the church door, her hand unsteady. It was open, so she stepped inside, glad of the silence. The attack on Frank Hargreaves weighed on her like she was shouldering his body. She needed to think.
The church was small and traditional, old wooden pews divided by a central aisle, white walls with arches and columns down the left side surmounted by a wooden gallery, a simple altar—by English standards—backed by a stained-glass window.
A vicar in a black robe emerged from the back of the church and greeted her warmly, nodding in response to her question about looking at the old parish registers.
“What year would you like to start?” he said.
“Sixteen twenty,” she said.
“Ah,” said the vicar, pausing and turning to her. “Spot of trouble there. We have no original records prior to 1721, but we do have a transcription made by one of my nineteenth-century forbears, Archdeacon Rushton. It goes back to 1574, though there is a gap between 1637 and 1662. Let’s see what we can find, shall we?”
They walked through a dark hallway smelling strongly of furniture polish and old flowers, into the vestry and offices beyond the church proper.
“I couldn’t help noting that ellipse on the church tower,” said Deborah.
“Ah, the All-Seeing Eye or the Eye of God,” said the vicar. “The legend is that it’s there to ward off evil. The tower is old, maybe seventeenth century, though it has been refurbished a couple of times since then, and there was a church here as early as 1250, so who knows where the eye came from. It could even be pre-Christian. Old stone gets reused as do old ideas and beliefs. This was a Catholic church till the reformation, after all. Maybe its materials came from other faiths too.”
He shrugged cheerfully, unconcerned by the suggestion that what seemed so solid and orthodox may have once represented something quite different.
“I know the region is famous for its witches,” said Deborah. “Do you think the eye was added after those women were put to trial?”
“To protect the region from old malice, you mean?” he answered. “I suppose. There’s no reason to believe it had anything to do with the witches at all, except that this church was the heart of their community. I think the eye was here in some form then and earlier. It could have been part of the church before the present tower was built.”
“Have you ever seen it connected to a coat of arms?” she asked on impulse.
He gave her a curious look.
“No,” he said. “Have you?”
“I’m looking for an Edward de Clifford,” she said, deciding just as impulsively to trust him. “Born about 1620 and raised partly in Skipton.”
“Clifford?” he said, raising his eyebrows. “You’ve probably heard that George Clifford may have had- er...connections...among some of the local women. But surely, he was dead by 1620?”
“Yes,” she said. “I’m just wondering if his daughter somehow retained connections to the area and formally adopted someone born here. I’m guessing, and without much evidence to go on,” she said, suddenly tired and a little desperate. She thought of Frank Hargreaves languishing in a hospital bed and had to push off the rising sense of horror and responsibility.
Hargreaves would want answers. You may have gotten him hurt, even killed. You at least owe him a solution.
The vicar sat her down at a broad wooden table and disappeared for a moment while he recovered a pair of large books, which he lay before her with a thud. One was modern and professionally printed, the other a considerably older binding of yellowing parchment.
“The spelling of names gets a bit erratic in this period, I’m afraid,” he said, “so you have to think phonetically. Have you ever looked at Renaissance signatures? Fascinating stuff. Truly amazing how many different spellings a person could come up with: Marlowe, Merlin, and Morley all for the same surname! It can get very confusing. Just try to sound them out and you should manage. Do you have children, Miss Miller?”
Deborah gave him a startled look. “No,” she said. “Why?”
“No reason,” he said. “I just find that people usually have a reason for getting interested in genealogy. You know, looking forward and backward through time and mortality.”
“Oh,” she said, inadequately. “Right. Well, it will probably stay quite academic for me. Not sure I’d ever be much of a mother.”
The vicar beamed and shook his head.
“I think you’d be a wonderful mother,” he said. “I have a good instinct about people.”
Deborah felt herself flush and she looked down at the books.
“Anything else I can get for you?” said the vicar.
“I think that’s all, thanks.”
“The modern copy should contain everything you need,” he added, tapping it with one finger, “but if you need to double-check a reference in the original, I’d ask you to be very careful with it. Absolutely no marks on the pages, please.”
“Of course.”
“I have a few odd jobs to take care of around the church, if you don’t mind,” he said, “so I’ll leave you to it for an hour or so. OK?”
“Fine,” said Deborah. “You’ve been most kind.”
I think you’d be a wonderful mother, she thought as he walked away. Well, that makes one of you. And what the hell was that based on anyway? It was absurd. Sweet, perhaps, or at least well-intentioned, but absurd all the same.
She thought of Adelita, her head in a book, grinning up at Deborah, who always gave her space and silence, as her own mother had never done.
There’s more to motherhood than staying out of your children’s way, she reminded herself. Planning to play the great white savior bringing liberation and education to the natives? You should be ashamed of yourself.
And being so, Deborah took out her laptop and turned it on. As it warmed up, she leafed through the book till she found 1620. Each year got about a page, each page contained thirty to forty entries in column form, each marked with the Latin abbreviations bap, nupta, and sepult: baptisms, marriages, and burials. They were mainly just names and dates occasionally augmented with a note.
She opened a new document on her desktop where she could take notes and, seeing that she was getting a strong wireless signal, opened her e-mail. There was a new message from Frank Hargreaves.
It startled her, not so much for what it contained, but because it struck her that this may have been the last thing he did before being attacked. She read it twice, but there was no sign of panic, no delirium, no hint of anxiety about the ghost of some Victorian poisoner. What it did contain was firm evidence of Edward Clifford (not de Clifford) showing up as a page in the court of King Charles I for four years. In that time, Hargrea
ves said, he seemed to have been well liked by most, looked after by prominent people who looked to his education. The boy must have been bright, may even have been a counselor in training.
Then things changed drastically and for the worse. It wasn’t clear why, but Edward fell from grace as dramatically as he had risen, and, at least according to one courtier’s diary, it had something to do with his mother. In the space of a month he had gone from being a prominent servant and counselor to being persona non grata. Whatever the cause, Edward vanished from court under a cloud, returning to the north and to Skipton in particular, where he remained till the end of the Civil War. He next returned briefly to London in the year the king was executed, and then left again for good—fleeing, it seemed—with the authorities at his heels.
She reopened the file with the picture of Lady Anne, trying not to remember what had happened when last she looked at it, and she avoided the woman’s face, studying instead the figures beneath her. She considered the children, the two boys marked with crosses, their eyes closed in death. Beside them, a little away from the group, was another young man, no taller than the children, but lightly bearded. He wore black and carried what looked like a pen and a book, but there was something strange about the representation of his body. It seemed squat, compressed to the point of distortion, as if the artist hadn’t either the skill or the space to draw him properly, though the rest of the painting was expertly done.
She snatched out her phone, then opened a directory on her desktop and dialed. As it began to ring, she checked her watch, calculating the time difference to Mexico. It was too early. The lab wouldn’t be open for another couple of hours. She could leave a message though, ask for an e-mail confirmation as soon as they could get her one. She did so, remembering at the last second that she might be considered a fugitive.
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