The journey was as smooth as could be expected, I guess. A few storms and no shortage of sickness. By offering the tutorage arranged by Milton some time ago, even to some of the sailors themselves so that they might barter a little better, I think that we were in return offered a higher degree of respect than we might reasonably have expected. It meant that everyone we encountered along the voyage, from Europe to Japan and beyond, was very understanding of Rachael and her state of mind. She is not there yet by any stretch, and even now she sits quietly in a world of her own as she looks out across the very same view as you, but she grows ever closer. As do we.
As I believe I mentioned before, I once told the late, great Alison Bond that “I would cross deserts, oceans and mountains” for Rachael. It makes me smile because now, given that I arrived in a barren America, found passage to France and overcame for than a few mountains along the way, both geographical and metaphorical, it is good to know that I was ultimately true to my word. To know that I became the man I spent too long merely claiming to be. To ultimately be the one person in this world that Rachael could rely on.
At all times.
It is good to be home again too, but home before any of the troubles. It is good to find peace, and peace of mind in a place and time we can truly call our own. We belong here. I feel it and I am sure from the gentle smile which sits on Rachael’s face every evening that she feels it too. Every day is a step forward and we are both capable of smiles we had long feared had been lost forever. We have of course visited Big Red, Diamond, across the valley once already and we shall go again. What she understood whilst she was there I do not know so I simply treated the visit as though we were out on a leisurely jaunt; admiring the beauty and enjoying our own company. It was there, however, that in amongst her few voiced feelings she said the words I have longed to hear.
Standing and facing the gnarled bark, I saw what I felt to be a slight twinge of recognition in her face. Reaching out to stroke the bark, and without ever looking at me, she said: “Is this home?”
It took me a moment to reply. Without knowing how much the truth might hurt her yet again, I didn’t really know what to say.
“It can be,” I said eventually. “If that’s what you want.”
With that she broke into a gentle, knowing smile. “Home came to me,” she said, as though to no-one in particular. Perhaps it was to me, perhaps to Big Red or perhaps just to herself. Then she leaned sideways until her soft hair was resting gently on my shoulder, reached her arm across my chest as though hugging me, and said the same words I believe I had heard her say a thousand times before. This time, however, they were not tinged with the sense of regret or hopelessness that I had come to know and fear, but rather with her first real sense of contentment:
“I shall not want.”
The love I felt for her at that moment is a feeling I shall carry with me through time.
So, given that I have been granted way too much time and seem to have told you everything about what happened, as you requested I should - and apologies if I upset you in any of my descriptions of you - what else is there to tell you?
Well, there is Hopkins! The despicable Master Hopkins. It would seem that he, like Rachael, also fell victim to consumption, but there was no-one willing to concoct him a cure. Knowing that at least one of the more mummified female bodies in the well had borne signs of tuberculosis, I sometimes wonder if Prudence had caught it from Rachael and Hopkins from Prudence? That would be a justice of which the very poetically named Endymion Porter would heartily approve, don’t you think? During our few months in Japan last year, I received word from Porter, as he continues to be known, that the utterly ethereal, endlessly malleable Hopkins had finally died at his home in Manningtree, Essex, on 12 August 1647. He was buried just a few hours after his death in the graveyard of the Church of St Mary at Mistley Heath. There was no pomp he wrote, no ceremony, no psalms sung and no sprig of rosemary laid in his coffin. There was talk also that the man had started to hallucinate in his latter days and that he saw two great bears visiting him in the night, taunting him. As you and I know full well from our times out here in the forest, the primary meanings of the bear spirit are fourfold: strength and confidence; standing against adversity; taking action and leadership and a time for healing. I like to think that, if Hopkins looked very closely, those two bears had the faces of Rachael and I set firm upon them.
Picturing him alone in his bed, ashen and emaciated with the fatigue he felt and his once-dry coughs having elevated themselves into a relentless fever and violent fits of expectoration, pleases me greatly. He was a thief who traded lives for money and he got what he deserved. I can only hope that the hundreds of innocents he condemned to death will haunt him for an eternity. Rachael herself, meanwhile, is much, much better. Thanks to the pellets of Rifampicin I managed to research and formulate, the tuberculosis is long since gone and she no longer suffers any harmful symptoms. It has, however, left her with a rasp to her breath which, if I am honest, I do find quite appealing.
The fact that she lived, against all the odds, whilst Hopkins died is to my mind the sheer epitome of modern witchcraft.
Throughout this very lengthy tome, far longer than I am sure you were expecting, I have told you as much of characters such as Master Clopton,as I know or could piece together from what I gleaned in the months before we travelled, but I am afraid know nothing of what happened to the Master since. He seemed like a good man however and, wherever he may be, I wish him well. He kept my Rachael safe for me as long as he could.
Porter, meanwhile, did indeed find the work he craved as amanuense to John Milton and, as best I know, he is still there to this day, taking notes and assisting where he can as the great man’s eyesight fails him. I hope he is managing to insert as many lines of verse as he already knows, smiling at the irony of such things and not spending too much of his latter years laid awake at night, as I do on occasion, trying to figure out which of us might actually be the chicken in this world and which of us the egg.
So, before I place this extensive journal of mine in the ground (so that you might find out some history of the place, remember?) and before I plant the seed I hold that will one day become your towering Jeffrey Pine, let me tell you one more thing: and that is this:
I, like you, have had way too much time to think about this - all of this - since I came. Months. I do not have all the missing answers you might seek, far from it, but I do have some theories which seem to me as though they might be logical, based on my slightly more scientific calculations of time and place.
I can boil them down for you to just three key points.
1/ I do not believe that your father is dead. At least, not yet. I tell you this not so that you will think and ponder and muse and drive yourself half crazy, as I have, but so that you will be happy. It is my belief that, somewhere along the way, your father saved us all.
2/ I believe that the tables he and Alison stole were probably already fakes. He just didn’t realise it at the time.
3/ Finally, I believe that you are going to be alright. I really do. No-one will come looking for you any more.
You have done all you were ever required to do and so much more. All you need to do now is rebuild the cabin Rachael and I once shared here (properly this time please) and then live out the rest of your days tramping the same beautiful ground that the two of us do today. Every so often I may leave something in odd places, just so that I can wonder myself crazy if one day you might find it and be reminded of us once more.
To that end, if you have not already, then you really should look under the box into which I placed these copious papers.
Goodbye and good luck, Victoria Lambert. Rachael and I thank you with all out hearts.
Never ending love.
‘Mr. Strauss’ - Peter.
* * * * *
Under the beautiful orange canopy of a peace-filled autumn evening, Victoria carefully placed the last of the papers face down on top of the oth
ers and smiled. They lived, she thought with a smile as warm as the sun. Both of them.
They lived.
She meant that in every sense.
Looking into the small, shallow hole she had dug, the area still surrounded by tape, she took another look at the box itself. On discovering it, exactly where she had always expected it to be, she had simply broken through the already decaying wooden lid and removed the parcel from inside. It had been wrapped in waxed animal skin against almost four hundred years’ worth of ever-changing seasons. Then she had peeled that package open in wonder and began to read. Strauss had not just delivered her the history of this place, as he had promised he would, but also the history of everything that had occurred. It made her smile and, for the first time in as long as she could remember, it also made her head feel calm. The wasps had gone. It had taken her a full day to read the papers, which she did in one sitting, but she had never been happier, smiled so much or felt so warm in her life.
Now, she peeled away yet more earth with her bare hands and, as best she could, attempted to remove the remnants of the box. Much of the wood fell away in her hands but, when the last piece was removed, she ran her fingers through the soft earth below, feeling gently. At first nothing, but then she felt… something. Something small. Awkwardly, she managed to grasp it in her quivering fingers and retrieve it from its four hundred year hiding place. A small leather purse, held by waxed string. She brushed and blew away the dirt and then opened the top, tipping the contents into her palm.
A 1922 Peace dollar. One that had actually been pressed in 1921 and still possessed the contentious and ultimately discarded broken sword. It was still there for all to see and, according to the notes she had just read, it was apparently worth millions.
intrigued, she held up the coin to the light, turning it gently and watching as the fading sun glinted from each and every crisp edge afforded by the pressing. She read the word ‘PEACE’ on its face and it made her smile again. Peace indeed, she thought. Peace at last.
Quickly and with clear purpose, she rose to her feet, and without even pausing, reached her arm back as far as she could, took a deep breath and threw - hard and fast - for all she was worth.
Good riddance, she thought.
Some way down the valley, the vial of 625 landed with a soft skid, swiftly disappearing into the undergrowth.
At the top of the hill Victoria, meanwhile, laid the dollar carefully across the back of her thumb, closed her eyes and smiled gently. A moment later she flicked and caught. Slapping it firmly on to the back of her left wrist, she took yet another quiet moment to simply ponder.
It took longer than she might have hoped to make a decision but she had to know. Slowly, she lifted her hand and let the light catch the very edge of the coin, glistening. She lifted and peered, just for a moment, and then removed her hand completely, finally seeing which side it had chosen.
The coin was the correct way up and ‘tails’ was facing her, the eagle sitting atop the rock with the sword and the olive branches held firm beneath its talons. She could not remember what the Latin which ran around the top said, and nor did she care to look it up again. Not right now.
For now, all she really cared about was the one word should could actually see, read and comprehend. The word which curved its way around the base of the rock, following the coin’s crisp edge like a gentle smile.
It was the only word that mattered any more.
Peace.
CODEX
“A classy, compelling and intelligent thriller.”
The Bookbag
“It’s refreshing in a blockbuster thriller such as Codex that one doesn’t have to put one’s intelligence on the back burner.”
Crimetime
When Jack Bernstein’s prodigal daughter Lara is killed as a result of the bombing of flight 320, the chess grandmaster is completely unaware that the flight was downed for one reason... to ensure that his daughter never made it home.
Having been summoned via a strangely coded message to a meeting with a man referring to himself only as ‘Simon’, Jack is made aware that his daughter was leaving a lot more than her new life behind. She was also leaving a secret… one that has been building for centuries and one which a global group of corporations will stop at nothing to protect. It soon becomes apparent that Lara Bernstein’s new life was no accident. Lara was selected to become part of an ever-expanding belief and her selection was a direct result of her father’s company’s near-perfection of the one thing they need - true artificial intelligence, computer systems capable of cracking the most complex codal system known to man. “Slowly, Jack Bernstein is being drawn into a global game of chess in which he has been an unwitting pawn for over a decade. To keep him in the game they have already killed his wife and now his daughter. When the game is over, they will kill a whole lot more unless Jack can find the one thing he never dreamed existed…
The following pages are an excerpt from
CODEX by ADRIAN DAWSON
The Number One Bestselling Thriller.
EXODUS
The chess board is the world. The pieces with which we play are the natural phenomena of the universe into which we have been placed, and the game, like life itself, is governed by a set of rules; ‘the Laws of Nature’.
We assume that we play white; that we make the first move, but we cannot be sure because our opponent, whoever He may be, is permanently hidden from view. And whilst we are aware that play, forced to reside within the rules, is always fair, just and patient, we must never forget that He will never overlook a mistake or make even the smallest allowance for our inherent ignorances.
And in life, as in chess, retreat is usually nothing more than a carefully concealed preparation for attack.....
At some distant point in a history too full of uncertainties to recall irrelevancies, Lara’s father had spoken those words. Softly, but with clear purpose. She remembered warmth. Fire, rich colour and better times, all sitting comfortably within her memory. All long gone. All proved horribly wrong. They were little more than shallow now, part of a past tucked quietly aside by an intelligent subconscious - one that understood the need for retention of hidden pearls should there come a day when they have reason to come crashing to the fore. But whilst each and every syllable, delivered in a better place and time, had stayed silently within her, their promise of consolation and justification for what she had been forced to leave behind right now was still little more than that; a promise. Her father, for all she still loved him desperately, had already shredded more of those than she could care to remember.
As a player in whatever game this had now become, Lara had been pushing forward for over three years, trying to find her God - her misguided assumption being that He had been the hidden opponent - and, though she had been unable to find Him, she knew now with a certainty that ate away at her from inside that He existed. She knew because scientists throughout the ages had helped us - the sacrificial pawns - thoroughly understand the Laws of Nature; the unbreakable rules that govern the game. Laws which demonstrated to all intelligent creatures that every action has an equal and opposite reaction; that every positive has a negative and that every deity to which people are drawn like magnets possesses its polar antithesis. Equal and opposite.
Its sole purpose to repel.
Lara, for all she had not found God, knew that she had undoubtedly stared hard into the eyes of His dark alternate. She had looked into those bottomless chasms and seen the soul of a man who had been granted equal and opposite power to that which had created us all. His sole purpose; destruction. She had fallen for his charms because there, in this global chess game, was God’s tactical mistake; his ability to lay a blanket over us all, come what may, whilst his adversary was willing to make the extra special effort required to seduce each of us separately.
Her thoughts had never been clearer. She must run; escape; fall back. Retreat.
As she settled into the window seat and flopped wearily against the t
hickened window, her heart pounding and her breath tight, her eyes were drawn to a priest immersed within the other passengers boarding the plane. For a time she observed with disgust how those same others seemed to go out of their way to accommodate him. Each took their turn to back reverently and allow him entry to the aisle before them. To them, blindly it seemed, he was their conduit with a higher power, as close to divine as they might ever come. They treated him with respect so that in some inconsequential way they might clear themselves a path for the moment when their own time on earth was at an end. Lara felt so very differently. She knew the path that the fragments of her soul would take when her breaths reached their end because she had spent the last three days reliving the mistakes of the last three years. Nothing she could do now could alter the descent her spirit would take when her time on this earth was over.
As he passed her seat, the priest felt Lara’s hand reach out and grab desperately at his wrist. He turned, pinhole eyes framed by wire-rimmed glasses looking innocently toward her. His initial shock at the state of the girl – as filthy, ragged and torn as any stray dog- slowly crawled toward to a gentle smile, one that he knew his position would demand he project. His eyes were filled with care, consolation and compassion; all the things his God demanded that they be. His expression was as fake as the girl who had handed Lara her boarding card.
It was not long before the smile had scurried away again. Lara asked the man just one question – one simple question - and without excessive consideration he had offered his truthful answer. As he did she turned away from him and spoke with quiet venom. His eyes widened and a moment later he shuffled hurriedly along the aisle, trying not to think too deeply about what she had said.
Somehow he just knew he would.
In a Boeing 747, weight and space are valuable commodities which must be guarded as stringently as the millions in revenue which an airline can expect to earn. It is because of this that a fully efficient air-conditioning unit, when placed in such a financially conscious environment, is only ever referred to on expenditure sheets as being ‘hungry’; an item whose implementation harbours no promise of profitable return. Like the passengers it should serve, it is seen only to consume. From the damp, slippery, processed food downward, airlines are astutely aware that economy has no room for consumption. So they bite a cheap bullet and fit a desperately weak air-con unit instead.
[Sequoia] Page 43
