‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘This is the son speaking now, David.’
She went on.
My mother maintained her life and routines at the villa for almost two years. But in her widowhood she began to miss her family, her sister, her father and mother, her aunts and uncles. That almost all of them were long dead did not seem to affect her. With each passing month the intensity of her longing increased. And it came to pass that a woman averse to travel and afraid of the sea decided to return to the land of her birth.
She tried to persuade me to leave the villa and the vineyards as well. But I only agreed to accompany her and to see her settled. My life, my home, was here on the island, here at the villa, here among the vines, on the sunlit hills surrounded by the Great Sea.
A few days before the ship was to depart, she decided to bring the remains of Yeshua with her. Though not enthused, I nevertheless acceded to her wishes. Upon opening the chamber at the Minerva shrine there was no scent of decay. The space within was cool and clean. The wooden encasement about him was still well sealed.
The voyage north was a melancholy one. I had no Lucca or Octavius to accompany me. Octavius by then could only walk with a cane. I had two strong youths from the vineyard eager for adventure. After many days on the water with only a few ports of call in Hispania, the grey green cliffs appeared on the horizon. My mother wept tears of joy and tears of pain. She wished to bury Yeshua there because it was there, she said, he had been happiest and most fulfilled. Though I did not doubt it, I knew as well that she was also talking about herself. She had been happiest with him and her sister there and had only come to accept Yosef the tin merchant over time.
The village had grown again to at least half its previous size my mother said. Twenty years had passed since they fled its shores. She was treated like a queen and it was strange for me to see so many people who resembled her. And there were men who remembered Yeshua and who told me stories about him. A new burial site was prepared for him in a clearing back in the woods above the bay. None of the villagers had ever seen a mummy’s casing. They treated it as a sacred object and buried it at the shore of a pond, next to a –
And here she came across a word she did not know the meaning of: a ‘something or other’.
All of this greatly pleased my mother.
Leaving her was as painful a thing as I have ever done. But after a few days back at sea I began to feel whole again and free, and the idea of returning to the villa where my true father was buried – whose only shrine are the vines we make our wine from – was a source of deep contentment. I have not seen my mother again and doubt I ever shall.
I have sat with the elderly scribe and had him write these things and entrusted him with the task of taking these words and all that he has written down for Yosef, back to Judea, just as Yosef asked of me. He is to find Miryam or one of Yeshua’s brothers or sisters and give the scrolls to them. His ship departs tomorrow.
I am soon to marry and make children of my own. Daphne will perform the ceremony. The course of life here mirrors the life of the vines. Seeds are planted and cared for, year in and year out, then they blossom and bear fruit before withering gently in the sun.
Astonished, they left everything resting on the towel, went upstairs to what had been her old room, and finished the champagne before making love again. Neither of them felt very much during sex but they were happy. When he fell asleep, close to two a.m., she dressed and tiptoed out. As she contemplated the mind-boggling discovery that the remains of Christ might be buried somewhere in Cornwall, she used the powder room on the ground floor under the stairs to pee and wash her hands and face. The last and only other time she had been in that odd little space was on the day she first arrived. Much had happened since that windy afternoon, and it felt unfair to her that she could still be there, and that Camilla was not. Before leaving the house, she looked once again at her new discovery, reset the alarm and closed the shelf in the library. Outside she was quickly drenched in the mist, but she took time to breathe in the sea air before getting into the Land Rover and driving back to the cottage.
Not wanting to risk waking Finn and Bidelia by opening the garage doors to repark the Land Rover next to their Morris Mini Traveller, she left it out on the driveway. Only a single lamp was on in the vast living room and though she was the only person in the rambling house, with its warren of upstairs bedrooms, main and back stairways, old doors to the outside woods and fields that rattled with the merest gust of wind, she felt secure here. She went into the kitchen for a glass of filtered water. The light in that room she flicked on came from neon tubes hidden under the dish shelves and they aimed an ethereal glow at the yellow linoleum floor. As she searched in her bag for some Advil to take as a preventive measure after all the alcohol, her phone rang. Given the late hour, she assumed it would be James, awake and wondering where she had gone. But, finding the phone and the Advil simultaneously she saw that it was Nathan.
‘Hello?’
‘Laura.’
She could tell from his tone that he had been drinking.
‘That’s me.’
‘Where are you?’
‘England.’
‘Oh my God. So sorry. Did I wake you?’
‘Actually, I am still up,’ she said.
‘How’s it going?’
‘Fine. Good. It’s going well.’
‘That’s great.’
‘How are you?’ she asked, taking the Advil.
‘Good. You know. Same ole, same ole.’
‘How’s Oksana?’
‘Oksana. God. How do you know her name?’
‘It seemed a logical thing to ask considering how I met her.’
‘Oh my God.’
‘You’ve been drinking.’
‘A little. Not too much. You know me so well. Better than anyone ever has, or ever will.’
She realized she did not have the strength or patience to deal with this now.
‘What’s up Nathan? Why the call, now, after all this time?’
‘I was having dinner, alone, at the bar at Knickerbockers, and, you know, missed you. And I wanted to apologize for being such a selfish shit.’
‘It’s a little late for that, but fine. I hear you. Apology accepted. We were in bad shape.’
‘You think?’
‘I do.’
‘So, are you seeing anyone?’
‘That’s not your concern anymore.’
‘Just asking is all.’
‘I’m just about to go to sleep. I’ve had a very long day.’
‘OK. Well. Big kiss.’
‘Goodnight Nathan.’
‘Bonsoir chérie.’
She hit ‘End Call’ and stood there. She stood there appalled, appalled that a relationship that had taken such a heavy slice from the prime of her life could end with such a lame conversation. She went upstairs, showered, put on a fresh pair of pyjamas and got into bed. She decided to try and sleep for as long as she could. Tomorrow, Carmensina day, would be a sick day for her, a stay-in-bed day, with a walk down to the lake in the afternoon. There was no need to think ahead any further than that. In finding the smaller scroll she had just discovered something extraordinary, something earth-shaking. Life was good. Life was so good she did not notice that her computer was missing.
Chapter 43
Bidelia MacShane, née Clancy, was born and raised in Cork. When she was seven and attending St Columba’s Primary School for girls, she won the Maynooth Catechism contest. She memorized the entire manual before receiving the sacrament of confession and then took her First Holy Communion in what the nuns declared was a state of absolute purity. Ever since she heard Laura speaking at dinner about the scroll and the codices, page ten of the Catechism flashed into her mind. And it stayed there, week after week, despite Finn’s advice that she keep their employer and the American guest in her prayers and move on.
On page ten in the Catechism, a copy of which she conserved in the drawer next to her bed, t
here was the following exchange of questions and answers all good Catholics swore by.
Q. On what day did Christ rise from the dead?
A. On Easter Sunday, the third day after His death, Christ arose in body and soul glorious and immortal from the dead.
Q. How long did Christ stay on earth after His resurrection?
A. Christ stayed on earth forty days after His resurrection, to show that He was truly risen from the dead, and to instruct His apostles.
Q. After Christ had remained forty days on earth, where did he go?
A. After forty days, Christ, on Ascension Day ascended from Mount Olivet, with His body and soul, into heaven.
Q. Where is Christ in heaven?
A. Christ sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty.
That the scroll and the codices were hidden in what had been a priest hole, a sacred place where mass had been said for the faithful in fear for their lives, was, all by itself, a blasphemy and a thorn in her side. But what boiled the blood within Bidelia’s Irish veins and shook her heart, was what she learned to be in them. ‘The Devil’s work’ was how she referred to it in private with Finn. For her, Camilla’s death had been an act of God, a punishment and a sign, a warning. It was followed with their banishment by Carmensina, a woman who hardly spoke to them and who had not been able to convert poor James to the true faith. And when, at the lunch with the Sotheby women, Bidelia heard the full extent of everything as Laura spelled it all out, while being simply taken for granted and ignored, and then hearing the price the devilry could be sold for, a sale that would give Carmensina millions of pounds, it was a call to action.
Finn protested. Finn reminded her of the eighth commandment: Thou Shalt not Steal. But the commandments were from the Old Testament. In Bidelia’s mind the liturgy she’d learned so well from the New Testament, the one that kept her faith so strong and that had got her through all of life’s unfairness thus far, superseded anything else. To steal the Devil’s work was not a sin, but rather a mission to fulfil, a test of faith to respond to. Finn only gave in when he saw how determined she was, how she would do it with or without him. And, he then reasoned, it was time to leave anyway, time to go home to Ireland, and if they were pursued and charged, well to the Devil with them as well.
Though Camilla had shown them many years earlier how to access the priest hole, they did not know the alarm code. When less than a minute had passed and the alarm’s persistent beeping began, the MacShanes, terrified of being caught, became exasperated. Bidelia had brought one of Camilla’s Mallorcan straw shopping baskets, and as the alarm went off, she began to throw the two scrolls and the codices into it. Finn grabbed the towel and was attempting to stifle the noise, thrusting it against the tiny speaker. They left as fast as they could, not bothering to move the bookshelf back in place. The towel fell from the alarm speaker of its own accord and the noise it made was what finally penetrated the sleep of the Andalusian couple. It took them a few minutes to track its source for they had never seen the priest hole and then, going upstairs, they had to knock on many doors before finding James who was lost to the world in bed. It gave the MacShanes the time they needed to empty the contents of the straw basket into the oil drum where trash was burned. They doused it with a litre of kerosene and lit it ablaze.
James came downstairs, entered the priest hole and, horrified by what was missing, punched in the code to silence the alarm. Then he heard the MacShanes’ Mini Morris Traveller leaving the estate. Entering the kitchen with the Spaniards, a rancid smell of burning leather, wood, parchment and papyrus drew them outside to behind the stables where the still sparking ashes were all that remained of his family treasure. Incensed and confused and unwilling to accept that the deed had been done by his faithful staff, he began to yell at the innocent pair gaping next to him, furious that they had not managed to awaken him earlier.
He took their little car and, filled with dread, drove to the cottage where he found Laura in tears. She was wrapped in a robe, sitting on the sofa in the living room, re-reading the note of apology Finn had written and placed in an envelope along with two thousand pounds for the loss of her laptop. Inconsolable and not wanting him to hold her, she cursed herself, over and over, for the paranoia that had prevented her from storing her work on the Cloud or keeping it backed up on a pen drive. The two photos still in her phone were useless.
By the time she and James were able to nibble on something for lunch, exhausted from anger and numb with shock, Bidelia was standing at the railing on the upper deck of a Holyhead Ferry. She made the sign of the cross, leaned over, and dropped Laura’s laptop into the Irish Sea. As it disappeared under the water, briefly shimmering like a diving fish, she could almost feel Camilla’s soul being released from the fires of Purgatory, rising up to heaven on the wings of angels.
Chapter 44
James swore the Spanish couple to secrecy. When Carmensina arrived that afternoon, he told her that Sotheby’s, after careful inspection, had declared the documents inauthentic. Only vaguely aware of the tests James had commissioned at Oxford a year earlier, ignorant of the price Sotheby’s had quoted, and more than pleased to have Laura’s work discredited, she took the news with gracious stoicism. James also told her that on second thought and taking her wishes into account, he had dismissed Finn and Bidelia, who after all were well past the age of official retirement. This declaration gave her great satisfaction. In an email he informed Sotheby’s that, after careful thought, the family had decided to withdraw the documents from auction.
He did not have the heart to go after the MacShanes. Though losing the imagined millions was hard to swallow and still made him angry, and though he felt terrible for Laura, part of him was secretly relieved to avoid what would have been relentless controversy. He tried to be philosophical about it and recognized that, in general terms, he was content with the money and property he had.
Laura was devastated. She left the estate that very evening during James and Carmensina’s dinner hour. She caught a flight from London to Mallorca with the idea of driving to Deià to visit Camilla’s grave. But then, en route, she thought better of it. She had also promised herself for years that she would one day visit her father’s grave in Palestine, a promise she had yet to keep. It felt unseemly to give priority to Camilla. Suddenly Palestine and Camilla and the texts were linked in her mind and the whole thing was just too painful.
Instead she spent the night in Palma and drove the following day to Formentor where she spent a week on the beach reading mystery novels and venting her rage with long swims. In a calmer state she did go to Deià and found Camilla’s grave, side by side with the tombstone of James’s little sister. After that, saturated with the topic of tombs and burial, she flew to California to visit with her stepfather in Carmel. Though eighty he was still spry and eager to have her there with his new family. The thought of being housed and fed and far away from Cornwall appealed to her. But what she carried with her to each of these places, as a talisman, was a print-out of an email from James inviting her to spend a week with him in Venice at the end of January.
A week before Christmas, Carmensina felt ill at her gym in Barcelona while jogging on a treadmill. That evening she lost the baby. James took her and their two daughters to spend the holidays with Carmensina’s parents and brothers at the family masia in the Empordá countryside.
Around the time Carmensina lost her child, Italian archaeologists at the villa in Sicily found what remained of the temple dedicated to Minerva. They reached Laura in California. Intrigued and desirous by then of recovering anything connected with what had been lost, she cancelled her direct flight to Venice scheduled for January and booked herself a ticket to Palermo instead, sending word to James that she would make her way to Venice from there.
She was more than ready to leave her stepfather’s. When she first told him some of what had happened to her, professionally at least, his reaction was muted. His large McMansion, virtually bookless, was built on the edge
of a fairway at the Pebble Beach golf course. Its blond wood floors were smothered with avocado-toned carpets that administered regular shocks of static electricity. Trophies from golf tournaments covered the surfaces of every table in the living room. His new wife and her grown-up children from a former marriage, glued to their phones all day, only talked about sports, diets, and exercise.
Laura found Gerald Cuddihy II considerably frailer than when she had last seen him. He was the man who had swept her mother off her feet, who had put Laura through school in New York, who was responsible for her financial independence, and who and given her the apartment on Tenth Street when she obtained her PhD. At the Christmas Eve dinner, held not at the house but in the Golf Club’s anodyne dining room, he publicly acknowledged Laura’s discomfort. Giving a toast he leaned down and put his arm around her proclaiming, ‘You must think us all terribly superficial.’
She decided to take leave of them a few days after that, bowing out of a New Year’s Eve costume ball. On the morning of her departure, as she was packing her suitcase in the bedroom they’d given her that faced a fairway and took in a view of the Pacific, Gerald knocked on the opened door, came in, and sat in a corner chair.
‘I’ve been thinking about what you told me when you got here,’ he said, ‘about what happened to you in England.’
This was a surprise. She’d become accustomed, all through her childhood and adolescence, to his New England reticence, his aversion to conflict and emotionality. She assumed some of that was a product of his former profession, diplomacy, though she also considered the possibility that perhaps he had exercised that profession so well due to his nature, a white Anglo-Saxon Protestantism instilled in him from generations of privileged male ancestors educated at elite prep schools and Ivy League colleges. Mentally, she fastened her seat-belt. Though he was not a man known for any sort of outspoken enthusiasm for his Presbyterian faith, who knew what dwelled under the surface? She could not remember them ever having any discussion about religion. Her mother had embraced the sect his family belonged to with her customary fervour, but he had remained a quiet man.
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