9

IT SEEMED A VERY LONG TIME AGO that Jack and Esperanza had stood in a hidden chamber in a proto-Mayan temple in the middle of a rain forest in Venezuela and made a series of discoveries that ended up changing their lives forever. It was thirteen years ago, in fact, and at the time Jack and Espy were barely on speaking terms. He was still dealing with the pain from the injuries she’d inflicted on him for having the nerve to show up and ask for her help five years after leaving her.

But in that temple they’d uncovered pieces of a puzzle that set them on the path of the bones of one of the most famous people in the Bible. Had it not been for that trip into the rain forest, Jack wouldn’t be married, he wouldn’t have the boys, and he wouldn’t be sitting in the faux business office of a cheap hotel trying to identify a symbol he’d spotted in the painting at Parkhurst—the same symbol that appeared as one in a line of such symbols in the Venezuelan temple.

After leaving the mansion, Jack hadn’t said anything to Espy until he ran around the corner and down the street, in search of a retail establishment that would part with a piece of paper and a pen. On the paper he transposed the picture he held in his mind as faithfully as he could, despite its fuzzy representation in the painting. When finished, he handed it to Espy for her review and, hopefully, to elicit confirmation that he wasn’t crazy.

Now they were once again monopolizing the computer in a hotel that seemed reluctant to allow them to take a room again but whose manager eventually took their money.

Espy, an expert linguist, was looking at the paper again, studying the drawing. It was an obvious serpentine shape, but primitive. A line ran through its coils, and on the paper, Jack had made tentative marks indicating a barb on one end. Those marks were more impression than an accurate accounting of what he saw. Or perhaps they were a memory from his first introduction to the symbol back in Venezuela. If he’d had his laptop, he could have pulled up the detailed photos he took during that time rather than relying on scribbles.

“I’m not positive, but I think this is a Pictish symbol,” Espy said. She held the drawing up and looked at it more closely.

“I’m not as up on my Pictish as I’d like to be,” he said. “So if you wouldn’t mind . . .”

“There’s not much to say about it. It’s a language that used to be spoken in Scotland sometime around the seventh century. But the records are so limited that some scholars think it may have been just a regional dialect as opposed to a fully developed language. In fact, some of the most compelling evidence that Pictish existed as a spoken language in its own right is a series of symbols they carved into giant stelae.” She paused, tapped the paper. “This looks like one of those symbols.”

“Do you know the name of it?”

She shook her head. Lacking any other direction, Jack typed Pictish serpent symbol into the search engine. Less than a second later he was rewarded with a page full of pictures, some of which matched his hand-drawn version.

“‘Serpent and Z-rod,’” he read. He shared a look with Espy.

Back in the temple all those years ago, they made a number of significant discoveries. Among them was the uncovering of an early Coptic inscription amid the ruins, a find that turned everything he knew about ancient cross-Atlantic intermingling on its head. Now, given what Espy had told him, and what an internet search had validated, a seventh-century Scottish language could also be added to the list of things that shouldn’t have been at the temple, yet were.

“So we’ve matched a Pictish symbol from a nineteenth-century oil painting to the same symbol in the temple outside of Rubio,” he said. “How far does that get us?”

“It gets us as far as tying the Chambers family to the bones,” Espy answered.

“A definite win. But I think you already established that in your conversation with Olivia Chambers.”

“Establishing and proving are two different things,” Espy said. “And this one provides an obvious next line of inquiry.”

“As in, if this symbol is important enough to appear as a sculpture in Granddad’s office, then where else does it appear?”

Espy gave him a wink and they set to work. One of the issues they ran into right away was how often the symbol appeared, although most of them seemed to be recent references relegated to mystic websites and blogs. Even filtering through these to find mentions that placed the symbol legitimately at some point in history left a great many choices. But on the third filter, an attempt to tie the symbol to the Chambers family directly, or tangentially via its appearance in or around London, they reached a much more manageable data set. Although, at first blush, Jack saw little that seemed to mean a whole lot. Espy was inclined to agree.

“Unless I’m missing something,” she said after they’d spent almost an hour poring over the results, “the only other family connection is that letter Henry Chambers wrote to Longfellow.”

“Which brings up a few troubling questions on its own,” Jack said.

Espy ignored his implication that the conspiracy—if that description fit—stretched to include even renowned literary figures. Jack couldn’t blame her; they’d already bitten off a great deal.

“So we move on,” Espy said. “Knowing the Chambers family has had a strong presence in London since the ninth century, my guess is if there’s a smoking gun, we’re practically sitting right on top of it.”

He found it impossible to debate that kind of enthusiasm, and so they started again, going through everything they’d already looked at.

“What’s this?” Jack asked more than an hour later. It was something he’d skimmed over during the first go-around, a brief article on a man named John Claudius Loudon, a landscape designer of some small fame. Reading with more care this time, he found something that all but jumped off the page. Halfway through the article, in a section that discussed Loudon’s interest in designing cemeteries, Jack saw the name Henry Chambers. It was tucked into a paragraph denoting financial backers for a few of Loudon’s projects.

He pointed out the find to Espy, and together they read through the article in its entirety. There was no mention of the Pictish symbol or of a Loudon tie to the Chambers family beyond the one occurrence. According to the writer, Chambers had provided a good portion of the funds for the design and development of a cemetery.

“Bath Abbey Cemetery,” Jack read. He looked at Espy, who was wearing a puzzled expression. “What’s wrong?”

“What’s wrong is that I know where this is going,” she said, her accent more pronounced than usual. “You’re going to convince me to go to the cemetery. Just to look, you’ll say. Then once we’re there, somehow you’re going to talk me into helping you desecrate somebody’s tomb. And I don’t want to desecrate a tomb.”

“Well, how about I make you a promise? If there’s any tomb desecrating to be done, I’ll do it all by myself.”

She looked unconvinced. “You say that now, but then we get there and it’s, Espy, help me move this. Espy, can you read this for me? Espy, do you mind holding the dead body up so I can look underneath it?”

Jack swiveled his chair and regarded his wife, marveling at his ability to anger the woman without saying so much as a word. She looked ready to spit.

One thing Jack knew about her anger, however, was that it seldom clouded her ability to make rational decisions. And he had no doubt that if there was any tomb desecration to be done, he was on his own.

The moment Jack stepped from the rental car onto the grounds of Bath Abbey Cemetery, he was reminded of how everything in that part of the world seemed older than things did back in the States. It was a phenomenon that extended even to things that weren’t very old. Completed in 1844, Bath Abbey was relatively new, yet it still held that indefinable quality peculiar to Europe that suggested that if you stood in one place and waited long enough, you’d see a hint of magic.

As they walked through the cemetery, they made an effort to avoid stepping on any graves. Their trip to Bath had left them with an hour of sun left, maybe two. From what Jack could see, they would need every bit of that just to cover a portion of the place. Aside from the lack of available daylight, what bothered him was that they’d arrived there on the barest wisp of a clue, without a clear idea of what it was they were looking for, save something that connected this place to the Chambers family.

“I know they have a family burial plot on their own land, so why would a Chambers put a lot of money into a cemetery unless they were planning to use it?” Espy asked.

“To bury their enemies?” he suggested.

Espy scowled and headed for the nearest gravestone while Jack took a moment to unfold the map he’d purchased from the Bath Abbey bookstore. The cemetery was something of a tourist attraction, as much for the wildlife that had worked to reclaim the land as for the stunning monuments and its mortuary. Yet at the moment, he and Espy were the only ones there—at least that he could see.

With the mortuary behind him as a point of reference, he found the structure on the map and then located a path that looked to meander among the plots. But when he looked up, sending his eyes over the landscape, he saw the overgrowth had done a thorough job of obscuring the path from sight. With a sigh he refolded the map and headed toward Espy, who was conducting her investigation in a more empirical fashion.

He found her crouching in front of a gravestone, which was leaning at a precarious angle. By the time he reached her, she’d pulled away a few vines of ivy, enough to see a name. The letters carved into the stone said Hotham. A proper English name. He looked up, taking in the five acres of such plots, wondering what they had gotten themselves into.

Espy seemed to be thinking the same thing. She stood, wiped her hands on her pants, and reached for the map. She did the same thing Jack had, locating the mortuary first, looking over his shoulder to fix its position before looking back at the map. When she finished her perusal, she turned to him.

“Start with the obvious,” she said.

The mortuary was exquisite, its white-stone Gothic spire rising at least fifty feet, blind arcading supplementing the few clerestory windows. When John Claudius Loudon designed the cemetery, Jack thought he must have had this building in mind as the focal point, the place where every eye would turn as visitors stepped onto the property.

He and Espy approached the tall, heavy oak door. It looked as if no one had opened the door in centuries. But despite the appearance of age, as well as the impression Jack got that they weren’t supposed to be trying to enter the mortuary, the door swung open easily.

Stepping inside, he looked up and saw that the tower rose to its full height just inside the entrance before giving way to a small chapel only half as tall as the spire. The interior was modest, a mix of stone and old wood. His initial impression was that the occasional funeral service was performed here before interment.

“I could curl up with a book in here,” Espy said, running her hand along the stone of one of the walls.

“You and all the dead people buried in the walls,” he said as he moved deeper into the mortuary.

Along the walls were square sections of stone, most of them inset with a handle, although some of the older ones appeared to lack the feature. Regardless of what he’d told Espy, Jack wasn’t inclined either to grave robbery or tomb desecration, even if it seemed he was called to those two activities on an oddly frequent basis. Today, though, he had no plans to open any of the tombs.

He took his time, using the light coming in from the high windows, walking near the wall to his left, looking at names, taking in all the details. When finished, he did the same with the second wall. The name Chambers did not appear once, but then he hadn’t expected it to. Like Espy said, they had their own burial plot, a place where they could mourn in private. Jack figured that a member of the family would have had to be an irredeemable black sheep to end up spending eternity in this place.

At the far end of the room, opposite the entrance, was a small altar. It sat on a level that was raised just a few inches off the floor. Jack stepped up onto the raised area and stepped behind the altar, glancing at the smooth, unbroken stone along the back side. The altar consisted of the same stone that made up the floor and walls. When he emerged from behind the altar, Espy raised a questioning eyebrow.

“Nothing,” he said.

Espy looked up at the windows. “We’re losing our light.”

Jack nodded. They were losing the light and had made little progress. He began contemplating a return trip for the next day. “Alright, how about we try finding that path our map shows is out there?”

When they left the mortuary, it was much dimmer outside than was the case when they’d entered. It made Jack wonder if they had spent more time examining the walls than he’d realized.

Taking the map back from Espy, he reviewed the page, seeing the path that, according to the folded paper in his hand, made a giant S through the acreage. He looked up and could find little evidence that such a thing existed. Instead he saw large, unruly bushes, wildflowers, and more of the ubiquitous ivy.

“Nothing ventured,” he said with a shrug and started off, with Espy right behind him.

Finally he found the start of the path, about ten yards to the west. Half-obscured by wild bushes, it led off the main walkway, back toward the cemetery entrance. He pushed a few scraggly branches aside so that Espy could pass, and then he followed. Once on it, it didn’t look as difficult to navigate as he’d anticipated. He saw that the reason it was hard to spot from the mortuary was because it was little more than a narrow dirt path.

In following the path, Jack and Espy made a wide arc that had them approaching the property line. Then it looped around to send them back in the other direction. Once they’d made the turn, it was difficult to see the part of the path they’d left behind. Farther along, the path made a second loop, and as they approached the end of it, there was a much sharper curve that brought them to the other side of the cemetery, where they were greeted by what looked like a single-person mausoleum.

It was a towering monument, at least ten feet from the base to the top of its dome. Six columns supported the dome, which covered a massive urn carved from stone. Ivy had claimed this monument as well, vines of the invading plant advancing into the urn.

Six stone steps at the front of the mausoleum led to the interment chamber belowground. The door to the chamber appeared to be marble and was sealed shut. Jack didn’t try to open it.

Beyond the structure, there didn’t appear to be much other than a smattering of smaller plots, all of the gravestones toppled. Whether by age, weather, or vandals, he couldn’t tell.

Jack glanced at the sky, saw the sun close to vanishing, and chided himself for not remembering to bring a flashlight. “Ready to head back?” he asked.

Espy seemed as reluctant to leave as he did, but then she nodded and started walking back toward the mortuary. As they took the second curve in the path, Jack pondered how the S shape made the walk seem longer than it really was. Then it hit him. A moment later, flush with excitement, he was fumbling for the map, unfolding it in what was now near darkness.

Espy had walked on ahead, and Jack was so focused on what had just occurred that he didn’t call out to her.

He brought the map close to his face, yet the light was essentially gone, and he just couldn’t see enough to understand what he was looking at. And even if he was right, he didn’t know for sure what it meant.

Suddenly Espy appeared out of the darkness and touched his arm.

Jack wheeled around. “I think I’ve got something.”

“What is it?” she asked.

“First, I need someplace to work. And I need light.”