The Courtship (9 page)

“What have we here?”

They looked up to see Jason Fleming, Baron Crowley, standing right in front of them, lightly tapping his riding crop against his right boot.

Lord Beecham didn't like Crowley, an older man who knew too much and appeared to make a lot of money off what he knew. He drank too much, gambled too much, and wenched until he should have dropped over dead from the French pox, but he hadn't yet done so. He habitually wore a sneer that made Lord Beecham want to smash him in the nose.

He gave the man an emotionless look, nodded, and said shortly, “Crowley.”

“Who is the lovely lady, Beecham?”

“No one to interest you, Crowley. Your horse looks restless.”

“I have seen you, my dear. I believe it was just last week at the Sanderling ball. You were with Alexandra Sherbrooke. Everyone remarked upon your rather obvious attributes.”

Helen, who had not entertained a single notion about like or dislike of this intruder, said immediately, “My attributes might be obvious, sir, but your rudeness is even more apparent. Indeed, it is rather transparent.”

Lord Crowley took a step back. His well-formed mouth grew ugly in its sneer. “Is this your first assignation with Lord Beecham, my dear? I beg you to have a care. Beecham is a dangerous man. He won't treat you as well as I would.” He bowed. “I am Crowley, you know. And you are?”

She smiled up at him, showing lots of white, locked teeth. “I am a lady, sir.”

“Go away, Crowley. The lady and I are busy.”

“Busy doing what?”

Lord Beecham rose slowly. He eyed Lord Crowley for a very long time. The man fidgeted. “Actually I will tell you, Crowley. The lady and I are partners.”

“Partners in what?”

“That is not any of your affair. Go away, Crowley.”

“You begin to interest me, Beecham.” Then he gave a small salute to Helen with his riding crop, turned, and gracefully mounted his horse.

“Stay away from him,” Lord Beecham said, looking after Crowley until he disappeared from view. “I have the reputation of a seducer, surely a harmless pursuit when all is said and done. Lord Crowley has a flair for evil.”

“What sort of evil?”

Lord Beecham said briefly, “He feeds on helplessness. Now, where were we?”

“Robert Burnell and the lamp. He said he'd never seen it do anything save just sit there and let the king and queen rub it endlessly until Eleanor grew violently ill in the fall of 1279. Some sort of fever was raging through London, and the queen, along with three of her ladies, became very ill. All of the ladies died. The king was distraught. He took the lamp—it was a last resort, Burnell wrote, because the physicians had given up—and he put it in Eleanor's arms.” She shuddered.

“Well, what happened?”

“She survived.”

Lord Beecham said slowly, “As I recall, Queen Eleanor bore more children that I can count. If she could survive all that childbirth, it seems to me that surviving a fever would be nothing to her.”

“She was pregnant nearly every year,” Helen admitted, “but still, the fever was virulent, and it did kill all three of her ladies. Don't be so cynical, sir.”

“What did Burnell write about that?”

“He claimed that the king wrapped the lamp in a bolt of exquisite crimson velvet from Genoa and set it beneath glass. He proclaimed the lamp magic and set guards around it. Then one morning, the king unwrapped the velvet to look at the lamp.

“It was gone. In its place was a silver lamp, ugly and quite new. The king went on a rampage. The guards were questioned, brutally. No one admitted anything. Then, the next morning, the gold lamp was back. Everyone believed that the guard who had stolen it had been so frightened that he simply returned it.

“But you see, it happened again the next week. One morning the gold lamp was gone and in its place was the ugly silver lamp. The following morning, the gold one was back.”

“Where did the lamp go?” Lord Beechem asked. “What magic made it disappear only to reappear?”

“King Edward brought in scholars, Burnell wrote, but none of them could figure it out. The king himself even slept by the lamp for a week, to guard it. The same thing happened. The lamp disappeared, then reappeared. Everyone proclaimed the lamp to be magic. Churchmen said it was evil. They wanted it destroyed. The king refused, saying it had saved his queen.

“Finally, Burnell wrote, the king, because of the pressure from the Church, buried the lamp near Aldeburgh, right on the coast. Supposedly when the queen was ill again, he sent men to fetch it. They reported that they could not find it. The queen died. It seems that the lamp disappeared.”

“Which of Burnell's versions do you prefer?”

“I believe the king buried it in Aldeburgh. Why else would Burnell write about its being there? I think the men who were sent to bring it back simply didn't go to the right place. It only makes sense, don't you think?”

“The lamp could simply have disappeared again. You have searched?”

“I bought the old Norman church and the land surrounding it.”

He raised an eyebrow to that.

“No, my father didn't buy it for me. I earn my own way, Lord Beecham. I run an excellent inn.”

“How do you propose that you and I proceed? You have found two accounts about the lamp. I will concede, for the sake of argument, that it did exist; its properties, however, are quite murky. You have doubtless sifted through every grain of sand to find more clues. What now?”

“There is something else, but I don't want to tell you until you agree to be my partner. I haven't even told my father.”

She had caught him with that bait. He sat forward, his eyes intent on her face. She was reeling him in quite nicely.

“What is it?”

Helen looked at him for a very long time, then said, “Will you be my partner? Will you help me find the lamp?”

He thought about his life until his thirty-third year. There were black clouds strewn throughout the years, particularly the young years, when his father had been alive. But surely everyone had tragedy or appalling situations to deal with. Perhaps his were blacker than most, carved more deeply into his soul. Perhaps his endless, relentless search for pleasure and its immediacy and its anticipation, its urgency, had kept him from succumbing to the black pit that he knew yawned at his feet.

No, he was being a fool. His life was in his control now, at least most of it. He enjoyed his pleasures, the women who favored him with their attention and their bodies.

He sat there and pondered. A magic lamp given to King Edward I by a Knight Templar. The chances of such a lamp's even existing in the first place were very close to none at all in his mind. And this same magic lamp that couldn't possibly exist was hidden somewhere in England, now, in modern times?

It was impossible. It was a chimera, a dream, nothing more. And he shook his head even as he said, “I will be your partner, Miss Mayberry. Now tell me what else you have discovered about the lamp.”

She stuck out her hand and he shook it.

“All right. Now, tell me.”

H
ELEN LEANED VERY close to him and whispered, “Not three months ago when I was in Aldeburgh, again searching as I have searched for the past six years, there had been a vicious storm that had destroyed parts of the beach just the week before. It had even torn away parts of cliffs. I found a small cave, uncovered by the storm.

“At the very back of the cave an iron cask had been dumped over onto a ledge. There was a hole in the wall where it had been hidden. Inside the cask was a rolled piece of leather, barely holding itself together. I don't know what language is written on that scroll, but it is very, very old.”

“You've taken it to none of the medieval scholars at Cambridge?”

“Oh, no, that would surely be my last resort. I want you to look at it, Lord Beecham. I want you to translate it. It would be your first act as my partner.”

He said very slowly, “How did you find out that I spent two years at Oxford studying the medieval parchments and manuscripts vaulted there, specifically the ones brought back from the Holy Land to England? You are not thinking about laying this at Blunder's door, are you? He couldn't have told you about my studies at Oxford. He has no idea.”

“One of the churchmen once told me about you. His brother taught you at Oxford some twelve years ago. Sir Giles—”

“—Gilliam,” Lord Beecham said, looking inward, remembering those exciting days when there was a discovery around each corner, on each page of some precious bit of parchment that Sir Giles had managed to unearth from the Oxford vaults.

“Yes. His churchman brother is Lockleer Gilliam, a vicar in Dereham. He married my father and mother once, about two years before she died.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Oh, I forgot. My father is a vastly romantic gentleman. He wed my mother on three different occasions. Vicar Gilliam is a man of flexible mind and infinite kindness. He and my father became great friends.”

“But why did you not simply take the writings to Oxford to Sir Giles Gilliam?”

“He died last year.”

“I didn't know,” Lord Beecham said, and he felt a blow of guilt so swift and powerful it nearly bowed him to his knees. He hadn't heard. No one had bothered to tell him because—because he was nothing more than a pleasure-seeking nobleman who didn't give a damn about anything other than his own gratification. He looked down to see her hand on his arm.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I met Sir Giles once at his brother's vicarage in Dereham. He was always talking, only it wasn't to any of us. He was conversing with people who lived back then, in thirteenth-century England, and he was explaining to them that he needed to know more about this or that. Then, and I swear this to you, he would pause and it seemed that he was listening to someone speak who wasn't there.

“The vicar told me not to pay any attention to Sir Giles. He said, however, that after Sir Giles's conversations he wrote the most remarkable documents.”

Helen clearly saw Sir Giles, his head cocked to one side, listening intently to a shelf of books, a picture on a wall, a carpet at his feet. “It was disconcerting. When Sir Giles finally realized I was there with his brother, he said, and I will never forget this, ‘How magnificent you are. But that is not important. What is important is that you not allow your mind to become mulch.' ”

Lord Beecham laughed, a free, full-bodied laugh this time that resonated throughout his head and into the air around him. It brought back marvelous memories of a young man of twenty, so very eager to learn everything Sir Giles knew. And Sir Giles had even told him once, patting his shoulder, that he was so very bright, and that Sir Giles was thankful that Spenser had given his brain over to him, Sir Giles. Ah, the medieval mind, there was nothing like it, Sir Giles would say, then drink down a snifter of delicious smuggled French brandy. But Spenser hadn't remained at Oxford. His father had died, and he had become seventh Baron Valesdale and fifth Viscount Beecham.

He had left Oxford at the age of twenty-one. And become a nobleman.

“I remember,” Lord Beecham said, his voice rich with memory, “Sir Giles once telling me that the Catholic Church was quite wrong. A man didn't need to give up lust in order to be obedient and holy and committed to God. He needed only to truly mean both his vows to God and his vows to a woman, and his life would be balanced and no part of him would ever wither.”

“I fancy that his brother, Vicar Lockleer, is relieved to be Church of England,” Helen said, smiling. “He has two children. His wife died last year, but he loved her very much. He is also a very practical man, unlike his learned brother.

“He didn't know how to begin to translate the scroll. That was when he recommended you. What do you think, Lord Beecham?”

He was silent for the longest time. The big girl sitting beside him jumped up once, patted Eleanor's nose, then returned and sat down. She began to tap her foot. She whistled.

“I have forgotten so very much,” he said at last.

“It won't matter. You'll see,” she said, still now, all her attention focused on him. “The vicar now has many of the translations, texts, and notes his brother made at Oxford. Perhaps there will be enough to help you remember.”

He said as he turned to take her hands between his. “I have never been a woman's partner before. This should prove interesting. I want to see that iron cask and the leather scroll.”

“The iron cask is old, very old. Medieval? Very possibly. Perhaps even older. As for the leather, I am very afraid that it will crumble if we work with it very much.”