“You’ve assured me that Fuzzies don’t have any.”
Niall snickered and gave up for the moment. “McCoy wants a birthday present for Gretchen. I told him to get a vat of oil and a—”
“Way too much information!” Erik cut in swiftly.
“Then what’s your suggestion?”
Erik opened his mouth. Nothing came out. Factoid’s seething ambition to get his boss Gretchen into bed was the running joke of Rarities Unlimited. Gretchen was ten years older than her would-be lover and built like a Wagnerian diva. McCoy had a turbocharged metabolism; no matter how much junk food he ate, he had to stand beside himself to cast a shadow.
“Prayer,” Erik said finally. “If that fails, virtual reality has my vote. There are websites out there that are guaranteed to rot your dick right off. Anything else?”
“One of our sources at Sotheby’s heard rumors of some unknown, very high-quality manuscript pages surfacing.”
“Twelfth-century Celtic?” Erik asked instantly, knowing that this was the real reason Niall was on the phone.
“I called you, didn’t I?”
“Insular script?”
“I don’t know.”
“Latin or vulgate?”
“Hell, boyo. I’m no Fuzzy.”
“Did the pages come to Sotheby’s?” Erik asked.
“No. House of Warrick. New York office.”
“Shit. If the pages are really good, the old man will buy them for his auction house, or even himself. Just because he prefers fifteenth-century manuscripts doesn’t mean he doesn’t buy others. Did Warrick contact you?”
“No. Our mole did. The stuff is in for preliminary appraisal only. Color copies, not the real thing. Nothing was said about selling.”
“Any kind of appraisal is the first step to selling,” Erik said impatiently. “I want to see those pages. If that fails, at least get me the copies. Find out the owner’s name.”
“Factoid’s working on it, but nothing has been entered into Warrick’s computer yet, or if it has, it’s on a secure computer. Or maybe the boy’s holding out for a really spiffy gift suggestion from you.”
“Chocolate syrup.”
“What?”
“Tell him to pour it into her—”
“Talk about too much information!” Niall cut in hastily. “I’m too young to hear this stuff.”
“Bull.” Before Niall could argue, Erik said, “Get me the information about those pages.”
“Since when did you start giving orders to your bosses?”
“I’m an independent consultant, remember?”
“On retainer.”
“Want it back?”
“Not today, boyo. I’ll wait until you piss me off.”
The sound changed, telling Erik that his employer/friend had hung up with his usual lack of ceremony.
“Good-bye to you, too,” Erik said.
He punched the end button and put the unit back in its cradle.
His left hand picked up the quill. His right hand reached for the penknife.
The front-gate buzzer went off.
Erik cursed. He turned, looked through the south window, and saw the white, purple, and orange van of FedEx delivery service. For a moment he was tempted to ignore the interruption. He wasn’t expecting any shipments. On the other hand, the unexpected was often the most interesting thing that happened on any given day.
He went to the intercom on the other side of the room, punched a button, and said, “Need a signature?”
The crackling “Yes” was just barely audible.
He really had to do something about that intercom. Antiques were fine in their place, but that place wasn’t in a security system. Although the rest of the system was beyond cutting edge, one of Rarities’s security consultants had a brilliant, if bent, mind. Erik admired Joella’s work, even if he didn’t understand her genial paranoia.
“I’m on my way,” he said into the intercom.
Setting aside the virgin quill, he went quickly down the stairs and out the large remodeled kitchen to the side gate where all deliveries came. The driver was new, female, and didn’t look old enough to vote. But then, since Erik had turned thirty-four, more and more people had started looking young to him.
“Thank you,” she said with a quick smile.
He took the package from her and smiled back automatically, but his attention was all for the package. She left while he held the parcel with fingers that were sensitive despite the scrapes and calluses left by his rock-climbing hobby. The package was too thin to hold much of interest, unless some cultural moron had shipped him naked manuscript pages.
Curious, he pulled a big pocketknife out of his jeans. The black plastic handle was deliberately rough, which allowed a good grip despite mud, rain, ice, or blood. The wicked, serrated edge of the knife could go through nylon webbing like lightning through night. The blade made short work of the package. He closed the knife with a distinct click and pulled some papers out of the parcel. The cover sheet was written in a modern hand that had no patience for beautifully executed letters.
Dear Sir,
Enclosed please find color copies of two manuscript leaves. If you feel they are worth a formal appraisal, please contact me at the number on top of this page.
Thank you.
Serena Charters
He raised tawny eyebrows at the energy that fairly crackled through the words. He wondered if Serena knew that her name, like his, dated back at least to the twelfth century. If she knew, she probably wouldn’t care. Twenty-first-century people were obsessed with the future, not the past. At least, most of them were.
Erik wasn’t. It was the past that haunted and intrigued him, the past that was his passion.
He flipped the cover page over to show the copy that lay beneath. He wasn’t expecting much, because color copies were difficult to judge even when they were made carefully. This one was barely adequate. The colors were faded and uneven, as though the printer had been out of ink or out of adjustment. The writing was so light as to be indecipherable.
Yet his breath came in and stayed: what little he could see of the text was written in an elegant calligraphic hand that was as familiar to him as his own.
The language of the text was Latin. The marginal commentary was in the vulgate that was Anglo-Saxon and Norman combined. The few words that were dark enough to make out sent adrenaline spiking into his blood.
The Book of the Learned.
The thought echoed in Erik’s mind, the pattern as clear to him as if it had been printed in letters an inch high. He had been enthralled by the Book of the Learned since he was nine and had seen his first leaf in a collection of old books and family papers his great-aunt had showed him. He had seen many other manuscript leaves since then, pages from books older and newer, more richly illuminated, more perfectly written script . . . but he had never seen a manuscript that moved him the way the Book of the Learned did.
Perhaps it was simply that the name of the Learned calligrapher and illuminator of the book was also Erik. Whatever the reason, his fascination with the book had driven him to learn Latin, Old English, and the fine arts of illumination and calligraphy.
Heart beating rapidly, he looked at the next color sheet and the next. The copies were so bad he wondered if it was deliberate. The pages weren’t sequential, but they were definitely part of the Book of the Learned. The calligraphy was unmistakable, as was the style of the decorated capitals, a combination of pagan and Christian sensibilities that was unique to the manuscripts he described as Insular Celtic.
There were four pages, both sides of two unbound sheets that looked like they had been removed from a bound manuscript. The last page had no writing. Its colors had been so badly reproduced that the painting was almost impossible to make out. Erik stared and kept on staring until he finally saw the images.
A man and a woman in medieval dress.
The man had sun-bright hair cut so that it would fit beneath a war helmet. His c
loak floated on a breeze, revealing the chain-mail hauberk beneath. A peregrine falcon rode his left arm. At his feet lay a staghound the size of a pony. He was watching a woman weave on a loom that was taller than a man. Her unbound hair tumbled in a fiery torrent down her back to her knees. She was looking over her shoulder at him with eyes the color of woodland violets. Instead of castle walls, the two people were surrounded by a rain-drenched forest, as though nothing on earth existed but a man and a woman caught in the mists of time.
More than anything else, the lifelike rendering of the people told Erik this was a secular rather than a religious manuscript. In the early twelfth century, the church was still so concerned about the possibility of idolatry that it insisted all representations of human figures be two-dimensional to the point of woodenness.
Slowly Erik let out a breath he hadn’t even been aware of holding. Nor did he remember walking back up to his turret studio and studying the wretched color copies. Yet he must have done just that, because when he looked up he was in his studio and the copies were spread across the floor in a patch of sunlight.
The woman’s hair, which he remembered as fiery, looked more like a wan taffy color. The man’s hair was equally faded. His clothes weren’t distinct. The proud peregrine was only a shapeless bundle on his left arm and the staghound could have been a mound of earth at his feet. Her incredible violet eyes had no color.
Yet Erik had seen it so vividly. All of it, the sun-bright and the fiery, the violet and the gleaming links of chain mail, the peregrine and the sleeping staghound. He was as certain of it as he was of his own heartbeat.
After a few moments Erik shook himself and came to his feet with the coordination of a man used to climbing rock faces. Without looking away from the copies, he picked up his phone and punched in the number at the top of the cover letter.
No one answered. Not even a machine.
He punched in Niall’s private number. Not his really private one, much less his most private one; but still, not the usual number.
“What?” Niall snarled, his accustomed telephone greeting.
“Tell Factoid that the woman who sent the color copies to the House of Warrick is called Serena Charters. She lives in Leucadia. She wants to know if the pages are worth a formal appraisal.”
“Are they?”
“Yes.” Sighing, Erik mentally kissed his next few Rarities Unlimited consulting fees good-bye. He should have done this years ago, but had been too stubborn. Too cheap, too, with the girls finishing off advanced degrees. “Also, I want a complete provenance search on some illuminated pages I own. I’ll forward the specifics to Gretchen. And yes, I’ll pay for a rush job.”
“Bugger.” Niall sighed. “I’ll tell Dana that her favorite Fuzzy is off on a private quest.”
“It shouldn’t take long.”
“Neither does dying, boyo.”
Chapter 5
LEUCADIA
WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON
Local tradition held that Serena’s house had been built by a man who had made his first million smuggling hashish during the Hippie Sixties. He had paid that million, plus a lot more in hashish, to his lawyer to keep him out of jail. As a result, house plans that had begun in grandeur and excess ended in a drastically trimmed-down version that required a “special” buyer to appreciate.
The house had three thousand square feet unevenly divided into one bedroom, one palatial bathroom, one kitchen, and one huge, vaulted room overlooking Leucadia’s flower farms, Interstate 5, and the Pacific Ocean. There was no office. No media room. No spa or sauna or exercise room. There wasn’t even a walk-in closet. None of the essential luxuries for the telecommuter of the late twentieth or early twenty-first century. As a result, the house had stood empty as often as not.
By the time Serena bought it, the house was approaching its half-century mark. The vaulted “great room” became her weaving studio. Five looms cast long shadows in the afternoon sun. Two of the looms were tall, one was medium height, one was small, and one was tiny enough to use sewing thread for the actual weaving. A tall loom stood empty but for the warp threads, ready for a new weaving to begin. The other big loom held a wall hanging that was almost finished. The pattern was a heraldic device that had been carried into the Second Crusade. Tear-shaped white Norman shields with simple red Christian crosses on them formed a huge patterned cross against a black background.
Critically Serena looked at the hanging. It was a commission piece from a wealthy high-tech entrepreneur who was trying to feel some connection to his past—or at least the past he would like to have had. As with most commissions when the design was simply handed to her, she didn’t find the result particularly satisfying, but she wasn’t in a position to refuse a guaranteed paycheck. Especially one of this size.
Though a few of her weavings were now on display in galleries in Manhattan, Milan, Los Angeles, and Hong Kong, it might take years for any single piece to sell. In the meantime she still had to eat, make house and car payments, buy quantities of fine yarn, pay taxes, and find cat food that Mr. Picky wouldn’t turn up his black nose at.
The only things Picky really liked were fresh Pacific lobster, tiger prawns, smoked salmon, and chicken pâté from the French deli at the beach. Since Serena didn’t have enough money to eat such things on a regular basis, she and Picky had to make do with tuna, cheese, and peanut butter. And rodents, of course.
For the cat, not for Serena. She had never been tempted by any of the mice, voles, shrews, or moles Picky proudly laid out for her inspection every morning—particularly as the cat had already eaten the choice bits. It was his way of telling her what he thought of commercial cat food, canned tuna, cheese, and peanut butter.
The cat in question yeowed loudly and stropped against the back of Serena’s knees with enough force to make her grab the heavy wooden pillar of the loom for balance. Picky was almost as big as a bobcat. He had wonderful orange eyes, sleek black fur, a bobbed tail, and a tuft of hair on the tip of each ear. Knee-high, muscular, predatory, he ruled the house with velvet paws and sheathed claws. Other than attacking salesmen, he had no faults worth mentioning, and certainly none worth the trouble of breaking.
“If you’re hungry, go hunting.” Serena reached down and gave the cat a thorough rubbing. “If you’re thirsty, go terrorize the koi in the garden pond. If you want to go out, you know where the cat door is.”
Picky rubbed his chin against the ancient woven cloth she wore around her neck.
“You like it, too, don’t you?” Serena said, laughing. She hadn’t been able to let go of the scarf since the lawyer Morton Hingham had given it to her. She had even slept with it under her pillow.
And her dreams had been both vivid and troubling: violet eyes like her own beseeching . . . something. The wild cry of a peregrine frustrated in its kill. The hell-deep baying of a staghound circling at the edge of a mist that kept retreating. Soon. Soon. He will see me and I will see him and there will be no more barriers, no safety, nothing but the fate I wrought on my loom.
Picky purred hard enough to make her hands vibrate. The dream-memories evaporated, leaving Serena feeling unsettled. Both the scarf and the purring cat were welcome distractions from the uncanny memories. No, dreams. She couldn’t possibly have remembered them, no matter how real they seemed at the moment.
“Too bad somebody fixed you,” she said to Picky. “I’d like to have a couple more like you.”
The look he gave her said: Eat your heart out. There aren’t any more like me on earth.
“Scoot. I have to work.”
As soon as she picked up the shuttle, Picky stalked off. He had learned that the fastest way to get locked out of the house was to be underfoot while Serena was weaving. He could watch. He could pace. He could lust after the rapidly moving shuttle. But if he made a pass at it or at even one of the dangling yarn-wrapped bobbins or lovely heaps of yarn piled around the room, he was out in the cold.
Absently Serena snapped her fingers. A remote
switch kicked over and music poured out of speakers all through the house. Normally she preferred chamber music, Renaissance motets, or twentieth-century blues, but the austere Crusader design seemed to call for martial music and laments. At the moment, American Civil War ballads wept in all their sad beauty. Not exactly the same war as the Crusades, but not all that different, either. Hell on earth in the name of a higher morality.
The phone rang.
She made no move to answer it.
She had ignored the phone twice already. It was a bad habit of hers, one she had promised various galleries that she would break, or at least get an answering machine that was reliable. But Picky adored any blinking light, and batted with his paws until answering machine, computer, telephone, whatever, was well and truly fouled up. She had tried to explain this to people who insisted that she find a better way to receive their messages. She no longer bothered. People always found a way to get to her. If it wasn’t easy, that just gave her more time to weave.
The phone rang. And rang.
And rang.
Serena finished the row and reached for the phone, hoping no one would be there. “Hello.”
“Good afternoon. Is this Ms. Charters?”
“If you’re selling something, I don’t buy over the phone. I don’t do surveys, either.”
“This is the House of Warrick,” a woman’s voice said crisply. “Janeen Scribner speaking. May I please speak to Ms. Serena Charters?”
“Oh. Sorry.” Serena put a lock of silky, wavy red hair behind her ear with a motion that was half exasperation, half embarrassment. “I’m Serena.”
“You sent us four color copies taken from an illuminated manuscript, correct?”
“Yes. I wondered if it was worth the trouble of getting a full, formal appraisal.”
“The person who could best answer your question is Mr. Norman Warrick himself. His specialty is illuminated manuscripts.”
“I’m reluctant to send the original pages to New York,” Serena said, “and I don’t have time to bring them myself right now.”
“That won’t be necessary. Mr. Warrick divides his year between New York and Palm Desert. He and his family are presently in Palm Desert. They will expect you this evening, if at all possible.”