The Layton Prophecy

by Tatiana March

  I asked her about Beatrice.

  “She was my great-grandmother,” Petra said. “The one who had a fling with Francis Layton and bore him a son.”

  “I’m not so sure.” I told her about the diary entry.

  “Daniel.” Petra frowned. “I know that name.” She whirled around and darted down the corridor, raising her voice to call back to me over her shoulder, “I’ll see you in the kitchen at nine. I think I have something that might help.”

  I took the diary with me when I went downstairs. I found my way into the kitchen, where Matilda was standing by the stove. She gave me a big smile. Something was sizzling on a cast iron griddle, sending spicy aromas floating in the air.

  “Good morning,” I said, and settled where the table was laid for two.

  Matilda nodded and flipped over rashers of bacon. She didn’t seem to speak much, but her ample frame and brightly colored clothes carried an aura of cheerfulness. I tried to assess her age, and decided it could be anywhere between forty and sixty.

  Petra rushed in. She was clutching a large book. She threw herself in the hard pine seat next to mine and began turning the pages. I craned my neck and caught a few glimpses. It was one of those coffee table books with more pictures than text.

  “Look at this.” Petra thrust the book in front of me and tapped her finger on a black and white photograph of a muscular youth on horseback.

  I read out the caption. “Daniel Wheatley on Chinook.”

  “He was a local hero.” Petra’s voice brimmed with excitement. “Dirt poor but handsome as sin.” She turned to another page. “Just look at him.”

  I leaned in for a better view. This picture was a formal portrait. The man was certainly handsome, with a square jaw, thick flaxen hair, and a sincere expression. I couldn’t tell the color of his eyes in the black and white picture, but the clear shade made me suspect they were pale blue.

  “This is the history of the Happy Valley,” Petra said. “My father put it together and had it published privately. We sell copies in the shop.”

  Goosebumps rose on my skin as I stared at the picture. “Who was this man?”

  “He was just a farm laborer, but in those days we bred horses. Daniel rode for the Happy Valley. Just local races, strictly amateur, but it gave him kudos. No wonder Beatrice had the hots for him.”

  “Do you know what happened to him?”

  “Now I do,” Petra said triumphantly. “He disappeared in 1929. Took off with one of our best horses, and was never heard of again.”

  “Francis Layton’s partner.” I stared at her in awe.

  “Right.” Petra ran her fingertip over the photograph. “When I was little, I used to read this book and make up stories about him. He was my hero. I can hardly believe that he is my great-grandfather.”

  “How can you be so sure?” I asked.

  She grinned at me. “Of course I’m sure. Clever girl, our Beatrice. She got herself knocked up by Daniel, but it had all been on the hush-hush. She gave him a valuable horse and sold her jewelry to fund his prospecting. He found a fortune, and they planned to marry. He went back to dig up more diamonds, but Francis Layton murdered him. When he didn’t come back at all, it was a lesser scandal to pretend that her child had been fathered by Lord Layton, who by then was dead. Beatrice probably lied and told people that they’d been engaged.”

  “The curse,” I said in a low voice, breathless in my excitement.

  Her face clouded. “I’m sorry. It’s you who’s in danger. I’m not a Layton.”

  “That’s not what I was thinking of.” I met her gaze. “We’ve cracked a part of it. You’re the one we need to make amends to. You’re a descendant of the man Francis Layton murdered, and half the loot belongs to you.”

  She nodded with a hesitant smile. “I need to leave for the photo shoot in a few minutes. Do you want to come? I promise to drive carefully.”

  I tried to smile back but only managed a shaky tilt of my lips. “Yes,” I said. “But you have to promise to drive very, very carefully.”

  Back to contents

  Chapter Twenty

  My stomach lurched every time a car coming the other way hurtled toward us. After a while, I motion sickness began to churn inside me. I wished I’d stayed at Happy Valley, and yet I knew that I couldn’t cocoon myself. I had to push the curse out of my mind and get on with life.

  I tried to distract myself by admiring the scenery. “What are those plants?” I asked Petra when we approached Soweto. In the distance, dry shrubs rose from the sandy earth. Each shrub was covered in huge flowers of all colors—blue, red, pink, orange, and bright green.

  Petra chuckled. “You’ll see when we get closer.”

  By the time we reached the edge of a shantytown that had been constructed from mud and corrugated iron, I realized the bright blobs weren’t flowers at all. They were hundreds of flimsy plastic bags, trapped in the thorns on the big shrubs that grew all around. I spotted a blue bag flying in the wind, and then it snagged on a branch.

  I shook my head. Beauty could take the strangest of forms.

  Petra jumped down from the jeep and rushed up to a knot of people milling about in the hot sunshine. “I’m sorry I’m late,” she called out to them.

  “That’s all right,” one of the two white men in the group shouted back. “Models are always late.”

  Everyone laughed, except me.

  The other dozen or so people were black, mostly young men, but also a couple of girls. Everyone was dressed in jeans and brightly colored windbreakers, baseball caps shielding their eyes from the glare of the sun.

  “I’ve got some new gear.” Petra spoke to the man who’d made the joke. “I’ll give it to you now, in case you want to allocate some of it right away.”

  “Great.” He sauntered up to the car. When he noticed me, he turned back to look at Petra over his shoulder. “You didn’t say you were bringing another model.”

  Petra winked at me. “I thought I’d surprise you.”

  The man scrutinized my face in a manner that felt intrusive, and yet at the same time oddly impersonal.

  “I’m not a model,” I told him, and felt a blush creeping over my skin. “I’m strictly a spectator.”

  He flashed me a smile. “Nobody’s a spectator around here. We’ll find you something to do.”

  I climbed down from the car and pulled my sunhat lower over my head to cover up my not-so-perfect features.

  The man dug into the cardboard box that Petra had loaded on the rear seat of the jeep. “Holy Moses, what did you do?” he said in wide-eyed awe. “Rob a camera store?”

  Petra studied a length fabric one of the girls was holding up for her inspection. “I signed up three more photographers. One of them had never thrown anything away. Some of the stuff is worthless junk.”

  “You get started,” the man instructed her. “I’ll keep your friend company.”

  “Her name is Alexandria,” Petra said as she strode over to the rest of the group and launched into a noisy round of greetings with hugs and high fives.

  “I’m Kenny,” the man said and handed a pen and a notepad to me. “This is what I want you to do. I’m going to call out the make and model and serial number of each of these cameras. You write it down. If you don’t know how to spell a name let me know, and I’ll spell it out for you.”

  My brows drew together, but I accepted the pad and pen. “I thought there’d be more people,” I said as I watched Kenny pick up a camera and turn it around in his hands. “Make-up artists, and klieg lights, and such.”

  Kenny threw me a sharp glance. “Didn’t Petra explain?”

  “Explain what?”

  “This isn’t a commercial photo shoot,” he said absently, peering through the lens of a black Cannon and clicking the shutter. “This is her charity project. She lines up photographers in the US to donate their obsolete equipment, and she poses here for nothing. It’s to help young South African photographers and fashion designers get a start in t
heir career. It makes a huge difference if they can include a shot of Petra when they shop their portfolio around.”

  I glanced over at Petra. She was standing in her underwear, appearing quite unabashed. One of the girls was draping a length of printed cotton around her body. A band of ragged children raced over and jostled around her. Cameras began to click, and ten different people were shouting conflicting instructions at Petra.

  She smiled, she twirled, she arched her back and tossed her hair, looking like a million dollars outside a mud hut.

  “No, she didn’t tell me,” I said to Kenny.

  “Nah,” Kenny winked at me. “She worries about her self-centered blonde airhead image getting spoiled.”

  I turned back to watch Petra.

  She’d charmed all the men, including the curious spectators standing at a distance. I recalled her flirting with Miles. Was she really interested in him? Or did she need to bewitch everyone around her, test her powers of attraction on every male who came into contact with her? Was she like Jolene in the Dolly Parton song, taking someone else’s man just because she could?

  I spent the rest of the photo shoot pondering the question.

  ****

  When we finally set off toward Happy Valley again, heat and dust itched on my skin, my jeans and cotton top damp with perspiration. Next to me, Petra seemed as fresh as morning dew.

  “Why didn’t you tell me it was for charity?” I asked her as the car bounced over potholes on our way out of Soweto.

  Petra kept her eyes on the road, alert for a ragtag bunch of children and dogs darting after a football. “I didn’t want to make it sound as if I was trying to justify myself as a good person, so you’ll resent me less if I end up with Miles.”

  I’d persuaded myself that Miles was more interested in me, and that wooing Petra was nothing for him but a ploy to break the Layton Prophecy. Now, I doubted my sanity in believing him. “Let’s not worry about him,” I said. “Let’s worry about Cleo. She’s lying unconscious in a hospital.”

  Petra nodded, looking suitably chastised. “We’ll try calling Miles when we get home,” she promised. “He didn’t call last night, although he said he would.”

  I stared out of the window, retreating into my thoughts. Petra concentrated on the driving. It occurred to me that Miles had no means of contacting me without going through her. My mobile phone didn’t work in South Africa, and I hadn’t brought a laptop with me on the trip. For my design work, I had a desktop computer with a big screen, and although Steven had offered to lend me his spare laptop, I’d preferred to travel light, assuming that I could find a public computer if I needed to send email or access the internet.

  Now I regretted my decision.

  When we reached the vineyard, a fax had arrived from Crosland and Baxter, confirming that the DNA test had been negative. Petra wasn’t a Layton. Of course, we already knew, but it was good to have an official confirmation.

  I called Aunt Rosemary and she called me back on her free TalkTalk line.

  “I could have told you that,” she said when I explained about the DNA test.

  “How could you have known?” I asked.

  “It’s in the prophecy. When there’s two, it happens twice. It had to be the Layton twins and their respective sons and granddaughters. Otherwise that verse in the rhyme would make little sense.”

  I swore under my breath.

  “Don’t worry,” Aunt Rosemary said. “It’s easy to miss the obvious.”

  “We did that before. We didn’t consider the Layton twins, how they died. Is that a part of the prophecy? And if so, who was the bonnie maiden? We didn’t give it any thought.”

  “Steven did.”

  “And?”

  “He believes the Layton Prophecy picks out a few key events. The curse targets all of Francis Layton’s descendants, but not everyone gets their own verse in the rhyme.” Aunt Rosemary sighed. “Or, the whole thing might be just one big coincidence. There’s no curse. There’s just a family with a nasty ancestor and bad luck, and you happen to be part of that family.”

  I gave her the details of the two shipping receipts, which proved that Francis Layton had sent his belongings back to England in 1929.

  “Steven’s coming down for the weekend,” Aunt Rosemary told me, anticipation bright in her voice. “We can research the Rotterdam Line together.”

  An image rose in my mind of the two of them working side by side at their makeshift desk. When I hung up the telephone, a hollow ache throbbed inside me, and I identified the feeling as homesickness.

  I relayed my conversation with Aunt Rosemary to Petra. We agreed there was nothing more we could do, apart from waiting for Miles to call. Petra tried his cell phone, but it was switched off. She left a message that we had important news.

  We spent the afternoon touring the house, admiring the paintings and the ornately carved pieces of furniture. My background in design and Petra’s career in fashion gave us a shared interest, and we talked with a bright, slightly forced enthusiasm, trying not to think of Cleo battling for her life in her hospital bed.

  By the time we retired to bed, Miles still hadn’t returned Petra’s call.

  ****

  The following day Petra got an email from Miles. I was sitting on a shaded bench in the garden, reading the Happy Valley history when she called out to invite me into her office, where she showed the text on the computer screen to me. I assumed she wanted me to know that there had been no personal message for her.

  “Cleo doing better and out of danger. Will call soon. Miles.”

  “He certainly doesn’t waste words,” Petra said.

  “No.” I bit my lip.

  “Do you want to write back?” Petra asked.

  There were so many feelings for Miles jumbled up inside me that I struggled to know where to start unraveling them. Memories of the nights we’d spent together kept flooding back at unexpected moments. In some way, my emotions were such a strong and confusing tangle that the safest thing seemed to be to avoid facing them altogether.

  I’d wait. Wait until I knew what he planned to do about Petra.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t want to write back to him.”

  Later that day, Aunt Rosemary called again. “There’s nothing on the internet about Rotterdam Line,” she told me. “So, instead, I’ve been making telephone calls to the offices of ship brokers in London. Some of them have records going that far back.”

  “I thought you planned to research it over the weekend when Steven comes.”

  Silence. Then Aunt Rosemary said, “He’s asked me to go to up Oxford instead and meet some of his friends, and like a fool I’ve agreed.”

  I moved the receiver away from my ear and stared at if, as if trying to see the words. Things really were moving fast between them. If there was anything Aunt Rosemary hated even more than she hated leaving her house, it was being paraded in front of strangers.

  “I know,” she said, reading my thoughts. “It’s kind of scary.”

  “You’ll be fine,” I reassured her, raising the phone back to my ear.

  “I’ll survive,” she said glumly. “That’s the best I can hope for. Anyway,” she continued, I got some information from a ship broker on Lombard Street in the City and I’m afraid it’s bad news about Rotterdam line and those shipments. The Neptune hit a storm in the Bay of Biscay and sank on the way to England.”

  “Oh, no.” My voice fell with disappointment.

  “It’s true, I’m afraid.” Aunt Rosemary exhaled a defeated sigh. “I’m waiting to get a copy of the Lloyds insurance records, but it looks like the grates Francis Layton shipped were lost. The man at Lloyds was pretty sure. He was able to trace the file. It had been kept open for a while, since no claim was made against that particular piece of cargo.”

  “I guess by then Francis Layton was dead, and nobody in England knew he’d shipped something over.”

  “According to the Lloyds records his daughter did, but she believed the crat
es were personal chattels and scientific specimens of no commercial value, like it said on the ship’s manifest.” Aunt Rosemary clicked her tongue to make a frustrated sound. “The loot is at the bottom of the ocean, and the game’s over.”

  We talked a bit longer and agreed on a plan of action, based on the facts we’d discovered so far—that there were no riches to share, Petra was a direct descendant of the man Francis Layton had murdered, and that and according to Miles, repentance was a biggest aspect of breaking a curse brought upon a family through past sins.

  After I hung up, I went to look for Petra. I found her in the shop, where she was pouring wine into plastic cups, charming a busload of tourists into spending money. I accepted a sample of Syrah and relayed the bad news about the Neptune to her.

  Petra was stoic. “Diamonds by the fistful, it sounded too good anyway.” She gave a dismissive shrug of her shoulders, sending the pale blue silk dress rippling over her perfect body. A man behind me nearly choked on a sip of wine that went the wrong way. Petra swept her gaze over the laden shelves “Shame,” she said. “I could have done with the money. I only have a few more years left in modeling. I hate to think of what will happen to this place when my income dries up.”

  “I thought top models make millions.”

  She shook her head. “Only a few girls reach that level. I’m strictly B-list.”

  “But you were on the cover of Vogue.”

  Petra lowered the bottle. “One good cover doesn’t make a career. I’m earning a living, but I have to pay agency fees, and the rent on the apartment in New York is astronomical. I’m not managing to save much.”

  My fingers tightened around the cup, denting the flimsy plastic. “I’m sorry if I got your hopes up.”

  “Not to worry.” She turned toward the entrance and greeted the next group of tourists with a professional smile on her lovely face.

  ****

  That night, we put Aunt Rosemary’s plan into action. Petra had a flair for the dramatic, and things got a bit out of hand. Since I was a guest in her home, I played along. She lit a dozen squat candles on metal stands around the courtyard, where a table and chairs clustered under a parasol. The flames sent out an acrid smell that Petra told me was citronella oil, which kept the insects away.