by Will Adams
‘Please, Uncle Avram. I beg you. Don’t do it. I don’t want to die.’ He looked around, as if in hope of miracle, but there was no chance of that. ‘They knew already,’ he sobbed. ‘I swear they did. I didn’t go to them. They came to me. And they knew everything. I never told them anything they didn’t already know.’
‘Go on.’
‘I made them promise they wouldn’t do anything to you, no gaol or anything like that. I made them sign an agreement. I was only thinking of you.’
‘Of me?’
‘You want to serve God. I know you do. But this has nothing to do with serving God. It’s not for people like you and me to-’
Avram was surprised to find himself pulling the trigger. He’d intended to squeeze Uri dry before he killed him. But his anger was too intense. The four shots tumbled Uri backwards, leaving him lying on his side, obscuring the entry and exit wounds. Avram stepped down into the trunk, pressed the silencer against his temple and fired once more. Then he climbed back out, wiped the gun clean of prints, tossed it inside, closed and locked the lid.
It looked like they’d be needing a new supply route …
The irreverence of the thought made him smile. He felt, indeed, something unsettlingly like euphoria. Until this very moment, he hadn’t known for certain that he’d have the strength of character to see this mission through. Now he did. Yet euphoria was an inappropriate reaction to such a solemn act, so he stamped down hard on it, picked up the shovel and almost in penance began the heavy work of burying his nephew and his makeshift coffin beneath the sand.
TWENTY
I
The room was maybe twelve feet tall and eight-sided, its walls rich with sculptures that stretched and shrank as Luke turned the lamp this way and that, making them seem eerily alive. There was an altar of some kind in the centre, or maybe a plinth, for it looked roughly the shape and size to hold a small sarcophagus. There was no sarcophagus on it at that moment, however, nothing but dust.
He glanced at Rachel to share the moment with her. She was staring raptly upwards. He looked up too. A great hemispheric dome of blue-black loomed high above them, a wondrous night sky inset into it: a silver crescent moon, galaxies of tiny diamonds, constellations of emeralds, rubies and sapphires, and comets with outstretched tails of crushed crystal that pointed them towards the peak and centre, where a dazzling golden sun presided like God over creation.
‘Have you ever seen anything like it?’ murmured Rachel, holding her camera down low to capture as much of it as she could.
‘Never.’
But he tore his eyes from it all the same, for there was too much else to look at, and time was precious. The wall to the right of the door had been sculpted into some kind of mystical tableau. Between a pair of flame-topped pillars, four gowned men studied and discussed some kind of scroll unfurled on a table. Hammers, trowels, squares and compasses and other such tools decorated the walls, while in the far background tiny figures laid out the perimeter of a new city upon a distant hill.
‘It looks Masonic,’ murmured Rachel, taking a photograph.
‘It is Masonic,’ he agreed. Several letters and numbers had been chiselled along the foot of the wall. He crouched, the better to read them. ‘BE 22108 BF,’ he said. ‘Any ideas?’
‘Some kind of signature?’
‘With BE and BF being the initials of the sculptors? Could be. What about the numbers?’
‘The date, maybe?’ suggested Rachel. ‘The twenty-second of January, 1708?’
‘Or the twenty-second of October, 1698? Or even ’88?’
‘Maybe.’
They let it lie, went to the next wall. It was carved in relief, too, borders of cascading flowers framing a life-sized portrait of an elderly man in scholar’s robes. There were two lines inscribed at the foot of this one. The uppermost was simply the man’s name: Elias Ashmole. And directly beneath it: BE 10460 BF. Luke glanced back at the first panel. ‘Same initials,’ he said. ‘Different number.’
They moved together to the third wall. Another portrait, but this time shockingly familiar. Everything was there, from the intellectual high brow to the casually open collar and the exuberant cascades of curled hair. A direct copy from a Kneller portrait the great man had commissioned himself in celebration of the Principia.
‘Sir Isaac Newton,’ murmured Rachel, reading the inscription.
Luke glanced down. Curiously, unlike on the first two walls, the inscription didn’t look quite centred, but was offset a little to the left instead.
Rachel now read out its lower line. ‘BH 01256.’ She gave a sigh. ‘So much for my initials and date theory.’
‘Maybe it’s a cipher of some kind.’
‘Saying what?’
‘I don’t know. It’s in cipher.’
She laughed and gave him a playful slap. ‘I thought maybe you’d know the kind of ciphers these guys used.’
He shook his head. ‘Olivia might. Or my mate Jay. Newtonian ciphers are right up his street.’
‘And he’s in Oxford, is he?’
‘London.’
‘That’s helpful, then.’
They moved to the next wall. Another portrait. ‘John Evelyn,’ read out Rachel. ‘The diarist, right?’
‘Among other things,’ said Luke. Like so many notables of his era, Evelyn had been a polymath: a pioneer in horticulture, medicine and city planning, and one of the driving forces behind the Royal Society. He had a line of cryptic characters beneath his name too. BC 10484. Luke crouched down and ran his finger over them, as though touch might reveal their secrets, like Braille. But all he got was dust. He stood again, looked around. Someone had gone to extraordinary lengths to build this place and make a gallery of its walls. Yet they’d also bricked it up and hidden it down a well shaft so that no one would ever know it was here. Why?
Rachel was already on the next wall. ‘Sir Christopher Wren,’ she said.
‘Makes sense,’ nodded Luke. ‘He wasn’t just mates with Newton and Ashmole, but with Evelyn, too.’
‘So he links them all together.’ She stooped to read out the cipher. ‘KD 11201,’ she said, glancing up in case inspiration had suddenly struck. He shook his head.
They went together to the last two walls, a double-width panel showing a single scene: a great tower at the heart of a walled courtyard. ‘What the hell?’ asked Rachel.
‘The Temple of Solomon,’ said Luke. ‘Taken from one of Newton’s own drawings, I think.’
‘Newton drew Solomon’s Temple?’ frowned Rachel.
‘He was one of the world’s great experts,’ Luke told her. ‘He wrote a famous treatise on it. At least, it was ostensibly about the Sacred Cubit of the Jews, but in truth it was about the Temple. It needed to be rebuilt for the Second Coming, you see, and as the Bible gave its measurements in cubits, you had to know how long a cubit was, or you’d build it wrong. And who better to get it right than Isaac Newton, old Jeova Sanctus Unus himself?’
‘And these other guys? Wren and Evelyn and Ashmole? Were they Temple geeks too?’
‘Wren was,’ said Luke. ‘A couple of days after his daughter died, he got blitzed with Robert Hooke and spent the whole night talking about the Temple. And Evelyn would have known it as well. The Temple had been designed by God, you see, so it was, by definition, perfect. Any city planner worth his salt had to be familiar with it.’ He turned the lamp back on the first wall. ‘And it ties into that, too. Solomon’s Temple is the basis of Masonic lore.’
‘Olivia said Ashmole was a Freemason,’ said Rachel. ‘And you said there were rumours about Newton. What about the others?’
‘I don’t know about Evelyn, but Wren for sure. Freemasonry came out of the construction industry, remember, and London was the construction capital of the world at the time, thanks to the Great Fire. And guess who was responsible for commissioning all the main work?’
‘Don’t tell me: Sir Christopher.’
‘They say he was the number two Mason for a wh
ile,’ said Luke. ‘And the first Grand Lodge met bang next door to St Paul’s Cathedral. There’s even a plaque to it.’
Rachel sighed deeply. ‘So what is this place? A monument to these men?’
‘Not to them. By them.’ He turned the lamp on the central plinth. ‘Maybe in honour of whatever Ashmole left Newton to complete, which was meant to go on that.’ He went across, wiped away dust, found nothing beneath.
‘Here,’ said Rachel. Some lines had been inscribed in a panel of green marble halfway along the plinth’s side. He crouched beside her to read them.
And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus: and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven:
And he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?
And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest: it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.
And he trembling and astonished said, Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?
‘St Paul on the road to Damascus,’ said Rachel. ‘I wonder if there’s another on the other side.’
They went around to check and were rewarded.
Below as above, above as below
As it once was, so it will be
Look to my father, the sun, my mother, the moon
In the belly of the wind was I carried
Nurtured in dry earth
Up from this world I rise
So sayeth I, Thrice Great Hermes
‘The Emerald Tablet,’ murmured Luke.
‘What on earth’s it doing here?’
He shrugged. The Hermetic texts had caused intense excitement when they’d been discovered during the Renaissance. People had believed them written in deepest antiquity, perhaps even at the time of Moses himself. Their prestige had faded, however, once they’d been correctly dated to the early centuries AD. Yet alchemists had continued to revere them, especially this particular text. Newton had been so intrigued by it that he’d even studied Arabic in order to make his own translation.
Rachel raised an eyebrow when Luke told her this. ‘Is this his?’ she asked.
‘No. But I think it’s based on his. Just a lot shorter.’
Rachel sighed and shook her head, then she stood and worked her spine. ‘Pelham and Olivia will be having kittens,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ agreed Luke. ‘It’s time we were getting back.’
II
Walters had just reached the outskirts of Oxford when Croke called to let him know they’d come up dry in Crane Court and were switching their search to the old Ashmolean instead. ‘What do you want us to do?’ he asked.
‘Hold off,’ Croke told him. ‘We’ll be coming down ourselves. We’ll take care of everything.’
‘Including Luke and the others?’ asked Walters. ‘Only they can cause us real grief, remember?’
‘I’m well aware of that, thank you. And I said I’ll take care of it. Anyway, it’s too late for you lot to do anything. My friends already have the place surrounded.’
‘Whatever you say.’ Walters ended the call and drove up Broad Street all the same. Sure enough, there were dark figures in a pair of cars parked across the road from the museum, and strange shadows in nearby alleys.
‘I don’t like this,’ muttered Kieran. ‘Too much bloody law.’
‘The boss knows what he’s doing.’
‘Yeah. Looking after his own interests, not ours.’
‘Our interests are his interests. If we go down, he has to realize we can take him with us.’
‘If you say so.’
‘I do.’ But he didn’t feel as confident as he made it sound. He drove on, guided by his SatNav, until he found the red BMW with the black soft top parked exactly where it was meant to be. Dark and unoccupied. He drove on a little way, found an empty spot with a decent line of sight and reversed into it. Maybe Luke and the others were hiding out in the museum. Maybe they weren’t. Either way, if they ever made it back to their car, Walters intended to make them regret it.
III
Luke held the rope for Rachel, then leaned out into the well shaft to help her should she need it. But she made it back up easily enough, was greeted at the top by helping hands. He waited until she was clear then followed. Olivia shook her head sorrowfully at the state of them both, as if they’d let themselves and her museum down. ‘I’ve a change of clothes for you, my dear,’ she told Rachel. ‘If you don’t mind looking a bit dowdy. But Luke is beyond my help.’
They repaired to her office, a cluttered small space with three desks, a sink and an area for making tea and coffee. Rachel went off with a change of clothes, but Luke had to make do with the sink, staining the water brown. Olivia loaded the photographs onto a museum laptop, then she and Pelham began hurrying through them, firing questions as they went. They reached the first shot of the inner chamber and Olivia drew in a sharp breath. ‘Good lord!’ she murmured. ‘The Rosicrucians.’
‘I thought the Rosicrucians were a myth,’ said Rachel, arriving back in the room in her borrowed blouse and tweeds.
‘Not a myth exactly,’ said Olivia. ‘A hoax, maybe. Though it’s hard to be sure even of that.’
‘How do you mean?’
Olivia nodded. ‘This was 1610, 1615, something like that. Copies of a mysterious letter called the Fama Fraternitatis began appearing in European cities. A Rosicrucian manifesto advocating a new world order run by natural philosophers. One passage of the letter described a multi-sided chamber discovered behind a false wall. It was topped by a dome, lit by an inner sun, and filled with treasure from around the world. It had a plinth too, and on it lay the body of Christian Rosencreutz.’
Rachel frowned. ‘Are you saying we’ve found his tomb?’
Olivia shook her head. ‘No, no, no. That was in Europe somewhere, and many decades before this. My only point is that Ashmole, Newton, Evelyn and Wren would absolutely have known about it. So this chamber isn’t a coincidence. It’s a reference. An homage.’ She tapped her keyboard, brought up a word file, paged down. ‘This is a talk I gave on the elder Tradescant,’ she told them. ‘He started collecting his specimens and curiosities right around the time the Fama Fraternitatis was published. Look at this bit.’
‘A man admitted into the mysteries of heaven and earth through divine revelations and unwearied toil. In his journey through Arabia and Africa he collected a treasure surpassing that of Kings and Emperors, but finding it not suitable for his times, he kept it guarded for posterity to uncover, and appointed loyal and faithful heirs. He constructed a microcosm corresponding to the macrocosm and drew up a compendium of things past, present and future.’
‘That’s about Tradescant?’ asked Luke.
‘No. Rosencreutz. It’s from the manifesto. But that’s exactly my point, because it could easily be about either Tradescant or even Ashmole. It was certainly how Ashmole saw himself. He used to tell this story about his baptism, how his godfather had had some kind of epiphany at the font, and cried out that his name should be Elias after the prophet Elijah. They were all expecting a new Elijah at that time. He was prophesied to bring strange things to light and begin a golden age of grace; which was what the Ashmolean was explicitly designed for.’
‘And so Ashmole built himself a vault in order to be buried here with all his treasures,’ suggested Rachel.
Luke shook his head. ‘That plinth wasn’t big enough, not for a grown man.’
Pelham was still peering at Olivia’s text. ‘Such an ambiguous word, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Treasure, I mean. Listen to this: “During his journey through Arabia and Africa, he collected a treasure surpassing that of Kings and Emperors.” You all seem to be assuming that it was some great hoard of different things. But why shouldn’t it refer to a single treasure? The proverbial pearl worth all the tribe.’
‘A treasure that surpassed that of Kings and Emperors,’ murmured Rachel. ‘What could it be?’
‘John Tradescant the Elder went on a
famous voyage to the Mediterranean,’ murmured Olivia. ‘When word got out he was paying good money for curiosities, traders flocked from all across North Africa and Arabia to flog him stuff. He ended up with so much that he and his son lost track of it all. That’s how Ashmole got involved. He catalogued their collection.’
‘What if he spotted something while he was at it?’ murmured Luke. ‘What if that’s why he set his heart on the collection?’
Rachel shook her head. ‘Why take all of it? Why not just that piece?’
‘Greed,’ said Luke. ‘Or maybe he was scared of tipping the son off.’
Olivia nodded. ‘Ashmole only got to inherit the collection after Tradescant the younger and his wife both died. John went first. Guess what Ashmole did? He bought the house next door to the widow, then watched to make sure she didn’t sell anything on the sly. He made her life hell, by all accounts, and then one day she was found drowned in her garden pond.’
Rachel looked shocked. ‘He murdered her?’
‘More likely hounded her to suicide. But the outcome was the same. And when he went to take possession of the collection, he flew into a rage and cursed her for hiding pieces from him. Then he took a lease on her house and searched it from top to bottom.’
‘Looking for the treasure?’
‘Makes sense, doesn’t it? But he lost interest after a month or so, and sublet the house to someone else.’
‘Implying that he’d found it,’ said Luke. ‘But he lacked the skill to complete it, so he turned to his friend Wren who brought in Evelyn and Newton to complete their little cabal.’
‘Good lord,’ said Olivia. ‘Yes. Of course. Their cabal!’
‘I’m sorry?’ said Luke.
‘The word comes from Kabbalah, but it was made famous in England because of five Ministers of Charles II. Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley and Lauderdale. Put their initials together and you’ve got yourself a cabal. Now look at our four lovelies: Ashmole, Newton, Evelyn and Wren.’