“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.”
7
HELEN 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.”