The Wyndham Legacy (Legacy 1)

“Probably not,” Trevor said, then smiled, robbing his words of offense.

Mr. Leonardo Burgess was a bull of a man, completely bald, but sported a huge black mustache that he liberally waxed. He grinned as he spoke, showing crossed front teeth.

“I’m glad you’ve arrived, Mr. Wyndham. And you, my lord. I knew your uncle, but I’ve yet to meet your lovely wife. My pleasure, your ladyship. Very nice, very nice. Now, Mr. Wyndham, do allow me to tell you how sorry I was to hear of your father’s death from dear Mrs. Wyndham.”

Trevor’s father had died five years before, but he nodded gravely to Mr. Burgess. “Thank you, sir. Now, I understand that you have come across something that will help us locate the Wyndham treasure?”

Mr. Burgess drew nearer and lowered his voice to a near whisper. “Oh aye, lad, I’m not stupid. I know you believe this is all twaddle, all fevered imaginings on your father’s part and now on your mother’s part. The old earl never did anything but laugh contemptuously about it. But do I look like a man who would suffer twaddle? There’s still a cast of uncertainty in your eyes. You believe me a meandering old fool. Ah, no matter. Just wait until you see this.” He turned on his heel and sped as fast as his impressive bulk would allow through a curtained-off entrance to a back room. He returned shortly, cradling in his arms a very large book that looked to be ancient. The cover was an illumination of a thick cross with a beautiful rope of pearls looped around it. The cross was red, the pearls a deep gray. The red ink was faded and peeling, but still vibrant. It was old, so very old.

“Come here, away from the light. The pages are so fragile I fear they’ll split and crumble. Now, look here, all of you.”

Mr. Burgess gently laid the book on top of a counter. The Duchess breathed in the stale dust raised by the turning of each thick page. The pages of the huge tome were done in beautifully executed script, some in a deep black, others in royal blue, yet others in that same brilliant red as the red cross on the outside of the tome. There were more pictures—of animals grazing in fields with piles of strange rock formations in the background, of priests blessing kneeling men and women in the square of a town, of the inside of a small Norman chapel that surely looked familiar. Finally, there were sketches of a magnificent abbey, drawn in stark black against a background of fierce heavy black clouds. Oddly, the next pages were of its lush grounds.

“I recognize this abbey,” Marcus said, lightly tracing a fingertip over the outline of the building.

“Aye, I do myself, my lord. It is the Saint Swale Abbey, once one of the richest monasteries in all of northern England.”

“Its ruins lie very near Chase Park,” Marcus added.

“So that is Saint Swale,” the Duchess said. “As children, Fanny, Antonia, and I would track each other like the wild Indians in America through the ruins.”

“Aye, my lady. Listen now, Cromwell, that miserable jackal, put it toward the top of his list.”

“Cromwell?” Trevor said. “I thought Cromwell was the fellow who led the anti-Royalist Roundheads and beheaded King Charles I back in the middle of the seventeenth century.”

“Aye, Oliver Cromwell was the great-grandson of this Cromwell’s nephew. Betrayal, greed, and power mongering flow in all their veins, curse the buggers, begging your pardon, my lady. The king—Henry the Eighth named Cromwell his vice-regent—made him more powerful than any man should ever be.”

“So it was in Henry the Eighth’s time. What is this about a list?” Trevor asked.

“The king was bankrupt. The easiest way to get all the wealth he wanted was to take the monasteries—they owed allegiance to the pope, after all—and not to Henry who was the head of the Church of England. Cromwell made up a list, beginning with the wealthiest of the monasteries. It was called the time of the dissolution, beginning way back in 1535 and lasting for three years.”

“I begin to see where the legend of the treasure derives,” Marcus said, stroking his fingertips over his jaw. “Many of the monasteries had great wealth, not only in land and buildings and holdings, but in jewels and gold collected over the centuries. And their religious artifacts were priceless even then—gold crosses encrusted with precious gems and the like. They knew Cromwell’s men were coming and thus they hid as much treasure as they could.”

“Exactly, my lord, exactly.” Mr. Burgess beamed with approval on Marcus, until Marcus added, “I would have thought, however, that instead of burying all the loot, the monks would have taken it with them when they fled.”

“They were holy men,” Mr. Burgess said in a voice to rival a bishop’s. “They didn’t want their monastery’s wealth to fall into the king’s rapacious hands.”

“As I recall,” Marcus continued, “most of the monks were set adrift in the world after Henry sold off their monasteries to anyone with the money to meet his price. Many starved, for they had no notion of how to survive.”

“Aye, ’tis true, the poor buggers, beggin’ your pardon, my lady.”

Bugger was a versatile word, she thought. If the monks were buggers, then surely it couldn’t be so very bad, could it? Did monks bugger themselves as well as being buggers?

Trevor said, “So, you have a clue to tell where some monk buried his abbey’s wealth?”

“Not exactly, Mr. Wyndham. What I have is the proof that there was a treasure buried.”

Mr. Burgess t

urned another page. There was only script on this one. It was in Latin. He ran a blunt finger beneath the words as he said slowly, “The monk says that it was Beltane—the celebration of Beltane or the first of May is an ancient rite, still practiced in Scotland and here in northern England,” he added to Trevor, then continued. “Aye, the monk writes that it was Beltane and the night was dark as a dead man’s eyes, and the winds blew strong across the dales and whistled through the crags, threatening to uproot the trees in the maple forests. The fires burned too brightly and many became uncontrolled, the winds whipping the fires and the people into a frenzy. Many were burned and killed but they stayed, swaying with the ancient rhythms of the past and crying out in blind ecstasy, and performing the heathen rites of fertility that heralded the growth and rich heat of summer. He says that he and six of his brothers dragged the chest from the abbey, staying in the shadows as best they could for they’d heard that Cromwell had sent men there to prevent just what they intended to do. Look here. It also seems they were carrying a body with them, a large bloated body, he writes. This is very odd. What body?” He pointed back to the following text. “He writes they promised their Holy Father that the king would not have their abbey’s wealth for his immoral uses.”

The page ended. Mr. Burgess slowly lifted the page and laid it carefully down. The next page was a drawing of the raging Beltane fires, their flames shooting heavenward with wild-faced people staring upward at the shooting flames. And then it changed. The people were still pointing, or perhaps reaching for something, but now, strangely, they seemed to be inside a room, not outside with the Beltane fires. And they were looking upward.

Mr. Burgess gently lifted and turned that page. There was nothing more, only the obvious proof that someone had torn out one or more of the precious pages. Gently, as if he were touching the most precious of gems, Leonardo Burgess lightly traced his blunt fingertips along the jagged rips. “Someone tore out the next pages, all of them.”

“I’ll be damned,” Marcus said.

“Indeed,” Trevor agreed.