The Adept Book 3 The Templar Treasure (9 page)

“Here’s the memorial marker,” Adam said, checking in his stride and pointing to the stone with its chiselled inscription. “The actual burial would have been in the crypt below here.” He indicated a steel trapdoor set into the paving just before it, closed with a heavy padlock.

Peregrine glanced at the trapdoor, then turned his gaze to the stone plaque, reading it aloud as an exercise to begin focusing his attention:

“Within the Vault beneath are interred the remains of John Graham of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee, who fell at the Battle of Killiecrankie 27
th
July, 1689, age 46. This memorial is placed here by John, 7
th
Duke of Atholl K.T. 1889.” Peregrine glanced at Adam. “Was he really forty-six? I always thought he was younger than that.”

“Actually, the most recent scholarship suggests that he was born in the summer of 1648,” Adam replied. “That would have made him just forty-one.”

Nodding, Peregrine swept his gaze around the chapel, returning finally to the trapdoor at his feet.

“This is about as close as you’re going to get, I think,” Adam said. “Go ahead and get yourself up, and we’ll see what you can See. Noel, why don’t you fend off interruptions, at least until he gets started?”

As McLeod retreated wordlessly up the aisle, Peregrine handed his sketchbox to Adam and opened it to take out a drawing pad and the book containing the Kneller portrait of Dundee. There was a low, rounded stone, like part of the top of a tombstone set against the wall under the memorial plaque, and Peregrine sat on it gingerly, facing the trapdoor that led down into the crypt, as Adam set the sketchbox on end beside him and crouched down alongside. After opening the art book to the appropriate page, Peregrine balanced it across his knees and turned to a fresh sheet in his drawing pad, situating that on the opposite page as he groped in an inner pocket of his leather jacket for a favorite pencil.

“Ready when you are,” he said, glancing over at Adam.

“All right, we’ll do this a little differently from what we usually do,” Adam said quietly. “You’re going to use the portrait as a focus, to help you zero in on Dundee’s connection with this place. Fix your gaze on the portrait and tell me what you see as you gradually let your focus move
through
the image.”

Peregrine drew a deep breath, shifting into the floating twilight of light trance.

“I see a man standing in the midst of a dark forest,” he murmured softly after a few seconds. “His name is John Grahame of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee. He’s arrayed like a gentleman soldier, in armor and lace, and his face is bright against the shadows.”

As he spoke, he felt Adam’s light touch on his brow. He took another sighing breath and felt normal waking perceptions recede, leaving him alone with the image of Claverhouse, Dark John of the Battles . . .

“Dark is the wood through which you must travel,” came Adam’s quiet voice, softly singsong in his ears. “Bright is the face of the man you seek there. Enter the wood where he stands waiting. His face shines before you like a beacon, drawing you to him amid the shades of his own lifetime . . .”

A landscape of shadows took hazy shape before Peregrine’s entranced vision. Anchored by Adam’s voice and the sense of his presence, the young artist let his perception move tentatively forward among the shadows. As he did so, the shapes before him sharpened and clarified. He was still surrounded by the stones of St. Bride’s Kirk, but the scene was of another age.

The burial vault gaped open. Beyond it, a small group of armored men holding torches stood clustered around a rough wooden coffin resting on two wooden hurdles. Several tartan plaids had been spread in the coffin to receive the body, spilling over its edges, and Peregrine felt his gaze drawn to the figure laid out within their woolen folds.

The pale, still face was very like the one in the Kneller portrait, but it retained yet the suggestion of the dashing younger Dundee of the Melville depiction. The lace at his throat harked back to both paintings, and the dark hair had been carefully arrayed in curling ringlets on his shoulders and chest. He was wearing in death the same buff cavalry jacket and thigh-high leather boots described in eyewitness accounts of the battle at Killiecrankie. In the dancing torchlight, Peregrine could see clearly the dark, rust-red stain and ragged hole marring the jacket on the dead man’s lower left side to show where he had taken his death wound, two hand-breadths within the area the breastplate would have covered.

Without consciously willing it, Peregrine’s hand began sketching what his deep sight reported. The faces of the mourners meant little to him, but his reading of the accounts of the burial suggested identities for several of those present. One of them, a well-favored man in cavalry buff like Dundee himself, Peregrine judged to be the brave and loyal Earl of Dunfermline, James Seton, who had been one of Dundee’s staunchest supporters and closest friends. Another he supposed to be Lord Murray’s factor, Patrick Steuart of Ballechin, in whose house the body had lain before bringing it here.

The one whose identity was little in question, both by his resemblance to the dead man and by the depth of his grief, was David Grahame, the brother of Dundee. Grahame was openly weeping, his lean face wet with unregarded tears. But what drew Peregrine like a magnet was something clenched tightly in Grahame’s right hand—something small and bright that winked crimson as he brought the closed fist to his lips and pressed a kiss to what lay enclosed within.

Pencil poised to draw what he was seeing, Peregrine moved closer in spirit to see what the object might be. With a small thrill of excitement, he realized it was a red enamelled cross, perhaps three inches in length and breadth, fixed to a sturdy gold chain.

Even as another part of his mind registered this discovery, his hand moving to sketch it, his trance-self watched raptly to see what would happen next. As the mourners began to draw the plaids over the body, preparatory to closing the coffin and transferring it to the vault, the Earl of Dunfermline abruptly signaled a delay. His look of grief was almost as poignant as that of the dead man’s brother. Taking a small, sharp blade from a sheath at his wrist, Dunfermline bent down and reverently cut away a long, curling lock of the dead man’s hair. He wrapped it in a silken handkerchief as he nodded to the others to proceed, and slipped it inside the breast of his buff jacket as he watched them lower the coffin into the crypt.

As the coffin disappeared from sight, Peregrine’s view of the scene blurred and dissolved into obscurity. His hand kept sketching automatically for several minutes, finishing what he had started, but as it finally became motionless, pencil merely poised over the paper, he found himself drifting in temporary limbo. It seemed like too much effort to do anything about it.

After a few more seconds, he heard Adam’s voice softly calling to him as from a great distance. Obedient to the summons, he took flight out of the depths of vision, winging upward in slow spirals toward the threshold of awakening. As he surfaced, he felt Adam’s strong fingers grip his wrist briefly in a touch that signalled his release from trance-state. With a sigh like a sleeper awakening, he gave himself a slight shake and blinked.

Adam was still crouched beside him, and McLeod was standing over him, bent with his hands braced on his knees, watching him expectantly. The concern left their faces when they saw he was once more aware of his present surroundings, and McLeod likewise dropped to a crouch beside Adam. Feeling more than a little drained, Peregrine summoned a wan grin and lowered his gaze to the sketchbook in his lap. He was mildly surprised to see that he had managed to fill three whole pages with images.

“Aye, you’ve been a very busy lad for the past twenty minutes,” McLeod observed with a faint smile.

Peregrine’s fingers were trembling slightly, as they usually did when his visions demanded that he draw at speed, and he pocketed his pencil and shook his hands lightly to relax them as he allowed Adam to turn back to the first page. The first sketch showed an overall scene of the funeral gathering, with quick cameo portraits of several of the mourners around the edges and a study of Dundee himself, lying in his coffin. The next showed David Grahame with the cross in his hand, and a life-sized detail of the cross itself—a cross
formée,
slightly flared at the ends, a form of insignia worn by the Templars at the time of the Crusades rather than a Maltese cross or the patriarchal cross worn by modem-day Templars.

“Well, there’s your cross,” Peregrine said softly. “It almost has to be the one he’s supposed to have been wearing at the battle. I guess this tends to confirm his affiliation with the Templar Order.”

“Indeed,” Adam agreed. As he turned to the last page, his own gaze was arrested by the attendant drawing of the Earl of Dunfermline taking a lock of Dundee’s hair. That incident seemed to him to have a significance equal to that of finding a Templar cross in the possession of the Grahames of Claverhouse. The feeling was strong enough to convince him that the matter might be worth further investigation. In the meantime, the shadows were lengthening. And Peregrine was looking decidedly in need of sustenance.

“I think we’ve garnered all the information we’re likely to get here,” Adam told his two companions. “Let’s pack up and go see if we can find some place that serves high tea. We’ll review the content of the drawings in greater detail once we get back home to Strathmourne.”

Chapter Eight

ADAM AND HIS
companions stopped off for tea in Blair Atholl village before embarking on the drive home. Peregrine was silent for most of the way back. Now that the elation of the moment had worn off, he realized that they were still no closer to finding the answers they were seeking regarding the stolen Seal of Solomon. They had confirmation of the existence of Dundee’s Templar cross, but that was of little practical value unless they could lay hands on the artifact itself. The cutting of a lock of hair suggested another possible avenue of inquiry-it was apt to have been preserved as a precious relic—but hair was far more perishable than metal. Whether cross or hair might have survived for more than three hundred years was by no means certain.

Yet only with some sort of physical focus such as the cross or lock of hair could they hope to make contact with the spiritual essence that once had been John Grahame of Claverhouse, and obtain directly from him whatever knowledge he once had held concerning the Seal. Peregrine wondered briefly about the possibility of centering such an inquiry on the tomb where Dundee’s body had been laid to rest, but almost as soon as the notion occurred to him, he dismissed it as being both technically and morally dubious. For one thing, the tomb was known to have been disturbed by grave-robbers at least once, and perhaps twice. One tradition even claimed that Dundee’s bones had been moved to a church at Old Deer, up in Aberdeenshire, in the 1850s. The very existence of such a tradition called into question the identity of any bones that still rested there.

And even assuming that the spirit of Dundee was willing to participate in a dialogue on those terms, to be called back via a body now no more than bones, Peregrine’s own soul shrank from the thought of even attempting such a thing. He had not forgotten how, less than a year ago, a rogue lodge of black magicians had conjured the spirit of the wizard Michael Scot back to Melrose Abbey, leaving it trapped there in the ghastly prison of its own mummified corpse until Adam had contrived to release it. Even though, in this instance, Dundee would be under no such horrible compulsion, Peregrine still found the associations too uncomfortable for his liking.

“Adam, what happens if we can’t locate any artifact associated with Dundee?” he asked, as they came off the M90 and began winding along the surface roads toward Strathmourne. “And can we afford to wait as long as it’s likely to take, even if such an artifact still exists?”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” Adam replied. “We won’t give up on Lindsay yet, but there’s a place with a strong connection. I mentioned Claypotts Castle, over in Dundee town. It’s essentially as it was when he lived there—at least the fabric of the building is essentially intact. None of the furnishings are the same, of course.”

“So we’d go there and—what?” Peregrine said. “Try to focus him in through Noel as a medium? Is that possible?”

“Oh, it’s possible,” McLeod replied. “Not easy and not pleasant, but with sufficient intent, it could probably be done. I
hope
Adam has that at the bottom of his list, though.”

“He does,” Adam said. “But I wanted to mention it now, so you both can be getting used to the idea, in case it becomes necessary. We’ll give Lindsay a couple of days before we start to panic—and meanwhile, see what else turns up on our M. Gerard by conventional police methods.”

It was getting dark by the time they turned in at the gates to Strathmourne. Having invited Peregrine and McLeod to join him for dinner, Adam drove on past the gate lodge without stopping and carried on up the beech-lined drive. As they came around the last bend, he was just reaching for the dashboard remote to activate the outside house lights when he realized they were already on, illuminating another vehicle pulled up before the front steps of the manor house. Peregrine’s eyes widened as he took in the exotic lines of a sleek Italian sports car, all swooping wings and glittering chrome and rich cream coachwork.

“Good Lord, that’s a
serious
piece of auto design!” Peregrine breathed. “Who do you know that goes in for custom-made race cars? A descendant of the Dukes of Lombardy?”

Adam chuckled. “Would you be very much surprised if I told you it belongs to an antique dealer of my acquaintance?”

“I’d be flabbergasted,” Peregrine said frankly, as they pulled in behind the car. He paused, blinking as the mental connection fell into place. “Not your friend Lindsay?”

“None other,” Adam said, switching off the ignition. “And if she’s taken the trouble to come here in person,” he continued, “that can only mean she’s found information that she was unwilling to entrust to the telephone. Bring that sketchbook, Peregrine, and we’ll go find out what she’s got to say.”

Humphrey had installed Adam’s visitor in the library with a drink. Taking the car as evidence for what Lindsay might be like in person, Peregrine decided that almost anything was possible. Even so, his first glimpse of her was as eye-opening as his first glimpse of her mode of transport. So struck was he by her appearance that he only belatedly realized that they were being introduced. Seizing on her last name as Adam pronounced it, he stammered, “I’m enchanted to make your acquaintance, Ms. Oriani.”

Lindsay Oriani, he reckoned, was perhaps an inch short of six feet tall, and slim as a thoroughbred racing filly, an impression that was accentuated by the elegant cream trouser suit she was wearing. As if that were not enough, her shoulder-length hair was a vibrant titian red, in dazzling contrast to the deep, cool blue of her eyes. Returning his gaze with a wry glint of amusement, she replied, “I’m pleased to meet you too, Mr. Lovat,” and offered him an elegant, long-fingered hand.

His first impulse was to raise it to his lips, but before he could do so, she turned the gesture deftly into a handshake. The clasp of her hand, despite its slenderness, was firm and sure as a man’s. Though her femininity was manifested to stunning advantage by her manner of dress, there was an ambiguous undercurrent of something else in her demeanor that he was slightly at a loss to interpret. But before he could refine his impressions, Adam stepped in with the suggestion that they should all be seated.

Together they moved toward the fireside, where Humphrey had kindled a fire. Humphrey remained on hand to serve up drinks to the new arrivals before retiring to the kitchen to supervise dinner arrangements. Two fingers of The Macallan in a cut-crystal tumbler made a start at restoring Peregrine’s composure. Lindsay allowed Adam to freshen her Campari and soda. By the time Adam turned the conversation to business, Peregrine had made the necessary adjustments and was ready to listen to what the fabulous Lindsay might have to say.

“As you’ve no doubt guessed, I have information for you,” she informed Adam, her attention focused on him alone. “I’ve managed to locate two artifacts associated with the person of John Grahame of Claverhouse. I cannot vouch personally for the authenticity of either piece, but I offer the information for what it may be worth.

“The first item is a ring containing what purports to be a lock of his hair, owned by a Miss Fiona Morrison, who lives in Inverness. The other piece is a gold cross overlaid with red enamel, which closely matches the description of the one you were inquiring about. This is in the keeping of a cadet branch of the Graham family down in Kent, specifically, a retired brigadier general named Sir John Graham.”

Adam’s face was very keen in the reflected light from the fire on the hearth. Peregrine’s jaw had dropped at the mention of the ring, and he continued to gape as Lindsay described the cross.

“Excellent,” Adam murmured, flicking Peregrine an amused glance. “Have you approached either of these people?”

“Yes. I’ve spoken to both of them over the telephone,” Lindsay said. “Since Miss Morrison lives in Scotland, I contacted her first. Having acquainted her with my own credentials, I told her that I was acting on your behalf to locate certain hitherto unpublicized Dundee relics which you are hoping to examine, preparatory to completing a learned article on Dundee for the Royal Society of Antiquaries. The Society would welcome such an article, I feel sure,” she added with a droll smile, “thus preserving your reputation as a gentleman of your word. Miss Morrison has agreed to let you see the ring, upon our joint assurances that no liberties will be taken.”

This quaint indirect rendering of what were evidently Miss Morrison’s own words drew a snort from McLeod, but he subsided again without further comment.

“And what about this Sir John Graham?” Adam asked Lindsay.

The elegant woman sitting opposite him smiled somewhat grimly.

“Sir John Graham is another matter entirely,” she said. “I was of two minds whether or not to contact him without first conferring with you.”

Adam raised an eyebrow. “Why so circumspect? You should know by now that I have absolute trust in your discretion.”

“You have yet to hear the whole story,” Lindsay said mildly, with a sultry flash of her sapphire eyes. “The name rang a bell, so I made some very discreet inquiries. It seems that Sir John is far more than a much-decorated military man retired to the country. He’s ex-intelligence, for one. Also, my initial contacts were reluctant to be very specific, but gave me to understand that he has worked in a number of esoteric disciplines.”

“Indeed?” Adam’s brow darkened as he considered this report. “Do you mean to imply that he sides with the Opposition?”

“Not at all,” she replied. “Further inquiry revealed that he generally prefers to work in an altogether different tradition from ours, but my sources assure me that his allegiance is pledged unreservedly to the Light. His overall abilities are said to be formidable, but his integrity is above reproach. However, he is not a man to be trifled with.”

“And what’s at stake here is no trifling matter, either,” Adam said. “I hope you were nothing less than candid in speaking with him.”

This observation earned him another sea-change flash from Lindsay’s deep blue eyes.

“I told him what I know of the matter—that you are interested in examining this relic of his for reasons that may prove of some urgency outside the conventional bounds of the law. What more he may have inferred for himself I can’t say. It may be that he has heard of you as well, at least in a professional capacity. He declined to commit himself to a meeting without first speaking to you—and who can blame him, under the circumstances?—but I gathered that he is favorably disposed, provided this conversation is to his liking. He indicated that he would be at home to take a call from you this evening, but he will be away for the weekend.”

Adam glanced up at the carriage clock on the mantel, smiling grimly. “Whatever we choose to confide in one another, I’d probably better not keep the gentleman waiting for my call, then, especially since it’s I who want a favor from
him.
Have you got his telephone number with you?”

“Of course.” She was already slipping a well-manicured hand into the pocket of her jacket to produce a business card. As she passed the card to Adam, Peregrine saw that there were two telephone numbers neatly pencilled on the back.

“The first one is Sir John’s,” she said. “The other is Miss Morrison’s.”

Adam glanced at the numbers and nodded as he rose.

“No time like the present. If the rest of you will excuse me a moment, I believe I’ll go ring up both parties. Peregrine, why don’t you show Lindsay the sketches you did this afternoon? Let her have a good look before you explain. I’ve
told
you he’s good, Lindsay,” he added, pointing at her for emphasis as he went out of the library.

While Adam retreated to another telephone to make his call, Peregrine opened his sketchbook to the first of today’ s pages without a word and handed the pad to the exquisite Lindsay. As she settled back to look at it, serene and tranquil as she turned the pages, Peregrine sat back to look at her. Under cover of polishing his glasses, he narrowed his gaze and allowed his deeper perceptions free rein. Not at all to his surprise, the ensuing flicker of overlaying images suggested that he was dealing with someone with multiple past lives. What did surprise him was that the dominant visual impressions he was receiving from Lindsay Oriani were masculine, rather than feminine.

The force of the gender bias was unexpected. Where Adam Sinclair’s preeminent historical identities included an Egyptian priest-king and a Templar knight, both quite in harmony with his present incarnation, Lindsay Oriani’s most potent anterior persona seemed to be that of a lean, powerful man in the uniform of a Hussar officer. The accompanying aura of masculinity was strong enough to color the personality and even some of the mannerisms of the present female incarnation. All at once Peregrine began to wonder whether that explained why Lindsay had deflected his impulse to kiss her hand.

It did make sense. In the early days of their acquaintance, he and Adam once had discussed the matter of gender identity with respect to reincarnation. On that occasion, Adam had asserted that it was not uncommon for the gender of a single historical individual to vary between one lifetime and the next. Since then, Peregrine had seen that assertion borne out in the case of the wizard Michael Scot, whose present-day incarnation was a young girl by the name of Gillian Talbot. It seemed likely that Lindsay Oriani was another example of the principle at work, except that the gender resonances of her past lives seemed to be unusually strong.