The South Lawn Plot (16 page)

T
WO MEN WERE STANDING
in a room that was approximately twelve paces by that same number. Before them was a low table adorned with lighted candles, a crucifix, chalice and several other vessels.

“Is there a priest hereabouts?” Falsham asked his companion.

“Oh there is and very close by, John,” Cole replied. “Help me kneel. I have taken the liberty of placing a pair of cushions on the floor. We deserve a little comfort.”

Falsham helped his friend to his knees before the table. He looked about for a figure to emerge from the shadows, perhaps even the walls. But there was no sign or sound. There was no one else in the dungeon-like room.

Possessed of keen senses in the matter of detection, Falsham closed his eyes for a moment and sniffed. He could detect no recent, unfamiliar human odor. Yes, he thought, they were indeed alone.

“So we just pray,” he said to Cole, whose head was now bowed, hands joined in supplication.

“
In nomine Patris
,” Cole said.

Falsham chimed in. “
Et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti
”

Before he could say amen, Cole raised his right hand. There was no mistaking the older man's intention. He was instructing Falsham to be silent.

Cole continued to speak. “
Introibo ad altare dei
.”

Falsham felt surprise and then astonishment take hold. Cole was speaking the opening words of Mass.

“My friend, what is this? You cannot, it is blasphemy,” he said, almost in a whisper, as if God would be deceived by a plea uttered under breath.

But Cole simply raised his hand.

“Be at ease, John, trust me. I will explain when I am finished. Please content yourself for now with delivering the responses.”

Falsham was silent, but Cole, his red-rimmed eyes now fixed sternly on the younger man, succeeded in eliciting the appropriate line.

“
Ad deum qui laetificat
,” Falsham said hesitatingly. “
Juventutem meam
.”

“Very good,” said Cole. “Even after all your soldiering you still remember the discipline that truly matters the most.”

Before Falsham could reply, Cole was proceeding with more incantations.

”
Causam meam de gente non sancta. Ab homine inique et doloso erue me
. And now join with me in confessing your sins. You might want to include doubt, and being of little faith.”

Falsham, feeling cowed, did not argue. Instead, he dutifully complied and responded to the priestly prayers when required and after some minutes took bread and wine over which the hands of Richard Cole had passed.

After the benediction, Falsham stood and helped Cole to his feet.

“I know, I know, John, a full explanation is warranted. But let us return to the room above. I am in need of a stout chair. Help me up the stairs, and I will answer all, or certainly most, of your questions.”

Slowly, the two men ascended the stairs and reentered the upper room. It took Falsham's eyes some moments to readjust to the light. By the time his sight was restored, Cole had settled into his firm chair.

Cole motioned to Falsham to sit in another chair opposite his. Saying nothing, and still feeling confused over the events below, Falsham sat and awaited his enlightenment. Cole, his hands joined again, bowed his head momentarily, then faced his friend.

“I have not been entirely honest with you, John. I was once married to a woman who was truly a gift from God. She took sick and the Lord took her back from me. But this you know. You believe that the woman with child now with me in this house is my new wife. But that is not so. She is a cousin of one of the November plotters, Catesby. The father of the child has long vanished, the dog. I have been her protector even to the point of feigning a marriage, even to the point of sharing a bed.

“This, I admit, has been to my advantage, our advantage. But I could never love another woman, John. That I knew from the first moment of my solitude.”

Falsham shifted in his chair. He had a feeling as to what was about to be said, but yet found it hard to believe.

“Are you going to tell me that you took Holy Orders?”

“That is precisely what I did,” said Cole. “For some considerable time, notwithstanding frequent interruption, I studied under the tutelage of a French bishop, Jules Thibaud. He has been traveling through England in secret since
the last days of Elizabeth's reign. He has ordained many, perhaps three dozen men, all in secret, of course, and in all cases the ordained must preserve their hidden identities. You yourself have seen the consequences of one of us being identified.”

“All too vividly,” said Falsham.

Cole lapsed into silence for a moment. Somewhere in the distance a bell was struck and he said “Terce,” a reference to the canonical prayers that fell at the ninth hour. He began to pray again, his words uttered in barely more than a whisper.

Falsham studied the room in closer detail. It was indeed more lavishly furnished than any other in the house. Then again, he thought, Ayvebury was more than a little Spartan in most of its corners. By contrast to the woodpaneled rooms and hallways adorned with grim portraits, the walls in this room were lined on three of the four sides with shelves overflowing with books and codices. The fourth side had three stained-glass windows, each about the height of a man by an arm's length.

It occurred to Falsham that the room might once have served as a chapel or spiritual study, that function having been now passed to the secret chamber below. The decorated glass panes, however, appeared new. They did not depict religious scenes but distinctly worldly themes: a harvest, a feast at a long dining table, and a deer hunting party. Appropriate, Falsham thought, given the reason for the king now being in the vicinity of Ayvebury.

Falsham, somewhat lost in the exercise of divining the room's former role, had failed to notice that Cole had made his way to one of the shelves and was even now running a bony finger along a row of codices, all of them bound in leather, all devoid of any identifying inscription on their spines.

Cole was clearly counting. When he had reached his finger's intended target he pulled the volume from the rest and uttered a mild exclamation of triumph.

“Stay seated, John, if you please. I have something to show you.”

Clasping the volume close to his bosom, Cole returned to his chair. He sat down and laid it on his lap.

“I enjoy my humble collection,” he said, his mouth forming what might have been a smile, or an expression of sorrowful regret; Falsham could not decide.

“I possess a Master Caxton, you know.
Confessio Amantis
. It is on the wall behind you. When I have gone, you should seek it and other notable works out
and read them, though not at your leisure. There will be little time for leisure given the task that will spread out before you.”

“Oh, but just a small dose of leisure,” Falsham mildly protested. His attempt at humor, however, fell flat.

“Reading is serious work, John. And reading this even more than most.”

As he spoke, Cole tapped the cover of the codex vigorously with the fingers of his right hand. His emphasis had the desired effect.

“That which you hold so closely. What knowledge or secrets does it hold?”

“No secrets at all, John, merely the plain truth of history over the course of my life, from before it began. This is a record, a perspicuous record, if I may say, of treachery and treason, the betrayal of all that was right and just by the king, Henry, a man more concerned with the content of his bed than with the natural order of God's temporal world.”

“You are the author,” said Falsham.

“Yes, Cole replied. “As you will see, it is written in Latin and amounts to a precise recording of the malodorous stench of these past four score years. I pay particular attention to the dissolution of the monasteries and the many falsehoods, desecrations and persecutions that have continued up to our modern time.”

Cole raised the volume and opened it. “Here, you see, some empty pages yet to be filled,”

“Yes, I see,” Falsham replied. But his tone carried in it another question.

“That will be for you, John. When I am gone the end of this account will be as your hand, and your hand alone, describes it. Use English if you will. Latin, I suspect, is not your particular
forte
.”

“No, it is not. I do better at the Spanish. But I will gladly do as you ask, though I suspect that the conclusion of your epistle will be a bitter affair in spite of my desire for it to be otherwise.”

Cole did not immediately reply. He stared at the words on an open page for a moment.

“Number sixteen,” he said. “If you look at the point where I pulled this from the others you will see that it is number sixteen on the shelf after you begin from the left side.”

“And the others? What do they hold?”

“Oh, just musings, records of the farm's work and so forth,” said Cole. “But that one at the very end, perhaps you can bring it to me.”

Falsham was on his feet in an instant. He retrieved the end volume from the row of its companions and handed it to the old man.

What occupied the next hour was the old man's detailed explanation of a series of lines, shapes and diagrams. To the uninitiated eye, they did not appear of to be of any particular place or thing. But between a jumble of words and numbers added for the purposes of distraction and deceit, the diagrams were in fact maps and locations of hidden money and valuables in the house. Enough, Cole assured Falsham, to ensure that the estate would both flourish in its visible business, but also in its secret purpose as a sanctuary for the blessed fathers ordained by the Frenchman Thibaud.

Ayvebury, Cole proclaimed, would become a new Canterbury pledged to Mother Church, but for the eyes of the world it would merely be the country estate of a fortunate and most loyal gentleman by the name of John Falsham.

“All that remains,” Cole said at the end of his instruction, “is for King James to unwittingly bless our most noble plot.”

“Long live the king,” said Falsham.

Richard Cole, with a goodly portion of his remaining strength, threw his head back and clapped his hands. He concluded his enunciation of pleasure with a wheezing laugh that quickly turned into a spasm of coughing.

Baranof Island, Alexander Archipelago, Alaska

In the evening of the fourth day, she stood in the open doorway of the cabin, daring herself to face down the shadowy reach of the great forest. Once the last light had faded, the darkness would be absolute. She had not turned on any of the inside lights, nor had she lit a candle.

Cleo Conway could not remember ever being so alone in her life.

Even on childhood camping trips with her parents the solitude had been illusory. Beyond each line of trees there had always been another tent, filled with moms, dads and babbling kids too excited to sleep.

In this place, beyond the trees, there were more trees. And in those trees were sounds and mysteries and hidden movements.

“Lions and tigers and bears,” Conway said softly, daring the forest creatures to show themselves.

Certainly bears were a possibility.

After nothing less than bright and clear conditions, a cold rain had settled over the island. It had come down for most of the day, and it had been a blessing of sorts. Conway had been hoping for an excuse to stay in the cabin. For three days, she had walked between the shore and the fringes of the Tongass National Forest. The only bears she had seen had been on the far side of the river, which, at this point on its journey, was more akin to an estuary. None of the great animals had come close and, mercifully, none had jumped out from behind a tree trunk. But Conway could not escape from the odd tingly feeling that comes from realizing that, for the first time in her life, she was in a place where she was not top of the natural food chain.

It was with this in mind that she had decided that the odds of a close encounter would rise to something approaching certainty on the fourth day. Cleo Conway was inclined to dwell on odds, so much so that she had avoided all forms of gambling. Her father had gambled, a lot. His daughter was afraid
of what might be in her blood. She was now also afraid of losing her blood in a lonely place. So she had stayed indoors for the daylight hours and had tried to read her book, a well-thumbed history of Alaska taken from a shelf crammed with damp paperbacks.

Not surprisingly, Alaska in print had been less of a lure than the real thing just outside the door. She took the book up, and put it down, took it up, and put it down. In between, she walked into the tiny kitchen to pour another cup of coffee. She didn't want to walk in the rain, but equally felt like she wanted to run a marathon. She wondered how people coped with cabin fever that lasted for months in some northern parts.

By late afternoon on that fourth day, Conway had felt the first pangs of regret, not just over her choice of destination, but because she had opted to spend her precious vacation days alone. At the same time, she reminded herself, this was not a vacation in the normal sense. It was more a pause, an opportunity for renewal, part embraced and part suggested by her superiors.

Divorce, they had told her, with more than a little experience of their own to back up the assertion, was no easy matter, even if commonplace. So any distraction from the job had to be addressed. She had a few days coming, so why not, they had suggested, just take them and flee to a faraway place. Their arguments had ultimately persuaded. You didn't take too much issue with the United States Secret Service, even when you were counted among its number.

Conway had considered drumming up a few of her single, free and divorced friends for a sun holiday. The Virgin Islands would have been easy and welcome after a Washington winter. But she had decided to do something novel. Having never been to Alaska, Conway had plumped for the cabin in the forest. Sitka was more than thirty miles away, Washington a million.

Baranof Island, with its bears, mountain goats and deer, but not many people, was a perfect setting to work most things out. The problem was, she now knew, it took more than a setting to sort out a future.

Conway had decided not to take a gun on the trip, not even her service issue weapon. She knew enough to realize that a wounded grizzly would be the greatest threat to a tenderfoot idiot with a popgun. So she had trudged along the trails with nothing more than a long, thick stick.

Her favored route was a path that tumbled the quarter mile from the cabin down to the river that flowed into the sound a mile to the west. She had taken
care on her walks to make noise so as to alert any animal in the vicinity. She had felt nervous, alive and vulnerable. It was, she thought, a little ruefully, not unlike being on the job.

So the rain had been timely.

The cabin did not have a landline. And although she had brought her cell phone, she had neglected to recharge it. This had added significantly to her solitude.

Conway made little effort to conjure up a dinner that night. She nibbled, cuddled into her bed and fell asleep over the Alaska tome a little after nine. The next day, the fifth, broke clear and cold, the rain having blown into Canada.

Not knowing why, or giving it much thought, Conway had recharged her phone overnight and had slipped it into a pocket before heading down to the water on her first walk of the new day. She made for the large rock on the water's edge at the end of the trail. It had served as her vantage point and it had been from this spot that she had picked out the bears, perhaps a quarter mile distant on the other side of the water.

None were in sight this morning.

She had been sitting for twenty minutes or so before her mind acknowledged what her ears were telling her. Her cell jingle was shattering the morning stillness.

“Yes,” she said, making no effort to disguise her annoyance.

“Miss Conway, ma'am,” the voice in the phone was apologetic.

She recognized it. It was the young cop in Sitka. She had checked in with local law enforcement as a courtesy before hitching a ride from a local boat owner to the cabin.

“Have you been trying to reach me? Is there anything wrong?”

“No, ma'am,” came the response. “Nothing wrong, but your office in Washington has been on to us. I think they were trying to raise you as of yesterday.”

“My phone was powered down. Did they say anything specific? Is there some situation or emergency?”

“No emergency so far as I know ma'am,” came the response. “And no details either. They just asked us to get in contact with you. If need be, they suggested we send someone down, but I got you first with this call.”

“Well, I'm obliged to you,” said Conway, a tad formally. “I'll be sure to give them a call. If I have problems, I'll get back to you, and if you could call them for me, that would be great.”

“No problem,” said the officer. “I'll be on most of the day. You have our number.”

“Thanks,” Conway said and she flipped the phone closed.

She had expected this. Her geek squad would not be able to get through more than a few days before getting overly excited about some story in an obscure newspaper in a country that wasn't in the latest atlases. Either that or it would be elevated internet chatter with bombastic threats against the United States, its citizens, perhaps the president.

She would not hurry to make a call. Later in the day would do fine. She had a full week and that was official.

It was at this moment that she noticed something in the corner of her left eye. Conway had always been optically observant. It had served her well in her training and in her work, most of which to date had involved protecting visiting diplomats.

The bear was huge, and it was only about a hundred yards away. The animal was standing at the water's edge, staring across to the other side, just as she was.

With a start, Conway realized that she and the bear had probably covered parallel paths to the water. She had arrived at the edge just a few minutes ahead of her clawed companion.

Conway did not move. She glanced at the ground around the rock. She was sitting at perhaps four feet above the shingle. It was not much of a fortress. She could slide down one side and be out of view of the animal, but decided against it. Slowly she turned her head. She did not want to stare straight at the beast fearing that it would sense some sort of provocation.

But the bear seemed unconcerned. He did not move. She guessed it was a male because it seemed especially big. She had seen brown bears at the zoo, and this one was right up there with the biggest of them.

She regretted not bringing her gun. Then she decided again that it had been the right thing to do. Under no circumstances could she imagine shooting such a magnificent creature. This was, after all, the bear's home. She was the intruder.

And so for what seemed like an age, Conway stared across the water, the bear held in the corner of her eye. Perhaps, she thought, it was just taking a drink. But no, the water here was too salty. It was, she decided, just out for its morning stroll and would turn on its paws and in a few moments and vanish back into the trees.

But no, the bear was moving towards her. She froze. For a moment a vision of the mermaid in Copenhagen's harbor flashed through her mind. Bears would not harm a mermaid. She would be one atop her rock, a US Secret Service undercover mermaid.

She was perspiring in the cold. The bear was walking in her direction although its head was still turned sideways towards the water.

Conway glanced over her shoulder towards the trees. She could make a run for it and hope to lose the bear in the woods. But everything she had read had advised against running. There was the play dead option, but it was a bit limited on top of the rock.

The bear was less than fifty yards away when it stopped. It raised its nose in the air, sniffing the wind. It did this for a several seconds before turning and walking slowly towards the trees. Conway felt her body loosen, the tension flowing out. She wanted to laugh aloud but stifled it. The bear had detected a human presence, or an odor that it did not appreciate.

Of course, Conway thought, she had not showered for a couple of days because it had been impossible to get the water in the cabin up to a temperature that could even be called warm. She must be smelling like some old trapper, Grizzly Adams in old L.L. Beans.

She did not move from the rock. She wanted to give the bear time to be well on its way. And it was time, she decided, to be on hers. It was time, she thought, to get back to the world.

Perhaps she had been unsettled by the sudden collision of tranquility with a life changing, or life ending, moment. But it occurred to Conway that Washington and that wider world had been unusually quiet of late as well. And yet, or perhaps because of this, Cleo Conway had a gut sense that something, somewhere, was going down. And it would beat a path to her boss, the president of the United States.