Unraveling the Past
I picked up one of the tiles and rubbed it between my thumb and forefinger. My ears rang, almost hurt. The texture was smooth but with a strange push-back, like two magnets pushing away from the same polarity. I’d seen tiles like this before. My friend Catrina had tiles like this. But that wasn’t all. I’d owned tiles like this… a long time ago.
“They’re some type of fired paste,” I offered. “Maybe fourth century?”
“Very good. Gemstones of particular qualities. Sea-shells. Iron from meteorites. Atlantean dolphin stone—or larimar—like from the Dominican Republic. Lava rock, like from Vesuvius.”
I nodded. “Elemental properties. Earth energies.” Just as historical texts told of ancient priests and priestesses who wore precious stones in their breastplates because of the power and representative qualities of the stones. Then I had a darker thought. “Maybe they’re explosive?”
“Not exactly. They’re radiological electromagnetic energy fields. The ley lines activate them, make them sing with purpose. Some people can hear them or feel them as a tingling in their extremities. Some see auras over the tiles. Some people see visions around them or hear sounds that resemble voices. It’s the way the energy stimulates the human brain, and each person is different. Most people sense nothing at all. I’ve been putting the mosaic together to see how much of the complete picture the boys have.”
“And how much do they have?”
“All but the best protected of the legacy collections of tiles. Your identity is tied to your legacy. See that corner? The wisps of hair and stars? The empty space below? The Adrianos knew the identity of the woman who inherited those tiles from her mother’s mother. Her name was Nanette. A beautiful girl from Poland who trusted the wrong man.” His eyes grew misty. “She died protecting those tiles.” His puckered mouth twisted to one side. “Simon’s father, Max Adriano. He killed her. With his own hands. But he never recovered those tiles.”
I said nothing. Obviously this Nanette had meant something to him. I guessed I wasn’t the only one with a penchant for living in the past. I wanted to hear about the tiles, but time was ticking away. We needed to get moving before Simon came back and left me down a hole permanently with a raving lunatic who felt as vindictive toward Max Adriano as I did toward Caleb.
“And that corner there, with the elbow and bit of cloak. That legacy was easier to take, from what I’m told. She was a farmer’s daughter, widowed with five daughters of her own. Killed in 1802. Brigid. From Ireland’s County Clare. They killed her daughters, too, except for one who escaped and was never found, but none of them ever knew their birthright. Her descendants are still out there somewhere, but they have no idea of the legacy they lost. The same with this one over here that was taken in 1719—”
“Look,” I said, hurrying him along, “Simon will be back to check on me. If we’re leaving, we need to get out of here before he shows up. Now come on, old man. Let’s go.”
“Myrddin. You can call me Myrddin.” The Welsh name for Merlin of Arthurian legend. Obviously not his real name and a surprising pseudonym for an Italian, but a fitting alter ego.
I touched his elbow. “All right, Myrddin. Let’s go.”
“You lost your legacy, too, didn’t you, Aubrey? Tell me about your tiles.”
I stared at him. How did he know? “There’s nothing to tell.”
My mother had inherited the strange tiles from her mother with the understanding that they must always be passed on and protected by a daughter. A story went with the legacy, one that I would have been told on my eighteenth birthday when my family felt I was old enough to grasp the gravity of our history, something more than just my grandmother’s fairy tales. When my own mother died unexpectedly and I was only seventeen and a student at Oxford, the tiles had been hidden away in my flat beneath the false bottom of a locked trunk, along with my mother’s jewelry and my father’s journals. I didn’t think much about them in those days. I was still reeling from Ma Ma’s death. Later, after Matthew rescued me from a near assassination, I never went back to my flat. My life had depended on it, he’d said. Trust me, he’d said. A friend had retrieved the trunk for me several months later, but it had been smashed and the tiles taken. My father’s journals and my mother’s jewelry had not been touched.
“Aubrey, are these yours?”
The old man knelt on the stone floor and turned over seven tiles of varying shapes and sizes, then placed them one by one in their proper place in the mosaic. All I could do was nod as the tiles took shape as a baby’s face and small, chubby body. A cherub-faced lap-child beamed back at me from the floor as it almost had years ago. I’d seen the tiles before, minus the small ones with blue stone eyes in a pinkish setting. Maybe that’s why I’d never liked the tiles—the eyeless baby had given me chills. But now, seeing the child’s body and face, seeing it whole, seeing those larimar-stone eyes drew me in. Larimar, reputed to be a stone used for healing, to the point of dredging up pain to be released.
A whimper escaped from my throat. Memories from all those years ago flooded back. The fresh sense of grief from my mother’s death. The difficulty fitting in at the university. Strange and loud men following me, invading the seminar taught at Oxford. The terror of a masked gunman promising to kill me if I moved. Matthew. Matthew rescuing me, Matthew loving me, Matthew disappearing forever. And years later, me telling my aunt in a discreet phone call to tell Lilah I was dead, that it was best that way. All those painful turning points flashed through me with the heat of lightning, both illuminating and burning.
I squeezed my eyes shut and opened them. I didn’t have time for sentiment. Not now. If ever. “Yes!” I blurted out. “They’re mine. The tiles are mine.”
Myrddin nodded as if he’d won. “The tiles weren’t the only baby you lost, were they?”
I held my breath. You can poke at a wound only so long before it bleeds again. Especially if it never healed.
The old man studied me carefully. “You weren’t pregnant when you left the country, were you? You’d lost the baby. That’s what Simon was told.” He squinted. “Or did you?”
“H-how do you know these things?”
“Simon and I were on speaking terms then. I knew everything.” He jabbed a finger at my stomach. “Was that what Matthew was protecting? His own little legacy with you?”
I shook my head and backed away—straight into the wall. He didn’t know about Lilah. Not Max, not Simon and certainly not Caleb. I’d kept her hidden as Matthew had made me promise to do. Myrddin seemed to know everything about me except when it came to Lilah. And if Simon and the Adrianos knew as much about me as I feared, how soon before they learned about Lilah? I hadn’t seen my baby in years, but perhaps that’s what had kept her safe. She was the only real legacy I believed in.
“Myrddin, we need to go. We need—”
“You don’t know, do you?”
“Apparently there’s a lot I don’t know. But there’s no time.” Simon would be back soon. He’d said two hours, but Simon had a habit of showing up unexpectedly and changing timelines to suit himself—and throw others off-kilter.
“You don’t know about Matthew. The boy-soldier who saved your life and seduced you.”
“He didn’t seduce me,” I fired back without thinking. I had been the one to seduce him. He’d been all about honor and integrity, but I’d slipped into his bed and rubbed my body against his until he’d relented. I’d been barely eighteen, and he’d been a little older and sweet, and I’d been so lost and so hurt and so scared.
“You still don’t know what happened to him.”
My jaw worked but nothing came out. Finally I said, “He never showed at our rendezvous point. He vanished from the face of the earth. He…” I hung my head. I wanted to believe that Matthew was still out there, but my Matthew certainly would have found his way back to me by now. “No, I don’t know what happened to him.”
Myrddin’s mouth snatched to one side in an awkward smile. “Still love the boy, don’t you? Isn’t that odd how the ones you lose end up perfectly preserved by time? If you’d had a full life with him, you may have discovered his flaws. And he certainly would have found yours. He might have been just another notch on your lipstick case if your passions had been allowed to play out—”
“Stop it.”
“Or you might have married and divorced bitterly a dozen years later when he left you for a younger woman. Maybe that would have been better for you, child. At least you might have resurrected yourself after that kind of tragedy.”
“Stop!”
“Or maybe it would have been a lasting love. With its rifts and joys, yes, but lasting. In any case, you can never know what future might have been waiting for you so you choose instead to honor him by burying yourself with his memory. Is that why you’ve never settled down with another man? You’ve had plenty of opportunities.”
I said nothing. I felt sick. I didn’t want to hear the truth and yet I did, just as it’s impossible to look away from a tragic accident when you drive past on the freeway and you want not to look but the flashing lights and sirens and sheer force of life and death around you pulls your attention to the thing you most hate to see. If Matthew was dead, I didn’t want to know. And yet I had to know once and for all the thing that I felt deep and cold in my bones.
“They traced the tiles to your grandmother,” Myrddin said, and I was relieved that he was changing the subject. “There was a family crest drawn in the margin of an old book that Max had lost as a young man. He used it to find women like you. Aubrey?” He leaned closer. “That book was the artifact Simon sent you to get. So that he could find the women his father missed. And you brought it back to him, didn’t you?”
After a few seconds, I remembered to close my mouth. The family crests in the margins. The notes. They were a treasure map to his victims’ genealogy. I’d just delivered and authenticated a murder plan.
“But by the time he found your family, your grandmother had already died of a fever. Max and Simon had nothing to do with that.”
“How reassuring,” I growled, anger and grief rising in my cheeks. “Come on, old man. Let’s get out of here.”
Myrddin tossed aside a piece of embroidery and selected one of the thinner tapestries and rolled it out on the floor beside the tiles. Quickly he began stacking the tiles in the center of the tapestry.
“What are you doing?” I sniffed twice and wiped discreetly at my eyes. I didn’t have time for emotion right now, not if I was going to survive the night.
“We’re taking these with us.”
“What if we break them?”
“It’s more important that Simon doesn’t have them, even if they’re dust. As long as he has them, your life will be full of storms.”
Rather than argue with his cryptic ramblings, I knelt beside him and helped transfer the tiles to the cloth. My fingers tingled when I touched them. I’d think about it later, when I could think clearly, about Ma Ma and Matthew and Lilah and Joan and me. I tied the four tapestry ends together and threw it over my shoulder, like the Fool in a tarot deck. I shinnied up the fire hose and left the tiles in the vault while I went back for Myrddin, who really wasn’t much heavier than the tiles. With the tiles slung over one shoulder and the briefcase full of the words of Isabelle, sister of Joan of Arc, I turned back to Myrddin.
“You said you could get us out of here,” I reminded him in a whisper. Guards still stood outside the vault door, and it was only a matter of time before Simon returned to see if I had authenticated the incunable. We had to escape before he returned or there might be no escape at all.
“Shhh,” he warned, finger to his lips.
The guards outside were talking, but in Italian. It sounded as though they were being dismissed. Then I recognized Caleb’s voice. God, no!
Myrddin pointed to a glass-and-brass case that held a Samurai helmet and armor. He ran his gnarled fingers under the edge of the ledge, found a button and pushed. The case swung open to reveal a passageway behind the wall. Myrddin tugged me inside and pulled the door closed behind us. We stood in the dark for a few seconds before Myrddin fumbled his way to something on the wall. The soft glow of a battery-powered lantern fell over us.
We stood in a small room no larger than a stall in a train-station latrine. I heard the vault door open and pressed my face to a small peephole in time to see Caleb stalk into the vault. I held my breath.
“Myrddin,” I whispered, “what is this place?”
“Trap.”
I jerked my head up to look at him in the dim light, but he smiled through dingy teeth.
“Not for us. For intruders. It’s on a time release in case thieves—like you—try to escape with Max’s jewels. The passageway opens in ten minutes if—”
“Ms. Moon?” Caleb called out. I watched through the peephole as he stalked around the vault looking under tables and behind counters. He didn’t seem to notice the missing artifact I’d brought with me. “Ginny? Come out, come out, wherever you are!”
I peered up at Myrddin, but he shook his head and gestured for me to remain quiet. Caleb paused for a moment to look at the glass-and-brass case in front of our hiding place. He was close enough that I could see the outline of a child’s dirty handprint on his shoulder. Benny, I assumed. Caleb squinted into the glass case and then a wide grin spread across his face.
“I see you!” he exclaimed.
Heart pounding, I stepped away from the peephole. Myrddin shook his head. Without exhaling, I leaned into the peephole again. No, he didn’t see us. He thought he did, though. He’d seen the reflection of the oubliette’s opening in the glass between us.
Caleb stomped over to the oubliette and addressed the opening as he flung the fire hose across the vault to prevent any future escapes. “I see you’ve found the old man. Excellent! I can’t think of two people who deserve each other more. Now you can rot down there together.” He kicked the trapdoor shut with one foot, then dragged a heavy Black Madonna statue over the door. “Enjoy your time together. You’ve got the rest of eternity.” He stalked out of the vault with a grin.
“We have to get out of here,” I told the old man beside me. “He’ll tell Simon—”
“Tell Simon what? That he disobeyed his father?” Myrddin snorted. “The two of them get along almost as badly as Simon and his father and the father and son before them.”
“Regardless,” I said, glancing around our hiding place, “Simon will be back and it won’t take long for him to realize I’m gone, you’re gone and the ‘artifact of the second millennium’ is gone. Now how do we get out of here?”
“Another few minutes. Max had this precaution installed because of you.”
I frowned. “Me? I never even knew him.”
“But he knew you. He knew how talented you were. He was afraid you’d break into his home one day and take back all the things you’d brought to this vault, especially if you figured out the tunnel system around the castle ruins. He wanted to make sure you got only so far before he caught you.” He laughed softly. “And now it’s your only means of escape. How ironic.”
But if the old man knew about the trap, then Simon…? “The Duke will be back. We can’t wait here.”
“You have two choices. Wait here with me or go back through that vault door and take your chances with Caleb and Simon.”
I didn’t like traps. I didn’t like feeling closed in. I didn’t like limited choices. Maybe with the guards gone I stood a better chance of escape. I reached for the door Myrddin had closed behind us.
“Your mother would have found a third possibility, though I have no idea what.”
I jerked my head up. “My mother? What’s my mother got to do with this?”
“How do you think she died, Aubrey?”
“Broken neck.” My voice cracked. “She was riding horses in the country. She wasn’t a very good equestrian. Her horse threw her. She died before the doctors could reach her, but there was nothing they could have done anyway.”
Myrddin eased his bony limbs down onto a low table not meant for sitting. “Yes, a broken neck. And yes, she was riding a horse shortly before it happened. But Aubrey—” he leaned forward with as much tenderness as he could muster “—she was fleeing Max and Simon’s men on horseback and protecting those tiles of hers. And yours.”
“What?” My mother? My mother had been a gloves-and-hat British-born lady who’d never raised her voice and would have been more concerned with tainting her manicure than with protecting tiles made of ground-up gemstones.
“Contrary to what you may have been led to believe, your mother was an excellent horsewoman. Sharp-shooter, too. She was fast but not fast enough to outrun a dozen men after shooting another six of them.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
“They took a package off her body. Tiles.” Myrddin laughed. “Tiles she’d made herself to fool Simon. It took him almost a year to find out they were fake and that you had the real ones in a false-bottomed trunk.”
My head was reeling. My mother had been murdered? My mother had had a secret life—and I’d followed in her footsteps?
“I didn’t know what they were. They were in a trunk with her other treasures and some weird recipes for plaster crafts. That’s the only reason I kept the tiles.” I’d been nauseated every time I’d looked at them. “Their only value to me was that they’d belonged to my mother. I didn’t even know what they were.”
“Simon found that out too late. He thought you knew your identity. That the tiles had been passed to you. That’s why he sent a man to assassinate you.”
Simon. Simon had been the one. It made sense now. I nodded furiously, suddenly seeing it again through eighteen-year-old eyes. “That guy meant to kill me. If Matthew hadn’t shown up…”
“Matthew worked for Simon.”
His words sank in. I shook my head. “No. No way. That man followed me and I ran into the medieval studies seminar and he took twenty of us hostage. He killed fifteen of my classmates, for pity’s sake! Then this young lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force showed up. Special Operations, he said. There on vacation. He saved me.”
How he’d gotten there or why he’d been armed, I never knew. I’d been eighteen and falling hard into love and I’d simply accepted his explanation in that naive way that very young women do when they’d led a sheltered life. Nothing but being with him had seemed important.
I could still feel his arm around me as he’d fired back at the gunman. I could still see the smoke as he’d led me to the rooftop of the building. Matthew had whipped off his belt and looped it over a cable at the roofline and twisted the belt around his wrist. Then he’d wrapped one arm around my waist, and we’d plunged over the side of the building, riding the cable to safety.
Instead of taking me to the police, Matthew took me away to the countryside. To somewhere in the thatch-roofed Cotswolds. He’d said the police could be bought and paid for and could do nothing to help us. We hid in the countryside for three months, and when we realized I was pregnant, he smuggled me into the Scottish highlands and told me to wait for his return. He never came back.
“He may have saved you, Aubrey, but his mission was to kill you.”
“I don’t believe you.” I scanned the walls of our hiding place. I had to get out. I needed air.
“It’s true. He went along as backup, in case the assassin failed. The man who was supposed to kill you got a little carried away. Panicked when you led him into a classroom full of students. Matthew was supposed to finish the job. Fortunately for you, he was also working for a higher power than the Adrianos. Simon had to abandon his plans when he realized you were gone, but his men did find your tiles eventually, exactly where Matthew said they’d find them.”
“Matthew would never betray me.” I was thinking seriously of leaving Myrddin in his hellhole for suggesting such a thing.
“He didn’t betray you. Not intentionally.” Myrddin rose from his makeshift seat. “Simon tortured the boy. Your lieutenant—he wasn’t really a lieutenant—gave up the location of the tiles with his dying breath. Your Matthew never did give up your whereabouts, though. All he would say was that you’d left him after you miscarried his child.”
I let my head loll against the wall. I shut my eyes and willed away any show of tears. So Matthew had died protecting me. At the hands of Simon Adriano. I had probably known in my heart for years that Matthew was dead, but I’d never let myself believe it. I had held on to the hope that someday I’d have back everything I’d lost—Matthew, Lilah, the Joan of Arc manuscript, peace of mind, something sweeter than the freedom to be unfettered by the bonds of normal relationships.
“Max found you almost ten years later. Lured you to Paris on a phony sabbatical. He knew you’d never stay on your own accord, so he set you up. Turned you into a criminal so you’d end up working for Simon.”
I blinked at him. “Why? Why would he do that if he’d tried to kill me before? Why didn’t he just kill me then?” Maybe it would have been better that way.
“He thought you knew who you were. He thought you’d lead him to others like you. So he let you live. And made you useful to him at the same time. But he didn’t trust his own son not to make a mess of things. He never told Simon that the fearless Dr. Moon and poor little Aubrey were the same woman. And Max didn’t know you’d never been told of your true legacy. That was his failing, and probably the one thing that kept you alive.”
For so many years I’d wanted answers. Nothing more. And now I had them. The problem was, so did Simon Adriano. Now, somehow, Simon knew the truth. But how? Had Max Adriano, dying somewhere in a hospital, had a change of heart about his secrets and passed them on?
It was bad enough to be on his blacklist when he didn’t know who I was, but now to learn that he’d tried to kill me when I’d been an innocent eighteen-year-old girl? That he’d killed my mother, that he’d killed my lover and that he knew my true identity, whatever that meant? If he knew about my life as LeighAnne Remington, how much longer before he found out about Lilah and went after her? How could I warn her without putting her in more danger? I could only hope that she had a little bit of Joan of Arc’s blood flowing through her veins, too.
Something clicked in the walls. A quiet whirring. The sliding of arched walls on two sides of us.
“When one door closes, another one opens,” Myrddin whispered. “Sometimes your only choice is to wait for it.”
We stood on a narrow plateau. The passageway led up more slender steps above us and looked the same below where it dipped deep into the earth.
Steps. Why did it have to be steps?
“How did you know about this passage?” I asked, following Myrddin carefully down the steps. My knee screamed with each downward motion. “What if Simon finds us here?”
“Simon doesn’t know about it. I told you, I knew Simon’s father, Max, quite well. When I was a boy, Max’s father showed the passages to me. Of course, back then it was kerosene lanterns, not battery packs. Max modernized it over the years.”
“So you used to run with the bad guys, but now you’re a good guy?”
Myrddin paused on the steps to look back at me through the heavy wrinkles around his eyes. “I never said I was a good guy. I never said I was anything. The only thing you need to know, Aubrey, is that we’re on the same side.”
I followed him down at least fifty steps before having to rest. “What’s up the stairs?”
“The passageway connects every treasure trove in case the Adrianos came under attack and needed to hide their most valuable treasures or escape with them. The vaults, certain bedrooms, Simon’s office.”
“And he doesn’t know?” I asked for the third time.
“No. His father never trusted him. That’s part of the Adriano legacy. It’s because of what sons have done to their fathers for centuries. Later, when the son becomes the father, he fears history will repeat itself. It usually does.” The old man was at least twenty steps ahead of me. “You should get that knee seen to, you know.”
Damn. I was slowing him down? Time to head back to that obscure little beach town with the eye candy of a knee doctor and relax and work the kinks out of my knee for good! Right after I figured out how to keep Lilah safe.
“Myrddin? Where does this passageway come out?”
“About thirty meters from the main gate. The tunnel levels off underground and comes up in a clump of bushes not far from the private beach.”
“Meet me at my automobile,” I said. “You go ahead and I’ll follow as best I can.”
“I’d hate to leave you behind. Would you like for me to carry the tiles?”
Arrogant tease. Arrogant smelly tease. “No, you go ahead. I’ll carry the tiles.”
“Suit yourself. But don’t get caught.”
I watched him walk ahead, turning on lanterns as he went. The weight of the briefcase and the tiles tore at me. I descended the steps sideways, which made the knee pain much more manageable but was incredibly slow. When the tunnel leveled out, I could walk normally and made better time. The last few steps swerved upward and I knew I was near the parking lot. I poked my head out of the bushes and then fully emerged from the tunnel.
A new pair of guards milled about at the main gate, but their attention was on the video monitors inside. I half ran, half limped to the automobile, spotting Myrddin bending down low in the front seat. Anxiously I fished in my dress pocket for the key and opened the trunk. I slipped in the tapestry of tiles, dumped in the briefcase, then closed it with the kind of solid click only an expensive German automobile makes. I turned to run to the driver’s seat and heard a click.
“Leaving without saying goodbye?”
Holding my breath, I turned and stared into the blue eyes of Eric Cabordes. Then I lowered my gaze to the gun in his hand and nearly went cross-eyed. I exhaled and let my breathing become heavy as I looked from the gun to the man. I wet my lips.
“Maybe we could just say, ‘Until we meet again.’” His face showed no emotion at all. “Turn around,” he said.
My pulse quickened. “Why? So you can shoot me in the back of the head? No, I’d rather watch.” My jaw wound tighter until it hurt. “I’d rather see the look in your eyes when you pull the trigger. I don’t want to miss anything.”
“Turn around.” He still didn’t raise his voice.
“No. If you’re going to kill me, you do it on my terms.”
He rolled his eyes. “Turn around. Please. And put your hands up.”
I took a deep breath and grudgingly obeyed. “Goodbye.” A whisper. That was all.
I closed my eyes and waited for bullet to splinter bone. Nothing happened. Slowly I turned to look over my shoulder at Eric Cabordes, but he was gone.
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© 2006 Lorna Tedder. All rights reserved. Free to read here — please don’t repost elsewhere.