The Messiah Secret

Angela’s Latin was reasonable, so she’d carried out a full scan of the Latin text using the search string thesaurus mundi, which she thought was close enough to the expression ‘the treasure of the world’. That produced no results, so she altered the search term to arcarum mundi, and that generated two hits, not as part of any spell, but just in a passage that described a number of hidden relics. The author of the grimoire imbued one of these lost objects with the most extraordinary abilities, claiming that it could confer incredible power on its owner. From what Angela had found out so far, she had assumed that the hidden treasure was simply gold or silver or some other object of high intrinsic value, but the passage definitely suggested that whatever it was had magical properties.

The book also hinted that although the object’s hiding place was still unknown, it was most likely somewhere in the Middle East. According to Angela’s quick translation, it was described as ‘hidden most cunningly in the gorge of the blooms’, a location that sounded close enough to the ‘valley of flowers’. Unfortunately, the grimoire gave no indication of the country in which the ‘gorge of the blooms’ might be found and, as far as she could tell, the writer was apparently copying the information from an earlier, but unnamed, source.

Although thesaurus translated as ‘treasure’ or ‘hoard’, and could also refer to a place where valuables were stored, like a ‘treasury’, the Latin word arcarum had a much wider and more general meaning. Depending on the context – which in Latin meant analysing the declension of the other nouns and the tenses of the verbs clustered at the end of the sentence – it could mean a box, a chest, a strong-box, a coffer, wealth, money, a coffin or a bier, or even a cell or cage. And there was one other possible meaning of the word that came as a complete surprise, and opened up both a whole new field of thought and a tantalizing possibility.

Excited now, Angela started checking texts that dated from the fifth to the tenth centuries AD, finding sufficient references to convince her she was on the right track.

She glanced at her watch: it was already after five in the afternoon. She copied all the documents and references she’d looked at on to a memory stick, copied them on to her laptop, which she shut down, then switched off the screen of her desktop PC – most of the museum’s computer systems ran all the time – and locked her office.

Chris was coming to her apartment that evening and they were going out for a meal together. She wanted to make sure she looked her best.

25

‘OK,’ Chris Bronson said, leaning back in his chair. They were sitting over an after-dinner pot of coffee in a small Italian restaurant a few streets away from Angela’s apartment in Ealing. ‘Let’s look at it like a police investigation. What’s your evidence?’

Angela leaned towards him, her brown eyes shining in the candlelight. ‘We know about Bartholomew’s Folly – at least, we know what’s printed in the Carfax Hall guidebook and what Jonathan Carfax told us. I also told you I recognized the reference to the “treasure of the world” on the parchment that old Bartholomew found, and I was right – the same expression was used on the Hillel fragment. In fact, both appeared to be copies of the same source document. The only difference was that the parchment Bartholomew found is written in Persian, and the Hillel piece is in Hebrew, but the text is virtually identical on both.’

Bronson nodded, happy to see Angela so excited. ‘What else did you find?’

‘I looked at a thirteenth-century grimoire – that’s a kind of ancient magician’s sourcebook of spells and incantations – and I found the same expression there. It even suggested the treasure was hidden in the “gorge of the blooms”, which is close enough to the “valley of the flowers” to suggest it’s referring to the same treasure, hidden in the same place.’

‘But you still don’t know which country?’

Angela put her hand on his. ‘No. That’s the downside. But I plugged away, going back through all the ancient texts I could find, because I thought there might be some really old source document that other authors had copied from over the centuries, and if I could find that, I hoped it might tell us where we should start looking.’ She paused, and Chris raised his eyebrows, so she continued.