Betina Krahn (12 page)

But as they nosed back into the cove’s calmer waters, and he returned to a less harried state of mind, he reassessed the importance of that conclusion. She might indeed be something
of a sailor, but that was a long way from diving unassisted in the open ocean and being adopted by a roving herd of hedonistic dolphins.

With his skepticism battered but still functional, he stepped out of the boat on wobbly legs, jerked his damp vest down into place, and resisted the impulse to fall to his knees and kiss every rotten board in that decrepit dock.

A
FTER LUNCHEON
, C
ELESTE
excused herself to her rooms for a time and Lady Sophia excused herself to the library. Titus was left to his own devices and found himself consumed with dread at knowing that Celeste intended to go out in the boat again that afternoon. After futile attempts at resting in his room and making notes in his damp journal—the ink bled into fat, fuzzy letters, an exercise in frustration—he escaped his room to prowl around the venerable old house.

Even in the unseasonable warmth of the afternoon, the old halls were serenely cool and shaded. Wandering the paneled corridors, he investigated a number of portraits, hangings, and aged but exotic furnishings. There were paintings on silk from the Orient, carved chests and cast-bronze lamp stands in Middle Eastern motifs, and screens of camphor wood inlaid with ivory. Clearly, in earlier days, Ashton House’s residents had been persons of wealth and world experience. After a time he found himself strolling down a side hallway on the main floor, heading for a column of light cast on the wall by a door left ajar.

Stealing to the opening and peering inside, he saw library shelves stuffed with oddly shaped stones, reassembled vases, ancient-looking wooden chests, stone obelisks, massive shells, and bits of corroded bronze resembling round shields. Around the edges of the room were crates and stacks of books that served as stands for artifacts, piles of cotton wool used for packing, plaster castings, and trays in which lay shards of crockery and bits of bone.

He gave the door a nudge. As it swung back he saw that the rest of the room was even more cluttered … with boxes, chests, larger inscribed stones, eroded statuary, and a few odd iron and wooden pieces that might have been either artifacts or furnishings.

Bathed in bright sunlight from the tall, leaded windows and bent over a cluttered worktable, was Lady Sophia, dressed in her customary gray dress, open entirely down the back. He must have made a sound because she turned, spotted him, and produced a smile that could have melted polar icecaps.

“Professor! Do come in.” She beckoned with the shard of pottery in her hand.

“I don’t wish to disturb—” But his curiosity got the better of him. “What the devil is all this?”

She beamed with proprietary pleasure at the motley collection around her. “This is my work, Professor. I’m continuing my late husband’s studies of the artifacts and culture of the Lost Civilization.” Seeing his frown deepen, she clarified: “Atlantis. Surely you know of the legend of the lost continent … sunken in the Atlantic … spoken of in Plato’s dialogues …”

“Of course I know it.” Indeed, there was scarcely a boy who got through grammar-school Latin without hearing the tantalizing legend. He looked from her to the maze of crates, objects, artifacts, and equipment stacked higgledy-piggledy about the room. “You mean to say you’re working on … that these objects supposedly come from—”

“Atlantis.” She folded her hands and rocked up on her toes, glowing like a young girl. “My Martin devoted his life to finding evidence of that great uncharted civilization. After his untimely death, well, I simply couldn’t allow his whole life’s work to go for naught.” She smiled fondly at the stacks of crates and stones, sketches, trays, and plaster impressions. “And since I was with him on all his journeys and excavations, and was sometimes drafted to serve as his secretary,
who better to interpret his journals and continue the analysis
of
his findings?”

“Atlantis. The lost continent in the Atlantic Ocean. Sir Martin found
factual
evidence, of the existence of Atlantis?” He scowled at the crowded and chaotic room. The place looked as if someone had set off a bomb in the basement of the British Museum. “And this”—he gestured to the artifacts—“is that evidence?”

“It is, indeed.” Lady Sophia clasped her hands to contain her excitement.

“That is absolutely … without a doubt the most …” He halted, struck powerfully by the old lady’s silver hair, lively blue eyes, and gently aged face. “It’s simply … utterly … inescapably …” Curious … how the light in her countenance made her seem both very old and very young at the same time.

Titus Thorne had never been a man to peer too deeply into his fellow beings. The inner workings of even the most rational members of the human species had always seemed to him to be messy and appallingly unpredictable. But just now, without trying to or even wanting to, he could see the old lady’s entire inner landscape, laid out before him like an open book. He saw a lifetime spent at her husband’s side, the affection and respect born of those many years, her immense grief at his passing, and the determination to carry on his work that had become her own reason to go on living. It was all so clear and so personal that he felt like a bloody window peeper.

He shifted his feet, felt his collar suddenly grow restrictive, and wished he could somehow block out those unsettling impressions. But it was too late; that unsought knowledge of who and what she was had already insinuated itself into the equation of his reaction. He groped for a way to complete the sentence he’d left hanging and found himself declaring her assertions to be “
fascinating
.”

She beamed. “Come, I’ll show you some of our treasures.”

Taking him by the arm, she led him through a stack of crates to where a bizarre-looking stone-and-bronze object sat warming in the afternoon sun. It had a large, flat, carved stone base that resembled a hefty bench, with three enormous bronze spikes attached along the far side, forming something resembling a pitchfork. Along two ends were clumps of what appeared to be bronze rope rounded into arches, some strands of which had been beaten flat and twisted into odd, undulating ribbons. He bent for a closer look.

There were carvings on the bench itself: shells, fish, stylized waves, clearly a nautical motif. The designs were simple, even primitive, but the closer he looked at them, the more he perceived the delicacy of their craft. The gray, flecked stone was cool and surprisingly smooth to the touch … granite, he guessed, and highly polished. Examining the spearlike projections, he suddenly recognized them as the points of a trident. Of course, he thought. A marine motif … it was Poseidon’s scepter. The curious bench was in fact …

“A chair,” he announced, glancing at Lady Sophia.

“A very special chair.” She fairly giggled with excitement. “A
throne.”

“Throne?” He stepped back to take in a fuller view and banged into an obelisk. He wheeled, caught it just in time, and found himself holding a tapered stone column about shoulder height, engraved with all manner of spirals, stylized waves, and fish. Not
fish
. He squinted and bent closer to examine them.
Dolphins
. He jerked his hands away.

When he looked up, Lady Sophia was gazing fondly at the piece. “It’s one of the crowning jewels of our collection, you know. From the temple of Poseidon, probably in the heart of the great capital city of Atlantis. Not quite grand enough to be intended for Poseidon himself. More likely a priest’s or priestess’s. Women figured quite prominently in their religious orders, you know. As did all things from the sea.”

She led him to a number of beaten-copper and bronze shields, stacked on boxes and propped against the walls. He had taken them for arms, but now saw that they were too broad and thin for military purposes and were covered with a sort of pictographic writing.

“At first, we couldn’t imagine how these were used.” She lifted one and offered it for his inspection. “But we eventually realized they were covered with descriptions of the temple in which they once hung. They depict images of the sacred rituals of the people of Atlantis.” She waved a hand indicating the circular shape and then narrowed in on the spirals and circles on the edge of the disk. “Waves, circles, and spirals seem to have held great meaning in their culture. Completion, perhaps. Or connection. Return. Celestial rhythms. So many interesting possibilities in a circle. And waves actually are really circles in disguise, you know. My Martin used to try to explain the theory behind that to me, but, I confess, I never quite grasped it.”

She introduced him to several other pieces, watching intently his handling of the artifacts. Then, as he peered into several other crates, she turned to a small polished chest on a nearby shelf, and produced something wrapped in black velvet and tied with a golden cord. He pulled his attention from the large stone carving on a pedestal in the corner … another damnable
dolphin
…

“This is something I’ve been working on for some time,” she said with a pensive frown. “Ingenious bit of workmanship, I’ll say that. We found it in the remains of a degraded wooden box, preserved in a large marble catafalque.” She opened the cloth reverently to reveal what appeared to be a set of notched silver sticks, each about six inches long, some of which were intricately angled on the ends. Each bore markings that looked like a combination of Scandinavian runes and Egyptian hieroglyphs.

“I believe they’re some sort of ritual puzzle, like the Urim and Thummin of biblical days. Created to give celestial advice to mortal decision makers. But”—she gave a wistful
sigh—“I have never been able to put it together properly. I don’t even know what shape it is supposed to be.”

Scowling, he looked from her hopeful gaze to the bundle of rectangular metal rods and reached for the cloth. Picking them up, one by one, he held them up to the light and examined their workmanship and curious markings. It was highly doubtful that these silver jackstraws, however unusual, were the “holy dice” of the lost continent of Atlantis. But he had to admit he’d never seen anything even remotely like them. As he examined one after the other, he found himself growing strangely absorbed in the challenge of their mystery.

“Are you certain they’re all here?” he asked, experimentally fitting the end of one to the end of another.

She shrugged. “How can one ever be certain with an artifact?”

Pursing his lips, he retreated to a seat, spread the cloth on his lap, and began to join the ends of the sticks together at various angles, matching angles and patterns of the engravings in what he hoped were logical configurations.

Half an hour later, Celeste hurried into the library with her face flushed and eyes stormy. “Nana, have you seen the professor? He seems to have—”

She stopped at the sight of her grandmother pressing a finger against her lips. When the old lady stepped out of her line of sight, Celeste beheld Titus Thorne sitting on what they all had come to regard as “Poseidon’s throne,” contemplating the half-assembled skeleton of a silver sphere.

Her stomach slid toward her knees as she glanced around the cluttered library and realized that for the professor to be sitting there, contemplating Nana’s special puzzle, Nana must have told him all about Atlantis. This was all she needed: his scientific outrage aggravated by her grandmother’s impassioned lectures on the world’s desperate need for the resurrected culture of the lost Atlantis.

“There you are.” She strode briskly around the worktable to stand before him with her hands on her waist. “I’ve been
searching everywhere for you. We have to put out soon or we’ll lose the light coming back.”

“Sorry, dear.” Nana slipped around the table. “The professor wandered in, and I couldn’t resist showing him some of your grandfather’s finds.”

“It must fascinate him, I know,” she responded tightly. “But we have another scientific issue to settle first.”

He shot up from his seat, reddening, “I should—indeed—” He looked at the half-assembled artifact in his hands as if wondering how it got there, then quickly glanced about for a place to dispose of it. Nana came to his rescue, and as he transferred it to her hands, it collapsed once more into a jumble of sticks.

The old lady watched her granddaughter usher the professor from the library and then lowered her smile to the pile of “sacred jackstraws” she held. In her mind’s eye, they became once again the skeletal orb that had begun to take shape as the professor worked on the puzzle. Moisture collected in the corners of her eyes as she rolled them heavenward.

“It’s
him
, Martin. Our ‘Man of Earth.’ He’s finally here.”

THE WIND HAD GENTLED
, giving the sea beyond the cove the smooth, satiny appearance of rain-soaked pavement and puffy white clouds had sprung up to block some of the strong afternoon sun. She stayed ahead of him by a pace or two as they approached the path down the cliff.

“So … your grandfather discovered the remains of the lost civilization of Atlantis.” When her step faltered briefly, he continued: “You Ashtons certainly are an inventive breed, I’ll give you that. But then you said as much, earlier.”