The Courtship - Catherine Coulter [25]
“Stay away from him,” Lord Beecham said, looking after Crowley until he disappeared from view. “I have the reputation of a seducer, surely a harmless pursuit when all is said and done. Lord Crowley has a flair for evil.”
“What sort of evil?”
Lord Beecham said briefly, “He feeds on helplessness. Now, where were we?”
“Robert Burnell and the lamp. He said he’d never seen it do anything save just sit there and let the king and queen rub it endlessly until Eleanor grew violently ill in the fall of 1279. Some sort of fever was raging through London, and the queen, along with three of her ladies, became very ill. All of the ladies died. The king was distraught. He took the lamp—it was a last resort, Burnell wrote, because the physicians had given up—and he put it in Eleanor’s arms.” She shuddered.
“Well, what happened?”
“She survived.”
Lord Beecham said slowly, “As I recall, Queen Eleanor bore more children that I can count. If she could survive all that childbirth, it seems to me that surviving a fever would be nothing to her.”
“She was pregnant nearly every year,” Helen admitted, “but still, the fever was virulent, and it did kill all three of her ladies. Don’t be so cynical, sir.”
“What did Burnell write about that?”
“He claimed that the king wrapped the lamp in a bolt of exquisite crimson velvet from Genoa and set it beneath glass. He proclaimed the lamp magic and set guards around it. Then one morning, the king unwrapped the velvet to look at the lamp.
“It was gone. In its place was a silver lamp, ugly and quite new. The king went on a rampage. The guards were questioned, brutally. No one admitted anything. Then, the next morning, the gold lamp was back. Everyone believed that the guard who had stolen it had been so frightened that he simply returned it.
“But you see, it happened again the next week. One morning the gold lamp was gone and in its place was the ugly silver lamp. The following morning, the gold one was back.”
“Where did the lamp go?” Lord Beechem asked. “What magic made it disappear only to reappear?”
“King Edward brought in scholars, Burnell wrote, but none of them could figure it out. The king himself even slept by the lamp for a week, to guard it. The same thing happened. The lamp disappeared, then reappeared. Everyone proclaimed the lamp to be magic. Churchmen said it was evil. They wanted it destroyed. The king refused, saying it had saved his queen.
“Finally, Burnell wrote, the king, because of the pressure from the Church, buried the lamp near Aldeburgh, right on the coast. Supposedly when the queen was ill again, he sent men to fetch it. They reported that they could not find it. The queen died. It seems that the lamp disappeared.”
“Which of Burnell’s versions do you prefer?”
“I believe the king buried it in Aldeburgh. Why else would Burnell write about its being there? I think the men who were sent to bring it back simply didn’t go to the right place. It only makes sense, don’t you think?”
“The lamp could simply have disappeared again. You have searched?”
“I bought the old Norman church and the land surrounding it.”
He raised an eyebrow to that.
“No, my father didn’t buy it for me. I earn my own way, Lord Beecham. I run an excellent inn.”
“How do you propose that you and I proceed? You have found two accounts about the lamp. I will concede, for the sake of argument, that it did exist; its properties, however, are quite murky. You have doubtless sifted through every grain of sand to find more clues. What now?”
“There is something else, but I don’t want to tell you until you agree to be my partner. I haven’t even told my father.”
She had caught him with that bait. He sat forward, his eyes intent on her face. She was reeling him in quite nicely.
“What is it?”
Helen looked at him for a very long time, then said, “Will you be my partner? Will you help me find the lamp?”
He thought about his life until his thirty-third year. There were black clouds strewn throughout the years, particularly