The Messiah Secret - James Becker [16]
‘Well, maybe it was just a money-making exercise after all. So why was he so short on funds?’
Mayhew stepped over beside Angela and they both looked out over the acres of peaceful parkland, so much in contrast, Angela thought, to the chaos of the house.
‘According to the guidebook – which is quite a good read, by the way – Bartholomew’s parents were very comfortably off. They owned huge tranches of land in East Anglia and had a couple of hundred tenant farmers, plus stock market investments, all that kind of thing. After that, the family fortune shrunk considerably, for all the usual reasons – the First World War and the Depression, plus Bartholomew’s Folly. And that’s another reason for the damage you saw. There are bits of panelling torn off in various areas of the house, and even a few holes dug through some of the walls.’
Mayhew paused, clearly waiting for Angela to ask the obvious question. She raised her eyebrows, but said nothing. He sighed.
‘Anyway, just after the end of the Great War, Bartholomew went off on a Grand Tour of Europe and the Middle East. At the time, that was still a very fashionable way for a wealthy young man to finish off his education, and lucky for us that he did, because a lot of the relics Oliver has now bequeathed to the museum were bought by Bartholomew on that Grand Tour. I gather he went as far east as Syria, and into what was then Persia, and acted as a bit of a shopaholic everywhere. He must have spent thousands, maybe even tens of thousands, of pounds, and at that time a thousand pounds was serious money.’
‘And Bartholomew’s Folly?’
‘One of the things Bartholomew brought back from his grand shopping tour of Europe was a wooden crate of mixed antiquities from Cairo. Apparently it was a kind of job lot. He only actually wanted a couple of ornamented vases – which we haven’t found so far, by the way, so they were probably sold some time later – but ended up having to take the whole crate, at an inflated price, naturally. Anyway, when he got the stuff back here, he opened the crate, took out the vases he wanted and stuck the box with all the rest of the bits in one of the attics.
‘A few years later, he dragged it down again and for the first time actually took a good look at what he’d bought. Most of it was rubbish, as he’d expected, but down at the bottom of the crate he found an earthenware jar. Bartholomew believed it was probably first century AD, but the guidebook doesn’t say what type of jar it was, or how he came to that conclusion. What attracted his attention wasn’t the age of the jar, but the fact that the stopper was pinned and wired through the neck of the vessel and the whole thing sealed with wax.’
Mayhew turned and led the way back down the corridor. Angela followed him, stepping over the occasional missing floorboard.
‘So, as you might have guessed, Bartholomew grabbed a screwdriver and attacked the jar. He broke the seal and ripped out the stopper, expecting to find something valuable inside.’
‘And did he?’
‘According to the guidebook, at first he thought the vase was empty, but then he saw a piece of parchment, or maybe papyrus, inside it – the account I read uses both words to describe it. He broke the jar and got it out, convinced it had to be some kind of priceless ancient text.’
‘But presumably it wasn’t?’
‘No. It was written in a language he didn’t recognize – not that that meant much, because the only language Bartholomew spoke or read was English. So he decided to get it translated, but was terrified of anyone else finding out what the text meant, so he copied out each line as best he could, then sent off the individual lines to half a dozen different linguists.’
Angela stopped, interested now in spite of herself. She touched Mayhew on the shoulder to make him turn round. ‘Don’t keep me in suspense, Richard. What was it – Aramaic? Hebrew? And what did it say?’
Mayhew shook his head. ‘The text was an early type of Persian script.’
‘Persian? Oh, the Silk Road, I suppose. There was already a lot of