Crusader Gold by David Gibbins Read Free Book Online Page A

curiosity was piqued and she crawled back towards him. Jeremy had unravelled about ten centimetres of the scroll and was holding it so she could see. The radius of a large inscribed circle was visible, and within it she could make out faint forms that looked like outline drawings and tightly written inscriptions.
    She knew what she was looking at even before she reached him. In her own doctoral thesis a decade earlier she had argued that the Hereford Mappa Mundi was a copy, the work of a remarkable artist but not a scholar. It was the only way to account for its most glaring error, the word AFFRICA written across Europe and EUROPA across Africa. The Bishop of Hereford had commissioned the map from Richard of Holdingham, who had prepared a blueprint in his home cathedral of Lincoln, but the final version had been completed in his absence by an artisan at Hereford skilled in calligraphy and illumination but not very literate or accurate. His ignorance was revealed in the finer detail, from small licences he had taken for aesthetic purposes at the expense of credibility to peculiarities in the spelling and geography.
    Now to her astonishment she knew she was looking at the sketch prepared by Richard himself, the cartographer and monk whose vision of the world had fascinated her since her student days. She stared with reverence at the precise, confident hand which had created captions all over the map. Just below Jeremy’s left hand were the faded letters EUROPA, correctly placed over France and Italy.
    Beside his right hand where he had pulled the scroll open was the elongated form of the British Isles, with Hereford and Lincoln prominently displayed.
    As Jeremy moved the fingers of his right hand to the edge of the parchment she noticed something odd.
    “My God,” she breathed. “The exergue. It’s missing.”
    The elaborate decoration which filled the space between the orb of the world and the square edges of the parchment on the finished Mappa Mundi had clearly been the creation of the artisan alone, a place for decorative features of less interest to Richard, embellishments which could have been tailored to the whim of the cathedral authorities. It explained the bizarre parade of images, from huntsmen and clerics to references to the Roman emperors, which the artisan must have drawn together haphazardly from other maps and manuscripts he had seen.
    In the corner Maria saw that the dedication she had so painstakingly cleaned on the Mappa Mundi was also missing, so it too must have been the work of the artisan rather than the master himself. Richard must have visited the cathedral to discuss the commission but had clearly not been present at the dedication. It solved the mystery of how the misnamed continents had been allowed to remain, mistakes Richard would surely never have countenanced. She felt a pang of disappointment as she looked at the blank space, a sense that Richard was no longer so securely in her grasp, that he had stepped back into the shadowlands of the past.
    As Jeremy shifted slightly, she realised that the mottled brown and yellow of the parchment where the dedication should have been held a defined shape.
    “Angle it towards the light,” she said. “There’s something here.”
    The faded image of a drawing came into view. It was another landmass, an irregular image not much larger than the British Isles wedged into the corner of the parchment.
    “It’s beyond the outer ocean surrounding the world, so it can’t be part of the map,” she said. “It must be Richard’s sketch for one of the continents. Look, you can see where he used his knife to scrape away the ink to try to erase it.”
    Jeremy was craning his head over for a better view, his lank blond forelock hanging directly in front of Maria’s face.
    “I’m not so sure,” he murmured. “It’s somehow vaguely familiar, but not from the Mappa Mundi. Perhaps if I saw it the right way up I might get a better…”
    As his words trailed