The Lazarus Prophecy by F. G. Cottam Read Free Book Online Page B

A small part of him felt remorseful at having humiliated three feeble old men. It had been a necessary process but when you attacked people without themeans to retaliate it could justifiably be described as bullying. The role of bully was not one with which he felt comfortable.
    They seemed happier, or at least relieved, when he put Daniel Barry’s account carefully into his rucksack. Their secrets were safe with him. He had told them the truth about that. Their beliefs and the purpose of their order would do untold damage to the credibility of the Church should any of their antics be exposed as duties practiced until as recently as seven or eight weeks ago.
    â€˜Make sure that they are obeying my explicit instructions,’ the Cardinal had said. ‘If there is further damage, do what you can to conceal and limit it. We will have of course to close the priory and dissolve the order and disperse them and reintegrate each of them individually into the true faith over the next few months. But in the first instance, their strict obedience is the most important thing, that and their silence.’
    Cantrell felt he could leave quite satisfied for the present. He felt magnanimous enough to eat their mountain cheese and home baked loaves with them in their stove-warmed kitchen and to sip more of the cold well water that had earlier satisfied his thirst. They offered him wine as their guest. But he refused it because the descent he faced to the meadow where he’d left the Jeep was long and arduous and required sobriety.
    He wondered about their individual natures and backgrounds. Dominic was not what the Americans would have called the sharpest knife in the drawer. Stephen was the most openly defiant of authority. Philip was their leader, more intelligent and pragmatic than the other two, someone whose intellectual gifts might, in other circumstances, have been useful in Rome. He could have seen Philip in the role of a Vatican diplomat, had the self-delusion of his calling not caused him to waste his vocation and life.
    They had each wasted their lives, he thought, chatting pleasantly with them, a smile on his face, his compliments about the quality of the bread provoking a smirk from Brother Dominic, who had kneaded the flour and yeast and done the baking, he was modestly informed.
    He paused as the heavy wooden door slammed juddering in its stone frame against his back, with the world a panorama before him of fluffy clouds and bleak rock gullies still smearedthis high by stretches of winter snow. He turned and saw the home the three old men shared once more as a forbidding rampart erected on deceit, defending malign and covert practices.
    For a moment it occurred to him that they might simply have lied about their obedience to the Cardinal’s command. It would be difficult to abandon rituals faithfully observed over a lifetime of self-denial. It would make all that suffering seem futile. He turned back to the vastness of the view and shook his head. They would not risk exile from the Kingdom of Heaven, would they? That was, for men like them, too terrible a price to think about having to pay.
    Pride, ego, ligaments, muscles, spirit, sinews: there wasn’t a single part of her that didn’t hurt. She left the rehearsal studio in Covent Garden with the vet-smell of embrocation rising from the sorest bits of her severely abused body. She decided she would walk to the flat she had recently rented for herself and the children in Pimlico. If she cut south along Catherine Street she could cross the Strand and do most of the journey with a view to her left of the river.
    It was eight o’clock in the evening and nowhere near dusk yet. It had been a sunny day. It had been a hard afternoon at the barre. The piano pieces she’d rehearsed to still rang vibrantly in her ears. She had almost forgotten that the piano was of course a percussion instrument. Four hours of its loud and relentless prompting had been an