The Messiah Secret by James Becker Read Free Book Online

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 wasalready a lot of interchange between the Middle East and the other eastern nations by the first century AD . But why was it in a sealed jar?’
    ‘No one knows. As for what it said, when Bartholomew received the various bits of translated text and tried to assemble them into a whole, he discovered that it was part of a much larger text that described a journey in an unnamed part of the world called the “Valley of the Flowers”, which was presumably somewhere in Persia or modern-day Iran.’
    ‘Because of the language the writer used?’
    ‘Yes. But what also caught Bartholomew’s attention was a phrase. Something the writer referred to as “the treasure of the world”.’
    ‘Of course,’ Angela said. ‘Roger Halliwell told me there was a kind of lost treasure story attached to this family, I presume this is it?’
    Mayhew laughed. ‘Yes. And because Bartholomew was such a nutter, it was enough to send him off on a whole series of expeditions to the Middle East that—’
    ‘Whereabouts in the Middle East?’
    ‘Iran, obviously, because of the Persian text, but quite possibly Iraq and God knows where else in the region. All his expeditions were completely fruitless, of course. Anyway, that’s what became known as “Bartholomew’s Folly”, because he ran through most of the family’s fortune searching for this so-called treasure. When he finally popped his clogs, he left his son with massive debts,and Oliver had to sell off a whole lot of antiques and most of the land he’d inherited just to stave off bankruptcy. The couple of hundred