Chapter 11
“Notebooks?” Magda exclaimed. “That’s all he left behind? Page after page of doodles and ramblings?”
Hurt sharpened her voice. She was impatient and just wanted to get home, and now this. The monk had disappeared again, and all that was left of him were some small bound notebooks, a sheaf of yellowed vellum, and innumerable bits of scattered sketches and papers.
It seemed the men of King’s College had more than heard of Brother Lonan; they’d housed him for a number of weeks prior, as they did many of the scholars who came for study, drawn by the silence of the vast library collections, or the academic camaraderie of noisy philosophical arguments over meals.
Lonan had favored the former, sticking primarily to the library and to the dimly lit cell that was his temporary bedroom.
“Now, hen, don’t lose heart. There may be some clue, aye?”
He sat next to her, Lonan’s thin woven cot creaking under the added weight. The room was a cramped rectangular space with walls of damp stone, lit by a single small slit open to the outside. The only furniture besides the cot was a rough-hewn oak desk.
Lonan’s fellows had been baffled by the man’s sudden disappearance, and more so by the fact that he’d left behind his prized journals.
Magda pored through them, both baffled and increasingly enthralled by what amounted to hundreds of pages of cramped writing.
Despite the thick blots of black ink that stained most every page, his notes were remarkably legible, if not utterly coherent tracts on everything from Greek musical scales to cycles of the Viking calendar.
But it was Lonan’s sketches that transfixed her.
She recognized a number of patterns plucked straight from ancient art history.
Chevrons rimmed many of the pages, the tightly drawn arrows stacked atop each other, hemming in his notes with their mad repetition.
Many sheets bore what Magda knew were meanders, interlocking lines and boxes looking like miniature mazes that intertwined and repeated with seeming infinity.
There were other maze shapes as well. Sanskritic swastikas—like those the Nazis had subverted—marched across the pages.
Lines branched out from many of the swastika shapes, forking off at right angles to create elaborate labyrinths.
And over and over the same image appeared amongst the patterns. That of a snake eating its tail.
“He’s mad.” James’s harsh whisper echoed off the dank cell walls.
“Or brilliant. Look.” Excitement twinged Magda’s voice.
“Maybe it’s just because I’m looking for it, but”—she riffled through the pages with increasing speed—“all these symbols represent time.
Like the swastika here: For many ancient peoples this was a sacred symbol of the equinoxes, or a representation of the sun, moon, and stars, or the passing of the seasons.
“Or these Egyptian symbols: The obelisk, this crescent moon, all represent the passing of time.”
“What of this? It’s common for the old Scots.” James pointed to an elaborate interweaving of vines and dragons. “I’ve seen its like on the old stone crosses.”
As she flipped farther along in the notebook, the Celtic designs that James had noted began to lose their detail. Drawn in an increasingly primitive manner, they eventually morphed in the final pages into the single image of a serpent swallowing its tail.
“Or this.” Magda ran her finger over the circle made by the snake’s body.
“Aye, he seems to favor that one.”
The drawings became even more rudimentary until, on the last page, all that remained was a circle, with a crudely rendered female figure at its center.
Greek symbols dotted the shape, and underneath Brother Lonan had written a single phrase.
“As many points on a single wheel, Time abides.”
James silently damned Lonan. He needed to help Magda back to her own time, and the brother alone held the key. Though his notebooks had been intriguing, they were useless without their author.
His country was on the brink of war. It was a dangerous place for any woman, not to mention a foreign lass with no notion of how to survive. Magda had no friends, no family. Nobody but him to rely on, and he was off to a battle from which he might not return.
He’d been letting himself get too comfortable with her, increasingly finding himself looking forward to talking to her, and to the challenge of goading a smile onto that bonny face of hers.
Now he feared he was getting too close, and felt the need to send her back to her own time with sudden urgency.
When he was by her side, the sensation of some epic change glimmered vague on the edges of his mind, some unrealized potential that was just within his grasp. And the feeling scared him.
He would not cast Magda out to face the Fates alone. No, he would keep her close until he could see her ushered home to safety. And not just for her own protection, but for his own good as well.
He could not forget his duty to his country.
He had pressing responsibilities, his own world and his own time, going to hell on the throne of Charles.
He needed to focus on Aberdeen. Then afterward he’d return to his home by the sea, and his golf and books and other pursuits.
He might even finally let his family find him a decent match among the fine flowers of Montrose.
James would remember what he was about. And that was not a wayward lass from a distant land.
“These . . . what do they call themselves now?”
“I know not, Your Highness.” The painter stepped back to admire his work. Never had he met a person so besotted with his image as this king of England. In fact, the whole of the English court kept him busy with their commissions, and he’d not enjoyed an idle day since his arrival from Antwerp.
“Flemish you may be,” King Charles scolded, “but you are in my court now, and best you begin following the goings-on. I talk of the Covenanters, man. I call them spoiled whelps in the midst of a tantrum.” The king waved his hand impatiently.
“Parliament chafes under my reign; these Lowland nobles buzz about like flies. They are all children, the lot of them.”
Charles once again fluffed the lace at his collar. “Tell me, Anthony, what does a good father do when a child has a tantrum?”
The court painter Van Dyck remained silent, merely continuing to look from subject to canvas and back again.
He was used to the king’s outbursts, and knew his questions were merely rhetorical.
The man seemed to use the time he sat for his portrait as an opportunity to think aloud, working through the growing conflicts: with the Church, with Scotland, with Parliament.
Charles seemed to be having a run of missteps that was slowly tripping up the whole of his kingdom.
“A good father ignores the tantrum, Anthony. But when pressed”— Charles shifted out of his pose to face the painter directly—"when pressed, the father has no choice but to discipline the child.”
He shifted back into his pose, chest puffed and back arched to elongate his short stature as much as possible.
“Aberdeen shall be my test. My children fight all around me, but I shall be the good father and step back. To see what happens in Aberdeen will tell us which way the wind blows.”