Chapter 7 Rhys
Rhys
After Rhys left their unexpected houseguest asleep in a bedroom far away from the other guests, he marched straight to his suite of rooms where the painting was hidden in the back of his changing room closet.
He took it out from its hiding place and removed the cloth draping it.
His eyes raked over the canvas, studying the woman’s graceful profile, the quarter moon of her face.
She was turned away from the viewer, giving only the glimpse of a smile.
A smile meant for a lover. Rhys had never been able to ask his father who she was—or if she existed at all.
The only clue was the painting’s title and date inscribed on the back:
How had she arrived at the labyrinth? And how had she come to possess such a diary?
His father had known so many people, both alchemists and antiquarians in England and abroad.
Had her family lent it to him? Rhys had yet to keep his promise to read it.
Which is why he decided it would be best to skip tonight’s dinner party altogether and go to the library.
He could visit with the guests tomorrow.
With barely a guilty conscience at being such a horrible host, he sent his regrets through the butler, saying he had an urgent matter to attend to. He did not share the matter was a book.
He headed to the east wing, well away from the bustle of the staff and guests.
The library had been his and his father’s favorite room, a vast space with vaulted ceilings holding one of the largest collections of historical texts and rare manuscripts in Europe.
His father had collected them like candy, including an assortment of alchemy manuscripts spanning the last five centuries.
The library even boasted having the coveted thirteenth-century text The Sum of Perfection in its collection, written by a Franciscan monk from southern Italy who had found great success tinkering in his laboratory.
The man’s opus was considered the bible of modern science where he’d detailed how to refine metals—and somehow known matter was made of invisible particles.
His revolutionary ideas helped pave the scientific revolution occurring in Rhys’s lifetime.
Other treasures gracing Hereford’s library were worth a fortune as well, which is why Rhys had been considering selling off the collection.
He had even extended a house party invitation to a colleague from the Historical Society.
Lord Erickson, a lofty baron, had arrived armed with his quizzing glass to appraise the alchemy texts over the course of the week.
Rhys had yet to speak with the man, and instead of showing Lord Erickson the library this evening as he had planned, he came alone.
The room welcomed him with its familiar scents of old leather, parchment, and beeswax polish. A hint of apple spice cake wafted from the tea tray a footman had just delivered.
Settling in at his desk in the alcove, Rhys got out a clean notebook, inks, and his dictionaries to conduct his translation.
Then he opened the hidden puzzle drawer.
The diary gleamed in the lamplight, and he was hit by a strange melancholy.
He had not opened this drawer since his father died.
Nor had he kept his word to translate the diary. But he would rectify that at once.
He laid the book in question front and center on his desk, again captivated by the cover’s beauty. The intricate carved triskelion of three interlocking spirals looked like a labyrinth itself.
If the diary was indeed authentic and penned by Merlin’s sister, the ramifications would be extraordinary.
Merlin was not only a most celebrated Bard from antiquity with a life steeped in myth and legend, he also had been one of the last Druids—and Druids never wrote down their history.
They were notoriously secret in safeguarding their esoteric knowledge.
Merlin had lived at the end of the Dark Ages, at the very edge of the country’s recorded history.
But even with all the lore attributed to him, little was known about the man.
If his twin sister truly had written about their lives, an actual memoir, Rhys couldn’t imagine what it might say.
The Old English text spread out before him like a treasure map, and for the first time in a long time, he felt the old thrum of excitement stir his blood.
He settled into the first page, ignoring the goose bumps trailing up his arms. He told himself he would translate only a page or two tonight—until he began to read, and the cavernous depths of the past opened its mouth up wide and beckoned him inside.