Free The Inheritance by Simon Tolkien Page A

comprehension that he could be so indifferent to what had been taken from him. Did he know more than he was saying? about Cade’s death? about the codex? and the cross? Suspicion creased her brow.
    “Look, I can’t even hold a cup of tea properly in my hand,” said Blayne, gesturing with his shaking hand.
    “I know,” she said. “I know.” She felt foolish for a moment, ashamed ofherself, looking down at her father’s ravaged body. She felt as if her long, fruitless search for codex and cross had started to make her see shadows in even the brightest corners.
    “I just want to have you and for you to be happy. That’s all,” said Blayne.
    It was hard to resist the appeal in his quavering voice or the tears glistening in his eyes, but Sasha’s face hardened, and she turned away from her father. Her jaw was set, and her lips folded in on themselves. She looked almost ugly.
    “I have to find it,” she said quietly. “I’ve gone too far to stop now.”
    Father and daughter looked deep into each other’s eyes for a moment before Andrew Blayne let go of Sasha’s sleeve and allowed his head to fall back against the sofa. He seemed to concentrate all his attention on a stain on the corner of the ceiling, and he kept his gaze fixed there even when he started speaking again.
    “Perhaps you’re wasting your time,” he said. “Perhaps Cade never even had the codex.”
    “But I know he did,” said Sasha passionately. “That’s why this diary is so important. Look, let me show it to you. You remember that he supposedly hired me to help him with research for his book on illuminated manuscripts?”
    “The magnum opus.”
    “Exactly. But he didn’t really care about that at all. He was obsessed with St. Peter’s cross. He kept sending me to this library and that, looking for clues. But it was a wild-goose chase, and I think he half knew that deep down. He was like a man who’s followed a trail to its logical end and found nothing there. He goes back, taking every side turn that he passed before but without any faith that they’ll lead anywhere.”
    “And he needed you because he couldn’t do his own research. Because he wouldn’t go out.”
    “Yes, he was always frightened,” said Sasha. “But the interesting part was that he was always looking for the cross in any place except the one where it ought to be.”
    “In Marjean?”
    “Yes. It was like he already knew it wasn’t there. I tested him once. I showed him the John of Rome letter. It was a risk that he’d connect me with you, but I don’t think he did. I said that I’d found a copy in the BodleianLibrary. But he wasn’t interested. He said it was a false trail. A waste of time.”
    “I remember you telling me that,” said the old man, becoming increasingly interested in spite of himself. “I was the one who showed him the letter back in 1936 when I thought we were friends. He pretended not to be interested then too.”
    “Except that he was,” said Sasha excitedly, pointing to an entry in the diary. “Here it is. May thirteenth, 1936. He’s copied out the whole of your translation, word for word.” Sasha held up the yellowed document covered with spidery blue handwriting that she’d snatched from Silas in the car. “Here’s your copy and that’s his. They’re the same.”
    Blayne took the manuscript in his trembling hand and began to read it aloud. The hoarseness seemed to go out of his voice, and Sasha felt herself transported back five hundred years, out of her father’s disordered attic room in Oxford to a wood-panelled library in the Vatican.
    Another old man in a black monk’s habit was writing a letter, dipping his quill in the inkwell at the top of his sloping mahogany desk. The sunshine sparkled on the Tiber and illuminated the parchment across which his old bony hand was moving steadily from side to side.
My dear brother in Christ
,
Let me tell you then what I know of the cross of Saint Peter. It has long been lost, but