Sir Bedford sighed. Perhaps Linley was right. He was a tired old man. In his day, the notion of falling in love was as preposterous as jumping off a cliff and flapping paper wings, expecting to fly like the birds.
“Forgive me if I’m old fashioned, Button, but I cannot let you turn yourself inside-out over someone who will forget about you as soon as he gets back home.”
“Papa!”
“You cater to him like he is a god. For Christ’s sake, you got down on your hands and knees and washed the man’s dirty underclothes.”
Linley turned scarlet.
“Do you think he would do the same for you?” her father asked. “Do you?”
“I don’t know.”
Sir Bedford put his arm around his daughter’s shoulders. “Some people are meant for homes and families, but not us. Our dreams are not their dreams. I understand it can be a lonely life we lead, but who else can say they have seen the things we’ve seen? Done the things we’ve done? In our own way, we live twice the lives they live.” He lowered his voice to a whisper, as if sharing some secret meant only for them. “Lord Kyre has had his grand adventure. Now he will go home, marry some Earl’s dull daughter, and spend the rest of his days growing fat and gouty while you are off discovering lost civilizations.”
In spite of it all, Linley choked out a laugh. No way in the world would she trade this life for one spent bandaging Patrick’s feet!
But it had never been her intention to marry him in the first place.
Despite her father’s protests, Linley intended to enjoy Patrick while she had him. This was her one—and perhaps, only—chance at a fling. The fling of a lifetime. A real romance. She would savor every moment of it, and when he left, she could carry the memory of him for the rest of her life. This would be better than a photograph. This would be an experience.
She could excavate statues and search for relics until she was seventy, but unless she went out and experienced the world as it really was, Linley felt certain she was not living at all. Merely pretending. She wanted to see everything, and feel everything, and know everything. Even if it broke her heart to do it.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Patrick took a seat at the long, low table for breakfast. He helped himself to the simple meal offered to the English visitors. The entire Talbot-Martin team stared at him. He actually seemed pleased to sit on a hard bench and eat with his hands out of a little bowl.
The monks ate in silence, using their one meal of the day to feed both their bodies and their spirits. Out of respect for their beliefs, the English visitors ate silently as well. It would be very difficult to adjust his eating and sleeping habits to coexist with the teachings of Buddha and the practices of the monks, but Patrick did not want to seem ungrateful for being taken in and fed by those who had so little to give.
After breakfast, the monks spent a few hours in prayer and then a few more hours reading from sacred texts. These texts did not appear to be the ones the Talbot-Martin team searched for, but Sir Bedford seemed no less discouraged. By mid-day, the monks sat in quiet meditation. The English visitors grew bored and restless. Most of them, for lack of anything else to do, retired to their rooms to nap.
Patrick, on the other hand, wandered around the monastery, marveling at the artwork and prayer wheels made by the Buddhist monks over the centuries. He walked quietly down the narrow, sunlit corridors, through the dim rooms, and in the courtyard between the buildings.
At the end of a long corridor, he found Linley’s father sneaking between walls of carefully preserved ancient scrolls.
“I do not think you should be touching their texts,” Patrick said.
Sir Bedford raised a hand to silence him. “These scrolls are thousands of years old,” he said. “If someone like me does not show them to the world, they will disappear without anyone ever knowing about them. Is that what I should do, Lord Kyre? Let them continue to be hidden from the world? People should know what we’ve seen here.”
“No, they should not.”
Linley’s father stepped onto a footstool and reached for the scrolls on the highest shelf. He sifted through blocks and blocks of carefully wrapped ancient texts, handling them with the utmost caution. It would take days—weeks, even—to sort through them all, but Sir Bedford was certain the first-century scrolls were hidden somewhere in the monastery.
Disgusted, Patrick turned from the room. As he did so, he nearly crashed into the old lama as he padded down the corridor.
“I beg your pardon,” Patrick said, bowing.
The lama nodded his head in recognition of the young man. “You are restless.”
Patrick shrugged. Was he restless? He was not sure, but he was…something.
“You are not like the others,” the lama said. “What you here for?”
“Here for?”
“Yes, everyone here for something. What you here for?”
“I don’t know.”
The lama motioned for him to follow. They slipped into the room behind the great tapestry and took seats across from each other on the floor.
“You want know the purpose of life?”