One plate was missing.
He maneuvered the mouse to a row of smaller images that towered on the right side of the screen and double-clicked. The screen filled with a close-up of one of the plates. The etchings depicted three soldiers toting long shields with bosses, one sounding a boar-headed trumpet.
He clicked on three more of the smaller images.
The enlargements revealed more warriors, boats, battle scenes.
One panel depicted death.
At the end was a narrative.
This vessel was found by a man cutting peat in Yorkshire sometime around 1857. The soil had preserved the silver remarkably well, along with the artistic depictions. Its purpose was surely ritual, hardly suitable for holding liquid, and the elaborate internal decoration on the plates would discount drinking as one of its preferred uses. It would seem illogical to craft something with such care only to expose it to caustic liquids. Investigation reveals the bowl to be Celtic. The serpent with ram’s horns, the torcs worn by deities, and the stags and boar were all regular components of Celtic art. The depiction of the sea creatures and other oddities confirms that this was an accounting of a great event, memorialized in the only permanent way for the 5th to 6th century CE, which is an accurate dating for the vessel’s creation.
This bowl remained with a private collector until recently, when Nigel Yourstone purchased it. We believe this occurred because of a discovery, happened on by chance, at the National Museum in Reykjavik, where Yourstone found the missing panel from the cauldron. It was displayed with an assortment of objects that had been unearthed in Iceland over the past 300 to 400 years. The curator of the museum attached no special significance to the etched silver panel other than to note that it helped establish a 6th-century connection among Ireland, England, and Iceland. The curator thought nothing of that connection since historians have long known Irish monks routinely ventured across the northern Atlantic to Iceland on religious retreat during the 5th, 6th, and 7th centuries. Yourstone visited the museum and photographed the panel extensively. With all of the panels in hand, our experts note that he now may be able to complete the message the cauldron was designed to convey.
Malone recalled what had been said at Buckingham Palace about the dead publisher who’d requested an audience with the queen.
He spoke of Arthur.
But how did that fit with this cauldron?
His next move was clear.
Time to pay a visit to Lord Nigel Yourstone.
CHAPTER FOUR
Yourstone dialed the phone resting on the corner of his desk. The line on the other end was answered after the third ring and he said, “We have a problem.”
The gravelly voice seemed unsurprised.
Over the course of the last decade they’d routinely communicated, the voice supplying otherwise unobtainable information—Yourstone ensuring that the resulting scathing stories about the Prince of Wales appeared in the media. The story about Richard’s presence at Lauder Place with the daughter of Lord Bryce had come to light thanks to the man on the other end of the phone.
“My and Lord Bryce’s comments on the monarchy will make an excellent story for tomorrow,” Yourstone said. “Buckingham Palace will have to make some sort of statement, and there’s the next day’s story. The media can then rerun the tryst photos with a comment from the darling-daughter-Bryce the following day.”
“I do believe you’ve come to both understand and appreciate this sordid business.”
“All I want is for that bloody peckerhead to be as welcome as yesterday’s coffee.”
“Such resentment for our future king Richard.”
“I hope such a title is never attached to that man’s name.”
“Based on the latest polls, you’re not alone in that sentiment.”
He’d read the same statistics. “I’ve always possessed a great deal of faith in the English people.”
There had been four Saxe-Coburg monarchs. The line was created in 1840 when Victoria I married a German prince of the Saxe-Coburg line. Edward VII, Victoria I’s eldest son, became the first Saxe-Coburg ruler. His son, George V, toyed with the idea during World War I of changing the family name to Windsor—a way to distance the royals from marauding Germans—but never did. The next son was Victoria’s father. But his sympathy to Germany in World War II, while Hitler’s bombs exploded over London, made him extremely unpopular. Victoria II was actually the first of the Saxe-Coburg line to rule with both popular support and no cloud of scandal.
Richard, though, had clearly inherited his grandfather’s weakness for women and a political ineptness.
His public gaffes were legendary.
Once he characterized the greenhouse effect as poppycock. He then recommended that all of the old terrace houses and Georgian buildings of London be razed and replaced with more modern structures. He openly criticized the gentry for driving gas guzzlers while being chauffeured about in a Bentley that offered less than ten miles per gallon. He regularly consulted a psychiatrist and gulped down antidepressants, neither fact he thought private enough to ever refuse comment upon.