The Layton Prophecy Read online

  I caught the look of surprise on his face. He recovered well, partly because Tracey arrived with a basket of bread rolls and two sets of cutlery wrapped inside paper napkins, giving Miles time to regain his composure while she set them on the table.

  When Tracey was gone, Miles shook his head slowly at me. “I’ve seen pictures of you. I’ve heard tales of you.” His full lips pursed. “Do you remember the stuffed polar bear you got for your tenth birthday?”

  I nodded. I wasn’t going to tell him that I still had it, and at times of extreme stress I slept with it, clutching the furry little animal tight to my chest.

  “I picked it out for you. Your father told me it was a success.”

  I stared at him. I could feel my lips moving, and yet no sound came out.

  Miles spoke carefully, as though afraid of upsetting me further. “I worked for your father during two summers before I went into the Navy. He was running a sailing school in Vancouver.”

  “How...how did you meet him?”

  “I’ve always known him.” Miles leaned back in his seat. His tone became distant. “Shortly after your father turned eighteen, that law firm in Oxford contacted him and told him about the Layton Trust. He came out to Seattle and looked up Francis. I was three at the time. After that, he kept in touch. When I was fifteen, he taught me to sail, and then he invited me to crew for him.”

  Tracey returned to deliver our food—salmon for me, a steak and kidney pie for Miles. Barely managing to mumble my thanks, I didn’t even attempt to return the conspiratorial smile she directed at me. As soon as her high heels clipped away across the floor, I turned to Miles.

  “You knew my father?” I repeated like an idiot.

  “Yes,” he said. “I knew him very well. On the ocean racing circuit, we spent weeks together in the closed confines of a sailing boat.” Miles used his knife to poke a hole in the crust of the pie on his plate, peeking inside. “In a way, I feel I know you too. He was always talking about you, showing me pictures of you and your mother.”

  I shook my head. “He didn’t get on with my mother. He had affairs.”

  Miles threw a puzzled glance at me. “Not as far as I know. I never saw him with another woman.”

  “There were pictures. My mother spotted them in some sailing magazine. He’d won a race, and he was photographed with a ravishing brunette, his arm around her. When my mother confronted him, he refused to talk about it. Later, she found more pictures of the same woman.”

  Miles reached into his back pocket and pulled out a battered leather wallet. “Was this the woman?” He extracted a snapshot and handed it to me.

  I inspected the photograph before returning it to him. “Yes. That’s her.” Unhappy childhood memories added an edge to my voice.

  He slotted the snapshot back into the wallet. Rather than reach for his pocket again, he left the wallet on the table. “That was my mother. She’s twenty years older than your father, but she looks damn good for her age. They were friends. She treated him like another son. Your father welcomed it, since he was on bad terms with his own parents.”

  “But—”

  “Your father never had other women,” Miles said with emphasis.

  “Then why did he let my mother think so? Why didn’t he explain?”

  Miles shrugged. “Perhaps he tried to, but she chose not to listen.”

  “He was never at home.”

  “Perhaps your mother didn’t want him there.”

  “Are you telling me that I’ve had it wrong about my father all these years?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “All I know is that I have your father’s side of the story, and you have your mother’s, and the two don’t match.”

  “My father was never around,” I complained, feeling forlorn. “He never told me about you, or about Francis and Cleopatra. After my grandparents died, there was no need to worry about hurting their feelings. There was no reason to hide the fact that my father was Martin Layton’s natural son.”

  Miles reached across the table and laid his hand over mine. “As far as I knew, it was your mother who didn’t want him to tell you. She already felt abandoned, with him away so much, and you spending the holidays with your aunt. She worried that you’d set roots even more strongly in Layton Village and she’d be even more alone.”

  When my parents met, my mother had aspired to be a portrait painter, and my father been studying for his Yacht Master Certificate. My mother had expected to become the wife of a cruise line captain, but instead, my father had opted for an ocean racing career that provided him with thrills but didn’t bring in enough money to support his family. My mother ended up working as a booking clerk for cross channel ferries in order to pay the household bills.

  Tears stung my eyes, and I surveyed Miles through the haze they made. I wasn’t sure if I was grieving for my father, or feeling sorry for my mother, or just giving in to a sense of loss for not having known sooner about my extended family. A single tear brimmed over and ran down my cheek. I didn’t want to pull my fingers from his warm grasp, so I wiped the wetness away with my left hand.

  “Have you finished your meal?” Miles asked.

  I glanced down at my salmon. The creamy hollandaise sauce had congealed into a yellow coating around the fish and the vegetables. “I’m not hungry.”

  He gave my fingers a reassuring squeeze. “All right,” he said in his deep voice. “We’ll go back. We need to talk.”

  “We can talk here. I’m not going to burst out crying, or anything.”

  Miles let go of my hand and dropped a twenty pound note on top of the slip of paper Tracey had left on the table. “I have things I want to show you. And it’s not as if we aren’t going in the same direction anyway.”

  I gave him a resigned pout. “I guess that means you know that your landlady is my Aunt Rosemary.”

  “Hell,” he said. “I know her face as well as my own.”

  “How...?” I paused, too baffled to even form a sentence.

  “I had nightmares as a kid,” Miles explained, rising up and walking around to help me out of my chair. “Your father gave me a picture of her dressed as a fairy for a school play. She had wings and a magic wand, and he told me she could twirl that wand and make all bad things go away. Until I was seven, I looked at that picture every night before I went to sleep. I thought that your Aunt Rosemary had greater powers than Superman, Batman and Spiderman combined.”

  After that, I believed he couldn’t tell me anything that would surprise me more.

  In less than one hour, I would find out how wrong I was.

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  Chapter Five

  It felt strange, entering my own home as a guest. I kicked off my shoes in the hall, and Miles did the same with his tan leather boots. I wondered if he was simply following my example, or if he would have done it anyway.

  “I’ll make coffee,” he told me. “You go and sit down. Put some music on.”

  It sounded like an order. Rather than point out that I knew my way around Rose Cottage kitchen better than he ever would, I drifted into the tiny living room and stood in front of the television set. I tried to assess if I could switch off the baby monitor without Miles noticing. Then I changed my mind. It would save time, if I didn’t have to brief Aunt Rosemary afterward.

  I picked up the remote control, pressed the power button and flicked through the channels. The summer renters had enticed Aunt Rosemary to subscribe to Sky TV. We now had endless programs to choose from, including radio stations. I found Classic FM and pressed ‘select’. The plaintive notes a violin concerto flowed into the room.

  Miles reappeared bearing two mugs filled with brown liquid that looked as thick as engine oil. “I don’t know how you like your coffee,” he said as he offered one to me.

  “That’s reassuring.” I accepted the mug with the picture of a cat on the side. Uncannily, he’d picked the one I normally favored. My hands curled around the hot surface. “I thought you knew everything a
bout me.”

  He ignored the jibe. “There’s milk and sugar on the table.” Nodding toward the white china bowl filled with long-life portion packs, he put down his mug and settled in one of the two-seater sofas facing each other. He took a moment to make himself comfortable, draping one muscular arm along the backrest and stretching out his legs, crossing them at the ankles. I sat down opposite him. He took his coffee black, which might explain why he had nothing better than the long-life milk.

  “There’s a lot I don’t know about you,” he said, inspecting me with his smoky eyes. He had a habit of raking his fingers through his black curls, which thoroughly mussed them up. I could tell he’d been doing it in the kitchen. If he hadn’t appeared so completely in charge, I’d have said it was nerves.

  I took a sip from my coffee and waited for him to make the next move.

  “I want to ask you a personal question, but I don’t want you to fly off the handle.” He held me in his scrutiny. “Will you promise to hear me out?”

  “You can ask, but that doesn’t mean I’ll answer.”

  He gave me a dark scowl. “I understand you’re not married.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Do you have a boyfriend?”

  “Not right now.”

  “Are you seeing anyone, even casually?”

  Irritation flared inside me, mixed with a vague sense of failure. I struggled to keep my voice even. “I can’t see why my social life would be any concern of yours.”

  “Humor me. Please.”

  My jaw tensed. “No one,” I said through my teeth. “Not right now.”

  “Good.” He adjusted his legs, appearing to relax. “That’s a relief.”

  “Relief to whom?” I fired back. “The male population of England?”

  His dark brows drew together. “You promised to hear me out.”

  I nodded, making an impatient sound in my throat.

  “Are you familiar with the Layton Prophecy?” he asked.

  “Of course I am. I spent summers in the village when I was a child.”

  “Write it down for me.” He twisted around to extract a pen and paper from the bookshelf at the end of the sofa and laid them down on the coffee table between us.

  “Why?” I contemplated him in challenge.

  “Just do it. Please.”

  I frowned, but picked up the pen and scrawled down the verses. Then I slid the piece of paper across the coffee table, turning it the right way up for him.

  He shunted the paper back to me. “Read it out.”

  I snatched up the sheet and recited the rhyme.

  Old Man Layton, he goes first

  Lost and lonely, dies of thirst

  Bonnie Maiden follows soon

  Love and marriage, that’s her doom

  Death is diamonds, curse is gold

  Those who seek them, won’t grow old

  Children, children, you be ware

  Heed this warning, leave it there

  “That’s it?” he said when I’d finished. “There’s no more?”

  I shook my head and slid the piece of paper back to him.

  “There is more,” he said. His voice dropped to a gentle murmur.

  Like a wheel, she starts again

  Crosses oceans, rejoins men

  When there's two, it happens twice

  Death with heat, with crystal ice

  Gold and diamonds, it’s all there

  One can get them, one who’ll care

  If they fail, don’t make amends

  The Layton line, there it ends

  I stared at him, puzzled and fascinated. “I’ve never heard that.”

  He picked up his coffee, blew into the murky depths and lowered the mug again without drinking. “The whole rhyme was forgotten for a long time. Almost three hundred years. Then Francis Layton got lost in South Africa in 1929. He died of thirst, and his daughter Cleopatra died in childbirth. The Layton Prophecy was revived. But only the first part became widely known. I found the second part in the Layton Archives.”

  “The Layton Archives?” I said.

  “The family papers. Diaries, letters, official documents. The prophecy was amongst them, written down in calligraphy on fine vellum.”

  The violin concerto ended, and the low, chanting sounds of Karl Orff’s Carmina Burana surrounded us. I picked up the remote control and turned down the volume before we got to the booming bits. “I’ve never heard of the Layton Archives.”

  Miles looked uncomfortable. “My mother took them with her when she returned to America. She thought there were no other Layton heirs except for my brother Francis, and she didn’t want to give the papers to the lawyers.”

  “Was she supposed to?”

  “Yes,” he said, shifting on the sofa. “It was against the conditions of the trust to remove anything from Layton Manor, but after the cave-in, the place was no longer habitable. Everything would have gotten ruined.”

  “What did she take?”

  Miles shrugged. “Everything that wasn’t nailed down. Furniture, paintings, rugs, porcelain. The only thing she left behind was the huge potted palms in the glasshouse at the back. The plants are dead now, but the pots are still there.”

  “I know. They’re metal, too heavy for anyone to carry off.” My mouth curled into a wry smile. “And if they appeared on someone’s patio, the rest of the village would know where they came from and there’d be a riot.”

  Miles slanted me a thoughtful glance. When he spoke, his tone was deliberate. “Francis offered to share everything with your father, you know. I heard him say it more than once.”

  My hands gripped the hot coffee. Images of the kind of treasures he’d just listed paraded through my mind. Furniture, rugs, porcelain. I loved the esthetic tradition of how practical things had throughout centuries evolved to combine purpose and beauty. I’d studied industrial design and art, in the hope of making that quest for attractive everyday objects into my profession.

  “What did my father say?” I asked.

  “He said that the chattels go with the title,” Miles replied. “They belonged to Francis, and if Francis died without issue, they’d belong to him. It was as simple as that. Although,” Miles added, a little awkward, “as illegitimate, your father wouldn’t of course have inherited the title. Now it’s gone into abeyance again.”

  I inspected the contents of my mug, hiding my resentment at my father’s stiff pride. I suspected he would have considered breaking the conditions of the trust as an act of charity. “It would have meant a lot to my mother,” I said quietly. “We never had much beyond the necessities.”

  Miles slid his gaze over me, regret shadowing his stern features. And there was something more, a hint of genuine distress over the fact that my mother and I had gone without, while he’d enjoyed access to what our shared ancestry had left behind.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Maybe one day I can make it up to you.”

  Heat swamped me at the husky, intimate tone in his voice, a tone that hinted at all kinds of possibilities between us. Up to now, I’d tried to ignore the attraction that had grown since he caught me breaking into Layton Manor. Now those feelings flooded out in full force. I knew I’d blushed. After the intrigue he’d used to secure us a table at the Royal Goat, his last comment seemed like flirting.

  But what about the woman he loved?

  Was he a man who liked to collect conquests?

  “It’s all right,” I told him, a little gruffly. “We didn’t starve.”

  He made a gesture with one hand, as if to brush the topic away. “Now that you know you’re a Layton, have you given any thought to what the prophecy might mean?”

  “Mean?” My chin jutted up. “Surely, it doesn’t mean anything?” I recalled the chuckling lawyer in Oxford, Simon Crosland. Children’s tales, he’d called it, and the dismissing tone in his voice still annoyed me.

  “I think it does,” Miles said. “I think it’s a potent source of evil that threatens the Layton l
ine. Unless broken, the curse will reach through generations, until there are no more living descendents of the Layton family on this earth.”

  “That’s...preposterous.” I wanted to laugh, but the laughter died in my throat as I met his dark, brooding gaze. “There are no curses,” I added, shrinking back against the sofa beneath his stubborn scowl.

  “Do you believe in the Bible?” Miles asked.

  “I...yes, I guess.”

  “The old testament is full of curses.” Miles picked up his coffee and paused to drink before continuing. “God cursed the serpent and the ground it slithers on, after Adam and Eve fell to sin. Women are cursed to suffer pain at childbirth, and men are cursed to toil for a living ‘by the sweat of their brow’. In Deuteronomy, chapter twenty-eight, the Bible talks about curses that span through generations. To quote, these curses shall come upon you and pursue you and overtake you, until you are destroyed. According to Christian teachings, many problems that run in families can be traced back to such curses. Serial accidents and unusual deaths are thought to happen because past generations broke one or more of God’s commandments, and the family became cursed as a result.”

  “But that’s mythology.” I waved my hand in dismissal. “The Bible expresses a moral code by using storybook concepts, such as curses, to dramatize the message that we must not sin.”

  “Are they really just storybook concepts?” Miles arched his brows. “If so, why does the Vatican have a bishop in charge of exorcism? Why does every diocese in your staid and dull Church of England employ a minister trained in deliverance? Why do so many primitive religions recognize the demonic power of certain individuals to bring evil onto others by using nothing but metaphysical means?”

  “I don’t know.” I found no clever words to dismantle the facts he’d put forward. It was clear that he possessed greater education and eloquence than I did and I’d lose any battle of wits between us before it had even truly begun. “So,” I said, my voice artificially bright, “if, as you claim, curses do exist, what does the Layton Prophecy mean, for me, as a member of the family?”