The Auguries by F. G. Cottam

Author:F. G. Cottam [Cottam, F. G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Severn House Publishers
Published: 2018-12-17T05:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-FIVE

The military base was at Paderborn, a 300-mile drive in a hire car from Berlin but the only place from which they could fly to the UK in the state of emergency that had downed all civilian flights in and out of the country. They’d set off early and reached the base at ten a.m. on Wednesday morning, Paul averaging over a hundred miles per hour at the wheel on the route. He might not have been a top-flight footballer, Juliet thought, but as far as his white-knuckled passenger was concerned, he certainly drove like one.

A Hercules aircraft was big, loud, prop-driven and, as Juliet discovered, completely free of creature comforts. It was five p.m. before they were picked up by a ministerial car at Heathrow and driven to their hotel. Juliet showered and changed, and Paul ordered a room service meal for each of them while she switched on her laptop and researched the man her Tudor specialist Oxford contact had told her was the likeliest to have commissioned Gunter Keller to mastermind the Almanac.

His name was Edmund Fleury and he was a baron. His lineage was Norman, an ancestor a knight and formidable warrior and one of the barons who had helped William the Conqueror achieve the victory at Hastings that gained him the English throne. In return for this service, Jean-Luc Fleury had been handed as his English estate a large slice of what was now Dorset. Almost 500 years later his direct descendant, Edmund, inherited as the eldest son.

Even by the standards of Tudor aristocracy, Edmund Fleury’s wealth was vast.

And he seemed to have been a true Renaissance man. He was an accomplished writer of sonnets. He’d designed buildings on his estate. He’d played and composed for the clavichord. And he’d been extremely enthusiastic about astronomy.

‘Not to mention running a variety of duellist opponents clean through with his pricey rapier,’ Paul said from behind her shoulder.

‘He didn’t need to run them through. He just needed to draw blood to settle an affair of honour. He was so handy with a sword he could apparently nick an opponent at will. Even he couldn’t have killed someone with impunity in peacetime. You needed to be the monarch to get away with that.’

‘And you needed the semblance of a trial,’ Paul said. ‘Thomas More. Anne Boleyn.’

‘You know your history.’

‘I just enjoy movies.’

Juliet read some more. Then she said, ‘Edmund Fleury isn’t quite adding up.’

‘He’s just your average clever blue-blooded psychopath,’ Paul said. ‘They were a fairly common breed, weren’t they? A bit of jousting, a bit of calculus, a dash of womanizing, some occasional warfare. I mean, there’s a theory Henry the Eighth wrote “Greensleeves”.’

‘What I mean is, he seems too rational to be the man who paid a fortune to have the Almanac compiled.’

‘I don’t know, Juliet. John Dee didn’t much differentiate between science and magic. Were there really any lines of demarcation before the Enlightenment?’

‘No. But there was an intolerance, religious and legal, of blasphemy, witchcraft and heresy.

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