surround it, spreading out as far as the raptured eye could reach.” Those are words that Robert Graves in Claudius the God has Herod Agrippa, King of the Jews, saying to his Queen Cypros. I’ve always remembered that description, since I first read Graves as a boy. Herod has always been thought of as anti-Christian, the man who ordered the execution of St James, but to me those words could have been an ancient Christian image of heaven.’
‘You’re talking about Herod Agrippa, friend of Claudius?’ Costas said.
‘That’s the one.’
Costas scanned the courtyard. ‘So if this villa is an accurate replica of the place where Claudius ended his days, he didn’t give up on life’s pleasures completely,’ he said.
‘He had all this to look out on, sure, but I doubt whether he would have cared less,’ Jack replied. ‘As long as he had his books and his statues of his beloved father and brother, he’d probably have been content to eke out his days in a sulphurous cave somewhere up on Mount Vesuvius.’
‘Claudius?’ Morgan said, clearly mystified. ‘Which Claudius?’
‘The Roman emperor Claudius,’ Costas said.
‘Jeremy didn’t mention any emperors.’ Morgan paused, then eyed Jack quizzically. ‘I think you’ve got some explaining to do.’
‘We have,’ Jack smiled. ‘Lead on.’
Morgan led them a few paces further to a room at the back of the portico. He opened the door, ushered them in and gestured at the marble table in the centre. ‘I had the cafe send up some things. Hungry?’
‘You bet.’ Costas launched himself at a plate of croissants, and Morgan poured coffee. After a few moments he gestured at three seats on one side of the table, and walked around to the other side with his coffee and sat down.
‘Okay.’ Jack sat in the middle chair, and leaned forward. ‘You know why we’re here.’
‘Jeremy filled me in. Or at least I thought he did.’ Morgan swivelled in his chair to face Jack, took a sip of his coffee and then set his cup down. ‘When Jeremy had his fellowship here we worked quite closely together, and when he called me yesterday he discovered I had an interest in Lawrence Everett. I’d always kept quiet about it, a private obsession of mine, but of course I told him when he asked. It’s an incredible coincidence, but a man like that can’t go completely underground as he might have wished. And I thought there couldn’t possibly be anyone else on his trail, but there was another enquiry this morning.’
Jack suddenly looked alarmed. ‘Who?’
‘No idea. Anonymous hotmail address.’
‘Did you reply?’
‘After my conversation with Jeremy yesterday, I felt it prudent to claim ignorance. But I sensed that this was someone who wouldn’t go away. Somehow they knew there was a connection here, with the Getty Villa. I checked the online ticket reservations for the museum, and someone with the same e-mail address booked a ticket for tomorrow.’
‘Could be a coincidence, as you say,’ Jeremy murmured. ‘I can’t see how they’d have known.’
‘Known what, exactly? Who are you talking about?’ Morgan said.
Jeremy was quiet for a moment, glanced at Jack and then looked back across the table. ‘You were right. I haven’t told you everything. But what I did tell you was true, that we think Everett had something extraordinary to hide, an early Christian manuscript. That’s the key thing. Let’s hear what you’ve got to say, then we’ll fill you in.’
Morgan looked perplexed. ‘I’ve got no reason to be secretive. My scholarship, the collections here are open to all. It’s the founding ethos of the museum.’
‘Unfortunately this has gone way beyond scholarship,’ Jack said. ‘There’s far more at stake here. Let’s hear you out, then we’ll bring you up to speed before we leave this room.’
Morgan pulled a document box towards him on the table. ‘Fair enough. I can start by giving you a potted biography.’
‘Fire away.’
‘The reason I know about Everett is that he tried to correspond with J. Paul Getty, the founder of the museum. The nuns who looked after Everett during his final illness found the Getty headed notepaper among his belongings, and some architectural drawings. They thought the museum might be interested. I stumbled across the box of papers when I was researching the early history of the Getty villa, and thought they might have some bearing on the Getty interest in antiquities.’ He opened up the box and carefully lifted out a handful of yellowed pages covered in words and figures in a precise, minute hand. He spread them out on the table in front of him, including one page with a ruled-out plan of an apsidal structure. ‘Everett was fascinated by mathematical problems, by the game of chess, crosswords. There’s lots of that kind of stuff here, most of it way beyond me. But before he came to America he’d been an architect, and there’s an unfinished manuscript I’ve been annotating for publication. He was interested in early Church architecture, in the earliest archaeological evidence for Christian places of worship.’
‘Fascinating,’ Jack murmured. ‘But why try to contact Getty?’
‘The two men had a surprising amount in common,’ Morgan replied. ‘Getty had studied at Oxford, Everett at Cambridge. Getty was a passionate Anglophile, and he might have been pleased to discover a kindred spirit in California. And both men had rejected their professional careers, Getty to be a millionaire philanthropist, Everett to be a Catholic ascetic. There may seem a world of difference between those two, but Everett’s correspondence shows that he’d liberated himself in much the same way. And there was a more particular reason.’
‘Go on.’
‘It was well known that Getty had been to Pompeii and Herculaneum before the First World War, had visited the site of the Villa of the Papyri, been fascinated by it. Hence the villa we’re in today. Then in the late 1930s Everett heard of an extraordinary new discovery at Herculaneum, and wanted Getty’s opinion. Everett was really intrigued by it, to the point of obsession.’
‘You mean the House of the Bicentenary?’ Jack said.
‘You guessed it.’
Jack turned to Costas. ‘I pointed it out to you on our quick tour of Herculaneum, when we arrived at the site last week.’
‘Another black hole, I’m afraid,’ Costas said ruefully. ‘I think I was still asleep.’
‘Bicentenary refers to the two hundredth anniversary of the discovery of Herculaneum, in 1738,’ Morgan said. ‘The 1930s excavation was one of the few to have taken place on any scale since the eighteenth century. Mussolini was behind it, part of his own obsession with all things Roman, though there seems to have been Church resistance to his more grandiose excavation schemes and the Herculaneum project was almost stillborn.’
‘Why does that not surprise me?’ Costas murmured.
‘They discovered a room which they called the Christian Chapel,’ Morgan continued. ‘They called it that because they found an inset cross shape in plaster above a wooden cabinet, which they thought looked like a prayer stand. In a house nearby they found the name David scratched on a wall. Hebraic names are not unusual in Pompeii and Herculaneum, but they’re usually Latinized. Jesus was thought to be a descendant of King David of the Jews, and some think the name David was a secret way the early Christians referred to him, before they started to use the Greek word for messiah, Christos.’ Morgan paused, and looked pensive. ‘These were very controversial finds, and plenty of scholars still don’t accept the interpretation, but it may be the earliest archaeological evidence anywhere for a place of Christian worship.’
‘Only a few hundred yards from the Villa of the Papyri,’ Jack murmured. ‘I wonder if Everett had any inkling, if he had any idea how close he was to the source of what he possessed.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Morgan asked.
‘First, let’s have the rest of your story,’ Jack said. ‘Do you have anything more on him?’
Morgan nodded, and slid a sheet of paper from the box across the table. ‘We don’t know whether Getty himself ever responded to Everett, or even knew about him. The headed notepaper we found was just an acknowledgement note from a secretary. But I like to think that Everett’s interest helped to fuel Getty’s continuing fascination with Herculaneum, in the years leading up to the creation of this villa. After that brief correspondence, Everett slid back into obscurity. This is the only image we have of him, an old photocopy of a picture taken by his daughter. She managed to discover his whereabouts and visit him in 1955, the year before he died. I traced her to a care home in Canada, where she’d emigrated from England, and got hold of this.’
Jack peered at the grainy black-and-white image, the details almost washed out. In the centre was an elderly
