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sequential, but they were definitely part of the Book of the Learned. The calligraphy was unmistakable, as was the style of the decorated capitals, a combination of pagan and Christian sensibilities that was unique to the manuscripts he described as Insular Celtic.
    There were four pages, both sides of two unbound sheets that looked like they had been removed from a bound manuscript. The last page had no writing. Its colors had been so badly reproduced that the painting was almost impossible to make out. Erik stared and kept on staring until he finally saw the images.
    A man and a woman in medieval dress.
    The man had sun-bright hair cut so that it would fit beneath a war helmet. His cloak floated on a breeze, revealing the chain-mail hauberk beneath. A peregrine falcon rode his left arm. At his feet lay a staghound the size of a pony. He was watching a woman weave on a loom that was taller than a man. Her unbound hair tumbled in a fiery torrent down her back to her knees. She was looking over her shoulder at him with eyes the color of woodland violets. Instead of castle walls, the two people were surrounded by a rain-drenched forest, as though nothing on earth existed but a man and a woman caught in the mists of time.
    More than anything else, the lifelike rendering of the people told Erik this was a secular rather than a religious manuscript. In the early twelfth century, the church was still so concerned about the possibility of idolatry that it insisted all representations of human figures be two-dimensional to the point of woodenness.
    Slowly Erik let out a breath he hadn’t even been aware of holding. Nor did he remember walking back up to his turret studio and studying the wretched color copies. Yet he must have done just that, because when he looked up he was in his studio and the copies were spread across the floor in a patch of sunlight.
    The woman’s hair, which he remembered as fiery, looked more like a wan taffy color. The man’s hair was equally faded. His clothes weren’t distinct. The proud peregrine was only a shapeless bundle on his left arm and the staghound could have been a mound of earth at his feet. Her incredible violet eyes had no color.
    Yet Erik had seen it so vividly. All of it, the sun-bright and the fiery, the violet and the gleaming links of chain mail, the peregrine and the sleeping staghound. He was as certain of it as he was of his own heartbeat.
    After a few moments Erik shook himself and came to his feet with the coordination of a man used to climbing rock faces. Without looking away from the copies, he picked up his phone and punched in the number at the top of the cover letter.
    No one answered. Not even a machine.
    He punched in Niall’s private number. Not his really private one, much less his most private one; but still, not the usual number.
    “What?” Niall snarled, his accustomed telephone greeting.
    “Tell Factoid that the woman who sent the color copies to the House of Warrick is called Serena Charters. She lives in Leucadia. She wants to know if the pages are worth a formal appraisal.”
    “Are they?”
    “Yes.” Sighing, Erik mentally kissed his next few Rarities Unlimited consulting fees good-bye. He should have done this years ago, but had been too stubborn. Too cheap, too, with the girls finishing off advanced degrees. “Also, I want a complete provenance search on some illuminated pages I own. I’ll forward the specifics to Gretchen. And yes, I’ll pay for a rush job.”
    “Bugger.” Niall sighed. “I’ll tell Dana that her favorite Fuzzy is off on a private quest.”
    “It shouldn’t take long.”
    “Neither does dying, boyo.”

Chapter 5
LEUCADIA
WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON
    L ocal tradition held that Serena’s house had been built by a man who had made his first million smuggling hashish during the Hippie Sixties. He had paid that million, plus a lot more in hashish, to his lawyer to keep him out of jail. As a result, house plans that had begun in grandeur