The Sword of the Templars Read Online Free PDF Page A

filled with a long, highly polished dining room table flanked by eight high-backed chairs upholstered in blue morocco leather. There was an ornate morini bowl of wax fruit as a centerpiece that was as dusty as everything else in the house.
    “It always made me nervous eating in here,” said Peggy. “All those glass eyes watching me.”
    “He bought the whole thing from a small-town natural history museum that was closing its doors,” said Holliday. “He was never into birds or animals really. He told me he’d picked it up at an auction for next to nothing. It was the bargain that attracted him.”
    “Was he working on anything?” Peggy asked. “I’ve been out of touch.”
    “Me, too,” said Holliday. “I hadn’t talked to him in quite a while. The last time we spoke he’d just come back from some sort of research jaunt to Oxford. I think it was just an excuse to see some of his old friends from before the war. That was more than a year ago. I really don’t know what he was up to. He always had some sort of project going.”
    They moved into the library. It was a magnificent room, the walls lined with arch-topped fruitwood bookcases, the spaces in between hung with fantastic oil paintings of medieval battle scenes done by long-forgotten artists. There was a wrought iron chandelier hanging from the dark oak coffered ceiling, and the floor was covered with a gigantic tree of life-pattern Persian carpet done in shades of rose and deep blue.
    There was a functional desk set at an angle in one corner, several comfortable old fan-backed club chairs upholstered in faded velvet that had once been red but that had worn down through the years to a faded pink, a small couch, and Henry’s personal chair, a giant green leather monstrosity that looked as though it had been spirited out of a nineteenth-century English men’s club. There was a conveniently placed pole lamp with a fringed shade and a side table at the chair’s right hand, just the perfect size for a book and a late-night tipple of sherry, or perhaps a small tumbler of Henry’s favorite single malt.
    The chair stood just beyond the hearth of the plain, practical fireplace. Above the fireplace was a signed mezzotint by the apocalyptic British artist John Martin, showing the fall of Babylon in desperate, murderous detail, complete with a tiny Assyrian priest being scorched by bolts of divine lightning descending from boiling, wrathful thunderheads above the ancient temple. There was a quotation in Italian printed within the frame. Holliday quoted it from memory; it had been Uncle Henry’s credo:
    “Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra
    traffito da un raggio di sole:
    ed č subito sera.”
    “Which means?” Peggy asked.
    “Every one of us stands alone on the heart of the
    earth,
    Transfixed by a beam of sun;
    And suddenly it is evening.”
     
    “Easy for you to say,” quipped Peggy.
    “It’s from a poem called ‘It Is Now Evening’ by Salvatore Quasimodo.”
    “The hunchback?”
    “The Italian poet. He won the Nobel Prize, if I remember correctly. Henry met him in Rome after the war.”
    “Sad,” said Peggy, staring up at the print above the fireplace.
    “Not to Uncle Henry.” Holliday shrugged. “To him it was a caution: your time on earth is brief, don’t waste it. Death comes to us all. Every day is a gift.”
    “And it came to Grandpa in the end,” sighed Peggy, slumping down into the big green chair.
    Holliday went to the desk and sat down in Uncle Henry’s old-fashioned wooden swivel chair. The desk was a massive oak rectangle, the twin pedestals roughly carved with trails of ivy and shapes of birds and small forest animals. There was a large, leather-edged blotter on the top surface and a green-shaded brass banker’s lamp to light it.
    The wood was dark, worm-eaten, and polished by time, the edges of the pedestals worn and chipped. Holliday had always assumed that the desk had been made from the remains of a shipwreck, although