Transit of Mercury

Simon Jones

Description

Think you know who you are? Think again! Within 48 hours Tom Talbot goes from high-flyer to no-hoper, city banker to jobless fraudster, pinstripe commuter to terror suspect. His dog is killed and his home is ransacked, a ghostly Tibetan monk and an enigmatic Oxford professor give him tantalising glimpses of a forgotten destiny.As well as an identity crisis of Jungian proportions, visions of the past link him to a girl murdered on the Silk Road, the gifts of the Magi and the house of Medici.Concurrently, in New York, young hotshot lawyer Miranda Maddingley learns that her wealthy uncle has died suddenly, leaving his fortune to a cousin she's never heard of, and leaving her with just an old ring. Smelling a rat, she tries to contact her cousin but learns he works deep inside the Vatican. Meanwhile, she unearths a mysterious family connection to Amerigo Vespucci, his voyages to America and a tragic Medici love triangle.Miranda meets Tom in Florence where she has fallen under the sinister Count Scala's spell. In a race against time, following cryptic clues and supernatural phenomena around iconic buildings and works of art, with gangsters and fanatics in hot pursuit, they finally reach an astounding apocalyptic climax.

Sujets

• Fantasy (canción de Mariah Carey)
• Magic realism
• Fantasy

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 03 avril 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781838595739
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

Copyright © 2019 Simon Jones

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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ISBN 9781838595739

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Matador® is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

For Betty
and for Alan and Mary

Simon Jones studied classics at the University of Oxford. He worked and travelled in the Far East before qualifying as a solicitor and now lives on the Welsh borders in Herefordshire. Transit of Mercury is his debut novel.

‘Orpheus would have brought Eurydice up from the Underworld… if he had not looked back.
Thus the principle of real life is the death of the life that is unreal.’

Lorenzo de’ Medici.
Contents
PROLOGUE

AUTUMN
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20

WINTER
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43

SPRING
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54

EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
NOTES
PROLOGUE
Tian Shan Mountains, Central Asia, – 1st/2nd Century B.C.
‘One last task I have for you,’ said the hermit.
A tear trickled down his disciple’s cheek: ‘Anything, Master,’
‘Many years ago, an earthquake destroyed my monastery and I left the land of Bo.’ The hermit picked up a pestle and drew it slowly around the rim of a bronze mortar. ‘For months I wandered the trackless Taklamakan. Then, one morning, as the sun struck the Mountains of Heaven, I descried this cave just below a mighty peak.’ He watched as the flame flickered in the oil lamp, rippling rocky shadows into life. ‘Yet I was not the first one here.’
His disciple’s eyes widened: in ten years of tending him, trekking up from the village with his daily meal of barley flour and yak milk, the hermit had never mentioned any previous dweller in this lonely fastness of the eagle and the wolf.
The pestle flew in ever faster circles, immersing the cave in a deep, hypnotic hum. The hermit began to chant:

‘Round and round the years unwind,
the warp and weft of life unfold,
into matter enters mind,
into space time untold.’

A loud crack. From a gash in the rock a wooden chest tumbled into view.
‘O treasure divine and dread,’ the hermit cried, ‘long have I guarded you. But now my time is come.’ He coughed and took a sip of butter tea from his disciple’s hand. ‘Now you,’ he said, gripping her arm, ‘you must take the chest to those who know. The Arhat Nagasena is one. Seek him at Sagala, the city of King Milinda.’
His disciple frowned: the road to Sagala was long and infested with bandits.
‘Be not afraid,’ the hermit smiled. ‘What is this life for if not to test our courage?’ He pointed to the one who stood at the mouth of the cave: ‘Your friend there will always protect you.’
She turned to look at the orphan she had once rescued from the winter snow who had become her constant companion. In his eyes she saw the bond which even death would not break.

AUTUMN
1
London – 21 September 2005
The rain fell lightly as Tom Talbot stared at the glass. Tiny flecks of water appeared out of the emptiness: some remained solitary and still, some combined with others and began to glide slowly down the carriage windowpane, only to stop part way, as if exhausted or blocked by some insuperable barrier. Now and then a droplet succeeded in reaching the bottom of the pane, only to hit the sill and cease to be. Tom watched this process impassively from within the cocoon of the stale, airless carriage. As the external world grew dark, his attention passed from the watery ribbons to the wry reflection staring back at him. How unfamiliar it seemed, this apparition on the surface of the glass. Was this really him: the man who, just a few short hours ago, still had a career, a future to look forward to? He sank back wearily into his seat and closed his eyes, reliving the day’s events.
It had certainly started off normal enough, right down to the early-morning train from Bristol being late ‘due to leaves on the line’. ‘I suppose they don’t have trees in Switzerland,’ one disgruntled commuter had carped.
‘All conifers, sir,’ the ticket collector had shot back in a lilting Welsh accent, much to his own amusement.
Emerging as usual from Bank tube, Tom had battled his way through the blustery, autumn drizzle, dodging the spokes of wayward umbrellas and the spray from cowboy bus drivers. Yet, no amount of rain could dampen the unfailing sense of achievement which, every weekday morning for the past three years, had accompanied him up the steps of No. 8 Lombard Street. The monolithic edifice of pale Portland stone housed the London branch of the Banca de’ Bianchi, the exclusive Italian private bank where he worked. Though small by city standards, it nevertheless enjoyed an enviable reputation as the financier of choice to the scions of some of Europe’s wealthiest elite. At the top of the steps, massive bronze doors, sporting imperious lion’s-head door-knockers, reinforced the bank’s impregnable image. Liveried footmen, looking like figures in a glockenspiel clock, opened them precisely at nine every morning and closed them again each evening on the stroke of five. Most staff had to enter the building via an anonymous side door, but the bank’s senior management (and a few young high-flyers like Tom) enjoyed the privilege of using the main entrance.
He glanced up at the bank’s insignia: back-to-back capital Bs, picked out in white on a square of black marble that stood proud of a granite lintel. But on that particular morning something else caught his eye: a weathered, sandstone plaque just above the lintel. He had not noticed it before, but then it was virtually invisible beneath a thick layer of city grime. He could just make out some round shapes on a shield and a few letters: ‘Le Tem…’, but the rest was illegible. Maybe it was ‘Le Temps Perdu’, a French version of ‘Tempus Fugit’? Below the shield was a single word, carved in raised capitals and somewhat more legible. It read: ‘SEMPER’. Though Tom’s degree was in modern languages, he had enough Latin to know that this meant ‘Always’. Some Victorian precursor of the modern mission statement, he guessed, exhorting workers to keep their noses to the grindstone.
In the lobby, Joe, the club-footed cockney porter in his traditional red tailcoat and top hat, had been watering a pair of neatly trimmed laurel bushes in bulbous urns that garnished the ends of the reception desk. He greeted Tom cheerily as ever with his customary ‘Morning, Mr T’.
‘Morning, Joe,’ Tom had responded in a tone that, in recent weeks, betrayed just a quiver of envy for the older man’s apparent contentment with his humble, uncomplicated lot.
A whisper-smooth lift, guarded by an old-fashioned concertina grill and brass fittings, whisked Tom to the third floor. His office lay at the far end of a large, open-plan area. ‘Hi, Tom, how are you today?’ a well-manicured voice with an Australian twang rang out as he passed by.
‘Fine, thanks, Carrie. Are you going out this evening?’ he answered, noticing his secretary’s unusually revealing outfit.
‘Sure am. Off to a birthday party with a couple of the other girls. Want to tag along?’
Tom grimaced. ‘Sorry, got to go home and feed Jasper.’ Jasper was his dog, a large shaggy beast with mastiff ancestry and as stubborn as the proverbial mule. He had always been Tom’s dog but, after he moved away to university and then to the City, Jasper had remained with his parents. They had both been killed a few months earlier in a car crash and Tom, as the only child, had temporarily had to abandon his bachelor pad in the Docklands to sort out their old house, a chocolate-box cottage in the depths of rural Gloucestershire. What to do with Jasper was a decision he had yet to face. The cottage was ideal for animals with expansive outdoor needs, but not so good for people whose work and social lives were defined by the Square Mile and the West End. Tom’s love life had been one of the first casualties of this enforced exile. His girlfriend, a Russian financial analyst, could not stand spending every weekend in the middle of nowhere with not a Michelin-starred restaurant or glitzy nightclub in sight. Such backwaters were too reminiscent of mother Russia.
‘You definitely need help,’ Carrie remarked, only half-jokingly. Having worked at the bank for six months now, she had reluctantly concluded that Tom was not her type. Though he had plenty of plus points – deep blue eyes, at