He thumbed through each one.

The tight script was Haddad’s, written in English. He read closer.

…the clues left with me by the Guardian have proven troubling. The hero’s quest is difficult. I’m afraid I’ve been the fool. But not the first. Thomas Bainbridge was also a foolish man. In the latter part of the eighteenth century, he apparently was extended an invitation to the library and completed the hero’s quest. A condition of the invitation must surely be that the visit stay private. The Guardians have not spent two millennia protecting their cache only to have it revealed by an invitee. But Bainbridge violated that trust and wrote of his experience. In an effort to ease his treachery, he couched his tale as fiction titled not so curiously, A Hero’s Journey. The book was printed in limited copies and hardly noticed. In Bainbridge’s day, the world was teeming with fantastic tales (novels regarded with little respect), so the protagonist’s journey to some mythical library was viewed with little enthusiasm. I found a copy three years ago, which I stole from a Welsh estate. Reading it offers little insight. Bainbridge, though, could not resist one final violation of the trust the Guardians placed in him. In the years before he died he erected an arbor in the garden of his Oxfordshire mansion. Into the marble he carved the image of a painting and Roman letters. The painting, by Nicolas Poussin, was originally known as Happiness Subdued by Death but its more common name today is The Shepherds of Arcadia II.

Malone knew little of Poussin, though he was familiar with the name. Luckily, in one of the notebooks, Haddad provided some details.

Poussin was a troubled soul, much like Bainbridge. He was born in Normandy in 1594, and the first thirty years of his life were ones of trials and tribulations. He suffered a lack of patrons, unappreciative courtesans, poor health, and debt. Even working on the ceiling in the Grand Gallery at the Louvre left him uninspired. Not until Poussin left France for Italy in 1642 did a change occur. That journey, which normally would have been one of a few weeks, took Poussin nearly six months. Once in Rome, Poussin began to paint with a new style and confidence, one that did not go unnoticed, one that quickly earned him the label as the most celebrated artist in Rome. Many have speculated that somewhere along his journey Poussin was inducted into a great secret. Interestingly, when The Shepherds of Arcadia was finished, the patron who commissioned the piece, Cardinal Rospigliosi, who later became Pope Clement IX, chose not to hang the work in public, but kept it in his private apartment. Rospigliosi was an artistic man with an interest in the arcane and esoteric. He possessed an outstanding personal library, and historians eventually labeled him “the freethinking pope.”

A clue as to what Poussin may have personally experienced can be found in a letter written six years after The Shepherds of Arcadia was completed. Its drafter, a priest, the brother of Louis XIV’s finance minister, thought what he’d learned from Poussin might be of interest to the French monarchy. I found the letter a few years ago among the archives of the Cossé-Brissac family:

He and I discussed certain things, which I shall with ease be able to explain to you in detail-things which will give you, through Monsieur Poussin, advantages which even kings would have great pains to draw from him, and which, according to him, it is possible that nobody else will discover in the centuries to come. And what is more, these are things so difficult to discover that nothing now on this earth can prove of better fortune nor be their equal.

Quite a statement-and puzzling, too. But what Bainbridge erected in his garden is even more puzzling. After completing The Shepherds of Arcadia, for some inexplicable reason, Poussin painted its reverse image in what has been labeled The Shepherds of Arcadia II. This is what Thomas Bainbridge chose for his marble bas-relief. Not the original, but its counter part. Bainbridge was clever, and for two hundred years his monument, ripe with symbolism, stood in obscurity.

Malone read on, his mind lost in a maze of possibilities. Unfortunately, Haddad did not reveal much more. The remainder of the notes dealt with the Old Testament, its translations, and its narrative inconsistencies. Not a word about what Haddad may have noticed that had generated so much interest. Nor was there any message from a Guardian. No details of any hero’s quest, only a fleeting reference at the end of one of the notebooks.

In the drawing room of Bainbridge Hall is more of Bainbridge’s arrogance. Its title is particularly reflective. The Epiphany of St. Jerome. Fascinating and fitting, as great quests often begin with an epiphany.

A bit more flesh to the bones, but still a lot of unanswered questions. And he’d learned that wrestling with questions that possessed no answers was the fastest way to immobilize the brain.

“What are you reading?”

He glanced up. Pam was still lying in the bed, head on the pillow, eyes open.

“What George left.”

She slowly sat up, cleared the sleep from her eyes, and checked her watch. “How long have I been out?”

“An hour or so. How’s the shoulder?”

“Sore.”

“It will be for a few days.”

She stretched her legs. “How many times were you shot, Cotton? Three?”

He nodded. “You don’t forget any of them.”

“Neither did I. If you recall, I took care of you.”

She had.

“I loved you,” she said. “I know you may not believe that. But I did.”

“You should have told me about Gary.”

“You hurt me with what you did. I never understood why you had to screw around on me. Why I wasn’t enough.”

“I was young. Stupid. Full of myself. It was twenty years ago, for God’s sake. And after, I was sorry. I tried to be a good husband. I really did.”

“How many women were there? You never said.”

He wasn’t going to lie. “Four. One-night stands, every one of them.” Now he wanted to know. “And you?”

“Just one. But I saw him for several months.”

That stung. “You loved him?”

“As much as a married woman could love somebody other than her husband.”

He saw her point.

“Gary came from that.” She seemed to be wrestling with a question mark that kept appearing from her past. “When I look at Gary a part of me is sometimes angry for what I did-God help me-but a part of me is grateful, too. Gary was always there. You came and went.”

“I loved you, Pam. I wanted to be your husband. I was really sorry for what I did.”

“It wasn’t enough,” she muttered, eyes to the floor. “I didn’t know it at the time, but I came to realize that it would never be enough. That’s why we stayed separated five years before we divorced. I wanted our marriage, but then again I didn’t.”

“You hated me that bad?”

“No. I hated myself, for what I did. It’s taken me years to come to that realization. Take it from one who knows, a person who hates herself is in a lot of trouble. She just doesn’t know it.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about Gary when it happened?”

“You didn’t deserve the truth. At least, that’s what I thought. Only in the past year have I realized the mistake. You screwed around, I screwed around, but I got pregnant. You’re right. I should have told you way back. But that’s maturity talking and, like you said, we were both young and stupid.”

She went silent. He did not intrude.

“That’s why I stay angry at you, Cotton. Can’t cuss myself out. But it’s also why I finally told you about Gary. You do realize that I didn’t have to say a word and you would have never known a thing? But I wanted to make it right. I wanted to make peace with you-”

“And with yourself.”

She slowly nodded. “Most of all.” Her voice broke.