Chapter TwelveBack at the hotel, Lara retrieved the manuscripts from the safe in her room and spent the night comparing the copies to the originals. The cotton gloves made her hands hot with the central heating on, so she turned down the radiator. She knew every piece of binding, every neat stitch which held them together and every rigid, crusty, delicate page. Yellowing and tinged with the scent of decay provided a familiar, comforting blanket. Lara buried herself in history to absent herself from the pain of the present.
The first and third manuscripts contained regular entries relating to Queen Mary’s persecution, although the damaged second artifact still hid its secrets. The museum’s painstaking work promised to tease them free by degrees. “I just might have to read about it in a jou
