CHAPTER 3: Glastonbury Knoll

Dr. Robert Josephs chuckled as he re-folded the recently opened letter from the British Deaf Assistance League. His public fame was still somewhat strange, but stranger yet were all the worldwide organizations wishing to lay claim to him in some fashion. More often it was due to his being identified as deaf, rather than for his talent as a writer, researcher,and every other thing about him that no one knew anything about. He knew for himself what personal attributes made him who he was. Two or three in Rome valued his anthropological and language specialities, and knew him but did not necessarily value him as a straight talker. Almost no one knew his family history. His mother and father were no longer living, but Robert remembered the lavender scent upon his French mother's hands and the steady gaze of his English father over the binding of a book. He had been a public barrister, and he had a strong conviction in serving Justice. The care he received at their hands made Robert both strongly curious and yet, spiritually determined and loyal. His parents had perished together, but somehow that seemed right rather than tragic. He did not try to distract himself with conspiracy theories or any unofficial reasoning for their disappearance while he was attending second year. Justice meant nothing if it was not demonstrated through devout compassion.

There was a deeper secret that Robert kept, and he only felt some sense of it rise to the surface when he was thinking of Northern England. Come Christmas, he'd have a brief visit with the Royals, but there was another stop not in the appointment book. A secret location and a spiritual retreat Robert craved annually. He had planned to give just that much of his secret knowledge to Aubrey Marquez. Now, he had to decide if Mister Enbrus would be secure by that time, or need to be excluded from those plans. Robert still did not know if Aubrey's death was a horrible accident, or intimately related to the knowledge which Robert kept from nearly all others.