Lord Byron's Ring (eBook)

James Pumpelly (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2021 | 1. Auflage
462 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-0983-4852-6 (ISBN)

Revered and envied in the Oklahoma badlands town their mansion overlooks, the Burden's love affair is both lusty and lush, explicit and ethereal, their union seemingly impervious to life's entrapments. But while vacationing in Salzburg, Austria, their fortunes reverse when a blackmailing businessman, with enemies to spare, swoops down from the Panhandle oil fields to threaten Jack Burden's drilling ventures- only to turn up dead. Motives of revenge and greed darken the plot, reasons which soon lead Drew into the path of murder- and to a medium who conjures Lord Byron's ghost.

From the author of The Girl with the Pendant Pearl and Twice Melvin, comes James Pumpelly's latest novel, Lord Byron's Ring. Excruciatingly intense and seasoned with mystery, romance and action, Lord Byron's Ring is dream haunting, running the gamut from dystopic to paradisical, a metaphysical thriller that keeps you turning pages. Devoted wife and mother, degreed historian and devotee of Byron, Sara Burden is her husband's heroine; Jack the only man who leaves her breathless. Their scholarly and popular teenage son, Drew, completes the idyllic family. Revered and envied in the Oklahoma badlands town their mansion overlooks, the Burden's love affair is both lusty and lush, explicit and ethereal, their union seemingly impervious to life's entrapments. But while vacationing in Salzburg, Austria, their fortune reverses when a blackmailing businessman, with enemies to spare, swoops down from the Panhandle oil fields to threaten Jack's drilling ventures, only to turn up dead. Motives of revenge and greed darken the plot, reasons which soon lead Drew into the path of murder - and to a medium who conjures Lord Byron's ghost. Jack Burden is a compassionate man, drawn to the unfortunates by his impoverished youth. Sara is his candle in the window, a beautiful woman discovering the potential of her sexuality in this graphic, lyrical bonding of two disparate hearts. The author leads us into the extraordinary, imaginative dimensions of the family's intimacies, a family bound by a desperate need - and a dreadful secret - in this suspenseful, hypnotically readable novel about murder, madness, power, love, spirit mediums, and the hypocrisy of religious dogmas. Pumpelly's contrapuntal theme is at once a rigadoon of rascality and a paean of passion, his exquisitely defined characters giving impetus to the big question, one not answered until the closing scene. Ingenious, intellectually exciting and shocking, Lord Byron's Ring is a powerful portrait of family, faith and fortune fusing like Roman candles over the shadowlands of failure. A riveting provocation of the improbable you can't put out of your mind.

Rain is falling harder on the city of Salzburg, turning trickles into gathering freshets, freshets falling in fanciful spurts from the valleys of Jack’s spoke-ribbed umbrella. Tilting it in favor of Sara, he gives her protection, gaining by this chivalry a better view of the cathedral’s facade, its gargoyles grinning and statues contemning old fears grown stone-faced and sedentary - contemning in a way that makes Jack smile through his nightmare of forty years past. But sloshing with Sara across the time-worn stones of the Domplatz - the old city square laid out like a mat before the great arched entry of its cathedral - he is consciously unaware of his returning scowl, his frown at a laughing, passing pedestrian.

Hand in hand, Jack and Sara enter the basilica, though arriving by different paths; experience, as teacher, having lent them conflicting texts. For her part, Sara never misspends such opportunities. With the erudition of Henry Adams, she synthesizes the virgin’s symbology with the chastity of her own communion, absorbing all the fervency of generations past from the beauty of Baroque cathedrals. Reared in the tradition of the ancients, she has none of the buried torments she’s helped Jack excavate from the dark of his troubled youth; her philosophy espousing the unfolding, the awakening, the upward progress of souls - a continuing story which, gaining epic proportions, begins in the believer’s heart, extending like Dante’s Paradiso into ever unending realms. A hypothesis made theory by the proof of her own love with Jack. Perhaps it is true, she concedes, that sin has wounded everything; but it has corrupted nothing. And what is merely wounded can always be healed. Or so she prays - and has for eighteen years.

For Jack, once inside the cathedral’s calm, its massive, soaring columns begin transporting his awe ever upwards, its marble-floored expanse meeting novel and unexplored horizons; vistas reaching up into new realms of reverie. Here, prayer can be a natural response, an unseen choir of spirit-exquisites ever abetting the inner voice; the sentient magnificence silencing all things trivial, convincing not only the intelligence, but alluring the soul; a kind of aesthetic seduction, an apprehension beyond the senses. And caught up in this ethereal spectrum - feeling necessary, even; part of this highly colored moment – Jack is moved to look again at his Sara, seeing the heaven in her countenance as a beautiful argument for immortality.

Peering deep into her blue, empathetic eyes - eyes softer than a Correggio angel’s – it’s as though he can see forever; the past, the future, merging along the moment’s continuum; his memories all current, his hopes all realized; the two of them alone as lovers, as strollers in the heavenly moonlight, their hearts immortal, silver-winged. And her smile … her smile setting him apart, making him unique among men; her smile like a pleasant pinch proving it isn’t a dream; recalling her oft quoted phrase from the Koran that Paradise lies under the shadow of swords - Paradise reminding him that its very peace can be estranged by his concealment of something romantic … something - if he can but find the words - something he can lose in this blessed moment, this place of Divine forgetfulness. He will tell her. He must tell her … but tell her after he’s listened; for even as he struggles to present her his heart, she’s sharing of herself with him:

“Trying to fathom a Baroque cathedral in one hour, or even in one day,” she whispers, “is like viewing the Alps at night, and that, by a single flash of lightening. The experience should rather be an emerging one, a growing awareness of some mystical bouquet … like the bouquet of a fine wine, so, that if you tarry long enough, you might well discover its vintage.”

Jack can only agree - that something, as yet undeclared, seeming irreverent for the moment - the sheer breadth of the basilica astonishing him, the gamut from his childhood chapel to this edifice all jubilant with art and design leaving him submissive to the silence it seems to impose - hearing himself reply, the hushed sound of his voice carrying with it a soft solemnity:

“Sara, I feel swaddled. Spiritually caressed, as it were, in the mysticism of this sacred place. Moved. Transported … as though lifted to the threshold of some higher revelation.”

“And what might that be, darling?” her soft hand comforting in his.

“I’m sure I’ll express it clumsily,” Jack lost in the blue of her eyes, a blue taking on the sanctity of a confessional as he tries, stammering, to tell her. “I-I would expect only you … only you to comprehend what’s hidden within my poor attempt. But the thought is this: at the instant of love’s most intense expression, that intensity, for that instant, could well be the soul breaking free to envelope the body loved.”

“Oh! And I do understand!” she beams, acquiescing to a discovered truth. “It’s the expression of an ultimate glory; the expression of a love greater than one’s self!”

Ah, yes, he thinks, love - and who am I to fathom it? to hazard its delicate moments? to having achieved its God-like image, discredit it by appearing mortal? I must wait….

Moved by introspection, they go reverently on, hand in hand, past the stations of the cross, moving quietly towards the lambent light of innumerable candles, petitioners’ candles all ardent as the innumerable prayers, the incalculable hopes they are lifting; Sara kneeling, beatific in her quiet gratitude, setting aflame one unspoiled taper, one lone white candle to the author of love. Jack kneeling, too, beside her, in submission to a vision, beholding, suddenly, his life - his life in all its importance, its nascent awareness, its intoxication of romance - glimpsing, for that sacred moment, a new vividness; seeing for the first time how wildly beautiful is the whole of life: every dew-dripped blossom, every time-hewn face, every robin’s song … there is nothing alive that is not a miracle!

And he is madly in love!

Although he might begin each day aware of uncertainty, any fear seems displaced by a deeper trust, by a meditation that lets him walk close against the sky. He sees clearly that great events in his life can be foreordained by facts so trifling, so common, they can pass unnoticed - unnoticed till that moment when he must wager his life by their premise. And he, Jack Burden, considering himself a true man, must be prepared to make that wager, even if it defies death. He must be a hero whose heroism is in challenging the weakness of flesh that renounces the boldness of spirit. He will act. He will tell her. And now. For what better circumstance can there be? Or what better moment?

It is not literally a death-defying act just to tell her, but his sudden resolve seems a death blow to the creature he’s been, a man cowering before his own enigma, a man bruising his heart against his will. So, he begins, reaching within his jacket - reaching for something that might brighten the path to revelation:

“Sara, my love,” Jack adjusting one knee to sidle closer against her, “five minutes ago I would’ve judged the passage of a gift between lovers to be an act of sacrilege, if it disrupted the communion of prayer. But by a glimpse into the mystery of the ages, I’ve just seen otherwise.”

Taking her hand in his, he feels the action itself a form of prayer, invoking the guardianship of angels as he transfers his tribute to the realm of her clasp:

“It’s a gift,” his tone like a prayer, “a gift invaluable when reckoned by its curious history - and one I’m sure you have more knowledge of than I. But first I must tell you. I-I must speak of-”

But he can’t go on, the sacred image before them appearing to move, to find residence at once in their hearts; Sara blushing as though she’s taken color from the dawn; in her hands – now, on her finger - the fire of her candle, its flame resplendent in a magnificent ring, in the refractive power of two perfect diamonds-

Two diamonds of seven carats.

And unmindful in that instant of a threadbare world, their eyes begin filling with a curious hope, a wondrous prerogative over the future; there being no expression adequate, no way of showing it but with tears. So, she weeps – as does Jack - and they agree it is better by far to weep for joy than for sorrow.

Overwhelming, this gift received without asking. For Joy can be sought with a pertinacity amounting to frenzy, the human ideals of wealth, position and power being all bad masters potentially, good servants only in the hands of a rightful love. But Sara has not asked for joy, only for protection of that joy which she already has, for the safeguarding of their relished togetherness, their faculty for a transient oblivion, a chameleon sentiment.

A sentiment too soon recolored by the slate hues of sky falling about them, the discomfort of water in their shoes announcing their return to the Domplatz; Jack noting wryly:

“Now that we’re dry-eyed, sweetheart, the world about us weeps the harder. But I, for one, can more easily bear these tears of sky if you’re ready to hear me out; hear the astonishing history of your anniversary ring. Why, it’s almost as remarkable as you!”

Squeezing his arm with the delicacy of a slight apprehension, she answers hesitantly. “Yes, darling …yes, I’m ready to hear; or will be ….” Faltering, she seems to need time to append gossamer to her thoughts, to float them cautiously as words. “I’ll hear your history of the ring,” she continues, “and will doubtless cherish its...

Erscheint lt. Verlag	6.2.2021
Sprache	englisch
Themenwelt	Literatur ► Krimi / Thriller / Horror
ISBN-10	1-0983-4852-4 / 1098348524
ISBN-13	978-1-0983-4852-6 / 9781098348526

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