The Holy Grail (A Cash Cassidy Adventure #1)
THE
HOLY GRAIL
A Cash Cassidy Adventure
#1
by
K.T. TOMB
Acclaim for K.T. Tomb:
“Epic and awesome!”
—J.T. Cross, bestselling author of Beneath the Deep
“Now this is what I call adventure. The Lost Garden will leave you breathless!”
—Summer Lee, bestselling author of Angel Heart
“The best adventure novel I’ve read in a long time. I can’t wait to read the sequel. Count me a fan. A big fan.”
—P.J. Day, bestselling author of The Sunset Prophecy
“K.T. Tomb is a wonderful new voice in adventure fiction. I was enthralled by The Lost Garden...and you will be, too.”
—Aiden James, bestselling author of Plague of Coins
OTHER BOOKS BY K.T. TOMB
STANDALONE ADVENTURES
The Last Crusade
The Kraken
The Adventurers
The Swashbucklers
The Tempest
Sasquatch Mountain
Ghosts of the Titanic
The Honeymooners
Curse of the Coins
Drums Along the Hudson
THE CHYNA STONE ADVENTURES
The Minoan Mask
The Mummy Codex
The Phoenician Falcon
The Babylonian Basilisk
The Aquitaine Armor
THE EVAN KNIGHT ADVENTURES
The Lost Garden
Keepers of the Lost Garden
Destroyers of the Lost Garden
THE PHOENIX QUEST ADVENTURES
The Hammer of Thor
The Spear of Destiny
The Lair of Beowulf
THE CASH CASSIDY ADVENTURES
The Holy Grail
The Lost Continent
The Lost City of Gold
THE ALPHA ADVENTURES
“A” is for Amethyst
“B” is for Bullion
The Holy Grail
Published by K.T. Tomb
Copyright © 2014 by K.T. Tomb
All rights reserved.
Ebook Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Dedication
The author wishes to dedicate this book to the late
James A. Michener.
The Holy Grail
by K.T. Tomb
Chapter One
Patricia Julia Cassidy did not want to be in San Francisco. She hated the city, as she hated most cities. She hated the downtown with the bums and junkies. She hated the pretentious tech guys everywhere. She hated the suburban country club they had joined and where she played her tennis games now.
She could not understand why her husband had taken up the offer of teaching here. He had had a nice gig at Cardiff University, they had a nice house just outside Barry and they were happy there. But then the bugger had gotten that offer from Berkeley and decided they should move to California. He had made the point that his job was the steady one that paid the bills every month, even if she did make more money. She could write anywhere, he had said.
And as he said that, seated in the plush leather seats in the grand living room of the big Glamorgan house her writing had bought them, she had felt herself hating him. Her first instinct was to grab her mobile and call her lawyer to file for divorce. But she had restrained herself, she had not even raised her voice and later that evening as they lay in bed, she had decided she loved Tim. The next day she grudgingly decided she loved him enough to leave Glamorgan.
Her drive to the country club in the stop-start traffic gave her too much time to think and she arrived for her tennis game in a foul mood. She just growled at the cheerful couple waiting for her in the clubhouse and made straight for the dressing room. She changed into her tennis kit and walked out to find her doubles partner leaned against the wall outside the door.
“How’re ye goin’ Sheila?” the tall, dark, handsome man asked in a thick Perth accent.
“Fuck off, Bruce.” she growled at him, glaring.
They both broke into a smile and embraced each other, starting their slow walk to the courts.
“Timmy still not giving you the time of day?”
She shook her head.
“Too busy working. He’s obsessed with his job and seems to think I’m some sort of trophy, like all these sheilas around here. And to be honest, Jack, I prefer your company as it is.”
Jack grinned, looking down at her.
“Because you know I’m going to be regaling you with every detail of the Eagles’ win over the Crows yesterday?”
“Fuck, you know, my elbow has been hurting a lot recently. Maybe I should give this one a miss and go home.”
Jack laughed and placed a big arm around her shoulders.
“Well, the Eagles just flew higher than the Crows, Cash, they just did.”
Jack had called her Cash from the moment they met at the club. Everyone in Barry had called her Cash as well. She had been given the nickname on the first day she went to the Barry Tennis Club. The association between an Australian tennis girl called Pat Cassidy and the Australian tennis great Pat Cash had been made within seconds and since the age of fifteen everyone had called her Cash. Until now that was. Everyone in this damned club insisted on calling her Patricia, a name she had hated for years. Her husband Tim called her Pat, which is what her parents called her as well, and she could accept that. But Patricia always made her angry.
It was one of the things she liked about Jack, him having called her Cash since the moment he heard her name and the Australian accent she still spoke with. He recognized the touch of Wanglish in her speech as well, which had impressed her.
He was a tall, athletic, attractive man who had played Australian Rules football until he had moved to California a few years ago. He worked in one of the big IT firms, but he made it obvious the job bored him to no end. Lacking a footy team, he spent most of his time surfing and playing tennis. He played a few rounds of golf sometimes, but he disliked the game, which was another quality Cash appreciated in him.
They arrived at the court, set down their bags and began warming up as their opponents came walking down the path.
“Hello Jack! Hello Patricia!” the chirpy, ditzy blonde in the far too short skirt greeted them.
Her husband shook Jack’s hand and as Cash extended her hand to him, he took her hand, turned it and kissed her knuckles. She swore under her breath.
Pretentious knob, she thought.
“Now I trust you will not just let us win, Jack.” the man smiled at them like a Cheshire cat.
“Even if I wanted to, I don’t think Cash would let me, mate,” Jack replied, making a huge effort to smile and be polite.
Cash picked up a ball and began to bounce it up and down impatiently.
“Shall we cut the chin-wagging and get this bloody game under way?”
The blonde’s jaw dropped at the blunt phrasing and her husband looked slightly shocked. This was polite society and people were not supposed to talk that way. Jack just grinned broadly, picked up his racket and made his way onto the court, pulling Cash with him.
“You do remember Americans don’t tend to like swearing?”
“Fuck them. I’m not American. You can take the girl out of Australia, but if you place her in South Glamorgan you won’t change the way she sings.”
“You can’t even bloody sing.”
Cash glowered at him and tossed him the ball she had been bouncing.
“Just serve, will you
?”
***
She was slightly tipsy when her husband came home from his work that evening. He did not even notice the booze on her breath as he kissed her. He immediately began telling her about all the little niggles of his day, never bothering to ask her about what she did all day. She remarked she had won the game as they sat down to eat, but he did not seem to listen.
As they finished he casually mentioned she should probably go into town to buy herself a nice new frock because they had a function to attend the next evening. She felt a boiling anger rising again. How dare he be so patronizing? She tossed her glass of wine down her throat and poured another and another after that, trying to drown the anger.
Tim Mathews was an old Etonian, from a posh English family and he had always had his ideas about what a wife should be like. Cash never accepted them though and always just did what she pleased. She was an affectionate wife for sure, but could never be the traditional wife Tim and his family expected her to be.
They had met a few years ago, when she took her masters at Cardiff University. She had taken her bachelor in english literature at Lampeter and decided to study history at Cardiff after. Tim was a junior lecturer there, having just graduated from Pembroke College Oxford. They fell for each other quite quickly and began dating as she started work on her ‘masters’ thesis. The year after that Tim was made a senior lecturer at the university.
In that year she found it very hard to find work anywhere, as the British economy slumped and the job market was flooded with university graduates. Tim had already suffered the same problem, but his family had interceded and gotten him the job at the university. But a few years later the situation was really quite hopeless.
And as most of Cash’s friends ended up taking jobs in supermarkets, she had grown more and more depressed. She had some short jobs in restaurants, pubs, shops, even a summer job at Barry Island, repairing the dodgems. There were no prospects, no hope of doing anything better than that though.
Tim stuck by her every step of the way and she recovered, having come up with the idea she should apply herself to writing.
She began work on her first book that summer, and Tim supported her still. He took a short sabbatical to accompany her to Australia as she researched the book, a novella on the Eureka Rebellion. And it was in their hotel room in Ballarat that Tim had proposed.
Cash had been over the moon and had jumped into her boyfriend’s arms, kissing him as she repeated her answer over and over again. Later that year they had celebrated their marriage at Tim’s family’s estate in the Cotswolds and her story on the Eureka Rebellion had become a best seller.
The same year she completed a novella on McAlpine’s Fusiliers, and a few months after a full novel about a family torn by Owain Glyndŵr’s rebellion. Both had been bestsellers, and she had been able to buy the house in Barry.
She had set up a library on the second floor of that house and made that the place to work from on her next bestseller, an adventure tale set in medieval France. She had gone to France to research the novel, but this time Tim had not joined her. He did not join her for the next book either, and increasingly he and his family complained about the untraditional way she fulfilled her duties as a wife. He complained she was away too much, and for a while she stayed home, writing everything from her library in Wales. But eventually she had to head out, and she had headed as far away as she could.
The book she wrote stuck in her own home had not been great, but the story she wrote about the McDouall Stuart expeditions in a little room in her grandfather’s station in South Australia was a great success. She spent half a year there, and had almost decided she would sell the house in Barry and stay there, when Tim came for her.
It took all his flattery and begging to get her to come back, but then not a month after she returned to Wales, he announced they would be moving to California.
The move had forced her for a while to take up a more traditional life. She had not written a word since the move, she was bored and increasingly inclined to pick up a bottle. She went to the country club to play tennis, she headed over to Jack’s to watch the footy, took wine tours in Napa Valley and Sonoma County, went to brunches, luncheons, dinners and cocktail parties with Tim and stopped herself feeling trapped by escaping through the bottom of a wine bottle.
“I’m going to write another book.” she remarked as they sat on the couch watching television. Tim looked at her.
“What are you going to write about? The marvelous leisure life of a wife of a Berkeley professor?”
Cash did not bother answering. She just got up and went into the kitchen.
“Come on Pat, I was just kidding.”
Tim cried out from the living room of their house. She ignored him, even when he followed her into the kitchen.
“Leave me alone, will you?”
Tim sputtered and tried to embrace his wife, but she pushed him away. She glowered at him and then had a thought. She held up her hand and put on the sweetest voice she could manage. “Well honey, if you want your gorgeous wife to buy herself a pretty dress, you’d better give her your credit card.”
She tried not to sound sarcastic, but to her own ears the sarcasm just dripped off the remark. But Tim did not seem to notice. He just drew his wallet out and gave her his MasterCard, then kissed her on the cheek.
“Of course, my love. I will be correcting essays upstairs.”
Cash was stunned. She did not say a word as she got in bed with her husband and she said nothing when she got up as soon as he began snoring. She watched some television in a sort of dull mood and eventually fell asleep on the couch.
In the morning Tim woke her with the question of whether she would make him his breakfast and she glowered at him as she obliged.
Later in the morning she took her husband’s credit card and went into town to buy a new cocktail dress and some matching shoes and a purse. When she was done with that, she bought some jewelry as well, maxing the card out in revenge of her husband’s behavior.
***
She looked stunning, and she knew it, but she felt quite plain at the party. She was anything but plain; she was of average height with a well-trained athletic body and an open face that showed a love of life. She had taken time to style her shoulder length blonde hair, which was something she normally did not bother to do. But many of the women were obviously trophy wives attached to the university staff and the businessmen who had shown up. Some were alumni of the university, some were sponsors. Some women were members of staff, but most of those did not look like the bombshells that played the doting wife.
Tim had made some remark on her makeup which had already put her in a foul mood on the drive over, and then told her she should try not to get drunk. Him introducing her as Patricia Mathews, even though she had never taken his name, made her even angrier, but she kept her mask on.
The conversation with the other women, whom she was herded to, was dull. The men patronized her and talked down to her, as though she were somehow less intelligent than they were. She did not blame them for that, because they simply assumed she was like the bimbos on show in the room, but she did blame her husband. Slowly she retreated, boiling internally, becoming more blank on the outside, smiling when she knew it was required, but hardly saying a word for fear of starting off on a rant.
“You look like you could use a drink.” a familiar voice said behind her.
She turned around and looked into the smiling face of Jack.
“How’s it going?”
She hugged him and smiled brightly at him.
“Going alright, what’s happening?”
Jack kissed her cheek and grinned at her.
“You really are a sheepshagger.”
He received a punch in the shoulder for that.
“Has anyone told you tonight you scrub up nicely?”
She shook her head sadly.
“Nope. Ta. Has anyone told you tonight you can look half decent when you make an effort?
”
Jack laughed.
“No, but nobody seems to reckon it’s a big effort to put on a tux and comb my hair.”
She gave a snort of laughter at the remark.
“For a lad from Perth?”
“Patricia?” Tim’s voice sounded not far away.
Cash looked around and saw Tim moving through the crowd, trying to locate his wife.
“Shite.” she muttered and grabbed Jack’s hand.
“Need to get out of here, now.”
She pulled him along and ran out of the room, weaving in and out of the gathered guests. They rushed through a door and reached the cool night air. The famous cold fog was beginning to drift in now, late in the night, but had not reached them yet. Cash let go of Jack’s hand and breathed deeply, brushing her hands through her hair. It ruined her carefully styled hair, but she couldn’t care less. She turned to look at Jack and found him holding up a bottle of sparkling wine.
“Pinched it?” she asked.
He nodded and began to pull the cork out. He offered the bottle to her first. She took a long swig and gave the bottle back to her friend.
He took a sip and then put the bottle down on a low wall.
“Your drinking does worry me, you know.”
“Shut up, dad.”
“Seriously,” he said as he looked at her gravely. “If you’re not happy there’s better ways to deal with it than by drowning it out.”
Cash looked at him, looked into his eyes and felt a twinge in her stomach. It was the first time anyone had shown some sort of affection to her since the move. She moved forward, intent on kissing Jack, but Jack moved away.
“No” was the only thing he said.
It confused her for a moment, angered her even, but it passed. She knew instantly why Jack had moved away. He was a nice, decent guy after all, and she knew he would not touch a married woman.
“You’re right,” she muttered, before putting the bottle to her lips again.