But Jack had already fallen asleep.

Chapter 28

December 21st, 2004. Hildersham. Mulberry Cottage

Mina peeped through Jack’s door. ‘Morning Jack.’

Jack had had a rough night, but he felt better this morning.

‘Morning beautiful.’ She came and sat on the edge of his bed.

‘We’re making progress,’ she said. ‘Come down for breakfast and we’ll tell you all about it.’

‘You know, if you’d rather I stayed up here, just tell me. I’ll leave the two of you alone,’ said Jack.

‘Jack, you aren’t really jealous of Daniel, are you?’ Mina asked, grinning.

‘Me. Never. Why? Should I be?’

‘No, you shouldn’t,’ she said, and she slowly bent down to kiss him.

Just as they were about to share their first kiss, they heard Joshua at the door and sprung up out like guilty teenagers. Joshua came in to check on his patient. After examining him, he announced that he was quite satisfied with his condition.

‘Jack, I’m amazed by your recovery. You must be made of steel,’ he said appreciatively.

‘I know, doc, it’s my curse,’ said Jack with a smile.

‘You’re almost as good as new,’ said Joshua.

‘It’s all thanks to you. I owe you one.’

‘Bring this whole matter to a close and you won’t owe me anything.’

‘I’ll do my best,’ said Jack.

When Jack eventually came downstairs, he found Mina and Daniel sitting at the breakfast table, arguing about the notes, which put Jack in an excellent mood.

‘We’re not getting anywhere,’ said Mina.

‘I don’t agree,’ said Daniel.

‘What’s going on?’ Jack said, pulling up a chair.

But Mina went on regardless. ‘Alright Daniel, maybe you’re right, but how do you explain the term ocean of water?’

‘It must be an image to describe the huge scale of the flood.’

‘And the mouth of the earth?’

‘That I don’t know. I’ve thought about it the entire night and I still don’t have a clue.’

‘But what sort of river flood are they talking about?’ asked Jack, ‘what sort of flood could be that awful that they’d think of warning us thousands of years ago? Are we talking about a major city?’

‘That’s why we may be wrong in our interpretation of the text,’ said Daniel.

‘What if my first guess was wrong, and what I took for flood management measurements were actually successive dates, maybe encrypted?’ said Jack.

‘Come on Jack, Daniel has been at this for days,’ said Mina.

‘I don’t know,’ said Jack, ‘even if we had a perfect description of a star position, we’d still need another event to compare it with.’

‘Mina, he may be right. Let me try out his theory.’

Daniel stayed at the kitchen table, covering sheets with calculations. Suddenly he looked up, dazed and rushed to his laptop. He typed ‘1755 flood’ into Google. As he read through the results, his face drained of colour. Jack and Mina looked at him, as he frantically scribbled more calculations. After a while, he turned to Mina and Jack, horror-struck, and motioned for them to approach the screen.

‘Jack was right. It is a date. I thought to myself, we have a date, 1755, the year the letter was sent to Safed from Hildersham. It’s a weird letter. There’s no other correspondence between the two places. What if Alejandro Cardozo and his family fled Portugal for some imperative reason and needed to write to say the tablet was safe? What if something dramatic happened in 1755? Well something did happen that year: the Lisbon earthquake. It’s one of the worst earthquakes ever recorded in history and it was followed by a horrifying tidal wave on November 1st, 1755, at about 10.25 am. It killed over sixty thousand people.’

Mina did not respond. Her smile had vanished. She was thinking back to the letter Yeshua had written to his brother. It was dated December 1755. So Yeshua had left Lisbon with his family after the earthquake. Had he known how to use the tablet, surely he’d have left the city weeks beforehand. So why had he taken the tablet with him? She could only conclude that it was his duty to preserve the family’s treasure out of respect for his ancestors. And, as it said in his letter, he’d keep on taking care of the tablet until the day it could be returned to the Jerusalem temple and used appropriately. ‘Simply stupefying,’ thought Mina.

‘When and where will the next natural disaster hit?’ asked Jack, whose brain, as ever, was trying to ignore the horrifying details and move to practical considerations.

‘Oh I think I know,’ said Daniel.

‘So, tell us!’ said Jack and Mina in unison.