Midnight Angels Read Free Page B

endeavors, affording him the luxury of traveling formonths at a time and allowing him to seek what many considered forever lost.
    He came to his calling well-equipped to handle its challenges. Naturally athletic, he worked his body hard to stay in shape. He was skilled in the use of a variety of weapons, from modern to medieval, and had spent decades studying martial arts. Even so, he didn’t embark on his adventures alone, but was instead one of a number of scholars, academics, art restorers, historians, and treasure hunters belonging to a dedicated and secretive group. The Vittoria Society had been named in honor of Signora Vittoria Colonna, daughter of the grand constable of the Kingdom of Naples and the only woman known to have captured Michelangelo’s heart. The artist had been sixty-one in 1536, when he met the beautiful Vittoria, by then the widow of a marquis who had fallen in battle, and Michelangelo would spend the remainder of his days in her grip. He wrote her numerous sonnets, drew dozens of pictures capturing her in various stages of repose, and spent as much time in her company as his work would allow. And when Vittoria died, on February 25, 1547, at the Convent of San Silvestro in Rome, Michelangelo mourned her loss more than that of any other who crossed his path.
    They were art hunters.
    In the past five years alone, half a dozen members of the Vittoria Society, spread across the globe, had discovered three paintings by Caravaggio in the basement of a soon-to-be demolished Paris hotel; found a soiled folio believed to have been written by William Shakespeare in a rusty freezer in the foyer of an abandoned farmhouse in the Scottish highlands; bought a complete manuscript thought to be written by Sir Walter Scott at an illegal auction held long after closing hours in a fashionable London row house; and were scouring Hong Kong seeking a sword used in battle by Genghis Khan. Each of their discoveries had been delivered with discretion to its rightful owner as determined by the leaders of the Society.
    Edwards had been brought into this secret world by Frank and Andrea Westcott.
    They were academic legends, a studious and brilliant couple long considered the most renowned Michelangelo scholars in the world. They were also among the six founding members of the Vittoria Society and by far the most active and adventurous of the group.
    Edwards had been a shy twelve-year-old, living in an Indianapolis orphanage, when he first met them, standing in the hallway of that prison-gray dormitory he had learned to call home. He did not question why they wanted to see him, and had not the slightest clue as to their identities. Still, he knew from that moment that he belonged in their company.
    The Westcotts taught him their methods and were as demanding in their work and study as they were effusive in their affections. “We’re not out to change the world,” Frank once told him, outside the Sir John Soane’s Museum in London a week before Edwards would begin his college studies. “We’re just looking to bring balance to it. No one should ever gaze at a work of art for what it’s worth financially. You seek it out and allow it to tell you all it can about who you are as a person. Watch a man’s eyes the first time he looks up at the statue of David and you’ll know all there is to know about him in a matter of seconds. If you can’t be moved by a great work, if all you can do is break it down to its financial value, then what more is there to say about you?”
    THE PROFESSOR WATCHED a young woman walk across the well-kept lawn of the quad outside his second-floor classroom and his mind immediately conjured the image of Kate. She had been barely four years old when her parents died. He was in his mid-twenties then, unprepared for a family. But he owed his life and calling to Kate’s parents. In turn he had devoted years to the raising of their daughter.
    He taught her as he himself had been taught.
    Her parents had