The Adept Book 3 The Templar Treasure by Katherine Kurtz, Deborah Turner Harris

him to do the honors?”
    “By all means,” Peregrine said with a grin, depositing his own burden on the table before the fire, where Adam was clearing a space. “And pour one for yourself as well, Humphrey.”
    “Thank you very much, sir,” Humphrey replied, a pleased smile touching his usually impassive features.
    As the butler retired to deposit the port on a Jacobean sideboard and began assembling the necessary requisites of corkscrew and crystal glasses, Peregrine settled in the chair opposite Adam and set aside the manila envelope and a slender booklet on paintings housed in properties owned by the National Trust for Scotland. Taking up the large art book, he ducked his head to search for the place he had marked.
    Peregrine Lovat was a slender, fair-haired young man of middling height and graceful carriage. At just thirty, he had already carved out a niche for himself as one of Scotland’s most important young portrait artists, with increasingly prestigious commissions coming his way. His attire reflected an artist’s instinct for color and texture—a nubby Fair Isle sweater in muted greys and creams over a cream silk shirt and tan slacks, subtle foil for the pale hair worn longish in the front. The hazel eyes behind gold wire-rimmed spectacles shone with a joy and sense of purpose that had grown and emerged steadily in the year since he and Adam first had met.
    For Peregrine Lovat also possessed the gift of Sight, the ability to focus his artist’s eye on a scene of past psychic intensity and bring images to mind—and to sketch or paint those images while in trance. Such visions had been disturbing enough, before he learned to control them; but far more devastating had been the emergence of a parallel talent for sometimes seeing into the future—a shattering experience when it involved glimpsing the deaths of some of his sitters.
    Despondency over one such death was what had driven him to seek Adam’s help in a professional capacity, almost a year ago. Since then Adam had helped him learn to channel his gifts, so that they now emerged only on command, and mainly when working with Adam and McLeod as a very special kind of forensic artist. The ability to catch glimpses of prior events at the scene of a crime was of inestimable value when teamed with the unique sort of law enforcement in which Adam and McLeod—and now Peregrine—were so often engaged.
    “Here we go,” Peregrine said, opening the book to a full-page color plate and turning it for Adam’s inspection. “I think that’s the one you’ll want.”
    Adam nodded and pulled the book onto his lap, studying the man who gazed back at him from the page. The face in the picture, somewhat stylized in the manner of all late seventeenth-century portraits, was that of a dashing cavalier gentleman swathed in brunette silk-velvet, with full white shirt sleeves, a bunch of lace at his chin, and the gleam of an armor breastplate just visible at his waist. The oval face, handsome and refined, was framed in lustrous auburn curls, the sensitivity of the finely modeled mouth effectively countered by the challenge lurking in the heavy-lidded dark eyes. The legend beneath the plate identified the subject as John Grahame of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee, by Sir Godfrey Kneller.
    “That one’s more commonly known as the Glamis Portrait,” Peregrine said, “on account of it being part of the collection housed at Glamis Castle. It was painted in London, only two years before his death. I found a print of another one that’s kept at Fyvie Castle,” he went on, opening the smaller booklet and laying it atop the first book. “This is a pretty small photo, and it’s in black and white, but you get the general idea. I’ve seen the original. It’s by a relatively obscure Scottish artist named John Alexander, who copied it from an original by Sir Peter Lillie. I couldn’t find any further mention of the Lillie portrait in what I’ve got at home, but if it’s