Investigator's name: Morgan Cross, Lord Armsdale of the Marshes

Age: 29

Sex: Male

Nationality: Brittish

Place of Birth: Upper Armsdale, Great Britain

Degrees/Colleges: PHD Oxford University

Occupation: Private Scholar(Dilletante),Part time officer, Guest tutor at a number of Universities

Background:

My name is Morgan Cross. My full title is Viscount, Lord Armadale of the Marshes. My father the the 17th Earl of the Middle Marshes. I have been given all the benefits, questionable as they are in this modern world, of an aristocratic education. I ride and shoot quite well although I do not hunt, mainly because there is no hunting near the estate. I have been taught theperceptions of taste in things like food and wines and much more besides. I tell you this not boastfully, but as a fact which is unavoidable. In spite of all this I am not rich. I have a small private income, sufficient to supplement my remuneration as a tutor at Oxford, but the estate provides little. Although this is probably one of the oldest Earldoms in England, it is definitely the last in precedence and, since the War, fundamentally poor, scarcely paying its own way. I make the fact of my inheritance clear because it has significance. In addition to these things I have learned to drill with precision, fire a rifle with some accuracy, and obey orders without question. All these things the Army taught me. I did not serve throughout the War. My brother, Henry, served with the Guards. He did not survive Ypres. My father refused to let me enlist, being the last heir, but eventually relented enough for me to take a Staff commission with the Cumberland Light Infantry. The C-in-C was a cousin.The Staff posting was probably inevitable. I am surprised Henry managed to avoid one. Our family has always had an extraordinary competence in languages and we have been described as hereditary archivists,. This needs explaining. The Cross family is very old. The ancestry can be traced back with some certainty the the Delacroix family from the southern part of Normandy and several of the Delacroix accompanied the Conqueror on his invasion. They were of a religious order known as the Black Brothers. Their association with William was as recorders and preservers of texts both ancient and modern. Their descendants have always remained such, and owes its position to the Brothers. The family home of the Cross family is still known as The Abbey, and it is all that remains of a monastery of the Black Brothers dissolved by Henry VIII in 1540. Nevertheless, in spite of this regal vandalism,the Brothers managed to preserve certain extremely old texts which were in their charge and which are still the property of our family. I will not describe these openly. They are of such a nature that they should not be made public at this time, nor at any time in the future. They are discreetly preserved in the hidden vaults of the Bodlean Library in Oxford and are available only to a very few scholars of which number I am one.

Now we come to myself. I am a single man, 29 years old, and with a sufficient private income to enable me to continue my studies into ancient mythologies and languages without interruption. I am, in position, a language scholar specialising in archaic and extinctlanguages on which subjects I lecture from time to time in the University at Oxford.I have led small study parties abroad to study in other libraries, includingMiskatonic University, where I attended a seminar on some aspects of early Arabic scripts. It is my wish to study further aspects of the archaic documents held at Miskatonic, and to investigate some connections, long known but never pursued, between the town of Arkham and the Cross family.

Yours Faithfully, Morgan Cross. Visct.