The Sherbrooke Series Novels 1-5 (162 page)

“Another twenty feet or so. It is like a long loaf of bread. There are no side chambers.” She sounded vastly disappointed. As for Lord Beecham, he was more relieved than he could say. The little girl had wandered off into a side chamber, and that was where he had found her all those years ago, huddled beneath a narrow ledge. Not two feet from the little girl lay a skeleton, something he doubted either of them would forget for the rest of their lives. The faded, tattered clothes, of excellent quality and at least one hundred years old, that still hung on those bones were so old they disintegrated completely when the men collected them for burial.

It wasn’t quite as damp and clammy in this cave because it was smaller, but still, inside, it was blacker than a villain’s dreams.

Helen paused a moment just ahead of him. He saw her tilt her head in the glittering light of the lantern as if she was listening to something. He stopped as well. He could hear his heart beat just as it had so many years before. The beat was deafening.

“It is nothing,” she called out, “just bats settling in.” She continued forward, the lantern held high.

Bats, he wondered, as he had always wondered about things for which man had no explanation. How did bats manage to see in the dark? He remembered that Sir Giles Gilliam had known the answer to many things, but he hadn’t known a thing about bats. No one at Oxford knew much about bats.

The ground was sloping downward now. Another two steps and he could stand straight with a good two inches between the top of his head and the ceiling of the cave.

Helen stopped. She went down to her hands and knees and carefully set the lantern on the ground beside her. “After that big storm, I was exploring in here. You can see that the wall there caved inward, spilling out a lot of dirt and the cask.” Her voice was low and deep, and the faint echo made her sound mysterious, perhaps not even of this world. It flashed cold over his flesh. He said aloud, “The echoes, even here, when we speak quietly, very close together, they spread throughout my brain. I believe I am becoming mystical, Helen. Perhaps soon I shall begin to chant in strange tongues.”

She looked up at him, the glow from the lantern making her face look like a white plaster death mask. “I know. Caves make me feel the same way. When I am by myself, I usually sing so I do not scare myself to death. When I am not shivering from fright, I am laughing at myself.”

“I will have to try that.” Lord Beecham came down beside her. “So the storm shook something loose and sent the cask spilling out of the wall. Look at this.” Pressed against the wall of the cave was a small ledge, no higher than a foot and a half off the ground. “It is perfectly flat, and that means that someone carved it this flat to hold something.” Now that he looked more closely, he added, “No, the ledge isn’t natural to this cave. I think perhaps some people built the ledge here specifically to hold that cask and then changed their minds. Too exposed, better to hide it, to bury it in the wall of the cave. And they left the ledge, why not?”

There were two narrow slabs of stone holding up the ledge.

“Goodness,” Helen said suddenly, nearly falling over with surprise. “I had not noticed this before.” She picked up the lantern and held it close. She pulled a handkerchief from her cloak pocket and began wiping down the stone. “Carvings, Spenser, or writing of some kind.”

He came down beside her. As she held the lantern, he took the handkerchief and finished brushing away grit and sand until the carved letters showed themselves to be deep and well chiseled. “Well, now,” he said slowly, “this certainly isn’t Pahlavi or Latin.” He turned to look into her shadowed eyes.

He said, “It’s Old French.”

“The French Edward the First spoke?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Just a moment.” Helen set the lantern down and reached into her cloak pocket. This time she pulled out some ribbon-tied papers and a chunk of charcoal wrapped in a white cloth.

“Are you always so prepared, Helen?”

“I sketch,” she said. She gave him a quick sideways look. “I had thought perhaps that later I would draw you on the beach, just over where the tide pool is.”

“I should like that,” he said. She looked down then. Was she mayhap embarrassed because her level of skill wasn’t sufficient? He was pleased, very pleased.

“Naked. Perhaps standing with your hands on your hips, staring out to sea, the tide pool flowing over your bare feet. What do you think?”

He stared at her, mesmerized. “Be quiet. I prefer you pulling off my boots.”

She was grinning as she smoothed out a piece of foolscap on the ledge. She held the charcoal, waiting for him to translate.

“The words are written on top of each other. This won’t be easy.” He read slowly, translating as he went, “ ‘It is blessed or it is nothing. It is here and yet it is not here. It is the light of his dawn.’ ” He paused, frowned.

“Yes,” he said, staring at that word, “it does say ‘
his
dawn,’ not ‘
the
dawn.’ ”

Helen was tugging on his sleeve. “Hurry, Spenser.”

“Let me think a moment. Oh, yes. ‘It is powerful but it cannot be proved. It is something other, but no one knows what. Whatever truths it holds we do not understand them. We fear its power. We bury it and pray that its spirit survives. If it is evil, withal, we pray it journeys back to hell.’ ”

Spenser looked up. “That’s all of it. I think I got most of it right. Have you gotten it all down?”

“Just a moment, a bit more. Now, let me take a few moments and copy down the original as well.”

He watched her very carefully copy down the Old French. When she was finished, she looked up at him and shuddered. “I’m cold. It’s from the inside out. What can it mean?” He rose slowly, then gave her his hand. “Why was this with the leather scroll?”

He just shook his head.

“Where is the lamp? Why wasn’t the lamp here? Surely this Old French speaks directly of the lamp.”

“Yes, it does. There is nothing else that fits.”

“Then where is it?”

“I begin to think that the Templar who gave King Edward the lamp presented it to him in the iron cask along with the leather scroll. I do not believe that anyone could have translated the scroll back then. I think that when the king decided to hide the lamp, perhaps at overwhelming urging from churchmen, he simply placed it back into its original cask, with the scroll, then buried it in the cave wall. He had someone write on this ledge—giving some sort of explanation, some sort of reasoning.”

“But none of it makes any sense. It seems it was just as great a mystery to them as it is to us.”

“Possibly. But perhaps they did understand a bit of it, enough to be frightened of it. Who knows? It is said that the medieval mind was a labyrinth with more twists and shadows than we modern folk can begin to comprehend.

“Or, Helen, perhaps someone found the lamp hundreds of years ago and simply removed it. He left the cask and the scroll behind because he perceived no value in them.”

“Yes,” she said slowly, “that sounds reasonable.” She looked as if she would cry. “Then the lamp is gone, found by someone long ago, perhaps disposed of again, and now there is simply no trace of it.”

“No, I could easily be wrong. The lamp could have been hidden elsewhere. Perhaps the scroll instructs that the lamp should be kept separate from it. That would mean, then, that someone did translate the scroll. If that is true, then the scroll will have to speak of it.” He saw that she wanted to believe him. He wasn’t at all sure what he himself believed at this moment. A riddle in Old French engraved on a ledge at the back of a cave. And out of the wall of that cave, just above that ledge, had fallen an iron cask that held a leather scroll with writing from before the birth of Christ.

He was beginning to feel chilled, the damp of the cave burrowing through his clothes to his flesh. “We can’t believe anything just yet, Helen. There are a number of possibilities. We will discover the truth, I swear it to you.”

“You are an excellent partner,” she said, and tried to smile.

He dismissed the lamp from his mind and lightly cupped her cheek with his palm. “Three weeks ago, Miss Mayberry, I was quite happily absorbed in doing not much of anything, simply enjoying all those delightful little pleasures of life. Then I heard you speak of discipline to Alexandra at the Sanderling’s ball, and my life flew out of my control.”

“Lord Beecham,” she said, all stern and hard, “I am the one who has been made love to six times in the past two days. Pray do not speak to me of life having flown out of control.”

He laughed deeply, a black sound in the damp darkness that echoed like chortling demons around a midnight fire. When they reached the narrow mouth of the cave and stepped into the sunlight, he turned to her and wiped the dust from her face. “When I became your partner, I had not expected such adventure.”

“I have a feeling,” she said slowly, staring at him, “that the adventure is just beginning.”

They stood together for a moment on the promontory just south of Aldeburgh and stared up the long, narrow beach. The small cave was ten feet below them, a shadowed black mouth in the side of the sliding rubble of a cliff. It was a bit treacherous getting to it because of all the strewn rocks and loose dirt.

“It’s the most beautiful place on the earth,” Helen said. The tide was rising, sending swirling waters to break and fan out higher and higher onto the dirty brown sand. Countless black rocks, piled atop each other or standing alone, were covered with sea lettuce, bright green beneath the bright morning sun overhead. There were scattered piles of driftwood with seaweed woven in and over the broken branches and stems, like tangled green ropes. Shallow tidal pools were filled with limpets, beadlet anemones, periwinkles, barnacles, and sponges, all clinging to the small rocks within the pool. Lord Beecham wondered which one Helen wanted to flow over his feet when she sketched him naked.

Marram grass stuck up in thick clumps on low sand dunes, along with lady’s bedstraw and restharrow, pink and violet blooms that looked delicate but were as tough as a man’s mother-in-law. And the pink of those dainty blooms reminded him of Helen’s mouth, and so he looked at her mouth, all softly plump and pink, and he shook.

Lord Beecham breathed in deeply and looked at the scores of birds, particularly the one sanderling who was just a bit slower than his brothers. On one of his races with the waves, he was going to lose. He watched and breathed in the smell of the sea, the drying seaweed, the scent of the wildflowers, and he didn’t look at Helen’s mouth.

“Just look at the avocets,” Helen said, pointing to several birds sitting in among the bedstraw and restharrow. “Those long, skinny, black beaks can go very deep to stab food. See how they turn up at the end? And there are so many black-headed gulls here. Most of all I love to watch the sandpipers hopping along the sand, racing the water both in and out.”

Somehow he wasn’t surprised. But he said nothing, just kept looking at all the birds. There were more kinds than he could begin to count, all of them hungry, all of them yelling, crying, squawking, yipping. He watched some small oystercatchers and gray plovers racing a fast incoming wave. The water feathered out more quickly this time than just the time before, and the sanderling he had been watching, lost the race. It got soaked and nearly tottered over.

“My family home,” Lord Beecham said, “as I told you already, is Paledowns, near the coast in North Devon. You can stand on the cliffs there and look toward Lundy Island. There are more birds mating there than you can even begin to count. They cover the sky during the spring. Puffins—my favorite as a boy—and razorbills, and kittiwakes—ah, so many different kinds, all of them loud and rowdy. If they’re not shrieking at each other, they’re flying over anyone who chances to be outside, their noise deafening, and naturally you’re running for cover. It’s a fascinating time of year.”

“I have never been to Devon. Where is Paledowns, exactly?”

“Between Combe Martin Bay and Woody Bay, by the village of Bassett. The sea cliffs there about are covered with shags and cormorants. There are days I remember as a child when there were so many fulmars diving and whirling about overhead that you couldn’t see the sky. Just fulmars gliding and swooping about, and even when one flew away you couldn’t see the sky because another moved in to take its place.”

She was looking at him as though he was a stranger to her. She said slowly, looking at his mouth—she didn’t know why, but his mouth pleased her—“I hadn’t imagined that you would be so familiar with birds and such.” She shrugged. “One thinks of a gentleman and one pictures a stack of playing cards, a bottle of brandy, and an unbuttoned waistcoat.”

“And a red nose? Perhaps a woman bending over him, her breasts nearly falling out of her gown?”

“It is the likeliest image.”

He supposed that was fair enough. A man of his proclaimed habits wasn’t necessarily given much credit for having expanded horizons. “Helen, a man who is a noted lover can appreciate other things as well. Life is not all drink and playing cards and women’s soft flesh.”

He had silenced her for the moment, he saw that, and it pleased him. He stared toward a small group of pink-footed geese who couldn’t seem to decide where to stay on the wet sand or soar up to the cliff top. Even geese had to have a leader, and so he said, “A woman, even a strong woman like you, Helen, needs a man to assist her over the cracks in the roads of life.”

She stared at him, her head cocked to one side.

He pointed upward. “See the geese, now soaring upward in a nearly perfect formation? Well, they need a leader to get anywhere at all. So does a woman. She needs a man. That’s what I meant.”

“If I could fly,” she said, shading her eyes with her hand and staring after the geese, “I wouldn’t need anything at all. Even without a leader, I would be free.”