The Wild Baron (Baron 1)

“I know that was difficult for you, Mother, but thank you for the consideration.”

Charlotte sighed. “It is most depressing to have to give you the locket, particularly since I wanted to find the treasure map.” She looked at Susannah. “One must compromise when one is a woman.”

“Surely this is the first time you’ve ever been required to do anything remotely resembling compromise,” said her son as he toyed with the locket. “Father did always say, though, that compromise was the very devil.” The locket was shaped like a heart, not at all original but the quality was acceptable.

“If you two would cease your recriminations, I could show you how to open it. You’ll see it’s much too small to hide anything.”

It took her only a moment. “There’s this small catch at the bottom, here. There, see, there is a miniature of George on one side and one of Marianne on the other.”

Why not of Susannah? Rohan wondered, taking the locket back from her. Very carefully, he removed Marianne’s portrait, smaller than his thumbnail. He held the locket close to the candle and gently pressed against the gold, but there was nothing there. It was perfectly flat. Then he pulled out George’s small portrait. George couldn’t have been more than twenty when it was painted. He was smiling. His shirt had very high points. His hair seemed just a bit longer. He looked stiff, uncomfortable. Rohan shook his head. His memory had simply rearranged itself. George was George, and he’d died, damn him. And he’d left a mess behind. What else had he done?

He laid the small portrait on the table and held the locket close to the light. He felt the gold back. It wasn’t flat, as was the other side.

“Well, well,” he said slowly, “what have we here?”

Charlotte nearly tripped over her chair to get to him.

Susannah dropped her soup bowl and yelped when the soup splattered on her bare feet. “Goodness, what have you found? Tell us! Don’t just stare at it as if it were a snake to bite you. I’ll bite you.”

Rohan merely toyed with the barest hint of a gold ridge at the edge of the locket. Then, quite suddenly, without his knowing what he had done, it snapped open. He handed the locket to Susannah. “Pull out the paper. It’s too small for me to grasp. Be careful, Susannah.”

Charlotte sighed and crowded closer.

Susannah managed to press the small square of paper hard enough against her finger pad so that it stuck. Slowly she pulled it away. The paper fell to the tabletop. On top of it landed a very small golden key. Rohan picked up the key. “How could something so tiny fit a lock?”

Charlotte took it from him and laid it flat on her palm. “I believe there’s some writing on it, dearest. But that can wait. Is that a map?”

?

??Unfold it,” said Rohan.

Flattened, the paper was only about half the size of Susannah’s palm. It was indeed a map—a map that was blurred and faded and very hard to make out. Rohan said slowly, “When I tricked the man, he started to spit out ‘Scotland.’ Do you remember?”

“I remember, dearest. It was very well done of you. Not only are you delightfully profligate and wicked to a fault, you are of a brilliance that rivals the sun itself.”

“I shall surely be ill,” Susannah remarked to no one in particular.

Charlotte ignored her. “Your dear father sometimes agreed that you had my brains. I think that you’ve now proved it conclusively. Bravo, dearest.”

“I think I will be ill again,” Susannah said. She looked at Rohan, who was paying no attention to either of them. “If you know so much, Rohan, since you are so terribly clever, just where in Scotland? And what does this key belong to?”

“I haven’t the foggiest idea,” he said, clearly distracted, “on either count, at least not yet. Now, be quiet, both of you. Mother, have one of the footmen—Augustus, if you like—fetch my magnifying glass from the estate room. It should be in the top left drawer of my desk.”

His mother raised a perfect blond eyebrow at him, saying, “I am amazed that you would know the location of such a mundane sort of article, dearest. Surely a man of your reputation wouldn’t retain memory of something like that. It is something a good servant would know, but not you, not the master, the baron, the . . .”

“Please, Mother, we need the magnifying glass.”

Seven minutes later, Rohan was closely studying the small yellowed piece of paper. “It is a map,” he said, more to himself than to the two women. “But unfortunately it’s only half a map. Now I can see the clean cut along this side. I can make out a body of water by these squiggly lines, and they continue off the paper. See these lines here? They must be paths branching away from the water. Perhaps these blocks are meant to represent houses. And yes, here are words, tiny words, but I can make them out.”

He couldn’t, however, make them out with his mother and Susannah crowding in on him.

“Susannah, sit down. Mother, your perfume palsies my man’s senses. Please move away. Good, now let’s see what we’ve got.”

“Rohan, you’ve been staring at it for an hour,” Susannah said, crowding close again. “Come, what do you see? What does it say?”

Slowly he straightened. “It says, ‘Seek the room below the tide.’ Which makes no sense at all except it might mean it’s near the sea. What sea? East coast or west coast? There is another word that has only two letters remaining after the map was cut into two. ‘DU’.”

“What room?” Susannah said. “One of those little blocks?”