“Yes,” he said, his eyes glazed.
She gave a merry laugh and went into Shugborough Hall.
One hour later, after a light luncheon of sliced chicken topped with apricot chutney, crunchy fresh bread with the sweetest butter Lord Beecham had ever tasted, and orange and pear slices sprinkled with roasted almonds, enjoyed with Lord Prith’s favorite drink, champagne, a treat that Lord Beecham declined, he found himself sitting at Miss Helen Mayberry’s charming gilt-and-white Louis XV desk in a sunny back chamber that didn’t enjoy the presence of many gentlemen, she had told him. It was her estate room, where she conducted all her business. It was also her library, where she read and thought and dreamed about the lamp and what it really did.
She carefully placed the iron cask on the desk in front of him. “It’s very old. But solid. After all these hundreds upon hundreds of years, it is still strong.”
“I wish there was some way we could tell just how old it really is,” he said. Slowly, with infinite care, he pulled the fraying leather strap off its hook and lifted it, then gently raised the domed lid. He breathed in deeply. It was an ancient smell, he thought, ancient and something else. Not only did it smell very old, the hundreds of years leaving a vaguely yeasty scent with perhaps just a hint of the smell of olives, but also it didn’t seem quite to belong here in this modern world where everything was explained by science and there were no more mysteries, no more magic, no more strange phenomena that boggled a man’s brain.
Olives, he thought. Yes, there was the faint but distinct smell of olives. And something else as well. It nearly overwhelmed him, this feeling that the cask was, in and of itself, important—very important. He felt it deep inside himself. It was also frightening because it did not feel to him as if it was of this world.
What did he mean by that? That this cask had somehow floated down from another world? One of the millions of stars he looked at in the heavens? It had come from one of them? Oh, certainly not. Just breathing in the smell of this ancient cask with its scent of olives and yeast was making him more fanciful than Helen’s little jest about pulling off his boots had done.
“I wish,” he said, “that we could find a person who has been around something magical, something exquisitely different from everything we know. He could perhaps explain, just breathing in the air of this cask, just touching it, how old it is and where it came from.”
“Yes, and what it is doing here. Hidden in a wall in the back of an old cave in a cliff beside the sea.”
“Do you smell the olives?”
She nodded, “When I carried the cask out of the cave and gently set it on a rock, I looked at it for the longest time before I could bring myself to open it. I don’t know if I expected some sort of genie to float out. When I did open it, the smell of olives nearly overwhelmed me it was so strong. It has grown weaker over time, allowing the other smells to come out.”
“The smell of age.”
“Yes. I felt too as though I were in the presence of something ancient and powerful, yet very strange, very different from me. The smell or the feeling of this thing hasn’t changed. Don’t you think that odd?”
He slowly nodded. He had no words. Slowly, with infinite care, Helen gently lifted out the scroll of leather. “You can see how very fragile it is.”
She unrolled it while he held down one side. It covered a third of the desk. There were four paperweights, each set carefully upon a corner, to hol
d it down. “Did you measure it?”
She nodded. “It’s twelve inches by nine and a half inches.”
He lightly touched his fingertips to the old leather as a blind man would. “There was probably something tying it closed?”
“Yes, but it disintegrated long ago. It must have been tied for a very long time, because when I found it, the scroll was still tightly rolled.”
Only then did he allow himself to look down upon the old leather. It was the color of dried blood. The writing was black. The person had pressed the inked tip hard into the leather. It wouldn’t have mattered if the leather had turned completely black over the years. The deep grooves and shapes were still perfectly clear.
Reading what was written, however, was a different matter.
“Do you have a magnifying glass?”
“Yes, right here.”
The silence grew long and thick. Helen walked away from him to the French doors of the small estate room, which gave onto a private walled garden.
She looked back at him, leaning over her desk, staring down intently at the leather scroll. He was frowning.
“What is it, Lord Beecham?”
“I believe,” he said at last, turning to look at her, “that it is time you called me by my given name. It’s Spenser.”
“All right. You may call me Helen.”
“Helen is a good name. This scroll—it is not Latin or old French or anything like that.”
“What is it?”