The Courtship (Sherbrooke Brides 5)

13

THE ROOF OF THE CAVE was so low that both Spenser and Helen had to bend over. Helen, leading the way, holding a lantern in front of her, said over her shoulder, “The floor slopes down in a few more steps. Then we can stand up, barely.”

Spenser hated caves, avoided them like the plague, always had since the time when he was nine years old and a young neighbor girl had gotten lost in one and he had had to go in to find her. Her echoing cries, like dying breaths of tortured souls, overlaid with the cold, wet air of that cave, were forever imprinted on his brain.

“How big is the cave?” His voice sounded hollow, thinning as the echoes used the sounds until his words dissolved throughout the cave. He wondered if his voice would even be recognizable in a few more steps.

“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 th

e 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.”