The Courtship (Sherbrooke Brides 5)

“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.”