The Courtship (Sherbrooke Brides 5)

Helen certainly did not disagree with that. After she had been bathed by Teeny and dressed in a fresh nightgown, she fell into a dreamless and deep sleep for the rest of the night.

Toward morning there was a huge storm. Trees were uprooted, rock avalanches ripped down cliffs. Helen slept through it all.

Two weeks later, when Lord Beecham and Helen visited the cave, they found that an entire wall had fallen inward. In that small opening they saw a strange light.

It pulsed, Helen thought, pulsed with a soft yellowish sort of glow. The light seemed to go on forever, extending back into the dirt wall as far as the eye could see.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know.” Lord Beecham reached his hand toward that light. His fingers closed around something solid, something very warm, something that felt as if it were somehow moving, but it wasn’t. It pulsed against his flesh.

“Helen,” he said very quietly, “I have found something that shouldn’t be here, something that isn’t like anything we have ever known.” Slowly, very slowly, he grasped the object between his hands and pulled it toward them.

It was a filthy old lamp.

Neither of them said a word. They could only stare at the thing. Helen ripped off a long strip from her petticoat, and Lord Beecham lightly began to rub the lamp clean. Some minutes later, they saw the dented old gold of its surface. The lamp was small, not longer than two of Lord Beecham’s hands, fingertip to fingertip, perhaps as tall as one of his hands, fingers extended. It was immensely heavy. Lord Beecham handed it to his wife.

Helen cupped it in her palms. It didn’t seem quite so heavy now. “The lamp,” she said, tears in her eyes. “I cannot believe it was here all the time. But why wasn’t it in the cask?”

“Maybe as an extra protection in case someone, like you, found the cask. It must be the lamp that King Edward the First received from the Knight Templar.”

“Or perhaps it was originally in the iron cask and it removed itself further inside the cave wall. Yes, it is the lamp, and it is so very warm. There is something alive about it, something that makes little sense to me, but it must, to someone.”

“It was hidden in the dark,” he said. “Very deep in the cave wall. Perhaps it was hidden there for more protection or more likely, I believe now, to keep it buried.” It made him want to withdraw, to forget anything like this damned lamp that wasn’t of this world, that shouldn’t be here, held in Helen’s hands, looking all sorts of benign, when he knew, he simply knew, that it held more power than was wise.

“It isn’t real, Helen.”

She was stroking the lamp. She sat down on the cave floor and held it close to the branch of candles they had brought into the cave with them. She tried to lift the golden lid that was shaped like a small onion. It didn’t move. It seemed all one piece, even though there was a dirty seam. “What do you mean, it isn’t real?”

“I don’t know. I just said it. What do you want to do with it?”

She said without hesitation, “You remember how King Edward laid the lamp in the queen’s arms when she was so very ill? And she survived? I want to see if it will help Mrs. Freelady. I visited just yesterday, and she is very near death.”

Lord Beecham didn’t think that was a good idea, but it was Helen’s lamp and her decision. Mrs. Freelady spent the night with the lamp held to her chest, Lord and Lady Beecham in the next room. When they looked in on her early the following morning, she was dead.

Helen said nothing at all, just took the lamp back to Shugborough Hall. Word got around, as word always did, that the lamp had been found.

Late one night, not three days later, three men tried to steal it. Lord Beecham awoke to hear Flock yelling at the top of his lungs. He shot one of the men in the arm, but the fellow’s cohorts managed to get him away.

He lit candles and stared at the bloody lamp that sat atop the mantel in the drawing room, just sat there, all old and dented and harmless-looking. He rolled his eyes and went back to bed.

The lamp had done nothing save sit there since they had found it. It didn’t pulse or give off any light. It didn’t disappear and then reappear again, it didn’t do anything remotely remarkable. Lord Beecham was beginning to believe that he disremembered any sort of magic attributes.

It was just an old lamp. If it had ever been magical, that magic was long gone.

Only two days after that, an old woman tried to steal the lamp. Lord Prith tucked her under his arm and carried her away. She never stopped yelling that the lamp was evil and she had to destroy it.

So many years, Helen thought, as she stroked the lamp. So many years she had searched for it, and now that it was hers, it appeared to be exactly what it was—an old, dented lamp with n

othing at all magical about it. It didn’t disappear, or change shape even once. It just sat there on the mantel, looking decrepit. But all the writings, warning of this and that. Why, really, had King Edward buried it? Nothing about the damned lamp made sense.

There were no answers. King Edward hadn’t found the answers either. The lamp simply sat there on the mantel through two more attempts to steal it.

32

Two Months Later

IT WAS EARLY SPRING, the wildflowers just beginning to bloom, the air soft and scented with salt and pine trees. Lord Beecham stood just behind his new wife on the promontory, his hands splayed over her now flat belly, looking out over the sea, watching the storm come closer. The waves were whipping up, huge spumes of water striking the black rocks just off to the left, sending arcs of water thundering into the air. Birds shrieked and wheeled in the air above them.