“I’ll wager,” Badger said, “that old Lockridge Wyndham died before he could tell his children where the treasure was. Surely they must have known about it. It just got lost in succeeding generations.”
“And the monks wrote two separate books about it,” Marcus said. “One of them doubtless given to Lockridge Wyndham and the other given to whom? We’ll never know. At least it did end up with Burgess.”
“Others read it probably but didn’t realize what it was meant to say,” Maggie said. “Now, this is all well and good and a bloody wonderful history lesson, Mr. Spears, but where’s the Wyndham treasure?”
“There must be a small hidden space,” Marcus said. “That small space, my friends, must somehow be attached to this room. Of course, we haven’t a single clue what the treasure actually is.”
“Or the treasure could be above the room,” Badger said. He pointed upward. “The clue was to reach overhead for the nines, which the young man did. Then there’s the well, and that’s where the monster is, and perhaps the treasure.”
“But a well goes down, not up,” Patricia Wyndham said.
“Then,” the Duchess said, rising to her feet, unconsciously holding her side, “the hidden room or space is directly below the oak tree and the well, under the floor.”
“Not quite,” Patricia Wyndham said. “To be precise, and I believe that precision is quite the key here, we must look right beneath those Janus-faced nines.”
“Good God,” Marcus said. “Sampson, fetch Horatio.”
“Oh yes, Mr. Sampson, do hurry,” Maggie said. “I’m so keen to find the bloody treasure.”
The Aubusson carpet was rolled neatly against the far side of the room. All the furniture was moved away from a large area right below the Medieval paintings. Horatio, a carpenter with magic in his hands, was on his knees, his ear close to the wooden floor, lightly tapping his hammer. Suddenly, he raised his head and grinned, showing a wide space between his two front teeth. “M’lord, there’s no support beam running all along here. I think I’ve found the empty space.” He carefully began prying up the thick wooden strips of oak. Maggie was fidgeting, wanting him to hurry, cursing him and his persnickety ways. Who cared about the damned floor, who cared if it got scratched, wasn’t it covered with that huge old carpet anyway? But Spears shushed her, saying, “Perhaps you could accelerate your hammer’s momentum just a bit more, Horatio. It isn’t a sacred burial mound you’re digging up, after all.”
It broke the tension, but just for a moment.
“Now, now, I’ve got to go easy. I don’t want to splinter this old wood. Ah, yes, there it comes up, all clean and tidy.”
“Quickly,” Patricia Wyndham said. “Bring candles, Sampson!”
The space was made large enough for a man to ease down through the opening, which Marcus did, since he was the earl, though there was much grumbling, particularly from the women. “It’s filthy and black down here, Mother, you’d hate it. There are more spiders than you can imagine. And you, Maggie, you would have ripped your gown for certain and gotten nasty spiderwebs in your hair. As for you, Duchess, you just keep your mouth shut. You’re not well enough yet to fight with all the myriad gloom and bugs down here. Maggie, hand me down a branch of candles. I can’t see a bloody thing with just one.”
Then there was silence.
“Do you see anything, Marcus?” He looked up briefly to see his wife’s face peering down into the dark space.
“Son, speak up, or do you want your old mother to expire from unrequited silence?”
The space was long and narrow, but very confined, not more than four feet high. He had to bend over almost double. The space seemed to stretch on endlessly, perhaps the entire length of the Green Cube Room. He held up the candles and clearly saw the floor beams. There didn’t seem to be anything else, just blackness, choking dust, spiders, and enough cobwebs to smother a battalion. He continued searching, hunched over like an old man. Then the space ended after about twenty feet, obviously at the end of the Green Cube Room above. There was something leaning against a wall. The something wasn’t a treasure chest. He drew closer, holding the branch of candles out in front of him. He drew to a startled stop before it. He called out even as he choked on the airless dust, “Oh my God, what the hell
is this? A skeleton, yes, so it appears, but how’s that possible?”
Marcus held the candle closer and drew a deep breath. It wasn’t a skeleton, but rather a dummy, a figure probably stuffed with moldy old straw, a man to be hung in effigy, for there was a rope around his neck and the rope was drawn up tight and nailed over the dummy’s head to the beam above it. The figure was dressed in fancy clothes from Elizabethan times. Marcus lightly touched the lace on a sleeve and it fell into dust. He held the branch of candles closer. The cloth face had been carefully painted: there was greed and avarice and cruelty on that stingy, heavy face, and dissipation and utter arrogance in those glass eyes staring sightlessly up at him.
He realized with a jolt that it was the king himself, Henry VIIIth, his face very much like the portrait painted of him by Holbein, only a bit younger. Marcus thought idly that it had taken a lot of straw stuffed in the frame to fill up the king’s stout body. But why here? Hidden away?
He heard voices above him, all of them demanding, yelling, calling out, even the Duchess’s voice, and she sounded very testy. He grinned, saying, “The skeleton is really a man probably stuffed with straw, Henry the Eighth to be exact, all ready to hang in effigy with a rope around its neck. Just a moment, there’s more. Hold on.”
It was at that moment he realized the fat figure, all outfitted in purple velvet and ermine and a ruff that was wider than a wagon wheel around the fat neck, was too fat. It wasn’t stuffed with straw. No, it was stuffed with something else. He gently reached inside an opening above the ruff at the neck and pulled out a long string of the most exquisite pearls he’d ever seen. He pressed his hands against the rotting material and felt the shape of more jewels, coins, even several outlines of rosaries, a scepter. His fingers made out the curve of a gold-coin plate and a chalice. There was also the heavy outline of a book, probably the Bible, its cover no doubt embedded with jewels. There were most likely other precious Church relics as well stuffed in that body. It wasn’t moldy straw, it was the treasure from St. Swale’s Abbey and it had been here stuffed in that fat figure of King Henry VIIIth for well over three hundred years.
“I think, Spears,” he called up, “that you need to send down some sort of long flat stretcher with ropes attached so we can pull it up. It’s very heavy, so make the ropes and board stout. Our dummy here is stuffed with treasure, a veritable king’s ransom in treasure.”
30
“DO YOU HAVE any idea how deliciously decadent you look?”
She just grinned up at him, the luminous loop of pearls around her neck, dipping down past her navel to rest on her white belly. She wasn’t wearing anything else, her husband having insisted that with the pearls lying on her flesh—ah, nothing more was necessary. She was, he told her now, to consider it his birthday present to her, perhaps for the next three years, so grand were the pearls.
“Yes, I know you think me wonderful, and I am. I found out from Aunt Gweneth that your birthday’s in September, just around the corner.”
“And I found out from Fanny that your birthday is in early October. Just perhaps I’ll manage to find a fitting bit of jewelry for you to wear. Ah, about dear Fanny, I believe she’s making you something very special for your birthday, Marcus.”