Last Night's Scandal (The Dressmakers 5)

He held up the candle. She stood on tiptoe, peering in to the space the stone had concealed.

In it lay an ironbound chest.

Chapter 18

At least it seemed to be an ironbound chest.

Olivia stood gaping at it.

She hadn’t, really, expected to find a treasure chest.

She wasn’t sure what she’d expected to find, but the very last thing was this.

“Good grief,” she said. “Good grief.”

“Looks like a chest,” he said.

“Is that dirt?” she said. “Is it as filthy as I think? Or is it rotting?”

“It looks as though it was buried somewhere else first,” Lisle said. “Maybe they put it in the ground, then changed their minds.” He reached in and caught hold of the sides. He tugged. It didn’t move. He tugged harder. It moved a fraction of an inch.

He was strong, she knew. He could lift her up effortlessly. She was taller than many women and hardly undernourished. But he could simply pick her up and put her down as if she were a teapot.

“It’s heavier than I thought,” he said. “I’ll need Nichols for this.”

He went out.

She remained, staring in disbelief at the chest. She was still trying to get her mind to believe what her eyes were telling it, when Lisle reappeared with Nichols and a set of tools.

She stood back while the men scraped dirt away.

This was what they did, she thought, in Egypt.

A handle appeared. With Nichols pulling on the handle and Lisle guiding the box, they eased it out of the hole and, with obvious effort, onto the floor.

“It’s amazingly heavy,” Lisle said. “But some of the weight might be centuries of dirt. We’ll need to carry it into the next room to see properly what we’re doing.”

After Nichols cleaned off the other handle, the two men carried the chest through the adjoining closet and into the guardroom.

Nichols continued cleaning. A minute or two later he paused. When he recommenced, he did so more slowly and gingerly.

It was hard to stand still, looking on. Inwardly, Olivia danced with impatience. “This is the way you deal with ancient artifacts, I suppose,” she said. “No wonder you said it wants patience. This is merely a chest. Even my imagination can’t grasp what it must take to unearth a tomb or a temple.”

“Sand is different,” Lisle said. “And we do have a crew of men. Even so . . . Is there a difficulty, Nichols?”

“Not exactly, your lordship,” said Nichols. “But I thought it best to exercise caution.”

“It’s not going to explode, is it?” Olivia said. “Cousin Frederick did have an odd sense of humor.”

“No danger of that, miss,” said Nichols. “It’s simply that certain features indicate sixteenth- or seventeenth-century German make.”

She’d barely got used to the chest. This wanted a moment to sink in. “German,” she said. “Sixteenth or seventeenth century.”

“What?” Lisle to her. “Why do you look like that?

“Like what?”

“As though it had exploded.”

She moved nearer to Nichols. “These chests are famous,” she said.

“Complicated,” said Nichols.

“Diabolically so,” she said. “Great Uncle Hubert DeLucey, who could open anything, said he spent days on one. And he had the keys.”

“Indeed, miss,” said Nichols, still diligently and delicately working. “One wouldn’t want to damage the mechanisms inadvertently.”

Her fingers itched to get at it. She made herself keep a distance. While Nichols carefully and patiently removed the thick crust of dirt, she walked around the chest, studying it.

It was about two feet long, a foot wide, and a foot deep. It was made of iron bands.

By the time Nichols finished, the sun was setting.

He swept the area.

She knelt in front of the chest. Lisle knelt beside her. “False keyholes, you see,” she said. “And hidden keyholes. And the outer locks. One must begin there, of course.”

“I assume that’s the easy part,” he said.

“I hope so,” she said. “I’ve only ever seen one of them, and I’ve never had the chance to work on any. One must unlock the locks in a certain order and turn screws and such. Even with keys it’s challenging, and we don’t have the keys.”

Lisle looked up at his valet. “We’re going to need candles,” he said. “And a fire. I suspect we’re going to be here for a while.”

Four hours later, Olivia sat at the table with her chin on her hands, scowling at the chest.

Things weren’t going well.

After she and Lisle had carefully cleaned off the rust and oiled the locks, she’d gone to work.

“It’s been ages since I had a proper lock to open,” she’d told him.

After the first hour passed, he had Nichols bring down a table and chair. He and Nichols lifted the chest onto the table.

After the second hour, Bailey brought in tea for them all and a heavier shawl for her mistress.

During the third hour, Lisle said, “We ought to go up and change for dinner.”

“You go,” Olivia said. “I’m not leaving this cursed thing until I’ve solved it.”

Instead, he told the Harpies to proceed without them. He brought sandwiches and wine back to the guardroom.

Olivia tried every lock pick in her housebreaking kit, and that amounted to scores of picks. She tried hairpins, dress pins, toothpicks, sewing needles, and wire.

Now, after four hours of her getting nowhere, Lisle said, “Sometimes you have to leave it alone for a while, and come back.”

She said, “I’ve never met a lock I couldn’t unlock.”

He said, “You’ve never met one of these. You said yourself that it wasn’t simply a lock or a set of locks. It’s a puzzle. How many years did it take Aunt Daphne to decipher the signs for ‘Ramses’?”

“It isn’t a lost language! It’s locks, pieces of metal. It’s the one thing I can do!” She tipped her head sideways and glared at a keyhole.

“What nonsense,” he said. “You can do all sorts of things. The trouble is, you haven’t the proper sort of mind for puzzles like this. It wants a plodding, methodical, obstinate sort of mind. Yours is all”—he made swirling motions with his hands—“excitable. Emotional.”

Her head came up again, and the blue glare she shot at him could have blistered steel.

“Are you saying you can solve this?” she said.

“It might be time to let me try,” he said.

“No,” she said. “I can do this. And I can do it without any help from amateurs.”

He started to go out. He got halfway to the door when he saw in his mind’s eye her face, and he heard again the contemptuous tone with which she’d uttered “amateurs.” He set his hand on the wall and looked down at the floor, but he couldn’t control it. He laughed. And laughed. And laughed.

She bolted up. “You great, arrogant thickhead! It isn’t funny.” He caught her up and pulled her close and kissed her. She struggled, but only for a moment. Then she flung her arms around his neck and kissed him back, angry and wild. And after a moment, her body shook, and she broke away and laughed, too, that rich, velvety sound, echoing through the room and cascading over his skin and through his heart like a waterfall of joy.

“I can’t do it,” she said. Still laughing, she stamped her foot. “I want to tear my hair out.”

He brought her close again, and stroked the top of her head, over the silky curls. “Maybe it isn’t you,” he said. “Maybe the locks have seized up.”

“What then?” she said. “A sledgehammer?”

“That will relieve your feelings, but it could destroy the chest an

d, possibly, what’s in it,” he said. “What we need is a blacksmith.”

That night

“You’re late, Mary,” Roy said, startling the housemaid as she came up the path to the cottage she shared with her brother.

“He’s all right, isn’t he?” she said. “You didn’t—”

“Jock’s looking after him, real careful. Don’t want nothing to happen to his fingers, after all. How could he work then? What took you so long?”

“It’s Sunday,” she said. “Most everybody took the half day.”

“But you didn’t. Glaud told me. You should have told me, Mary.”

“They pay extra if you work your half day,” she said. “You know I need the money.”

“And you ought to know, just because the tavern’s closed, you can’t sneak home without talking to me,” he said. “I’d start talking, was I you.”