The Courtship (17 page)

“Bloodworth, ma'am. Bloodworth Nettle.”

“You are jesting.”

“No, ma'am. It was my ma's name before she married my pa and became a Nettle.”

Helen's voice was faint. “That would make Teeny and Bloodworth Nettle. It curdles the belly.”

Lord Beecham rocked with laughter. The covers fell even lower. Helen looked resolutely away. She needed to solve this problem. “I try to use a bit of blood whenever I call for him,” said Lord Beecham.

“That's right, ma'am. His lordship calls me bloody Nettle or bloody scoundrel or bloody baboon. Something along that line, you understand.”

“Yes, I quite understand.”

“It would be simply Teeny Nettle, ma'am.”

“No, Teeny is very sensitive. There is too much blood in the names. It will never do.”

Lord Beecham remarked to the room at large, “There is also the matter of Teeny becoming a small weed.”

She ignored that. “How old are you, Nettle?”

“I am only thirty-five, Miss Helen.”

“Flock is thirty-eight,” she said, and sighed.

“Not much difference there,” Lord Beecham said. “What's a poor big girl to do?”

Helen said as she walked to the bedchamber door, “I am going to introduce Teeny to Walter Jones, the young man who works in his father's mercantile shop in Court Hammering. He is only twenty-two, and there is no blood in any of his names.”

“Oh, no, Miss Helen!”

“Don't do that, Miss Helen!”

Nettle leapt to his feet. Flock flung open the bedchamber door, nearly knocking Helen sideways against the wall.

Lord Beecham leaped out of bed, stark naked.

Helen whirled about to look at him, blinked, then resolutely turned away. “Lord Beecham,” she called out over her shoulder, “return to your bed. I have things well in hand.” She got herself together, straightened her skirt, and poked a finger at Lord Beecham's valet and her father's butler. “I have had quite enough of this. Neither one of you will ever win Teeny. Flock, your name simply will not do. Teeny Flock—it is impossible. She cannot be a small herd.

“As for you, Nettle, in addition to Teeny being a small weed, your first name will not do at all. As a couple, she would be Teeny Bloodbane, and you would be Bloodworth Nettle. It will not work.

“As I told his lordship here, there is just too much blood flowing about. Now, both of you might as well set your sights elsewhere. Teeny Jones sounds marvelous and that is the way it will be. Teeny and Walter Jones. I have also decided that both of you are too old for Teeny. Walter is just right. Now, both of you get out of here.”

“Er, Miss Mayberry, may my valet remain and assist me?”

“You are a grown man, Lord Beecham. I have never understood why a grown man can't assist himself.”

“And your Teeny?”

“You, sir, have no notion what it is like to have buttons marching up your back. Now, out of here, Flock. You may remain for the moment, Nettle, but no more scurrying under his lordship's bed. You will maintain a modicum of dignity.”

With that, Helen whisked out of his bedchamber, her pale-blue muslin skirts dancing around her ankles.

Lord Beecham crossed his arms behind his head. He eyed his valet, who looked to be on the verge of tears. “I don't believe I've ever been quite so entertained at seven o'clock in the morning. Fetch me some bathwater, Nettle. Don't cry, man, you'll get over it soon enough. Didn't you see the downstairs maid?”

“No, my lord. I doubt I could see her even if I looked directly at her, what with all the tears from my broken heart filling my eyes.”

Lord Beecham rolled his own eyes.

At the breakfast table with Lord Prith, Lord Beecham even managed to avoid sipping a noxious mixture of apple juice and champagne, but he watched Lord Prith vigorously down a glass. Lord Prith ruminated a moment, then admitted, “I must say, this concoction would send a warning to a man's liver. What would you think of a mixture of elderberry wine and champagne?”

Lord Beecham nearly gagged.

T
HE 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 the 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.”

“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.