“When everyone’s asleep,” she said. “So as not to Arouse Suspicion.”
“Right,” he said. “Here’s what we’ll do, you dramatic nodcock. We’ll stop and have tea. By the time we’re done, the workmen will be gone, and we can go down and see how much progress they’ve made. We’ll probably argue about it. That should give us a few hours. Do you understand?”
She turned and continued down the stairs. “Of course I understand. And I am not a nodcock.”
Two hours after the workmen had left for the day, Olivia scowled at the walls of the basement entresol.
“Either we must go at it with pickaxes, or we must do this by daylight,” she said. “Both ends measure twelve feet. Both ends are simply blank walls. I don’t know how you work in windowless tombs. I can’t make out whether the marks in the stones are meant to be symbols or they’re simply random marks.”
“Tomb walls tend to be carefully chiseled and painted,” Lisle said. “With a torch or candles, one can see well enough.” He ran his hand over a block of stone. “It does look as though someone has had a go at the mortar with a pickaxe, and it was covered up later. But that might have been a repair.”
Olivia could see what he was talking about, though it was a very slight difference in the look of the mortar. “If someone was searching, it appears they hadn’t any better idea than we do where to look.”
“I don’t propose to start tearing into walls at random,” he said. “This room is in reasonably good repair.” He looked at her. “You’re going to have to contain your impatience. We need to think this through and make a plan.”
Olivia looked around her. The room, according to Lisle, must have been a guard chamber once upon a time. It boasted a fireplace, a cupboard, and a garderobe tucked in at the corner of a closet in the south-facing wall. At present it was empty, but in recent days it had been cleaned and repaired. She was frustrated and impatient, but she wasn’t eager to undo all the work the laborers had put into it.
“Sunday,” he said. “The workmen won’t be here, and most of the servants will take their half day. We can go over every inch of this place without being interrupted or setting off rumors. And we’ll have daylight. Or something like it. Maybe.”
“I should hope we’d know a bit more by then,” she said. “The ladies will be back for dinner. I’m counting on them to shed at least a little light on the mystery. And there are always your cousin’s papers to review. I’ve only made a start with those.” She waved her hand at the provoking wall. “Sunday, then, you annoying enigma.”
“If it doesn’t rain,” Lisle said.
That evening
“‘The walls have ears and eyes. But that’s their lookout below,’ ” Lisle repeated. “That’s it?”
The two ladies nodded.
They’d returned late from Edinburgh, where they’d dined with friends.
Over a light supper the ladies reported the results of their conversations with Frederick Dalmay’s attendants.
The two sentences were what it amounted to.
“Sorry, my dears,” said Lady Withcote. “Mere gibberish.”
“And no secret,” said Lady Cooper. “All the world knows what Frederick Dalmay said on his deathbed. Everyone thought it was one of his jokes.”
“They apparently made less and less sense during his last months,” said Lady Withcote.
All the world knew about his affair with a local widow that went on for years. The world knew of all his other affairs. Lisle’s cousin had liked the ladies very much, and they liked him back.
Apparently, he liked collecting things as much as he liked jokes and women. Every time he found a book or a pamphlet or a letter dealing with Gorewood Castle, he was thrilled. He hadn’t singled out—at least not in any obvious way—any documents specifically connected with the fabled treasure.
But, “The walls,” Lisle said.
He looked at Olivia, who was pushing a bit of cake about her plate. She’d done that with most of her food: arranged and rearranged it and now and again remembered to eat it.
“Yes,” she said, her mind clearly elsewhere. “The walls.”
Night of Friday 28 October
The Rankin brothers watched Mary Millar and some others guide her drunken brother out of the tavern.
“Useful fellow, he is,” said Roy.
“First time,” said Jock.
Mary Millar had been hired as a housemaid at Gorewood Castle. Her brother Glaud was a cobbler. The Rankin brothers had told Mary that they were worried Glaud’s fingers might accidentally get broken. They were worried this would happen if Mary didn’t get friendlier and talk to them more—say, about everything that was going on at the castle. They worried, too, about what might happen to her if she told anybody.
Anyone who bought Glaud a drink was his friend. Overnight, the Rankin brothers became his very good friends. Every evening, when Mary came to collect him, he was sitting in a corner away from everyone else with his two good friends. She would sit down, too, and talk to them, quickly and very quietly.
Tonight she’d told them about the old ladies’ visit to Edinburgh.
“They know what the old man said,” Jock said. “But they ain’t digging.”
“ ‘Walls have eyes and ears but lookout below,’ ” Roy said. “What else’s below the walls but the ground?”
Jock looked about him, but no one was nearby, listening. Even when the pub was crowded, people usually left a little space around them. He leaned over his tankard and said, “We found things in the ground. By the wall.”
Roy thought for a long time.
Jock stared into his tankard. “They ain’t digging, not proper,” he said. “And we can’t.”
Roy went on thinking.
“I’ll go right mad, I will,” Jock said. “All this time—”
“Maybe it don’t mean what it says,” Roy said.
This was too deep for Jock. He shook his head, lifted his tankard and emptied it.
“Maybe they can work out what it means,” Roy said. “Stands to reason. Old man was educated. Laird’s son’s educated. Maybe what he said was like Greek. Stands for something else. And the paper explains it. We can’t get the paper. We can’t do anything. Maybe we should let them do it, let them do the work.”
“And find it?” Jock said. “Just like that? Give up?”
“Why not let them do all the work and find it?” Roy said. “Finding is one thing. Keeping is another.”
“You took a fever, Roy?” said his brother. “You think we can get it away from them? A houseful of servants and that bastard Herrick in charge of ’em? Bars on the doors. Traps in the basement.”
“We got Mary,” Roy said. “She’ll do what we tell her.”
Sunday 30 October
“Curse you, curse you!” Olivia cried. “You cursed, stubborn stones! You’re not the Sphinx, damn you! You’ve got something in there and we both know it.” She struck at the entresol wall with her mallet.
“Don’t—”
“Ow!” The mallet clanged to the floor.
“Don’t hit it so hard,” Lisle muttered. He set down his hammer and went to her. She was rubbing her arm. He pushed her hand away and massaged. “You’re supposed to tap gently,” he said.
“I’m not cut out for this,” she said. “I don’t know what I’m tapping for. I don’t know what I’m listening for. Can’t you simply do that thing that Belzoni does—did?”
He stopped rubbing her arm. “What Belzoni did?”
“You know. You explained it to me once. The way he’d look at a structure and discern something different about the sand or the rubble about it. That was how he found the entrance to the Second Pyramid. He said so in his book.” She pointed at the wall. “Can’t you just look?”
“I’ve looked,”
Lisle said. “But this is completely different. It isn’t covered in sand and rubble. I’m not sure what I’m looking for.”
He’d stopped rubbing her arm but he was still holding onto it, he realized. He let go, gently and carefully, and stepped back a pace.
Five days.
It was a long time. They’d kept busy, going through Frederick’s papers and books. But not behind closed doors. They’d carried down the books and papers and worked in the great hall, he on one side of the table, she on the other.
They hadn’t said it aloud. They didn’t need to. Matters had got out of hand, and even she’d admitted it. Even she had seen they were on the brink, and even she, so incautious, had stepped back.
We’ll ruin each other’s lives . . . I won’t settle for second place in a man’s heart.
“Where’s our clue?” he said.
“On the floor somewhere,” she said. “I dropped it. I wish I’d never seen it.”
“Remind me never to take you on an excavation,” he said.
“As though you would,” she said.
“I would,” he said. “But you’d die of boredom. Or kill somebody. Patience isn’t your strong suit.”
She spun away in a whirl of skirts and flung herself onto one of the benches the workmen had left.
He found the ancient piece of paper she’d tossed aside. He focused on that. The marks didn’t match the ones on the walls. The walls held initials and mason’s marks—everyone leaving some mark behind, the way visitors had done on the Great Bed of Ware.
“You actually thought about it,” she said. “About my being with you, on an excavation.”
He had thought about it, more than he realized. When he first saw the Great Pyramids and the Sphinx, he’d thought of her, and what her expression would be like, the first time, and what she’d say. He’d enter a tomb and. . .
“I think, sometimes, of what it would be like, to be able to turn to you, and say, ‘Look at this. Look at this, Olivia.’ Yes. I think that sometimes.”
“Oh,” she said.
“It would be exciting, that first moment of discovery,” he said. “You’d like it. But before and after are the hours and days and weeks and months of tedious, repetitive work.”
“During which you’d forget I existed.”
“You could bring me a cup of tea,” he said. “That would remind me.”
“You’ve got Nichols for that,” she said.
“You could take off all your clothes,” he said.
“And dance naked in the desert?”
“At night,” he said. “Under the starry skies. You’ve never seen such stars, such nights.”
“It sounds heavenly,” she said softly. Then she bounced up from the bench. “But I know what you’re doing. You’re casting lures.”
“Don’t be absurd.”
Was he? Perhaps.
“I know you, Lisle. I know you better than anybody else does. Your conscience has been chipping away, night after night, chipping, chipping. And you’ve laid a cunning plan for my downfall. ‘I’ll lure her,’ you decide. And because you know me better than anybody else except Mama does, you know the way to do it.”
Did he? Was it working?
She came to him. “I’ve more patience than you think, but I’m out of sorts. This star-crossed tragic passion business doesn’t agree with me. Let me look at that accursed paper again.”
Egypt. Dancing in the desert naked, under the stars.
He looked so angelic—the golden hair and silvery eyes—but he was an evil tempter.
She took the paper from him and made herself concentrate.
The drawing showed two walls measuring twelve feet wide. Inside the squares representing stones were tiny markings and numbers.
About a quarter of the way up the drawing of the wall, on the right hand side, was a symbol.
“That one,” she said. “Not like the others, is it?”
“A mason’s mark, I think. It looks like GL with an arrow through it.”
“If it’s an arrow, it’s pointing left,” he said.
“But where is it?”
They both walked to the east wall and looked for the mark.
Nothing.
They walked to the west wall and looked for the mark.
Nothing.
“It ought to be on one . . .” She trailed off. “Unless we’re looking for the wrong thing.”
Words shifted in her mind, images, too. What the ladies had said. What Lisle had said.
“Remember when I said that a drawing of the wall was so obvious and you said maps are obvious?” she said.
He looked down at the mark. He looked at the wall.
“An arrow pointing to the spot?” he said.
“If the wall’s meant to be the west wall, perhaps it’s pointing to a window.”
“But why GL?”
“It’s your cousin’s drawing,” she said. “What if it’s one of his jokes?”
“ ‘The walls have eyes and ears’ ” she said. “ ‘Lookout below.’ ”
And that was when she saw it in her mind’s eye. The city on its great rock. The city where Frederick Dalmay had spent the last years of his life. “Edinburgh,” she said. “He would have thought it was funny.”
“I don’t—”
“Come,” she said. She took his hand.
His hand, his hand. Such a simple thing, holding his hand, yet what happened inside wasn’t simple at all.
She led him into the easternmost window recess, into the closet. She opened the door. “Gardy loo,” she said.
“This is the privy,” he said.
“The garderobe,” she said. “A play on the words and the meaning. In Edinburgh, when they’d empty the slops out of the window, they’d call out ‘gardyloo,’—garde à l’eau—mind the water. A warning, you see: Look out below.”
It was a small space, and dark. It was easy enough, though, to find a board to set over the hole, and the single candle Lisle brought in seemed very bright in the narrow room. It showed them the initials and primitive pictures and rude poetry scratched into the stones by various hands at various times.
Lisle did have to squeeze in amongst Olivia’s skirts, and they stood elbow to elbow, while he slowly raised the candle and slowly brought it down, so that they could scrutinize each stone.
Though they’d propped the door open, to allow in as much light as possible from the closet window, the room wasn’t meant to hold two people and not for any length of time. The air grew warmer and thicker, and her hair was under his nose, and the shadowy fragrance of her clothes and skin wrapped about him.
“We’d better find something soon,” he said. “This is . . . this is . . .”
“I know,” she said. “Is it like this in the tombs?”
“I’ve never been in a tomb with you,” he said. His head was bowing toward hers, where wispy curls dangled at her temple.
“Mind the candle,” she said, and in the same instant he felt the hot wax touch his hand, and he tipped it upright, and the light revealed a line of mortar around a stone. On each side someone had scratched a small cross.
“There,” she said. “Is that—”
“Yes.” He moved the candle. “X marks the spot.”
“Good heavens.” She clutched his arm. “I can’t believe it. It’s old, isn’t it?”
“It’s old,” he said. “And the marks are in the mortar, not on the stones. Old marks, old mortar.”
Everywhere else, the marks were in the stones.
His heart was racing. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe it was another of his cousin’s jokes. The marks were old, but it was impossible to say how old. Ten years or twenty or two hundred.
“Oh, Lisle,” she said. “We??
?ve found it.” She turned to him. “I don’t care what it is. But it’s old and we searched and we found it.”
He didn’t care what it was, either.
He set down the candle in the far corner of the privy seat. He wrapped his hands about her waist and lifted her up to bring them eye to eye. “You mad girl,” he said. “You mad, clever girl.”
She flung her arms round his neck. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you. If we find nothing else, thank you for this.”
He kissed her. He’d lifted her to do so. She kissed him back. Once, long and fierce, as though it was the last chance they’d ever get.
Then slowly, he set her down. He picked up the candle and made himself do what he always did. Examine. Assess. Decide. He studied the mortar. He considered the alternatives. He decided.
“We need chisels,” he said.
It took forever. They’d brought pickaxes, but as Lisle had obviously realized, one couldn’t swing a pickaxe effectively in these close quarters.
And so they picked away at the mortar, standing side by side, their bodies touching from time to time as they worked.
Bit by bit, the mortar came away from the edges of the stone until, finally, they’d freed the stone enough to move it.
“The mortar wasn’t as solid as I expected,” he said. “I thought we’d be at this for hours.” He jiggled the stone. “I don’t think this is as heavy as it looks, either. Do you want to try moving it with me, or do you want to send for servants?”
“How can you ask?” she said. “After all the time we’ve spent with that vexatious piece of paper and those stubborn walls? After all that, I’m to let servants have the triumphant moment?”
“We don’t know that it’ll be triumphant,” he said.
“I don’t care if all we find is a pair of Cousin Frederick’s shoes,” she said. “We found something.”
“Very well,” he said. “You put your hand there, and hold it up, and let me do the shifting.”
She followed his directions, and slowly, by inches, the stone emerged from the wall.
It was less slowly than she’d expected, though. The back corner appeared so suddenly that she was unprepared, and would have dropped it, but Lisle quickly grabbed it. Then he heaved the stone out and set it down on the board over the privy hole. From the front it looked like the other stones, but it had been cut to a few inches in depth.