The Sherwood Ring (23 page)

"When we're . . . what?"

"Married," said Pat, casually. "Don't look so taken aback! Surely it can't really be news to you? I've had it in my mind ever since I saw you standing there in the road with your shoes all over mud."

"B-but — "

"And don't bother trying to argue with me about it. You can have as long as you like to accustom yourself to the idea, but you may as well get it through your head now that nothing you can do will make the slightest difference in the end. The members of my family have always been as stubborn as mules, and notoriously good at getting what they wanted. We even have a motto about it on our coat of arms:
quod desidero obtineo,
which, roughly translated, means — "

My whole universe suddenly seemed to splinter and crack and go whirling chaotically in bits around my head like the pieces of a gigantic jigsaw puzzle.

"Pat! Wait a minute! No, please listen to me! What did you say your family name was? Not the Thorne part — the other?"

"Sherwood," said Pat, looking rather bewildered. "What's the matter? Did you expect it to be something like Montmorency or Plantagenet? Peggy Plantagenet would be a horrible name."

"And your ancestor you were telling me about — you know, the eighteenth-century Thorne who was with the British Army in New York — was he called Sherwood too? Peaceable Drummond Sherwood?"

"That was the one. He didn't come into the title and so on till after the war. I believe he was originally a nephew or something of the sort."

"And he was the man with the diary and the letters and all the other stuff you couldn't find any trace of?"

"Yes."

"And the diary — was it written in a brown leather book with his coat of arms on the cover?"

Pat frowned suddenly. "Yes; I remember now — there were about nine or ten of them altogether. But how on earth did you — ?"

I drew a deep breath. Great fragments of the jigsaw puzzle were beginning to fall into place and fit together at last.

"Pat, I'm afraid I know what's become of your things. Uncle Enos must have them."

"What?"

"I'm not sure about the rest, but he had one of the diary books in his study last month. I saw it accidentally when I was trying to pick up his notes for him after the big thunderstorm. I expect he's got all the others put away somewhere too."

"But that just isn't possible! Where in the world could your Uncle Enos have —" Pat broke off abruptly, his face clearing. "Of course! It must have been at that weekend in the country with Cousin Mildred after the old gentleman died. The one Mrs. Cunningham was talking about at the party." He leaned back against the gate and began to laugh helplessly. "Oh, naughty Uncle Enos! Do you suppose he carried them off down a ladder and smuggled them aboard the lugger in the middle of the night?"

"But I thought you said your Cousin Mildred told you that she'd never heard of them, and she'd hung a picture of Salisbury Cathedral over the place where the miniature used to be, and I don't see any reason why she should do that unless she — she —" My voice faltered and went to pieces. I could not think of any tactful way to finish the sentence.

"That's right," said Pat approvingly. "A courteous reticence in speaking about your husband's family is the key to a successful married life. But if you would like to ask: is my Cousin Mildred the sort of person who would sell those papers without consulting me and then try to carry the matter off with a high hand afterwards? the answer is: yes, I'm afraid so. In fact, I ought to have thought of it myself. She's an old lady, you see, and she's lived at the place all her life, and I suppose she's just gotten into the way of thinking about everything in it as more or less belonging to her. I don't mean she would have made off with the pearls or anything else she really regarded as valuable family property. But a box of dirty old papers that had been lying around the library for years on end without anyone paying the slightest attention to them? It wouldn't strike her as being the same sort of thing at all. And then when I charged in asking questions and pulling the house apart trying to find where they were — of course, she flew into a panic. You can't blame her."

"But Uncle Enos! He must have known."

"Not necessarily at the time he bought them. I fancy she wrote to him after her balloon got off the string. And then he flew into a panic too."

"But he couldn't have! Why should he?"

"I know the answer to that one." Pat's mouth twisted wryly, and for an instant there was a curious, self-questioning look in his eyes. "It's the good old occupational disease I always think of as the Scholar's Clutch. Don't you realize the Sherwood Papers are probably going to be the biggest historical discovery in their own field for a generation at least? I tell you that he could no more have given them up once he had his hands on them than — well, than I might have been able to if I'd been in his place. You think about it a minute. There he was, with his pen practically dipped in the ink to start rewriting the whole history of Orange County and New York and the War of Independence — and then he suddenly finds out that he doesn't have any valid claim to the material, and it all really belongs to some young whippersnapper with no reputation as a scholar who might make a complete botch of the job!"

"That isn't any excuse."

"No, I suppose not. There can't be very much wrong with him, though. He could perfectly well have blackmailed me into holding my tongue by threatening to take the whole business into court and raise a scandal about poor Cousin Mildred. That doesn't seem even to have occurred to him. All he's tried to do is get rid of the problem by ignoring it in a grand manner."

" 'Run along and don't bother me!' " I said, laughing in spite of myself.

"Something like that. I rather think he must have done it on the spur of the moment to begin with, and then found that he'd landed himself in a completely impossible situation. He couldn't very well admit what had happened, and he couldn't publish the papers without everybody finding out, and as a good historian it must have broken his heart to keep them a secret, and he never knew when you or Mrs. Cunningham or somebody else might get on his track, and there I was at New Jerusalem like an innocent child playing hide-and-go-seek in the cellar where he'd hidden the body — and all in all, he's probably had a fine, merry time of it for the last month or so. I don't wonder he cracked up."

"And I didn't think there was anything he could possibly have on his conscience! Pat, it must be those papers he wants. He was trying to go downstairs to 'get' something this afternoon. And even after we put him back to bed, he went on groping about over the sheet and making me promise I'd 'find them.' Of course, and that's why he kept repeating your name the way he did. He was going to give them back to you."

"I said there couldn't be very much wrong with him. What do we do now? Go tell him that the game is up, but never mind, we're not playing for keeps?"

But when we got back to the house and halfway up the stairs, the doctor came out of the bedroom with his coat off, and told us to go away for another hour at least, and for heaven's sake to find those papers Uncle Enos seemed to have on his mind if we really wanted to make ourselves useful.

"Well, that ought not to take much doing, anyway," I remarked as I led the way down again. "They must be in the study some place. He wouldn't leave them anywhere else."

It seemed strange to be going through the study door again with Pat behind me, exactly as I had that first afternoon, and I could not help glancing across the room at the spot where Uncle Enos had stood with his arm stretched out while he ordered him to leave the house. Pat took no notice. He went straight across to the nearest bookcase and began examining the contents systematically one shelf at a time, pulling out a volume now and then to look at it more closely. I sat down on the floor by the big desk and tried the drawer where I had seen Uncle Enos lock away the diary on the afternoon of the thunderstorm. But the drawer was open now, and there was nothing in it except an untidy heap of catalogues from rare-book dealers, and some discarded notes for the article on the drinking customs of the eighteenth century.

The search took a long time. There were four bookcases in the room, tall ones set back at intervals between the panels of the wall, with brass-handled drawers to hold papers, built in under them. Uncle Enos had a bad habit of thrusting odd books away behind the regular rows, and Pat had to grope around at the back of all the shelves and then empty them out to make certain whenever his hand struck anything. The drawers underneath were a housekeeper's nightmare of manuscripts, off-prints, more discarded notes and catalogues, unframed engravings, manila folders full of correspondence, bundles of old bills tied up with tape, family records, files, bibliography cards, and historical documents of every sort and kind. Nowhere in the confusion was there any trace of the Sherwood Papers. At the end of an hour all we had found was the letter from Cousin Mildred, on eight sheets of airmail stationery in a very agitated hand, beginning: "Dear Mr. Grahame, I write in
great distress
to say that I am obliged to tell you — "

"Never mind the rest of it," said Pat. "We know all that. What on earth do you suppose he could have done with the stuff?"

I twisted one foot around the rung of the bookcase ladder as I sat perched on the top step, and gazed up at the tall shelves overhead. "Maybe he took the papers apart and slipped them one by one between the pages of the encyclopedia or something," I suggested.

"He might have if they'd only been a couple of brief notes written on tissue paper," retorted Pat. "Do use your head, Peggy! There must be enough of them to fill a packing case, and nine or ten diary books besides. That's not the sort of thing you can just tuck away into any odd corner and forget."

"No, I suppose not," I agreed dejectedly.

"In fact, I don't see how he can be keeping them in the study at all. We'd have found them by now. Where else might they be? Is there a safe somewhere in the house? Or any other place you use to hide away the family valuables?"

It was the word "valuables" that suddenly brought back to my mind something which I had completely forgotten in all the stress and excitement of the afternoon.

"Oh, good heavens!" I broke in. "Of course! Why didn't I think of that? He must have put them in the treasure room."

"What fancy names you do have for things," remarked Pat. "We call it the 'lock-up' at home in Thorne. Is the floor covered knee-deep with pirate's gold?"

"I haven't been inside. Uncle Enos never tells me anything, and I only heard about it by accident" — or was it really by accident? I wondered, remembering Barbara Grahame's voice and look when she had told me I would have to work things out for myself. "It's a big closet somewhere off the study, with a secret door."

Pat groaned. "It would be," he said briefly. "And how does one go about getting in? Do you know that too?"

"I'm afraid not. Just that it opens when you press a spring somewhere on the carving. Oh, dear!" I added, as my eyes went around the room.

The woodwork in the study was very modest — that is, compared to the big drawing room and the library, where the architect had really let himself go — but nobody could truthfully say that there wasn't a good deal of it. The four walls were sheathed in dark oak divided symmetrically into twelve long panels by the windows and the bookcases, the fireplace and the door. All the windows and bookcases curved over at the top into deep recessed fluted shells, and the curve of the shells was in turn taken up and echoed in reverse by garlands of carved fruit and flowers looped across the intervening panels — a different garland corresponding to each of the twelve months of the year, from roses and strawberries and ripe grass for June to ivy and berries and clusters of pine cones for December.

"I never realized before what a lot of curlicues and little knobby bits there are on these things," I remarked, frowning up at the December garland.

"Pat, this is going to take forever. I suppose we'll just have to start around the walls and press and rap and knock and beat till the door gives way."

Pat glanced back at me across the room, and for a moment there was something in his expression that made him look almost startlingly like Peaceable Sherwood. "My darling heart, we're not a pair of bumblebees on a window pane," he said gently. "Never run about exerting yourself unnecessarily when you can use your intelligence instead." He dropped down into the big wing chair and settled back comfortably with his hands linked around one knee. "Now! Before we start the pressing and rapping and knocking and beating, tell me one thing — did you say it was a large closet?"

"Yes, but — "

"Then it can't be just anywhere behind one of those panels — at least, not according to Lesson Two of my five-shilling course on How-To-Learn- Logic-By-Mail. A large closet has to have a large space to fit into. Very well. Turn over the page to Lesson Three. There are four walls in this room. Over on my left—" he waved his hand vaguely to the east, "the wall is made up of three panels separated by two windows opening on the garden. Kindly step to the nearest window and see if there's anything resembling a large closet jutting out on that side into the lilac bushes or the pansy bed."

"I can tell you without even looking. It's a perfectly straight wall. The flagstone path goes along there to the terrace."

"Very well. That leaves us with only the three remaining walls to worry about. The south wall facing me is made up of three panels separated by one bookcase and the door that leads into the library. As I remember it, the wall on the library side is also perfectly straight, and there's only the width of the doorway anywhere between the two rooms. Cross out the south wall. Very well. The north wall behind me is made up of three more panels separated by two bookcases. What's on the other side there?"

"It's the morning room where the ladies used to sit in the eighteenth century. I don't know whether there's a place for a closet on that side or not. We never use it nowadays."