Vexing The Viscount (32 page)

No one out of the ordinary had come to the Wounded Boar but she and Lucian. And Mr. Tinklingham was the only ferryman who regularly plied these waters, so she was fairly certain Fitzhugh and his Jacobites were far of their trail. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that
something
watched them. She glanced at Lucian to see if he felt the chill of unseen malice too, but his eyes were alight with discovery.

“Would you look at that? Pagan blade and goddess sheath,” he whispered.

Though the perimeter of the island was still murky with mist, the sun shone brightly on the center. In the middle of the clearing, there were two standing stones of dark gray granite, glittering with embedded mica.

One was a six-foot obelisk, an ancient phallic symbol pointing skyward. Formed from one stone, the four-sided monolith had been shaped by man, the tool marks leaving fading grooves in the granite. The other stone was carved in a large circle with the center chiseled out, an obvious reference to the goddess.

“There are plenty of exposed boulders on this island, but the stone is much lighter in color than these.” Lucian approached the goddess stone and ran his hand over the inner curve. “Have you seen this granite nearby?”

“No,” she said softly. To speak louder would have felt like sacrilege.

There was a strange emptiness in the place. Barring that first rustle she’d heard in the woods and the occasional
soughing of the breeze through the treetops, there was no sound. No drowsy hum of insects, no birdcalls, just a…silent expectancy, as if someone were waiting.

If she listened hard enough, would she hear the stones themselves speak in slow, measured syllables? She gave herself a little shake to ward of the odd notion. Her imagination had always been keen. She usually considered it a blessing. Now she wondered if it might not be a dual-edged sword.

“The stones were quarried elsewhere,” she said, relieved to focus on something as mundane as geology. “Brought here for a purpose.”

“And long before the Romans, from the look of them,” Lucian surmised. He turned in a slow circle, taking the mea sure of the place. “But how do they help us find the trea sure?”

“‘Where pagan blade points to goddess sheath,’” Daisy quoted. “That’s just the trouble. The monolith is not pointing at the circle. It’s pointing straight up. Do you suppose we’ve got the wrong island?”

“No,” Lucian said quickly. “This is the place. We’re close, very close. Don’t you feel it?”

She felt something. All her senses were on heightened alert. They were definitely being watched, but she couldn’t voice her apprehension. Lucian would dismiss it as fancies, or worse, vaporish womanly weakness for listening too attentively to the wild talk of the locals about Braellafgwen. He might even laugh at her.

So she held her tongue as they walked in circles around the great stones, mea suring the distance in Lucian’s long strides.

“Might Caius have buried the treasure between the stones in the center of the clearing?” he asked. “That would be using them as markers of sorts.”

“If adherents of the old religion are still using the island even now, it stands to reason that Braellafgwen has never been without occasional visitors.”

“A disturbance of the ground would have been noticed and investigated,” he said, following her logic.

They made another slow circuit, wending their way in a figure eight this time.

“Perhaps that’s what happened,” Lucian finally said with a frown. “The Romans didn’t find the treasure, but do you suppose the Celts did?”

Disappointment draped over him like a cloud casting its long gray shadow over the land.

“Shadow!” Daisy said more loudly than she intended. “That’s how the blade points to the sheath. Look!”

The monolith threw a long, dark shadow on the grass, knife-sharp and creeping inexorably toward the stone circle. They watched, spellbound, hardly daring to breathe. As the sun reached its zenith, the shadow struck the center of the circle squarely and spilled past the opening toward the vine-covered rise beyond.

“‘Where pagan blade points to goddess sheath, there shall my love be pleased.’It’s definitely pointing.” Lucian hugged Daisy and pressed a quick kiss to her temple. “You are brilliant. Come. Let’s see where it leads.”

He grabbed her hand and they ran together like children escaping a tutor’s heavy-handed class, laughing and talking at once. The laughter stopped when they reached the raised ground, which seemed to be a rock outcropping obscured by dense overgrowth.

“Another dead end,” Daisy said with a sigh.

Lucian scoured the area with his gaze, standing stock-still. “I feel something,” he said after a moment. “A draft. There’s a void behind this greenery.”

He began shoving the tangled vines aside, ripping them
when he had to and slashing with his penknife when they would give no other way. The fragrance of fresh-cut clippings filled the air, along with an older, darker smell.

“There,” he said, stepping back to let Daisy survey his handiwork.

Behind the hacked greenery, a black space yawned, a toothless maw in the rock face. Lucian stepped forward.

“Are you coming?” he asked, when she didn’t immediately follow. “If You’d rather not, you can wait for me here.”

“And miss the adventure?” she said, more lightly than she felt. “Surely you jest.”

She turned sideways to slide through the narrow opening and followed him into the mouth of the hidden cave.

“Did you see that?” Lord Brumley said from his place of concealment behind the broad trunk of an old beech. His hand tremored against the smooth gray bark. “They just…disappeared.”

“Brumley, you idiot,” Sir Alistair said. “They’ve found an opening in the rock behind the vines. A cave of some sort. We could have searched the island for months without stumbling across it.”

“Stay here for months? I should say not,” Brumley mumbled. “Not without even packing so much as a food hamper.”

“What I mean is, they obviously have information to which we are not privy,” Sir Alistair continued. “We were wise to arrive soon enough to observe them undetected.”

Lord Montford grunted noncommittally. The three had spent a miserable night on the island. The strange mist that surrounded Braellafgwen not only spawned fairy stories, it was an ideal breeding ground for mosquitoes. When the sun sank beneath the horizon, the woods came alive with their whining hum, and the voracious little demons feasted
on the blue blood of two English lords and a knight of the realm without discrimination.

“I could have sworn that Drake girl saw us,” Brumley said. “She looked this way. Several times.”

Alistair raised a brow at Brumley. If the man could only see himself—wig gone, hair askew and filthy, cuts and welts from the predation of insects all over his grimy face, his ensemble ripped and muddied. If Daisy Drake had seen him, she’d have thought him a wild man in the woods. As it was, his miserable turnout probably concealed him better than a hunting blind.

“Now we follow them. Right?” Brumley asked.

“No,” Lord Montford said before Alistair could. “Now we wait to see if they find something. One does not follow a bear into its den.”

Alistair looked sharply at Lord Montford. They weren’t stalking a wild beast. They were tracking the man’s own son and a slip of a girl who would be no trouble at all. He narrowed his eyes at the earl in uneasy speculation. Of his two confederates, now he wasn’t sure which of them troubled him more.

Lord Montford pulled back the firing pin and checked his pistol. Apparently satisfied, he shoved it back into the waist of his breeches. “At least, not until one is sure the bear is thoroughly distracted by something else.”

Sunlight fought to enter the opening Lucian cut through the vines, but once they stepped into the cave, darkness pressed around them. He found a row of old torches jammed in a fissure in the wall and pulled his tinderbox out to set one ablaze.

“There we are,” he said as he lifted the smoky torch. “Seems someone used this cave at one time and expected to return. Kind of them to leave us a light.”

“Caius?”

“Or, before him, the druids.”

The reek of pitch stung Daisy’s nostrils, but she and Lucian were bathed in a wavering circle of light that shot through the dark, throwing macabre shadows against the uneven walls and rock-strewn floor. The cave receded past the reach of the torchlight in a long, narrow tunnel, just wide enough for them to walk abreast as it angled down. The air that feathered her cheek felt dry and cool and smelled musty enough to suggest that no one had disturbed this chamber for a very long time.

Daisy slipped her hand into Lucian’s. She was brave enough to want an adventure, but sensible enough to have a healthy fear of the unknown.

“Don’t worry,” he said as he helped her over a small outcropping
of rock. “I’ve a feeling the worst we might encounter here is a bat or two.”

“That gives me small comfort,” she said dryly, wishing she’d thought to wrap a fichu about her neck. She’d never much cared for rodents in the first place. Adding wings did not improve them, in her estimation. She strode forward, keeping pace with Lucian, trailing her fingers along the rock wall at her side to keep her bearings. Then she brushed against something that was decidedly not mineral.

“Jupiter!” Daisy grasped Lucian’s hand with both of hers.

Lying in a carved niche in the wall of the tunnel was a body. Or rather, what was left of one. The flesh was long gone and the cloth shroud had rotted into tatters, exposing chalk-colored bone. A small oval of gold glinted on the sunken ribs. Delicate. Dainty. A woman’s necklace.

“That is not a bat,” Daisy said.

“No, it seems to be a lady who’s been dead for a very, very long time.”

“Do you suppose…Could this be…Deirdre?” Daisy asked.

“‘There shall my love be pleased,’” Lucian quoted. “If we’re right about this place, she might be Deirdre. Perhaps Caius thought she’d rest easy here.”

“All his treasure in one place,” Daisy said thoughtfully. Traveling up the Thames with the body of his lover would be a sad, lonely journey indeed, even if Caius bore the wealth of Rome as well.

Carefully, they stepped past the skeleton, leaving her undisturbed. They pressed forward, feeling their way, climbing over and around the rocks that obstructed their path. Their voices echoed in retreating sibilance. The scuff of a boot on stone was amplified several times over. Occasionally Daisy imagined some of the echoes were a bit long in coming and wondered if they were being followed, but when she
turned to look back up the tunnel, she saw no silhouette against the distant opening of light. After a few moments, they reached a place where they could go no farther.

A gaping abyss yawned at their feet. It was a little more than ten feet across. The lip on the other side was narrow, no more than a foot or so, before rising in a solid wall marred by one long, sloping crack. Even with a running jump, a body couldn’t be sure of being able to leap across. Lucian raised the torch higher. The ledge that ran along the left wall provided a precarious way to cross over, but it was even narrower.

“It looks like we’ve reached the end,” she whispered.

“No,” Lucian said, waving the torch before him as if he could will the light to reach farther. “We haven’t found the treasure yet, and it has to be here. I know it looks like the cave ends, but remember the hidden staircase. Would you have ever guessed there was a way up that steep slope that didn’t involve a rough scramble and a stout rope? This island takes pains to keep its secrets. There must be a way through that wall as well. It’s just not evident from this vantage point.”

“I don’t know,” Daisy said. “There doesn’t seem to be a way across. I mean, if Caius Meritus were hauling in the treasure, he certainly couldn’t have crept around on that narrow ledge with a load in his arms.”

“Perhaps the chasm wasn’t here back then. Or if it was, he might have built a little bridge of sorts. It wouldn’t have taken much, and there’s plenty of wood here on Braellafgwen. Then when he was done, he could have pushed it of down there.” He squatted to peer into the void. The light of the torch didn’t reveal the bottom. Lucian picked up a small rock and dropped it over the edge.

Daisy counted silently to ten and still didn’t hear the rock hit.

“I have to cross it,” Lucian said.

“No, don’t,” she pleaded. “It’s not worth it, Lucian. Honestly, it’s not. If You were to slip—”

“Miss Drake,” a voice came from the darkness, “I wouldn’t try so hard to dissuade him if I were you.”

Daisy nearly jumped out of her skin. She turned to see two faces rise from behind a large boulder.

“Sir Alistair Fitzhugh and Lord Brumley, fancy meeting you here.” She lowered her voice and hissed to Lucian, “So much for only encountering bats.”

“Well, gentlemen,” Lucian said. “As you can see, we have reached an impasse. The trail has gone cold, and Miss Drake and I are leaving.”

“I think not.” Sir Alistair raised a pistol and brandished it toward them as Brumley fumbled with his tinderbox to light a second torch. “As you rightly pointed out, this island has ways of keeping its secrets. I believe you are correct, Rutland. There may indeed be a false wall on the other side of yon abyss, and you, Miss Drake, are going to investigate that notion for us.”

“Me?”

“Yes, indeed,” he said. “You’re the smallest here. You’ll fit most easily along that ledge.”

“Leave her out of this, Fitzhugh.” A muscle ticked along Lucian’s jaw. “I’ll go.”

“Oh, you’ll get your chance,” Sir Alister said. “If something unfortunate happens to Miss Drake, you’ll try next. Now go, girl, before I decide it’s necessary to put a shot through the viscount’s knee in order to properly motivate you.”

“No, don’t. I’m going,” Daisy said as she started toward the ledge.

“Oh, no, you’re not.” Lucian grabbed her forearm to stop her.