“I think it’s wonderful,” she said and laughed aloud again. She thought she heard Marcus mutter under his breath, “The bloody fool, the damnable bloody fool.”
“Surely though, Trevor, your mother can’t want you telling all of us about the treasure.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Trevor said, shrugging. “As I said, I don’t believe it exists. I agree with Marcus entirely. It is a game to pass the time until I can pry my mother from here and take her and James and Ursula to London. But before I can do that, I must exhaust all possibilities. She must be convinced that there is no treasure and never was. I’m sure you’ve noticed that her mind is of a tenacious bent.”
“But if there is such a thing and if we find it, why then, it would belong to Marcus. Surely your mother realizes that.”
“That is why she wants to box my ears for spilling the treasure story. If she thought I had the two of you with me today, off on this most sacred of quests, she’d doubtless want to stick a knife in my throat. I suppose she planned to dig up the treasure beneath a full moon at midnight, pile it into a coach, and escape without you, Marcus, being any the wiser.”
“I’ll tell her as soon as we return,” Marcus said. “A knife in your throat isn’t a bad thought.”
“Oh no, he won’t, Trevor, don’t worry. We’ll stay mum. Your mother will never know that we’ve dipped our feet into her treasure hunt. And Ursula? What does she think about all this?”
Trevor shot her an odd look. “Ursula is a girl.”
“This is incontestable. What does she think about the treasure?”
“I don’t know.”
“Girls do have brains, you know, Trevor, and imaginations. Perhaps they even have talents about which men have no idea.”
“Yes,” he said, his voice suddenly clipped.
“The Duchess is right. Girls have many things—talents included—that continually surprise men,” Marcus said, his eye suddenly caught by a quite lovely young girl who was openly eyeing both him and Trevor. “That little lass over there, why she could be naught but a flirt, or she could willingly want to have a man pleasure her.”
The Duchess clamped her mouth shut.
Trevor frowned at Marcus.
They walked in silence to High Row.
As it turned out, Mr. Leonardo Burgess was quite a surprise to all three of them.
Once they’d identified themselves, Mr. Burgess ushered them quickly into the dusty shop, pulled the curtains over the windows, and drew them back into the deep shadows.
“You’ll not believe this,” he said, shaking Trevor’s hand with fervent enthusiasm.
“Probably not,” Trevor said, then smiled, robbing his words of offense.
Mr. Leonardo Burgess was a bull of a man, completely bald, but sported a huge black mustache that he liberally waxed. He grinned as he spoke, showing crossed front teeth.
“I’m glad you’ve arrived, Mr. Wyndham. And you, my lord. I knew your uncle, but I’ve yet to meet your lovely wife. My pleasure, your ladyship. Very nice, very nice. Now, Mr. Wyndham, do allow me to tell you how sorry I was to hear of your father’s death from dear Mrs. Wyndham.”
Trevor’s father had died five years before, but he nodded gravely to Mr. Burgess. “Thank you, sir. Now, I understand that you have come across something that will help us locate the Wyndham treasure?”
Mr. Burgess drew nearer and lowered his voice to a near whisper. “Oh aye, lad, I’m not stupid. I know you believe this is all twaddle, all fevered imaginings on your father’s part and now on your mother’s part. The old earl never did anything but laugh contemptuously about it. But do I look like a man who would suffer twaddle? There’s still a cast of uncertainty in your eyes. You believe me a meandering old fool. Ah, no matter. Just wait until you see this.” He turned on his heel and sped as fast as his impressive bulk would allow through a curtained-off entrance to a back room. He returned shortly, cradling in his arms a very large book that looked to be ancient. The cover was an illumination of a thick cross with a beautiful rope of pearls looped around it. The cross was red, the pearls a deep gray. The red ink was faded and peeling, but still vibrant. It was old, so very old.
“Come here, away from the light. The pages are so fragile I fear they’ll split and crumble. Now, look here, all of you.”
Mr. Burgess gently laid the book on top of a counter. The Duchess breathed in the stale dust raised by the turning of each thick page. The pages of the huge tome were done in beautifully executed script, some in a deep black, others in royal blue, yet others in that same brilliant red as the red cross on the outside of the tome. There were more pictures—of animals grazing in fields with piles of strange rock formations in the background, of priests blessing kneeling men and women in the square of a town, of the inside of a small Norman chapel that surely looked familiar. Finally, there were sketches of a magnificent abbey, drawn in stark black against a background of fierce heavy black clouds. Oddly, the next pages were of its lush grounds.
“I recognize this abbey,” Marcus said, lightly tracing a fingertip over the outline of the building.
“Aye, I do myself, my lord. It is the Saint Swale Abbey, once one of the richest monasteries in all of northern England.”
“Its ruins lie very near Chase Park,” Marcus added.
“So that is Saint Swale,” the Duchess said. “As children, Fanny, Antonia, and I would track each other like the wild Indians in America through the ruins.”
“Aye, my lady. Listen now, Cromwell, that miserable jackal, put it toward the top of his list.”
“Cromwell?” Trevor said. “I thought Cromwell was the fellow who led the anti-Royalist Roundheads and beheaded King Charles I back in the middle of the seventeenth century.”
“Aye, Oliver Cromwell was the great-grandson of this Cromwell’s nephew. Betrayal, greed, and power mongering flow in all their veins, curse the buggers, begging your pardon, my lady. The king—Henry the Eighth named Cromwell his vice-regent—made him more powerful than any man should ever be.”
“So it was in Henry the Eighth’s time. What is this about a list?” Trevor asked.
“The king was bankrupt. The easiest way to get all the wealth he wanted was to take the monasteries—they owed allegiance to the pope, after all—and not to Henry who was the head of the Church of England. Cromwell made up a list, beginning with the wealthiest of the monasteries. It was called the time of the dissolution, beginning way back in 1535 and lasting for three years.”
“I begin to see where the legend of the treasure derives,” Marcus said, stroking his fingertips over his jaw. “Many of the monasteries had great wealth, not only in land and buildings and holdings, but in jewels and gold collected over the centuries. And their religious artifacts were priceless even then—gold crosses encrusted with precious gems and the like. They knew Cromwell’s men were coming and thus they hid as much treasure as they could.”
“Exactly, my lord, exactly.” Mr. Burgess beamed with approval on Marcus, until Marcus added, “I would have thought, however, that instead of burying all the loot, the monks would have taken it with them when they fled.”
“They were holy men,” Mr. Burgess said in a voice to rival a bishop’s. “They didn’t want their monastery’s wealth to fall into the king’s rapacious hands.”
“As I recall,” Marcus continued, “most of the monks were set adrift in the world after Henry sold off their monasteries to anyone with the money to meet his price. Many starved, for they had no notion of how to survive.”
“Aye, ’tis true, the poor buggers, beggin’ your pardon, my lady.”
Bugger was a versatile word, she thought. If the monks were buggers, then surely it couldn’t be so very bad, could it? Did monks bugger themselves as well as being buggers?
Trevor said, “So, you have a clue to tell where some monk buried his abbey’s wealth?”
“Not exactly, Mr. Wyndham. What I have is the proof that there was a treasure buried.”
Mr. Burgess t
urned another page. There was only script on this one. It was in Latin. He ran a blunt finger beneath the words as he said slowly, “The monk says that it was Beltane—the celebration of Beltane or the first of May is an ancient rite, still practiced in Scotland and here in northern England,” he added to Trevor, then continued. “Aye, the monk writes that it was Beltane and the night was dark as a dead man’s eyes, and the winds blew strong across the dales and whistled through the crags, threatening to uproot the trees in the maple forests. The fires burned too brightly and many became uncontrolled, the winds whipping the fires and the people into a frenzy. Many were burned and killed but they stayed, swaying with the ancient rhythms of the past and crying out in blind ecstasy, and performing the heathen rites of fertility that heralded the growth and rich heat of summer. He says that he and six of his brothers dragged the chest from the abbey, staying in the shadows as best they could for they’d heard that Cromwell had sent men there to prevent just what they intended to do. Look here. It also seems they were carrying a body with them, a large bloated body, he writes. This is very odd. What body?” He pointed back to the following text. “He writes they promised their Holy Father that the king would not have their abbey’s wealth for his immoral uses.”
The page ended. Mr. Burgess slowly lifted the page and laid it carefully down. The next page was a drawing of the raging Beltane fires, their flames shooting heavenward with wild-faced people staring upward at the shooting flames. And then it changed. The people were still pointing, or perhaps reaching for something, but now, strangely, they seemed to be inside a room, not outside with the Beltane fires. And they were looking upward.
Mr. Burgess gently lifted and turned that page. There was nothing more, only the obvious proof that someone had torn out one or more of the precious pages. Gently, as if he were touching the most precious of gems, Leonardo Burgess lightly traced his blunt fingertips along the jagged rips. “Someone tore out the next pages, all of them.”
“I’ll be damned,” Marcus said.
“Indeed,” Trevor agreed.
“But who?” the Duchess asked. “And when?”
“A long time ago,” Mr. Burgess said. “There’s yellowing at the edges. See?”
“I do wonder who,” Trevor said. “In any case, the thief didn’t find the treasure, else it would have been the news of the decade.”
Marcus said suddenly, “You, sir, look very familiar to me. It’s the way you hold your head, the way—”
“Aye, my lord. I believe I would be your half-cousin, and yours as well, Mr. Wyndham. Goodness,” he added, smiling at the Duchess. “You’re all my kin. My mother was born on the wrong side of the blanket, begging your pardon, my lady, thus she was a half-sister to your grandfather. Thus it wasn’t difficult for me and your father, Mr. Wyndham, to be friends as boys and to keep that friendship once he’d left for the Colonies. The earl, naturally, didn’t acknowledge me.”
Marcus shook his bastard half-cousin’s hand before they left the shop, assuring him of acknowledgment.
“Good God,” Marcus said, shaking his head, as they walked back to where the young boy was patiently tending their horses. “I believe that there is some sort of precedent here.” He said to the Duchess, “Do you think I am expected to continue in the tradition of producing offspring out of blessed wedlock? Will my ancestors’ ghosts haunt me if I don’t populate the area with my bastards?”
“That is all well and good, Marcus,” she said, frowning at him, “but not to the point. What we learned makes me believe there is more to this treasure than fevered brains making up stories.”
“I wrote it all down,” Trevor said.
“And you,” Marcus added to her, “sketched those drawings very nicely. I had no idea you had a lady’s talents. You continue to surprise me. I don’t like it.”
“You have no idea of many things, Marcus,” she said. “Or perhaps you do, you just don’t want to accept them.”
He saw the half-smile on her mouth and wished devoutly that Trevor was in Algiers. He wanted her. Quite simply, he wanted to jerk up that riding skirt of hers, brace her against a tree, and bury himself inside her.
He trembled. Damn Trevor.
She turned then to look up at him. The half-smile froze on her face but she didn’t look away. She simply stared at him, unconsciously taking a step toward him. Marcus cursed.
Trevor, eyeing the two of them, quickly mounted Clancy and dug his heels in the stallion’s sides. He called out over his shoulder, “Take care not to fall off a cliff.”
Marcus cursed again and helped her to mount Birdie. “Just wait,” he said. “Just wait.”
She said slowly, not looking away from his blue eyes that were glittering brighter than the summer sky overhead, “I’ve a mind to find that treasure, Marcus.”
“Which treasure?” he said, his eyes on her breasts.
17
MARCUS SAID ABSOLUTELY nothing throughout the two-hour ride back to Chase Park, staring straight ahead between Stanley’s ears. She didn’t look at him either, but her thoughts were of him, all of him and what he was thinking, what he wanted, what he would do to her. She spurred Birdie to a faster pace.
When they reached the Chase stables, he nearly jerked her off Birdie’s back, grabbed her hand, and said low, “Come on. Now.” He grabbed her hand and nearly ran to the stables, kicked open the door to one of the tack rooms, then slammed it shut again with the heel of his boot. There was a key in the door and he turned it, still not releasing her right hand.
She had never imagined that a man could be so very urgent in the middle of the day. And here they were, not five minutes from his bedchamber and his bed. He’d waited two hours, but no longer? It was fascinating. Maybe this had something to do with that beyond business.
She devoutly hoped so. Suddenly, she was doing more than hoping.
“Now,” he said, turning to face her. He pulled on her hand, bringing her against him. His cheeks were flushed, his eyes narrowed, focused entirely on her. “Hurry, Duchess.”
She was pressed to his chest, feeling the deep pounding of his heart. She closed her eyes, those two simple words of his roiling through her. “What do you want me to do?” She was whispering, feeling suddenly so urgent she could barely talk. She flattened her hands against his chest, felt the pounding of his heart beneath her palm, and rose on her tiptoes. “Marcus, tell me what you want me to do.”
He stared down at her, his look intent. “Just be you. I want to see if you will moan for me again, if you will scream and nearly buck me off you. I want to see if you will become frantic for me again.”
She felt his large hands pulling open her riding jacket. He was holding his breath, she realized, when suddenly his hands cupped her breasts through the thin white lawn of her blouse. He closed his eyes, throwing his head back as he kneaded her through the soft material.
“Marcus,” she said again. He hugged her to him. He pulled off her jaunty riding hat, then tugged the pins from her hair. “Ah,” he said, and kissed her ear, blowing tendrils of hair from his mouth, his breath warm against her flesh, his fingers tangling in her hair.
“Do you want me, Duchess?”
She pulled him more tightly against her. She let her hands go down his back to his flanks. “I think that’s quite the stupidest thing you’ve ever said.”
He had to grin at that, but it was difficult. He had her undressed and flat on her back in a matter of moments. He stood over her, pulling off his boots and his buckskin trousers, looking at her face all the while he jerked off his clothes, and she lay there on her back, her riding clothes spread out beneath her, watching him, excitement rippling through her as he removed each piece of clothing. When he tossed his trousers aside and stood over her, his legs slightly spread, his sex free of his clothes, full and heavy, she said, “Please hurry, Marcus.” She stretched out her arms to him, her eyes darkening. “Oh goodness, you’re more beautiful than your stallion.”
He cocked an eyebrow at that and came
down on his knees beside her. “Stanley would hurt a mare when he took her. I would never hurt you. And I won’t hurry, Duchess, at least I’ll try my damnedest not to.”
He leaned down as he spoke and his last words were a whisper against her breast.
She cried out, arching up against his mouth.
“Easy,” he said, pushing her back, his hand flat on her belly. “Easy. It will be all right. Just be open for me, Duchess. Just open.”
He wanted her mouth immediately and she gave him her warmth as she parted her lips and he touched her tongue. She arched again and she felt him trembling against her, his hand now moving from her breasts to her belly, kneading her, spanning her with splayed fingers, gently caressing her pelvic bones, then going lower, circling her, lightly touching the warm flesh of her thighs, then finally cupping her, his fingers caressing and so very gentle until he found her and began to move in a rhythm that made her forget everything but him and those fingers of his and his mouth on hers and the heat of him as he moved over her. This time, though, his mouth never left hers, and it was his fingers that brought her to a tension that threatened to shatter her, so intense it was. And just at that instant when she knew, just knew there could be no more for her, he came into her, hard and deep, and her body exploded into blazing light, sparking a pleasure so strong, so urgent, she screamed, her hands clutching at his arms, at his back. It was too much.
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