December

by Gabrielle Lord

  ‘I’ve heard of overtime,’ said Boges, ‘but that’s crazy.’

  The bright light shone on the stained and discoloured plaster of the ceiling above the corner, and for the first time I could see traces of words. As more of the damaged plaster of the corner came into focus, I gasped.

  ‘Wow!’ yelped Boges over the sound of the bulldozer, following my line of sight and spotting the words on the wall. ‘The words inscribed on the Ormond Jewel!’

  ‘And look up here! You can see where they are repeated high up on the wall!’ cried Winter, carefully stepping across the uneven floor to see the faint words better. ‘They would have run all the way round this section of the gallery! Just like in the old sketch you found in Dr Brinsley’s study!’

  The spot we were standing in looked like it had once been a small room, just off the main, long gallery.

  ‘Now I know we’re in the right place,’ said Winter, ‘even in the right corner! The rose and inscription are showing us the way!’

  My exhilaration surged as did the sense of danger. I was shaking with mixed emotions. To be so close … so close to what?

  Boges twisted to look at the roof and tripped over something on the floor. The contents of his backpack flew out and his water bottle hit the ground, popping its lid and spraying water everywhere. He swore, climbing to his feet.

  Winter went to help him gather up his things, retrieving his bottle. Most of the water had spilled out onto the ground, making a slippery mess on the mud-covered mosaic flooring.

  ‘Hey, look at this—there’s some kind of pattern on these tiles,’ said Winter, squatting down to take a closer look. ‘Underneath the dirt.’

  ‘We don’t have time for appreciating tiles,’ said Boges, getting back on his feet.

  ‘You’d better make time for this,’ scoffed Winter, her voice quivering with excitement. ‘Cal, get over here and check this out!’

  She dropped to her hands and knees, and wrenched off her scarf, scrubbing the ground with it. She grabbed Boges’s bottle and splashed more water over the tiles. ‘Don’t just stand there, help me!’

  We joined her and started clearing more of the tiles—me with my bare hands, Boges with his beanie—pushing aside leaves and debris, wiping dirt away.

  Outside, the bulldozer seemed to be getting louder.

  ‘Luckily they’re only here to dismantle the place,’ Boges said, ‘not destroy it.’

  I stood back up, shining my torch onto the area we’d been working on. Although smeared and dirty, parts of the original mosaic floor of the gallery started to become clear. More and more was being revealed with every sweep of Winter’s wet scarf.

  ‘Get up!’ I shouted excitedly to my friends. ‘Look!’

  A pattern in the tiles of intertwined leaves of faded yellow surrounded what once would have been a huge, dark green oval. I dug around in my backpack and pulled out the Ormond Jewel, holding it up over the remnants of the pattern on the floor.

  There was no doubt about it.

  ‘It’s the same design as the front of the Ormond Jewel! The Ormond Jewel is a miniature! It’s a tiny replica of the floor design of Cragkill Keep!’

  Stunned by this revelation, the three of us stood immobilised, staring at each other, then at the tiled jewel on the floor beneath us.

  Feverishly we dropped back to our knees to clear more of the rubble and grass, revealing more patches of coloured tiling.

  ‘Look!’ I said. ‘There’s the pattern of red and white tiles! The same pattern as the alternating rubies and pearls surrounding the emerald!’

  Little by little, the clues were falling into place!

  ‘Hurry,’ I said to the others. ‘If that guy in the bulldozer comes any closer, he’ll spot us. We mustn’t be seen. The clock’s ticking!’

  I could hear Winter reciting the words of the Ormond Riddle under her breath as she cleared enough ground to start examining the alternating red and white tiles.

  ‘There are thirteen white tiles,’ she said. ‘The same number as the pearls on the Ormond Jewel.’

  ‘Thirteen teares, thirteen tiles, thirteen steps!’ said Boges, excitedly. ‘The numbers in the Riddle relate to counting out the steps on this floor!’ Boges suddenly stopped, looking deflated. ‘But the thirteen steps we need to take have to start from “the Sunnes grate Doore”,’ he said. ‘Is there some sort of grate or door around here? I can’t see anything like that.’

  With the grinding of the bulldozer becoming louder, I risked running down to the other end of the gallery and back again.

  ‘There’s nothing on the floor near the arch where we came in,’ I reported.

  ‘We don’t need to look for a grate,’ said Winter. ‘That’s just old-fashioned spelling for “great”. We should be looking for something big that lets the sun in—a great door, or something.’

  I looked around. ‘“The Sunnes grate Doore”,’ I repeated.

  A mix of moonlight and floodlight shone on the rough floor of the ruin. I tried to follow the beams of moonlight, and imagined sunlight pouring through the gaping arches of the three-tiered window in the tower rearing above us.

  A wave of vibrations shuddered through the stone walls as the rumbling from the big earthmover outside became louder. What was left of the roof of the main gallery trembled visibly.

  ‘Something that lets the sun in?’ said Winter, suddenly beside me. She was looking up at the moonlight, like me—at the crumbling arches of the empty windows.

  ‘Them?’ I asked, staring at the arches. ‘The sun would have come streaming through those windows. Onto the floor. Just like the moonlight is trying to do now!’

  Winter raced over to the crumbling stones beneath the ruined windows, and stood there directly against the wall. ‘If we take the thirteen steps as starting from here, under the big triple window—the sun’s great door—we might find something.’

  I ran over to join her and we walked the steps, counting aloud over the drone of the bulldozer.

  One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen … We could go no further. We had already come up hard against the opposite wall of this smaller, ruined room we were in. I stood there with my nose almost touching the cold stone wall as disappointment drained me.

  There was nothing beyond the thirteenth step.

  ‘The tiles don’t lead anywhere!’ I spat bitterly. ‘They end right here at this wall. It’s not working. The Riddle isn’t right!’

  ‘“Thirteen Teares from the Sunnes grate Doore”,’ Winter chanted, ‘“Make right to treadde in Gules on the Floore …”’

  I paused. ‘Make right!’ I shouted. ‘I’ve gotta take a step to the right.’

  ‘Of course!’ cried Winter.

  I stepped to the right and kicked away the leaf litter and debris at my feet.

  ‘You’re standing on a red tile!’ said Boges. ‘Gules! Gules means red! Gules on the floor!’

  ‘But there’s only one of them! Hard up against the wall!’ I said.

  At that moment, the sound of the bulldozer outside roared at top speed and the wall under the gaping hole of the ruined window, started to crack in a thin, jagged black line.

  Boges yelled. ‘We’ll have to show ourselves, dude. That guy’s going to kill us!’

  ‘We can’t!’ I said. ‘We’re so close to the deadline!’

  ‘You have to “adde One in, for the Queenes fayre Sinne”,’ recited Winter, who seemed unaware of the danger we were in. ‘That means there should be one more tile! There should be two red tiles. The Riddle says so!’

  ‘But there’s only one here,’ I argued.

  ‘Can we have this conversation somewhere else please, dudes?’ yelled Boges over the noise of the bulldozer outside. ‘That crack’s getting bigger every second! The wall’s going to fall and we’re going to be crushed if we stay here!’

  He was right. The crack in the wall now ran all the way down from the window and almost the entire length of the gallery. It wa
s getting wider, deeper and blacker the longer I stared at it.

  A shower of small stones from around the three-tiered window above dropped dangerously close. It was about to come down. The entire Cragkill Keep was about to come down.

  As I stood there, immobilised with frustration, unwilling to just walk away from the Ormond Singularity, the other wall next to me cracked wider with a sound like a gunshot.

  Bigger stones tumbled and crashed to the ground, peppering me with stinging fragments.

  ‘Cal!’ urged Boges. ‘I’m serious, we have to move! We have to get out of here!’

  ‘We can’t,’ cried Winter. ‘We can’t leave now! We’re so close! There’s gotta be something else. The Riddle talks about the orb being riven and the gift being given. Something’s wrong! Where’s the orb?’

  Boges grabbed me and Winter by the arms. ‘You betcha something’s wrong! A lunatic in a bulldozer’s bringing the house down around us! We’ll be flattened if we don’t get out now!’

  Everything was trembling violently. Boges’s fingers dug into my upper arm, wrenching me away from the wall.

  ‘Come on! This whole place is about to come down on top of us!’

  ‘No! We can’t leave now!’ insisted Winter, a crazed, fearless determination in her eyes. ‘If we leave now, the Ormond Singularity is lost. Cal will never find out what it is!’

  The crack in the wall next to me suddenly shifted, and another ominous zigzag crack appeared, spearing down its entire length. More stones and rocks cascaded down.

  ‘Watch out!’ I lunged at Winter, knocking her out of the way as a huge rock fell, narrowly missing her.

  The close call shook me out of my stupor. Boges was right. ‘We’ll die if we don’t get out now!’ I shouted.

  ‘That’s what I’ve been trying to tell both of you!’ screeched Boges.

  I grabbed Winter’s arm and pulled her along, following Boges. We were about to run across the shaking floor and get outside when a huge crash made me turn back to see the wall I’d been facing moments ago collapsing. If we’d still been standing there, we would have been crushed by its bulk. Like a line of dominoes, the length of the wall crumpled in a cloud of dust.

  And then something amazing happened …

  The collapsed wall revealed a black cavity behind it.

  ‘It was a false wall!’ Winter shouted. She too had stopped to witness the collapse. ‘That’s why the tile steps suddenly stopped. See? There’s a space behind it!’ She ran back through the dust cloud to peer into the space that had opened up—it was about the size of a backyard shed. ‘And there’s the other red tile! See? Just here, where the wall was stopping us before! I told you there’d have to be another one. The Riddle said so!’

  Winter pointed and another huge rock fell from above and shattered on impact just centimetres from her. It sent up more murky dust, acting like a smokescreen.

  I heard Boges swear as he was struck by something on the side of the face.

  Now we really did have to run for our lives. I thought I heard the clock chiming again—eleven o’clock—but I couldn’t tell, over all the rumbling and panic.

  I grabbed Winter’s arm once more and started dragging her out. But as I dodged another rock crashing close behind us I caught a glimpse of something colourful within the dark cavity. Something on the floor, just beyond the last of the red tiles.

  I squinted. Protected for centuries from the elements by the fake wall, was a perfect mosaic! In it was a white monkey holding a ball—an orb—just like the monkey in Dad’s drawing!

  ‘Boges, Winter! Wait! Look!’

  As my friends and I stood mesmerised by the amazing tiled image, the floor cracked before our eyes and the monkey mosaic began to destruct. The mosaic was buckling up and then collapsing apart, like in an earthquake.

  ‘It’s a prophecy!’ cried Winter. ‘The whole thing’s breaking up!’

  ‘The orb must be riven,’ I whispered, stunned, as the image of the white monkey holding the orb seemed to lift up momentarily, then subside, breaking up and draining downwards in a waterfall of puzzle pieces. It vanished into the darkness under the floor like being swallowed by a sinkhole.

  Masonry and stones pelted down around us, while outside, the bulldozer revved again, making another assault on the surrounding walls, attacking what little remained of the structure.

  Fearfully we made our way to the edge of the hole that was getting larger by the second. More and more of the floor collapsed and disappeared into the cavity.

  Any moment, I thought we would join the rest of the floor, and be sucked down into the darkness of the foundations of the Cragkill Keep. Then suddenly, the sound of the bulldozer stopped.

  The shower of rocks and stones eased.

  The floor movements shuddered to a halt.

  I seized the opportunity and crept right up to the widening hole and peered into it.

  Under the piled-up earth and broken tiles, I could see the corner of a wooden chest.

  Boges and Winter teetered over beside me, dodging falling debris.

  ‘Dude, that must be the treasure!’ Boges shouted.

  With that, the three of us reached in and started digging away like mad dogs, trying to free the wooden chest from the rubble that had fallen in on top of it.

  ‘Cal?’ came a voice, approaching from outside. ‘Cal, are you in there?’

  ‘Sharkey!’ Boges shouted out. ‘We’re over here! Come and see what we’ve found!’

  Nelson appeared in the crumbling archway.

  He strode over, looking up and around, overwhelmed by the disaster zone inside the Keep. ‘I’ve stopped that crazy guy in the bulldozer, but this place is dangerously unstable. You need to get out.’

  As he spoke, a huge stone from the top of the wall crashed down behind him, making us all jump.

  Sharkey stopped when he saw what we were all staring at. He whistled. ‘Seems like you’ve found what you were looking for!’

  ‘We found it, all right!’ I said, almost exploding with excitement. ‘Can you give us a hand?’ I asked, indicating the pile of rubble in the cavity under the floor. Adrenaline was surging through every muscle in my body, making me shiver uncontrollably.

  Eventually the four of us were able to haul the extremely heavy chest up.

  Puffing and panting, we dropped it near the archway. As it settled on the ground, one side of the ancient timber box split open, and a stream of gold spilled out! A steady flood of golden coins, lit by the brilliant generator lights, kept spreading in a gleaming pool!

  It was like a dream come true. I could feel the excitement of the others. I realised I had a huge grin on my face.

  Another heavy stone from the ceiling crashed straight into the top of the chest, splitting the lid into jagged pieces, sending more gold and precious jewels cascading out.

  We all stepped back, speechless. Through the split timber I could see the gleam of gold, the flash of colourful gems, and what looked like an ancient document, partly obscured by the broken rock. But before we did anything else, I needed proof. If the contents of this chest turned out to be the Ormond Singularity, I needed proof that I’d found it before the deadline. Before time was up at midnight on 31 December.

  ‘Boges!’ I said, turning to them all. ‘We did it! Get the camera out and start filming!’

  ‘While you’re doing that,’ said Sharkey, ‘I’ll get some big canvas sacks I have in the back of my car.’

  I barely heard his words as I threw off bits of the broken rock and splintered timber until the contents of the chest were plain to see: a collection of amazing jewels and gold coins, gold chains, ropes of pearls and, most importantly, the signed document that sat on the top of it all.

  ‘We did it!’ I yelled again. I threw my arms around my friends and the three of us jumped around with excitement. ‘Let’s have a look at what we’ve discovered!’

  My hands were trembling as I carefully lifted out the document. I knew from the touch that it was vellum.
I smoothed it open so Boges could film it more easily.

  The Queen and Black Tom had a baby together. A baby who no-one could know about.

  Carefully, I picked up a small book from the chest. The cover was decorated with coloured silk stitching. Flowers, Tudor roses and tiny pearls were woven around the initial ‘E’.

  ‘Hey!’ I said, recognising it. ‘We’ve seen this before—in that portrait you discovered, Winter, in the Sotheby’s catalogue. Hanging from her waist in the painting.’

  I put it down, my attention taken by something else. Tucked down beside the pile of gold coins lay an embroidered leather satchel. Carefully, I opened it. It contained something made of really fine material, embroidered with pearls and gold. I picked it up. For a few seconds it hung in my hands—a precious silky robe, made for a tiny baby. But then it fell into shreds, dropping away from my hands into dusty fragments.

  ‘The silk has perished!’ cried Winter. ‘What a shame! But look at the beautiful trimming! How sad for the princess—and later the queen. She could never acknowledge her baby. She’d have been in huge danger if people ever found out. She would have been killed over it. And look at this!’ she said, picking up another locket. ‘It’s a bit like the Ormond Jewel!’

  She passed it to me. The locket, with a yellow crystal surrounded by diamonds and gold on its top lid, opened to reveal a miniature of Princess Elizabeth on one side, and on the other, the portrait of a boy, holding a rose.

  ‘The boy with the rose,’ breathed Winter. ‘Like your dad’s drawing!’

  ‘The boy,’ I repeated. ‘It wasn’t just the secret love between Black Tom and Princess Elizabeth. The greater secret love was their son—the child they had together.’

  Winter attempted to pick up the shreds of rotted yellow silk, gathering them into her hands together with the embroidered borders of gold and pearls. ‘Elizabeth made this for her baby. The baby she could never share with the world. She was the “great unknown lady” who sadly couldn’t name herself.’

  ‘This little guy is the reason for the Ormond Singularity. He grew up and became Piers Duiske Ormond. All this,’ I said, pointing to the treasure trove and documents signed by the Queen, ‘was supposed to be claimed by Piers Duiske Ormond, for his family and his heirs, but something happened and it was never retrieved. Maybe his dad, Black Tom, died without ever revealing where it was hidden exactly. We’ll never know why it wasn’t claimed. The descendants of Piers Duiske Ormond kept the line going. The line that started with Black Tom and Princess Elizabeth. My ancestor, Piers Ormond, was gathering information about this secret when the Great War interrupted him. Dad took over and somehow got hold of the Ormond Jewel, but then he got sick and …’ My voice trailed away. I hoped that somewhere, somehow, my dad could see what I’d done and be happy about it.