Home From The Sea

by Keegan, Mel

  He was deliberately ignoring the wound, Jim knew from the faint pinch in his features as he moved it. Toby was far from a stranger to pain. He knew how to disregard it when the need arose. “A guard of dragoons might delay the day, but in the end Nathaniel Burke would come for me, armed to the gills, ready to tear me apart along with the tavern,” Jim finished bleakly.

  “He would. Damn, I’m so sorry, Jim. I’ve just brought death to your house. I never intended to – it wasn’t supposed to be like this.” He pulled his shoulders square. “Look, I can make my way back to Exmouth at first light. Head them off, if they’re on their way here – tell them about Charlie, for a start. I can tell how Barney pulled a pistol on me. The wound proves it! Then I can also tell them I killed the bugger, borrowed your boat without you knowing a thing about it, and dumped his body on the tide.”

  Jim nodded slowly. “But Nathaniel and his people will still be heading here. You’ll be with them, and you’ll have to pretend you don’t know me from Adam. They’ll expect you to help them tear the house to pieces.”

  “I can do that. It’s only a sticks and stones, Jim. You can always rebuild a house. Or I can volunteer to hold a pistol on you while they do it,” Toby suggested. “At least I’m not likely to actually shoot you! Then – let them rip the place to pieces, if you like. Lord knows, maybe they’ll actually find the prize and just bugger off with it, and leave us in peace.”

  It was possible. Jim mulled over the proposition for some time, while Toby stared unblinkingly into the fire. At last he asked almost soundlessly, “Could you let them do that?”

  “What – find the prize and walk away from here, leaving wreckage and ruin behind them?” He dropped his buttocks onto the chair by Jim’s, a few feet closer by the hearth. The firelight gilded his face and his hair had begun to dry almost curly. “I’m still a balladsinger and this is still your tavern. We can repair what they broke, and we’d have our lives. The future.” He dropped his voice to a faint whisper. “Each other.”

  He was right, and Jim gave an expressive groan. “Damnation! You know, for one moment I was sure I could smell a fortune. I could almost feel those baubles among my fingers.” He mocked himself with a grin, and gave Toby his hand. Toby took it lightly, squeezed it. “All right. When you’ve got enough daylight, start back. You’re sure they won’t take the price out of your hide, for Bellowes’s death?”

  “They might.” Toby’s face shuttered. “Nathaniel might. But Barney’s been a hardcase every day since he signed on the Rose. Nathaniel used to tell him, one day it’d be the end of him.” He glanced down at the wound. “He almost killed me, what chance did I have?”

  “Almost killed you for what?” Jim’s brows arched. “Nathaniel will be asking the same question.”

  “For things that were done and said between us a long, long time ago.” Toby seemed to wrestle with himself, and Jim knew much remained unsaid. “He used to tell me, a sodomite priest belonged in hell with a spit shoved through him from his arse to his gullet, turning on that spit over a slow fire for the rest of eternity.” The blue eyes were haunted as he looked up at Jim. “It wouldn’t take much to make Barney pull a pistol on me. I just got the better of him at last. Even if Nathaniel took it out of my hide, as you said, he’d also reckon it was overdue and Barney had it coming.”

  The reasoning was sound. Jim looked up at the clock on the mantel over the fireplace. “We won’t see them before afternoon tomorrow, not in this weather. Which gives us half a chance, if you’re game.”

  “Game?” Toby echoed. “For what?”

  “For tearing the house apart just a little more gently,” Jim told him. “If Charlie hid the prize somewhere on this property before my dad and me got here, he certainly never touched it again. He died two weeks after he signed the bill of sale, and it’s a safe bet this chest of yours is still here. Where else would he put it?”

  “Where else indeed?” Toby was on his feet now, obviously thinking hard.

  “Did he own any other property, besides The Raven?” Jim wondered.

  But Toby made negative noises. “The fact is his mother, Helen – Nell, to those who knew her well – owned The Raven outright, after the death of his father when Charlie was quite young. He always said he chafed at being tied to a woman’s apron strings, so he went to sea in his teens, to make his own way in the world. He was still shipping out when Nell was very old. A man gets to love the sea and goes back to her, the way he’d return to a lover. It was only providence that brought him to The Rose of Gloucester the day that swine of a captain was signing on a crew for the run to the Azores, the Caribbean, the Carolinas and back. No, Jim … The Raven was all Charlie owned. So, if he still had the chest, it’s here somewhere.”

  “Oh, he had it.” Jim stood in the middle of the kitchen, turning around and around, using his eyes to look at the place for the first time in years. “In the weeks before he died, he’d sit at the window either in the taproom or in his bedchamber, watching, always watching – now I know he was watching out for any one of you to come walking up that path.”

  “We all swore we wouldn’t come back a day ahead of the date we set,” Toby reminded.

  “I haven’t forgotten,” Jim mused. “But a man like Bellowes could easily have come back a year early, or five years, and stolen the prize from Charlie either by force or trickery. I think Charlie believed one of them would. He was … vigilant. That’s the word. Even when he was green to the ears with the ailment that put him in the ground he was vigilant, as if he half expected someone like Bellowes to creep up on him and hold a pistol to his head, for the secret of where he’d hidden the prize. I never knew if Charlie kept a pistol on him, but from what I know now, I’d have to guess he had two or three stashed, loaded, against the chances of a swindle.”

  The argument was compelling, and Toby accepted every word. “All right, so we assume the treasure of Diego Monteras is still here. The only other piece of turf Charlie could lay claim to was his mother’s grave, and he wouldn’t have buried it there. Not when Nathaniel would have defiled the grave to recover it. One thing Charlie always did was lift a mug to his old ma when a new bottle was opened. She raised him alone, when his father died. He had no siblings, just two little brothers who died as babes.”

  “So it’s here. Somewhere.” Jim looked down into Mrs. Clitheroe’s face, wondering how much of this she was hearing. She was listening intently and Jim ventured, “You knew Charlie well, Edith, didn’t you?”

  “Better than ’is ma even knew ’im.” She had the cat on her lap, and a cup of ale in both gnarled hands. “I can tell thee many a truth ’bout Charlie Chegwidden that Nell never dreamed of.”

  “But you never knew he was hiding a chest of … valuables.”

  “I knew ’e were ’idin’ somethin’, but a man’s got a right to ’ave ’is share o’ secrets. S’not fer the likes o’ me to ask.” She petted the cat absently, thinking back across the years. “An’ ’e were fond of ’is guns. That much were no secret! As I recall ’e ’ad three bloody great boat guns, always loaded, one under the bar, like Master Fairley ’isself … one in the pantry, and t’other up in ’is bedchamber. An’ ’e were always watchin’, like thee, Master Trelane. An’ now,” she added darkly, “we know why.”

  “We do.” Jim gave Toby a deeply speculative look. “I’d start in his bedchamber.”

  “I looked,” Toby began. “Chests and trunks –”

  “Hearthstones, floorboards, loose plaster on the walls, or new plaster that looks like it was added just in the last eight years.” Jim managed a creditable chuckle. “I’ll wager you didn’t have time to look at those!”

  Toby echoed the rueful humor. “I didn’t. And we ought to be looking at every hearthstone, every floorboard, every flake of plaster in the house.”

  “The good news is, we have all night.” Jim cocked an ear to the rain. “Even Barney Bellowes waited for the sky to clear before he came here. If he’d been a day earlier –”

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p; “You could be dead already,” Toby finished. “Lucky for the pair of us, he was blind drunk in Exmouth. Drunk enough to take his fist to a poor young girl. I’d walked away from them before it happened. Barney liked to swing a kick at Bess, if she got too close. I’ve smashed a bottle over his head before now, for similar malice.” He mocked himself with a crooked grin. “What kind of a priest would you call me?”

  “A bloody good one.” Jim did not even have to think about it.

  But Toby’s head was shaking. “A priest ought to have some skerrick of faith. I’ve none. Or, none left. I never had much to begin with, and what I owned was soon knocked out of me aboard The Rose of Gloucester.” He rubbed the back of his neck where he still wore the gall, a constant reminder that the weight of a cross had rested there for many years. “Put it out of your mind, Jim. I surely have. I’ll pick up that particular gauntlet when I’m called to be judged – and by damn, the only authority I’ll be judged by is the Almighty. If he wants to burn me for being exactly as he made me, and loving just as he designed me to love … well, it’s his prerogative, I suppose. But it doesn’t reflect very well on him, does it?”

  The words framed everything Jim had always half-felt, half-known, without ever being able to think the matter through to its bitter end. Toby had trodden this path a long time ago, and gone on. For a moment Jim dwelt on what he had seen and suffered, and then consigned the past to another day when he could brood on it at length – or when Toby would speak of it.

  For the moment, time was wasting and he felt the prickle of excitement. Like most boys, he had grown up on stories of pirates and treasure and exotic islands where palm trees nodded in the heavy, humid air and a king’s ransom lay buried under golden sand. As a man, he had listened to the tales of men like Charlie and Fred Bailey, stories of the brutality of the navy, the hardships and danger of life on the whalers in oceans filled with ice and ripped by massive storms. With the gammy leg, Jim had resigned himself to living in his imagination, with daydreams fed and colored by the stories of men like Chegwidden and Bailey – and Toby Trelane. What he could never have imagined was that the thrill would walk up to his own door –

  Or that a violent death would be stalking him as surely as Toby. His skin prickled again as he took a lantern in each hand and headed up the stairs with Toby on his heels, carrying two more. A great gust, no less than gale force, broadsided The Raven just as they came up onto the landing, and Jim ducked involuntarily.

  Toby whistled. “Listen to her blow. You want to be in the rigging in this weather, Jim, fighting with a bunch of tangled rope that’s so slick with rain, you can’t get a grip on it, while the ship leans over and almost puts her gunwales underwater, smacking into every wave like a diving porpoise, and the wind seems to grab hold of you with fingers like ice and tries to tear you away into a sky that’s all silver with mist and wild water.”

  “Christ.” Jim took a breath, held it, let it out slowly. The pulse in his throat was hard and fast. “You’ve done that.” Not a question. “Fred Bailey tells those same stories, and …” He looked down at his leg. “Maybe I’m lucky to be too lame for the navy to take an interest in me.”

  “I’m not sure I’d call it luck,” Toby mused, “but any luck you had changed when I showed my face here. Did it change for the better? Now, there’s another question!”

  He was right, but Jim felt the thrill now, the challenge, and he was not about to run up any surrender flag without a fight. He led Toby to the bedchamber where Charlie had slept, and they lit a dozen smoky tallow candles to augment the lanterns.

  First, the rugs came up. The mattress was lifted, shaken, probed, opened in long slits on the bottom, and Toby thrust his arm, elbow-deep, into the straw stuffing. A shake of his head, and they upturned the table at the bedside, and then the trunks under the window. Nothing.

  They held the lanterns to the walls, peering at the plaster, knocking on it, finding loose pieces and pulling them carefully out. Nothing was hidden in the walls, and the remaining plaster was probably older than Jim. They puzzled the plaster bits back into the holes and turned their attention to the floor.

  The bed squealed as it was shoved into a corner, and now Toby stamped on the floorboards, hunting for loose ones. Most were tight, but two moved a fraction, enough to make them suspicious. Jim fetched the smallest of the fire irons and forced it into the gaps between the slack boards and their snug neighbors. They lifted out cleanly, and in a wash of lantern light he and Toby peered into the space beneath.

  Nothing. Jim swore and sat down on the bedside, watching as Toby dismissed the floor from his attention and began to examine the fireplace. The musician’s hands tried every stone, every brick, jiggling and pulling until he found three loose enough to be interesting. He glanced at Jim, beckoned with a nod of his head, and together they wrestled the bricks out.

  Again, lantern light probed into the dark places, but they were empty and Jim muttered blistering curses. The bricks jiggled back into place and Toby stood, hands on hips, glaring at the room. “I’d have been prepared to swear we’d find it in here.”

  So would Jim, but his mind had raced on. “It could be in any chamber, under any floor, in any wall. Hand it to Charlie – he made a bloody good job of this! If he’d been able to read and write he might have left a letter, not to be opened till one of you returned.”

  “But Charlie never learned how to read,” Toby said with wry amusement, “and the treasure of Diego Monteras is not the kind of secret you’d ever share, to have someone else write it for you.” He huffed a sigh. “We have a long night ahead of us, I think. Could he have buried the chest somewhere else, not on your property but very close to it?”

  The question was shrewd and Jim gave it full consideration. “No,” he said at last. “Right in front, it’s beach and tidal. Nothing stays buried. The sea washes anything right out. To the east, it’s the beck, and inclined to flood every two or three years. Anything you bury there will be washed out of the ground. To the north it’s heathland and paddocks, and it floods when the beck washes over. To the west it’s fields belonging to Squire Lawson. Half the time they’re under the plow. He grows barley to feed his cattle through the winter.” His brows rose and he scratched his chin thoughtfully. “Mind you, Charlie grew up in this area. He’d have known there’s old mine workings not far from here. They’re still taking tin and copper out of the ground but a lot of the mines are dead, abandoned.” Then he dismissed his own idea. “No, the mines are dangerous and anybody born on this coast, like Charlie, knows it. The roofs come down, the pits are flooded with rainwater … and there’s always gypsies on those heaths. You go lumbering in with a heavy load and an hour later ride away without it – anything you left behind wouldn’t say hidden for long. Charlie’d know this as well as I do. Damn!”

  “Patience, Jim.” Toby’s hands fell on Jim’s shoulders. “Two of us and all night to search, and we know what we’re searching for. The odds are with us.” He leaned in and down the little that separated them in height, and laid a kiss on Jim’s mouth.

  Jim’s arms went around his waist and for some time they were silent, content to eat each other alive. “What wouldn’t I give,” Jim said with unrepentant humor when they parted, “for a soft bed and an hour to beguile away with you, and nothing to do in the morning but sleep it off.”

  “You make it sound very tempting,” Toby admitted. “But an hour could be the difference between having the treasure of Diego Monteras in the palm of your hand, and looking down the business end of a pistol and begging Nathaniel Burke not to shoot the pair of us in the head.”

  “We work,” Jim said with grim conviction. “Work now, hump later.”

  “Win through tonight,” Toby agreed, “and we’ve months and years, a lifetime, to learn each other’s secrets.”

  “A lifetime.” Jim smiled, and it was not a sham. “I like the sound of that.” He pecked Toby’s cheek with a kiss and stepped out of his embrace. “So we work.”

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p; Each bedchamber consumed an hour, and there were six of them including Jim’s own and the one they had already searched. Mattresses, floorboards, plaster, bricking in the hearth – nothing was overlooked and they were tired, filthy, hungry, when they returned to the kitchen.

  The backdoor stood open and steel blue light streamed in. Dawn was not far away. Mrs. Clitheroe was absent – she would have gone out to the privy, Jim guessed – and the dogs were nosing around the stableyard, about their business. He put a pan of water on the hob for coffee and gave Toby a dark look.

  “We’re running out of time,” Toby said quietly. “We need to look behind the hearth stones in both the fireplaces in the taproom … God! How strange, and how fitting, if Barney broke his stupid neck right on top of the prize!”

  “And we should check the walls in the taproom, and then in the kitchen here, and then every floorboard in the kitchen before we get into the cellar. Not to mention the stable and the coach house.”

  “Not enough time,” Toby repeated, and gave Jim a faint, tired smile. “It was worth every moment we spent, and at least we can be sure about the taproom before I have to go.” He gave Jim his hand. “You know Burke and Pledge and the others will be here, if not today, then tomorrow.”

  “Oh, I know.” Jim held Toby’s hand tightly for a moment. “But I’ll feel a thousand times safer with you holding the pistol on me!” He hesitated, and then framed what was on his mind with great care. “Are you sure you can you do it, Toby? Be sure. Can you let them tear this place to pieces find the prize, then stand back and watch them walk away with everything?”