by C T Cassana
Horatio moved there provisionally and hired six strong, burly men to help him carry out the tasks of cleaning and clearing up the site. None of these men knew anything about archeology, so the professor supervised all their movements and directed them patiently to ensure that the recovery and classification of the building’s remains was performed as meticulously as possible.
One balmy summer afternoon, while they were working on bracing the foundations of the building, one of the workers struck his spade on an object buried deep down next to one of the building’s outer walls. At first he thought it was a rock, but the dull, metallic thud he heard made him realize that it was something else. Intrigued, he crouched down and dug through the thick sand with his hands until they touched something cold and smooth.
Without revealing his discovery to the others and working practically in the dark, he continued to dig with his hands until he had uncovered the lid of what looked like a treasure chest. Before going on, he looked up to make sure that no one had seen him. Trying to control his nerves, he stuck his hand into one of his pockets and pulled out a box of matches. Once again, he looked around to ensure that nobody was nearby. If it turned out to be something valuable, he would cover it up again and come back for it under cover of night so that nobody would know what he had found.
As if fearing to make any noise that might give him away, he lit a match as discreetly as he could and bent down to get a closer look at his discovery. It was indeed a metal chest with two simple ribbed lines and an hourglass on its lid. The emblem was too simple to be the coat of arms of some wealthy family, but perhaps the chest contained something valuable that could be sold to an antique shop.
The heat of the flame on his fingers interrupted his train of thought. The man blew out the match and lit another so that he could take a second look at the chest before hiding it.
Then a voice behind him dashed all his plans.
“Have you found something, Mr. Evans?”
Before the man could answer, the light of Professor Conwell’s flashlight flooded the whole ditch, illuminating the half-buried chest.
“Seems so, Professor,” responded Evans, trying to conceal his annoyance, although he really had no idea of the amazing opportunity that had just slipped through his hands.
“Good work!” the professor congratulated him as he looked over the chest from above. Then he turned back to where the other men were to call for reinforcements. “Gentlemen, come here! It seems we have found a small treasure!”
The other men ran toward the ditch and crowded around him, trying to see what it was. One of them jumped nimbly into the hole to help Evans, who hadn’t stopped cursing his bad luck.
Within a few minutes, the two men had extracted the object from the ground and brought it up to the surface and into the sunlight.
Horatio knelt down and looked it over carefully. It was a black metal chest, of medium size, adorned only by two fine ribbed lines that ran from one side to the other and a simple hourglass located just above the lock.
Just as Evans had guessed, Professor Horatio knew that the symbol was too simple to be a family coat of arms. Moreover, and more intriguingly, the hourglass was not a common element of Cistercian symbology, suggesting the chest had nothing to do with the monks who would have lived in that little monastery. Furthermore, the hourglass on the chest had the peculiarity that the sand in it didn’t fall from top to bottom, but flowed in the opposite direction, which obviously had some kind of special meaning. The professor also noticed that whoever had buried the chest seemed to have gone to a lot of trouble to ensure that it would not be easily found. Perhaps this was because whatever it held inside should not have been in the hands of men dedicated to prayer and a pious life.
With a swift motion, Evans took his spade and delivered a dull blow that knocked the lock right off. Although he wouldn’t be able to keep it now, at least he could confirm whether the chest contained some valuable object that might have changed his life.
All the men took a step forward to be able to see every detail. But just when Evans reached down to open it, Horatio took him by the arm firmly to stop him.
“Believe me, gentlemen,” he said. “I am just as curious as all of you to know what might be inside this chest. But it has been found on the property of Sir Robert Ashworth, and only he should have the privilege of finding that out.”
. . .
The following morning, Charlie jumped out of bed, got dressed and ate breakfast hurriedly without anyone having to ask him to get ready even once. This was a totally unprecedented event that surprised all the members of his family.
While they were still getting dressed, the boy sneaked into the library and picked out a small Latin dictionary. When he got back from school he would use it to try to translate the poem on the sheet of paper he’d found with Professor Conwell’s letter.
As his mother had explained the night before, old Horatio had left a will, so it was clear that the letter he had found was not a last testament but a secret message for his descendants, revealing that he had left them an important treasure. For some reason, the professor didn’t seem to trust his son, much less his rotten grandson, so clearly he had decided to hide the letter for another, more intelligent family member to find. What the professor hadn’t counted on was that the house would end up in the hands of another family altogether… although, luckily, it was a decent, upstanding family whose members were exceptionally clever.
Charlie stuffed the dictionary into his backpack and slipped out of the library as stealthily as he had entered. When he passed in front of the portrait of Horatio, he walked solemnly, with great care not to look at him; he didn’t want to find a look of reproach in the old man’s eyes.
. . .
As soon as he got back from school, Charlie ate a rushed snack and then made his way straight up to the attic, Latin dictionary in hand. With great patience, and even greater difficulty, he looked up each of the words that made up the sentence on the envelope and the poem that Professor Conwell had written, one by one.
Trying to apply a rigorous scientific method, he re-wrote everything on a sheet of paper, copying down the words that he could find in English, and the ones that didn’t seem to be in the dictionary in Latin. Perhaps it would all make some kind of sense once it was done.
After an hour of tedious searching, all he had managed to achieve was a pounding headache and the translation of a few words. Feeling rather demoralized by the result, he took the paper in both hands and read it in silence.
“Bloody Latin!” he exclaimed, pounding his fist on the desk.
Trying to control his bad mood, he read the words he’d scribbled down once more. He didn’t understand a thing.
That bloody Horatio was a cagey, crafty old man, but Charlie was a pretty resourceful boy, and considering that what was at stake was no less than a treasure, he wasn’t about to give up yet.
First of all, he would go down to the library again and get one of the bigger dictionaries he had seen there. In his morning raid he had grabbed the smallest one so that he could hide it easily in his backpack, but he had seen two other much larger ones where he would surely find the missing words.
Having decided on his course of action, he hid everything away and sneaked down to the library. Unfortunately, his father was working at his desk, as he did every afternoon, and Lisa was sitting on the leather couch studying. It seemed she loved the library; she spent countless hours there reading, doing her homework or studying, especially if her father was there too, which was most of the time.
Charlie stopped for a moment at the door, weighing up whether or not to enter. If he did, either of the two might see him take the dictionary and would be curious to know why. And if they asked him, he wouldn’t be able to use the same excuse he’d used the previous evening.
Another option would be to wait until they left, but by then it would be late and he’d have to take his bath or have dinner, which would leave him with no time to transla
te the poem. And to let another night go by with the knowledge that there was a wonderful treasure somewhere in the house without doing anything about it was too much to ask.
He peeked in through the doorway again to evaluate the situation. Both his father and his sister looked absorbed in their work. If he pretended to be looking through the animal books on the shelf next to the one with the dictionaries they wouldn’t pay him much attention. He would have to be especially careful with Lisa, because she was the nosiest busybody on the planet, and because from where she was sitting she would easily be able to see the books he pulled off the shelf.
Charlie entered the room and greeted them as nonchalantly as he could.
“Hi!” he exclaimed.
“Hello, Charlie,” replied Marcus, without raising his gaze.
Lisa didn’t even respond. Everything was going according to plan.
The boy made for the bookcase with the animal books and thumbed through a couple of them: My First Dinosaur Book and Life on the African Savanna. Before putting them back on the shelf he shot a sideways glance at the others. His father was typing away on his laptop and Lisa was underlining important points in her exercise book. It was the perfect moment. He reached out his hand quickly and took down one of the dictionaries, and slid it under the book about the African savanna. It was a very large and rather heavy dictionary, but not the biggest one, which he left on the shelf to avoid raising the suspicion of his sister.
He walked out of the library without a word and went up to the attic. He had to hurry, because it was getting close to his bath time.
It wasn’t long before Charlie concluded with satisfaction that it had been worth the risk. He didn’t manage to translate all the missing words, but he did find quite a few of them, and at least deduced the meaning of a few others, which he annotated with question marks to indicate that he wasn’t completely sure what they meant. Like any good researcher, he had to apply the scientific method as rigorously as possible.
Once he was done, he hid the dictionaries so that nobody would see them, and he read the poem again. When he did, he realized that his efforts had not been sufficient: it still didn’t make any sense.
Frustrated by his failure, he recalled the story of the light bulb that his mother would tell them when he or his sister wanted to give up on something. More than a thousand attempts were necessary to find a material that could withstand the passage of electricity so that it could be used to produce an incandescent filament. Inspired by the great Thomas Edison, Charlie decided that he wouldn’t give up either; not without first trying to find the missing words in the biggest Latin dictionary in the library. Late that night, while the others were asleep, he would go downstairs to get it without the danger of being seen.
Cheered up by his new plan, he gathered up the message in Latin and his translation to hide it all away in the secret compartment.
But when he picked up the envelope he remembered something which, inexplicably, he had overlooked until then.
. . .
On Thursday nights, Horatio Conwell would go to Sir Robert Ashworth’s house to have dinner with his old friend, a custom that had remained unchanged since the professor had first moved to London and that had rarely been missed. On each visit, Horatio would thank his host with an elegant little gift, such as a box of fine Belgian chocolate or Cuban cigars or a bottle of French cognac.
But that Thursday, the first after the discovery at the abbey, his gift was an old dark-colored chest, which the professor placed on the table in Sir Robert’s library.
Although the lock was broken, Sir Robert had no doubt that its contents would be exactly as they had been found. Horatio was the most honest man he had ever known in his whole life and would never take anything that didn’t belong to him.
However, when he saw his friend’s eyes sparkling with a mixture of satisfaction and curiosity, Sir Robert realized that Horatio didn’t even know what was inside the strange chest. Clearly, the good professor had left the honor to him.
“Good Lord, Horatio! Don’t tell me that you haven’t looked to see what’s inside!” he exclaimed with chagrin. “What if there’s a skeleton in there? Or vermin?”
“I think your imagination is getting the better of you, Sir Robert,” replied the professor.
“Who knows... Perhaps it’s a relic. And although it may well belong to an important saint, I have no desire to wrestle a dead man’s bones right before dinner.”
“I think not. Look at the hourglass here on the lid. This symbol has nothing to do with any saint.”
“You know that the only history I’m interested in is the history found in books. Whatever may be inside this chest, it is yours,” stated Sir Robert flatly.
Horatio smiled at his friend’s words. He had expected a reaction something like this, but not that Sir Robert would not even have the slightest interest in knowing what was inside the chest.
“Perhaps there is something valuable inside,” he suggested.
“I don’t care!” replied Sir Robert with a shake of his head. “Whatever it is, it is yours. And furthermore, I would be grateful if you would take it away this very evening and inspect it at your home. For now, let’s have dinner and forget the matter.”
Horatio obeyed his friend’s wishes, and although he couldn’t get the chest out of his mind for the rest of the evening, not once did he betray any sense of haste or impatience for the dinner to end.
However, as soon as he got home, before even removing his coat and hat, he locked himself in the library and set down the mysterious black chest to find out at last what it contained.
. . .
Charlie took the key and the ring out of the envelope. He then unfolded the sheet of paper with his translation and reviewed it anxiously.
Moments later, with a smile of satisfaction he confirmed his hunch: just as he had suspected, the word “key” was there, in Professor Horatio’s message in Latin. Clearly, the message was a series of clues, clues that would lead him to the treasure, clues that explained what he had to do with the key and the ring that he had found inside the envelope. That was why the professor had kept them all together, because they were all needed to find the treasure.
Almost beside himself with excitement, he picked up the Latin dictionary once more and opened it on the desk. But this time he went to the back of the book, to where the words were translated from English to Latin. With his pulse racing, he looked up the word “ring”.
“Ring, ring... Here it is,” he said, pointing to the word with his index finger. “Ring: anulus”.
Then he picked up the message in Latin, trying to find “anulus” in that sea of meaningless words.
“It’s not here! Why isn’t it here?” he asked in a fluster.
He picked up the ring between his fingers, turning it around while he examined the waves engraved on the inside.
“So, what are you doing in the envelope?” he asked the little object, his eyes fixed upon it.
Charlie examined the ring for a moment longer and then slipped it onto the ring finger of his right hand. “The old guy must have had fingers like sausages,” he thought, because the ring was huge. He closed the dictionary, hid it inside the old wardrobe that stood in one corner of the attic, and sat down again at the desk. Carefully he folded the letter, inserted it in the envelope and then made to take off the ring to put it back in the envelope as well.
He froze with disbelief at what he saw: the ring had shrunk to fit his finger. Suddenly anxious, he tried to pull it off again and again without success.
Charlie took a slow and deep breath, trying to calm down. Could this really be happening? When he had put it on, the ring had been much bigger than his finger; he was completely sure of it. And now it was just his size. It wasn’t too tight, but he couldn’t get it off. Without much hope he tried again, while thinking that at least he had put it on the right finger.
At that moment, Marcus opened the door and looked in to tell them that it was bath t
ime.
“Okay, Dad,” the boy replied with a startled expression, hiding his hand under the desk.
Fortunately, his father left as quickly as he had appeared, without noticing anything.
Charlie tried to get the ring off one last time, again without success. Still a little bewildered, he decided to put the letter away and leave the ring on. He would try to take it off again in the bathroom, soaping up his hand so that it would slip off easily.
He wasn’t going to let panic get the better of him. He had the situation under control.
. . .
At dinner, Charlie was rather quiet. He had tried unsuccessfully to get the ring off by every method he could think of, until his finger had turned red. He knew that sooner or later somebody would notice it, although that night he felt far too tired to have to come up with an explanation. So he tried to keep it concealed, holding his hand under the table after each spoonful, until finally the dreaded question was asked.
“What’s that ugly ring you’ve got on?” asked his nosy sister.
“I found it in the attic. It’s mine,” replied Charlie, with a sullen expression.
“What a nerve!” Lisa protested. “Why do you get to keep it?”
Charlie replied only by glaring at his sister with a fierce scowl.
“Leave him be, Lisa,” said Maggie. “It’s only a trinket. I don’t see why your brother can’t keep it if he found it.”
“Fine, I couldn’t care less,” retorted Lisa with an indifferent tone. “It’s really ugly anyway. But the next thing I see that I like, I’m keeping.”
Charlie was going to respond, but he didn’t feel like getting into an argument with his sister. So he continued eating in silence. Better to leave it at that, he thought. At least he wouldn’t have to try to take the ring off in front of his family, because if anyone did try to get him to do so they would all end up realizing that something fishy was going on.