Home From The Sea (27 page)

Toby was pale, grim,
tight
lipped as he leaned on a pry bar, trying every stone in the hearth in turn. He was working fast, in the scant moments after Jim took the big yard broom and sent a dirty tidal wave sweeping out into the kitchen. For two seconds at most, as every wave went out, they saw the bricks of the hearth itself. Toby would pinpoint a new crevice between them, jam in the pry bar and throw all his strength against it.

Nothing was moving, while the sweat rolled off the pair of them, no matter the aching cold of the water. At last Toby surrendered and took a moment to catch his breath. He leaned both hands on his knees, chest heaving.

“There is no way between heaven and hell old Charlie was up to this,” he panted. “Not single handed. And there was
no one
he’d share the secret with –
not even Nell, if she’d be awake when he came home, which she wasn’t
, may she rest in peace.”

“The prize isn’t in the hearth floor, then,” Jim agreed bleakly. “Well, damn. That was the best idea yet. You want to try the fire back?”

“We have to try everything.” Toby straightened his spine with an obvious effort. “And we don’t have much time.”

He was looking at the far corner of the kitchen, where the trapdoor was under several inches of water by now. As soon as they lifted it, the cellar would start to flood fast. If Charlie had buried the prize in the floor, they were not likely to find it before the cellar was bailed out by a bucket-line of hired laborers. Men like Burke and Pledge were too impatient and much too angry to wait so long, and Jim’s skin prickled as he grasped the danger.

Toby had turned his attention to the stones at the back of the hearth, and Jim dropped a hand on his arm. “Leave them. They’ll be above water for hours yet. It’s the cellar floor that scares me spitless.”

“You’re right.” Toby pulled both hands over his face and grabbed a lantern in each fist. His eyes were dark, hollow, as he gave Jim a hard look. “You be bloody careful on those steps. They were slick even before they were wet. They’ll be lethal now – if you’re not sure, stay up here and let me do this.”

The thought was kindly meant but Jim would have none of it. “And how many years have I been climbing those steps in all weathers? They get slick as glass, winter and summer alike, soon as it rains. There’s always
mold
in there – even when the cellar’s dry, you can still smell it.”

“All right.”
Toby paused to take a gulp of coffee. Both mugs had gone cold on the corner of the table while they worked. He took two lanterns in each hand and splashed through the water to the trapdoor with Jim on his heels. They set
a half
dozen lanterns on the pantry shelf, perched in front of flour and rice, barley and oats, and Toby lifted a brow at him. “You’re sure?”

“Dead sure.”
With a soft curse, Jim thrust both hands into the water, hunting for the big iron rings to lift the trap.

They were cold and the trapdoor was so heavy, under the weight of water, he and Toby strained and swore as they wrestled it up. It dropped back with a splash, and the kitchen seemed to drain itself into a pit as black as the gateway to hell.

Cautious as a lame old wolf, Toby took a pair of lanterns and looked in, and down. “Let me go first.”

He was by far the more nimble, and Jim was not about to argue. If Toby had the strength and agility to scramble around in the rigging of a ship that was rolling, pitching in a storm, he was capable of negotiating a flight of
mold
-slick steps in semi-darkness and moving water.

With great care he found the top step, and the second, and felt his way down, balanced like an acrobat. Still, halfway between trapdoor and floor he missed his footing and went down on his right hip, hard enough to make him shout with pain, shock, anger. He would wear a bruise for a month, Jim knew, but Toby was up a moment later and hanging lanterns from the hooks set into the old timber beams so close over his head, he almost had to duck. With the lights in place he
came
halfway back up, and on one knee Jim leaned down to pass him the rest of the lanterns, save one. Jim clutched the last in his left hand as he made his own way down, right hand clawing at the wall as if he might find purchase there.

Everything was wet. His feet slithered on the blue-black slime which grew on the steps as soon as the rains came. Twice he felt the sickening
dread,
sure he was going to fall. Toby was right below, ready to make a grab for him, but only Jim knew how much a fall could hurt him. It could cripple him, as the hedgehog spines of bone that quilled his leg moved, shifted – it could send him to the surgeon right here, right now, to have the leg opened and probed, or else sawn off not much under the hip –

And then, how fondly would Master Trelane think of him? Jim wondered as he caught himself on the thin edge of the fall. How greatly would Toby desire a man whose leg had been taken off as the price of his life? The same uncertainty might have been in Toby’s head, for as Jim made it down within reach the balladsinger’s hands were there at once, steadying, buttressing. He stepped right into an embrace tight enough to knock the air out of his lungs.

“Easy, easy.
Goddamnit,” Toby whispered against his ear, still punishing him with the embrace. “If we get out of this, Jim, I’m going to coddle you till you’re sick and tired of me … and then I’ll just coddle you some more.”

It would make a nice change, Jim thought, pushing his face into the bony angle of Toby’s shoulder. There had been far too little coddling in his
life,
and none at all since his father died. He soaked up Toby’s body heat as long as he dared, and then fended him off with a sound of reluctant
humor
.

“I’m not done for yet. And we’ve got more work ahead of us than I like to think about.”

Even then Toby was watching the amount of water trickling down the steps from the kitchen, where it was still coming in under the house’s outside doors. “Two hours,” he judged, “and we’ll be ankle deep, and after that we won’t find any damn’ thing on the floor, or under it.”

“Shrewd guess?”
Jim stepped back and cast about for inspiration.

“It’s like watching a ship’s hold flood, when you’ve opened up a seam.” Toby dragged a handful of hair out of his face and thrust it behind his ear. “You watch for a few minutes, get an idea of how fast she’s flooding, so you know how long you have to fix her up or get her offloaded and let her go.”

“You’ve watched a ship trying to sink
itself
,” Jim observed. Toby answered with a mute nod. “Two hours, then.” Jim took a kick at the water, to judge how deep it was already. “Same as we did in the hearth?
There’s brooms
down here, and irons.”

“Same again,” Toby agreed grimly. “You want to sweep while I lean on the bar, or try your hand with the iron?”

Jim’s whole body was hurting, head to foot. He had never done this kind of work, nor kept up the pace for so long. He doubted it would make any difference which job he took. “You’re handy with the iron,” he growled, snatching up a big, battered yard broom.

The worst of the job was moving the piles of
stuff
which had been stashed down here over so many
years,
he had no idea what most of it was. In minutes they had exhausted the possibilities of any open area of floor, and the real work began – humping crates, trunks, kegs and barrels to lay bare parts of the floor which human eyes had not seen in years.

“You piled all this lumber here?” Toby asked, panting under the weight of a keg of nails.

“Some,” Jim told him. “Some of this stuff was here when we bought the place. I remember my father telling Charlie, ‘Don’t you start thinking I’m going to count the sundries in the cellar and pay for ’em one at a time!’ A lot of this gear must’ve belonged to Nell Chegwidden.” He hoisted up a crate, felt the pull in his shoulders and arms, and splashed across to the new pile taking shape on the area of floor they had searched first. “I never bothered to open most of these, never even thought about them.”

“You had no cause to,” Toby reasoned, panting under the weight of another load. “What was Charlie to you?
A crusty old salt, telling strange stories and staring out of those windows at the path, or the bay.”

“Waiting for you,” Jim added.

“Or for whichever of us made it back here first.”
Toby wiped the back of his forearm across his sweated face, leaving a streak of dirt there. “It could have been Eli or Willie or Rufus, any of us, who got here first. We scattered on the wind, and eight years was a lifetime.”

For Jim the same eight years had been just as interminable, for different reasons. A lame leg, the confines of home, and always the sea, the horizon, mocking him with the promise of adventure he would never share. He watched Toby for a moment, working with strength and energy Jim could only envy, driven by a desire to stay alive a little longer.
Perhaps to take that handful of gems and live long enough to enjoy them.

“Jim?” Toby stopped long enough to angle a concerned look at him. “You’re in pain.” Not a question.

“Of course I bloody am,” Jim said brusquely.

“Go up and rest,” Toby began.

“Sod that.” Jim stooped for another load. “Like the saying goes, you’re a long time dead … I’ll rest then.”

The remark won him a husky chuckle before Toby applied himself to the work as if defying it to beat him. But the water was soon noticeably, measurably higher, and Jim watched it gloomily. They would never be done with the entire floor before they must turn their attention to the walls, which invited an element of luck into the scheme.

He had always hated anything that pivoted on luck. Jim Fairley was not a gambling man. If he had been, he would have hesitated to wager a shilling on their chances of beating Charlie Chegwidden at the years-old game of hide and seek.

And he would have been wrong. The water was lapping ankle deep, and Toby had abandoned the floor moments before with a passionate curse. Jim awarded himself one minute of rest and perched on a barrel, rubbing his leg against the ache, the cold, the fatigue. His eyes had almost fallen out of focus as he concentrated on the
leg,
let his own body overwhelm him for this moment. And it was then – when he
stopped
looking – that he saw it.

Tired eyes and mind snapped back into focus as if a dragoon had pulled back the hammer on a loaded musket.
“Toby.”

Something sharp, dark and acid in his tone made Toby spin toward him, poised in mid-water with a keg in his hands.

They had shifted enough of the cellar’s final stack to make the wall behind it visible for the first time. There, no more than a foot above the lap of the black, filthy water, was a picture – a cameo image painted on an oval of bone or ivory half the breadth of Jim’s palm.

He hopped down off the barrel with a grunt, and stooped toward it. The picture was well
painted,
if quickly, a likeness good enough to jog a man’s memory, make a face from yesteryear come alive once more. The cameo hung on what was left of a red satin ribbon, from the long, rusted spike of a ship nail driven into the space between two stones, where the earth and mortar had been dug out.

He plucked it off the nail and turned it to the light – a woman’s face, and young when the tiny portrait was done. She was a redhead with pale skin and a heart shaped face; and beneath the likeness were the initials ‘H.C.’

“Helen Chegwidden,” Toby whispered, “everyone called her Nell for short. I’ve
seen
this, Jim, many times. Charlie used to carry it with him. I think he loved his mother more than any other woman who ever crossed his path. He used to say, ‘She’s the gold you can’t spend, the diamond you can’t wear, the treasure you hunt the world for and find back at home.”

“Damn.” Jim swallowed hard on a dry throat. “Charlie couldn’t read or write, you said?”

“No.” Toby was intent on the face in the cameo. “Did he mark the hiding place with this? Did he leave it for someone who’d know it, if they saw it?”

“Like you.” Jim’s heart beat faster. “How many in your company did he share the cameo with? Not Burke and Pledge, surely? They’d have mocked him, spat on it out of scorn.”

“He used to show it to me and Rufus,” Toby remembered. “Me, because I’d been a priest, he knew I understood a man’s love and respect for the woman who birthed and raised him.
Rufus,
because he was another one raised by his ma, after his da passed on and left a woman and eight children to fend for themselves.”

“Then, Charlie
knew
you’d recognize this,” Jim said slowly, “and Rufus would know it. The others wouldn’t have seen it, much less remember … ‘the treasure you hunt the world for, and find back at home.’” His brows arched at Toby, and he slapped the cameo into his outstretched hand. “Charlie’s talking to you. You can’t hear him? He couldn’t write
,
he knew he was dying and he didn’t dare share the secret. He’s
talking
to you, Toby.”

And even now, even here, Toby crossed himself and shivered as if the old man’s voice had indeed whispered in his ear, across the years. The blue eyes were wide, pale in the light of four lanterns all burning the purest whale oil, as he handed back the precious little picture, retrieved the pry bar and went down on one knee in the water.