The Book of Hours (27 page)

“And the price,” Arthur demanded, preening for his wife.

“Somewhere in the vicinity of five thousand pounds.”

“There, you see!” Proudly Arthur waved his arm around the chamber. “A veritable Aladdin's cave.”

“You needn't go on so,” Gladys scolded, only partly mollified. “It's not like you made the things yourself.”

Percy stepped closer to Brian. “I say, about taking those photographs.” “Help yourself,” Brian said. “Long as you can do it today.”

“Ah yes, Arthur mentioned your problem with the death duties. How tragic.” Percy turned back to the chamber. “Well, we shall move with all possible haste. Gerald?”

The young man was already headed for the tunnel. “I'll get on it immediately.”

Arthur demanded, “What's this I hear about another riddle?”

Gladys looked stricken. “Another one?”

“Brian found a letter in the spark machine,” Cecilia said, then glanced at her watch and felt a chill run through her. “I have to go back to the clinic now. Promise you'll come get me if you find anything?”

“Promise,” Brian answered. “And thanks.”

The last thing she heard as she passed through the tunnel was Percy's voice echoing, “I say, I've always enjoyed a good puzzle.”

Twenty-nine

T
HE AFTERNOON SLOWLY RESIGNED ITSELF TO A TEDIOUS
evening, filled with nothing but frustration and grime. Cecilia returned to Castle Keep after work, supplying them with surgical masks and plastic lab goggles. The articles helped, but the strain showed on all their faces. Percival Atkins and his young assistant came and went, anxiously returning to the search when not occupied with photographing and cataloging and packing the glass. They finished with the basement and moved to the cellar where the car had been found. When that proved fruitless, they made a careful inspection of the grounds, then walked through Rose Cottage and the stables, searching for a door or catch of any kind that might lead to another cellar. Despite their best efforts, however, they found nothing at all. Gradually their sense of urgency slipped into grim resignation. When Gladys finally called them to dinner, no one had the strength to argue.

They entered the ground-floor apartment, a grubby and weary lot. Percy did not even have the strength to complain over the state of his Savile Row suit, and the dust in Gerald's hair aged him twenty years. Their eyes were red-rimmed, their knees bruised, their fingernails broken and blackened by searching for cracks and levers in the walls. They all had weak coughs from the dust. Over dinner they held a desultory discussion of the riddle, but no new ideas were formed.

As they tarried over coffee, all of them reluctant to return to what seemed a useless search, the doorbell rang. Brian walked across the front hall, only to discover himself confronting Hardy Seade. The man wore a natty blue blazer and striped shirt with a stiff white collar and a kerchief to match his bright yellow tie. Joe Eaves stood on the bottom step, showing nothing but his ever-present smile.

Hardy Seade eyed Brian's rumpled form with disdain and said, “I see you're preparing yourself for a return to the gutter.”

Brian found himself unable to even care, much less respond. He started to shut the door, but was blocked by Hardy's foot. “I just came by to let you know that I have received unofficial word that my bid for Castle Keep has been accepted.”

“Get your foot out of my door.”

Hardy Seade pushed on the door, and when Brian did not budge he shouted through the opening, “I'm a generous man! I'll give you twenty-four hours to clear off before I call in the bailiff!”

Brian reared back and heaved, wanting to strike the door hard enough to break the man's foot. Hardy Seade sensed the motion just in time, and pulled his foot to safety. The door boomed closed, then Hardy shouted from outside, “Twenty-four hours! Tell that geriatric pair and your meddling doctor friend they have the same, and not one minute more!”

Wearily Brian crossed back to where the group crowded about Arthur's doorway—Gladys and Trevor and Molly and Cecilia and the auctioneers. “I say,” Percy drawled. “He's rather a bad sort, wouldn't you agree?”

“Oh dear, oh dear,” Gladys murmured. Cecilia's look was so potent that Brian reached over and took her hand for comfort, not caring who noticed.

Arthur blew out his cheeks, then said, “I suppose you could look on the bright side. At least you won't be going away empty-handed.”

Brian did not remove his gaze from Cecilia's tragic features. “But I don't want to go at all.”

Cecilia went to bed because her exhausted body cried out for rest. But sleep came and went in fitful snatches, and the hands on her clock seemed to crawl their way around the night. Her mind remained a tumultuous muddle. Brian and the riddle and Hardy Seade and her beloved little home—thoughts and worries tumbled and tangled until she could scarcely tell one from the other. She found herself returning to the conversation with Angeline Townsend, doubting now that she had done the right thing in telling her not to take Tommy to the Reading hospital. Every choice seemed wrong now, every avenue ahead fraught with peril.

Helpless frustration welled up until she could no longer lie there. Cecilia rolled from the bed, fell to her knees, and prayed with a fervor so strong that her mind not only began to calm, but the worries began to unravel. They had to, for the only way to pray over them was one at a time. She knelt there so long that her legs went numb, yet she was blessed with a comfort she would have thought impossible to find in such a dismal night.

She stood by pressing up with her hands, because her legs would not support her. At that moment the final words in Heather's letter seemed to rise up before her eyes, flaming there in the dark night. Cecilia saw them for the very first time, with such clarity that the answer might as well have been illuminated by the night.

The dream was soft in coming. It seemed to have been waiting for Brian just on the other side of sleep, waiting for him to stop with his prayers and slide into his pallet and give in to his exhaustion and his defeat.

It was as much a memory as a dream, really. Yet a dream just the same, for the image's vivid clarity held no pain whatsoever. Brian found himself seated once more beside Sarah's hospital bed. It was during one of her final stays; he knew that as soon as the dream took form. She had the look of one hollowed by her illness, all the life and all the energy and all the joy that had made her who she was just scooped out such that she was left an empty gourd.

Sarah looked at him and once again said words Brian had thought lost and gone forever. “I'm ready to go home now.”

At that moment, the dream seemed to split in two, part of him recalling what had happened on that day, the other part living it anew. That day he had protested as he had done so often before, but his objections had been as hollow as her gaze. Now, however, he sat and nodded, and said simply, “I know you are.”

“Grieve for me awhile,” she had said then, and now said again. Only this time she was not crying, and the defeat and the coming farewell were no longer in her voice. There was only calm, only love. So much, so very much love. “Then I want you to get on with your life.”

Though he dreamed, he still remembered that day very well. At the time he had confessed with a broken and remorseful spirit, “I don't know if I can.” But now it was different, for he was held by the same love and peace he felt pouring from his dead wife's gaze. Now he was able to say in utter honesty, “I'm trying.”

Sarah smiled at him, and in so doing took him back to another time, back before the illness and the strain had robbed them of so much. She said, “I know you are.”

Then she said what she had said that day, yet this time it was with the joy of eternal light, a flooding so powerful that Brian found himself being pushed back to wakefulness, though he wanted to remain. Oh, he wanted so very much to stay right where he was. Sarah said to him, “Just remember I will be in the company of all the saints.” And the joy and the love seemed to rise up and take him along, like a bubble being lifted from the darkest depths, up into the light of endless day. And the last thing he heard before waking was his beloved wife saying, “I'll be waiting there to greet you when your own time arrives.”

He awoke and opened his eyes not to sorrow or loss or loneliness. No, instead he bounded from the bed and shouted to the gathering dawn, “I have it!”

Brian slipped into his clothes and raced down the stairs. He was midway along the gravel drive when he heard footsteps hurrying toward him. He knew it was Cecilia even before he rounded the trees and saw the slight, shadowy form. Knew because there was an illogical rightness to her being there, caught in the same power that sped him along. He rushed up, gripped her hands, and half shouted, “Rose Cottage!” Yet she could not hear him, not entirely, for at that very same moment she shouted back, “Joe Eaves!”

He said, “You told me the old monastery wasn't situated at Castle Keep; it was at your cottage!”

She said, “He pops up everywhere we turn! He's here with Hardy Seade, and he's pacing off the garden and digging holes that don't make any sense.”

They stopped, then started off together once more. Brian said, “Joe—of course, he was here with John Miles yesterday.” And Cecilia said, “The cottage—of course, Joe was always stamping around, looking under the carpet. I just assumed it was because he wanted to get his hands on it and rebuild.”

They stopped a second time, so excited that they could only gasp a little laugh, not wanting to miss anything else the other said. Cecilia pressed, “You first.”

“No, you.”

She gave Brian's hands an impatient shake. “I don't want to talk about Joe anymore. Tell me!”

“Heather said we had to get down on our knees.”

“And look in the oldest place.”

“Right. You told me, and then I think it was Trevor who also said something, about a thousand-year-old monastery on the grounds.”

“Castle Priory—that's what the legend claims it was called.” Cecilia gave his hands another shake, this one from irrepressible excitement. “And the old-timers say it was built where Rose Cottage stands now.”

“Then that's where we have to look.”

“But the cottage doesn't have a cellar.” Even so, she was already turning and hurrying back down the drive. “And if there had been, Joe would have found it.”

“There has to be . . .” Brian had to stop. He had no choice.

Cecilia halted because his arm reached full stretch and pulled her back. “What's the matter?”

“Your cottage,” Brian said softly. “It's so beautiful.”

Cecilia returned to stand beside him. “You should see it on a summer's night. The roses give off their strongest fragrance after dark, like a secret mystery kept for a select few. This was the first thing that I fell in love with, the way the aroma reached out and greeted me even before I could see the old place. I'm glad you like it.”

“I love it.” Brian sensed a change to the night then, a different fragrance, one that drew his gaze down to where Cecilia was looking up at him. Her dark eyes had captured the starlight. He felt drawn down by their power, closer and closer until he kissed those soft lips. Arms warm and strong rose up to envelop his neck and tighten so that he felt he would never be let go, nor would he want to be. When they finally released, as he traced a hand down the side of her face and neck and then kissed her a second time, he felt as though the night and the world surrounded them with sweet-scented approval.

Thirty

T
HIS TIME THE TWO HOURS OF SEARCHING DID NOT DISPEL
either the happiness or the excitement. Wednesday's dawn arrived and strengthened into another sunlit day. Brian and Cecilia used the light to tramp about the cottage's exterior, making wider and wider circles, kicking at the leaf-strewn garden and rummaging under shrubbery, looking for another ring or opening. When the chill worked into their bones, they stopped for coffee and toast. Neither needed to ask whether they should go and gather the others. This was their discovery, their morning, a gift too precious to share.

They drew their chairs close together and lingered long over the final cup of coffee, holding hands and listening to the birdsong drifting through the open window. Finally Brian said, “What we should be searching for is some corner of Rose Cottage where Joe Eaves couldn't have looked.”

Reluctantly Cecilia lifted her head from where it had been resting on his shoulder. “A place he couldn't have gotten to without making me suspicious.”

“Someplace hidden,” Brian agreed. He felt her stiffen beside him. “What is it?”

She rose slowly, as though pulled by invisible strings. “Probably nothing.”

He watched the tense excitement play upon her features. “You've thought of something.”

“Maybe.” She walked over to the kitchen pantry, pried open the reluctant door, and pointed at the ancient shelving in the corner. “Come give me a hand.”

“With that?” Brian cast it a doubtful glance. “The thing looks planted.”

“Which is exactly what Joe would have thought.” Cecilia was already worming her way to the corner by the rusty fuse box. “But the only way to get to the house's wiring is by shifting this thing around. It can be moved. Arthur and I did it together the day you arrived.”

“Right.” He tried not to give in to the rising excitement. They had been disappointed so often before. But as they heaved and scraped the heavy shelving back out of the way, he could not completely stifle the thrill gripping his gut. As soon as there was space, he dropped to his knees and tapped the floorboards. Instantly he knew. “They're hollow!”

“Wait right there!” Cecilia flew away and returned with a foot-long screwdriver and a flashlight. “Try this.”