Chapter 23
Hart would have recognized Peachey’s neat, cramped hand if he’d glimpsed the letter from across the room, for he’d been reading messages from her since he was in short coats.
Lord Jasper, I regret to write to you in this manner, but Miss St. Briac’s welfare is too important…
For a moment, Hart couldn’t breathe. Something had happened to Emeline, curse it, and he was to blame!
Pardon my plain speaking, my lord, but did you give no thought to the implications when you took the girl’s innocence and then rode away in the night?
A black wave of guilt and anger swamped him.
Never in all the years since he’d left Oxford had Peachey dared to raise the subject of his amorous encounters, not even when he brought a woman home to his own bed and he knew she must have heard them.
Why now, when he hadn’t wanted Emeline there at all, had warned her repeatedly that only heartbreak could come of it?
Somehow, he expected Peachey to understand that he had only gone away to spare Emeline from any further pain at his hands.
Perhaps, before you decamped to the Continent, you did not consider that this young lady might find herself in a delicate condition?
I suggest that you consider it now, my lord!
And you should further be aware that Miss St. Briac and her cousin have come with me to Woodcroft Priory.
In your absence, they kindly volunteered to assist Mr. Ackerman with the dig.
Hart barely saw Peachey’s signature at the bottom of the brief missive. The room seemed to tilt as he sank back down into his chair.
“Lord Jasper, has something happened?” A hand touched his arm, and he looked up into William’s anxious gray eyes.
“No one has been injured, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“But—something is clearly amiss. Must we return to England?”
Feeling as if his head was in a vise, Hart closed his eyes and groaned. “Possibly.” The bloody priory was the last place he wanted to be, especially with Emeline. She didn’t belong there with all his family ghosts. “I need a few minutes to think. Bring me a brandy.”
William drew back and blinked. “Really, my lord, the sun has not fully risen yet.”
“Perhaps you did not hear me correctly.” Hart sent him a dangerous look.
Turning to Bertram, who stood quaking near the door, William ordered, “Fetch a brandy for his lordship!”
Monte added three sharp barks to the conversation, jumped onto Hart’s lap, and boldly licked his cheek.
The digging at Woodcroft Priory proceeded at a snail’s pace, or so it seemed to Emeline.
“I had forgotten how many long hours we spent with Miss Anning as she patiently revealed fossils encased in rock for millennia,” she remarked to Louise as the excavation entered its second week.
The two of them sat at a small table placed under an elm tree so those who labored in the nearby trench might enjoy a respite.
“When one is lost in the work, time becomes a blur, but this initial stage is always trying,” agreed Louise. “I hope that soon enough we shall uncover some real artifacts, not just the bits of pottery and glass we’ve come across so far.”
Mrs. Peachey was walking across the grass holding a tea tray that looked enormous against her tiny frame. “I see I am just in time,” she called.
Emeline gladly ate a biscuit and drank the strong, hot tea with milk that Mrs. Peachey prepared for her, but then she gave up her chair to Tobias and went back to work.
The first dark rectangle of earth they’d discovered days ago had yielded only a few shards of bone and some bits of colored glass, causing Tobias to warn that it was another sign that robbers had beaten them there long ago.
“It is said that Henry VII sent men to explore the mounds along this stretch of coastline, and Queen Elizabeth’s astrologer visited as well. ”
“That doesn’t mean they located a burial chamber, or even all the graves,” Emeline had insisted.
Now, she climbed back down the ladder into the trench, which was so deep now that she had to stand on tiptoe to see over the edge.
After the men finished digging each day, it was Emeline’s practice to spend time gently troweling the far edges of the trench to check for any important new signs.
First one place, then another, working her way up and down with the edge of her trowel, looking for anything that didn’t quite fit with the surrounding area.
The work had an almost hypnotic effect on Emeline. She could lose herself in it, imagining the moment when she might come upon…
“Oh!” she gasped softly. The edge of her trowel had caught on an object, and her heart kicked up. In the distance, she could hear Tobias and Louise talking, occasionally laughing.
Scrape, scrape. The odors of rotted wood and soil filled her nostrils.
After a few minutes, Emeline realized that her great find seemed to be bits of decayed timber.
This felt anti-climactic, and yet it quickly came to her that the wood could be the remains of a casket or… even something more substantial.
“Tobias! Can you please come here?” Emeline heard the slight tremor in her voice.
When Tobias descended into the trench and crossed to look over her shoulder, he let out a low whistle. “By Jove,” he muttered. “You may have discovered the burial chamber itself.”
Her heart was thumping now. “How thrilling!”
“What is it?” Louise’s pale face appeared above them, peering over the edge of the trench.
“Your cousin is a proper archaeologist!” declared Tobias. “Look at this!” He pointed to the place where the soil was stained in the shape of a beam. “The wood itself has decomposed, but it left a mark behind.”
“I’m coming down,” cried Louise, waving her journal in the air. “I must record the event and the description of the find.”
He shook his big head. “The light is going. Let us call it a day and begin early tomorrow.” Smiling up at her, he added, “You can write down the details you know up to this point.”
“I can’t imagine how I will sleep tonight,” Emeline murmured.
Once the trio were standing together again on the lawn, and Mrs. Peachey came to join them, Emeline thought of Hart.
“We must get word to his lordship, as quickly as possible,” she said to the older woman. “It’s possible that we have found the burial chamber!”
After all that Mrs. Peachey had done to get them to come to Woodcroft Priory, Emeline expected a stronger reaction to this news. “That’s good to know,” Mrs. Peachey said, pursing her lips. “But we do not know quite where Lord Jasper might be, and even if we did, he cannot return so easily.”
Her heart sank. “But if there is a burial chamber, I feel certain he would want to know! It wouldn’t be right to open it without him.”
Mrs. Peachey would not meet her eyes. “If that was truly what he wanted, miss, he would not have gone to Lisbon.”
The full import of her words surged through her. Hart had made a choice to travel thousands of miles away, to take his pick of beautiful, willing women along the way, to pursue a life without her. Perhaps he didn’t feel worthy of Emeline’s love, but that didn’t change the fact that he had left her.
“So…you are saying that we should carry on without him,” she whispered.
“I am.” Mrs. Peachey reached out to clasp her hand, and now she was looking directly into Emeline’s eyes. “It’s just that…I happen to know, it will take more than an archaeological discovery to bring Lord Jasper back to Woodcroft Priory.”
“I didn’t expect it to progress quite so slowly,” Emeline said to Mr. Ackerman on the third morning after she had uncovered evidence of wood in the trench.
But even as she stood with the gardener, drinking a cup of coffee before climbing down the ladder, she knew that it had to be this way.
If they rushed to reveal too much too quickly, the few fragments of wood might crumble to dust.
“I’ve a feelin’ about today, miss,” said Ackerman in his flat Suffolk accent. A smile flickered at his mouth.
“Do you? I’d better get at it, then!”
The entire shape of the trench had changed, widening considerably at one end as Tobias and Emeline, with help from Cyril Ackerman and his nephews Sam and Tom, had carefully followed the outline stained on the soil from a wooden structure.
Now it was time for the more detailed work of troweling and sieving.
As the morning stretched on, the hazy chill of dawn was broken by intervals of sun. Emeline wore a tweed cap over her thick ebony locks that she had pinned up in a coil atop her head. Gloves protected her hands, but there was always dirt under her fingernails when she bathed each night.
Tobias had decided that they might begin to search deeper into what appeared to be the burial chamber.
None of them dared to hope they would find anything, however.
Even if robbers hadn’t gotten there first, there might not have ever been anything of value in the chamber.
Perhaps it had all turned to dust, even the body.
Then Tobias gave a yell and Emeline looked over to see him holding up a large, corroded iron hook.
“It must have been attached to the inner wall!” He pointed then to what appeared to be the edge of a vessel peeping from the dirt.
It would take time to reveal the entire piece without causing any damage.
“It’s so exciting,” called Emeline. “And it certainly tells us we are on course.”
Louise went to join Tobias, all the while writing in her book about the time and exact location of each find and adding sketches. She pointed to the piece Tobias was uncovering with his trowel. “Perhaps that will be a hanging bowl or a flagon.”
They were smiling at each other, heads bent close together.
Emeline stayed where she was, leaving them the space to share the thrill of this initial discovery.
The bond between Louise and Tobias was clear, forged quietly over time rather than in a few moments of heady romance.
She was happy for them, of course she was!
Yet Emeline’s heart stung at the realization that her own love was lost to her.
It was a relief to turn back to her work on the other side of the pit. Time passed in a blur, and Emeline barely noticed when Sarah appeared to say that luncheon would be served in a quarter hour. Soon after, Louise tapped Emeline on the shoulder.
“Tobias and I are going in to wash and eat.”
“I’ll stay here for a bit,” Emeline said. “I think I am close to a discovery of my own.”
Louise smiled and reached out to brush some dirt from her nose. “Don’t forget, my dear, you must eat, too.”
When they had gone off and Emeline was alone, a sudden wave of melancholy washed over her.
The time was coming to plan the future. When her task here was ended, she would return to London and find real work so that she might craft a life for herself.
If the British Museum would not grant her employment, perhaps she might tutor young women in the sciences—and if a way forward did not present itself, Emeline would carve one out herself.
Tears stung her eyes, and she wiped them away. It seemed she had been right all along…life was so much simpler without the confusion and heartache of men.
Giving her head a shake, she returned to her troweling.
There was an area at her feet where the dirt seemed a bit softer, and as she worked at it with the flat edge of the blade, a rim of greenish glass appeared.
Her first thought was that it was a bottle, dropped in recent decades, but more troweling revealed that the piece was more elaborate.
A conical beaker or goblet, with claw-shaped blobs around the circumference, and smaller ones encircling the base!
Each green glass claw was edged with tiny ridges.
No sooner did Emeline release the first beaker from the soil and begin brushing away the dirt, than she glimpsed a second one peeking out nearby.
Her senses swam, and again she felt as if she were looking through a window in time.
Who were the people who had lived here? She imagined a man and woman drinking together from these colorful, intricately made goblets.
How long ago had their fingers touched the same places as hers?
It tore at Emeline’s heart that the one person she longed to share this moment with was far away, making a new life without her.
Dimly, she became aware of the sound of hoofbeats. After replacing the goblet and covering it with a layer of soil, Emeline got to her feet and looked out above the edge of the trench. A tall, dark man with wide shoulders was riding toward her on a fine chestnut stallion.
“It is an illusion,” she whispered to herself and closed her eyes. When she opened them, she saw Hart swinging gracefully down from the horse’s back and striding toward her, even more splendid than she remembered. It cannot be…