Chapter Twenty-Four
Alice arrived at the construction site first thing the following morning and was relieved to see that Jack had arranged for security to block the end of the rural lane leading to the Roost. A guard checked the identification of anyone who wanted to get through, which meant the construction zone was blessedly free of distractions, photographers, and onlookers.
A fresh autumn breeze greeted her as she stepped from her car into a glorious morning.
Acorn caps crunched underfoot and her boots sliced through the long grass, still damp with dew.
Everything had a rich, peaty smell. Was this what the settlers would have experienced three hundred years ago?
The rustle of autumn leaves and the soft, damp give of the earth beneath her feet would have been the same.
So too the chirping of birds in the sycamore trees and the musky-sweet scent of the field grass going dormant.
The Roost was halfway dismantled. Without its roof or second story, it looked naked and exposed. The stone chimney remained untouched, sticking up from the ground floor and encased in scaffolding from the ground to its top. Taking the chimney down stone by stone would be their first task today.
Jack looked cautious as he approached. “Any more trouble last night?”
He didn’t even need to mention Sebastian’s name. “No trouble,” she said easily. “Why are you dressed like that?” Instead of chinos and a golf shirt, he wore jeans, work boots, and a pair of heavy-duty gloves.
“I’m going to help take the chimney apart,” he said. “Nothing needs my attention at the golf course and this seems like more fun.”
She eyed the scaffolding. A couple of workers wearing hard hats and goggles scrambled up the widely spaced bars, hand over hand, on their journey to the top of the chimney.
Hammers and chisels dangled from their work belts, and it looked like a dangerous job.
For someone like Jack, maybe even deadly.
“Are you sure?” she asked. “Chiseling the stones out of the mortar might cause a cut and then—”
He stopped her worries with a kiss. “I’ve been living with hemophilia all my life,” he said. “I’m always careful, but I can’t live my life wrapped in cotton and watching from the sidelines.”
Jack gave her another quick kiss before putting on a hard hat and heading up the scaffolding. A cherry picker with a platform basket was positioned beside the top of the chimney to collect the stones.
The tapping of chisels and mallets filled the air.
She shaded her eyes to watch Jack as he climbed to the top of the chimney.
The flash of his white smile in his tanned face showed his delight as he jawboned with the other workers.
Was he paying full attention? His skin glistened with sweat as he wiggled a metal shim beneath a stone, rocking it free of the mortar.
A fellow worker lifted the rock free and passed it over to a man standing in the basket of the cherry picker.
Bits of mortar rained down, pinging on the rungs of the scaffolding.
She couldn’t look. Jack might want to risk his neck playing macho man, but standing mutely down here while he did it was torture.
Her cell phone vibrated, and Sebastian’s name appeared on the screen. Accepting his call would be as reckless as Jack risking a catastrophic accident by dismantling the chimney, but she couldn’t help herself and accepted the call.
“Yeah, Seb, what is it?”
She had to cover her other ear against the construction noise to hear him. “The security guards won’t let me through,” he said. “I’m trapped at the end of the drive. There are reporters here, and none of us can get through.”
“That’s why Jack hired security,” she pointed out. Sebastian’s presence was going to trigger a fresh round of publicity she didn’t need.
“Can’t you let me through? I came all the way from London to see the Roost in person.”
She sighed. Back when she was in the depths of her infatuation with him, she told Sebastian all about the Roost and its layers of history. He seemed genuinely curious and asked insightful questions. He even offered his own speculation and got Margo to do some additional research.
She couldn’t deny him the opportunity to see the place he had helped her research. “Pass the phone to the guard,” she said, feeling like a pushover. All it took was a few words with the guard to grant Sebastian permission to enter the site.
Five minutes later he came strolling up the path, once again looking like a Ralph Lauren model, this time the safari version. He wore a white, open-collar shirt with its cuffs rolled up and khaki trousers, as though he was prepared to hunt a lion or pitch a tent on the African savanna.
“So that’s Reid’s Roost,” he said with a nod to the halfway-pulled-down building.
“It was Reid’s Roost,” she replied. Without its roof, the chimney mostly dismantled, and the second floor laying in stacks of logs, the remnants of the building looked puny and sad.
It was a little embarrassing to have painted such a grandiose picture of it for Sebastian when England was full of castles and manor houses far older and more impressive.
“The roof and the logs from the second story are in those tents,” she said with a nod to the two oversized canvas tents erected near the golf course.
“Give me a tour,” Sebastian wheedled, and she obliged. He was full of questions, and within minutes their old friendship was coming back to life. She spread a blanket well away from the falling bits of mortar to watch the dismantling of the chimney.
After an hour, the job was halfway complete, with only about eight more feet to go. At some point Jack spotted Sebastian and climbed down the scaffolding to approach them.
“What’s he doing here?” Jack asked, swiping a grubby forearm across his sweaty face. Sebastian came dressed like a gorgeous outdoorsman, but Jack was the real deal, with sweat and soot covering his muscled arms.
“I’m curious about the Roost,” Sebastian said.
“You scammed your way through security.”
Alice bit her lip. “Actually, I let him in.”
Instead of getting annoyed, Jack looked mildly amused. “You’re way too tender-hearted and forgiving.”
“Is that a flaw?”
He paused, tilting his head as if genuinely weighing the answer.
“I’m not sure,” he said at last. “It’s either a glaring weakness or the purest form of selfless Christian compassion.
But right now”—his smile deepened—“I’m not in the mood to argue about it.
” He tossed a pair of work gloves to her and she caught them.
“Come on over and help us take down the rest of the chimney.”
She instinctively recoiled. She’d just painted her nails last night and construction work wasn’t really her thing. “The others are far more qualified,” she hedged, but Jack wasn’t having it.
“Maybe, but you need to trust me. The crane is going to lift the lintel stone, then pulling the rest of the rocks down will go quickly. Put the gloves on, get off your tush, and follow me.”
“That’s rather rude,” Sebastian began, but once again, Jack ignored him.
“You’re going to want to experience this,” he told her. “I can’t describe it, but the second you get near that fireplace you’ll know what I mean.”
Curiosity began to gnaw, not so much because of what he said, but from his expression. His eyes glinted in anticipation, as if a tremendous surprise awaited her.
“Okay,” she said, tugging on the gloves.
The battered leather gloves were laughably too big and the fingers had been permanently molded to a man’s hand.
They were dirty and grubby, but she needed them if she was to handle the heavy building stones.
Jack plopped a hard hat on her head, and she felt a little silly as she approached the Roost.
How strange it felt to walk inside this once-familiar house.
It had always been so dim inside, but now everything was open and exposed to the bright sky above.
Jack stood beside the fireplace, one hand propped on the massive slab of the lintel stone stretching across the top opening of the fireplace. It probably weighed a thousand pounds.
“Come closer,” Jack urged.
She drifted a few steps forward, then she caught it .
. . the reason Jack beckoned her here. That smell!
The smoky aroma of a thousand home-cooked meals emanated from the fireplace.
Chipping away at the mortar had exposed pockets of soot and residue to the air.
It smelled like bacon and bread and meaty stew.
It sent shivers down her arms, and she locked gazes with him. “You feel it too?”
“I feel it,” he confirmed. “We could smell all those cooking aromas the second we lifted the capstone off the chimney. Probably thousands of meals were cooked in old cast-iron pots, pumping up smoke that smelled like bacon and homemade soup.”
“Biscuits,” she added.
“Warm bread and hot apple pies.”
Alice leaned closer to inhale again, and it seemed she could smell every one of the foods they listed.
How often had women through the centuries cooked at this exact spot?
Dismantling the chimney released the scent molecules that had been trapped in the chimney mortar for centuries.
The remnants of those former meals danced in the air, an echo from long ago. The thought triggered another shiver.
“Who invited you inside?” Jack said in a surly tone.
Alice whirled to see Sebastian, sporting his devil-may-care grin as he strolled inside.
“The lady out front gave me a hard hat and said it would be okay to come inside. You don’t mind, do you, Alice?”
It was hard to resist Sebastian, but she needed to do a better job of it. “Jack owns this place,” she said. “It’s up to him.”
Jack looked heavenward and muttered a string of salty curses, but it wasn’t in his nature to be needlessly unkind. “Don’t get into any trouble,” he grumbled.
Sebastian strolled to the fireplace and ran the flat of his hand across the lintel.
“I’ll bet this old stone could tell a lot of interesting stories.
” He ran his hand across the surface, then zeroed in on the palm frond carved into the corner.
It was the same doodle Alice had seen on the letter connecting Helga to this house.
“Look at that, a Commonwealth wreath,” Sebastian murmured as he traced the palm fronds, then gave a little shudder. “Creepy.”
Alice blinked in confusion. “Creepy? How so?”
“Commonwealth wreaths were used by followers of Oliver Cromwell during the Puritan Revolution.”
She looked again, studying the pair of curved palm fronds more closely. “Is there some special meaning behind it?”
“Absolutely,” Sebastian said cheerfully.
“After they beheaded the king, the Puritans refused to use English coins because they had the king’s face on them.
They melted them down to mint new coins and wanted a Christian symbol instead of a monarch.
They chose palm fronds, a symbol of Christ’s triumph, to surround the outer rim of the coin.
Come on, Alice, you should be watching my miniseries. It’s all in there.”
Alice gaped at the tiny emblem with new eyes. Could it really be a symbol of the Puritan Commonwealth? And if it was . . . did that make Helga and the man who built the Roost part of the Puritan Revolution?
If Reid Santos and Helga had been followers of Oliver Cromwell during the bloody English Civil War, it could have been an excellent reason a wealthy man would need to flee to the New World.
After a crane lifted the massive lintel stone and carried it to the staging area, Jack headed back inside the Roost to continue dismantling the fireplace.
Now that the stone had been safely removed, it wouldn’t take long to finish taking apart the rest of the fireplace.
Most of the fireplace was made of local stone, but the lining of the fireplace was crude, handmade brick.
He started chiseling at the line of bricks that had been directly beneath the lintel stone.
It was better here than outside, where he’d have to watch Alice lounging on the picnic blanket alongside Sebastian Bell.
Sam Bartholomew, he silently corrected himself.
Everything about the man was a fraud, from his name to his surgically corrected nose.
He tamped down his frustration and went back to chipping away at the mortar between the bricks.
The interior of the cooking area was coated with creosote, the oily black sludge from years of wood-burning fires.
Outside, Sebastian looked fresh as a daisy, while Jack was smudged with soot and sweat.
It was tempting to flop down next to Alice on the blanket and draw her into a big, sweaty hug.
A man was supposed to get dirty . . . not submit to facials, manicures, and wear everyday clothes that required dry-cleaning.
He focused on the next layer of bricks, angling his chisel carefully because this section had an extra-thick layer of mortar.
Taps with the mallet slowly chipped the soot-blackened mortar away, revealing the smooth beige mortar that hadn’t seen daylight in over three hundred years.
He rocked the brick free of the mortar and carefully set it with the other bricks.
A chunk of the remaining mortar fell into a cavity beneath the brick he had just removed.
That was odd. The bricks were uniform in size, so they should have been snug.
A cavity like this made no sense, so it was probably deliberate.
It was about the size of a deck of cards.
He yanked off his gloves to scoop out crumbles of mortar from the hollow.
It was brittle, dry, and grainy . . . but there was something smooth inside the cavity.
He stirred his fingers around until he grasped the cold and smooth object. He lifted it out and swiped away the grit.
In the palm of his hand lay a heavy gold signet ring.