Page 98 of To Treasure an Heiress
She stared at the map for a moment, closed her eyes.
He held his breath. Well, for a second. Then huffed it out. “Tell me it’s not. Where he was already digging, I mean.”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
“Beth.” Oliver’s voice was hesitant. And had a warning in it. “One line isn’t enough to go on. We can’t exactly dig all along it.”
“Well. We don’t just have one line, though, do we?” He nodded toward Beth’s stack of papers. “We’ve got the clues that led us thereto begin with. Mucknell mentioning the Old Man. And that part of his watermark map with the word in it.”
“Perfect.” Abbie moved over to the stack he indicated. “Three points will allow us to triangulate with precision.”
It took them a bit of doing to put it all together on this one map, however. It wasn’t exactly drawn to the same scale as the one Mucknell had put down by hand on his letter. But between the two clues the pirate had left for his wife and the one the prince had for his, they soon had it.
A beautiful dot on a beautiful map. And nearly twenty-four hours’ head start. Surely that was enough time to dig up a pirate hoard, all evidence to the contrary not worth considering. At least since Telly wasn’t awake yet to remind him of it. Once he drew a circle around their place of choice, he looked up with a grin. “Well, then. Time to get digging.”
28
Considering the fact that a swarm of people she didn’t trust a whit would be descending upon them any moment, Beth probably shouldn’t have been having quite so much fun. But as the sun burned its way from the mist the next morning and spilled its gold onto their site, she couldn’t help but grin.
She’d thought, when she set out on this adventure three months ago, that it was hers and hers alone. She’d thought she had to hide it from her family—and then hide her family from the people who would take it from her if they could. But when she paused for a moment to lean on her shovel and look over her shoulder, she couldn’t deny how wrong she’d been.
Oliver was sitting a stone’s throw away, rubbing at eyes that had been closed in sleep the last time she looked. Libby stood a few feet beyond, spyglass raised and watchful, Telford at her elbow. Senara had remained on Tresco with the promise that she’d join them in the morning with some fresh-baked sustenance, but Emily still slumbered on her blanket, having refused to return to St. Mary’s when they dropped the Howe sisters there yesterday afternoon.
They had business to attend to, they said. And since Sheridan had only nodded, his smile not dimming in the slightest, she hadn’t questioned them on what this business could possibly be that wasmore important than finding the treasure before the Scofields and Vandermeer arrived.
To be perfectly honest, she still couldn’t quite reconcile the idea of either of them at an excavation anyway. Obviously they were, and frequently. But until she saw them dressed in appropriate clothes for it and taking a shovel in hand, she just couldn’t picture it.
It was challenging enough to accept that elegant, proper Ainsley was knee-deep in the trench they’d been digging, humming an old hymn as he dug.
Sheridan was sifting through each shovelful of dirt that came topside, humming right along, as if he hadn’t been awake for twenty-four hours straight at this point.
Beth had stolen a few hours of sleep sometime in the hours of deepest night. Just a few. It hadn’t been great sleep—not that she minded the hardness of the ground after making a bed of it for all that time earlier in the summer, but she’d been alert to every sound. Waiting, hoping to hear Sheridan shout, “Eureka!”
They could find nothing. She knew that. Their chances were especially slim of finding it in this sliver of a time window before the Scofields and their American arrived.
But then, theycould. It was possible, given the precision of their location and the shallowness of the soil here. She drew in another breath and went back to shoveling.
Telford tromped their way, a bag in his hands. “Chocolate, anyone?”
Sheridan, his hands a mess with mud, simply opened his mouth. Telford took aim and lobbed a chocolate drop at him, letting out a whoop of victory when it went in.
She shook her head. “It’s morning. Shouldn’t you be mute again?”
Telford chuckled. “It’s not morning until one has slept, Miss Tremayne. This is my favorite time of day. The last breath of night. The first brush of dawn.”
She rather liked it herself—but preferably after a solid night’s sleep. “You mean to tell me you always stay up all night?”
“Why do you think he can’t be roused until nearly noon?” Sheridan grinned over at her. “Diggidy dig, darling. Or we can switch, if you like.”
She duggidy-dug her shovel back in. He’d already taken many a turn with it—his back must be sore, even if he wouldn’t admit it. “No sails on the horizon yet, I assume?”
“Not yet.” Telford angled himself toward the incline. Probably looking at Scofield’s site, naught but a hundred yards away. The granite slab that had nearly been her end. The campsite that had been taken down by the locals whom Nigel had hired when he was supposedly so distressed over her “accident.”
Beth deliberately didnotlook that direction. She focused instead on her digging. And sighed when her shovel hit something hard, and with the distinctive sound of granite. “Bedrock again.”
“To your right, then.” Sheridan abandoned the dirt and came around to her. “We must be close now. Process of elimination and all that.”
Half of her mouth smiled at his optimism. The other half at his obvious joy. “You want the shovel again, don’t you?”
