Page 228 of Feathers in the Wind
Nat’s gaze hadn’t moved from the Colonel’s face.
He nodded. ‘Thank you. I would be honored and I will do what is in my power to be that son to you. No one should die alone.’
* * *
I lay curledin Nat’s arms on my sofa, an empty bottle of wine on the coffee table in front of us. We had been celebrating. Tomorrow Christian would be coming home.
I had thrown myself into redecorating the spare bedroom, turning it into a room suitable for a small boy. A hitherto unknown maternal instinct had sprung up in me and I had filled the room with toys and furniture--even if he clung to Horsey as his most precious toy.
I adored the child, and in his stay in hospital, he had won the hearts of the staff.
Even Mark unbent enough to present the child with a toy car. To his credit, Mark only billed me for the bare minimum, and while he didn’t exactly apologize to Nat, we took his actions as apology enough.
As I stared at the empty fireplace, the long forgotten conversation with Dame Alice crept into my memory. For the last few weeks, every fiber of my being had been centered on getting Christian well again. Now as I looked at my hearthstone, I remembered.
I sat up. ‘We need Alan.’
Nat looked up at me with hazy eyes. ‘Now?’
I felt excitement welling inside me. ‘Yes, now. This has waited three hundred and fifty years. It can’t wait any longer.’
I rang Alan and dragged Nat out to the garage, where we gathered the tools we would need. By the time Alan arrived, we had pushed the sofa back and rolled up the rug, and Nat and I sat on either side of the hearthstone, a crowbar, sacking and a spade neatly piled in front of us.
Alan looked from the hearthstone to me. ‘What are you doing?’
Nat shrugged and gave Alan the sort of sympathetic glance that only two men faced with the incomprehensible whims of women can manage. ‘She will not tell me. Some strange female fancy?’
I glared at him. ‘We need to raise the hearthstone.’
‘Why?’ asked Alan.
My courage began to fail. ‘It could be utter foolishness, but I need to know what’s underneath it.’
* * *
‘Dirt,’the men concluded in chorus as they stopped from their labors, sweating and panting and a full two feet down into the earth.
If the hearthstone had ever been moved since the day it had been laid, then it had been many, many years. Exasperated, I picked up the spade and dug into the dirt. Nothing.
‘Keep going,’ I said with false cheerfulness.
We took it in turns to excavate and I had all but given hope, when the spade hit something solid a good four feet below the surface. I gasped and looked up at the two men.
‘It’s here! You take over. This needs proper excavation.’
I handed the spade to Alan. As part of his studies, Alan had played around with a bit of archaeology and I didn’t want to break anything important.
It seemed to take forever as Alan crouched in the hole carefully digging around the object, flicking dirt all over my living room with a trowel. He finally revealed a square object wrapped in what had once been a heavy, oiled cloth of some type. It took both men to extricate the object from the hole. They laid it on a sack on the floor.
‘Well?’ I said, breaking the reverential silence and addressing Nat. ‘It’s yours. You get to do the honors.’
‘What do you mean, mine?’
‘Unwrap it and see.’ I could hardly contain my own excitement. No Christmas present could have been more mysterious.
The cloth wrapping disintegrated to the touch, revealing a metal bound box of some antiquity. Nat recoiled from the box as if he had been burned.
‘You recognize it?’ I found it hard to keep the triumph from my voice. I too had seen this box before—in the study of Heatherhill Hall in June, 1645.
