Like when Jimbo had thrown him into the display of air fresheners shaped like little trees and women in bathing suits in Tryon, North Carolina.
Albert, as was his custom, shook his head to dispel the memory.
He wrote the words on his wrist, then, rolling up the sleeve on his pajamas, wrote the other line of the poem that remained enigmatic.‘Hear what the bells above say’.
What do bells say? “Ding dong.”
‘Bells above’. Above. Overhead.
Albert closed his eyes and imagined himself once again standing where the wall met the stairs. Bells above?
In a church?
What was above?
A steeple.
What was in a steeple? Bells!
Churchbells!
These thoughts cascaded into his brain like towels down a laundry shoot and landed in a jumble. Whatever mental constipation had restrained them ‘til that moment, when freed they arrived almost all at once, leaving Albert to sort them out before another consignment arrived.
But what did church bells have to say? Probably ‘come to church’, or ‘it’s time for church’. He’d have to make another trip to Langar and listen to them. Meantime, one more line needed explaining. ‘And John said, ‘Surprises await.’
Who had been surprised?
Foss had apparently been surprised at finding his name on the wall, otherwise why would he have laughed?
Welf probably hadn’t expected to be hit on the head. Surprise!
Larky probably hadn’t intended to be buried behind the wall, unless he committed suicide in remorse for having taken Welf’s life? Surprise!
Ma, it might be said, had been surprised at finding herself a Lady. Surprise!
The earl would have been surprised—unpleasantly—at losing his estate. Surprise!
Whohadn’t been surprised?
Only John, who knew that surprises await; who, perhaps—intentionally or unintentionally—had set the whole train of surprises in motion?
Wicked King John.
“Somebody else must have read that.”
The voice woke Albert from the deep sleep into which his ruminations had cudgeled him. Esperanza was nestled behind him, with her arms around his waist, as he had come to expect. He didn’t open his eyes. Her toehold in his dimension was not a strong one, and sometimes when he looked at her directly, she would become transparent, or slip away altogether, like a drowning person filtering into the murky depths.
His head was throbbing.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s all up here,” she whispered, tracing his temple with her cool fingertip. “All in this little nest of threads.”
The perfect description of his brain, Albert thought. A nest of threads. Short threads of different shapes, sizes, and colors. None connected. Each with a life of its own. More like worms.
“You have discovered so much,” Esperanza said, squeezing his hand in her own. Her breath reminded him of flowers growing near the ocean.
“Have I?”
“You know what the man in the painting was looking at.”
“Yes.”
“You know who Foss was.”
Also true.
“You know who killed Welf.”
“Probably.”
“Surely, I would say.” Her accent was so thick he had to concentrate on her words as she spoke.
“Yes.”
“You know where he and Larky are buried.”
“Yes.”
“The same place as King John’s treasury.”
“Yes.”
“What don’t you know?”
That is why his dreams had been unsettled, Albert thought. His discovery of where Blue Robert had been looking only opened up a Pandora’s Box of new questions.
“I don’t know why the brick with Foss’s name was moved,” he said, dreamily. “I don’t know why Annabella Howe had the painting made.”
“Very strange, that,” said Esperanza. “It’s as if she wished to leave a clue. But to whom? To what purpose?”
It had been a clue, hadn’t it? A visual code. Perhaps he wasn’t as bad at codes as he thought.
“Odd that she and Robert Tiptoft both owned Langar at one time or another.”
“Yes.”
“Odd that Robert Tiptoft suddenly became very wealthy.”
“Yes.”
“Odd that two of his daughters married their fortunes to the Scroops.”
“Scropes,” Albert corrected.
“Odd that Annabella was the illegitimate daughter of Emanuel, the last of the Scropes in his line.”
Albert thought of the poor little plaster Emanuel, kneeling forever at the foot of his parents on the lid of the family sarcophagus in Langar Chapel, eternally penitent for having had no legitimate children through which to pass along their DNA; rendering mute the music of their existence. “She was?”
Esperanza made a curlicue with her fingers in the hair above his ear. “You know that.”
“I do?”
“I can only remind you of things you already know,” said Esperanza. “Odd that King Charles the Second elevated her from a nobody to the nobility.”
“That’s a lot to not know.”
Esperanza squeezed his stomach slightly. “It’s all up there,” she said sleepily. “All in that nest of threads.”
He opened his eyes and looked at himself in the mirror on the wall. The bedside lamp cast his face in sharp relief against the deep shadows.
There was no other reflection; only his.
He shut off the light and went back to sleep with the sense of her breath on his ear and the smell of some kind of flower in the air.
Definitely a Spanish flower.
Probably.
Langar Chapel, Langar Manor, 1370
Oldmanson had been up early that morning, mixing a plaster that would spread evenly and adhere to the wall despite the October chill. Margaret was already in the chapel when he arrived. A pungent steam rose from the wooden hod he carried containing his special concoction, and trailed after him as he crossed the sanctuary to where she was evaluating the job at hand.
“What would the Man think to see you in his cotte and braies, m’um?” He said this every time she donned her husbands tunic and trousers for what she called ‘property work,’ and her husband Robert, the Man, described as ‘the landowners curse’.
She laughed, as if this were the first time he’d made the remark. “I don’t know what would alarm him more, to find me in them, or that they fit!” She looked down at the leggings. “Or what sorry shape they’re in.”
She turned to the wall and brushed dust from the Foss stone with the flat of her hand. “What do you think it means, Oldmanson?”
“Not a clue, m’um. Been there no end of time, has that. Most say someone named Foss must be buried yon.”
“And you don’t think so?”
“I ain’t one to yea or nay such a possibility, your ladyship.” He wiped his nose with the back of his sleeve. “But I never see a grave marker with naught but a name on it.” He leaned close and read the letters off, tapping them one at a time. “F-O-S-S.” He turned to his patroness. “Foss. That’s all. Might not even be a name.”
“What then?” said Margaret. She lifted one of the trowels from his rope belt and, bending over the bucket, began to stir.
Oldmanson shrugged. “Who knows?” He massaged the plaster from which an island, roughly two feet square, had fallen away, revealing a swatch of roughly finished stone. Delicate rivulets of veins gave way to channels and harbors of cracks in the plaster. “Put on wet wall,” he said.
“Did you say something?”
“Aye. This plaster were put on wet wall. Dew, mos’ likely. Whoever done it needed a wetter brew, like that yer twiddlin’.”
“Well, it’s held up for a couple of hundred years,” Margaret allowed.
“Aye. Shoddy, that. This’ll outlast it.” He nudged the bucket with his foot.
“So, what are
you saying? We need to remove all the old plaster?”
“Only if you want to make a good job of it,” said Oldmanson. “That’s your lookout. Mind,” he added, before she could respond. “It’ll take a mite more brew than this.”
“Well, a job worth doing is worth doing well,” said Margaret. She liked the sound of that, and repeated it. “You may write that down, Oldmanson.”
Oldmanson chortled under his breath. “Soon’s I come by quill and ink, m’um. So, we’ll scrape this lot off?”
“Aye,” said Margaret, adopting his accent. “You go milk the chickens or dance under the moon or whatever witchery you perform for your secret recipe, and I’ll tuck in and be ready for it by the time you return.”
Oldmanson, feeling, on so cold a morning, every minute of his seventy-odd years, was pleased to leave the thankless and dusty work of removing the plaster to his lovely apprentice. He turned to leave and, calling over his shoulder as he walked toward the door, said: “You know, m’lady, if I was thirty year-yoonger. . .”
Of course, he knew much more than time separated them, but it was a compliment with which he enjoyed tickling himself, and she took it as such.
“If only,” said Margaret. He hadn’t shuffled half-way across the sanctuary before the walls resounded with the sound of plaster crumbling before her hammer.
“Twenty year,” he sighed to himself, and his shadow followed him silently, obediently, through the door.
Margaret loved physical labor. It was a distraction from worrying about Robert and the perils he faced day-to-day on the battlefields of Normandy, and the never-ending demands of the manor, and what future she could orchestrate for her trio of daughters as children of a cash-poor family dangling from the lower fringes of nobility’s tapestry. All that worry, and its attendant frustration, she bundled into the fervor with which she attacked the job.
In twenty minutes the wall, from edge to stair, had been stripped bare of plaster, leaving her bedewed with sweat and the Foss stone the only irregularity remaining on the wall’s surface. She picked up the debris and filled the barrow with those bits big enough not to sift through the slats and holes.
Having swept the dust into a pile, she stood, massaging her lower back with the heals of her hands as she appraised her handiwork. “Who were you, Foss?” she said, advancing on the enigmatic little stone. “What’s your story?”
The thought occurred to her that if, as Oldmanson had contested, the plaster had been applied with less than careful craftsmanship, the singular monument might need to be re-anchored. For that matter, she thought, since nobody knew or remembered why it was there, why not remove it altogether? She could use it to stop that obstinate door in the Magdelaine bedroom that kept swinging open. It would make a lively curiosity.
She pinched the brick between her forefingers and thumb and tugged. It yielded slightly. Using both hands she rocked, pushed, and pulled. Something seemed to be holding it from behind, as if there was a bolt through its middle by which it was anchored. She picked up her trowel and, wedging it beneath the stone, pried as hard as the metal would allow without bending.
While nothing happened immediately, there was a response in the bowels of the brick that told her, with the application of a little more force, it would.
She got the gravedigger’s shovel from the closet in the vestry and applied it to the task, this time the results were almost immediate, but shockingly unexpected.
At first there was a rumble, like soft summer thunder, that seemed to come from above. For an instant, she thought the roof might be caving in but, looking up, she discovered not the slightest sign of movement. Then the sonorous unmistakable sound of a clapper brushing one of the great bells in the church tower. This sound continued, and concentrating, she followed its progress. There could be no doubt, the bell was descending the tower. Not in free-fall, as if it had been cut loose, but slowly, deliberately, almost stealthily being lowered.
On impulse, she took a step or two toward the tower, but the sound of soft grinding came from behind, spinning her on her heel. To her astonishment, the stairs were moving toward her!
“Oldmanson!” she screamed, knowing at the same time how fruitless her hope of being heard since he was half a mile away mixing his foul-smelling potion. Nor was there likely to be anyone else in the neighborhood during autumn harvest to hear her cries.
She crossed herself. “Lord, what enchantment is this?” She stood frozen to the spot, her eyes widening to embrace her wonder.
When the stairs stopped moving, their former place had been taken by a gap of five or six feet.
“Hello?”
There was, much to her relief, no reply. What had she expected? But, somehow, it seemed the only thing she could say. She darted a glance at the door, in hopes Oldmanson’s shadow might be crossing the threshold with its owner in tow.
There was no one there.
Retrieving the shovel from the floor and positioning it menacingly on her shoulder, she advanced on tip-toe to the newly created channel between the wall and the stair.
“Who’s there?”
She had meant to infuse the demand with all the authority she could summon. But her words came out in a choked whisper. She cleared her throat and, taking another two cautious steps closer, repeated the question.
Again, no response.
She closed her eyes, expelled a long, steadying breath and, gripping the shovel handle tightly, advanced on the opening now revealed behind the stair, which, even as she watched, was being widened by the last stages of retreat of a solid slab of stone that had once blocked it.
“Is anyone in there?”
No sound. No reply. No leaping from the inky darkness the demons her imagination summoned out to play. Nothing but the soft, silent outrushing of air long entombed, hushing by her with its burden of mustiness and ancient secrets, seeking release.
A miniature choir of candles flickered in the votary—luminous mutes speaking tongues of fire in praise to God. With one of these held an arm’s length before her, she ventured into the shadows.
The scene revealed as the darkness retreated from the tiny light, though horrific, was what Margaret had most feared, and most expected. Her hand, clutching surplus fabric from her husband’s cotte, flew to her mouth.
Five dead men, equal parts flesh and bone. Three arranged neatly, half-sitting, against the wall to her right. Almost at peace. One splayed upon the floor not much beyond her feet, face-down. The arrangement of the final corpse, however, told a chilling tale. The others had been dead when they were interred. He had not.
The marks of his fingernails etched the tale of his terror along the full length of the wall, upon which his skeletal hands still rested. He was on his knees and his head was turned toward the corpses of his companions, the orbs of his eyes wide with horror, as if he had detected a motion in the pitch darkness.
Margaret held the candle, which was guttering, nearly to the ceiling. There was no lantern. No candle wax. Not the slightest seam, crack, or crevice in the stone, nothing that could have relieved the oppressive darkness in the least.
The candle died and she withdrew quickly, with the fearful knowledge that neither time, nor whatever distance she might establish between herself and the scene would expunge it from her memory.
Then her foot hit an obstacle. Something metal clanged against the floor. She bent down and spidered her hand blindly across the cold stones. A sack. Very coarse. Her fingers raced over the burlap, some of which sent up a cloud of dust at her touch. She could taste it in the air she breathed.
It was a huge sack. Then. . . no.Two sacks, one nearly on top of the other, both filled with hard objects. Tossing aside the dead candle, she seized a sack in each hand and dragged them out into the light.
Within seconds she was aware what she had stumbled upon, and suddenly she was no longer eager for the company of Oldmanson. She flashed a glance toward the door.
No one was there.
Her heart pounded vi
olently—as if wanting to tear open her chest for a peek at the treasure—as her fingers waded deeper and deeper into the first sack, through jumbled layers of beautifully crafted gold and silver work, a king’s ransom in coin, and the whole pile morticed, ribboned, and veined by cut jewels, rings, broaches, necklaces, bracelets, and bangles of every conceivable description.
Some spilled onto the floor. Hastily she swept them up with her hands, dropped them in the sack and folded the neck upon itself.
Another assuring glance at the door. She was suddenly aware that her body was wreathed in sweat that had begun to saturate her clothes, lapping her flesh with cold tongues whenever she moved.
But move she did, seizing the second sack, far heavier than the first, and attempting to drag it further in to the light. As she did, it disintegrated in her hands, and a cascade of royal treasures tumbled to the floor.
Another glance at the door, followed by a quick survey of the sanctuary affirmed that she was still alone. Lord willing, Oldmanson would be taking a few minutes to fortify himself over a mug of cider, as was his custom.
“King John’s treasury!” she gasped. Having been raised on tales of the treasure and its loss, and rumors that the wily old king had hidden rather than lost the jewels - to keep them out of the hands of the barons who were pursuing him, but close enough to lay his hands on should his political fortunes improve.
Her supposition was supported by the most obvious of the articles: a crown and scepter. The jewels encrusting them, so long in darkness, rejoiced in the light falling on them through the celestory windows. She fell to her knees, allowing her eyes to gorge her mind with the enormity of the discovery as her fingers wandered the golden landscape and, from its near horizon, retrieved a heavy golden chain, suspended from which was conclusive evidence: a seal bearing the words ‘Johannes Rex.’
“What’s all this, then!” gasped a voice behind her.
Her heart leapt to her throat and she spun on her flank to find Oldmanson staring slack-jawed, the orbs of his eyes not large enough to contain so vast a treasure, much less its implications.
Margaret’s mind raced to invent a plausible truth, but how to explain the stairs, the hiding place, so overwhelming a discovery other than the truth?
Coda: The Third Albert Mystery (The Albert Mysteries Book 3) Page 28
