The Return of Lord Conistone (20 page)

She looked back just once because she thought she’d heard a twig snap somewhere close to the path behind the tall chestnuts. She shivered. The wind was moaning down from the hills and it was starting to rain again. But she was almost at the house. Just as she started to climb the wide steps, the big door swung open, and a grey-haired man in a black, stained coat stepped out, frowning down at her.

‘State your business!’

It was the Earl’s steward, Rickmanby, with his twisted body and spiteful face. She and Pippa used to detest him and he always made it clear their dislike was returned.

‘Good day, Rickmanby,’ she replied evenly. ‘I’m sure you remember me. I am Verena Sheldon, from Wycherley. The Earl sent for me’.

He made a great show of making up his mind as she stood outside in the cold rain that was now starting to fall heavily. At last he muttered, ‘Ye’d best come in, then’.

And Verena, boiling at his rudeness, climbed the wide steps to enter the huge house that seemed every bit as daunting as it had in her childhood.

Rickmanby took her in silence to a vast, unlit room on the ground floor that held an odour of smoke and damp. He offered to light neither fire nor candles, nor did he suggest refreshment. ‘I will tell the Earl you are here,’ he said heavily and closed the big door, leaving her alone.

And the minutes went by.

This is ridiculous, she whispered to herself, after what
seemed an interminable time. I feel like a prisoner. If the Earl does not appear soon, I will simply leave.

But nature was conspiring against her also. Outside the rain poured down in a deluge. The sky was black, except for the lightning that seemed to crack it asunder with shafts of white light almost more frightening than the thunder.

Impossible to go home in this. Impossible, too, to imagine that Rickmanby would make her the offer of a carriage. Verena bit her lip and walked to and fro, to and fro. How much time had gone by? Half an hour? An hour? There was no clock in the room. Just rows of ancient, dusty books, and some old, tapestry-covered chairs that looked as if they would crumble were anyone to actually dare sit on them.

Suddenly she froze. For a door was opening, slowly, from the hallway. A white-haired man leaning on a stick appeared there in the half-light and took a step forwards. Then he rubbed one hand across his rheumy eyes. ‘Verena,’ he breathed. ‘Verena Sheldon. Is it really you?’

Verena wanted to turn and run. Far away from this place of such dark memories. Far from this powerful, rich old man who had so cruelly slandered her.

But he had repented and helped them
. She faced him steadfastly.

‘I am indeed Verena Sheldon, my lord. I am Jack’s oldest daughter and your goddaughter. You sent me a message, asking me to visit. And I’ve come, because despite our past differences, it was good of you to arrange the compensation for the stream…’

‘The stream?’ He was limping towards her, scowling. ‘Compensation? What the deuce are you talking about, girl?’

Verena was quickly backing away.
Oh, no
. He didn’t know a thing about it! Another of Lucas’s tricks; yet another
revelation of his incomprehensible determination to make them beholden to him.

She looked for the door, but the old Earl was blocking her way. Then suddenly he was putting his finger to his lips, nodding conspiratorially.

‘I’ll tell you why I asked you here. You and I must talk’. He dropped his voice even lower. ‘About the gold’.

She realised she had been holding her breath. Now she let it out, but her heart was still racing violently.
Gold?

‘We will sit,’ the Earl was muttering. ‘We will talk’.

He was all outward calmness now, but she could not forget that earlier look of bitter cunning.

The Earl sat close by the fireplace. She seated herself reluctantly in a worn armchair opposite to him.

‘Now, Miss Sheldon,’ went on the Earl softly, ‘you know and I know what your father found, don’t we? And other people want to find it, but we have to stop them. They are all around us. They come quite openly now’.

Verena’s heart was beating hard. Was he mad? She answered as steadily as she could, ‘If my father discovered anything at all of value, my lord, then I do not know of it’.

My father must have talked to the Earl, as he did to me, about some rumour of treasure that came to nothing.

The Earl stood up. Banged his stick on the floor. ‘You must know where it is! I want the gold! Half of it should be mine!’

She stood up also, clenching her hands. ‘I’ve told you! I don’t know what gold you’re talking about!’

He stared at her. Then he shook his head, as if confused. ‘They call it the hill of lost treasure,’ he muttered. ‘Where the gold from the Americas was hidden centuries ago, in the mines up there, high in a lost valley. He wanted my
money to fund his search. I gave it to him. Then he told me that there
is
no gold, the liar, the thief!’

He was limping now, with the aid of his stick, over to the window where the storm could be seen in full play, with lightning forking across the thunderous grey sky and the rain sheeting down. He swung round to face her, jabbing his finger. ‘He lied to me! But
I
have his diary!’

Her heart stopped.

Was this the diary that Lucas had wanted? Not at Wycherley, not taken by her poor father on his last-ever journey, but
—here?

‘His diary holds the secret!’ the Earl rambled on. He looked carefully over his shoulder. ‘There have been strange people round, asking for it. Even Lucas was asking. I know what he is up to. I know he wants the gold, too! But it’s mine!’

Somehow Verena kept her voice steady. ‘Where is this diary, my lord?’

‘So many ask me that! So many!’ He shook his head, clearly agitated. ‘And I cannot make sense of his writing, you understand? But they killed your father for what he knew! Yes, killed him, do you hear?’

Verena stood there, stunned.

‘Come!’ the Earl instructed. He was hobbling towards the door that led out into the rain-drenched garden. ‘Come, I will show you where it is!’ He flung the door open. The cold air rushed in. ‘And you will read it to me and tell me where Jack has hidden the gold!’

And he was gone, limping as fast as he could through the pouring rain across the lawns, his old coat flying out behind him.

* * *

Verena gasped as the rain blew into the room and the sound of thunder reverberated round outside. She
went to tug desperately at the bell-pull. ‘Rickmanby! Rickmanby!’

No answer. She ran out into the hallway, and called again, for anyone; still no one came. The big house seemed to moan and creak in the darkness of the storm.

They killed your father for what he knew.…

The Earl had almost disappeared, running towards the woods as the rain lashed down. Wrapping her cloak around her, gasping at the cold and the rain, she ran after him, across the sodden lawns to the shrubbery, beyond which lay the lake, with its wooded islets, the largest of them with its little Gothic pavilion, where her father and the Earl used to sit talking for hour after hour.

She got to the first of the bridges and hesitated. The lake had risen yet further, brown and turbulent, swirling round the bridge’s fragile stanchions. But she had to reach the Earl and guide him back to safety! She hurried across to the first islet. Then crossed another bridge, to the next, and the next.

The last one was the weakest. She took every step carefully, feeling the whole frail construction shudder beneath her as the flood waters continued to rise; but at last she was there, at the pavilion. She pushed open the door with its peeling blue paint. And he was inside, in the darkness, crouching in a corner, huddled over a slim leather case the size of a book, his hand over his eyes as lightning illuminated the interior.

‘Jack!’ he cried out. ‘Is it you?’

Verena walked steadily towards him. ‘Not Jack, my lord. It’s me. Verena, Jack’s daughter’.

‘Ah, Verena!’ He was weeping now. ‘Jack betrayed me, so I stole it and hid it here. But I cannot read it. Please, will
you
tell me where the gold is?’

From the case he drew out a book bound in faded red
leather. She knew it, of course. Lucas had wanted this so badly he’d offered her money.
Some people would pay.…

Bentinck, nosing around. The ransacked boxes of papers.

This was her father’s diary.

Thunder rumbled ominously outside. ‘Soon,’ Verena soothed, ‘soon we will talk about the gold! But my lord, first you must come back to the house’. She held out her hand. ‘Give me my father’s diary. I will keep it safe for you’.

‘No!’

‘Then leave it here. We can come back for it when the storm has gone’.

‘Only if you tell me about the gold!’

She hesitated. She hated lying, but— ‘I will,’ she said softly. ‘I will, once we are safely back at the house’.

He let the book slip to the floor, then came slowly, suspiciously towards her, his eyes darting from side to side. She led him out through the door.

And saw, with a sick lurch of her heart, that the footbridge to the next islet was already under water. The handrails were still visible, but they were old and half-rotted. The wind and the floods were turning the lake into a raging seascape, with waves snarling and battering.

Suddenly the Earl staggered forwards, his white hair wild, his black clothes drenched, towards the half-submerged bridge. Verena flew after him.

‘My lord! It’s not safe—please
wait
—someone will come for us!’ But he was already stepping onto the bridge, grasping the handrails.

Verena suppressed a cry and forced herself to stay where she was, for her added weight would be too much for that ancient structure. She watched in anguish, seeing that the Earl had just reached the next islet when a great surge of water swept over the narrow bridge and took away the last
support. Pieces of old timber toppled into the stormy grey lake and rode away on the foam like driftwood.

She was alone on the island. The Earl’s black-coated, white-haired figure had disappeared between the trees. She prayed that an instinctive sense of direction would somehow carry him back to the house. But would the Earl remember that she was stranded here? Would he tell the servants?

He would be rambling about Jack and the pavilion, perhaps even herself, but they would put his words down to an old, sick man’s fevered imagination. Rickmanby would assume that Verena had left long ago for Wycherley.

No one would dream that she was marooned here, in this desolate place.

Stranded, on this shrine to adventurers.

They killed your father, for what he knew.

* * *

From Framlington harbour, Lucas had ridden like the wind to Stancliffe, knowing he should not have left her, not for an instant. Leaping from his horse, he’d marched to the door and pulled it open, to be met by Rickmanby.

‘Where is she?’ Lucas had rapped out. ‘Where the hell is the girl?’

Rickmanby backed away. ‘Dunno, my lord’.

‘What about my grandfather? Do you at least know where
he
is, you fool?’

‘Upstairs, my lord’. And Rickmanby had led the way up to the Earl’s bedchamber, where a fire had been lit, and his grandfather, shaking with cold and soaked to the skin, was wrapped in a blanket. When he saw Lucas he cried out, again and again,

‘It’s there! You must save it for me!’

‘What is there?’ Lucas almost wanted to shake him.

‘The secret of the gold! That swindler Jack Sheldon’s gold!’

‘What in hell…?’

‘I couldn’t read it,’ the Earl quavered. ‘I stole it from him, Lucas, but I couldn’t read it, then the waters came…’

And Lucas Conistone realised, at last, what had happened to Jack Sheldon’s diary.

* * *

As the lightning flashed across the sky, Verena could see that on the far side of the pavilion was a small wood-burning brazier, set beneath a chimney pipe. Beside it was a box of firewood. She had no way of lighting it. But she had—this. She swiftly picked up the leather-bound book and, sweeping her wet hair back from her face, she leafed carefully through the damp pages of her father’s diary, almost holding her breath.

Each sheet was covered with not only words, but also sketches and maps. She read, in Portuguese,
Today, I held my first meeting with the one they call
O Estrangeiro.
He, too, wanted my maps—treasure indeed.

O estrangeiro
. Portuguese for foreigner. Treasure.

She frowned, then stiffened, her eyes flying to the door. For a moment she’d thought she heard someone calling her name. Then the sound was lost, muffled by the rain pounding on the roof, and a fresh peal of thunder. She went back to the book.
Then
O Estrangeiro
paid me the agreed sum, with a promise of more next time.

There it was again. A man’s voice, coming closer. ‘Verena! Verena! Answer me, for God’s sake!’ She quickly jammed the diary back into its leather case and hid it under the mouldering cushions of the window seat. Then she hurried over to the door, her heart pounding.

Lucas. It was Lucas. Her breathing was quite ragged.
Do not trust him.