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Her eyes lit up. ‘Oh, really? Well, that is good timing on our part.’ She stretched up on tiptoes to give him a quick kiss before looking around the bar. ‘Where are we sitting?’
‘We’ve got a table outside. Here, can you take these glasses?’ When she reached for them with a nod, Cam picked up the bottle of wine which Iain had helpfully placed in an ice bucket. ‘Can you manage this, Amelia?’
She stepped forward. ‘Yes. Hey, I hope you don’t mind me gatecrashing?’
Cam smiled down at her. ‘You’re not at all, but you might regret it when we bore you to death with archaeology talk.’
Her smile warmed at the edges and he was pleased to see a spark of interest in her tired eyes. ‘I’ve been dying to find out more about what you’re all doing up at the dig. I’ll confess I had a quick study of the plans up on the wall in the office when I was cleaning the other day, but I couldn’t make head or tail of them.’
‘You might regret saying that by the end of the evening,’ Cam said with a laugh. ‘Ladies first.’ It wasn’t any conscious design, but the four of them formed a protective circle around Amelia as they made their way out to the garden. Rhys led the way, with Hope and Cassie on either side of the other woman and Cam at the rear. There were a few interested glances turned their way, a couple of nudges and nods, and Cam stepped closer to the three women, when he noticed Hope shooting a hard stare at the people on the table beside her.
Rhys sat down beside Ed and Barnie, leaving Cam to squeeze onto the end of the opposite bench next to Hope. ‘I told you I should’ve stayed at home,’ he heard Amelia murmur from where she was sitting between Hope and Cassie. ‘Everyone’s staring.’
‘Ignore them,’ Hope said, giving her friend’s hand a quick pat before she reached for the bottle of wine. ‘Have a drink and forget about them. They’ll get bored soon enough.’ She poured three glasses and handed one to Cassie. ‘Cam says you’ve got news about the dig.’
23
Hope was relieved when Cassie accepted both the drink and the conversational cue. She was worried about Amelia, but the longer she stayed cooped up at home, the worse she was going to feel. Keith was away at the private rehab facility her uncle was paying for, and Hope was damned if she was going to let her friend skulk around feeling like she was in any way to blame for her father’s bad behaviour. Hope didn’t fool herself into thinking she held much sway over the community, but what little bit of influence she had, she would put to good use. Amelia being seen with both her and Rhys – particularly when it was her cousin who’d been forced into the position of having to fire Keith – would make it clear to everyone there were no hard feelings between the Travers and the Rileys.
‘We were just telling Cam that we found two sets of plans for the Hall gardens as well as a diary belonging to your…’ Cassie paused to count off on her fingers. ‘Eight or maybe nine times great-grandfather. Assuming there is a direct line of succession for the family title.’ She looked to Barnie as though for confirmation.
Barnie shrugged. ‘I haven’t got around to sorting out a family tree yet, it’s on the list but hasn’t been a priority.’ Because Cam had asked him not to go poking around in the family history, Hope knew, but she appreciated him not saying as much.
‘I’m sorry,’ Rhys said. ‘But what have the gardens got to do with anything? I thought you were confining your work to up near the chapel.’
‘We are,’ Cam confirmed. ‘But we found some unusual materials in the test pits we’ve dug, including what looks like brick and rubble that match those used in the construction of the ornamental gardens. It’s definitely much later than what we were expecting to find, so Barnie and the others have been trying to track down some answers via the records in your family archive.’ He pushed a creased-looking piece of paper towards Rhys and traced the outline of something with his finger. ‘See here? These are the original designs for the gardens and it looks like your ancestor planned to construct a folly using some of the stonework from the ruins.’
Hope leaned forward, trying to make sense of the blurry photocopy. ‘A folly?’ She’d heard the term before, but wasn’t clear on the historical significance of it.
‘It was a bit of a trend in the eighteenth century in particular for the owners of big estates like yours to build elaborate architectural features in their grounds,’ Cam explained. ‘Mock Grecian temples, fantasy grottos, stone towers that looked out over the parkland.’
‘Your great-whatever grandfather decided to build himself a cloister, a covered walkway like you often find attached to large churches or other religious buildings.’ He tapped the piece of paper. ‘What’s unclear at the moment is if they knocked down one that was already part of the ruins up by the chapel and were planning to rebuild it, or if they were just repurposing whatever they could find and cobbling something more fanciful together.’
Hope frowned. ‘But surely if there was something that big on the site, we’d know about it? What happened to all the stones, even if they did knock the existing buildings down?’
‘That’s where the curse comes in,’ Cassie said, which didn’t make any more sense than the rest of it.
Hope looked up at Cam. ‘What curse?’
He grinned. ‘This is as far as I got in the conversation earlier, so I’m as much in the dark about it as you are.’
‘If you’ll be quiet for a minute, I’ll explain,’ Cassie said, rolling her eyes. But before she could do just that, two of the local youngsters who helped out in the pub arrived at their table laden down with food.
It took another five minutes for everyone to grab a plate and take what they wanted, hand around napkins, sauces, cutlery and the like. Once everyone was sorted, Hope picked up a chicken goujon from her plate and dipped it in a little ramekin of sweet chilli sauce she and Cam had commandeered between them. ‘So, come on then, what’s all this about a curse?’
While the rest of them made inroads into the platters, Cassie outlined what they’d found in the old baron’s diary. ‘At first, it appears that work on the new gardens went smoothly. With the help of local labourers from the village, the architect got the pieces he wanted from the ruins extracted and transported to the grounds at the back of the Hall.’ She pulled a face. ‘I don’t think they took much care with anything they didn’t want to use for the new cloister.’
Cam shook his head. ‘I dread to think how much destruction they wrought on the site. Folly, indeed.’
Reaching for his hand beneath the table, Hope gave it a comforting squeeze. ‘So what happened next? How did we end up with what we have now and not this cloister design?’
‘As I said, at first they made good progress and then things started to go wrong. They were working up near what I think is what the family refers to as the chapel. It’s not entirely clear, but there is a reference to the oak tree. One of the labourers was breaking up what they thought was a stone floor and smashed right through into an underground crypt.’
‘Oh, God, how awful! I had no idea there were even any burials up there.’ The family had a private graveyard near the newer chapel next to the Hall, so she supposed she should’ve considered the possibility of older graves near the original chapel – or whatever it was because from what she could make out from the elaborate design of the folly walk, there had been something much more substantial on the site once upon a time.
‘Nobody did, according to your ancestor’s diary,’ Cassie said in a quiet voice. ‘They covered the crypt back up but the next day one of the workers fell from some height and broke his neck. Two days later, there was a storm unlike anything they’d ever seen. The river broke its banks and flooded the site. That’s when the rumours started that they’d unleashed a curse by disturbing the dead.’
Amelia shuddered next to Hope. ‘Ugh, how macabre.’
