Page 39 of Impetuous

Cassandra had to smile. “You mean you do not find this room elegant enough?” She struck an arrogant pose, her arm outstretched toward the jumble of goods that filled the attic.

“Indeed, Miss Verrere.” He put one hand theatrically to his heart. “Any room is elegant as long as you are there.”

Cassandra giggled and started back toward the trunk where she had been working. It was amazing how lighthearted she felt now that her suspicions about Sir Philip had been proved false.

Sir Philip followed her, good-naturedly pitching in to help with a box just beyond Cassandra’s trunk. They laughed and talked as they worked, making their way closer to the trunk in which Olivia had discovered the clothes the day before. Neville opened a trunk and pulled out a moth-eaten suit of men’s clothing. Looking at the style, Cassandra’s heart skipped a beat. It was the sort of attire worn by Richard Verrere, the Lord Chesilworth who was Margaret Verrere’s father, in the painting of him in the ancestral gallery on the second floor.

Eagerly she came over to kneel beside Sir Philip as he dragged out piece after piece of clothing. Carefully he made his way down to the very bottom of the trunk, but there was no sign of anything other than clothing. Cassandra sat back on her heels with a groan.

“At least we are close,” Philip reminded her. “Here, let’s shift these things and get out that trunk.”

He began to move a bedstead, and Cassandra went to help him. He pulled a chair out of the way, and there, in front of the other trunk, hidden beneath a small table, was a square metal box. Cassandra reached down and dragged it out by its handle. Philip moved around her and shifted a last piece of furniture so that he could open the trunk he had indicated.

Cassandra turned the box around to undo its clasp, but when she did, she found that it was fastened with a lock. She sighed. She had no idea where its key might be. For a moment she started to ignore it, but she couldn’t put aside the niggling thought that it looked the sort of box in which one might store valuables and papers to protect them from the elements. She searched around her for something heavy and finally returned with a fireplace poker.

She began to beat on the lock with the poker, and after a few moments, Sir Philip took over. It took some time, even with his superior strength, and in the end, it was the clasp that came away in a shower of rust from the box, not the lock.

Cassandra lifted the ruined lid. Inside, on top, lay a ledger book. She lifted it out and opened the cover, her heart going into her throat when she saw the date at the top of the page—eleven years after Margaret eloped with her lover. Carefully, she set the old book aside and reached in for the papers below it. She found several bills of sale for various horses and other animals, as well as a few IOUs. All the dates were in the years following Margaret’s aborted engagement.

She lifted a deed, and there, on top of another ledger book, lay a stack of letters, bound by a black ribbon and all addressed in a hand now familiar to Cassandra.

Her chest tightened, and she put in a shaky hand to take the stack and pull it out. “Philip…”

He turned, and when he saw the expression on her face, he moved quickly to her side. “My God. Are they hers?”

Cassandra nodded. Her voice trembled when she spoke, “It is her writing. I can scarcely believe it. These are Margaret Verrere’s letters to her father!”

* * *

“IT IS ALL true.” Sir Philip looked stunned. “I cannot believe it. The diaries, the letters, the map, everything—it’s all true.”

Cassandra narrowed her eyes at him. “You mean you still didn’t believe it?”

They were sitting beneath the shade of a spreading oak tree in front of Chesilworth, the remains of Cassandra’s picnic lunch spread out before them. The pile of letters, once again bound, lay on the ground next to Neville, and now and then he reached out and touched the top one, as if to convince himself of its reality.

They had unbound the letters and gone through them, breaking the seal of each unread letter. It was a heartrending series of a daughter’s attempts to reconcile with an unyielding father. Cassandra thought that if Margaret’s father had wanted to remain at odds with her, he had been wise not to read the letters. They would have melted any but a heart of stone. Just glancing through them for mention of the map, she had had tears in her eyes by the time she had found the letter she sought.

“No, I really did not believe it,” Sir Philip admitted. “I think perhaps I wanted it to be true, and after your intruder tried to break into Chesilworth, I began to think that perhaps the diaries were real, but I could not believe that the letters would still be here after all this time, or that one of them would contain a treasure map.”

“Somewhat of a treasure map,” Cassandra corrected, pulling the document in question from the top of the pile and gently opening the yellowed, creased page. She laid it on the dark background of her skirt and studied it. Sir Philip moved closer and gazed over her shoulder.

“It still makes as little sense as when we first looked at it,” he commented.

There were lines drawn here and there on the page and a block that Cassandra thought might indicate a building of some sort, with an arrow pointing away from it. In two places, there were numbers, and in another there was the word Littlejohn. The letter N was written on one side of the paper. By common consent Cassandra and Philip had designated the N to mean the direction north and had turned the paper so that it lay at the top.

“I know.” Margaret sighed. “I had hoped that it would contain enough information that we could at least figure out the general area where the treasure might be hidden. But this… Margaret has done her job too well.”

“I hope that when we get the other half—if we get the other half—it will all become clear, and we will not have two incomprehensible maps.”

“The other map must carry the key to this one. I cannot believe that a woman who wrote as clearly and well as Margaret would have drawn a foolish map.” She paused. “I think the important thing here is Littlejohn. Is there anything near your home named Littlejohn?”

He let out a snort. “Oh, yes, indeed. The problem is that there is a great deal too much named Littlejohn. It is a common name in the area. There are several families named Littlejohn, as well as a meadow and a creek—two creeks, actually, a greater and a lesser. And of course, the lane to where two or three of the Littlejohns live is called Littlejohn, too, for convenience.”

Cassandra groaned. She cast a last look at the map, refolded it with a sigh and slipped it back into the stack of letters. “We shall be able to figure it out, I’m sure, when we have the other map. I refuse to be discouraged.” She smiled at Philip. “Not on this day, when we have found what I had almost given up hope of getting.”

Philip leaned closer. Their heads were almost touching, their faces only inches apart. Cassandra looked into his eyes, golden in the sunlight. She wanted him to kiss her. Instead, she moved back.

“We had better go,” she said, turning her face aside and beginning to rise. “There are…things to do. I mean, now that we have the map.”