Angela shook her head. “Tonight, absolutely the only thing I need to get to sleep is a bed.”
“Listen,” Bronson said. “I’m worried about the people who are looking for us. I think we should sleep in the same room while we’re here, for safety. There’s a twin-bedded guest room at the top of the stairs, on the right. I think we should use that.”
Angela looked at him for a few seconds. “We are keeping this professional, aren’t we? You’re not going to try to crawl into bed with me?”
“No,” Bronson said, almost convincingly. “I just think we should be together, in case these people decide to come back here.”
“Right, as long as that’s clearly understood.”
“I’ll just check that all the windows and doors are closed, then I’ll be up,” Bronson said, bolting the front door.
With both Jackie and Mark gone, it seemed strange to be back here. He felt a surge of emotion, of loss and regret that he’d never see his friends again, but suppressed it firmly. There’d be time for grief when this was all over. For now, he had a job to do.
Bronson woke just after ten, glanced at Angela still sleeping soundly in the other single bed, pulled on a dressing gown he found in the en suite bathroom, and walked down to the kitchen to make breakfast. By the time he’d brewed a pot of coffee, found half a sliced loaf in the Hamptons’ freezer and produced two only slightly burnt slices of toast, Angela had appeared in the doorway.
“Morning,” she said, rubbing her eyes. “Still burning the toast, I see.”
“In my defense,” Bronson replied, “the loaf was frozen, and I’m not used to the toaster.”
“Excuses, excuses.” Angela walked over to the worktop where the toaster sat and peered at the two slices. “Actually, these aren’t too bad,” she said. “I’ll have these, and you can burn another couple for yourself.”
“Coffee?”
“You have to ask? Of course I want coffee.”
Thirty minutes later they were dressed and back in the kitchen—apart from the bedrooms, it was the only place in the house where all the furniture wasn’t covered in dust sheets. Bronson put the translation of the Occitan inscription on the table.
“Before we start looking at that, can I just see the two carved stones?” Angela asked.
“Of course,” Bronson said, and led the way into the living room. He dragged a stepladder over to the fireplace and Angela climbed up to examine the Latin inscription. She ran her fingers over the incised letters with a kind of reverence.
“It always gives me a strange feeling when I touch something as old as this,” she said. “I mean, when you realize that the man who carved this stone lived about one and a half millennia before Shakespeare was even born, it gives you a real sense of age.”
She took a final look at the inscription, then stepped off the ladder. “And the second stone was directly behind this, but in the dining room?” she asked.
“It was, yes,” Bronson replied, leading the way through the doorway, “but our uninvited guests removed it.” He pointed at a more or less square hole in the wall of the room, debris from the extraction process littering the floor below.
“And they took it to try to recover the inscription you’d obliterated?”
“I think so. That’s the only explanation that makes sense.”
Angela nodded. “Right, so where do we start?”
“Well, the most obvious clue is the first line of the second verse of the inscription: Here oak and elm descry the mark. That could mean whatever’s been hidden is in a wood or forest, its location indicated by the two different species of tree, but there’s one obvious problem . . .”
“Exactly,” Angela said. “This was probably written about six hundred and fifty years ago. The oak is a long-lived tree—I think they can survive for up to five hundred years or so—but the elm, even if it doesn’t get hit by Dutch elm disease, only lives for about half that time. So even if this line refers to two saplings, they’d both be long dead by now.”
“But suppose the author of this verse expected the object to be recovered fairly soon afterward, within just a few years, say?”
Angela shook her head decisively. “I don’t think so. The Pope’s opposition to the Cathars was so great that they must have known there was no chance of the religion surviving except as a covert, underground movement. Whoever wrote this line was anticipating a long wait before there would be any chance of a revival in their fortunes.
“And, in any case, it’s far too vague. Suppose there was a stand of oaks next to a group of elm trees on the hillside behind the house. Where, exactly, would you start digging? And note that the line says ‘oak and elm,’ not ‘oaks and elms.’ Jeremy was quite specific about that. We can take a look outside if you want, but we’d just be wasting our time. That line refers to something made of wood. Some object fabricated from oak and elm that would already have been in existence when the verse was written.”
Bronson waved his hand to encompass the entire house. “This place is built of wood and stone. It’s full of wooden furniture, and I know that the Hamptons inherited a lot of it when they bought the property, partly because some of the pieces are far too big to be removed.”
“So somewhere in the house there must be a chest or some other piece of furniture made of oak and elm, and there’ll be a clue or something on it or inside it. Maybe another verse or a map, something like that.”
The old house had an attic that ran the entire length of the building. Bronson found a large flashlight in the kitchen and they ascended the stairs. At first sight, the attic appeared almost empty but, once they started looking, it was clear that among the inevitable detritus that accumulates in old houses, like the empty cardboard boxes, broken suitcases, old and discarded clothing and shoes, and impressive collections of cobwebs, there were a number of wooden objects, all of which they needed to look at. There were boxes, large and small, some with lids, some without, bits and pieces of broken furniture, and even a number of lengths of timber, presumably from some construction project that had never come to fruition.
After almost two hours, they had checked everything. They were both covered in dust, cobwebs decorating their hair, their hands filthy, and they’d found exactly nothing.
“Enough?” Bronson asked.
Angela cast a final glance around the attic before nodding her agreement. “Enough. Let’s get washed and have a drink. In fact, I know it’s early, but let’s have some lunch. At least that’s the worst of the search over.”
Bronson shook his head. “Don’t forget this house has cellars too. And that means rats and mice, as well as spiders.”
“You really know how to show a girl a good time, don’t you? Think positive—maybe we’ll find the clue before we have to go down there.”
Searching the bedrooms didn’t take as long as Bronson had expected, because there wasn’t a huge amount to check. There were chests, wardrobes and beds which had been inherited with the property, many of them made of oak, but despite emptying every one there was no sign of anything that didn’t belong to the Hamptons. There was also no indication that any of them were made from two types of wood, apart from three of the freestanding wardrobes that had an inlaid marquetry decoration, but the wood used on those pieces was certainly not elm: it looked to Bronson more like cherry.
“This isn’t easy,” he remarked, replacing a pile of bedding in a large chest at the foot of the bed in one of the guest bedrooms.