“Sounds good,” he said, and his smile was bright enough to blind the sun.
Jack led us through the spotless, old-fashioned kitchen and out the back door. We stood beneath the cottage’s overhanging eaves, letting the rain-cooled air clear our heads, until Jack suggested a modest expedition.
“I was poking around out here this morning, taking the lay of the land,” he said, “and I bumped into something you might find interesting. Want to see it?”
“Absolutely,” said Bree.
“Then grab your rain gear,” said Jack, “and come with me.”
Seven
The back garden was a shadow of its former self. A few reminders of its glory days were still visible—a tumbledown stone wall at its outermost boundaries, a broken pergola framing the gap that had once held a gate, a ruined trellis swallowed by a rampant rosebush—but in its present state it was nearly indistinguishable from the untamed meadows that surrounded it.
Bree and I followed Jack along a trail of flattened greenery he’d left behind during his early morning rambles, to a spot in the center of the garden, where a tall mound of ivy rose like a bristling hillock from the matted vegetation. When we reached the mound, he motioned for us to stand back, then seized a handful of vines and drew them aside like a swathe of drapery to reveal his discovery.
Bree’s face lit up like a child’s on Christmas morning.
“It’s a well!” she exclaimed.
It was a well, but it wasn’t a plain old workaday well. It was a well straight out of a fairy tale, round in shape and made of smooth river stones as large as cantaloupes, with a shingled roof resting on a pair of wooden posts. A wooden spindle spanned the posts, but there was no rope wound around it, and the crank, if it still existed, was concealed by vines.
“Is it a real well?” I asked. “I mean, is there water in it or is it just there for decoration?”
Instead of answering me directly, Jack plucked a pebble from the ground and let it fall into the well. I listened closely and felt a shivery thrill of delight when I heard a distant splash.
“Let’s give it some air,” Bree proposed, and stepping forward, she began to tear vigorously at the ivy with both hands.
“Hold up, Muscles,” Jack cautioned. “The posts may come down around your ears if you go at it full-bore.”
“Right, Boss,” Bree agreed. “Easy does it.”
Jack produced a fierce-looking folding knife and proceeded to slice through the tough vines as if they were strings of spaghetti. Bree and I removed the detached strands as gently as our eagerness would allow, and as the pile of discarded vines grew, my hopes rose. It looked as though at least one of the garden’s features had survived Hector Huggins’s reign of benign neglect.
“I don’t see any holes in the roof,” Bree announced, “and the posts seem to be sound.”
“The crank’s still attached,” I said happily, uncovering the spindle’s business end.
“I reckon the rope rotted a long time ago,” said Jack, gazing into the well. “It’s probably down there, with the bucket.”
“They can be replaced,” I said confidently.
It took us thirty minutes to free the well from its tangled shroud and though the shingled roof shook from time to time, nothing came down around our ears. We were as wet as dishrags by the time we finished, but no one complained. Jack looked exhilarated, Bree seemed utterly enchanted, and I felt as giddy as an archaeologist excavating a treasure-filled tomb.
While Jack and I stood back to survey the fruits of our labor, Bree remained on her knees, clearing the last few vines from the side of the wellhead nearest the cottage.
“I wonder how long it’s been since anyone set eyes on it?” I mused aloud.
“I wonder how long it’s been since anyone used it?” said Jack.
“You’ll have to have the water tested,” I advised. “It might not be safe to drink. And you might consider putting a lid on it.”
“We don’t want Will and Rob to make a splash,” Jack said, with an understanding nod.
“We most certainly don’t,” I said fervently. “And they will, given the smallest opportunity.”
Bree sat back on her heels suddenly and gave a short gasp of surprise.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Look,” she said, beckoning to us. “There are words. Words carved into the stone.”
I sank to my knees beside her and saw that a bulbous river stone beneath the well’s rim had been chiseled flat to form a kind of plaque. Seven words had been engraved on the flattened stone, in a rough but readable Celtic script:
SPEAK AND YOUR WISH WILL BE GRANTED.