As if he stroked old stones every day, he removed his leather glove and pretended he was an archeologist hunting for hidden hieroglyphics.
The vibration stung him, almost like a bee. He yanked his hand away.
“I’m not sensing anything painful or I would have warned you.” Iona regarded him with fascination, as one might a monster in a freak show.
“And to think, I married you for life. What was I thinking?” She’d given him a map, one that might locate a Roman ruin. But he’d need this weird talent to find anything. If there might actually be treasure. . .
He held his palm a fraction above the surface, looking for. . . who knows what. Curiosity and excitement warred with practicality. “Will we spend the rest of our days crawling about Wystan, hunting ghosts?”
“Or treasure,” she said with equanimity. “Or just satisfying our intellectual nosiness.”
For good or ill, and against all logical sense, he’d married a woman after his own heart. Feeling a little less stifled, he crouched down and flattened his palm against the oldest name carved into the wall.
No church bells. “Chanting Latin,” he decided.
Iona crouched beside him. “Bell has been studying her affliction. She says we may be like tuning forks, designed to find a perfect pitch in the energies around us. In our case, that pitch may be the right combination of vibration and smell.”
She laid her delicate fingers across his. The connection was instantaneous.
Hooded figures, large and small, male and female. Sorrow. A bier carrying a slender, white-robed woman. A man in primitive leather armor—a Roman soldier?—kissing her cold cheek, laying a circlet of gold on her chest.
The chanting increased. The soldier embraced the shoulders of two weeping girls. “My treasures,” he murmured.
The trio wept and watched as the bier was laid inside a vault and sealed.
Warning shouts. With the tomb sealed, the robed figures slipped away.
Immense sorrow and tension. Setting a gold medallion into the seal, the soldier hugged his daughters, then handed them over to another. “You must go south to your mother’s family, to safety.”
Iona lost her grip and sat down abruptly, shaken. Undoubtedly ruining his trousers, her husband sat beside her and drew her into his lap, murmuring comforting, if meaningless, phrases.
How did one make meaning of what they’d seen? She shivered in his embrace. Gerard had done this. Her husband had pulled ancient history out of a stone.
Once she’d drawn her mind out of the vision and recovered from the shock, she leaned into his broad shoulder and contemplated what they had seen. “Interesting, if not illuminating. Very good for a beginner.”
He snorted and dug his square chin into the top of her head. “Minx. Admit, you were enthralled.”
“Maybe, just a little.” She leaned back and kissed his stubbly jaw. “I could smell his grief. I’ve never had visions until you came along. You could be a very dangerous man.”
Gerard fished inside his pocket and produced a small gold coin. “Not necessarily. I may have had guidance. This is one of the artifacts Max dug out of the foundation in his repairs.”
She could sense his unease as he handed her the coin. In the light of their lamps, she examined it. “You think it is similar to the one in the vision?”
He reluctantly nodded. “It speaks to me. That’s why I picked it up.”
He waited for her reaction, as if this were a matter of grave importance. She’d been speaking to bees all her life. She was more curious than amazed. But for Gerard—it revealed so much.
“It is a weird sensation, isn’t it?” She phrased her words with care, as if hearing voices in her head was an everyday matter. “I had to learn to accept the buzz and interpret.”
He relaxed a fraction. “The soldier in our vision spoke colloquial Latin, like the voice in my head. It’s not easy to interpret. He called his daughters his treasures. He used that word when I found the coin.”
“I’ve had some Latin. I wasn’t certain. The others weren’t soldiers, were they? Even the men plaited their hair, like the woman’s. Her hair was gold.”
“So was the children’s. The voice in my head said there was treasure in Wystan. If it is the same soldier—”
“He sent his daughters to Wystan—the original Malcolms! The people in hoods, could they have been a Celtic tribe? Could the one leading the indecipherable chant have been a druid? He had golden hair too. Druids are part of our Malcolm legends.” Iona eagerly reviewed the vision, but her knowledge of ancient language was nil.
“Perhaps the legends are based on visions such as these—and our interpretations. It could be their carvings in this arch. I suppose I’ll have to take writing my journal a little more seriously.”
She pinched his arm through his coat, then kissed his cheek when that brought no reaction. “You should always take journals seriously. We should ask Lydia for books on visions.”
“Oh no, you don’t!” He stood, still holding her. “I’ll not have Max laughing me out of the house. This goes no further than us. An earl with an affinity for dead people does not lead to intelligent discussion.”
“You’re being ridiculous.” She wriggled out of his hold to shake out her dirty skirt. “If you wish one day to write scholarly tomes on ancient civilizations, perhaps it might matter—”
He snorted inelegantly. “I doubt that vision qualifies as research. It’s just . . . interesting.” He tilted his head as if listening. “The soldier is gone from my head, perhaps to be with his wife now that we’ve found her.”
He pressed the coin into the dirt by the wall and covered it. “But he was right. I found my treasure at Wystan. We’ll figure out how to repair the castle together. I had considered closing it and letting it rot, but we need to know more
