“Do not take it lightly.”
“All right. I am utmost serious.”
John retrieved the book of Vectis from the shelf and sat down with it near Will. He dropped his voice to a low, conspiratorial tone. “I know you are not as staunch a believer as I, but I have a notion.”
Will raised his eyebrows with interest.
“You have seen the letter. You know what this old monk, Felix, wrote. Perhaps the Library was not destroyed after all. Perhaps it exists still? What if I could find it and take possession of these books? What would I care if I had meager Wroxall then? If I had the keys to the future, I would be as rich as any lord, more famous than father’s friend, old Nostradamus who, as we know, lacked full powers.”
Will watched him rant, fascinated by his crazy eyes. “What would you do, go there?”
“Yes! Come with me.”
“You’re mad. I am to marry, not partake in adventure. I will travel to London soon, to be sure, but no farther. Besides, I take this Abbot’s letter to be a work of fancy. He spins a good story, I’ll give him his due, but monks with ginger hair and green eyes! It is too much.”
“Then I will go alone. I believe in the book with all my heart,” John said truculently.
“I wish you good speed.”
“Listen, Will, I refuse to let my brother learn the secret. I wish to hide the papers, all of them. Without the letters from Felix and Calvin and Nostradamus, the book is useless. Even if my father were to tell my brother its origins, there would be no basis for belief.”
“Where would you hide them?”
John shrugged. “I do not know. In a hole in the ground. Behind a wall. It is a large house.”
Will’s eyes began to sparkle, and he sat upright. “Why not turn this into a game?”
“What sort of a game?”
“So, let us hide your precious letters, but let us make them clues in a hunt for hidden treasure! I will compose a puzzle poem with all the clues, then we will hide the poem too!”
John laughed heartily and poured both of them more mead. “I can always count on you to thoroughly amuse me, Shakespeare! Let us proceed with your game.”
The two of them scampered around the house, giggling like children, looking for hiding places, shushing themselves so not to wake the servants. When they had a rudimentary plan, Will asked for sheets of parchment and writing implements.
John knew where his father kept the Vectis papers, inside a wooden box secreted behind other books on the top shelf. He used the library ladder to reach it, and when he hauled it down, he reread Felix’s letter while Will bent over the writing table. After dipping the quill, he would quickly write a line or two, then tickle his cheek with the feathered end for inspiration.
When he was done, he waved the sheet above his head to dry and presented it to John for inspection. “I am best pleased with my effort and so should you be,” he said. “I have chosen the sonnet form, which adds further amusement to the enterprise.”
John began to read it, and as he did, he squirmed in his chair with impish pleasure. “Can’t be well! Clever, very clever.”
“I thank you,” Will said proudly. “It is pleasing enough that I have signed it, though I doubt my vanity will ever be discovered!”
John slapped his thighs. “The clues are challenging but not insurmountable. The tone, playful but not frivolous. It serves its purpose most ably. I am indeed pleased! Now, let us bury our treasure like a pair of filthy pirates marooned on an island!”
They returned to the Great Hall and lit a few more candles to ease their task. Their first clue went inside one of the great candlesticks that adorned the banqueting table. John had wrenched one open and satisfied himself it would hold several rolled sheets. Will had argued that Felix’s letter should be divided into a first clue and a last, since the end of the letter held the greatest revelation. John placed the pages and forced the candlestick back together, banging the base on the carpeted floor to make sure it would hold firm.
The next clue, the Calvin letter, required more effort. John scurried off to the barn to fetch a mallet, chisel, an auger, and grout, and a full hour later, drenched in sweat, they had succeeded in prying off one of the fireplace tiles and drilling a deep hole. After inserting the rolled letter, they plugged the hole and regrouted the tile. In celebration, they raided the pantry, had some bread and cold mutton and the rest of a good bottle of wine from an onion-shaped green-glass bottle.
It was the middle of the night, but there was still work to do. The Nostradamus letter and the page from his Prophecies book needed to find their way up to the bell tower of the chapel. As long as they didn’t drunkenly ring the bell, there was little chance of being discovered so far away from the house. That task took longer than they had planned because the planking was devilishly hard to rip up, but when they were done, they had put their spent bottle of wine to good use as the repository of the pages. To finish, Will etched a small rose on the plank with his sheath knife.
They feared that dawn would come before they hid the last clue, so they proceeded with great speed to complete this task, one that they might not have been able to accomplish if sober.
When they returned to the house smudged and smelly from their physical labors, they retired to the library as the first rays of sunlight streaked the sky.
John gleefully approved Will’s idea for the poem’s hiding place and applauded its perfection. Will cut a piece of parchment to size and made it into a false endpaper. Then the exhausted boys made for the kitchen, relieved that the cooks were still in bed. The bookish Will knew how to make a bookbinder’s paste from bread, flour, and water, and in a short while they had the white glue they needed to seal the poem into place inside the back cover of the Vectis book.
When they were done, they placed the heavy book back onto its shelf. The library was getting bright from the rising sun, and they could hear the house stirring with activity. They sank into their chairs for a final laughing fit. When they burned themselves out, they sat for a while, chests heaving, close to nodding off.
“You know,” Will said, “this has all been for naught. You, yourself, will undoubtedly undo all this fine work and retrieve the papers on your own account.”
“You are probably right,” John smiled sleepily, “but it has been excellent fun.”
“One of these days I may write a play about this,” Will said, closing his reddened eyes. His friend was already snoring. “I will call it Much Ado About Nothing. ”
Chapter 25
It was autumn when John Cantwell finally set out on the quest that had consumed him ever since the night he drunkenly conceived it. Then, he was warm and dry in his father’s library. Now, the crossing of the Solent was treacherous, and he was shivering and sea-splashed.
A stiff gale was blowing from the mainland toward the Isle of Wight, and the captain of the sailing ferry had to be persuaded with a few extra shillings to make the passage that day. John was not a seafaring man, and he spent the brief journey heaving over the gunwales. At Cowes harbor, he made straight for the roughest public house he could find to buy himself a drink, converse with the oldest men he could find, and hire a couple of locals with strong backs.
He did not bother to buy himself a bed for the night because he was planning on toiling while most men slept. During the course of the evening, he consumed a good many tankards of ale and a large bowl of cheap stew, and, thus fortified, he waited in the moonlight for his hired men to return with picks and shovels and coils of rope. At midnight, the entourage of John Cantwell and three burly islanders wielding oily torches left the tavern and headed down a footpath through the woods.
They were never more than a few hundred yards from the pounded shore. Nearby, the gulls called, the waves rhythmically crashed on the beach, and the salty, fresh breezes off the Solent sobered John and cleared his head. It was a cool night, and for warmth he clasped his fur-collared cloak over his high-collared doublet and pulled his cap down over the tops of his ears. His laborers led the way, whispering among themselves, and he gave himself to his
