Page 25 of A Treacherous Treasure

“You would be within your rights,” Thomas said. “The house belongs to you now.”

“In all honesty, I have prayed that she will go live with her brother, or someone.” It was a daily struggle to forgive the woman, so was it wrong to pray for her to find another home?

“Then I shall pray the same,” Caroline declared.

“She does have a jointure, and the dowager cottage behind the main house has been willed to her for her lifetime.” Truthfully, though, Rebecca was relatively certain the woman would never leave the main house, as she had alluded to a couple of times.

But the fact that Caroline would also be praying that Mrs. Heywood would go live elsewhere, the same thing that Rebecca was praying, was comforting.

Chapter Eight

Rebecca returned home with both well wishes and excited anticipatory words from the Westbrooks ringing in her head.

She hurried up the stairs. Thankfully, Mrs. Heywood had not returned home, so she went boldly into the library and started searching the bookshelves for a Bible.

After a few minutes she found a relatively small one and pulled it off the shelf. The top was dusty but its leather binding was in good condition.

As she carefully turned the pages, searching for the book of Romans, chapter eight, she noted that it did not look as if it had ever been opened. Many of the pages were stuck together, held by the gold leaf edges that she had to carefully pull apart.

She finally found the book of Romans. She turned to the eighth chapter but there was nothing there. It was just a normal page in the Bible.

She read the entire chapter, but there didn’t seem to be any clues in the text itself. It was quite a delightful chapter, especially the last part, and she would go back and read it again later. But for now she flipped to the front of the Bible. Nothing there either, no inscription of any kind.

She sighed, feeling defeated. But perhaps there was another Bible in the room.

She continued to search, on table tops and on the bookshelves. When she had examined every book in the room, she started to go back through them again.

The sound of carriage wheels on the lane outside caught her ears.

She put the books back on the shelf, including the Bible, then hurried from the room, closing the door just moments before she heard Mrs. Heywood’s strident voice below, barking an order at the servants.

Not wishing to see her mother-in-law, especially as her chest ached in her disappointment at not finding what she and her friends, the Westbrooks, had been so excited to discover, she hurried to her room and closed herself inside.

She had only been in her room for a few minutes when a servant came and summoned her. “Mrs. Heywood wishes to see you,” the servant said.

With a heavy heart, Rebecca let the servant lead her to the breakfast room, which had to be lighted by candles due to the black cloth covering the window, even though it was the middle of the day.

Her mother-in-law sat at a writing desk, bent over and writing in a large book. Rebecca had rarely ever seen Mrs. Heywood write anything.

Mrs. Heywood placed a finger on the page of the huge book she was writing in as soon as Rebecca walked in the room, a pen poised in her other hand.

“I was just writing Arthur Wendell Heywood’s date of death.” Her voice cracked and she made a whimpering sound, followed by a sniff as she dabbed at her nose with her handkerchief.

“Since there is no one else alive to care about the Heywood family line and family estate,” Mrs. Heywood said, “I will be taking the family Bible and giving it to Arthur’s cousin to pass down to his children. You certainly will not want it after you remarry and have children with some other man.”

Rebecca’s stomach twisted at her mother-in-law’s words, then she suddenly realized what was niggling in the back of her mind.Bible.Mrs. Heywood had the family Bible.

Her heart pounded against her chest. She’d never seen the enormous book before. Did Mrs. Heywood keep it in her room? She said she was planning to take it and give it to someone else. Rebecca had to get a look inside it before she gave it away. But how?

Mrs. Heywood was writing in the front of the book. She wouldn’t open it to Romans 8, surely.

“I never wrote down the date of his marriage to you,” Mrs. Heywood went on. “And now I don’t remember it. Do you remember?”

Of course she remembered the date of her wedding. And of course her mother-in-law only wished to insult her by saying such things. But she would go along with her.

“It was November 10th, eighteen—”

“Yes, I remember the year.” Mrs. Heywood held her pen poised above the page for several moments. Then she said, “No children came from the marriage, so why should it be significant enough to write down in the family Bible?”