Page 76 of A Modest Independence

“It makes me want to know everything about you. All of your secrets.”

“Greedy of you,” he managed to say, his voice hoarse.

“Undoubtedly.” Jenny’s expression sobered, her hand stilling on his face. “Was it Mr. Cheevers who did it?”

Tom could think of no name more designed to dispel the mood between them. One mention of it and the warm glow resulting from Jenny’s declaration receded into the shadows, leaving nothing but desolation in its wake. “No, it wasn’t Cheevers.”

Though the man had hardly been above such behavior. He’d enjoyed nothing more than punishing perceived wrongdoers by caning them or taking away their rations—no matter how small and vulnerable those perceived wrongdoers might be.

But there was no cause to tell Jenny any of that. Nothing could come of burdening her with the full breadth of Cheevers’s cruelties. It was his own cross to bear. His and Justin’s and Neville’s and—

“Then who?” Jenny asked. “Sir Oswald? Or another of the men involved with the orphanage?”

“No, it wasn’t any of them. It wasn’t a man at all.” Tom pressed her hand. The truth of his injury didn’t come easily. He’d kept it too long and held it too close. But Jenny coaxed it out of him with her soft words and even softer caresses. She wanted his darkest secret. His very soul.

And so he gave it to her.

“It was another boy,” he said. “It was Alex Archer.”

Jenny stared at Tom, trying her best to understand what it was he was telling her. “Do you mean to say that the pair of you engaged in a bout of fisticuffs?”

It wasn’t uncommon among boys of a certain age. Her own two older brothers had regularly pummeled each other senseless. She’d seen so many black eyes, bloody noses, and injured limbs as a girl, that for a time, she’d considered taking up nursing.

“It wasn’t fisticuffs,” Tom said. “It was a beating, more or less. A fairly brutal one.”

“A beating?” Jenny couldn’t hide her confusion. She’d thought they’d been friends. As close as brothers, wasn’t that how Helena had described them? Four orphans united against the world? “Why?”

“There was an incident. A confluence of events leading up to Archer’s disappearance.” Tom removed her hand from his cheek, but he didn’t relinquish it. He held it fast in his as if it were his lifeline. “Whenever we climbed down the cliffs at Abbot’s Holcombe, we’d row up the coast to the Abbey. We did it at least once a week, even after Cross had his accident. You’d think that would have stopped us, but it didn’t.”

Jenny couldn’t imagine what would be so powerful as to draw the remaining boys back to the cliffs after their friend had been so grievously injured. “Was it because of Sir Oswald? Because you’d discovered he was Mr. Thornhill’s father?”

“In the beginning, yes. But that wasn’t our only motivation for braving the cliffs.” The corner of Tom’s mouth quirked wryly. “There are ghost stories about the Abbey. Just the sort of nonsense to appeal to young boys. You must have heard them.”

She grimaced. “In all their infinite variations.” It was difficult not to when one was residing in the very house that featured in the local legends. “Helena mentioned vengeful pirate ghosts and smugglers’ treasure. And one of the serving girls in the village said something about mad monks and papists’ gold.”

“There are dozens more, each version a little different. Ancient structures like the Abbey often inspire such tales. But in this case, all the old stories have one thing in common.”

Realization dawned slowly in Jenny’s brain. When it came, it left her almost speechless. “The treasure?”

“The treasure,” Tom concurred.

“Do you mean to say there really was such a thing?”

“I never believed it myself, not even as a boy. It was merely a dream. A childish fancy. And then, one day, not long after Cross’s accident, Archer and I rowed to the Abbey. Thornhill wasn’t with us. He was keeping vigil at Cross’s bed.”

“What did you do?”

“The usual mischief. We went down to the storerooms. We’d been digging there for some time already. But this time, we didn’t dig. Archer saw a loose stone in the wall. It gave us the idea to start checking all of the loose stones.”

“You don’t mean to say you found something?”

“We did, much to our astonishment.”

“Well?” she prompted him. “What was it?”

“A rotted leather pouch with one hundred pounds in gold coins inside of it.”

“One hundred pounds!”