Page 117 of A Rare Find

“Blood?” Georgie dropped it, wiping their fingers frantically on the grass. Visions of murdered nuns danced before their eyes.

“Metal.” Elf lifted a stone similarly smeared with gore. “Any iron would have rusted in the water.”

Iron nails connecting the planks of a chest. Iron straps reinforcing the wood.

“And oak?” asked Georgie, grabbing another stone. “Would an oak chest have rotted?”

Elf didn’t respond. The stone in her hands thudded to the ground beside her.

“Oh,” said Georgie. Because they were looking down at the answer, looking into the gap between stones at the dark grain of preserved wood.

“Oh,” they said again, heart swooping. “Oh.”

The last stones were the most difficult to pull out, given their depth, about the length of Georgie’s arm.

“I’ll do it,” said Charles Peach. He knelt and removed them, and then, as easily as Georgie might have lifted a hatbox, he lifted out the chest. The chest was the size of two hatboxes, but clearly much weightier. It looked intact until he set it down, and then the sides collapsed. The lid balanced on the contents, some of which spilled onto the grass.

Georgie’s gaze followed a ball of dirt as it bounced, only it wasn’t dirt. It was fragments of tarnished silver stuck together with rust. They looked at Elf. Her eyes were huge, her knuckles white, fists crossed at the wrists against her chest.

“What is this?” asked Peach, voice soft with wonder.

Elf unfroze. She crawled to the chest and picked up the lid. Georgie and Peach leaned closer. A mass of metal, gleaming in the morning sun. Coins, rings, bracelets, their warm yellow undimmed by the centuries.

“That’s gold,” said Peach.

It was gold. Silver too. Georgie glanced from a lidded silver vessel to a large silver cross. They started to laugh. The bird had returned, twitting away, and they whistled along, then gave up, to laugh some more.

A two-handled silver cup had tipped when the chest broke apart, scattering glass beads and other small ornaments. The cup had a gold lip, gold bands and enamel studs around the bowl, a short stem and a flared foot.

A chalice.

Georgie felt a jolt when their fingers closed around the stem. Connection. Not only with the metal but with the other hands that had touched it before them. They sought Elf’s eyes, which she raised now from the treasure to meet theirs.

“To Sexburga.” They raised the chalice. “And to your grandmother,” they went on. “And to you, Elfreda Marsden, archaeologist.”

The holy well itself had gone dry, but Elf’s dark eyes welled with tears and with light. They could fall into her eyes, and keep falling, for another thousand years.

She turned away, turned at the waist to lay down the lid, and turned back, accepting the chalice. She rotated it every which way, studying it hungrily, then shook herself.

“It’s yours,” she said. “We had an agreement.” She held it out to them.

They didn’t take it. “Give me something less unique.”

Her smile was relieved. “There are chopped ingots. Little hunks of hack gold and silver.”

“I want three,” they said. “Three pieces to sell. I’ll divide the proceeds between the three of us, the finders.”

“Me?” asked Peach.

“Of course you,” said Georgie. “We all found it together.”

Elf was hesitating, and they wondered for a moment if she’d reject the proposition, to preserve a sense of herself as disinterested in anything but the hoard’s historical import. She needed money, though. Besides, money was the hoard’s historical import.

“These objects were twice plundered already,” they pointed out. “Don’t you antiquaries like to uphold tradition?”

She looked nettled, but she returned the chalice and selected three hunks of gold.

“Your plunder,” she said as she dropped them into their hand.