Page 68 of A Rare Find

For the rest of the day’s fruitless search, she worried that, if it had been up to her alone, she’d still lie pressed against them at the mouth of the wrong cave. And what would that mean, for her, for them, for the days to come?

19

“I saw him carry a horse! On his back. A full-grown horse. Sixteen hands.” Phipps was waving emphatically with his fork.

Georgie sat at the other end of the breakfast table, failing to glean something about agriculture from The Derby Mercury. “You told me last night. I still don’t understand the circumstances.”

Phipps began to explain. A few minutes into it, Georgie realized the problem was them. They’d stopped listening. Yesterday afternoon, Charles Peach had, for some inexplicable reason, performed the impossible feat of horse portage—a truly remarkable exploit upon which Georgie couldn’t focus for half a second.

They were counting down to their rendezvous with Elf.

“He’s going to show me the threshing machines,” Phipps was saying when Georgie stood up. “I take an interest in threshing machines.”

“Grand,” responded Georgie, meaning it. If Phipps didn’t intend to leave, at least he didn’t intend either to be always underfoot. They wouldn’t worry about the trouble he could cause for Charles Peach. Peach could drop a horse on him.

The clouds were low and drizzly. As Georgie reached Holywell Rock, the clouds dropped lower still and opened. Elf had a lantern, and a trowel, and no umbrella. Georgie had a flask, and some chocolate, and no umbrella. Both of them were soaked to the skin within minutes, and raced through the soggy park up to Marsden Hall. Elf took them straight to the library, left them dripping by the Finglesham urn, and returned promptly, with linens, Agnes, the twins, and a fat, friendly beagle. While they dried off, Elf built a fire in the fireplace, a novelty and a defiance, to gauge by her sisters’ awed excitement. As soon as it was crackling, everyone piled in front of it. Georgie realized they’d rather missed Matilda’s wiggles and kicks, and surrendered as well to the beagle, who draped herself over their legs. The twins wanted to hear a story, and Elf obliged, and then Agnes wanted to dress her hair, and Georgie obliged, extracting carefully from children and dog, and following her to her bedchamber. She wanted the Titus, in fact. Georgie demurred, but she grabbed one of her waist-length tresses and snipped it so close to the scalp that they had no choice but to finish the job.

“It wasn’t my idea,” whispered Georgie to Elf afterward, when Agnes was back by the fire, the twins rubbing her shorn hair with chocolatey fingers. “I tried to stop her.”

Elf was stretched out, propped on her palms, feet toward the hearth, and Georgie assumed the same position, right next to her, pinkies overlapping.

“My sisters have ideas,” she sighed. “It’s very hard to stop them.” She sounded sleepy, and fond, and before long, her head was in Georgie’s lap, and they were stroking her silky hair, surrounded by napping Marsdens, listening to the grunts of the beagle and the soft patter of the rain.

The next day was fair, and the next, and the next. Reverend Cruttwell’s second cave proved recalcitrant, and they tramped with Elf upstream and downstream and back, again and again.

“Perhaps the intrepid vicar mistook a hollow log for a cave,” Georgie suggested on the afternoon of the fourth day. “No lack of hollow logs around here.”

That was the day Elf found it, the second cave, as shallow and underwhelming as the first.

“We’ll head north, to the Roman ruins,” she said, so determined, they didn’t lodge the obvious objection. What two defenseless nuns would have dared to travel so far with stolen gold?

Instead, they agreed, and proposed they go by boat.

The following morning, they rowed upstream, facing Elf, who sat stiffly on her bench.

“I’ve never been in a boat before.” She gasped and gripped the hull as it pitched in the current.

“We Redmaynes made our fortune on boats.” They grinned. “Watermen all the way back. Transported cargo and passengers on the Thames. Until my grandfather got a foothold in the Docklands and became a go-between for suppliers and wholesalers.”

“That’s why Papa refers to him as…” She bit her lip.

“Pray continue. Is it scurrilous?”

“Fishmonger,” she said, with obvious chagrin.

“Nothing wrong with fishmongering. And it’s not too wide of the mark. I’m sure Grandfather mongered a few fish, among other things.”

Elf rarely took the path of least resistance, not if it involved letting an error pass. They knew this about her. They liked it about her. They could see the thoughts moving behind her eyes as she conducted a rapid self-interrogation.

“Be that as it may,” she said, “in my family, it’s used as an insult. Because of our appalling prejudice.”

“You understand your family’s treatment of my family as deriving from…appalling prejudice?” They raised their brows.

She nodded. “And I am endeavoring to examine more closely my own assumptions.”

“According to your newly examined view, tell me: Is being in trade a blot on one’s character?”

She shook her head.