Sheridan was sifting through each shovelful of dirt that came topside, humming right along, as if he hadn’t been awake for twenty-four hours straight at this point.
Beth had stolen a few hours of sleep sometime in the hours of deepest night. Just a few. It hadn’t been great sleep—not that she minded the hardness of the ground after making a bed of it for all that time earlier in the summer, but she’d been alert to every sound. Waiting, hoping to hear Sheridan shout, “Eureka!”
They could find nothing. She knew that. Their chances were especially slim of finding it in this sliver of a time window before the Scofields and their American arrived.
But then, they could. It was possible, given the precision of their location and the shallowness of the soil here. She drew in another breath and went back to shoveling.
Telford tromped their way, a bag in his hands. “Chocolate, anyone?”
Sheridan, his hands a mess with mud, simply opened his mouth. Telford took aim and lobbed a chocolate drop at him, letting out a whoop of victory when it went in.
She shook her head. “It’s morning. Shouldn’t you be mute again?”
Telford chuckled. “It’s not morning until one has slept, Miss Tremayne. This is my favorite time of day. The last breath of night. The first brush of dawn.”
She rather liked it herself—but preferably after a solid night’s sleep. “You mean to tell me you always stay up all night?”
“Why do you think he can’t be roused until nearly noon?” Sheridan grinned over at her. “Diggidy dig, darling. Or we can switch, if you like.”
She duggidy-dug her shovel back in. He’d already taken many a turn with it—his back must be sore, even if he wouldn’t admit it. “No sails on the horizon yet, I assume?”
“Not yet.” Telford angled himself toward the incline. Probably looking at Scofield’s site, naught but a hundred yards away. The granite slab that had nearly been her end. The campsite that had been taken down by the locals whom Nigel had hired when he was supposedly so distressed over her “accident.”
Beth deliberately did not look that direction. She focused instead on her digging. And sighed when her shovel hit something hard, and with the distinctive sound of granite. “Bedrock again.”
“To your right, then.” Sheridan abandoned the dirt and came around to her. “We must be close now. Process of elimination and all that.”
Half of her mouth smiled at his optimism. The other half at his obvious joy. “You want the shovel again, don’t you?”
He clapped his hands together, eager as a pup. “If you’re not ready for a respite, I can spell Ainsley. A-I-N—”
“Here.” Ainsley tossed the shovel at him, though a smile peeked out. “Spell away.”
“A-W—”
“All right, all right.” Ainsley hauled himself out of his hole—they were shallower here than Scofield’s up the hill—and stretched. “You should really rest for an hour or so, my lord. While you can.”
“Bah.” Sheridan jumped down the two feet to bedrock. “I can sleep after we’ve found our pirate hoard.”
Or after the Scofields arrived and chased them away. Beth dug her shovel in once more, a bit of that negativity eclipsing the fun of it. Emily’s family had no more right to dig here than the rest of them. And they were here first—today, anyway. Didn’t that count for anything?
“Shall we join up?”
She eyed the narrow stretch of soil between her hole and his and nodded. “Seems reasonable. It has to be nearby.”
“It most certainly is. Though off by an inch . . .”
She tossed a clod of dirt at him with a chuckle. “Not encouraging, dearovim.”
“Of course it is!” He jerked his head up the hill. “Applies to them, too, after all.”
He had a point. Scofield was off by quite a lot of inches, if their own calculations were right. And that had bought them weeks of time. “True enough. So then . . . let’s pass the time. Tell me a story. Of when you last encountered Vandermeer, perhaps.”
He hummed low in his throat. “Goodness. It was . . . I don’t know, perhaps four or five years ago now. He’d beaten me to a site in Finland once already, and another on Iceland. It was becoming quite annoying, I have to say. Or rather, Millicent did. She was convinced someone was spying on her while she researched and passing her findings along to him.” Sheridan chuckled and shook his head. “Abbie—always practical, you know—pointed out that he had access to the same books we did. Clearly it was just that we shared interests and resources and they led us to the same places.”
“Clearly.” It was certainly the disadvantage of relying on clues others had laid out in a text. To make altogether new discoveries, one needed original research. Like pirate maps and letters discovered in one’s grandfather’s foundation.
“Anyway. We were on the scent of a Viking tomb—figuratively, I mean. It wasn’t literally smelly, though that would have made it easier to find. We were—where were we, Ains? Was that Holland or Norway?”
“Norway, my lord. You were working with Professor Larsen, if you recall.”
“Ah, that’s right. Lovely old gent, that one—I told you a bit about him already. I’d been studying a book he’d written, you see, and thought I saw something in the runes that he hadn’t elucidated in the text.” Sheridan cut free a section of grass with the side of his shovel. “We spent some time puzzling it out in Oslo together and then followed the clues toward what we thought might be an unexplored burial mound.”
“But Vandermeer was already there?” She dug in again.
Sheridan sighed. “Quite the Viking aficionado. Understandable, I suppose, given his heritage. They were all over Holland back in the day, you know.”
Which made her remember the question that had been niggling. “What do you suppose his interest is in Prince Rupert, though? Just a passing fancy, or something that sparked his interest? Not that it matters, I suppose, but I do wonder.”
“The Caribbean.” This from Telford, who was staring into his bag of chocolate drops again. “Dutch West Indies, didn’t Abbie say?”
“Good point, Telly. Perhaps his family had some dealings with Mucknell or Rupert there.” Sheridan lifted away the square of sod and they both started clearing away soil from opposite sides of the new earth he’d uncovered.
“That would make sense,” she said. “But back to Norway.”
“Ah, right. Well, it’s as you guessed. He was already there and had been for at least a week. Had the whole mound sectioned off and had just broken through to the main chamber. The ship wasn’t intact, though—that’s what we were all hoping to find. The mound had collapsed on it at some point and broken it to pieces. Poor Larsen was beside himself with disappointment.”
“But the runes his lordship helped him decipher turned up in another location a few months later.” Ainsley reached for a canteen and unscrewed the cap. “And Mr. Vandermeer wasn’t already at that one. Professor Larsen made his discovery.”
“Indeed.” Sheridan sounded quite chipper about it, despite the fact that this would have been the discovery he let the professor take all the credit for, asking only for a small artifact for his collection in return—the story he’d told her in the drawing room after the accident. “And that was about when I decided that the Druids were where I’d like to focus for a while, given that we’re all but surrounded with evidence of them. So, really, I suppose I owe Vandermeer a thanks. I may not have turned my attention from the Vikings if not for him always crowding me.”