There was not a book, or a mirror, or a picture upon the wall. I had wondered at G.o.dfrey Norton's paying so royally to keep his hated father here until I saw the emptiness of that room. It struck me that the son's mercy had literally killed his father with kindness-or what pa.s.sed for it toward the feeble-minded.

Irene walked to the window. "Did... cousin John... have an opportunity to enjoy these lovely grounds?"

"Of course." Mr. Edgewaithe was eager to relate his inst.i.tution's amenities. "Each resident is escorted outside on a regular schedule, as the weather allows. Your cousin particularly enjoyed sitting by the duck pond."

"By that great beech tree I see from here?"

"Why, yes. That was his special spot. How did you guess?"

"It's the only landmark visible from here. I imagine one would spend many hours staring out this window. No matter how shattered one's mind, it would still turn to the exceptional, else why do we all swoon at a sunset when they are so frequent?"

"Mr. Norton was not facing the west, unfortunately."

"Well, the sunrise then," Irene returned. "To Mr. Norton they must have been much the same."

Mr. Edgewaithe frowned, as if sniffing a criticism he couldn't name. "Is there anything else, then, ladies, before you visit the mausoleum, which is just the other side of the pond?"

"Via the little bridge. Ah, Henrietta, how charming. Our cousin found, at last, a lovely place to die."

We swept out, Irene sweeping as only she could, her layered skirts swishing, I merely swept up in her progress. Downstairs in the main hall another visitor awaited Mr. Edgewaithe's return, pacing on the black-and-white paving stones.

"Good day, then, ladies; many thanks for such humane concern for your cousin." Mr. Edgewaithe's words were a dismissal. He had already turned to his new visitor, an angular, hawk-nosed gentleman in a checked Inverness cloak and a deerstalker cap. Despite the dusty country clothes, the gentleman's clipped speech and impatient eyes bespoke a city dweller.

He glanced sharply at us as we pa.s.sed, not with any impertinent interest, but as he would catalogue a new variety of tree, a sort of unthinking, ever-constant observation. Irene was burying her face in her handkerchief again, so affected by her own crocodile tears that she had to draw me against the paneling while she collected herself.

"Irene, why are you carrying on so?" I whispered. "Mr. Edgewaithe isn't paying us the least mind any more-"

"Shh!" She seized my throat as if to strangle me.

"-Holmes," I heard the stranger's acerbic tones announce behind me. "I read the obituary in the Telegraph this morning and came down immediately."

"Norton's obituary?" Edgewaithe guessed.

"Yes. Norton. He had dropped from sight these last few years. Some of his old a.s.sociates wanted to a.s.sure themselves of his well-being, such as it might have been."

"Come into my office, Mr. Holmes," Edgewaithe invited, with a cordiality alien to us. "I'd be happy to a.s.sist in any way I can. Never telling when a gentleman like yourself might require The Sycamores for a dear one. Tragedy can strike even a young man, perhaps a wife- "I am not married, Mr. Edgewaithe, nor do I expect to be. But I am interested in the particulars of Mr. Norton's life here and last illness-"

The broad doors closed, ending our eavesdropping.

"Yes, I imagine many an inconvenient wife languishes above," Irene said grimly. "Instead of a whited sepulcher we have a well-landscaped one. Only in England could greenery cover so much greed! But why Holmes? Here? Now? Ah, he has not forgotten the Zone, either."

"You talk of greed," I said quietly.

She gave me an incredulous look. "Greed does not motivate him, no more than it does myself. Or rather a higher form of greed; ambition to know all, that is our mutual flaw, Mr. Holmes's and mine. He is younger than I had imagined, and such a busy, interesting face. It's a pity he considers women beneath notice."

"But he noticed us!"

"As he would a garden variety of cuc.u.mber, Nell, with no real recognition. I fancy he will pay for the failing someday, though he does not strike me as a truly prejudiced man-only arrogant in his intelligence and self-sufficiency."

"As some might say of you."

"Penelope! You show signs of becoming a character reader. I shall have to set you up with a crystal ball in the King's Road and see how many fortune seekers you attract. It might pay better than typewriting."

"No, thank you. And may we go home now?"

"Certainly. But first we picnic."

"Picnic?" We had wandered onto the entry pavement. The bushes were alive with birds trilling like the emperor's nightingale. Honeysuckle and lilac bloomed along the lanes and fanned their fragrance to us on zephyrs of sun-steeped air. The day seemed the warm amber color of Earl Grey tea.

"Picnic," Irene reiterated, heading for the carriage. "I fancy a banquet by that towering beech tree. Coachman, could you fetch our hamper from the carriage-and have you a shovel aboard?"

His plain face froze in stupefaction.

"A crowbar, then?" she prompted him. "Surely you carry something in the nature of a tool for difficulties you may encounter along the road, man? I suspect our tins of sardines will prove somewhat stubborn to open," Irene finished with an air of helpless femininity as false as the rouge that pinked her lips.

Without a word, the coachman pulled a short-handled shovel from beneath his seat.

"Capital!" Irene said, seizing it eagerly. "We will bring you the leftovers." With that she slipped it under the lid of our hamper-the handle protruded quite visibly until she draped my best Chinese shawl over it-and we went together down the lilac-laden lane, the hamper swinging by its handles between us.

I was silent for some time, and then I could no longer contain myself.

"Tell me, Irene," I begged, "that you don't really intend to disinter the unfortunate Mr. Norton!"

She would not answer.

Chapter Twelve.

BURIED TREASURE.

Mr. Beaverholt, our driver, munched the better part of our picnic on the box above us while our carriage rattled along the tree-shaded roadway.

Inside the coach, Irene and I lurched like loose sardines in a tin, our mud-stained hands clinging to the straps. In place of the picnic hamper that Irene had offered Mr. Beaverholt on condition he "drive like the wind" to the railway station was a small, leather-buckled chest as dirt-laden as our hands.

"Your best walking suit is ruined!" I wailed.

"It needed retr.i.m.m.i.n.g anyway," she answered.

"My Chinese shawl is in shreds!"

"We had to cover the chest with something."

"Your fingernails are worn to-to saw teeth!"

"Cutting them will make playing the piano easier." Irene lifted the ivory handle of her parasol and tapped the coach ceiling. The horse quickened its already frantic trot as a discarded sardine tin flew past the open window.

"What a glorious day this is, Nell!" Irene shouted over the rush of the wind, the rattle of the conveyance and the screech of Surrey's prolific birdlife. "Just think! We have beaten Sherlock Holmes himself to the prize."

I regarded the battered box at our feet in silence... in silence until a particularly rough jolt lurched its metal-bound edge into my shin.

"What can be in this devil's chest that's worth all this deception and going behind poor young Mr. Norton's back and the ruination of our attire?" I cried, beside myself.

I confess to having been so unnerved at the notion of disturbing the late Mr. Norton's bones that our struggle to disinter something less than human at the foot of the sycamore tree had completely exhausted me.

"Treasure!" Irene replied, dimpling wickedly.

"I still can't fathom how you knew where to dig."

"I didn't until I thought like a madman. As Mr. Edgewaithe pointed out, his... cell, shall we call it?... and its sole window overlooked the sunrise. The tree was the only landmark for a mind as feeble as old Norton's to fix upon. During his outings, I'm sure the attendant's attention would wander while the old man drooled at the pondside-"

"Irene!"

"Then there was that peculiar pattern of roots fanning out into a sort of sunburst. That, too, would catch an unfocused eye. Old Norton was senile, not ordinarily mad. He must have had moments of clarity. In such a moment he secreted the things most important to him in this chest, then buried it."

"The Zone?" I eyed the bucking box between us with more respect. "You really think the Zone of Diamonds lies in this very receptacle?"

"And Mr. Sherlock Holmes does not have it!" Irene crowed. "Mr. Charles Tiffany does not have it. Mr. G.o.dfrey Norton does not have it. But I do."

"Greed," said I, my heart pounding nevertheless at the notion of opening the box. So Pandora must have felt.

"Not greed." Irene teased me with a smile. "Glory."

How I survived that headlong return trip to London I shall never quite know. The chest was heavy, which very fact encouraged our dreams of booty. Irene and I were forced to cart it like some ungainly valise between us through the length of Victoria Station. The cabman we hailed outside offered to lift our "luggage" to the box. Irene refused so adamantly that I expected him, suspicions aroused, to whistle for the nearest bobby.

Our hansom rattled 'round the curve of Buckingham Palace along The Mall and across Trafalgar Square onto Charing Cross Road. I was so guilt-ridden by now that I antic.i.p.ated the Royal Guard riding out and commanding us to "stand and deliver" our ill-gotten goods on the spot. Every nearing hansom seemed to conceal a Scotland Yard man. Every pause for traffic congestion to untangle seemed a plot to detain us.

"Amusing how convenient our rooms are to Baker Street," Irene commented as we turned onto New Oxford Road and away from the northwest section of the town.

I said nothing, wondering if our efforts to smooth over The Sycamores' disturbed earth would escape the notice of Mr. Sherlock Holmes.

"He is sure to be suspicious," she said, as if antic.i.p.ating my thoughts. "He may even find our 'dig.' But then what? The Misses Saunders and Rushwimple have naught to do with us."

"Our descriptions-"

"-could match a thousand women's in London-more, perhaps a half-million of these busy four-and-a-half million souls around us! Besides, even if he catches us eventually, we have the prize now."

My shoe-toe touched it gingerly.

"Yes, it's plain and ugly," Irene admitted. "Yet great beauty can dwell in a lowly exterior, do not Scriptures tell us, Penelope? As the earth accepted the remains of old Norton, so it gives up the better part of him, that prize which was bought, people say, and so does G.o.dfrey Norton testify by inference, with the sacrifice of wife and sons."

"What will you do with it?"

Irene stared at me, her face uncharacteristically blank. "I have not considered. I thought only of obtaining it. I can hardly p.a.w.n it and I don't know... yet... how to sell it. Perhaps I'll wear it on the stage. I can do so more honorably than my sister singers who collect their stage jewels from rich admirers."

"You are still in the chorus."

"I will not always be."

"Oh, Irene." I found myself laughing wearily, fatigued by the day's surprises. "You are such an optimist. Why can you not aim lower-a supporting role instead of a starring one? A respectable marriage instead of such fevered independence? A modest suite of garnets instead of Marie Antoinette's diamonds? Such things are more naturally within your grasp."

"Such things are within any woman's grasp-which is why so few women make anything of themselves. I shall try at least."

She settled back in her seat, saying no more as the familiar streets rolled past, but I felt that I had offended her-even worse, had cast a shadow over her moment of triumph. I simply did not wish to see her fail, and she always reached so far beyond herself that ultimate failure seemed inevitable to me.

" 'A man's reach must exceed his grasp, 'else what's a heaven for?' " Irene declaimed suddenly from her quiet corner. "Why not a woman's reach?"

I need not describe the bruising progress of two women and one inexcusably heavy piece of baggage up four two-hundred year-old flights of stairs. Once our rooms had been reserved for hard-working eighteenth-century servants. We two were equally as prostrate as they after a day's labor when we finally dragged the accursed little trunk over the threshold. I panted in the doorway, loosening hairs trailing like witchweed around my face, as Irene rushed to light the gasolier and the lamps.

"Now, Nell, do you think we can swing it atop this table?"

"We can try," said I, preparing to heave up my end as she joined me.

We finally had the trunk posed like a homely centerpiece on the dining table, the gasolier's light directly above, glittering on the dull nail heads.

"It looks rather like a stage chest from 'The Merchant of Venice,'" Irene said.

"The one made of lead," I couldn't help adding pointedly.

Irene laughed as she seized a carving knife and ran it under the strapping. The buckles were rusted shut and the leather as stiff as whalebone. More fingernails snapped before we had pried the three leather tongues through their steel bits.

"Now." Irene paused to brush fallen hair from her brow with her forearm. The elegant lady of the morning was gone; she looked like a washerwoman after a long day's labor over the steaming tubs-save for the mud.

"Now," she repeated, pushing at the lid. It resisted. She s.n.a.t.c.hed the knife again and ran it under the rim, ramming the handle with the heel of her hand.

There came a snap and a visible exhalation of earthy dust, then the lid sprang back.

"You show alarming signs of prophecy," Irene said, surveying the interior without a change of expression. She lifted out a score of small grey metal bars.

"Lead," said I.

An inventory revealed the remaining items to be lighter but no less puzzling than the lead bars: among them a box of starch, a huge ring of keys, and a piece of lambskin.

Irene sc.r.a.ped the knife over the lead bars as if peeling potatoes; no gold glimmered through.

"Perhaps this is the Zone of Diamonds in disguise." I lifted a long string of dusty amber beads.

Irene held them up to the light. "Hand-knotted Russian amber, not my favorite. Worth a few pounds, but-"

"But hardly the find of the century."

"You grow sarcastic, Penelope. It does not become you."