The Burning Stone Read online

  “It is,” he said. “But as a workable suggestion it has one inherent weakness.” He watched her as she frowned gently. “For that to work, I would have to give up my position at the armouries—my smith’s training, for I am not yet qualified to join the smiths guild. I have two more years of training before I may legitimately claim to be a smith.”

  “But—”

  “Yes, but…I know what you are going to say, my love. As long as I am in my own smithy, it would make little difference whether I am qualified or not. No one could challenge me at my own forge.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Not so. Believe me, love, I would enjoy believing that, if it were true. But the truth is that many people would refuse to use my services, rightfully claiming that I am unqualified. I am a student at this stage. A gifted one, I believe, but nonetheless an apprentice, learning how to be a master craftsman in the not-distant future. Demetrius Hanno and I are exploring better ways of making blades and treating iron—there’s a new word he has taught me: steel. Steel is iron, hardened more strongly and more purely than any iron ever has ever been. It is utterly unlike any other form of iron, and I am learning how to make it consistently and predictably. When I have learned how, and can make sword and other blades with it, then I will be a smith—in fact a specialist smith, a blade maker. But that will take two more years, and there are no shortcuts.”

  She sat silent, her eyes lowered, but then she looked up and met his eyes and nodded gently. “You’re right,” she said. “I was wishing for the moon. You can’t walk away from what you have, Quintus. It’s an opportunity you will never have again. We’ll find another way.”

  “We will, my love. In fact we have one now.”

  Her brows came together immediately. “Now?”

  He smiled broadly at her, and his white teeth flashed in that sparkling grin that never failed to make her smile in return. “You have lost sight, my love, of the fact that I am Quintus Varrus, not Shanna Mcuil. I am not a frail old woman. I can hire a fully qualified smith without any fears that he might bully me. He’ll handle the morning shifts, as Liam and Shamus did, while I train at the armouries, and I’ll come back here in the afternoons. So you see, your plan will work very well, despite all your misgivings.”

  “My misgivings?” Lydia pretended to be angry, but her eyes were dancing and she could not conceal her excitement. “You beast,” she hissed, swinging an open-handed slap far short of him. “You were the one who said it couldn’t work!”

  “No, and you need to control your temper, my lady. And to start listening more attentively. I said your suggestion had an inherent weakness. I did not say it was a fatal weakness, for I had already seen a way around it. And anyway, I didn’t want you to think yourself too clev—” He stared at her.

  “What? What are you thinking?”

  “I’ll tell you that if you will answer me one question.”

  “Ask me.”

  “Last night, in my bed, in the dark. How many times did we…do it?”

  A flush of colour stained her cheeks. “I can’t remember,” she said eventually, her voice soft and breathy. “I stopped counting after the third time…Or perhaps it was the fourth.”

  “I counted six,” he said, his voice as soft as hers. “Six times I poured myself into you, and every time I thought what I am thinking now: that I wanted to do the same thing in daylight, to be able to see your face and look into your eyes as I let go and lost myself in you. I want to look at you and see you looking back at me as I fill you.”

  The very air between them seemed to vibrate with tension, and then someone, somewhere outside, dropped something or knocked it over, reminding them that there were other people close by, and they both sagged, returning to the moment.

  “Later,” she breathed, almost inaudibly. “This afternoon. In my room. Wait for me to go and give me time to prepare, then follow me.”

  He nodded. “Done.” Then he stretched out his hand. “Look at this,” he said, and dropped the little wedge of coins he had been holding, so that they hit the tabletop and broke apart, rolling in several directions.

  She watched them scatter, her eyes growing round, then reached out slowly and picked one up, examining it so closely that she was almost squinting in concentration. “Gold,” she breathed. “Caesar Augustus.” She picked up another and did the same. “Marcus Brutus.”

  Lydia weighed the three remaining coins in her hand reflectively.

  “The box,” she said quietly. “You opened your uncle’s box. When?”

  “Three days ago.”

  “And you said nothing? Not a word to anyone?”

  He shook his head. “Too many other more important things to see to.”

  “What else did it contain? Can you tell me?”

  “I can show you, if you’d like.”

  “I would.” But she made no move to stand up, instead staring at the five gold coins in her hand, tossing them gently into the air from time to time as though trying to gauge the weight of them. “I’ve never handled a gold coin before,” she said. “Never even seen one. Are these what they call aurei? Gold pieces? What are they worth?”

  “They are aurei,” Varrus said. “As to what they are worth, I’m not sure. I haven’t seen too many of them myself, even where I came from. But I know those in your hand are ancient, stamped from pure, unadulterated gold. In all likelihood, according to my uncle, these are worth ten times as much in sesterces as a modern equivalent containing one tenth of the gold—if you could find such a thing. But that would only be if you could find the right buyer to sell them to. I’m going to have to approach that matter carefully. Which reminds me to ask you, if you will, not to mention these to anyone yet.”

  “I wouldn’t dare,” she said, still hefting them in her hand. “This is far too much money to discuss casually. Even at five times their face value in sesterces, I have more money in one hand than my father and my brothers could earn in a year.”

  “What you have there,” he said, “should be about two years’ revenue for Dominic’s smithy.”

  “That is difficult to believe,” she murmured, opening her fingers to stare at the coins in her palm. “Were there any more of them?”

  “Five thousand of them.”

  He watched her freeze, gazing down at her palm for what seemed like an age before her head rose with comedic slowness and she met his eyes. “What did you say?” Her voice was barely audible.

  “I said five thousand. Five thousand gold aurei.”

  “Five…thousand.” She closed her eyes and spoke slowly, her voice holding no inflection. “Five thousand solid gold coins, each worth five hundred sesterces…” She looked at him again then, continuing to speak in the same flat tone, her slow pronunciation stressing each word as she uttered it. “That is five hundred thousand sesterces.”

  “At least,” Varrus said. “The true value should be double that. You are marrying a wealthy man, Lydia Mcuil.”

  “I’m marrying a dead man if word of this gets out,” she said. “What are we going to do, Quintus? We can’t live with this.”

  He saw the panic in her eyes and stood up, moving to her quickly, and pulled her gently to her feet, gathering her into his arms and stooping to kiss the top of her head as he hugged her close. “Of course we can,” he whispered. “Come, love, sit down again and I’ll tell you how we’ll do it, and you’ll see the truth of it.”

  He seated her again, then took her hand in both of his, looking directly into her eyes and speaking softly but with authority.

  “Listen now,” he said. “We can live with this new wealth just as surely as we can live in a world without Liam Mcuil in it. It will be alien in some ways, and at first it will be difficult, but it will gradually become bearable as life goes on and we adjust. And you and I simply have to grit our teeth and adjust quickly. We have to plan our future carefully and concern ourselves, above all else, with concealing how much we truly have. We could never use so much wealth in our lifetime, bu
t no one says we have to. Do you hear me, Lydia? No one is saying we have to use it all, or put it on display, or let the world know what we truly have.”

  She looked down when he said that, as though unwilling or unable to believe what he was saying, and he moved his hand to tilt her chin up until she was looking right at him again. “Hear me, my love,” he continued, keeping his voice low and calm. “We will split it into tiny portions—into far smaller amounts, each of perhaps one hundred coins—and we’ll bury it all, carefully, in secret, well-hidden places. As the need arises to trade them for silver, I will make arrangements to exchange them at fair prices. There will be no difficulty there. I have legitimacy, in that I can prove I, Fingael Mcuil, received a legacy, shipped to Britain through the good offices of the colonial military headquarters in Londinium, and dispatched from Italy by Sub-Prefect Marius Varrus, vice-admiral of the Ravenna fleet. The shipment contained the personal possessions and accumulated savings of my friend Rhys Twohands, who vanished in Upper Moesia while on a clandestine mission for the admiral several years earlier. That has all been legally established by letter, so the legitimacy of my sudden possession of gold coins will never be in question. Do you hear me, my love? Do you believe what I have said?”

  She nodded, hesitantly, and he stooped to kiss her.

  She was unresponsive at first—not unwilling but simply not participating for the first few moments, but then, gradually, she came to life, her mouth softening and warming, yielding to his growing urgency, then matching and outdoing it with her own until he lifted her and carried her to where he could brace his back against a wall and hold her high while she struggled to rid them of the barriers of clothing between their bodies and to share with him the need that had closed their minds to any possibility of being interrupted.

  Afterwards, when he had lowered her, shaking and laughing, to huddle against him again, he hugged her tenderly and whispered in her ear.

  “A lifetime of this ahead of us, my love.”

  She nodded, her head moving against his breast, and then leaned back and looked up at him. “That’s true, my love, I know. But we have a lifetime of plain life to live, too, and much to be done before we can start to enjoy it.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Such as?”

  “Well, there’s a wedding, for one thing.”

  “Aye, but—”

  “No, my love, no buts. I am accepting your word on what will happen with the money—Where is it, by the way?”

  “It’s in the smithy. No one will see it before I move it.”

  “You have to hide it for a while. Have you somewhere safe?”

  “I do.” He had suddenly remembered a good hiding place—an old rusted, unused oven at the back of the forge, in an awkward little corner. “I’ll hide them later this afternoon, while no one is around.”

  “Do that. But here’s what I was saying. If I can accept your say-so on the matter of the coins, then you must accept mine on the matter of the wedding.”

  He blinked. “I will. But what does that mean?”

  “It means that we are already married.” She nodded towards the corner where they had so recently enjoyed each other. “That, what we just did there, was a wedding in every sense of the word, save that no one was here to witness it.” She glanced around, wide-eyed, and laughed. “At least, my modesty hopes no one witnessed it.”

  She sobered again instantly. “But make no mistake, my love. That is what it was, in my eyes and in my heart. I could commit no more sincerely than that we were in a Christian ecclesia, swearing an oath in front of the assembled citizens of this town.”

  “I’m not doubting you, Lydia. I feel the same way. But I still don’t understand what you are really saying.”

  “I’m saying kiss me.”

  So he did, at great length, then pulled away and leaned back again while he yet could. She broke free of his arms and took him by the hand, swinging him back towards the table, where she waited for him to sit, then sat beside him.

  “Liam is newly dead,” she said, “and most of my family is here. I set the rules to govern our wooing almost a year ago. I said I needed time to come to know you, and everyone else agreed, including you, even though it was not your wish. Well, that time is now in the past. I know you now, and I have come to love you and I have no slightest doubt that you love me. We want to be man and wife, and the time has come for us to be so. But the time is also ill suited to a wedding celebration, with the shadow of death still hovering around us.

  “It is equally inconvenient because of the number of friends and relatives who would be forced to travel here in dangerous times and unpredictable weather. That would take months to arrange, and I do not want to waste those months. I want to share every day of them with you and no one else. So my proposal is this. We will stand up together here in this house, in the presence of those family and friends who are here, and we will exchange our commitments to each other and pledge to be man and wife henceforth, and then I will remain here as your wife while my father and brother return to Londuin.”

  “But…I think that is a wonderful idea, my love, but what about all your friends down there?”

  “What about them? They are my friends, but they are down there, as you say. They may be disappointed to have missed my wedding, but they will all soon realize their good fortune in not having to travel all the way from there and back for what is really little more than a celebration dinner. They will recover from the shock, and they’ll remain my friends.”

  “Well I would hope so. But I doubt your father would ever agree to that suggestion. And I doubt if I could blame him. You are his only daughter and he loves you dearly. But his pride in you is even greater than his love, and I suspect he would—and will—have difficulty in letting go of you so easily. You wait and see if I am not right. Dominic will want to part with you far more ceremoniously than this suggestion of yours permits. He’ll want his entire family—all your brothers and their wives and children—and all his friends and neighbours, and yours, too, to be there to see you wed. Dominic Mcuil will want to launch his daughter into marriage in the grand style. You wait and see.”

  “We’ll see about that. You leave my father to me.”

  “Happily, my love. I pledge that I will leave your father to you as long as I know that you will leave your father for me…Now, what will we do about Shamus?”

  “What should we do about him? He’s a grown man now, and much of that is thanks to you. He won’t go back to Londuin, not as long as he has hopes for a life as a barrel maker with his Eylin.”

  “No, I agree. But he might stay here, with us, as a smith. For a short time, I mean, once we are married. Providing he knows that at the end of it—say in two years’ time—I would help him to purchase a cooperage of his own.”

  “He would be a fool—and a very selfish one—to balk at such an offer!”

  “And I could arrange to have him work in the afternoons, under supervision, as a trainee barrel maker at the fort. That would give him an understanding of the basics of the craft—sufficient to know, after two years, how to hire and supervise an employee of his own.”

  She blinked at him. “Could you do that?”

  “Of course. And we both know the money is less than troublesome. This could work, if Shamus really wants to try it.”

  “And why would you want to help him to that extent? Out of charity? That would be his first question, because deep down he’s proud, despite appearances. Do you have an answer he could live with?”

  “Absolutely. I need him, Lydia. I need him here in the mornings for the next two years. And if he will oblige me in that, then I’ll reciprocate and help him gain what he wants. We will be family to each other, brothers-in-law. Is that not reason enough? Besides, if I set him up in business I would expect a share of the profits, as a partner. Shamus would have no problem with that.”

  She sat silent for long moments, looking at him, then shook her head slowly and smiled at him. “You see?” she said. “
That’s the kind of thinking that makes me love you, Quintus Varrus.”

  He grinned back at her. “I’m happy to hear that, then, for that’s the kind of thing I do with my eyes closed. Being clever takes far more effort. And so, barring your father’s refusal to grant us his blessing, we are cancelling the wedding plans for your friends and family from Londinium, we are seducing Shamus into staying as a smith for a while longer, we are moving into this house instead of building one of our own, and we are going to live our lives in a way that conceals the fact that we have suddenly become immensely rich. Have I forgotten anything?”

  “You have.” She leaned in and kissed him. “What will become of Shanna, when this is no longer her household?”

  “Why must we discuss that? Nothing will change for Shanna, apart from our living with her for a short time, in addition to Shamus, at least until our new house is built. The smithy will still be hers and I will run it, with Shamus’s help, in return for living in her house. You’re the one who will have to decide if we need to rearrange the rooms. We should have a bedroom of our own. I would insist on that, and I think we could easily enlarge the space in the north end of the house—it’s mostly used for storage anyway. That’s no more than a suggestion, but I think you could make it a reality, so let me know what you decide…Anything else?”

  Neither of them could think of another thing, and there were still no signs of life elsewhere in the house, so Lydia went away humming towards her bedchamber, and Varrus split the boxed coins into four large nail bags of sturdy, hand-sewn leather and stowed them in the rusted oven in the corner of the forge, then followed her into her room, unaware that he, too, was humming under his breath.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Varrus was up and out of the house by dawn the next morning, feeling youthfully fresh and buoyant despite his nocturnal activities with Lydia Mcuil. Lydia, too, had survived the night in exceptional spirits and had been singing quietly to herself as she prepared another bowl of oaten porridge for him before sending him off to the armouries with a kiss. There appeared to be no one astir yet in the house when he left, and it crossed his mind that he’d heard nothing at all the night before to indicate that anyone had come home. They must have, he concluded. He simply had not heard them, having other, more pleasurable matters to engage his attention.