Wide-eyed with horror, Lowell fled.
Iona sipped her tea and watched him with interest. “You could grow a beard and wear a colorful scarf over your battered head and look like a pirate. Foundation exploring may be just the thing. Didn’t Max say it is Roman? We needn’t go to Italy to explore Roman ruins.”
“I cannot believeI’m spending the first day of our wedded life crawling around in a sewer.” Gerard held up his lantern so his dainty bride could avoid sticking her too-large boot into a hole.
“You’re not crawling,” she pointed out pragmatically. “And I do not believe this part was the sewer. Did you not listen when Lydia regaled us with tales of ghosts and spirits down here?”
“It’s Lydia’sdutyto listen to books.” Of course,hewas listening to a Roman soldier chuckling in his head. Iona couldn’t know that.
“But Max is the one who saw the ghost, remember? Can there be any better place for us to practice your talent for seeing history? There is no one around to notice. Think of this as my wedding gift to you.”
She had him there. Allowing him to explore the peculiar without disapproval was quite a spectacular gift, now that he realized the freedom she provided.
“Here.” She lifted her lantern to examine what appeared to be a filled-in archway. “I can sense... the oddity. It’s not like feeling the knife we found. I can’t describe the scent.”
“Mold. Decay. Rot.” Hiding his exhilaration at this freedom, Gerard found the names engraved on the arch as Max had described. His fingers tingled. He picked up weird... sensations. People whispering. Bells tolling. Song. Prayer. A church?
“You’re hiding behind cynicism,” she accused, hitting the mark dead on. “You’re afraid you’re weird—like me.”
“Maybe I’m afraid I’mnotweird.” That was a stupid retort. The voice in his head cackled agreement.
“You’re not insane,” she reassured him.
“I didn’t think I was.” But he did, down deep inside. Ives weren’t weird. He was an Ives, a logical, educated earl, someday a marquess. He was meant to be a leader of men—not a madman who stroked stones. His bride was a shade too perceptive.
“I can smell your fear, and I know perfectly well it isn’t of ghosts. Tell me you don’t feel anything here.” She ran her hand over the arch.
Gerard didn’t want to open his Pandora’s box of fears, but Iona seemed as mad as he was. She hadn’t minded his earlier vision. And sensingvibrationsmay have saved his life. He supposed if he were to be labeled a Mad Malcolm, he should at least experiment to see if it was justified.
As if he stroked old stones every day, he removed his leather glove and pretended he was an archeologist hunting for hidden hieroglyphics.
The vibration stung him, almost like a bee. He yanked his hand away.
“I’m not sensing anything painful or I would have warned you.” Iona regarded him with fascination, as one might a monster in a freak show.
“And to think, I married you for life. What was I thinking?” She’d given him amap,one that might locate a Roman ruin. But he’d need this weird talent to find anything. If there might actually be treasure...
He held his palm a fraction above the surface, looking for... who knows what. Curiosity and excitement warred with practicality. “Will we spend the rest of our days crawling about Wystan, hunting ghosts?”
“Or treasure,” she said with equanimity. “Or just satisfying our intellectual nosiness.”
For good or ill, and against all logical sense, he’d married a woman after his own heart. Feeling a little less stifled, he crouched down and flattened his palm against the oldest name carved into the wall.
No church bells. “Chanting Latin,” he decided.
Iona crouched beside him. “Bell has been studying her affliction. She says we may be like tuning forks, designed to find a perfect pitch in the energies around us. In our case, that pitch may be the right combination of vibration and smell.”
She laid her delicate fingers across his. The connection was instantaneous.
Hooded figures, large and small, male and female. Sorrow. A bier carrying a slender, white-robed woman. A man in primitive leather armor—a Roman soldier?—kissing her cold cheek, laying a circlet of gold on her chest.
The chanting increased. The soldier embraced the shoulders of two weeping girls. “My treasures,” he murmured.
The trio wept and watched as the bier was laid inside a vault and sealed.
Warning shouts. With the tomb sealed, the robed figures slipped away.
Immense sorrow and tension. Setting a gold medallion into the seal, the soldier hugged his daughters, then handed them over to another. “You must go south to your mother’s family, to safety.”
