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The Seventh Earl of St Erth sat across the table from his wife of one year and five months and counted himself entranced. Drusilla Frant, nee Morville, now the Countess of St Erth, spread the tiniest dab of butter across a slice of toast and Gervase had to admit that it might seem slightly besotted should he describe her actions as damnably captivating. As she laid down her knife, the Countess caught his intense gaze and tilted her head very slightly in reproof.
"Isn't a man allowed to look at his wife?" The Earl complained. A light blush of colour rose to his wife's cheeks, but she steadfastly kept her gaze on the toast, observing the butter melting evenly into the warm bread.
The Earl's half-brother, Martin, looked up from his heaping breakfast. "You should know, it's not the done thing! You would live in Drusilla's pocket, would she let it!"
"My Countess would never permit such impropriety," quietly answered Gervase as he laid down his napkin while never taking his eyes from his wife's smooth, untroubled mien.
Martin mumbled something annoyed around a mouthful. His sister-in-law took pity upon him and shifted the conversation slightly. "I believe you have another chase with the Melton this week, do you not, Martin?"
An enthusiastic nod answered the Countess who let her sporting-mad brother-in-law continue to determinedly put away his breakfast as she turned her regard upon her husband. "And what are your plans for the day, St Erth?"
Gervase appeared to sink into deep thought at this request. "You know, I am become quite a man of leisure of late given Martin's tireless work with the estate management. Perhaps I will devote myself to perfecting my design of a new cravat. Would you care to assist?"
Drusilla shook her head minutely against his teasing. "Turvey would not appreciate this interference. In any case, I have plans for today that may require some small assistance on both of your parts. You see, I believe there is a secret compartment near the muniment room and I would like to start investigating it today." Having made her pronouncement, Drusilla delicately sipped her tea as she regarded her husband and brother-in-law across the breakfast-table.
"By Jove, Drusilla, the muniment room is all compartments and none of them secret! That's how the records are all stored, right there in the north wall. It's all cupboards stuffed with Frant papers! Nothing secret about that." Martin eyed the countess quizzically before he plunged a fork into the remaining kidneys on his plate and returned to the serious work of eating.
Gervase watched Drusilla patiently listening to Martin's continued grumbling about the rackety ways of women believing all sorts of stories straight out of the Minerva Press. He was rewarded for his quiet observation when she turned her gaze upon him. Drusilla's fierce devotion to his undeserving self was a constant wonder as was the Countess' serene capability in handling every problem posed by the fractious Frant family and the sadly ramshackle Stanyon Castle. Every day of his life, the Earl of St Erth was filled with gratitude that this glorious woman had become his wife.
So if his countess believed that there was a secret compartment to be uncovered, Gervase knew her belief was informed by something substantial and serious. As he watched her lips curve into a quiet, gentle smile at Martin's scoffing, his certainty deepened.
"Martin, don't be a fool," St Erth chided. "Drusilla knows everything obvious about the castle and a deuced bit more about its mysteries. If she says there's a secret compartment to be found, she knows whereof she speaks."
"Thank you, my dear," Drusilla murmured as she put down her tea cup and nodded to the footman who stood at the earl's shoulder with the coffee pot. While William poured the dark brew that her husband preferred, Drusilla leveled her gaze on Martin.
"Your brother is too kind, Martin, to praise me so highly, but he is correct. I have been researching in the library these past weeks while you have been busy with the other Melton men. Did you know we have journals of the first earl's wives bound up there? His first two wives left only household accounts, but his third wife, Anne Frant? She was quite the family historian."
Martin frowned in puzzlement as he searched back in his mind to identify this person in the family tree. "She was the Second Earl's mother, wasn't she? Raised him from a tyke when the First Earl died, kept Stanyon safe under Bloody Mary, and even hosted Good Queen Bess at her son's wedding, didn't she?"
Drusilla nodded. "You have it precisely. Countess Anne kept an account of all the comings and goings at Stanyon as well as quite an interesting set of recipes. Let me know if you ever experience a touch of rheumatism, Martin, for I am intrigued by her ointment promised to cure that ailment entirely. It involves a great deal of wild onions."
Martin laughed sharply. "I've not taken that many bad falls, Drusilla! Don't be thinking that I'll be all aches and pains or, worse yet!, willing to try any strange fits of some ancient Frant. Onions? It's modern medicine for me if ever I should need it."
"Fair enough, Martin. But I think my wife has something more substantial than onion ointment to engage us this morning. So why do we not adjourn?," his brother said, pushing back from the table to offer his arm to the countess. Together they exited the breakfast parlour with Martin close behind.
"It was after her receipts that I found an interesting passage describing her husband's secretive ways," Drusilla continued, lengthening her pace to match that of her tall husband and his towering brother. "The old earl was twenty years her senior when they wed and did not trust her with the household treasures like the Stanyon Cup. Whenever they entertained, the countess applied to her husband to bring out the plate and once guests were away, he stowed it away. After his passing, she had the servants search high and low, but no one ever found it. I believe the Stanyon treasures are hidden, to this very day!, in a secret compartment that is connected to the muniment room."
Martin danced forward around his brother and sister-in-law to stop them beside the staircase. "Oh that, yes! I heard the tales of the great cup and other treasures from our father when I was but a boy. But everyone says that the First Earl likely gambled the lot away to one of his ne'er-do-well companions. Bluff King Hal was the least of his bad company, don't you know?"
Gervase turned his head to meet Drusilla's quiet regard. Covering her small hand with his own, he enquired. "But if the Countess never found the treasure, what in her journals makes you think you have?"
As they continued on through the warrens of passages that transitioned with chronological impunity from rococo to medieval and back to Jacobean, Drusilla explained how the second countess' journal had complained of returning from the court to discover the Earl had finished a new project "of which I am not to knowe."
"Almost guaranteed to set her curiosity aflame," Gervase observed. Martin nodded as he leaned against the open door of the muniment room, which now served as his office. In the past year it had transformed from Theodore's fiercely organized domain to a disheveled yet welcoming space that housed Martin's desk along with centuries of Frant records, squirreled away in cabinets built into the room's north wall.
"Reading through his chaplain's history of Stanyon, I noticed that happened in the same year the first Earl reportedly closed in the garderobe outside the muniment room," Drusilla continued as she and Ger stood in the dark, wood-lined hall.
The younger Frant was blushing and stuttering at Drusilla's words. "That can't be a secret room! Drusilla, a garderobe is, well, erm, there's no polite way to say this-"
"A retiring chamber?" St Erth filled in for his brother's embarrassment.
"That's the least of it, and you know it. Of course the old Earl closed up the gardy-loo here. Too smelly by half, that'd be. So it's no treasure you'd find there, sorry!"
Drusilla removed her hand from the perfect blue superfine of her husband's sleeve and reached out her hand towards the expanse of carved wood panels on one side of the muniment room's door. "But this is not and never was an exterior part of the old fortress. The muniment room opens to this hallway that leads to the old solar and other family chambers. Right below it was the old armory and servants' hall. There is no place here for waste to flow below."
Drusilla let her hand roam around the curling acanthus leaves that decorated every corner of the dark panels, poking and pulling at one after another. "As daughter to an assiduous historian, I can tell you that 'garderobe' also means 'storeroom'. So if the first earl closed up a storeroom, perhaps it was not to block it away but to turn it into a secret space?"
There was about ten feet, all told, of Tudor wood carving before the hall took a sharp turn to accommodate a Jacobean addition. If a secret room was to be found, it would be within a fairly defined space. Gervase joined her, using his greater height to probe at the leaves along the higher range of panelling while Martin crossed and uncrossed his arms, clearly attempting to think of a retort but having none come to mind.
"Clever, my robin," St Erth murmured as his questing hand felt one leaf on the upper left corner of the tallest panel drop inwards and twist slightly.
"You found it!" Drusilla exclaimed, sharing a rare, bright smile with her husband as Martin attempted to lean over his brother's shoulder and see into the opening.
"Get off, Martin," Gervase grunted as he struggled to maintain his hold on the surprisingly mobile wood panel. "Make yourself useful and get me something to stand on so that I may hoist this out of place."
Martin ducked into the muniment room and soon returned with a small, low chest. "The old lawn bowling set," he explained as Drusilla stepped aside, allowing her brother-in-law to lay the sturdy box at the foot of the paneled wall.
Gervase stepped one booted foot atop the box and was elevated enough to maneuver the carved panel out of the space. Drusilla accepted the carved wood and laid it carefully aside. "I think that the next panel down appears to slide upward and out," she offered. "Do you see?"
"Capital, Drusilla," Martin said while his fair-haired brother deftly slipped one and then another panel up and out. All of a sudden, it was possible to simply step over the bottom panel and enter the small room it had concealed for centuries.
Possible, at least, if one was a Frant by birth, Drusilla thought as she stared at the remaining obstacle. Before she could say a word, Gervase had lifted her in his arms and stepped into the small, shadowy room their work had revealed. In the half-light, she regarded his angelically beautiful face with fond surprise.
Gervase chuckled, a light rumble she felt against her own torso pressed close against his chest. "This is your discovery, my dear. How would you think any could precede you?"
Drusilla shook her head with disbelief. "Only you, Gervase, could be so caring of my rights. But would it not be wiser to put me down so that I can examine what we have uncovered?" Once on her feet, the Countess attempted to make out the details of the small, wood-lined space while Martin took to his heels at his brother's request for candles and servants.
The concealed garderobe featured a number of built-in cabinets - a small version of the muniment room's capacious drawers. Her heart sank slightly - might it simply be an even old set of Frant family papers? While her stepmother would glory in more records of the distant ancestors of her husband's family, Drusilla had a more practical aim. Medieval gold and silver, the famed Stanyon treasures, in the hands of the earl, today, stood likely to realize a tidy sum, even if some of the treasures were too dear to ever sell.
"Don't you want to try to open these?" Gervase murmured.
Drusilla twisted slightly to try and catch his eye in the weak light. She felt his hand come up on either side to cup her shoulder, thumbs sliding up and down in habitual caress against the sage wool of her morning gown. "I do and. . . I don't," she finally confessed. "I was certain that I had it all correct but now. . . ."
Gervase pulled her back against him, wrapping his arms low around her waist so that she was all but enveloped in his warmth. "Only you could doubt your capabilities. Without hesitation, you led us precisely to this hidden room that has eluded generations of Frants. How can you doubt the rest of your predictions will come true?"
Before Drusilla could expostulate further, Martin returned with Abney and three of the footmen bearing two lanterns each. As they were lit, Abney handed them in to the Earl and Countess. Martin vaulted impatiently over the low, fixed panel and grabbed the third lantern for himself.
"Well, what have we here?" He demanded of his brother and sister-in-law.
Gervase kept one arm around his wife as he lifted the lantern in his arm high enough to illuminate the wall of cabinets ahead of them. Small metal plates embedded in the dark wood drawers twinkled in the light. "Why, the Stanyon treasure, I am certain."
Drusilla elbowed him slightly as servants gasped at their master's proclamation. "I am not," she hissed. But despite that, she stepped forward and lifted her own lantern to examine the deeply tarnished brass plates affixed to the wood. Each was engraved with a small symbol. On one, she traced what appeared to be a circle around a ball. On another, three lines converged at the bottom. "An arrow?"
On the lowest plate, she dimly made out two half circles, one perched above the other. It looked almost like a cup. "I think this is it, Gervase," Drusilla said calmly and the Earl handed his lantern to Martin. Gervase then bent forward and carefully worked the wood drawer forward. With a dry groan, it revealed a soft bed of ancient velvet carefully clutching a large bejeweled gold and enamel cup as tall as a man's forearm. Beside it, another bed carefully nestled a half-moon shape the precise size to cover the sizable girth of the cup it accompanied.
"The Stanyon Cup? I'll be damned! Er, beg your pardon, Drusilla!" Martin's excitement was enough to rouse the servants to a clamour but Abney restored good order with one sharp rebuke.
Meanwhile, the Earl regarded his family's great relic with some bemusement. "It appears rather mediaeval."
The Countess tilted her head up from careful scrutiny of her discovery to regard her husband with some asperity. "An it were any other, it would not be the Stanyon Cup."
He sighed, faintly. "At least it has no snarling tigers on it, to disturb my digestion if it were displayed on the dining-table. At least, I think not. Should we not remove it from the case and inspect it, my dear?"
At this, Drusilla started slightly. "You want me to do so?"
"If you do not do so shortly, I fear we will have a riot on our hands." The Earl glanced over his shoulder at the growing crowd of servants clustered in the hallway, some shuffling into the muniment room. Sensing their master's gaze upon them, the assembled crowd grew quiet.
Drusilla placed her lantern on the floor and then squared her shoulders to carefully extract the family heirloom from its hiding place. She staggered slightly at the cup's prodigious weight and Gervase reached out to support her grip.
"It is astonishing," he murmured as she rotated the cup from side to side, revealing enameled figures of mounted knights galloping around the cup's enormous bowl. The stem of the piece was chased in patterns around ungainly mountings of large blue and red stones. "And rather out of the mode."
Drusilla stifled a gasp of laughter at her husband's irrepressible drollery and contented herself instead with a look of sharp admonishment. Gervase smiled broadly as he helped her maneuver the cup around so that they stood at the doorway to the secret room. "Martin, would you do the honours?"
At the Earl's prompting, his half-brother sprang forward to take the heavy cup and lift it out of the secret room. He held it aloft for the assembled crowd to behold. "Good God, it weighs as much as a pointer! Be careful, Abney, or I'll brain someone accidentally! We need a table!"
Martin continued to expostulate as he the servants stepped back and he carried the weighty cup around the corner to his desk in the muniment room. Footmen were dispatched to a candelabra and end table to better illuminate the secret room. Abney dispatched the rest of the staff back to their duties and they slowly cleared away.
Over the next hours, they cleared out the First Earl's secret room. One drawer held a wealth of gold plate and jewelry, including a massive chain studded with pearls and emeralds.
The drawer marked with the upside down arrowhead proved to be filled with silver: black with tarnish enough to make Abney nearly quiver with distress as he set footmen to fetch polish and cloths. The fourth drawer, slimmer than the others, held a pair of miniatures and nothing more.
"This appears to be the First Earl," Gervase observed, of the dark-haired, severe face staring back at him across the centuries. "But I am at a loss to identify the woman."
She was unremarkable in her Tudor hood, wrapped close around a small, delicate countenance.. Drusilla traced the gold filigree around the small portrait. "I suspect this would be his first wife, Margaret. They married young and she died of smallpox before she turned twenty."
"Perhaps he was heartbroken at her passing and locked this away with his heart," Gervase commented.
"More likely he left these away because they had fallen out of fashion," Drusilla responded prosaically. The excitement at uncovering one of Stanyon's hidden treasures still ran high, but the small, empty room now felt less of a sanctuary and more of a sad hole.
Gervase slipped his arm around her shoulders. "Would my Countess care to take some refreshment? We can retire to the family parlour."
Drusilla straightened her shoulders with quiet resolution. "I believe it is well past time for luncheon. Abney? Could you set up a cold repast for the family?"
At the butler's smooth affirmative, Drusilla allowed her husband to assist her over the fixed panel and out of the secret room. Martin had shoved papers aside on his desk to make room for the cup and much of the rest of their morning's discovery. "What a wonder, Drusilla! Ger, should I let Mother know? She'll be in high alt and ready to quit my sister's house early."
Gervase shuddered exquisitely. "Why ever would we deprive the Dowager of one precious moment with her grandchildren, Martin? There will be time enough when she returns to the Dower House after Twelfth Night."
"In any case, Martin, you must be famished," the Countess observed. "Go wash up and we will meet shortly."
At Martin's obedient departure, the Earl spun his wife into his embrace. "Well done, my robin! You have uncovered yet another of Stanyon's secrets which, if I'm not mistaken, might include enough saleable chaff to fund the pressing roof repairs."
"Are you saying you intend to sell off the patrimony?" Drusilla inquired. "While I agree that maintenance is pressing, you had best not let the Dowager hear of your plans or you'll never hear the end of her complaints."
"Few worse fates in the world than being forced to listen to her catalogue of Stanyon's glories," her husband replied amiably. "However, I am willing to risk her endless commentary should we no longer have buckets decorating the back hallways."
At this mention, his wife nodded in heartfelt agreement. A November rainstorm had brought a near deluge into two of the little-used guest rooms and she had watched in some trepidation as Gervase and his brother had clambered upon the roof to oversee the temporary repairs. The thought of Gervase doing so again, repeatedly, as the Frants endeavoured to maintain the old building, was enough to make Drusilla line up auctioneers for all the old treasure, then and there.
"Speaking of back hallways," Gervase continued as he offered his arm to her, "do you think there's time for a visit to our chambers to freshen up before luncheon? It would not do for the Earl and Countess to dine in dishabille, after all?"
"Certainly not," Drusilla agreed gravely. "I am quite certain we both have dust on our clothing and in our hair-"
"Not to mention other places," the Earl offered with speaking glint in his eye. "I shall ask Turvey to draw a bath. We can even share!"
"How economical," his Countess observed. "I am certain that the staff will approve your careful husbanding of resources."
They rounded the corner that led to their hallway, quiet and mercifully unmolested by leaks and drafts, which had been, just after its remoteness from the rest of the family's rooms, its chief appeal for them both. Gervase spun Drusilla lightly on his arm so that she stood just in front of him. "What other mysteries do you have in store for me?" he asked as he slid one elegant finger along the decorous neckline of her dress, causing his petite wife to shiver slightly at the warmth and intimacy of his gesture.
"I could not tell," Drusilla answered soberly, "for if I knew what to expect, it would not be a mystery."
Gervase laughed as he ushered her into their quiet suite and rang the bell that would eventually bring his valet from the distant environs of the servants' hall. "Shall we see what mysteries I can explore here in our rooms?"
At that suggestion, the Earl and his Countess were, as usual, in perfect agreement.