The Librarian's Spell by Patricia Rice (ebook offline reader TXT) 📗

And she wanted to speak with Mr. Ives—Max—as a man and not a woman.

She should probably be insulted that he saw her as male, but she’d accepted her size early on, when even the promise of a small dowry hadn’t interested the local fellows.

Well, she hadn’t been much interested in them either. She liked books and far rather spend her time reading than flirting. Or whatever it was one did as courtship.

Which was why Max’s appeal was such a conundrum. He wasn’t a book. He couldn’t even read. His tale last night of quitting school at fifteen to sail the seas—definitely appalling. And fascinating, she had to admit, like a good book. She wanted to know his story. She was hopeless.

Wrapped in her cloak, she took the stairs down to the wine cellar below the kitchen. The unused vault smelled of must and stale air. With the promise of more oil to come, she turned her lantern up as far as it would go and studied the walls as she descended.

The stairwell had been plastered and once painted white to better reflect candlelight. The walls were riddled with cracks because they were old. They could be plastered again.

She scanned the perimeter of the nearly empty cellar. If she had endless wealth at her disposal, she might ask that the walls be better shored up and maybe whitewashed. With new gas lights for illumination. . .

Other than a few kegs of ale and whisky and an ancient rack of wine, they didn’t use this room, so that idea was ridiculous. And if there had ever been a means of accessing the tower’s underground rooms from the kitchen, she couldn’t locate it.

Fine. She knew where to find the tower’s outer door. It had been built wide to allow in cattle at one time. The gardeners used to keep tools down there.

Pulling her cloak over her hair, she hurried upstairs and into the sunshine, drinking appreciatively of the scents of earth and greenery after the musty cellar.

The kitchen garden had once flourished at this time of year, but Marta didn’t have time to tend vegetables along with all her other chores. Some potatoes grew back every year from small ones left in the ground. Marta had a few herbs she clipped. Lydia brushed her fingers along the plants to stir their fragrance as she located the cellar door—which stood open.

She entered the cool damp expecting to see Max, but the byre appeared empty, except for the now-unused gardening tools. The packed dirt floor held faint boot prints, but they could be a hundred years old for all she knew. The air was fresher here than in the wine cellar, but she didn’t like being underground.

Intent only on verifying their guest’s claims, she raised her lantern to study the walls.

More primitive, cracking plaster. Other than a rolling pencil, which meant nothing except the floor wasn’t even, how did one discern a tilt?

She’d never explored the byre. She tried to imagine moving the library down here and shuddered. The place crawled with spiders—and probably mice.

In a dark, back corner she found another open door. Was this the back of the wine cellar? Where did this other door lead?

Did she really want to know? Well, she’d like to see if her name was written somewhere. That seemed fantastical. But she needed to see a tilt or a crack or something that looked dangerous. Maybe outside. . . ?

She was retreating to the outer door when she heard footsteps.

“Mr. Cadwallader, excellent timing. Come along, let me show you what I’ve found.”

Covered in filth, Max strolled from the interior door, beaming as if he’d discovered gold.

“You have a fascinating structure here, Mr. Cadwallader,” Max said, holding his lamp up so the librarian could follow safely.

He’d always had the impression that Malcolm librarians were ancient, but this one followed him with strong, youthful strides—although he was about as talkative as the monk he appeared.

“It seems that you have a structure within a structure.” Max led the way through a maze of empty storage rooms, probably for grain and munitions. “I would say the core of the tower was a primitive peel watchtower originally, except it appears to be circular, not square. And the dry stone construction behind the cracking plaster is similar to a broch I heard about in the Orkneys. The engineer who’d seen them was fascinated by the unique design. Apparently, the structures date back to the iron age. The brochs he’d seen had spiral staircases on the inside, simply amazing for that period, but I can’t find a way into this thing to find out.”

“The iron age?” the librarian rasped in a low voice. “As in the first century, before even peel towers were built? But this is far from the Orkneys.” The librarian ran his cloaked hand over the walls and studied them as they walked.

“Exactly. Maybe the engineer who built this one took his talents north. Or he was a Norseman who brought his talents south. Who knows? Or maybe it is just a very early, very primitive peel tower. Archeology is not my field.” Max shrugged. He might be interested in the past, but it didn’t pay for the future. “At some point, probably when the fortress was expanded in the 1400s or 1500s, they constructed your outer tower around the original watch tower. You’re walking through that part now.”

“Does this have anything to do with the tower leaning?” the librarian asked with the usual hint of disapproval.

“That’s what I need to find out. Early plumbing required water—a moat, a stream, a river—not just for drinking but to carry off waste. If there is an underground stream, it might be causing subsidence. This newer, outer wall. . .” He gestured at the heavy timbers overhead. “Has protected the inner core from the weather and deterioration.”

“But if the inner wall fails, the whole tower falls? The main tower may be held up by a fourteenth century watchtower? Or something even older?” The librarian sounded incredulous.

“It’s possible,