“Do you have any idea what this place is?” he asked. “Stories you’ve been told…anything?”
“Nay,” Finley said, and her words were hushed, as though she was afraid of being overheard even when they could not have been more alone. “None of us children were ever brave enough to stay in the storerooms for long. It’s where the ghost was said to live.” She looked down at the out-of-place wooden planks, and saw that some were still strapped together in broken pairs and trios, chunks of wreckage from what once must have been a construct of men’s hands; there were metal nail heads and bands, rusted to black now, the stain weeping out into the murky grain of the woods like macabre tears.
It called to Finley’s mind the pile of rust at the top of the stairs.English armor…
“Perhaps you were right to fear a ghost,” he said, and she turned quickly to look at him. He pointed to the top of the shaft, so high above their heads as to be barely discernible in the gloom. “There are pulleys and stops all along the wall, all the way to the top, is my guess,” he said. “Although I haven’t found evidence of a winding drum, I think we’re standing on what’s left of a hoist that met a bad end.”
Finley squinted up. “But how…?”
He took her hand again, steadying her across the debris to the corner of the room against the cliff. Once there, he slapped his left palm against the wall, his fingers disappearing into a deep, rounded indent. He withdrew and moved his hand up in a zigzagging pattern, three, four times and then stepped back, looking up and then pointing again.
“It’s a ladder. To the very top.”
Finley felt her eyes widen. “Did you go up?”
“Only half.” He paused, his hands on his hips, and Finley could sense that he was preparing to deliver the prize. He looked at her. “It’s where I found yet another chamber carved into the wall—just tall enough for a man to stand in, and filled with all manner of old things, including the Irish. A cache.”
She stared at him for a long moment. “A cache. You mean the sort that smugglers would use.”
His mouth turned down thoughtfully and he nodded. “Aye.”
Finley shoved him. “You two-faced lout!” Lachlan rocked on his feet against her slight onslaught but stood his ground. “How dare you accuse my people of…of—”she sputtered, shook her head—“piracy?”
“I didna accuse anyone of anything,” he clarified. “It could be from trade. I was only describing—”
“Is there anything else in it?” she interrupted, setting down the lamp. “Or just whisky?”
Lachlan stopped and pressed his lips together, watching her closely as she unclasped her weighty cloak and flung it aside. The corners of his eyes were slightly upturned.
Finley could wait no longer for his answer. She spun to face the wall and hitched up her skirts until her slipper found the first foothold.
“You’re going up there?” He half-laughed.
“Well, sure; I’d see for myself,” she said, looking up and then reaching with her left arm for the tread.
“Finley, wait,” he said, and she felt his hands on her calves through her skirts. “It’s more dangerous that it looks. If you slip…”
“You’re the one who brought me up here, Lachlan Blair,” she snapped at him, twisting around to give him a saucy glare. “Did you think I was the sort of woman before whom you could dangle words like ‘smuggling’ and ‘Irish’ and I’d not wish to see it with my own eyes?”
His laugh echoed up toward the tiny opening so far above the floor, and Finley started up, even as he called after her, “And you were so certain it was me trying to lure you to your death!”
She smiled smugly to the wall before her face and kept climbing. “I like to do things myself, is all.”
All jest was gone from her a moment later, though, as Finley concentrated on maintaining firm hold on the sandy rock. It seemed as though her bottom became heavier, the wall slanted outward and at a gradual cantilever the higher she went, and it caused her to curl into the cliff with fingertips and toes and even her pelvis. She couldn’t see the opening Lachlan had spoken of from her position pressed up against the cliff, but she didn’t dare lean away from the wall to look up properly. Beads of perspiration broke out along her upper lip and hairline, trickled in itchy rivulets down her back.
She froze when she realized she’d have to eventually come back down, which would likely prove to be an even more treacherous journey.
“Finley?”
She forced herself to swallow, and her fingers and toes tightened even further, the little pieces of grit beneath her fingertips seeming to roll like marbles.
“I’m not afraid,” she gritted through her teeth.
“I know you’re not,” Lachlan called up quickly. “You’re only five handholds from the cache.” He paused. “Take a deep breath.”
She did, but even her lungs quivered.
“Step up with your left foot,” Lachlan directed. “There you are. Right hand now. Almost there.”
