“Is that a flaw?”
He paused, tilting his head as if genuinely weighing the answer. “I’m not sure,” he said at last. “It’s either a glaring weakness or the purest form of selfless Christian compassion. But right now”—his smile deepened—“I’m not in the mood to argue about it.” He tossed a pair of work gloves to her and she caught them. “Come on over and help us take down the rest of the chimney.”
She instinctively recoiled. She’d just painted her nails last night and construction work wasn’t really her thing. “The others are far more qualified,” she hedged, but Jack wasn’t having it.
“Maybe, but you need to trust me. The crane is going to lift the lintel stone, then pulling the rest of the rocks down will go quickly. Put the gloves on, get off your tush, and follow me.”
“That’s rather rude,” Sebastian began, but once again, Jack ignored him.
“You’re going to want to experience this,” he told her. “I can’t describe it, but the second you get near that fireplace you’ll know what I mean.”
Curiosity began to gnaw, not so much because of what he said, but from his expression. His eyes glinted in anticipation, as if a tremendous surprise awaited her.
“Okay,” she said, tugging on the gloves. The battered leather gloves were laughably too big and the fingers had been permanently molded to a man’s hand. They were dirty and grubby, but she needed them if she was to handle the heavy building stones. Jack plopped a hard hat on her head, and she felt a little silly as she approached the Roost.
How strange it felt to walk inside this once-familiar house. It had always been so dim inside, but now everything was open and exposed to the bright sky above. Jack stood beside the fireplace, one hand propped on the massive slab of the lintel stone stretching across the top opening of the fireplace. It probably weighed a thousand pounds.
“Come closer,” Jack urged.
She drifted a few steps forward, then she caught it . . . the reason Jack beckoned her here. That smell! The smoky aroma of a thousand home-cooked meals emanated from the fireplace. Chipping away at the mortar had exposed pockets of soot and residue to the air. It smelled like bacon and bread and meaty stew.
It sent shivers down her arms, and she locked gazes with him. “You feel it too?”
“I feel it,” he confirmed. “We could smell all those cooking aromas the second we lifted the capstone off the chimney. Probably thousands of meals were cooked in old cast-iron pots, pumping up smoke that smelled like bacon and homemade soup.”
“Biscuits,” she added.
“Warm bread and hot apple pies.”
Alice leaned closer to inhale again, and it seemed she could smell every one of the foods they listed. How often had women through the centuries cooked at this exact spot? Dismantling the chimney released the scent molecules that had been trapped in the chimney mortar for centuries. The remnants of those former meals danced in the air, an echo from long ago. The thought triggered another shiver.
“Who invited you inside?” Jack said in a surly tone.
Alice whirled to see Sebastian, sporting his devil-may-care grin as he strolled inside.
“The lady out front gave me a hard hat and said it would be okay to come inside. You don’t mind, do you, Alice?”
It was hard to resist Sebastian, but she needed to do a better job of it. “Jack owns this place,” she said. “It’s up to him.”
Jack looked heavenward and muttered a string of salty curses, but it wasn’t in his nature to be needlessly unkind. “Don’t get into any trouble,” he grumbled.
Sebastian strolled to the fireplace and ran the flat of his hand across the lintel. “I’ll bet this old stone could tell a lot of interesting stories.” He ran his hand across the surface, then zeroed in on the palm frond carved into the corner. It was the same doodle Alice had seen on the letter connecting Helga to this house.
“Look at that, a Commonwealth wreath,” Sebastian murmured as he traced the palm fronds, then gave a little shudder. “Creepy.”
Alice blinked in confusion. “Creepy? How so?”
“Commonwealth wreaths were used by followers of Oliver Cromwell during the Puritan Revolution.”
She looked again, studying the pair of curved palm fronds more closely. “Is there some special meaning behind it?”
“Absolutely,” Sebastian said cheerfully. “After they beheaded the king, the Puritans refused to use English coins because they had the king’s face on them. They melted them down to mint new coins and wanted a Christian symbol instead of a monarch. They chose palm fronds, a symbol of Christ’s triumph, to surround the outer rim of the coin. Come on, Alice, you should be watching my miniseries. It’s all in there.”
Alice gaped at the tiny emblem with new eyes. Could it really be a symbol of the Puritan Commonwealth? And if it was . . . did that make Helga and the man who built the Roost part of the Puritan Revolution?
If Reid Santos and Helga had been followers of Oliver Cromwell during the bloody English Civil War, it could have been an excellent reason a wealthy man would need to flee to the New World.
After a crane lifted the massive lintel stone and carried it to the staging area, Jack headed back inside the Roost to continue dismantling the fireplace. Now that the stone had been safely removed, it wouldn’t take long to finish taking apart the rest of the fireplace. Most of the fireplace was made of local stone, but the lining of the fireplace was crude, handmade brick. He started chiseling at the line of bricks that had been directly beneath the lintel stone.
