He was an astonishing sight in Nan’s eyes; she had no idea just how old he was, but his hair and beard were snow-white, and two bushy white eyebrows overshadowed a face that was a mass of wrinkles, in which his eyes appeared like two shiny black currants. He certainly looked a lot older than her gran ever did, and gran had been the oldest person Nan had ever known. He wore a linen smock and buff trousers, a pair of old, worn boots, and a floppy hat.
He gave Nan a friendly nod as she approached, and grinned at Neville. She half expected to hear some sort of country dialect she’d only half understand when he opened his mouth, but instead, out came, “So, raven lass, come to see old Gaffer Geordie, have you?”
Nan nodded, distracted by the dogs, which came up to sniff and inspect her. Neville eyed them with disdain, even contempt. It was pretty clear that Gaffer Geordie saved the dogs no one else wanted. Even the spaniels at his feet, while pretty and charming, were not perfect specimens.
“So what can old Geordie do for you?” the old man continued, eyeing her with curiosity. “I don’t know much but dogs and horses, lass. If there’s aught wrong with your bird, I probably can’t help you.”
Neville quorked, and shook himself. “Neville’s right as rain, sir,” Nan said, as politely as possible. “I heard you knew a lot about Highleigh Park, an’ I wanted to ask you ‘bout something. That dry well by the kitchen garden—”
“Oh, now, that’s an uncanny spot that is,” Gaffer Geordie said instantly, and shook his head. “Had a bad reputation. Some said it was a cursed place, and some said it was a curse on the master of Highleigh. Very uncanny, and no surprise, seeing them bones as was pulled out of it.”
There could not have been anything more likely to spark Nan’s interest than that sentence. “Bones?” she repeated, as Neville bobbed his head.
“Oh, aye, bones. A full skellington, it was, and chains, leg chains and arm chains.” Geordie nodded wisely. “Summun dropped that feller down and clamped the lid on the top, leavin’ him to die. Master of Highleigh that was, back when I was no more bigger than you, reckoned to clean out the well, maybe use it for summat, but after the bones was found, he gave up on the notion of usin’ it for anything. Vicar took charge of them, gave the poor fellow a proper Christian burial. Spot’s been a bit quieter since then.” He scratched his head. “Used to be, there was noise in that well, of a night, now and again.”
“Moaning?” Nan asked, shivering.
But the old man shook his head. “Curses.”
That was all he could tell her, but it was more than she had until that point. The next person to approach seemed to be the local vicar who was, in any case, coming to take tea with Mem’sab. Unfortunately, he could not shed light on the matter either. “That was long before my time, dear child,” he said, shaking his head. And that seemed to be that.
Until, however, someone unexpectedly approached Nan the next day, rather than the other way around.
Called out of the nursery by one of the ayahs, she found the estate manager waiting in the hallway with an enormous ledger under his arm. She knew he was the estate manager only because she had seen him consulting with Mem’sab over some matter and had been told who the lean, slightly stooped, middle-aged man was. He was smiling slightly and pushed his glasses farther up his nose with one finger.
“You would be Miss Nan, investigating the mystery of the dry well?” he asked, making it sound far more intriguing than it had been up until that moment.
She nodded, and he handed the large and heavy book to her, bound in brown calfskin. “The Lord of Highleigh of those days was an amateur antiquarian and archaeologist, although they would not have put it that way back then. In his own writing, he referred to himself as a Student of Natural Sciences. He took notes on everything he found and did in and around the estate, so if there is any record of anything to do with the well, it will surely be in this book.”
Flabbergasted, as well as astonished, Nan took it from him. “Thankee!” she exclaimed. “Thankee kindly!”
He waved her thanks off, peering at her benignly from behind his spectacles. “On the whole, having you children here has been no great work or inconvenience and has been quite amusing. This project of your schoolmistress’ is teaching you all valuable lessons in conducting research, and I am happy to be able to assist.”
With that, he went on his way, leaving her clutching the oversized volume to her chest.
After luncheon, she, Sarah, and Tommy—who, having completed his own history of the suit of armor in the library, was eaten up with curiosity about Nan’s project—took it to the dining room, opened the book on the big table, and began looking through it. The three of them knelt side-by-side on dining room chairs so they could all get a good view. The neat, copperplate handwriting was surprisingly easy to read, and the three of them, with the birds looking on from Nan and Sarah’s shoulders, perused the pages with interest.
This self-professed “Student of Natural History” was more of a dabbler in anything and everything, it seemed to Nan. There were notes on chemical experiments, on stellar observations, weather observations, but what clearly intrigued him most was the far past. It was when he was digging the foundations of the folly that he first encountered some Roman artifacts, and the discovery of the few coins, the bits of pottery, and the old dagger changed his life.
While he did not go wholesale into digging up his estate, he used every new construction project as a reason to excavate. When he was not digging, he was finding other places where he could indulge his hobby.
And that brought him around to exploring the past through the records of his own family, and trying to link what he found to the papers and diaries in the family archives.
He wasn’t often all that successful, and some of his notes seemed to be stretching the facts even to Nan. How on earth could he determine that a coin was Roman, for instance, when it was so worn that there wasn’t anything to show it even was a coin except that it was round and bronze?
Eventually, though, he had built all that a reasonable man could, and he turned his attention to other places he might go looking for bits of the past.
That was when he hit on the idea of clearing out the old well.
The children leaned over the book intently as they realized that they had struck gold at last. The first few entries, mostly the general dates Lord Mathew had uncovered telling him who had ordered the well built and why it had gone dry, interspersed with observations about the weather and the implications for the harvest, were rather boring. One very small man had to be lowered down to the bottom on a rope, and dug the debris out, shovelful by small shovelful, dumping it into buckets to be sent up for examination and disposal. Then it all got sifted once it arrived at the top of the well, and anything not dirt, rocks, and plant life were set aside for Lord Mathew to look at in detail. It had been difficult finding someone willing to go down into the well; it had a bad reputation, and according to Lord Mathew’s notes, the servants claimed that on certain nights one could hear moaning and vile curses coming from the bottom.
Then the digger found the skull and nothing would persuade anyone on the estate to go down into the well. Lord Mathew, now afire with excitement, stripped to his shirtsleeves and had himself lowered down into the hole. With the aid of a lantern held over his head, he meticulously excavated until he uncovered the entire body.