Page 137 of The Bastard's Iberian Bride
As they bent their heads together, his scent engulfed her, soap and clean linens, and a hint of the alcohol used on his wound.
“These marks on the heart don’t look like much,” he said. “Perhaps they’re just from the jeweler’s tongs gripping hot metal. I don’t see any key here.”
She pulled out the letter. “Filomena, Kincaid, Tellingford and I had a long chat.” She put the paper aside and fingered the rings. “Tellingford thinks my father’s man, Jock, had the key to whatever code my father was using, but he’d been coshed on the crossing, and couldn’t remember father’s last message. Filomena said my father would have made allowances for that possibility, and would have laid in another—or perhaps two more paths to the treasure.”
“If there really is a treasure.”
She looked at him through her lashes. “I didn’t tell you… Jock had claimed my father left a great fortune for me. Forgive me.”
He lifted her chin and studied her. “You had expectations of treasure, yet you married me anyway.” A smile cracked his face.
“One doesn’t pass up a house, an income, and a man who can kiss like you.”
He leaned forward but she held up a finger and stopped him. “Thereisa treasure, at least, that much Jock did swear to.” She chewed on her lip. “Though when Mama denied she’d ever been a spy and said the stories he’d told me about her weren’t true, I doubted his treasure story also.”
“He was speaking of Filomena.”
“Yes. And why could he not just tell me the truth, directly?” She shook her head. “Because he too was a spy and a liar, and nothing is ever a straight path with them.”
He drew her head to his chest where she heard his great heart beating fiercely.
“I’m glad you’re not a spy, Bink. And I don’t truly care about this hidden money.”
“Not at all?”
“Well, perhaps I do. Perhaps a little. I suppose I won’t entirely stop wondering.”
“So perhaps we should look for one of the other crooked paths your father laid. He sent you Jock, who was no help, and the ring, which has proven ineffective, the letter to your mother, which holds no clues, and this.”
He slid the wooden box closer.
She drew in a sharp breath, her chin lifting. “And there’s also the message he wrote to me.”
She unfastened the lid and drew out the yellowed paper, Bink’s breath warming her ear.
“But it’s not a letter,” he said.
He’d read that also, when he’d searched her things. Of course he had.
Never mind. “It’s a poem.” She read the terse script aloud:
A sweet girl named Polly
Curled up with her dolly
And spent the whole morning in play.
She ought have been learning
From books, pages turning
At work at her letters all day.
A quill you must take
And write without break
Until all of your letters are true.
