Page 40 of Stolen By the Rogue
Come on. Get up. You can’t allow yourself to wallow. You must go on.
Those words had kept her sane over the past few years, had enabled her to survive the hardest days of grief following the loss of her family, and then Pietro. Busy hands stopped her mind from wandering into dark places.
“So, where does that leave us?” asked George.
Now, that’s a question with more than one answer. Are you referring to the treasure or you and me?
And when it came to the matter of the two of them, it wasn’t something Jane wished to ponder under the current circumstances. George had not taken her blanket refusal to discuss the future of their relationship all that well, but her seductive techniques whilst they lay together on the mattress each night had always won over any possible resistance he had sought to attempt.
“I checked the drawings of the house plans this morning in anticipation of the floorboards not revealing anything of value. I am going to clean out the soot and dirt from the fireplace in the kitchen. If it doesn’t yield a hidden fortune, then at least we might be able to get the chimney working and have a fire. I would love to be able to boil some water here in the house,” she replied.
A tired looking George simply nodded. “Alright, then I will start checking the roof. Poking a broom about might loosen something.”
From the state of the fireplace in the kitchen, it appeared not to have been used for many years. There was no grate for burning wood, nor hooks to hold iron pots. For all Jane knew, the black burn marks on the bricks at the back had been there for more than a century.
Kneeling on the hard stone floor, Jane proceeded to brush away the remains of old fires. She hummed a traditional Maltese folk song as she worked but soon stopped when painful memories came rushing back. “Reckless and foolish—that was you in Malta. And you have done the same here—trusted your heart and future to a man who you don’t know can be relied upon,” she muttered.
Slowly, the bricks of the fireplace began to appear. Jane scrubbed them down with a bucket and brush. Most had once been grey, the odd one or two a reddish brown. But slowly, in the right-hand rear corner of the brickwork, a new color began to appear.
These bricks were of a neater, more uniform design. It seemed that at some point in the past, repairs had been made to this part of the hearth.
“Why would you need to replace only some bricks?” she mused.
Jane stared at the chocolate-colored patch of masonry for a moment, then slowly got to her feet. “George, could you please come downstairs for a moment?” she called. Her voice was steady, but her heart raced.
He appeared in the kitchen a short time later, broom in hand. “What do you need?”
Jane pointed toward the fireplace. “Notice anything odd or unusual?”
He crossed the floor and stood in front of the brickwork. Jane patiently waited.
And waited.
When he finally turned and faced her, the hint of a grin was on his lips.
“Why aren’t you more excited?” she asked.
George slipped a hand about her waist and drew Jane in close. He kissed her gently on the forehead. “One thing you learn when you are a thief is not to get your hopes up. I’ve lost count of the number of times in my younger years when I thought I was about to discover Eldorado only to end up with nothing.”
Her shoulders dropped. It wasn’t George’s fault; he was obviously trying to be helpful, to temper her excitement, but it wasn’t what Jane wanted to hear. She pulled out of his embrace.
“Wait a minute,” he said, and walked from the kitchen.
He disappeared for a brief moment before reappearing bearing a mallet and chisel. He knelt in front of the odd-colored section of the fireplace and set the chisel against the mortar of one of the bricks. With steady knocks, he chipped away at the edges.
Setting his tools aside, George then worked one of the bricks free. “Damn,” he muttered.
“What?”
“There is another brick behind it. I was hoping there might be something else,” he replied.
Jane chewed impatiently on the nail of her left thumb.
Please let there be something there.
“What about the other bricks? Could you chip around one of those and see if there is anything different?” she said.
George glanced back over his shoulder at her. He waved Jane over. “Come and help. There is nothing worse than standing by while someone else is working, especially when you have so much at stake.”
