The Benevent Treasure

Chapter Thirty-eight

Candida did not know how much time had gone by. Perhaps the effect of the drug had not quite worn off, perhaps the heavy air of this small confined space had dulled her senses, but after she had come upon the door which had no handle everything seemed to stand still. She couldn’t move the door, she couldn’t go on, and there was no strength in her to go back. She wasn’t afraid any longer – everything was too hazy for that. But she remembered that she must save the battery of the torch, and she switched it off. She didn’t remember anything after that for quite a long time.

She woke to a cramped position and stiff limbs, and for a moment she did not know where she was. With returning memory, she put on the torch again. There was no sense in staying here. The door wouldn’t move, and the air was fresher below. She went down the steps and back along the way that she had come. There must be other ways out of these passages. There was the one behind the bookcase in her room, and certainly one in the room which Nellie had had, or how could Miss Cara have come into it walking in her sleep? There might be a dozen ways in, a dozen ways out. Any one of them would serve her turn, but she must find it before the light began to fail.

She came back to the place from which she had started. At least she thought it was that place, because looking back, she had seen, or thought she had seen, that the passage ran away to the right. She went on and found that the right-hand bend had become a turn. There was something that lay across the path. The light fell on it. It was an iron bar coated with rust. She stepped across it without thinking what it might be.

The passage ran on a few feet and ended in a kind of hollow cave or niche. The niche was narrower than the passage, and it was raised above it. The beam of the torch played over it and showed an iron-bound box or chest with the lid thrown back. It filled the niche and it disclosed, piled up within, the treasure which Ugodi Benevento had stolen three hundred years ago.

At the first glance she had held the torch too high, but even then she had no doubt as to what she had stumbled upon. There was a dish or platter standing on its edge and leaning against one of the hinges. There was a pair of candlesticks fallen in a St. Andrew’s cross. There were other things. She remembered that there had been a golden dish – no, ‘sundry golden plates and dishes’ – in the list which she and Derek had read, sitting safely in the daylight with the table between them. They had looked across the three-hundred-year gap, and Derek had warned her to have nothing to do with the Treasure. She could remember that he had said to let it alone. And then he had spoken about Alan Thompson – just his name and, ‘I’ve got a feeling he didn’t leave it alone.’

It was something like that – in her mind, but vaguely, with memory playing on it as the beam of the torch played on the hidden things in the niche.

The beam was still too high. The hand that held the torch was rigid, reluctant to bring it down. She did not direct it consciously, but began, to move as if she could no longer hold it up. The shimmering light slid over the stones of a necklace. They were great red stones, and they were linked with diamonds. It slid lower. Now what it touched was not stone, but bone. Fleshless bones of a skeleton hand which clutched the edge of the chest.

Lower, down the shape of an arm, to a heap of huddled clothes pressed close against the niche. Someone had knelt there to clutch at the Treasure – had knelt – and clutched – and died. Even to Candida’s failing senses there could be no doubt as to who that someone had been. She had no doubt at all that it was Alan Thompson who had laid hands on the Benevento Treasure and died for it. She took a wavering step backwards and went down.