Warriors

CHAPTER 31

Hawke never slept very well in an empty bed, and currently he had the problem of sleeplessness to cope with. He couldn’t turn his brain off. It was always thus, he thought, whenever the possibility of a new case or mission would spring full-blown into existence.

Having said good night to little Alexei and his guardian, Scotland Yard’s detective sergeant Nell Spooner, Hawke had wearily climbed into bed and fallen asleep. It had been a long day at Cambridge and he’d arrived home late, expecting Nell’s welcoming arms in his bed.

Normally, except when they had quarreled, Nell shared his bed. But on this night she’d chosen to sleep alone. Her room was on the same floor as his but situated at the distant end of the hallway, right next door to the nursery. She’d been wearing an odd expression when she’d kissed him good night. Something was bothering her. He’d asked if she was all right and she’d brushed it off, rising on tiptoes to peck his cheek before vanishing, a rustle of silk gliding into the darkness of the long corridor.

It was raining, and he listened to the rain and to the rain turning to ice and to the thunder. Rain always sounded like darkness somehow, darkness and night storms — and, perhaps, youth, he supposed, since it always struck him as a pleasant sound. He’d always preferred bad weather to good, the moody and electric drama of a looming cold front; he liked imagining the abiding solace of a strong roof over his head, hatches battened down, anchor to leeward, his better angels keeping the black dogs at bay.

Imagining because the black dogs were always out there, always snarling at the door. No matter how fast you ran, how far, their red eyes gleaming in the pitch-black night.

Usually the sound of a storm had the power to distract him and he’d sleep again. Not tonight. No, on this wintry night nothing at all worked, and at 3:00 A.M. he rolled over in bed and switched on the bedside lamp. He picked up the book he was reading, plumped up his pillows, and settled in, soon lost in the story.

A wave of happiness settled over him. A good book on a stormy night, the drafty silence of the big house, the soft glow of dying embers in the hearth, shadows climbing the walls around him. He was reading a slim volume Ambrose had bought for him when they stopped in a bookstore in Cambridge. On Chesil Beach. It was the tale of a doomed marriage, of lost hope and dashed dreams. It wasn’t the stuff of his favorite author, P.G. Wodehouse, plainly — no Right Ho, Jeeves! or Pigs Have Wings tonight — but the author wrote beautifully and Hawke found himself growing sleepy again.

He must have drifted off because now everything was quiet again, the storm having moved out over the Evesham Valley. Only the dim sound of a farm dog barking somewhere in the distance. He had that overwhelmingly pleasant sensation of the full weight of his body upon the bed, heavy and somnolent. He didn’t want to open his eyes yet; he wanted to feel the steady rise of consciousness leaving the dream state and pushing up through the grey clouds of—

Then he heard, very close to him, a footstep and a cough.

He felt that terrible hardening of the flesh that always accompanied the absolute surety that you were being watched. Footsteps in the fog…

“Daddy! Wake up! It’s snowing!”

“Is it, darling?” he mumbled sleepily. He rolled over and saw that precious face hovering in the grey light filling the high-ceilinged room.

Alexei laughed.

And in that fleeting moment Hawke thought: we’re all going to be all right here…

“It is, it is, Papa!” Alexei cried. “Come to the window and see. Treasure Mountain is all covered with snow. We can go sledding, Spooner says so. Isn’t that exciting?”

“Yes, it certainly is snowing, all right,” he said, gazing toward his windows.

Hawke sat up in bed and reached down to lift the boy up onto his wide four-poster bed. Alexei was dressed in his bright red snowsuit and was wearing a matching woolen cap and mittens. The intensity of the love Hawke felt threatened to overpower his ability to speak.

“Have you had your breakfast yet, son?”

“Oh, yes. Spooner and I have been up for hours, Papa. I’ve been waiting and waiting to wake you up.”

“And you say that our very own Treasure Mountain is covered with snow?”

“Yes!”

“Hmm. That presents yet another mystery. Do you know where pirates go in the snow, Alexei?”

“No… but… to their rooms?”

Hawke smiled at this.

“Maybe. As good a guess as any. But, Alexei, you do know that if we do see a pirate, no matter how big or how fearsome that blackguard looks, we are going right up to him and demand to know if they’ve buried any more secret treasure on that mountain lately.”

“Oh, Papa,” Alexei said, his shining eyes conveying his shivering pleasure in the direction his morning was taking. Pirates. Snow. Sled. Treasure. He wanted to put his arms round his father’s neck and squeeze so tight…

Since October Hawke had been reading Treasure Island to Alexei before bedtime in the nursery, a new chapter every night. Like all boys, his son was captivated by the story, and even insisted that his favorite, meaning terrifying, passages about Long John Silver and his dastardly crew be read over and over again.

Pirates had appeared on the little boy’s horizon and his world was a far better place for it.

One morning, Hawke had risen at dawn. He’d found the old wooden lockbox he’d had hidden away in his closet since childhood, the one where he’d kept the priceless treasures of youth: a crow feather, a clear marble, the shriveled rose he’d worn in his lapel the day of his parents’ funeral, a skate key, a lock of his mother’s hair, many old coins he’d collected, some of them even gold, tickets to a country fair, a faded black-and-white snapshot of his mom and dad aboard their ill-fated yawl, Seahawke.

That morning, Hawke, holding a candle, had added a few new gold and silver coins from his collection inside the battered box, then tucked it under his arm and made his way through the darkness outside, through the parterre and up the long incline beyond, a narrow mown field that rose to the river’s edge. There was a stand of birch near the end with a pathway leading into the woods. The narrow dirt path led to the sizable hill of earth then and ever after officially known as Treasure Mountain by his family.

He climbed to the summit and looked around for a location suitable to his purposes.

He carefully paced off the chosen spot by triangulating three trees twenty paces distant. There he drove the sharp end of a broken branch into the hard ground and began to dig. Not too deep, he reminded himself. Alexei’s patience with his little shovel was limited.

Returning to his library, he’d scrawled a map of the buried treasure in charcoal and left it that night under Alexei’s pillow. A heavy black X marked the spot. Later that morning, the sun high, the two of them had climbed the hill. It had been a clear blue winter’s day and Alexei had returned home in the evening clutching the little box that had once belonged to his father, pledging never, ever to lose it. He’d fallen asleep counting his treasure and dreaming of pirates digging in the moonlight on the hilltop he could see from the nursery window.