The Lost Treasure of Lorne

Chapter Seven

Three days later, they had retraced Michael's treasure-seeking steps throughout the castle, from the attics of the tallest towers to the lowest of the storerooms in the cellars.

John's birthday dawned, and still they had not found the treasure. They were covering some of the same ground now, banging on walls in the hopes of hearing something hollow; trying to turn the flourishes in carved wall panels and frames in case one of them unlocked a hidden door.

"What time of day did Lady Normington pronounce her curse?" John asked, as he circled the dining hall for the third time that day, so intent on his search that he walked right through the watching ghosts.

Caitlin didn't know, and so she told him.

The approaching doom did not seem to make the ghosts more agitated than usual. Indeed, the usual group of women carried on mysterious tasks in the corner, as they had for weeks, often joined by one or more other ghosts.

The duke's man of business arrived, and monopolised his master's attention for most of the afternoon and into the evening, but Caitlin and John carried on the hunt until they had to change for dinner and pretend to the man of business, who was staying overnight, that nothing was amiss.

Once he was safely off to bed, the three of them met in Michael's private sitting room to wait for midnight, and in ones and twos the ghosts seeped through the walls to join them.

"Do you suppose the servants are mistaken about the date?" John asked as the clock chimed eleven times. Several of the ghosts looked up from whatever they were doing and shook their heads.

"Then about the consequence," Michael suggested. "You will stay in the castle, and not all be forfeit to the devil."

But that suggestion set off not just a flurry of shakes but a mournful wailing.

"But if the curse is true and the date is true..." Caitlin said, as the ghosts crowded around her nodding, "then we have less than an hour to find the answer." The ghosts seemed to lose interest, wandering off again to their corners.

"I can't think of anywhere we have not looked," Michael grieved. "Fiona." He stood in front of the ghost of his young wife, so that she had to look up at him. "Fiona, I want to help. Can't you tell us how to find the treasure? And the casket with the marriage lines? Please, Fiona."

But Fiona slid her eyes away from him and circled around him to join the others in the corner.

They watched the hands of the clock shift with glacial speed towards midnight, and still the ghosts remained, even after the thirty-first of August became the first of September. Caitlin had no idea what she expected. Anything from a silent disappearance to Satan himself arriving in clouds of fire and sweeping her relatives into the maw of hell. For nothing to happen at all was almost a letdown, relieved though she was.

"Is the clock slow, perhaps?" John suggested, and they waited another interminable half hour.

"We might as well go to bed," Caitlin said at last. "Either the legend is wrong or the date is."

"The date!" Michael stopped short, halfway across the room to the door. "It isn't the thirty-first of August."

"No," John agreed. "It is after midnight."

"That's not what I mean. The Calendar Act. The Calendar Act, Caitlin."

"Michael, you are not making sense."

Michael caught her hands and almost danced her across the room.

"No, listen. We have another eleven days. You're too young to realise, it isn't three hundred years for almost a fortnight."

Caitlin glanced at John who looked as mystified as she. "You will need to explain."

"The dates changed. The whole calendar changed. They took eleven days out to bring us in line with the rest of Europe. I was born under the Julian calendar and had my first birthday under the Gregorian. It became a joke in my family that I was always in a hurry to get places, and even had my birthday early. My mother used to wish me a happy natal day on the date I was born, and another eleven days later on the actual anniversary."

The ghosts did not look enlightened. But then the confusion of sound went both ways, and Michael's explanation was far too complex to put into simple mime. Unless... Caitlin stepped in front of Fiona, attracting her attention, and held up both hands, then folded down one finger after another, and both thumbs, tipping her head to one side and raising her brows in question. She did it a second time, and a third.

Other ghosts gathered to watch, and John came to repeat the gestures at her side, and then Michael, who added a pantomime at the end in which he pointed to the ghosts, and swished his fisted hands from side to side, as if scrubbing something out.

The ghosts vanished. Every single one, disappearing in a moment.

"What did I do?" Michael wondered out loud, but before he could finish the sentence, they were back, watching him expectantly, glowering or smiling according to their nature.

"Do it again," Caitlin said, and led the two men, holding up both of her hands to start the sequence, all the way through to the scrubbing motion. The ghosts were gone as she finished the motion, then back in before she had time to blink, the bolder ones grinning broadly, and clapping.

"We have ten days before they vanish," Michael concluded.

"Tendays," John said, "to find Lorne's treasure."