I felt his quick, assessing glance. 'I see.'
'He wears a ring on the little finger of his left hand,' I said. 'A fairly heavy ring. Silver. It's got the family crest on it, that hooded hawk's head on the braided wreath. You can sort of see it, in this picture.'
I pointed, and Geoff looked.
'Not that it really matters,' I went on, 'since it only shows that he's head of the family. It doesn't prove his name was Richard.'
'No,' Geoff admitted, cocking his head, 'but it might prove that someone owned the Hall in between William's death and Arthur's inheritance. Unless, of course, this is Arthur we're looking at.'
I shook my head emphatically, my curls bouncing. 'Not a chance. Arthur has a weaselly sort of face, and looks a proper brat.'
'Watch it,' Geoff warned, grinning. 'I'm a direct descendant of that weaselly-faced brat.'
'Sorry.'
He leaned closer, until his nose was just inches from the brushstrokes. 'It's a pity the poor chap's mother didn't sew a name tag onto his jacket,' he quipped.
'That's it!'
'What's it?' He brought his head round, curious.
'Richard's mother,' I told him, my excitement mounting. 'Look, suppose I could prove to you that I knew something, something I couldn't have learned any other way than by seeing it, and suppose I could back that up with evidence, physical evidence. Would you believe in Richard then?'
'I believe in him now.'
'No you don't. Not really. But if I can show you that one part of my story is factual, then maybe you'll accept the rest of it as fact, too.'
'The law of logical deduction, you mean.' He smiled faintly. 'All right, Sherlock. What did you have in mind?'
'We'll need a shovel,' I told him, and the smile faded.
'A shovel?'
'Something to dig with.'
*-*-*-*
The sun was creeping overhead, and there were scarcely any shadows in the sleeping courtyard. I stood knee-deep in a tangle of weeds and briars and looked at the tools in Geoff’s hands.
'I'm not sure those will be enough," I voiced my doubts, and he looked down himself, frowning over the slightly rusted ice pick and trowel.
'Well, they'll have to do,' he replied. 'It's not my fault Iain hides all the tools. He's got all sorts of spades and shovels stashed away somewhere, but I haven't the faintest idea where he keeps them.' 'All right.' I shrugged, taking another step forward and shifting the matted growth with an experimental foot. 'I think it was around here, somewhere.'
'What was?'
'The tombstone,' I told him plainly. 'Richard's mother's tombstone. They wouldn't bury her in the churchyard because she was a Catholic, so William de Mornay had her buried here.'
'You're joking.'
'Not at all. It's a white slab, about this wide'—I spread my hands two feet apart—'and her name is carved on it.'
His eyes caught a gleam of my own excitement. 'Right here, you say?'
'I think so. It might be underneath a lot of soil,' I qualified, looking around us. 'The ground seems higher against the wall than it looked back then, but that could just be my imagination.'
'What about using that door as a reference point?' he suggested, nodding back over his shoulder toward the house. 'Where did the ground level used to be relative to that door?'
'The door wasn't there, then. The whole west passage used to be open on this side, like the cloisters in a monastery.'
Geoff accepted my statement philosophically. 'Well, we'll just have to hope for the best, then. The ice pick has a seven-inch blade, that ought to be enough.'
I felt an urge to cross my fingers as I watched him crouch down on his heels and begin to probe the overgrown earth with the ice pick, his movements cautious, half-believing. I suppose I had been secretly hoping, all along, that Geoff knew that he had once been Richard. I had envisioned in my waking fantasies a sort of euphoric moment of revelation, with both of us running into each other's arms like those hackneyed couples on television, glorying in the fact that we had found each other again after more than three centuries of waiting.... Of course, it hadn't happened quite like that. Reality rarely conformed to fantasy, in my experience. But perhaps, I thought, if I could convince him at least that I wasn't mad, that Richard de Mornay had in fact existed, then in time he might come to realize who he was. What we were.
His voice drifted over my thoughts. 'You think I'm Richard, don't you?'
'What makes you say that?'
'Deductive reasoning, again,' he said, slanting a smile in my direction. 'If you were Mariana, then ...' He paused, significantly.
'I can't say the thought hasn't crossed my mind,' I admitted, choosing my words with care. 'We did hit it off rather well, you and I, and your last name is de Mornay, and you love France nearly as much as he did.'
'How do you know he didn't come back as a Frenchman, then?'
I gazed down at that dark head, bent low over his work so that I couldn't see his expression. 'And you look exactly like him,' I finished in a quiet voice.
He let that one pass, moving his exploration a little farther from the house. 'It may not be here, anymore,' he warned. 'The tombstone, I mean. It may have been broken, or someone may have dug it up in later years and got rid of it, sacrilegious as that sounds. Or it may be down deeper than seven inches.' He glanced at my face and grinned. 'But you're going to keep me out here until I find the blasted thing, aren't you?'