Chapter Four

“Oh my goodness!” exclaimed Olivia Dale.

Jewels! Large, winking, many-colored jewels!

Olivia could be forgiven for gawking. As the youngest of the grown-up Kings, she was often more like a friend to Sara and her cousins than an aunt. Before her recent marriage to Jasper Dale, she had actually lived at Rose Cottage with Sara and Hetty. Even after her marriage, she visited Rose Cottage so often that Sara didn’t really feel her aunt had moved away at all. Olivia sat in the kitchen of Rose Cottage now, her cup of tea quite forgotten.

“It’s a treasure,” she whispered, blinking so hard at the astonishing sight that she didn’t even have time to think how odd it was to see it in the kitchen of an Avonlea farmhouse.

Hetty, standing nearby, spared only a glance to see what was stirring her sister up so. Hetty, the eldest of the Kings, considered herself the head of the King clan. Unlike Olivia, who still bloomed with youth, Hetty was unmarried and well into middle age. She was a spare, bony woman with strong cheekbones and equally forceful opinions. Her hair was disciplined into a frighteningly neat bun and she wore a watch pinned to her bosom, as though to remind herself perpetually of precious moments awasting. She made it a point to be unimpressed by things that younger, more foolish heads were turned by.

“They’re obviously not real, Olivia,” Hetty said disparagingly. “Far too garish to be genuine.”

Olivia, as romantic in her soul as Hetty was practical, took exception to this killjoy attitude.

“How do you know that?” she objected. “Why what if those rumors about old Captain Crane finding the treasure are true, Hetty?”

Avonlea had long been titillated by rumors of pirate’s treasure hidden away in the many caves that riddled the coast. And the rumors might not have been so farfetched. Prince Edward Islanders had always been a seagoing people. Many had ancestors who might very well have been pirates, considering the old-time ideas of what was fair on the high seas. Hetty herself had an old diary that painted a less than respectable picture of some of her enterprising King forbears—a picture Hetty had done her best to suppress.

Hetty scoffed in her best schoolmarmish manner. Though he had been a good friend to Gus Pike, Hetty considered the Captain nothing but a half-crazy reprobate, good only for scaring children and ranting into the wind.

“Ezekiel Crane? That man couldn’t find the sky lying face upwards on a raft in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.”

Just then, Gus Pike himself stepped out of the pantry. He’d been sent there to change into the snowy white shirt that now adorned his shoulders.

He was still fumbling at getting it done up as he came in.

“I never had no shirt with more than three buttons before,” he told them, to explain his efforts. “Thanks, Miss Olivia. It’s very fine.”

Olivia glowed at Gus’s pleasure. She had raced to finish the last cuff that very morning.

“Well, you know, Gus, it took me hardly any time at all with my new sewing machine.”

Progress was inevitable, even in Avonlea. Olivia’s new machine was quite a sensation in a community where everything was generally stitched by hand. Olivia’s husband, Jasper, was a bit of an inventor, so it was natural that Olivia, too, should be in the forefront of new ideas. Hetty, on the contrary, supported tradition and examined the shirt with a critical eye.

“Let me see! Oh well, no substitute for my own fine hand-stitching, mind you.” Hetty circled round and peered at the garment from the back, expecting to uncover some dread fault committed by the newfangled machine. She only found one committed by her sister. “But Olivia, what have you done? I never asked for an abrupt taper there.”

She pointed to the shoulders, where Gus was beginning to develop a manly breadth. Olivia smiled to herself, knowing what pleased a growing fellow.

“Well, Hetty, Gus is a young man and he cuts a fine figure.”

Gus grinned and Hetty sniffed. Making too much of oneself, Hetty believed, was a recipe for permanently addling one’s head.

“Let us not forget that Gus’s new employment is one of service, Olivia, not glamor,” she commented, poking Gus in the ribs to make him stand up straighter.

“I’d never have gotten the job if it weren’t for your letter of recommendation, Miss King,” Gus put in gratefully.

In spite of all her prickles, Hetty had been responsible, almost single-handedly, for Gus’s current elevation in life. Now she was helping him up the ladder by getting him a nice indoor job as a waiter at the nearby hotel. The new white shirt, the first Gus had ever had on his back, had been a joint project between Hetty and Olivia so that Gus could be properly dressed for his job.

“I’m sure you’ll do very well at the White Sands, Gus,” Olivia told him confidently, despite the fact that the White Sands was a very luxurious place. It attracted the fashionable and the wealthy from all over the continent to sample the bracing sea air and the glorious seaside vistas of Prince Edward Island. Before he met Hetty King, Gus wouldn’t have dared so much as set foot upon the White Sands’ lawn.

Hetty waved one of her hands dismissively. “Certainly he will. Now, off you go, boy. Remember ‘Late for work, our duties will shirk’.”

“I’m halfway there already,” Gus told her, then paused, his gaze sliding to the handkerchief in Olivia’s hand. “Oh, Miss King, could you watch my treasure for me while I’m at work?”

Staunchly true to the wishes of Miss Amanda Stone, Gus had told no one about his adventure the previous night. He had resisted the children’s wild inquiries and valiantly kept hidden the crazy turmoil her visit had set up inside him. Nevertheless, by the light of dawn, his first instinct had been to seek Hetty’s help. If he couldn’t tell her about Amanda, he could at least ask her to guard the booty he had found in his cap after Amanda had fled. That way he’d know the cache was safe and he wouldn’t have to spend his first day at work wondering who was tearing up his humble home in his absence.

“Certainly I will,” Hetty agreed, with an air of humoring the boy. With Gus in such a hurry, she didn’t have time to deliver a lecture about making so much out of a handful of colored glass.

Reassured, Gus dashed for the door and set off hastily at a jog. Ever since Hetty had taken him to task about getting to school on time, Gus had developed a chronic fear of being late for anything. Consequently, he spent a good deal of his life on the run.

“He’s certainly excited about that new job, isn’t he?” Olivia observed, listening with pleasure to the sound of Gus’s receding footsteps.

Hetty turned her attention to the table, from which she gathered up the handkerchief full of jewels.

“Treasure indeed,” she muttered. “Although I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to ascertain their actual worth. Yes, I’ll take them to the jeweler in Carmody whilst I’m there.”

Though she would never admit it out loud, Hetty was not as ready to dismiss Captain Crane as she appeared. She tucked the bundle onto the cupboard shelf and scanned the room.

“Olivia, you haven’t seen my magazine, by any chance?”

The magazine, a copy of the very one Sara had been reading from the evening before, had just fallen into Olivia’s hands As Hetty searched, Olivia paged through it with increasing amusement

“Oh? You mean ‘Death Rides by Night’?” she inquired, her lips quirking.

Hetty’s chin twitched righteously.

“I don’t bother with serials, if that’s what you’re talking about. Oh no, just the occasional recipe and a political essay.”

“Oh, of course,” Olivia conceded, her lips on the very verge of knowing laughter.