“Don’t put it past a pirate to write sideways on his map.” Sheridan grinned and turned with the rest of them. “Let’s say it is a bird. So it’s the way to hold the map. How do we know? What we should be facing with it, I mean?”

“St. Martin’s! Of course.” Beth laughed and shoved the map at Sheridan, who took it eagerly. “We’ll assume that square shape at the base is the window that most directly faces St. Martin’s. Here.” She ran to the remains of a window and patted the stone.

“To your right next then.”

Libby trailed behind as Beth led them along the east-facing wall, along what might have once been a rampart before the top levels had fallen in. They turned at the corner, scurried over a low bit of wall, and struck off down the hill. Libby, Oliver, and Bram hurried to catch up.

“Are you ever going to tell us where you found the map, Beth?” Oliver called after his sister.

She made no answer.

“If the key to knowing how to use it was in a letter to his wife, as was the message about treasure from the Canary, with that songbird reference,” Libby mused as she jumped down from the wall with the aid of Oliver’s hand, “then it has to have been somewhere Mrs. Mucknell would have known to find it. Probably not, for instance, in a cave.”

Bram snorted a laugh. “You mean most ladies don’t go climbing about in caves? What a novel concept.”

“You do have a point, Libby,” Oliver said. “Perhaps not in her care exactly, since she never hunted it up herself. But a place she’d have easy access to, if she knew to look for it. The church, maybe. The garrison.”

She came to a halt. “Their house.”

Oliver stopped too, staring at her for a moment with another of course look on his face. And then burst into a run. “Beth! Tas-gwyn’s? So you fetched the letters while we were there!”

His sister wasn’t paying him any heed though. She and Sheridan had arrived at another outcropping of stones whose original purpose Libby couldn’t discern, and they’d fallen to their knees behind it. “Shovel!” she shouted.

Oliver delivered it into Beth’s hands—she certainly didn’t look inclined to move out of the way and let him do the digging for her.

Bram heaved a long breath and leaned against a different piece of wall. “You might as well make yourselves comfortable.” As if to prove it, he reached into his pocket, pulled out a bag of chocolate drops, and held it out to them. “Don’t let their initial excitement fool you. Sheridan can dig for hours—days—not find anything, and still be convinced he’s in the right place, or just a few inches off.”