He chuckled and looked to the sky as if it had a calendar printed upon it. “So it is. Here you are, then.” He reached toward her rock as he opened the satchel, sliding a huge, paper-wrapped something onto the surface a foot or so away from her books and pencils. A heavy something, from the looks of it. Smiling all the while, as if it were perfectly normal for a complete stranger to call her by name, exchange a line of a handwritten poem with her, give her a gift, and then just tip his cap. “Cheerio.”

She blinked. “Good day.” What else was she supposed to say? She could protest, she supposed, that she had no idea what he was about. But then he’d probably take that parcel back, and she couldn’t deny a sudden, rather sharp desire to see what was in it. It was a rather enormous thing to be carrying around in a shoulder bag.

Curious indeed.

He whistled as he turned and tromped back through the sand and grass toward the path. A minute later he’d disappeared over the garrison wall. Libby watched him until he was gone, cataloguing everything she could think to note about him. Then, making herself ignore the parcel for a moment more, she grabbed her notebook and opened to a page at the back, jotting down her observations about him.

She scribbled down the words they’d exchanged as well as the clothes he’d been wearing. And finally the words Brown paper–wrapped parcel, round, approximately nineteen inches in diameter. Tied with white string.

There. She’d examined it all scientifically. She rather felt she’d earned the curiosity now as she reached for the parcel. The . . . rock? It certainly felt like one as she hefted it, which made her mouth twist. The last time someone had presented her with a rock, it had been Sheridan. And the rock had supposedly borne evidence of some ancient civilization that he claimed had once lived at the location of Telford Hall. She’d stared at it for a solid five minutes and noted absolutely nothing of interest. Had it contained a fossil or impression of a leaf, perhaps she would have seen the allure. But chisel marks or whatever caught his eye? What did that matter?

If this was more of the same . . . Well, no way to know until she opened it. A tug on the string, a folding of the paper. And she frowned again.

It definitely wasn’t a tool-marked rock. It was, without question, a cannonball. A very large, very heavy cannonball.

Setting it down on the rock before her, she picked up her pencil again and described it as best she could, adding a couple sketches from the various angles that revealed wear.

A cannonball. Utterly boring, except for the mystery of the delivery.