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Peach twitched his head, as though this didn’t merit a verbal rebuttal.

“You’ll try, though.” Georgie smiled a hopeful smile.

“You’ll tell me what’s the reason?” Peach retorted.

“There’s something under it,” said Elf, and Peach flicked his glare to her. The expression on her face made him turn his eyes up to the heavens and mutter under his breath.

It seemed the opposite of prayerful, but also, promising.

“You’ll try,” said Georgie, more confidently.

Peach loosened his neckerchief, rolled his head on his shoulders, cracked his knuckles, and tried.

He tried, and he failed. He couldn’t get his arms around the boulder, or budge it with his shoulder, even as his boots slid and gouged the earth like a plow.

After a quarter hour of bone-cracking effort, he stepped away, red in the face and steaming. He didn’t so much as look at Georgie or Elf. He turned and strode down the path.

Georgie sagged as he disappeared into the woodland. Elf was biting her lip, arms tightly folded.

That cheeky, sarcastic, intolerable bird was still twit, twit, twitting.

And then Peach reappeared, a Christmas goose–sized rock under one arm. He was dragging a tree branch.

With the Christmas goose as a fulcrum, and the branch as a lever, he tried again. The branch snapped with a sound like a gunshot.

Peach didn’t flinch. He repositioned the shortened length.

Georgie watched him work with bated breath and didn’t realize Elf was gone, until she was back, dragging a second branch.

Peach directed its placement, and together, she and Peach levered Holywell Rock up by inches, and then Georgie braced Peach’s branch, while he set his shoulder to the rock once more. His neck bulged. A vein throbbed on his forehead. And Holywell Rock began to tilt.

Peach made a noise like a bull.

Holywell Rock flipped over. Georgie and Elf fell backward. Every bird that hadn’t fluttered off at that first crack of wood flapped into the air.

There was silence in the meadow. Peach was doubled up, hands on his thighs, heaving for breath.

Elf crawled forward. Georgie crawled too.

The recess in the earth was circular, perhaps a yard in diameter, embanked with masonry, its crumbled gray rim scratched white.

Georgie expected to confront their own face, and Elf’s, reflecting up from the surface of an ancient pool.

The well held only river stones. Stones those two Saxon nuns had thrown down on top of the sunken treasure, to conceal it.

Georgie’s gaze locked on Elf’s. She was thinking the same thing.

Together, the two of them stretched their arms down into the well. The stones were smooth and cold, bigger than muffins, for the most part, smaller than loaves of bread.

Georgie dropped them one by one on the grass, rapidly, carelessly. They clattered off each other. Some of the stones were gray, others paler. The one in Georgie’s hands was streaked with dark brown and darker red.

“Blood?” Georgie dropped it, wiping their fingers frantically on the grass. Visions of murdered nuns danced before their eyes.

“Metal.” Elf lifted a stone similarly smeared with gore. “Any iron would have rusted in the water.”

Iron nails connecting the planks of a chest. Iron straps reinforcing the wood.

“And oak?” asked Georgie, grabbing another stone. “Would an oak chest have rotted?”

Elf didn’t respond. The stone in her hands thudded to the ground beside her.

“Oh,” said Georgie. Because they were looking down at the answer, looking into the gap between stones at the dark grain of preserved wood.

“Oh,” they said again, heart swooping. “Oh.”

The last stones were the most difficult to pull out, given their depth, about the length of Georgie’s arm.

“I’ll do it,” said Charles Peach. He knelt and removed them, and then, as easily as Georgie might have lifted a hatbox, he lifted out the chest. The chest was the size of two hatboxes, but clearly much weightier.

It looked intact until he set it down, and then the sides collapsed.

The lid balanced on the contents, some of which spilled onto the grass.

Georgie’s gaze followed a ball of dirt as it bounced, only it wasn’t dirt. It was fragments of tarnished silver stuck together with rust. They looked at Elf. Her eyes were huge, her knuckles white, fists crossed at the wrists against her chest.

“What is this?” asked Peach, voice soft with wonder.

Elf unfroze. She crawled to the chest and picked up the lid. Georgie and Peach leaned closer. A mass of metal, gleaming in the morning sun. Coins, rings, bracelets, their warm yellow undimmed by the centuries.

“That’s gold,” said Peach.

It was gold. Silver too. Georgie glanced from a lidded silver vessel to a large silver cross. They started to laugh. The bird had returned, twitting away, and they whistled along, then gave up, to laugh some more.

A two-handled silver cup had tipped when the chest broke apart, scattering glass beads and other small ornaments. The cup had a gold lip, gold bands and enamel studs around the bowl, a short stem and a flared foot.

A chalice.

Georgie felt a jolt when their fingers closed around the stem. Connection. Not only with the metal but with the other hands that had touched it before them. They sought Elf’s eyes, which she raised now from the treasure to meet theirs.

“To Sexburga.” They raised the chalice. “And to your grandmother,” they went on. “And to you, Elfreda Marsden, archaeologist.”

The holy well itself had gone dry, but Elf’s dark eyes welled with tears and with light. They could fall into her eyes, and keep falling, for another thousand years.

She turned away, turned at the waist to lay down the lid, and turned back, accepting the chalice. She rotated it every which way, studying it hungrily, then shook herself.

“It’s yours,” she said. “We had an agreement.” She held it out to them.

They didn’t take it. “Give me something less unique.”

Her smile was relieved. “There are chopped ingots. Little hunks of hack gold and silver.”

“I want three,” they said. “Three pieces to sell. I’ll divide the proceeds between the three of us, the finders.”

“Me?” asked Peach.

“Of course you,” said Georgie. “We all found it together.”

Elf was hesitating, and they wondered for a moment if she’d reject the proposition, to preserve a sense of herself as disinterested in anything but the hoard’s historical import. She needed money, though. Besides, money was the hoard’s historical import.

“These objects were twice plundered already,” they pointed out. “Don’t you antiquaries like to uphold tradition?”

She looked nettled, but she returned the chalice and selected three hunks of gold.

“Your plunder,” she said as she dropped them into their hand.

“Our plunder.” They grinned. A good thing they’d dressed in a gown styled like a riding habit, with buttoned pockets. They slipped the gold inside.

“And the rest of it?” Peach seemed dazed.

“By law, all of it belongs to the king,” said Elf. “Once we report it to the coroner, he’ll take possession and hold an inquest. But first I’ll catalog and describe and draw every piece.” Her face was lighting up at the thought.

Peach’s face had darkened. “The Crown owns what’s buried?”

“Only if it’s gold or silver, and deliberately hidden,” replied Elf, almost absently. She was somewhere else, winging away in her mind, toward the Peak was Georgie’s guess.

“So not something as was dropped?” persisted Peach. “Or made of bronze or iron?”

Georgie was about to ask him why he wondered, but Elf was rising, and they forgot Peach as they sprang to their feet.

“I must go to the Peak at once,” she said. “I must tell Papa, and the Barrow Prince.”

“I’ll drive you,” offered Georgie, but she was staring at them like a woman newly woken from a dream.

“What time is it?” she gasped. “After ten? The theater company! If I’ve spoiled your chance, I won’t forgive myself. Perhaps it’s not too late. Hurry.”

She made a frantic, flapping gesture with her hands.

She wouldn’t believe them if they told her now that they’d already chosen to stay, so they didn’t bother.

They shook their head. “You need me to drive you. How else will you get there?”

“Mrs. Alderwalsey. She’ll let me take her carriage, I know it. Papa last wrote from Incledon Hall, in a village near Youlgreave. It’s not so far.” Her flapping hands pressed their arm in an urgent little shove. “Hurry.”

They let her move them away a step. And because a plan had been forming in their mind all morning, and they did have cause to chase down the strollers, they took another step away.

“All right,” they said. “I’ll hurry.” They glanced at Peach. The farmer cut his eyes at Elf, then cocked a brow at them.

“Don’t mind me,” he murmured. The dimple was back in his cheek.

Georgie didn’t mind him. They didn’t mind anything. They bounded the two steps back to Elf, and before they hurried off, they gave her a thorough kiss goodbye.