Conspiracies - Mercedes Lackey [61]
Maybe it was just the idea of getting away from this place even for a day. Maybe it was the whole Tom Sawyer trick of knowing she wasn’t going to get something that made her want to have it. Just another divide-and-conquer Oakhurst trick. Probably they’d make a point of dividing up kids who were friends, so one got to go and the other didn’t.
Good old Oakhurst.
She deleted the e-mail. No point in having it sit there, mocking her.
Besides, this evening they were all going to get together to see what they’d found in the scrapbooks. That should keep her mind off stupid field trips.
* * *
“I guess I’ll start,” Spirit said, as they all pulled up chairs to the Monopoly board. “Most of what was in the books I’ve looked through so far is newspaper stories about Arthur Tyniger.”
“Bleah,” Muirin said, making a face. “He was probably hanging out with my robber-baron great-grandfather, figuring out how to evict widows and orphans.”
“This was all stuff from the social columns,” Spirit corrected her. “Lots from New York City and San Francisco newspapers. He was kind of like William Randolph Hearst, not as wealthy, but rich enough to do what he wanted, and he was considered a real catch. Most of the stories are about how he was buying up all kinds of antiquities and art for all of his mansions. English mostly. And what they called ‘curiosities.’ One of them was the oak, and he thought it was so important that he built the whole house around it! And guess what it was sold to him as?”
“Robin Hood’s oak tree in Sherwood Forest,” said Burke, with a laugh.
“The oak Bonnie Prince Charlie hid in,” Addie put in.
Spirit shook her head. “He bought it as the same oak that Merlin was imprisoned in by Nimue,” she told them. “The Merlin. Merlin the Magician. King Arthur’s Merlin. He believed it, too. It was on some farm in Cornwall near Tintagel and was struck and brought down by lightning in a huge storm; that was how he was able to buy it. He had the whole thing transported by steamship to New York, then put on its own flatcar and brought here via rail.”
They stared at her. “Uh … he was a sucker?” Burke said, finally.
“Oh I don’t believe it, either,” she assured them. “I mean, King Arthur’s a myth. And ‘The Merlin’ was supposed to just be a title for a major Druid priest, so there would have been hundreds of Merlins. But I do believe there is a lot of magic in that tree, and we’ve seen the evidence of it.”
The rest nodded. “There’s probably a hundred Merlin’s Oaks, too,” Addie added. “It’s like pieces of the True Cross, you go around collecting those from all the churches in the world and you’ll have enough wood to build the Italian navy.”
Muirin’s eyes had lit up, and she had a strange, eager expression on her face. “Well, the runes on the trunk really are runes, only not the Norse kind,” she said, her voice getting that lilt that meant she was excited. “They’re Celtic ogham. I haven’t been able to translate them yet, but they match perfectly to the ogham symbols I’ve found. It might not have been the Merlin’s Oak, but it was a Merlin’s Oak, I bet!” Spirit looked at her askance. She sounded as if she’d uncovered a cache of double chocolate chocolate-dunked brownies. “I bet it was used for human sacrifices! The Druids would do that with their sacred oaks, tie a victim to it and—”
“More likely some farmer found the tree down, didn’t want to go to the work of cutting it up for firewood, knew Tyniger was in the neighborhood, and decided to make a lot