Conspiracies - Mercedes Lackey [62]
Burke grinned and Addie chuckled. “That’s a very likely story,” she said. “At the turn of the century people manufactured hundreds of those sorts of things. Petrified giants, baby mermaids…”
“I don’t know why it couldn’t be a real Druid oak,” Muirin replied, sullenly. “It’s just as likely a story. And how do you explain the magic in it? We all felt it, the way we can’t look at the oak without working really hard.”
“Oh, it’s almost certainly a spell carved into it,” Loch replied. “That’s how Druidic spells were cast in the first place. Written language was so sacred you weren’t supposed to use it for anything but magic and prayers. For that matter, spoken language was sacred, too, and bards were also magicians. That’s where the word ‘enchantment’ came from—you chanted at something and that worked magic. Just because some farmer carved something he found in a book into that tree, that doesn’t make the inscription itself phony. If he copied something faithfully enough, it would be real magic all right. For all we know, it really is the sort of spell you’d find carved into a sacrificial oak.”
Muirin didn’t look mollified, but finally she shrugged. “There’s definitely magic going on there,” she repeated.
“Definitely,” Loch agreed, and the rest of them nodded.
“It might have been even more powerful when it was fresh,” Addie pointed out. “Probably protective. Tyniger lived to be awfully old, and his fortune managed to pass through the Great Depression pretty much intact. That’s what’s been in my scrapbooks. He made his fortune in the 1880s, and built mansions with it in San Francisco, Denver, New Orleans, and New York City. But instead of building a vacation home in the Catskills or the Hamptons like everyone else did, he built Oakhurst out here. He started construction around 1900 and it took ten years to finish. It was a real showplace; for the first couple of years he was bringing people here all the time by his private rail line to show it off. Then, about the time World War I started, he gradually stopped spending any time in any of his other mansions, and stopped bringing people out here. People didn’t notice so much because everyone was wrapped up in the War. But the Great Influenza Epidemic in 1918 pretty much seems to have made him decide he wasn’t going to bring anyone here anymore and he wasn’t going to leave; he sold all the other places and lived here as a recluse. The funny thing is that one of the books has a big section of notes to him from the staff, thanking him for saving them from the Influenza; not one of them got sick. And it looks like that year is when he started making the scrapbooks. I’m no expert, but it looks as if all of the earliest ones were made in the same year, like he finally took stacks of clippings and things and made them into books.”
“Huh,” Burke said. “And all of them say ‘Oakhurst’ on the front. Not his name. It’s like the house was his kid.”
“The house might have been his child,” Addie replied. “He never married, he never had any children at all, and he died without an heir and without a will. But he doubled his fortune in the war, and when he died in 1939 he was over eighty, and that was really old for those times.”
“Then I got the oldest of the scrapbooks,” said Burke. “The house was in really good shape when he died, too; the last of the scrapbooks is full of photos he took and developed himself, and it was just amazing. So if there’s some spell on the tree, it explains why Tyniger devoted himself to the house and the tree took care of him,” Burke said slowly. “But then what?”
“All I found in my scrapbooks were more of those photos,” Loch said. “So I did some research. You had a huge estate here, from a really wealthy man, with no heir and no will. When there’s that much money, the State has to be really careful how