Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

and fast. The ordinary listener wouldn’t have heard him coming. His moccasined feet made no percussive tap as they hit the treads, but there was a faint creaking in the old wood that Faye, attuned to any disturbance in her cherished home, couldn’t ignore.
    Joe rose through the floor and stepped onto the landing, saying, “I made something for you, Faye. I was saving it for later, but I think you’ve had a hard day.”
    She took Joe’s gift and turned it over in her hands, unable to think of an appropriate response other than, “You shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble for me.”
    The workmanship couldn’t be criticized. Joe was very, very clever with his hands. There was no way to tell him that it was wrong to alter something thousands of years old; she didn’t intend to try.
    Joe had used new materials to reconstruct fragments of an atlatl made by west Florida’s Deptford people before the birth of Christ. Starting with a stone weight and a shell trigger that he’d taken from her display case, Joe had whittled and chipped the missing pieces of the atlatl , an archaic type of spear that was thrown by slinging its hinged spearthrower in a whiplash motion. The crowning glory of Joe’s gift was a finely flaked stone point crafted out of chert, the same native stone Florida’s original inhabitants had used in their tools. Given his penchant for stone tools and homemade glue, she couldn’t hazard a guess as to how much of Joe’s time she held in her hands. There was nothing Faye could do but thank him sincerely and resolve to keep her artifact cases locked in the future.
    Joe, embarrassed by the encounter, disappeared down the stairs. Faye hefted the atlatl , choosing a prominent place for it in a display case in her bedroom, then she returned to the landing and lifted the hooked tool above her head. It grabbed hold of a recessed ring in the ceiling and she pulled hard. A hidden trapdoor opened, and she unfolded the rickety wooden ladder that dangled from the door. This was why she rarely ventured into Joyeuse’s cupola. It was so dang hard to get up there.
    Once she had struggled up through the trapdoor, she saw the cranny she’d had in mind. By standing on a windowsill and stretching upward, she could reach her hand into a gap between the top of the wall and the rafters. It was the perfect hiding place…
    …And someone had found it before. There was a wooden box there, about the size of a shoebox, and she gingerly lifted it down to her eye level. Aside from an inch-thick layer of matted dust, the box was in good shape. Carefully dovetailed together without a visible nail, the box itself was an exciting find. She tucked the earring atop a rafter and sat down to study the box.
    Faye knew how Howard Carter must have felt, clearing rubble day after day from the staircase leading to King Tut’s tomb, knowing that wonderful things awaited him, but savoring the anticipation. She hefted the box in her hands a moment—it wasn’t empty, she could tell—then she lifted the lid and her breath faltered.
    It was an old book bound in leather and canvas, and handwritten across the cover were the words, “Journal of Wm. Whitehall, begun on 15 May, 1782, to commemorate the Birth of his Daughter, Mariah.” William Whitehall had formed each f with a long, vertical curve shaped like an s . Time wrought changes in everything, even the alphabet, and that sometimes made manuscripts of this age devilish to interpret.
    The penmanship made Faye think of John Hancock’s unrepentant signature on the Declaration of Independence, and her breath left her again. A man who was an adult in 1782 was a contemporary of John Hancock and his revolutionary friends.
    The journal was stuffed full of stray sheets of paper. A palm-sized portrait of a man in a powdered wig slipped free and drifted toward the dusty floor, but Faye, who had the instincts of a museum curator, caught it without so much as crinkling the yellowed paper.
    She opened the journal and saw that William, like others of a time when paper was hard to come by, had inscribed each page in the normal left-to-right fashion, then turned the book a quarter-turn to the right and written another full page of text atop the first. No wonder neat penmanship was so valued in those days. It was going to take her quite awhile to decipher what William had to tell her.
    ***
    Excerpt from the journal of William Whitehall, 15 May, 1782
    My Woman—that is to say my Wife, for we are