It took us another hour to pick and choose the contents of the treasure chamber that we wanted to take with us, much of it strange or no easy value to place on it.

Arthur explained more of it to me and showed me that some of the crates, boxes, and glass jars were full of spices, including salt. It was heartbreaking on some level to tell him that certain spices and the salt were worth very little now, the process to make them so much cheaper and easier to reproduce that their value had decreased.

Of course, if that was true of the spices, the gold, precious metals and gemstones were worth even more than before and I knew that we were looking at a small fortune. And according to Arthur, this was one of several large treasure chambers.

I didn't know if they all held equal value, or if the others would have been broken into, but I knew that if we were sensible with the wealth in this one, it could easily be enough to support him and make sure he never had to want for money again. If it was enough to sustain a country and a campaign to be kind was another matter.

This journey had all been on faith so much that I hadn't thought about what might happen after this. Where did his plans take us?

In the end we had a selection of coins, already made jewellery, silver cutlery and loose gemstones that hadn't been cut. Not all of them would be easy to shift and transfer into real money and with the coins, we might not want to, but loads of antiques dealers took silver spoons and things like that. If we were careful we could probably get a decent price for them.

Arthur had followed my advice but picked up a few more sentimental items for himself to keep and I certainly couldn't begrudge him that. He'd also insisted that I take some of it for myself. I wasn't sure what he felt was fair and also had the impression that if he gave me even a small container of anything in there it would be enough to change my life.

I might not be able to quit my job, but he could easily make it so I never struggled to put food on the table ever again. That was something I wasn't going to say no to. Not when my life had been so difficult so far.

We both stood outside the stone room, the door in front of us and no handle for us to pull it back with. The mechanism to open and shut it was broken, Arthur had already tried locking it and unlocking it again and it hadn't helped, but neither of us wanted to leave the chamber so open and exposed that anyone could come down here and take what was left.

It wouldn't help his cause if someone else found it and exposed it. And we could only take so much of the treasure in trips back and forth. At least, until it was dark, this was all we would be taking.

I reached for the door and pulled it back, feeling it move this way more easily than it had the other, but I still had to pull my hand in and it slowed the momentum enough that it didn't completely close.

"No one is going to notice it's a partially open door if they come down here," Arthur said. "And that's assuming that they get past all the other obstacles we can put in their way."

He had a good point. For now we should just let it go. Especially as we were probably going to come back ourselves and take more of it soon anyway. As soon as it got dark and late enough. For now we would have drawn enough attention to it.

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Once we made our way back up the passage, I remembered that we had to squeeze through a gap and this time we had to shove our previously empty rucksacks through first, both of them heavy and so bulky I wasn't sure they'd both go through.

Arthur wanted to go out first in case someone had discovered the opening as well and come down there. We hadn't made any attempt to cover our tracks during the day and it was obvious that the path we had gone down led here. The open doorway with the ripped off boards, the carpet pulled back and the open cellar door, then this.

It wasn't exactly a hard trail to follow for anyone seriously looking. Thankfully Arthur managed the squeeze a little better going back through and landed better, not injuring himself this time. Having him help me through was also a lot easier than my first scramble, especially as I'd already practiced it once.

"I think the floor might be higher on this side," Arthur pointed out. I looked back and used the flashlight to try and get a comparison. It looked like he was right, but I didn't get a chance to say so before he was pushing a wine rack over in our direction.

"Not yet," I said, picking up the stone we'd pulled out. Some of the mortar was still on the chunks and I hoped it would make it possible to hide it a little. I started putting them back, not sure exactly of the order, but I'd been good at tetris in the past.

Arthur soon helped, bringing them over again and suggesting ways to make it look more like solid stone rather than stones that could be taken out. It wasn't perfect and because of the lack of mortar between the chunks of stone there was a gap at the top, but we shoved the wine rack over as well and the shelf was a close enough height to the gap that for most people it would be entirely hidden by it.

"That works," I declared before we made our way back up into the church itself. We climbed the ladder again and it was only as I was part way up and noticing it creaking a lot more that I remembered we were both carrying a lot more weight on our backs.

I quickly climbed, hoping that speed would save me, but nothing broke still. When I got to the top, I reached back and suggested Arthur hand me his ruck first.

He seemed a little reluctant and I saw a strange look pass across his face. A moment later he took the bag off and instead of handing it to me, he chucked it up sideways out of the hole. It landed on some of the random junk in the church and made a fair amount of noise. I winced, but he soon came up and retrieved it himself.

This seemed to take away whatever had been bothering him and we worked together to put the trapdoor back the way we had found it as well and covered it with the rug and then with some of the pews as well. Although the door to the treasure chamber was now open and anyone could push through, we'd done everything we could to hide the route to it.

Given we intended to come back in the next day, it seemed a little over kill in some ways, but we'd barely taken a tiny amount of the wealth in there. I didn't want Arthur to lose any of it because we got complacent or anything like that.

I followed him back to the door we'd gone through, the daylight as we got closer making me blink. My eyes were forced to adjust, but I didn't try to rush. We waited just inside, out of sight, neither of us really wanting to leave.

In the end, my stomach rumbled and reminded us that we hadn't had any food since breakfast. There was a picnic in my car and there was only one way back to it.

As we went outside, Arthur grabbed the first board and we tried to loosely put it back. It didn't work so well, the nails bent and not lining up with the holes they had initially been in. Both of us were feeling tired at this point as well.

Eventually, I opted to pop them up in roughly the position they were in before and then I pulled some crime scene tape from a side pocket in my rucksack. Arthur stared at it in my hands and lifted his eyebrows as I put several strands of it across the doorway before anyone would even get to the boards.

"Will that work?" he asked.

I shrugged. Some people didn't pay much attention to it, but it could deter others. If nothing else, it would make it look as if we had good reason to be here.

"If anyone comes along and goes through here, we'll at least know and be on our guard."

This seemed to satisfy Arthur and we finally made our way to get some food.