Chapter 19
NINETEEN
‘It’s somewhere here. A wooden lever.’ William pulled out a few of the leather-bound books at the end of one of the top shelves of the furthest bookshelf on the right and peered inside. He dropped the books carelessly on the floor; they made a loud thud.
‘William. Be quiet!’ I hissed.
‘Oh. Sorry.’ He shrugged. ‘I suppose I just… feel like I can do what I like, here. I can’t stop thinking I’m at home.’
‘You’re not,’ I whispered, looking around at the door. I thought the household would probably be in bed by now – it was past midnight by the time the three of us had made our way back to the house like thieves, and snuck into the library – but I couldn’t be sure. ‘Be careful.’
‘Stop worrying. Your aunt said Lord Albert isn’t home,’ he countered, slightly dismissively. I wondered privately if William wasn’t spoiling for a fight. Did he want someone to come in and disturb us?
He’d been furious when he’d heard what Lord Albert had been doing to his wife and daughter – completely understandably – and I knew William enough by now to know that his go-to method for working out his frustrations was fighting.
He would never, ever be anything other than gentle and protective with me, but I knew that there was a dark side to him, nonetheless.
I knew he fought with his own shadow: the guilt of not being there to protect Edith and Charles. The guilt that Elspeth had died, running to warn him that the police were coming, when he was out smuggling.
Perhaps he always would fight with those demons.
‘Lord Albert isn’t ‘ome, but his spies are,’ Aunt Bill said, in a low voice.
‘The butlers and footmen watch everythin’.
I can’t guarantee they aren’t patrollin’ the ‘ouse and the grounds while Lord Albert’s away.
I know they watch Lady Hermione and Miss Violet’s rooms at night.
Fortunately, not mine. Not yet.’ She gave us both a stern look.
‘All right, all right.’ William lowered his voice. ‘Now… it should be… aha.’ He smiled, his face lighting up. He had rolled up his sleeve; he was still wearing his suit from the ball.
It wasn’t the moment to notice – we were intruders, inside Trevarron House, looking for something that William said would provide us with an escape route for Lady Hermione and Miss Violet – but still, my gaze was drawn to William’s exposed arm.
I marvelled once again at his beautifully muscled forearms and the sheer width of his biceps.
‘What are you looking for, again? Some kind of map?’ Aunt Bill whispered.
William had told us he had an idea of how we could get Lady Hermione and Violet out of Trevarron House without anyone suspecting anything; that there was a secret way out of the house, but he couldn’t remember where it was.
There was, though, a map, if he could find it.
‘Yes. A map of the house and the grounds.’ He pointed to a recess in the bookshelf that had opened up. ‘This is a secret compartment my grandfather created. He put them all over the house,’ he added.
‘Why?’ I asked, peering into the space behind the bookshelf curiously.
‘I suppose he liked to keep things secret.’ William shrugged.
‘It was a different time. He was worried about thieves. He hid jewellery and money in them. By the time I was lord, I put all of that in the bank.’ He reached into the recess and felt around for a moment.
‘I used the cubby holes for other things.’
‘Like what?’ I asked. I thought of the secret cabinet I’d found in my bedroom in 1755, where I’d found Aunt Bill’s letter. That must have been one of the spaces that William was talking about.
‘Things that I didn’t want all and sundry finding,’ he muttered. ‘There should be some papers… hmmm. Here we are.’
He lifted out a large bound folio in brown leather. It was the size of a large modern notebook, tied with a leather strap.
‘That’s sat there for over a hundred years, then. Unless anyone else knew about that secret compartment,’ Aunt Bill observed.
‘No one knew except me. I never told Charles or Edith. Grandfather showed me the secrets of Trevarron before he died. Unless they found out of their own accord, then, yes, the secret died with me.’ He gave me a wry look. ‘Although I didn’t die…’
‘Not yet,’ I replied, a little tartly.
‘Hm. Well, one hopes one may be alive a little longer yet.’ A smile tugged at the edge of his mouth.
‘There is, after all, so much to savour in a life well lived.’ William’s gaze dropped to my chest, even though the dress I was wearing was high-necked and distinctly less revealing than the ones I’d worn in the 1700s.
Was he enjoying this?
‘William!’ I hissed, feeling myself blush. ‘It’s not the time.’
‘No? Then perhaps it will be time later.’ He raised an eyebrow. I blushed harder.
We still hadn’t made love since that first, passionate and angry connection after I’d rescued William from gaol. But, he’d held me when we danced at the ball, and we’d shared a moment where I’d felt that familiar chemistry, and now this.
I wondered suddenly whether, even though Aunt Bill had told us something horrifying, having a sense of purpose – the rescue of Violet and Lady Hermione – was restoring William’s sense of self.
He was still struggling with the knowledge that he was no longer Lord of Trevarron, but at least he had a mission now – a way to make himself feel more like his old self.
‘Loves, I’d never usually want to interrupt your flirtin’, but time is of the essence.’ Aunt Bill cleared her throat. ‘’Ave we got a getaway plan, or not?’
‘Here. This is what I spoke of.’ William opened the folio and rummaged around in it for a moment before holding up a folded piece of paper.
He beckoned us to a beautiful walnut table inlaid with mother of pearl in a design of roses.
Aunt Bill found an oil lamp and turned up the flame.
We sat down on the leather chairs at the table and looked at the map.
‘My grandfather, as I said, was very much a secretive man,’ William began.
‘My own father had secrets, but of a terrible kind.’ A dark expression crossed his face.
‘However, my grandfather taught me the secrets of Trevarron as a house. Or, the ones he knew.’ He blinked for a moment.
‘He certainly didn’t teach me about the time portal. But he did show me this.’
William pointed at the map in front of us.
It was drawn on thick, cream paper, like parchment, with the drawing made in brown ink.
Trevarron House was drawn in a surprisingly draughtsman-like way in the front and rear view, and then there were cross-section diagrams similar to the ones that estate agents would use to show buyers a house’s layout.
Obviously, because Trevarron was huge, the diagrams were very complicated. It took me a while to understand where anything was.
‘Now. This is the house, and the grounds, as you can see. Here are the outbuildings: the stables, the gatehouse.’ His gaze flickered to mine, and he smiled, subtly. ‘And the main gates.’
‘Yes. What’s this about a getaway, then?’ Aunt Bill prompted.
‘I will tell you. I see that impatience runs in the Penrose family.’ William raised one eyebrow.
‘When Trevarron was built, life could be a little more dangerous than it might be in your time,’ he began.
‘And, there had been smuggling on the coast for some time already. Grandfather said that his ancestor knew smuggling would become all the more important as time went on, and he was right. As you know, Tegan, when I became Lord of Trevarron, I had no choice but to become involved. It was either go against them or join them, and I had debts.’
I knew that Charles, William’s brother, had run up big debts, gambling and investing the family money badly, and William had turned to smuggling to try and retain the Trevarron family estate.
‘Trevarron is ideally situated for smugglin’,’ Aunt Bill agreed. ‘I don’t doubt it was a terrible temptation.’
‘Not so much a temptation as an inevitability.’ William sighed. ‘Anyhow, my ancestor had the forethought of mind to cut out tunnels leading from the beach alongside Trevarron to the house itself. Smugglers would use them – I would use them – to bring cargo in.’
‘I’ve heard about those old smuggling tunnels,’ I said.
You couldn’t grow up in Cornwall without knowing about them.
Most of them had collapsed, or were incredibly dangerous to enter if they hadn’t.
‘Some of the old houses in villages along the coast still have doors in the basement that lead to the old tunnels.’
‘That’s right. My old cottage does, in fact, in the kitchen.
’ Aunt Bill nodded. ‘Course, I ’ad it closed off, years back.
Years back, in our time, I mean,’ she corrected herself.
‘Spooky old thing, it was. I went down there a couple o’ times before I ’ad it closed off.
Steps cut in the dirt an’ stone, leads down to a tunnel, cut out o’ the earth.
Bolstered by wooden posts, but so many o’ them had rot away.
There’d been fall-ins, places where the tunnel collapsed.
I couldn’t’ve got very far in there if I’d tried.
’ She made a face. ‘Not that I wanted to, mind.’
‘Really? I didn’t know that.’ I’d had no idea about a tunnel under Aunt Bill’s house, and the thought of it spooked me.
In Cornwall there was the legends of the Knockers, which were said to be fairy or elflike creatures that lived in tunnels and in the old Cornish tin mines.
They were named for the knocking noises that they made underground.
It was likely, of course, that earth being displaced or trapped air made the strange noises, but the Cornish were always a superstitious folk.
‘Aye. Some nights, ’specially if it’s bad weather, if there was a big storm an’ the sea was crashin’ up against the rocks, it’d make terrible noises. Chillin’. Sounded like cryin’.’ Aunt Bill shivered.
‘Hm. Well, that’s the other part of the secret.’ William nodded. ‘Here, you can see there’s a tunnel that leads from under the house, out under the grounds, to St Nantes,’ he looked up, and the realisation hit me before he said it.
No.
Surely not.
He couldn’t be about to say what I thought he was about to say.
‘There’s a tunnel that leads from Trevarron House to your cottage, Bill,’ William said.
‘Trevarron House and Yew Tree Cottage are linked. That was the escape route my ancestors built if the Lords of Trevarron ever had to leave the house unexpectedly. And that’s the escape route we’re going to use to get Lady Hermione and Violet away from here. ’