Chapter Twelve #3
“Cora,” she heard her father’s voice whisper low in her ear. “Do you know what happens when a dog tries to catch two rabbits?”
He gets none.
She had last seen Jack only a moment ago, on the esplanade, near the swan and pheon arrowheads carved into the main house.
Her heart sank. He must have seen an opportunity in Beau’s entrance and used the moment to disappear.
As Truman stepped forward to greet Beau Remington, William Morton grabbed a glass from Cora’s tray and raised it in the air. “Hear, hear!” he said.
And out of the corner of Cora’s eye, she saw a shadow move.
She turned her head to see Jack slipping into the main house. The door closed silently behind him.
She set down her tray on the fountain and darted to the house, pulling open the immense door herself.
It was heavy, plated with iron and gold; and by the time Cora had wrenched it open, the atrium was empty.
She stopped to listen carefully. The entryway opened up into two stories of intricately carved marble and limestone, and the main staircase was carpeted to absorb footsteps; but Cora noticed that the pots of ferns that surrounded them remained still, their fronds undisturbed.
Cora’s heart beat steady in her chest, strong and powerful, as though she were hitting her stride in a race she had been born to run.
Instead of panic, her thoughts felt clear and razor-sharp.
The sounds of the party grew distant, and she finally caught them: the faint echo of footsteps, disappearing down the east hallway.
She followed them. The east corridor was easily forty feet long, and she glimpsed Jack before he’d reached the end of it.
He was stopping to try each door, peeking his head in to the morning room first, then one of the sitting rooms. He was just opening the door to the Billiards Room when Liam, the butler, intercepted him.
Cora pressed herself to the wall and hid behind a bronze statue.
“May I help you, sir?” she heard Liam ask.
“Just nipping back into the Assembly Room for something I left behind,” Jack said.
“Certainly. Do let me know if you need help locating it,” Liam said.
Liam began walking down the corridor again, and Cora waited until he had passed before allowing herself to peek out. She watched Jack pull open the door to the Assembly Room and duck inside.
Cora rose, knowing that she couldn’t follow him through the doorway without giving away her advantage of surprise. She needed more answers than he had given her earlier in the day.
But she also wanted to know what he would do when he thought no one was watching.
She doubled back toward the foyer, stopping in front of a weathered bookcase.
She searched the faded spines for the one called Daedalus’s Labyrinth, then pulled it free and re-shelved it at the top right, fitting it into a carved indentation.
The book slipped neatly into a lock apparatus, and Cora heard the faintest click.
Then, using all her weight, she dragged open the bookcase and stepped inside.
Cora pulled the door closed behind her into almost complete darkness. She was standing in the entryway to Byrd’s secret passage: the one that led to the right of the fireplace, where Truman liked to emerge and surprise his guests.
She heard the sound of her own breathing and suddenly wished for her gun.
Her father had bought her a pistol when she was twenty.
It had a silky silver barrel, a pearlish white handle.
She had fought with him for months over wanting to become an investigator or a detective, or perhaps to join a police force somewhere—to follow a slightly different path from him that still bore traces of his footsteps.
She had taken typing classes and would start off as a secretary somewhere, but she planned for that to be a stepping stone to something else.
They’d had it out over dinner, lowered voices over onion soup and sourdough bread.
And finally he had folded his napkin and said: “Your mother would have hated it.” It was his trump card, and they both knew it, and for one day Cora almost changed her mind.
Then it had steeled again, like fresh metal over a bear trap, and he had known the argument was over.
A week later, he had come home with a package. “If you’re determined to be in dangerous work, then you’ll have to become more dangerous than it is,” he said.
He had presented Cora with the gun as his olive branch, and Cora thought it was so like her father that his peace offering was actually a weapon.
And then he had trained her to use it.
She felt along the corridor as she moved forward. She had expected it to feel stuffy and airless in the passage, but it was made from plain stone and the air inside it was cool. The walls were smooth beneath her hands, and were bare except for sconces kept so dim that she was only just able to see.
When she reached the end of the corridor, she met a door. She put an ear to it, listening, and then eased the panel open the barest crack. The room was fairly dark. The windows were closed, and light from the outside lamps was cast through golden panes of glass set into the wall like honeycombs.
She bent forward and peered through the crack to watch.