Chapter 11
Cecilia was tired, and fell asleep almost immediately, despite the unfamiliar bed and new surroundings, but awoke what seemed like just a few moments later, her heart pounding and her hair prickling disagreeably.
She’d been disturbed by a noise, and now she heard it again.
A loud creak, like a gunshot in the silent house. Inside. Upstairs.
There were several possible explanations, some of them reassuring, some decidedly not.
It might be one of her sisters or Miss Macintyre, going downstairs to use the privy or collect some forgotten item: a book, a pair of eyeglasses, even an illicit midnight snack.
It might be the old house settling, the ancient boards and panels creaking as the night air cooled.
It might even be Mrs Pritty or Lucy, though what they’d be doing here, when their bedrooms were two staircases and many yards of panelled corridors away and they could easily come upstairs whenever they wanted in the daytime, she couldn’t conjecture.
Or she might be imagining it completely.
Or alternatively, of course, it could be a housebreaker, or some other person who had no right to be here and who meant them ill.
Or something supernatural. Did ghosts or other sorts of apparitions make noises?
She’d never had any occasion to wonder before, and her wide and sometimes sensational reading had somehow neglected to inform her of this important fact.
It was not possible, Cecilia discovered, to pull the covers over her head and pretend she hadn’t heard, not with all these thoughts churning in her uneasy brain.
She sighed and struggled out of the embrace of her deep feather bed, shoving her feet into her slippers and reaching for her swansdown-lined dressing gown.
She did not waste time with her tinderbox, but crept as quietly as she could over the old, uneven floorboards and very cautiously pulled open the door, feeling simultaneously ridiculous and terrified.
The hinge only protested a little, a mere faint squeak, and she peered out into the shadowy passageway.
She had been right! There was a light there: a flickering candle.
‘Is that you, Cecilia?’ came an instant soft whisper.
She sagged in relief. ‘Yes, Miss Macintyre. Are you unwell? I thought I heard a noise, but it must have been your door opening. Can I fetch you anything from downstairs?’
The flame grew closer, shielded by a careful hand. Miss Macintyre, wrapped in an ancient, hairy plaid robe, her long grey hair hanging down in chaste plaits, was a reassuring sight. Surely nothing uncanny or murderous could ever coexist with such a dressing gown.
‘I am quite well, thank you, my dear, but I’m sorry to say it wasn’t me. I heard it too, quite distinctly, as I was still awake and reading. Someone or something moving about, out here in the passageway, I was almost positive. But there is certainly nobody here now.’
Cecilia gulped at this unwelcome news and tried to order her thoughts in a sensible manner. ‘Have you checked on the others?’
‘I haven’t; I was just about to. But better if you do that. Then if they are… both well, as I am sure they must be, we can go down together and reassure ourselves that the front door is still locked and nothing has gone amiss.’
Cecilia acceded to the wisdom of this suggestion, and made her way first to Bianca’s room.
She had no fear of disturbing her youngest sister; Bianca would slumber undisturbed through a French invasion, complete with pealing church bells, yelling villagers, and cannon fire.
Waking her early in the morning for some important appointment was never an easy task; often drastic, water-based measures had to be employed.
And indeed she was fast asleep now, sprawled across her bed, face down in the pillow.
It was possible to tell that she was still alive only because she was snoring slightly, no doubt because of the unaccustomed wine she had consumed.
Bea was a far more challenging prospect.
Cecilia tiptoed stealthily across her sitting room and, with agonising slowness, eased open the door of the inner chamber.
Luckily, Beatrice talked in her sleep, as Cecilia had had occasion to notice only the night before at the inn.
She did not attempt to approach the curtained bed alcove; she merely waited.
And indeed, a second or two later, her sister let out a gusty sigh and muttered an indistinct sentence, then turned over with a great rustling of bedcovers and fell silent.
Cecilia had no idea why she might be dreaming about roses, as her mumbled words suggested.
But she was alive, and sleeping, albeit restlessly, in her little cave.
Thus reassured, the two women crept downstairs by the light of Miss Macintyre’s bedroom candle, neither of them choosing to remark aloud how very sinister the shadows in the corners of the old hall appeared in its inadequate, unsteady light.
Persons of ill will could so easily have been hiding in any number of places, which might have been designed for that express purpose.
But they checked each alcove and corner carefully; there was nobody there, and no sign of disturbance.
They swiftly reassured themselves that the heavy oak front door was indeed securely fastened; not only locked, but still bolted top and bottom.
The lesser but still venerable portal that led to the unused wing of the house was also bolted from this side, as they had left it when they went up to bed.
The humble baize-lined door that gave access to the kitchen and servants’ rooms was not locked, of course, but when Cecilia went to open it, it began to squeak on its hinges in such an alarming manner that she hastily abandoned the enterprise.
They both agreed that if such a distinctive sound had been produced while Miss Macintyre was awake, she must have heard it perfectly well even from upstairs.
So if Albery Hall had harboured an intruder, he or she had not come or gone from the servants’ domain.
It remained possible that a person might have entered stealthily through one of the many windows in the rooms in this part of the house, and could either have left in the same manner or still be lurking there in the darkness, lying in wait for God knows what sinister purpose.
But a brief whispered conference quickly established that they were both unaccountably reluctant to go stumbling about looking, and that if any windows had in fact been tampered with, this could better be ascertained in the morning.
The doors of all these rooms at least had stout locks with keys on the outside; they turned them, and admitted failure.
‘Of course,’ said Miss Macintyre thoughtfully, ‘this is all very well and good, as far as it goes, and we may try to tell ourselves that we unaccountably shared a common delusion, but a house of this age and in this remote coastal location, so convenient for a boat from the Continent, could easily have…’
Cecilia groaned softly, and they finished together: ‘Secret passages and priests’ holes.’
The governess grunted. ‘I am not normally of a fanciful disposition, unlike you, Cecilia, but there is such a great quantity of elaborate panelling in this house, and so many of the rooms are such a curious shape, so that missing spaces could hardly be detected even by careful measurement, and therefore the idea, though outlandish, does rather force itself upon the imagination.’
Cecilia’s imagination, by contrast, had needed no forcing in that direction.
It was curious, she thought, how a youthful fascination with the Gothic, and a deep-seated desire to encounter it in real life, was rapidly dissipating now that she actually found herself in a situation much like the ones she had been reading about for years.
There were many things, novels told her, that happened to heroines who recklessly investigated sinister noises in old, remote houses in the middle of the night, and she didn’t want a single one of them to overcome her now. Or Miss Macintyre, for that matter.
‘We’re going to have to look properly, aren’t we? I can see that we are. But please, not now.’
‘No, we are not to think of searching further at this hour, my dear child. Now we are going to go upstairs, lock ourselves in, tell ourselves that there is a perfectly rational explanation for what we both heard, and attempt to sleep.’
Cecilia was in full agreement, but she saw a flaw in Miss Macintyre’s reasoning.
‘It seems a little unfair that we should be able to protect ourselves against any potential threat, however unlikely it really is, and yet leave my sisters exposed and vulnerable. I can lock Bianca in and take the key; never once in all her life has she woken up in the morning before me. But Bea…’
After a brief discussion, they agreed to set a heavy Indian brass vessel, which they had both noticed in an alcove upstairs, just inside the door of Beatrice’s sitting room, and close it; she’d see it when she woke and they would have to explain its presence, but anybody moving surreptitiously about, trying doors, might not, until he entered the room, knocked it over, and made a great clanging noise that would wake the whole household.
They tacitly agreed not to admit the possibility that a secret entrance might actually lead straight to Bea’s sitting room or bedroom; it was late, and they were both trembling slightly in the draining aftermath of their alarming experience.
The only other realistic alternative was for Cecilia to sleep for the rest of the night on Bea’s small boudoir sofa, and this she could not quite bring herself to do, because it could not fail to be anything other than excessively uncomfortable.
Probably the noise had been nothing at all, and they were worrying unnecessarily, they both agreed, each separately hoping that they had convinced the other more readily than herself.
Cecilia was still telling herself this an hour later, when Albery Hall was utterly silent and yet sleep stubbornly refused to come.
There were no more noises; her straining ears imagined them anyway, and her heightened pulse was slow to subside.
But she was still physically exhausted after all the excitements of the day, and so at length, she did slip into a restless slumber.