Chapter Twenty-Three #3
The bishop and his team didn’t reach the tower or the cellars that day. They arranged to return the next day, and went home. They were all pale and looked exhausted, and Allan totally agreed. But his own weakness in the family wing was bothering him.
“Before we go,” he said, “I want to go back to the marquess’s study.” Want was the wrong word. He wanted nothing less, but he was determined to do it, nonetheless.
Melody opened her mouth, and he could see from her expression that she was minded to argue. But she must have thought better of it, for what she said was, “I will come with you.”
In the end, they all went. Five brothers and their wives.
And the suffocating weight of despair was not waiting for them in the family wing.
Allan stood outside the study examining his own feelings.
He was tired. He was happy to have Melody and others of his family at his side.
But none of that negative miasma remained.
“It is gone,” said Ernest, sounding surprised.
“‘More things in heaven and earth,’” quoted Hudson, and stepped forward to open the study door.
Allan braced himself and followed Hudson and Parthena into the room, to be assailed with memories.
But that was all they were. In this room, he had experienced many things, most of them terrible.
He didn’t like remembering them, but it was not the devastating horror of that few minutes earlier today.
“A complete redecoration,” Melody said. “In fact, we should make another room into your study, Allan, and turn this one into a visitor parlor, since it is just inside the side door.”
“We did it,” said Ernest. “We showed each other how brave we all are. Now let’s go home.”
*
It took two more days for the bishop and his team to go over every room, closet, and passage in the house, but the gruesome discovery on the second day overshadowed the third day, which was benign by comparison.
Allan and Melody were showing the men around the tower.
Several of the other brothers went ahead of them, opening the hidden rooms and hiding places.
One could only hope that five clerical gentlemen could be trusted to keep the secret of their existence.
However, even if one or more had loose lips, sending the brothers ahead meant none of them knew where the catches were.
They had prayed for the deliverance of each room in both upper and lower tower, and in the stairwells and tunnels, and were about to leave the tower dungeon when Ernest said, “What about the oubliette?”
After his experiences yesterday, Allan was more than half inclined to tear the house down and not leave one stone on another, but Ernest was right. Best to be thorough.
He nodded to Ernest to open the hidden door, and said to everyone else, “There’s a hidden door on the right-hand side of the dining space on the fourth level.
At first sight, it looks just like the one we came down by.
The door lets on to stairs much like those behind the left-hand side, but certain steps will trigger ambushes—weights from the ceiling to drop on people’s heads, steps that drop away, arrows that fire from the walls.
At the bottom is an oubliette—a bottle dungeon.
Anyone caught in one of the traps drops down to end up in the oubliette, and there’s no way out except for the hole twelve or fifteen feet above an unfortunate prisoner’s head, with sheer walls all around. ”
“We shall stand in the doorway for our prayers,” said the bishop. “Will that be safe, my lord?”
“Yes, Your Grace, but I warn everyone to go no further. The oubliette itself is covered with a thin piece of card, and the stairs are treacherous.”
“Allan, the traps have been triggered,” Ernest exclaimed. Sure enough, the hole to the oubliette was uncovered.
And worse, a foul smell rose from within.
At that moment, something happened. An attack, Mr. Beauclair had called it yesterday, when they approached the marquess’s study.
This one was so much worse that Allan never for a moment thought that the emotions that surged out of the gloom had their origin in himself.
Despair, envy, spite, anger, and surpassing all the rest, the tide on which they rose, hate—they battered at him with such force that his knees sagged, and only the grip Mel had on his hand kept him upright.
Dear Mel, once again keeping him sane in the insanity that boiled up from the oubliette, so strong that Ernest had fallen to his knees and was bent over, supporting himself on his hands.
And wonderful Mr. Beauclair had stepped forward to help Ernest to his feet and passed him backward to be supported by Rosina, and was standing in the entrance, holding up a cross and reciting the prayers with which they were all now so familiar.
The weight on Allan was already lighter, and as the other clerics joined Mr. Beauclair, the gale of emotions lessened and finally whisped into nothing.
“Is anybody there?” called the bishop down into the hole in the floor.
There was no reply. Allan had not expected one. Perhaps the person who had triggered the traps and fallen into the oubliette had survived the fall, but surely not for long. And the similarity of the recent storm to the emotions that had infested the house for so long identified the person.
“We have found Teign,” Allan said.
*
It was, indeed, the Marquess of Teign and he was dead. The coroner had to send someone down a ladder to tie the corpse to a stretcher so it could be hauled out of the oubliette on a rope.
The brothers left that matter to the coroner and the runners from the nearest magistrate’s court, and only learned at the coronial inquiry that the marquess had survived his fall for many days, and eventually died of thirst.
When the door at the top of the fatal stairs had been opened, they’d found food, drink, books and other supplies—the marquess had clearly planned to wait in hiding until the furor over his disappearance died down.
Reconstructing the man’s fall and subsequent death from the available evidence, the officer in charge of the recovery and investigation hypothesized that Teign had been carrying a box containing bottles of wine and a lamp when he reached the first trap.
The lamp had not survived the fall intact. The box and most of its contents landed in the oubliette with the marquess, all but a couple of bottles shattered and their contents lost into the cracks between the cobbles of the floor.
Allan stared at the sheet that covered the marquess’s remains and imagined the man at the bottom of the oubliette, in pain from two broken legs, a cracked rib, multiple scrapes and bruises, a dislocated shoulder, and more.
In the dark. Alone. Cradling the surviving bottles of wine and taking a miserly sip from time to time, to make the liquid last. Hoping that someone would come in time.
Knowing he would die if he was not rescued.
The end was inevitable. Farnham, the only man who might have known where the marquess was hiding, had not recovered consciousness and had eventually died from his injuries.
The coroner ruled the marquess’s death accidental but in Allan’s mind, and perhaps those of his brothers’—it was an appropriate ending, for he suffered, even as his sons and the women he’d abused had suffered.
Most importantly, the evil man’s reign was finally over—Teign was gone and Allan’s brothers were safe.
“May I express my condolences, Lord Teign,” said the coroner, and for an awful moment, Allan thought the man was talking to the dead marquess. But of course, he was addressing the living marquess—Allan himself. I shall never get used to wearing that name.
Melody squeezed his hand, and Allan managed to respond with a semblance of composure. “Thank you,” he said. How would the man react if I said what I was thinking? Don’t be sorry. I am not, and nor are any of his family.
“The body will be released to you whenever you are ready, my lord,” the coroner continued. “I know you shall wish to arrange burial.”
“Thank you,” Allan said again. He considered telling the coroner that the marquess could be thrown into a common grave with whatever other anonymous or pauper bodies required burial, but he supposed it wouldn’t be fair to the paupers.
Once he was free of the rooms where the inquest had been held, he shared that thought with his family. “I don’t want him put in the family tomb at Barcliffe Priory, though. Buried with all honors? He doesn’t deserve it.”
“We should plant him at a crossroads with a stake through his heart,” Cornelius grumbled.
“Given what you all experienced in the house,” said Baldwin, “consecrated ground would probably spit him out.” Strong words from a rationalist.
“Given what you experienced in the house,” Clara corrected, “burying his remains in consecrated ground might be a wise, defensive measure.” She added, “And may he burn in Hell,” which was surprising, from such a kind and composed woman.
In the end, Melody and Clara arranged for the man to be buried without fanfare, in a grave in the corner of the burial ground of St. John’s church, with a simple wooden marker that recorded his name and nothing else.
Even the interred corpses from the cellar had more dignity in the cemetery of St. Brides—a joint tombstone listing as many names as they could discover and the catchall phrase “and other women who could not be identified.” Underneath was a verse from the Book of Psalms: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.”
Now the Sheppard brothers could all pick up the pieces of their lives and be happy.
Baldwin and Clara were off to Edinburgh in the spring, where Baldwin would be attending the medical school at the university.
Cornelius and Thomasina had purchased tickets to cross the channel and would be taking their family to France as soon as weather allowed.
Donald and Verity had decided to live chiefly on her country estate, where they had an engineering workshop and a breeding kennel for dogs.
The next two brothers and their wives would live closest to Allan and Melody.
They were moving to cottages on the Barcliffe Priory estate, where Ernest would study with the steward, so he could take over when the man retired, and where Frank would become Allan’s secretary while Winifred and her father continued their studies.
The twins Gerard and Hudson, with their wives Amber and Parthena, had chosen an estate near the Priory that was big enough to comfortably support two families, and that could be split in two for their future heirs.
And, to judge by their letters, Isaac and Jerome were thoroughly enjoying their grand tour.
As for Allan and Melody, they gave the architect and builder their approval to begin planning the reconstruction and refurbishment of the townhouse, and left for the country with Harriet and Lydia.
Allan would be perfectly happy, except he did not want to go through life wearing the Teign title.
At least none of his family used the hated name, and even some of the fashionable people he had met through Dellborough were content to call him Allan, whereas in the country, once they arrived, the servants soon learned to call him “my lord” and “his lordship.”
If there was occasional confusion over the generic form of address, the reward was not having to hear himself addressed by the title that had always meant pain and humiliation for him or someone he loved.
Melody, of course, called him many things. “Husband” was one of his favorites. “Beloved,” “darling,” “my heart,” “dearest love,” and so many other endearments. She, at least, never addressed him as Lord Teign. And it was she who came up with the solution.