Chapter 3 #3
Amelia descended the nearest staircase, imagining the space filled with music and dancing and chatter.
Society mothers hoping for good matches for their daughters, grand dames as imperious as the house itself, an assortment of lords…
The light seeping in through the arched Palladian windows upstairs and French doors downstairs was diffuse, thanks to grime and the dull sun, and many of the latticed windowpanes were taped over.
But Amelia let her imagination take over.
For a few glorious seconds, the panes cleared, bright sunlight cut out corresponding squares on the floor, and the three sets of French doors were thrown open to the terrace and garden tucked into the crook of the horseshoe-shaped building.
She pirouetted on the parquet flooring. Her sneaker caught on a wayward finger of wood, forcing her into fancy footwork to avoid falling.
Imagine, a ballroom as your childhood playroom.
A playroom with intact navy silk brocade wallcoverings.
Amelia ran to one, stifling a giggle. When she was doing her grad degree, she would examine scraps of fabric at the Cooper Hewitt without daring to breathe on them, and here was a textile older than the state of New York covering an entire wall.
Recklessly, she pressed her cheek to it, feeling the raised paisley teardrop pattern.
She waltzed across to the staircase at the other end of the room and climbed it.
Ascended it—it wasn’t the kind of staircase one merely walked up.
Several doors led off into more rooms that begged to be explored.
The first was ajar. She nudged it. Inside, a balding man in a blue puffer jacket stood over an old desk, opening and closing drawers.
Her face went cold. “It’s not bloody here now, is it?
” he said. Another man, out of view, responded in a mutter she couldn’t decipher.
She heard papers being shuffled. Holding her breath, she retreated onto the mezzanine, and clonked into a large glass vase on a hall table.
She managed to catch it and right it, but the noises in the room silenced.
Shit. She scooted through the next open doorway into what might once have been a sitting room and darted behind a curtain, finding herself in an alcove around a bay window.
She pressed her back against the side of the alcove, to avoid making a silhouette.
Anyone outside would clearly see her, but nothing stirred but skeletal, tawny trees bending in the wind and the twisting river, bisected by an old stone footbridge.
Faint footfalls sounded on the mezzanine, followed by low, rumbling voices.
It was one thing to claim she got separated from the tour, quite another to be caught snooping and then hiding.
Plus, she was now officially frightened, which was exactly the state she was trying to escape from. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
A minute passed, and then another, counted in the raspy tock-tock of a clock out in the ballroom, and the curtain breathing in an icy draft that seeped around the windowpanes. The same draft tiptoed along the back of Amelia’s neck. She hunkered into her scarf.
She shouldn’t be surprised at her fear hitching a ride, even across the Atlantic.
You could escape many things on vacation, but not your screwed-up mind.
Or in her case, her chest, where the fear sat like an anchor.
Even when you were wandering grand halls and faded ballrooms, you were still disappointingly you.
What she really needed was a vacation from herself.
Outside, a couple of dogs bayed. Unable to spot them, she imagined Sherlock Holmes-style demon hounds.
Surprisingly, the gardens were in pristine condition: sculpted hedging, pruned rose bushes, sharply cut lawns.
Beyond the lawns were the shadowy beginnings of the forest, obscured by fog.
Now that she was alert to noises, she heard them all: the river, a peacock’s eerie call, a distant chainsaw.
The gunshots had stopped, at least. She suppressed a sneeze and then another, her sinuses stinging.
The voices retreated until their murmur became so faint she could be imagining it.
She peeked out, half-bracing for a jump scare, if not from the men, then a ghost. The countess with the lost diamond was a solid bet.
Not a speck of dust moved. She crouched, picked up a corner of the curtain and turned it over.
Faded sea-green silk damask with a gold fringe.
It was lined with worsted and cotton, and stiffened with canvas.
The kind of fabric she stored in acid-free tissue in acid-free boxes in a ventilated, darkened, dust-free, condensation-free, pest-free, temperature and humidity-controlled, custom-built storage room.
She released it and it settled back into the fall it had become accustomed to over hundreds of years.
She peeked beneath a calico furniture cover and found an ornate Rococo chaise spilling its stuffing.
Horsehair, probably. The red silk upholstery had mostly faded to yellow, the glossy warp disintegrating to reveal the matte weft underneath.
Centuries old. Even the cobwebs that curtseyed from the corners of the room might have belonged to spiders that had been dead a hundred years.
Nearby, a door slammed. Amelia scooted back behind the curtain.
After a minute, she concluded the drafts were to blame, but the message from the universe was clear: Time to return to the group.
This illicit private tour was doing nothing for her poor nerves, as Mrs. Bennet of Pride and Prejudice would say.
Amelia retraced her route, stealthily following the breadcrumb trail of fabric: velvet, damask, brocade, chintz…
Every curtain seemed to hide a human shape—or perhaps a ghost!
—though in reality the only soul known to have hidden behind a curtain today was her.
As she reached the music room, voices filtered in from outside.
She crept to the windows and nudged aside a blue velvet drape.
Through a warped, weather-smeared windowpane, she could see the tour group directly below her, in a brick-walled kitchen garden.
They were peering at a barrel-shaped metal object attached to the top of a wooden post, with turbines at either end.
“Spot on, you got it,” Xanthe was saying.
“It’s a Carter air raid siren, called a ‘Magpie’ back in the Blitz.
A servant would have the job of listening to the BBC on the radio.
If the program was interrupted with a heads-up about a Luftwaffe attack, they’d be out here in a jiffy, cranking this baby.
All the curtains inside were switched out with blackout ones for the war, so everyone’d be legging it around the place to pull them closed.
Then the lights would go off, and they’d make a mad dash to the air raid shelter in the basement.
Would you like a go? Just open up that little metal control box and flip the switch. ”
Someone idly glanced up, and Amelia retreated, dropping the curtain.
After maybe a minute, the siren began to whine, itself sounding like an airplane propeller warming up.
How could she get to the group from here?
By the time she found the main entrance and skirted around the building, they’d surely have moved on.
But Xanthe did say that the secret stairs led to the kitchen, which surely had a door out to the kitchen garden.
The siren’s pulsating whine rose to a discordant wail that reverberated deep inside her ear.
Even without the likelihood of a Luftwaffe attack, it was terrifying.
It descended in pitch and volume to a bass chord below any note on a piano, until it hummed under the very earth.
She wiggled her jaw to equalize her ears.
After trying to open a wall that was actually a wall, she found the fake one.
It scraped along the floorboards as it opened.
She winced at the noise, but not even a ghost stirred up the stale air.
She shakily inhaled. This was supposed to be her Jane Austen rom-com tour of Britain, not the Daphne du Maurier suspense edition.
She stepped into a small stairwell, with wooden stairs that disappeared down into darkness as well as up.
It had to be completely internal. She left the wall panel open for the meager light it cast. Her eyes would adjust.
After descending about ten steps, she left the reach of the light.
She slowed, feeling her way to a landing that didn’t seem to have any door.
Below her, the stairwell was as dark as an actual well.
But it had to lead somewhere. Even she could be brave about this.
She picked her way more carefully, clinging to the spindly timber railing.
From above came a wood-on-wood scrape, and the door slammed.
She squeaked. Complete darkness. Immediately, her brain summoned the image of a hand reaching for her.
She swatted at it, but of course it wasn’t real.
A grown woman afraid of the dark, and she’d come to England in the middle of winter.
She should have gone to Antarctica, where it was all-day sunshine.
She hadn’t thought that through, like she hadn’t thought through a lot of things.
She was sick of thinking things through.
Sick of her stupid brain. Sick of trying to fix her stupid brain.
Who was she kidding that she could outrun it by coming here?
Her life back home might be in a holding pattern, but going around in circles was at least safe and predictable.
She would simply follow the stairs back up, using the railing, and find the door. Failing that, she would suck up her pride and scream for help. She pulled herself up one step, and then another, forcing her breath to calm. This was okay. This was fine.
As she put her weight on the next step, she heard and felt a crack.
Her chest tightened. She clutched the railing and eased her foot off.
The railing snapped clear away in her hand, and she unbalanced, forward and then back, cold panic seizing her belly.
She stomped with one foot, looking for the next step, but her shoe burst through the wood, shooting her downward.
Her knees smacked onto something hard. The next step?
Her flailing hands found nothing but thick cobwebs.
With a groan, the stairs gave way beneath her, and she plummeted, screeching.
Something scraped her side, and she thumped to a stop on her butt.
Then came stillness, apart from bits of debris pattering over her.
She felt around. She’d landed on a dirt floor, among a pile of broken wood.
Something touched her foot and she yelped, kicking out. It nudged her again, whining.
Suddenly, there was light ahead. An open door. A man’s silhouette. Hands reaching for her. She hit out wildly, screaming in full voice.
“Easy, easy. You’re all right.” A low, male voice, in an English accent. “You fell.”
A dull click, and a bare bulb lit the stairwell in a warm glow.
A man knelt before her, dressed in a cream waistcoat and cravat, black tailcoat, knee-length black breeches, ivory stockings, black shoes with silver buckles.
He had dark, glossy hair, and blue-gray eyes that brought to mind a tropical storm.
She gaped, planting her hands on the dirt and shards of timber on either side of her butt, to make sure the world hadn’t flipped upside down in the time between falling and landing.
Pemberley the house was not. But this man was all Darcy.