Chapter 19
Amelia
Amelia knew she should be running, but she couldn’t make herself.
Frozen, again. Was this Tom’s plan, or had his plan gone very wrong?
He had been carrying a lighter. She couldn’t tell which cracks and booms were coming from the stables and which were rifle fire.
As she watched, a figure ran from the flames, coming straight for her. Tom.
“Go!” he yelled, pointing to the front of the house.
She found her feet and made it to the butler’s room window shortly before he did. Between them, they hoisted it open. He helped her in and then tumbled in after her. She shoved it closed and twisted the latch, for what little help that would be, but sometimes you needed the illusion of safety.
“That was your diversion?” she said, panting.
“Nothing messes with a thermal scope like heat.” Tom flopped flat on his back on the rug, breathing heavily. “Only one of them was firing just now, and I guess he was firing blind.”
“Can we barricade the house?”
“Not in the five minutes it’ll take for them to figure out where we’ve gone. There are thirty rooms on the ground floor, hundreds of windows they could break. Come on, let’s grab some water.”
“Oh God, yes!” They snuck along the servants’ corridor. She felt much better with a stone wall at her back. “A moat and drawbridge could have been useful.”
“The river was diverted into a moat at one point,” he said as they crept into the kitchen. “There’s bottled water in there.” He pointed at a cupboard. “Would you mind?” He opened the pantry, grabbed a couple of shopping totes, and tossed one in her direction.
She found the water by feel rather than sight, while he loaded packets of things into his bag that she hoped like hell were edible.
“The original abbey might have had fortifications. Back then, installing windows on the ground floor would have been unheard of. People were a lot more trusting by the eighteenth century, when it was rebuilt.”
“How na?ve of them.”
“These guys might have been snooping around lately, but they don’t know this place like I do. Nobody alive does.”
As they left the kitchen, Amelia opened a bottle of water, and they shared it. Forget eighty-year-old wine—Amelia was ready to declare regular old water the most precious drop ever created. Tom pulled a small box from his tote and drew out a tray of pills. “Painkillers?”
“God, yes,” she said, taking them.
They crept up the main staircase. Amelia refused to meet the eye of the countess in the tapestry, though she could feel the woman’s gaze on her.
At the top floor, Tom led her through a maze of rooms, some lit, some not.
They came to a door she hadn’t noticed before—unless it was when they were high on lizard snot—and he opened it.
As they entered, cold air walloped her cheeks.
The moon loomed above a progression of thick wooden rafters.
The collapsed roof. They were inside the whale.
She could smell and hear the fire in the stables.
“This is the oldest part of the house—the former abbey,” Tom whispered.
He opened another door. It squeaked and he stilled, listening.
“After you,” he said, a few seconds later.
He followed her into a musty room, though it at least had a ceiling.
Amelia could make out a four-poster bed, a rug, and a scattering of furniture.
“The yellow room. We used it as a guest room before the roof came down in a storm a few years ago.”
“We’re hiding here? But they’ll come, they’ll find us.”
“No,” he said, crouching in front of a cabinet, “we’re hiding here.” He removed a wooden panel that lay across the bottom of it, leaving a low rectangle-shaped dark gap.
“In a cabinet?”
“Not quite.” His voice strained as he shimmied in. He completely disappeared.
“Are we going to Narnia? This is quite the literary tour.”
He laughed quietly. “No. Although there is another room where a wardrobe leads to a secret passageway. Eddie and I used to play The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe in there. Can you hand me the food and water?” She couldn’t completely see where she was passing the bags to, but his hands emerged from the blackness to draw them in.
“Now you. Bit of a squeeze, I’m afraid. Best way is to lie sideways and shimmy in.
I’ll guide you. Make sure you don’t leave anything out there. ”
A door slammed, and her breath hitched.
“The floor below us,” he whispered. “Probably the ghosts.”
“Let’s hope.”
“Careful, it steps down a little,” he said as she climbed in, passing clean through where the wall should rightly be. “Don’t stand up.” He reached past to pull the panel back into place. “Sit while your eyes adjust.”
There wasn’t much to adjust to. It was less a room and more a box—a cell, in fact—the size of a small elevator but half the height, with a small window.
Moonlight stamped the shadow of the windowpanes onto the wall opposite, in a sharp grid.
Outside, clouds scudded over a pearly moon.
They were sitting on a small mattress with a quilt spread across it. “What is this room?”
“It’s a priest hole from the sixteenth century,” he said, slotting in beside her. “I hope you’re not claustrophobic. It’s a space built for one.”
“More of an agoraphobe, myself. You folks kept your priests in holes?”
“For the priest’s protection. It was during the Reformation. Catholics created a network of safe houses—safe holes—around the country for Jesuit priests. They would sometimes hide in places like this for weeks.”
“Ah, the Refurbishment.”
“The what?”
She shook her head. “The tour guide said there was a ghost priest who clicks his rosary beads. He hid here?”
“If he ever existed, sure, why not? There are a few hides around the house. We use a couple of them in the haunted house tour. There’s a fake chimney my father discovered when he tried to light a fire in the grate and the room smoked up, and a tiny one in a section of ceiling that was lowered just enough so a person could lie down in it.
That one’s legit creepy. Like a coffin.”
“Ugh. The thought of being stuck somewhere where you can’t sit up…”
“I’m guessing it was only used when the priest hunters came knocking.”
“Priest hunters?”
“They’d tear houses apart looking for concealed spaces and then drag the poor bloke away to be executed.
I choose to believe that whoever hid here remained safe.
No one alive knows this exists—well, Eddie did, but I don’t think he recalls.
Entire books have been written on the architecture of the abbey that haven’t mentioned it, so safe to say its existence has been lost to history.
” He reached across her and pushed another panel, lifting it for a second before he lowered it back.
“And bonus—an en-suite bathroom! Not that it was a bathroom back then, just a useful second exit, I guess. But don’t flush, or run the taps.
The plumbing sounds like a flash flood.”
Amelia snuggled up against Tom’s side. There wasn’t a lot of choice, given the room’s dimensions. He slung an arm around her. “Was the secret passageway behind the closet also for priests?”
“Quite the opposite. The story goes that it was built to sneak the lover of a former countess in and out of her chambers. It was later used by servants. It links a few rooms, these days.”
“Like Clue, the board game.”
“How they built entire internal brick walls without her husband noticing, I have no idea.”
“Perhaps he was busy hiding his own affairs.”
“Or not. Even kings didn’t bother to hide their mistresses, half the time. Charles II had maybe twenty of them, and loads of children. It was treasonous for the queen to have an affair, though.”
“So maybe the countess had to hide her lover while the earl’s was common knowledge.”
“There are people in the village who claim to be descended from some dodgy Earl of Hawthorne or another, and they’re probably right. But the countess would have been taking an enormous risk.”
“People starved of love in a relationship will seek it elsewhere, like how plants grow toward sunlight.” Like herself, yearning for a damn hug.
“The success rate for marriages in those days must have been very low, if you measure success in whether you can stand being in the same room as your spouse.”
“They probably didn’t expect much either, until the likes of Austen put crazy ideas into their heads.
” Tom began rhythmically smoothing his palm down her back like he was stroking a cat, and she sure as hell felt like purring.
Yet another whiplash from one extreme emotional state to another.
“These days we use the secret passageway for the haunted house tours—we used to use it. It’s windowless, narrow, damp.
We have fake cobwebs and other creepy stuff hanging from the ceiling, and sound effects. All done on a budget, but it works.”
He took a deep breath, and Amelia soaked up the feeling of his torso expanding.
What a relief to be in a safe space, talking shit again.
To be in his arms. She ached for him, even with him right there.
“I can’t believe people pay you to frighten them.
But then, I don’t understand horror movies, either.
Terror is the worst feeling—why willingly subject yourself to it? ”
“I did some reading up about that when we were setting up the haunted house experience. People get surges of adrenaline, dopamine, endorphins from experiences like that. They’re addictive, primal. Some people get a natural high.”