Chapter 12
Beatrice, discovering that a large brass vessel had mysteriously appeared just inside her antechamber door, did not take at all well to the notion that murderous intruders might have been creeping about the house for half the night and yet nobody had thought to wake her.
‘We could find no trace of anyone,’ Cecilia argued.
‘We thought it would be nothing but selfish to make you share our no doubt groundless worry. And as for “murderous”, that’s plain silly; none of us has been harmed in any way.
Probably we were imagining things, after all.
’ It was much easier to be cheerful in the light of day, she found, with sunlight pouring in through the dining room’s east-facing windows, and a very substantial breakfast set steaming before her.
Mrs Pritty plainly did not subscribe to the fashionable idea that ladies should merely toy with a light pastry or piece of toast of a morning. She was feeding them like farmers.
‘Both of you?’ Bea said grimly. ‘Both of you were imagining things? If it had just been you, Cecilia, very well; I know you are of a fanciful nature. But it was not just you. And Miss Macintyre, if I understand matters correctly, you were not actually asleep when you heard the noises, but awake and reading. So there seems little possibility of you being mistaken.’
‘We cannot know what sounds a house of this age makes as it cools, since last night was our first here,’ the governess responded calmly, spreading blackberry jam with a lavish hand.
‘We should of course investigate this morning, as is only prudent, and look for any signs of an intruder in the rooms down here; we might also explore the notion of secret passages. But—’
‘Secret passages?’ Beatrice and Bianca cried, in chorus, but in very different tones.
The youngest Constantine sister went on, ‘I’m sorry for interrupting you, ma’am, but I am sure I would like nothing better in the world than a secret passage.
I propose to spend the rest of the morning looking for one; Cecilia, you must feel the same, so you may help me.
Bea, I believe Mrs Pritty has prospective maids and other staff coming to be interviewed after breakfast, and clearly we can’t all be present or we would horrify them.
Shall you and Miss Macintyre take charge of that?
You are the eldest, after all; you can wear your spectacles.
And in the intervals between maids, you can subtly ask if Mrs P knows of any secret rooms and so on.
Get her talking about the history of the place.
She’s lived here for so many years; she must know most about the house. ’
Bea found this speech deplorably high-handed, but could not find anything else in it to argue with, and so, as soon as everyone had done eating, she headed off, with the old governess to the servants’ quarters.
Both of them bore trays to clear away the breakfast crockery and cutlery; there was once again very little food left uneaten.
‘We should be methodical,’ Cecilia said. ‘Make a note of each chamber, describe it, and then we can also use the exercise to decide which rooms we shall use, and for what purpose, in the long term. I’ll get a pencil and a notebook, and a sewing tape for measuring.’
Two hours later, the girls were both dusty, several pages of Cecilia’s notebook had been filled, but no secret passage, priest’s hole or hidden chamber had been discovered.
A brief moment of excitement had occurred in the library when one of the carved wooden decorative elements around the mantelpiece had been found to move under Bianca’s fingers.
This must be it! they both thought. She prodded and twisted with determination, and they both held their breath in great suspense when a section of the wall swung open at her touch, but what was revealed was only a small hidden compartment, perhaps a primitive sort of a strongbox.
It was interesting, but disappointingly empty, and nothing larger than a kitten could ever have been hidden there.
The back of it was solid brickwork, unplastered, concealing no more secrets.
Bianca, refusing to be discouraged, pointed out that its existence proved earlier owners of the house had used the panelling for purposes of ingenious concealment, and might easily have created far larger spaces too, and it only wanted a little energy in looking for them.
But nothing else came to light apart from dust and cobwebs.
Cecilia said gloomily that if there really were secret ways into the house from outside, they might be sealed with wedges that prevented them being accessed by any searchers.
‘I suppose the people who ruthlessly hunted down Catholic priests and other fugitives must have been far more expert than we are; surely hidden places must have been constructed so that people could lock themselves securely in and simply wait until the danger had passed before they emerged into safety.’
‘You may be right, but I absolutely refuse to believe that someone is now lurking in a secret chamber, and has been all night, waiting for us to go away,’ Bianca replied stoutly.
‘Such an idea will destroy all our pleasure in having inherited the house, and I simply will not countenance it. We are not characters in The Mysteries of Udolpho, but modern women living in the nineteenth century. Let us strive to be sensible.’
Cecilia sighed and transferred a smear of dirt from her hand to her slightly clammy brow.
‘I think we should go outside and take some air. I can’t bear to start on the upstairs yet.
I’m not even sure I want to find anything, or what we should do about it if we did.
We haven’t explored the grounds at all since we arrived, and it’s a lovely day we’re missing.
If you need a justification for Bea, in case she accuses us of flagging in our labours when she is working hard, we can look for secret entrances concealed by creepers and that sort of thing. ’
They went out through the main door and turned right, with some obscure idea that one should not walk widdershins around a building even if it wasn’t a church.
The climbing roses were not yet so fully in leaf and bud that they could have concealed a door, or anything much at all, but as Cecilia had said, other parts of the house were more thickly covered in great mats of ivy.
It had plainly been cut back by Mr Fisk on the ground level not long since, so that it did not obscure any of the windows too much, but it was making vigorous encroachments even there, branches and glossy leaves reaching out and tapping at the glass; it could easily have covered a door.
The girls were dustier yet, with twigs and more cobwebs tangled in their dark hair, before they reached the back of the house overlooking the bay.
They had discovered no secret portals, only a great quantity of scuttling spiders, dead leaves, and abandoned birds’ nests.
And there were no signs of footprints or broken branches, nor anything else that might have revealed the recent presence of intruders.
But then, the ground was dry, and might not have shown any marks.
‘It is a glorious view,’ Cecilia said, pausing to look out towards the shining sea.
The day was sunny but breezy, and small white clouds were scudding across the sky like so many lively sheep.
There was a wide gravel path, or what had once been a gravel path before the weeds had taken over, all the way round the building, and beyond it, an overgrown lawn that sloped down a short way to a stone balustrade.
Wild rosebushes had seeded themselves here and there, threatening to turn the garden into even more of a wilderness, and eventually, no doubt to swallow the house entirely like Sleeping Beauty’s castle.
Their gowns could not well be any dirtier than they were already, and so they picked up their skirts to avoid snagging them on brambles and walked through the wet, tangled grass.
When they reached the boundary wall, they stood together, enjoying the fresh air and looking out across the wide expanse of sand, water, and distant shores that was now revealed to them.
They discovered that there was a flight of steps leading down at one side, the bricks mossy and split in places, but still usable; they made their way carefully to the bottom and through more tussocky grass, along a narrow path apparently made by animals, towards the edge of the sand.
Londoners that they were, the sea drew them with its unfamiliar grandeur of scale.
Cecilia shaded her eyes with her hand and looked about her.
It was exhilarating, she found, to survey such a large and open scene, while feeling the wind tugging playfully at her braided hair and blowing her narrow skirts hard against her body.
They were both hatless and coatless, out in public in some sense, but on the edge of their own land, no one could criticise them for it, or they need not care if they did; they owed explanations or excuses for their unladylike behaviour to precisely nobody.
The thought was unexpectedly liberating.
‘I wonder if Mama did not come with us just so as to allow us this feeling of freedom?’ she mused.
‘The house is not hers but ours, and because she is not here, we need defer to no one in our management of it, or our general conduct, except each other. Most young women, and older women too, will never be independent of their parents unless they marry; our situation is entirely different and I am only now coming to realise it.’
‘If so, that was unusually tactful of Mama,’ Bianca said, her dark locks whipping about her face.
‘But her blunt speaking has always been in one cause: we’ve always known all she wanted for us was security, since she never had any herself, due to poor Papa’s unfortunate situation.
And she is free of all such cares too now, for the first time in forever.
She has her independent income from all of us, without having to depend on handouts from anybody, as is only right.
I do wish we could have met Mrs Albery. We have a great deal to thank her for.
And most of all, I am glad that she has put us in a position where we must not think of marriage or courtship for a year. That too is freeing, don’t you think?’
‘Yes,’ Cecilia said slowly. ‘Of course, if one of us should wish to, such a restriction would be irksome, and a year seem long. But that seems unlikely at the moment, I agree, and I shall not worry about such a thing. It’s a responsibility too, though, you know – the freedom.
Most girls who marry in our station in life do so at the urging of their friends and relations, because they know that their choices are limited.
Ours are not. If we make bad decisions, we will only have ourselves to blame. ’