Chapter Nineteen
When it comes to history, we only know
what we’ve been told.
I, on the Past, Cornelius Ottersock
Amelia remained calm as the two women took her and Caleb across the field and through a small kitchen garden toward the back of the manor house.
With every step, she evaluated possibilities for escape but ultimately overthought each one so much that they had gone deep in the apple orchard behind the house before she reached any decision.
Night thickened as the heavy rain clouds loomed steadily closer, and although Hilda had taken a lantern that hung from one of the trees and lit it to illuminate their way, this provided barely more than a pallid ghost of light in the eerie, whispering darkness beneath the orchard’s canopy.
Amelia felt like a blighted Tudor queen entering the Tower of London, unsure of her fate but anticipating something unpleasant.
Her calm intensified until she had to acknowledge it was in fact dissociation, wrought of fear.
Beside her, still clutching her hand, Caleb breathed with a spikiness that suggested the carpet of fallen leaves and rotting apples beneath them was ruining any lingering hope he might have had to save his shoes.
Stopping abruptly between two trees, Mavis dragged the leaf litter with her pitchfork until she located a loop of rope.
When she pulled on this, the ground levered up in the form of a hatch, dirt and leaves scattering off its wooden surface.
Hilda’s lantern revealed a ladder descending into a tunnel beneath the earth.
“Down we go,” the woman said with a cheerfulness that gave Amelia goosebumps. Mavis climbed down; then Hilda jerked her head at Amelia and Caleb.
“Your turn. Inside.”
“Look, we’re just historians,” Caleb told her anxiously.
“We’re not interested in anything that’s less than a century old, and of course you’re much younger than that.
” He smiled, but both the night and Hilda’s mood were too dark for it to have any effect, so he pressed on with increasing desperation.
“We don’t care about you burying treasure, and I promise we won’t tell any—”
“In. Side.” Hilda’s punctuation made an inarguable point.
“We aren’t going to hurt you,” Mavis called out from below.
“So long as you do what we say,” Hilda added.
Caleb squeezed Amelia’s hand, then released it. He began to climb slowly down the ladder. “Oh God!” his voice arose from the darkness, and Amelia gasped at the horrified sound, fear shooting through her. “There are spiderwebs!”
“Tsk,” Hilda said contemptuously. She gestured to Amelia. “In you go. Sounds like he needs someone to hold his hand.”
Hoisting her skirts, Amelia began the descent with all the Tarrant courage she could muster.
Spiders are more scared of me than I am of them, she silently chanted.
This helped her about as much as it always had—which is to say, aaaahhhhh, arachnids!
—and when she made it to the tunnel floor she could not restrain herself from reaching through the darkness to hug Caleb, both assuring herself of his safety and steadying her own nerves.
“There, there,” he said, patting her back.
But his voice was more high-pitched than usual, and he felt softer than she recalled, and two seconds later she realized she was in fact hugging Mavis.
Pulling away, blushing so fiercely it was a wonder she didn’t light up the whole tunnel, she murmured a hasty apology.
“It’s fine,” the woman assured her, wryly amused. “Being kidnapped is harrowing, I’m sure.”
Hilda came down the ladder, pulling the hatch shut behind her, and the group moved into the tunnel.
Packed dirt lay beneath their feet, but wooden buttresses had been established to keep the walls and roof from crumbling, and there was enough space to walk comfortably upright.
Indeed, other than the mustiness, the spiderwebs, and the whole fact of it being a secret underground tunnel leading possibly to their doom, Amelia found it really quite interesting, historically speaking.
Before long they arrived at a second ladder, at the top of which a hatch opened to another tunnel, only this one featured wooden floorboards, and wooden walls, and the musty smell was somehow more civilized.
Amelia concluded that they were inside the manor.
“Secret passageways!” she exclaimed with the delight of one who had solved a mystery.
She recollected not only the door that had suddenly opened in Sir Nigel’s study but also how Lady Ruperta and her housekeeper had disappeared in a corridor without exits, and her mind started running ahead of her, even while she inched carefully, slowly through the dark between Caleb and Mavis.
“Keep quiet!” Hilda ordered in a severe whisper.
Muted household sounds could be heard through the walls, suggesting the servants’ realm was within hearing—and possibly rescuing—distance.
Amelia considered shouting for help, but that seemed more likely to get her a spade applied forcefully against her head than a rescue.
And so they trudged on along passageways and up a crooked flight of stairs.
Amelia could not help but feel rather thrilled, despite the circumstances, to be experiencing a secret escape route that might have been created long ago in case of war, or for Catholics needing to evade religious persecution.
Throckmorton would love this, she thought, and a welter of emotions tumbled through her—fear and fascination and, most confusing of all, a kind of melancholy fondness for the medieval studies professor that suggested she was suffering from oxygen deprivation in such an enclosed space.
At last, Mavis halted beside a blank wall. From its other side came the sound of a voice speaking in an unusual cadence, as if chanting. Amelia’s stomach clenched.
Tap-tap, tap-tap, tap, Mavis knocked against the wall.
Nothing happened.
“It’s supposed to be tap-tap-tap, tap-tap,” Hilda whispered from the rear.
“I don’t think so,” Mavis said, and reproduced her knock. Still, nothing happened.
“I’m telling you—” Hilda’s whisper increased in volume.
“And I’m telling you, I know what the secret knock is,” Mavis snapped.
“Obviously not,” Hilda answered snarkily.
Mavis glared at her through the dim lantern light with such a ferocity that Amelia and Caleb prudently shifted back, pressing themselves against the wall.
“Shall I knock the code against your head, to remind you of it?” Mavis suggested.
“You can try,” Hilda said, raising her spade. “Alternatively, you can try tap-tap-tap, tap-tap against the wall, like a sensible person would do, it being the CORRECT secret code.”
Wincing at Hilda’s choleric tone and obvious capital letters, Amelia groped for Caleb’s hand in the darkness.
He caught hers in a strong, reassuring grip, and she knew that, with him at her side, she could survive belligerent lady farmers, claustrophobic dark passages, and whatever existed behind the wall (although perhaps not spiders).
“I’ll do it just to prove you wrong,” Mavis said. Without shifting her gaze, she reached out and knocked as Hilda had suggested.
Nothing happened.
“Ha!” Mavis declared triumphantly. The sound echoed like desperate ghosts through the passageway. “Wrong!”
“You were wrong too!” Hilda pointed out, whisper abandoned in favor of bluster as she took a step toward Mavis. Glancing at each other nervously, Amelia and Caleb attempted to lean even farther backward, despite the solid wood behind them—
CREAK.
Suddenly, the wall at their backs disappeared as someone yanked open what was evidently a secret door.
“Stop being so nois—” began an irate demand that was cut off when Amelia and Caleb stumbled backward, colliding with the speaker.
A tumult of voices and limbs ensued, ending horizontally on the floor.
Dazed, Amelia looked up through streaks of her hair to see Mavis’s embarrassed face.
“Oops, sorry, knocked in the wrong place,” the woman said.
“We need to mark it better,” Hilda added.
“Then it wouldn’t be a secret door,” pointed out the woman currently lying beneath Amelia. She shoved and wriggled, and Amelia hastily clambered up as Caleb did the same beside her.
“Are you all right?” he asked, touching her face, tidying her hair. Amelia did not have time to answer before a familiar voice whipped sharply between them.
“What are you doing here?!”
Turning, clutching hands again automatically, Amelia and Caleb faced the dramatic and rather bewildering sight of Lady Ruperta enthroned like the Queen of the Dead upon an elegant and overtly expensive mahogany chair (Chippendale, cabriole legs, eighteenth century, Amelia estimated) at the center of some five other senior ladies, all of whom were seated on velveteen chaise lounges of lesser value.
Amelia thought back to the murmured voices she’d heard at various times inside the house walls and realized they were not ghosts after all but a secret society of women lurking in the darkness.
Although it wasn’t actually darkness. The chamber they occupied was in fact a cozy, chintz-papered salon, warmly illuminated by lamplight.
Potted ferns, gilded mirrors, and several portraits of female nudes decorated the space.
Delicate melodies drifted through the exotically scented air from a music box in one corner.
On a side table, plush iced cakes, doughnuts, and biscuits quickly became the focus of Amelia’s interest, considering the last thing she’d eaten was half a sardine hors d’oeuvre, more than an hour ago.
Altogether the scene seemed vaguely risqué, despite the fact that the women were not only dressed in sturdy woolens and gum boots but also busily working on knitting projects. The only exception to this was Lady Ruperta, in whose hands rested a small gilded book.
“We caught these two in the field,” Mavis announced.