A Dark and Stormy Night (22 page)

‘That door was locked, always. She was scared to death of someone. She wouldn't have just taken a fancy to leave her room, not when she could ring for anything she needed and be sure who was at the door before she opened it.

‘Now. There is another key to her room, the one kept in the kitchen for the Bateses to use. Suppose she realized that anyone could take that key and get into her room. She's not a terribly intelligent woman, but she has a certain amount of cunning, and even if she's been drinking, she could have worked that one out.'

‘That could be what happened. Someone took the key and dragged her away.'

‘It could. But I can't see it. For one thing, she would have screamed the house down.'

‘Not if she was drugged,' Alan pointed out. ‘Someone could have slipped something into her glass.'

‘But then they would have had to drag her, literally, and as you're in a good position to know, she's not a light weight. No, if I were someone who had wanted to get Julie out of her room, to . . . to kill her, or do her harm, I would have tried to entice her out. But she wouldn't have enticed all that easily – or at all, if the person she was afraid of were trying it. I think she decided in that muddled mind of hers that she was more vulnerable in the house than out of it, and left for another hiding place. But where that place might be, I have no idea at all.'

‘I agree with your reasoning. That's the way I worked it out, too, except I do have a little idea about her hiding place.' He tapped his temple.

‘Little grey cells functioning, are they? OK, tell me.'

‘I have an unfair advantage, you see. I've covered more of the estate than you, most of it searching for someone. I seem, indeed to have spent most of the weekend searching for someone!'

‘You poor dear. And this was supposed to be fun.'

‘Yes, well. I began to ponder the Harrisons' idea of tunnels.'

‘But Alan, we're much too far from the sea for smuggling to have been practical.'

‘That isn't the only use to which tunnels were put, you know. Think about it, Dorothy. The house is, according to Jim and Mr Bates, riddled with secret rooms and so on . . .' He paused suggestively.

‘Priest's holes – oh, how utterly stupid of me! Escape tunnels!'

‘Or passageways to a church. Remember Mr Leatherbury commented about the High Church tendencies of the Upshawes? I asked him, while you were off somewhere the other day, whether there was a good deal of Anglo-Catholic sentiment in the parish. He said it had died out a bit now, but that according to parish records most of the communicants were, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, very Catholic-minded. And that implies to me—'

‘That they were actually Roman Catholic!'

‘Or had been at one time. They – the brave souls who professed that faith – would have had to hide it, naturally. Hence the priest's holes. Now, often a Catholic household would have, somewhere in the house, a chapel, or at least a place where Mass could be said. But the vicar said he had never heard of a chapel here at the Abbey.'

I giggled. ‘A secular bunch of monks, they must have been.'

‘Now, now. Obviously there was a church here when the Abbey was functioning as such. But it was apparently destroyed when Henry shut the place down, leaving only the cloisters of the old religious establishment.'

‘And the papists, later on, wouldn't have dared use any place that was so obvious for their clandestine Masses.'

‘Naturally not. So the vicar's best guess is that they used the parish church itself, but approached secretly by dark of night. Hence a tunnel.'

TWENTY-FOUR

‘
O
of.' I tripped over a root and grabbed Alan's arm. ‘Could we slow down a little? I'm fine, really, but I wouldn't mind sitting for a bit. If there's any place to sit.'

‘Sorry, love. You should have said something.'

‘I was perfectly all right until that last root. It reached up and grabbed my ankle. Reminded me of those trees in
The Wizard of Oz
. Remember? They struck out at Dorothy and Toto.'

‘Downright malevolent, some trees are.'

We sat on a felled trunk while I caught my breath. ‘So where do you think this tunnel is?'

‘Well, it would have come out in the parish church, which is just across the river. The vicar says that end has apparently been blocked up; at least he's never been able to find it. And the entry, in the house, has kept its secret all these years, according to both the vicar and Jim.
But
.' He tented his hands and went into his lecturing mode. ‘A long tunnel like that would have had air vents built in, and very likely an escape hatch.'

‘Sure! Rather like an animal's burrow. Various ways in and out so that, if an enemy was at one hole, the badger or whatever could get out the other.'

‘Exactly. And on one recent foray I found what looked very much like one of those emergency exits. It's not much farther now; do you think you can make it?'

‘I told you I'm fine. But Alan – you're not going to make me go into a tunnel, or a cave, or anything like that?'

‘Would I do that to you? No, I just thought I'd rather have you along. I hated the idea of leaving you back at the house all by yourself.'

He sounded apologetic. We've worked hard to keep a decent balance between his desire to protect me and my need for independence. Every now and then I get testy about his hovering, but on the whole I find it rather endearing – when not carried to extremes. I patted his arm and we continued amicably.

We were nearing the river now. I could hear the rush of water and smell the freshness. ‘It sounds not quite so . . . fierce, I guess is the word.'

‘It's gone down a bit,' Alan agreed. ‘Now watch your step here.' He guided me around a fallen tree, to the edge of what seemed to be a grassy cliff, if there is such a thing.

‘Erosion of some kind?' I asked, dubious.

‘I don't think so. I think it's a kind of ha-ha.'

A ha-ha, as I learned on a trip to Bath some years ago, is a landscaping device serving the purpose of a fence without creating a barrier to the view. Imagine a lawn sloping away from the manor house towards a meadow where sheep or cows are grazing. It's a lovely, pastoral scene, but plainly you don't want the animals coming up and eating all your flowers and shrubs. Nor do you want to see an ugly affair of posts and rails in the middle distance. So you have your army of gardeners (we're in the eighteenth century at this point, and you're rich as Croesus) – you have your gardeners terrace the slope so that rather than a smooth incline, the lawn levels off for a few yards and then drops off suddenly, forming something very like a cliff perhaps six feet high. The vertical wall is reinforced with brick or stone, and there you have it. From the house the difference in level is invisible, but the beasts on the other side can't get to your garden. Somewhere you build a flight of steps so people can get down, if they want to.

‘This is the wrong sort of place for a ha-ha,' I objected. ‘No lawn, no vista, no livestock.'

‘That's why I think it's what we're looking for. I think they – whoever “they” were, back during the Civil War perhaps – they built this to make possible a concealed door into the tunnel. Or rather out of the tunnel; it would have been used as an exit rather than an entrance.'

‘And you've found the door?' This was getting exciting.

‘I think so. There aren't any steps left, if there ever were any. I'll have to lift you down.'

‘Don't be silly. Help me sit.'

Sitting on the ground isn't easy when you have titanium knees. They don't flex as readily as your original equipment. And getting up is even worse. You have to kneel, and that can be very painful. However, I wasn't going to give in. With Alan's help I sat, awkwardly, on the muddy, leafy ground and scooted to the edge. Then, using my cane as a prop, I slid down on my bottom.

My slacks would never be the same again, but I made it.

I insisted on getting up without Alan's help. That required a good deal of manoeuvring, grunting, and at least one yelp, but I was at last standing upright. ‘OK,' I said, still panting, ‘Show me.' I brushed some leaves off various bits of clothing.

‘You see that bit of stone? It looked odd to me when I first saw it. Not a match to the rest of the rock nearby.'

I moved closer and scrutinized it. ‘Well – maybe not exactly the same colour. But different rocks are different colours. Aren't there different sorts of rocks, most places? I never studied geology.'

Alan grinned. ‘It is refreshing, if I may say so, my dear, to discover something you don't know. In many parts of the country you get a mix of sedimentary and igneous rocks. Those are—'

‘I know what they are. I'm not quite a dunce. Rocks compressed from silt, and rocks created by fire.'

‘Roughly, yes. Well, the fact is, here it's all sandstone. But this is a piece of much harder stone, and it looks as if it was once part of a building. It doesn't belong here. So when I discovered it, I tried to work out what it was doing here, and when I came up with the idea of a door, I came back to try to find some way to shift it. I couldn't, but if I'm right about this, Julie may well have wedged it somehow to elude pursuit. So a spot of force seemed indicated.' He pulled out of an inner jacket pocket a small but efficient-looking crowbar, and from another pocket a piece of what looked like old lead pipe, and flourished them. ‘Now, if you will hold the pipe a moment while I position the lever . . . good. And I wedge the pipe over the end, thus—'

‘Yes, to extend the crowbar and give yourself more leverage. That much science I know.'

‘Keep your hair on, woman – I wasn't showing off my male superiority. At least I don't think I was. You'd best stand back a bit; if Julie mucked about with the hinge points, I may well pull some of the bank down on us.'

He braced himself as well as he could in the mud, took hold of the pipe with both hands, and pushed hard toward the wall to force the business end of the lever outwards.

It was as well I obeyed his injunction to step back. He did bring down part of the bank, but that wasn't the real surprise. It was the torrent of water that gushed out, shoving the heavy piece of granite aside like a falling domino, and knocking Alan off his feet.

He wasn't hurt. That was the first thing I checked, the only thing I cared about. Sopping wet, muddy, and smelling like a swamp – an
old
swamp – he got to his feet with difficulty only because the footing was so slippery.

When I was sure he was intact, I studied him as he looked at me. We both burst into somewhat hysterical laughter. ‘You look like the Tar-Baby,' I said when I could speak.

‘And you like a most disreputable bag lady. We shall have to creep into the house by a back way.'

‘What I'd like to do is get to the laundry room, strip, and wash all our clothes on the spot. But getting up to our room—'

‘—stark naked, through several acres of stately home—'

That set us off again, but we sobered as we clambered up the bank and squelched off toward the house.

‘You were wrong,' I said to Alan.

‘I was,' he admitted.

‘It was a great idea, though.'

‘It never occurred to me that the tunnel would have flooded, though I should have thought of it, given the rains we've had.'

‘And the tunnel runs under the river, and might have developed a leak or two in the past several hundred years.'

‘Yes. In any case, Julie could certainly not have hidden in there. I was wrong.'

‘Or,' I said grimly, ‘if she did, and the flood came later . . .' I didn't need to finish the thought. I went on, hurriedly. ‘But assuming she
is
alive and hiding – or being hidden – somewhere, the question is, where?'

And to that question, neither of us could come up with an answer.

When we got back to the house, we managed to sneak up to our bedroom without seeing anyone. I was tired, and nearly as wet and dirty as Alan, but when I had shed my impossible clothes and cleaned up a bit, I wanted some tea.

‘Alan,' I called into the bathroom, where he was relishing a hot bath – his second, the first having removed only the top layer of grime. ‘Alan, we're out of tea. Will you disown me if I go down to the kitchen?'

‘You could ring.'

‘I'm not very good at that, and besides, I want to talk to Rose. She seemed, this morning, thoroughly recovered from whatever fit of superstition assailed her last night, but I'd like to make sure she's OK. I promise I won't let anyone lure me into a closet, and if I'm not back soon, you can come looking for me.'

‘And don't think I won't!' he growled.

I headed for the kitchen.

‘Mrs Martin, what can I do for you?' Rose Bates was once again her cool, efficient self, disposed to resent my presence in her kitchen.

‘I'm pining for some tea, and I'm sorry, Rose, but I'm just not used to asking someone else to do what I can perfectly well do for myself. It seems really rude to ring a bell and summon you to my side when you're busy doing something else. Is the kettle hot?'

She pursed her lips. ‘It will be in a moment. I'll get a tray.'

I had thought we had established friendly relations, and wondered why she was now snubbing me. Maybe now that she had her electricity back and could cook properly, she didn't want help or companionship. In any case, I'd been put firmly in my place. I sat on a kitchen chair, feeling foolish, while she prepared a tray: cloth, cups and saucers, spoons, sugar, lemon and a plate of biscuits. I didn't dare protest that after that breakfast I wouldn't need food for a week. Nor did I comment on the lemon, assuming that the milk was used up, or sour. Electricity or not, it would be some little time before the household routine was back to normal.