The Empty Frame (12 page)

He looked round for the old woman, peering into side chapels and then behind a blue felt curtain where bell-ropes hung, and vestments, and old brooms. She was definitely not there, so he turned to go out again. As he walked towards the great west door, his eyes travelled up to a wooden gallery which he hadn't noticed last time, a simple structure, the same unadorned oak as the pews, which must once have held musicians. In the middle of this gallery stood the old lady. She was staring down at him, staring straight into his eyes and with one long thin hand, heavily ringed he noticed, she was pointing to the Neale memorial.

The face of the modern boy stared up into the face of the Elizabethan widow. It was an ancient face, a face cut almost to pieces by its channels of pain, and of grief, but it was the face he had seen before in the painting, when it was a younger, harder face, before all this life had happened to it.

“You are looking at an authentic minstrels' gallery, young man,” said a voice behind him. The officious caretaker, wearing a brass badge that said “Robert
Atherton, Sidesperson”, was standing at his elbow. “Read your Thomas Hardy? Read
Under the Greenwood Tree
? That's the kind of gallery they'd have played in, with their fiddles and such like. I prefer a good organ myself.”

Sam turned round when the man spoke to him but almost immediately looked back again, up into the gallery. In that instant, the figure in black had disappeared totally. He looked back wildly, and in some anguish, at Robert Atherton. “Can I – ca – ca – can I go up?” he stammered, his heart thumping violently. “It's, I'm, I'm very keen on history. I'd like to see it properly.”

But the man folded his arms across his chest with a definite satisfaction. “I'm afraid not. The stairs became dangerous and they had to be removed.”

Something in Sam hardened. The man was obviously lying. “But I've just seen someone, someone up there,” he said. “She was there a few seconds ago.”

“Oh really? When?”

“I've told you,
just now.
It was quite an old woman. She was definitely there.”

The man glanced at his wristwatch. “As I say, young man, they removed the stairs several years ago. There is no way of getting up there these days. Now, if you don't mind, I have to lock up for an hour. It's my lunch time. We don't leave the church unattended any more,
there's too much vandalism. And he began to steer Sam towards the door.

But Sam shook him off. “Listen,” he said hotly, “there
are
stairs, they're behind that door, aren't they?” For not only had he seen the old woman up in the gallery, he had seen a pencil-slim bulge in a side wall which obviously concealed a spiral staircase which led up to it. This man was lying.

Robert Atherton sighed indulgently and produced a large bunch of keys. “Well,” he said, “you certainly know your church architecture, and you're right, the stairs were there, originally. But as I explained, they were removed years ago. Let me put your mind at rest. Come on.”

He unlocked the tiny timbered door, pulled it open and allowed Sam to go before him into a small round room. And when he looked very carefully, Sam realised that he had told the truth. Visible on the walls were dark lines indicating the former existence of a spiral staircase. But it was there no longer, and the roof of the chamber came down so low that Sam could almost touch it with his hands.

All through the afternoon, they worked away in the shrubbery. The patch of waste ground, and the holly trees which Sam thought he had seen from the tree, were much further away from the passage they had cleared than he'd thought. Magnus began to grumble. “Are you
sure
this is right?” he said. “We seem to be getting into thicker and thicker stuff, to me. Something's biting me too. We'll have to go back, I can't stand much more of this.”

Sam took no notice but hacked away in silence. He was locked in his own world, still thinking of what had happened in the church, and of what they might find in this tunnel, should they ever uncover an entrance. The face staring down at him from the gallery was unmistakeably the face of Lady Alice Neale. No-one would easily forget its strong, hard lines, its austere beauty, unyielding, even in the teeth of time. He had seen his first ghost. Did ghosts, therefore, grow old? And did they really try to communicate and change the course of history? He'd thought their lives existed parallel to one's own but this ghost seemed to want
something from them, or rather, from Magnus. Magnus was certainly the key to it.

Sam felt he was in very deep waters, plunged into them against his will and into something to do with time and suffering and regret that he did not begin to understand. But the incident in the church had definitely happened. He had seen the Lady Alice for himself now, like Doubting Thomas who also would not believe until he had hard evidence. But what was he to do with this evidence? He must tell the other two but then he would feel foolish because, all along, he had been so scornful. Nobody liked admitting they were wrong.

Magnus suddenly announced that the midges were eating him alive. “It's because we've come back to the river,” said Floss, trying to be helpful. “I suppose they could be mosquitoes.”

“Oh
no
!” Magnus said dramatically. “We could get malaria, people
can
get it here, you don't have to go to India to catch malaria.”

But Floss had had enough. “For heaven's sake, Mags,” she said, “don't be such a wimp.”

But then Sam called out, “Shut up, just SHUT UP, the pair of you,” and they saw him drop down on to his knees, and begin to wriggle under a low bush. They watched as he slowly disappeared from sight, then a silence fell. At first there was only the gentle movement of tree branches, the occasional bird and a plop as
something moved on the river. Then they heard Sam's voice, shrill with excitement, “I've found it, honestly, I really have! And it's not even covered over with earth, let alone with a bush or anything. This is fantastic!”

“We're coming!” Magnus shouted, and he plunged into the undergrowth in the direction of Sam's voice, not even bothering to wriggle through, but staying upright, fighting his way through the trees. Floss followed and within seconds they had found the tiny clearing where Sam stood, blood trickling down one cheek from a deep scratch and a bruise on the other.

He was standing with folded arms looking down and grinning. “That's what we're looking for,” he said, kicking at something. “And I can see where we went wrong. There were more elms here, look, you can see where they cut them down. But they're further along, and not right on the river, like the others. I suppose Cousin M didn't think of that.”

Magnus dropped on to his knees and started brushing leaf mould off whatever it was that Sam was kicking with his foot. Floss joined him and soon they found themselves looking at a square metal plate, roughly a metre square. Very slowly, together, the three of them brought their faces very close to the ground, and looked. There was a moment of silence, then Magnus said in disgust, “It says ‘Harrington, Stoke-on-Trent'. It's a
manhole cover
, that's all it is.”

But Sam shoved Magnus aside quite roughly. “I know what it is, Magnus. There are lots of them around. But the point is, what's it doing here in the middle of a wood? They could easily have used a drain cover, to hide the tunnel entrance. They'd have done it on purpose.”

“It reminds me of that lamp post in the middle of Narnia,” Floss said dreamily. Because Sam was obviously furious with Magnus, she didn't say that she too felt disappointed because the cover probably concealed no more than a boring old drain. She said, trying to sound encouraging, “Miss Adeline would have been a little girl in the nineteen hundreds, wouldn't she? Surely they had drain covers by then?”

“They did,” Magnus informed her. “Victorian sewers are marvellous. Where I used to live, in Deptford—”

But Sam interrupted. This wasn't the moment for a lecture on sewers. “We need the spade,” he said, “and the jemmy Wilf gave us. Come on. We won't shift it in five minutes, not after the time it's been sitting here.”

The first thing they did was the most obvious, which was to take turns in pulling on the iron ring in the middle. But the plate was immoveable. From his backpack, Magnus silently produced a small coil of rope. Sam, looping it round the ring, was impressed. “What made you bring that, Mags?” he asked.

Magnus shrugged. “Dunno. Thought a rope might
come in useful. I've brought one or two more things, as well. But let's see if this works first.”

They knotted the rope firmly to the ring, took hold of it and pulled. Nothing at all happened at first, then there was a clinking sound. The rope gave suddenly, and sent them tottering backwards. Eagerly they rushed forward, to inspect the cover.

But it hadn't moved. Instead, the iron ring had crumbled away into rusty red lumps.

“Time to try the key, don't you think, Mags?” Sam said, in a respectful voice. He was impressed by the provision of the rope. He took it from his pocket and unwrapped the tissue paper. It was a thick heavy key, very plain and business-like, of a dull grey clean metal and with not a spot of rust. It looked as if Miss Adeline might have polished it regularly.

“Let's spray a bit of this in the hole first,” said Magnus, rummaging in his backpack and producing a blue aerosol can. “This loosens rusty locks and things. We can put a bit on the key as well.”

“Brilliant,” Floss said, putting a hand on his shoulder and staring down at “Harrington, Stoke-on-Trent”. She was still finding it hard to believe that there was anything more than a drain underneath the cover, but the two boys were now tense and silent.

Sam inserted the key and turned gently, first to the left, then to the right. “No go,” he said. “I don't want
to break anything inside the lock. You have a try, Mags.”

Magnus squatted beside him and fiddled with the key for a long time, stopping now and again to squirt in more of the de-rusting agent. After some minutes they heard a dull clunking noise and Magnus's back stiffened. He stood upright and wiped his forehead. “Done it. I've definitely turned the key in the lock. But now what do we do?”

“Let's try levering it up with the jemmy,” Sam suggested. So they inserted the flat end under the edge of the manhole cover. Then Sam stood on the main part of the handle, leaning all his weight upon it. “Please be careful,” Floss said anxiously. “If the blade snaps it could go in someone's eye.” But Sam, who seemed to be growing increasingly frantic in their efforts to dislodge the infuriating cover, jumped up and down on the twanging blade. Magnus and Floss retreated. “You're moving it,” Magnus said in excitement, “so it's definitely unlocked. But I think we'll have to dig round the sides a bit. Good job the earth's fairly soft.”

Sam picked up the spade and began to jab round the edges of the cover with the blade. “Mags,” he said humbly. “You didn't by any chance bring a torch, did you?”

“Yes, I did, I brought one each. There were two in Wilf's shed.” His was the army one that had belonged
to Father Godless, the one he kept by him at night, in case something frightened him. Its little pencil beam wouldn't do much to penetrate the kind of darkness they might encounter under the river.

Sam had already started digging seriously round all four sides of the manhole cover. There was only one spade so the others watched. Quite soon the soft earth started to fall away, as there began to be an indentation of several centimetres all round it. “Mind where you put your feet,” warned Sam, “the whole thing might cave in.” But before anybody actually jumped clear, they saw a sizeable hole appear, gaping blackly between “Harrington, Stoke-on-Trent” and their neat ridges of sweet-smelling forest floor. Silently, as if under orders from some unseen leader, each took hold of a corner of the metal cover, lifted it away quite easily and set it on the ground. Then they looked down.

They saw a flight of very narrow steps disappearing into blackness and curved, rough walls lined with stones and pieces of flint. A dank, sour smell came up at them and Sam, touching the rocky walls, withdrew his hand sharply. “Ugh, it's slimy.”

“Well, it's bound to be,” said Magnus in a flat, matter-of-fact voice. “It goes under a river. Come on then, there's a torch each. And he handed Sam a big yellow flashlight, and Floss a stout rubber torch,
keeping Father Godless's little green one for himself. “I'll go at the back,” he said.

Sam, at the front, did not budge. “Come
on
!” Magnus said irritably, “or do you want me to lead?”

“No. No, it's OK. Only… it's terribly narrow. Hope we don't get stuck. I – you all right, Floss? Do you want to stay out here?”

“No,” she snapped. “Do you?” Without another word, and not understanding himself what he was so afraid of, Sam put his foot gingerly on the first of the slimy steps and went down into the darkness.

They realised afterwards, when they swam across the river from bank to bank, that they could have only advanced a few yards through the tunnel, but now, while they were deep inside it, and inching blindly forwards through the foul darkness, it felt as if it must be miles long. The roof of it scraped their heads and the sides were so close that at times even Magnus, who was terribly thin, had to turn sideways to get through. In one place they had to crouch and wriggle under a spar of timber that had fallen from the roof. When they shone their torch beams upwards, they could see that it was a properly constructed tunnel, the walls lined with lumps of knobbled flint mixed with river stones and the odd brick, all crudely plastered together and shored up with timbers which, amazingly, had not rotted away. Underfoot, they were squelching through what felt like thick mud.

Nobody spoke. All three knew instinctively that all any of them wanted was for the tunnel to end, in daylight, in a blank wall, anything – just as long as they could legitimately turn round and go back. Floss was
starting to panic. She had always loathed stuffy enclosed spaces and she tried to avoid going in lifts or up into lofts or in things like ghost trains at a funfair. The fear she hoped she might have conquered was now coming back. It was rising up into her mouth, and it was getting very big. It was threatening to become a scream.

But then, just as she thought she really would have to go back, she heard Sam call out, “Hey, it's widening out. It's a kind of room.” And soon they were all standing together in the middle of a rough-walled chamber, with a domed roof, the top-most point of which was considerably higher than the tunnel.

Although there was now plenty of space around them they stood in a little knot, their bodies touching for reassurance, looking round them. “It's empty,” Magnus said in a small voice. “I thought—”

“What?” Sam's voice too sounded crestfallen. “Did you expect – human remains? The remains of the boy?”

“Of course not, though I suppose they might be in a cavity, say, under the floor. We might have to dig.”

Floss shivered. It just sounded too horrible, too like hideous murders one saw on the TV news. The police were always digging for people. She said, “We can't do that, Mags.”

“Why not? The mother wants her son. She wants him to be decently buried. That's what we're here for.”

“I'll go back if you start digging,” she said.

“On your own?”

“Yes, if I have to.”

“Listen. Just wait a minute.” Sam was running the beam of his torch all over the chamber. The floor was made of brick and against one wall a slab of stone had been placed across two smaller stone supports, to make a bench. More slabs of stone, looking like the ruins of a table, lay on the floor, but apart from these things the room really was empty. Directly opposite where they had stepped out of their tunnel, another tunnel began, but they could see from where they stood that it was impassable. It only went in about a foot before ending abruptly in a wall of flints and bricks, all firmly mortared into place, with two great beams driven into the ground to shore the wall up, in the shape of an X.

Sam said, “Perhaps they never took the tunnel as far as the other side of the river. It looks as if they gave up. This must have just been a hiding place. After all, you could have taken a boat across the river I suppose, under cover of darkness.”

Magnus was now working his way systematically round the walls of the chamber with his torch, but Floss's fear of dark, enclosed spaces was creeping over her again. “Look, you can see that there's nothing here,” she said. “
Please
can we go back?” It was enough that she had braved the darkness and come this
far. Now she wanted to return to the river and sit in the sun.

“I'm looking for something,” he said. “Not a body. But Miss Adeline told us that her brother used to hide his treasures here. Remember? There's got to be a little hidey-hole. But where?”

“In the walls, perhaps?” Sam suggested, flashing his big yellow light up and down. But the crude mixture of brick and flint was firmly cemented together. Between them they went over every inch, but there was no loose stone that pulled out, revealing a hiding place.

Next they turned their attention to the brick floor which was raised higher than the floor of the tunnel which was mainly mud mixed with small river stones. The floor of the chamber itself was perfectly dry. Care had obviously been taken in the construction of this little room, presumably built to shelter people who might have had to stay in hiding for weeks. When he could find no obvious place where bricks had been removed, then replaced, Sam squatted down to look at the floor more closely. But Floss, who was now back inside the tunnel, noticed that Magnus too was standing at a distance, viewing the floor as a whole. For a minute or two he said nothing, then he seemed to pounce. “That's the place,” he said. “That's got to be it.”

“Why?” demanded Sam. “That's the one damp bit.
No point in hiding anything there.”

“But that's exactly it! It's damp because there's cold air trapped underneath it, so there must be a space. Manholes are always the last things to dry, for the same reason. I bet that's it. Come
on… 
good thing I brought this.”

But Sam was sceptical and Floss, who could feel her panic rising, was increasingly desperate to get away. They stood side by side, watching as Magnus drove the blade of the chisel into the joists between the damp bricks, working it carefully round each one. Then they saw that he was lifting them out, and placing them beside him in an orderly pile. They crept closer. Floss found that Sam was holding her hand. She gave his fingers a reassuring squeeze because he was shaking as much as she was. Magnus was lifting something out of the hole in the floor.

It was quite large and wrapped in brownish cloth that smelt as if it had been impregnated with oil. Magnus handed this over to Sam who, instinctively, folded it up carefully and placed it on top of the bricks. Then they looked at the box which he was holding up in front of him with the air of one of the Three Wise Men. “Well, I know what that is,” Floss said. “It's an old travelling writing desk. Aunt Helen's got one. She's leaving it to Sam in her will.”

Magnus placed the box on the floor and they all
looked at it. The oily cloth had preserved the beautifully figured wood from which it was made, but had blackened the brass plate set into the lid. On this, barely visible, engraved in thin, flowing letters, was the name “Maurice Scott-Carr”. “That's Miss Adeline's surname too,” Floss said. “It's on a little notice next to her front door. Open it, Mags.”

“I don't know if I can,” he said, his voice steely with tension. “It's got a keyhole too. It might be locked.”

But as they watched they saw him open the box quite easily. The inside of the lid divided into two halves, each fitting together to make the small leathered slope of a writing desk. Set into the top were two small bottles of ink, and a polished ledge for pens. “It's
just
like Aunt Helen's,” Floss said. “You pull that bit of ribbon and there's space to store things, underneath.”

“I
know
,” said Magnus, and he opened up the storage space to reveal a small package, wrapped in the same kind of oily cloth which had protected the box. Carefully he unwrapped it, took out a bundle of yellowish papers tied round with string, and held them in his hands. He was breathing very fast in the silence.

“What are they, do you think?” Sam said. Magnus had handled everything with such reverential care he didn't dare rush him now.

“I'm not sure. They look like little books. Look, it's a
lot of sections sewn together. But there aren't any covers. “Of course, nowadays they'd be glued – that's why books fall apart – but these have been sewn together, with silk I think.”

“The string's rotten,” warned Sam. “It'll disintegrate if we try to undo it.”

“I don't think we should,” Floss said, “at least, not yet. This all belongs to Miss Adeline. Shouldn't we take it to her first?”

But Magnus was already teasing out something from under the string, a folded piece of paper which looked rather newer than the little silk bound bundles. He opened it and it separated into two pieces, so he pieced the two halves together and held them up in front of his face. “Can you shine your torches,” he said. “There's some writing on this. It's a bit faded.”

But he found that even in the wavering light he could read what was written quite easily, because it was in a bold round hand, honest, unpretentious writing, the hand of a boy like Sam, perhaps, who liked climbing trees and being practical.

Magnus read, first to himself and then aloud:

“‘The only known evidence of the existence of the unfortunate William Neale, whose grieving mother is supposed to haunt the Abbey, was uncovered in the 1850s by some workmen repairing a floor. Taking up
the boards they came across some papers mixed up with rubble. On examination these proved to be copy books, such as a schoolboy might use, of the Tudor period. Corrections had been made on many of them, in a hand that was identified from other manuscripts, as that of the Lady Alice Neale. Each book was signed “William, His Booke,” and, significantly, nearly every page of them was badly blotched. (Taken from my father, Edmund Scott-Carr's unpublished
History of the Abbey.
)'”

“Go on,” said Floss, “What else does it say?”

“That's it. There isn't any more. Maurice must have copied it out of something his father was writing. Perhaps Miss Adeline's got it.”

“But I wonder why he took the books,” Sam said, “and hid them here?”

“He was going to the war,” Floss said, “and his own father was dead. Miss Adeline told us that. Maurice had already inherited the Abbey. But he knew he might never come back, and he didn't. He was killed. He didn't know what was going to happen to the Abbey, it could have been sold off, anything. I think he put them here to keep them safe. Only his sister knew where he'd put his treasures.”

Sam was fingering the ancient little books, under the string. “Look, it says ‘William, His Booke',” he said in
wonder. “Look, on the very first page of the very first one. And someone
has
corrected it. They've written over the top.” Everything was in Latin but it was obvious that a grown up had stood over the boy, ferociously crossing out his own pathetic scribblings.

“Poor William, he really was messy,” Floss murmured. “Look at all those blots.”

But Magnus said very sadly, “They look more like tears to me.”