Iron Chamber of Memory (4 page)

So she spoke as the two came around a corner and saw a lit window. It gleamed in the angle between the north wing and the dovecote like a spark between cupped hands. Halfway up the ancient curving wall of the central priory, twenty or thirty feet off the ground, was a small arched window burning a pale red light. It was dim, furtive, flickering, like a pink star.

Closer, they could see an arch of glass was decorated with the image of a rose in bloom, and a figure of a helmed knight embracing a fish-tailed woman.

Hal shouted up at the window. Silence answered. He shouted again, and then threw pebbles.

“You’re making a good deal of racket,” said Laurel in a dry, half-mocking voice.

“From the look of it, that is not an electric light. Someone lit a fire, or a lamp,” Hal said. “They don’t burn forever. I wonder if Manfred is up there.”

“No doubt he fell asleep reading some massive, dusty volume on native mesmeric cures for insomnia found among Patagonian Hottentots, or some other such nonsense. Or perhaps he is watching us fumble at his doors as one of his psychological experiments, timing us with his pocketwatch to see how long it takes us to get frustrated.”

“Well, I am frustrated now.” He glared at the tiny red light, seemingly bright in the great darkness all about him. “I suppose we should go back to the inn?”

She said, “Which way is that?”

Hal turned away from the lit window. The night somehow seemed darker and larger than it had been a moment ago. He could hear the wind moving like some massive beast prowling among the treetops. The rustling noise receded into the distance as the wind passed, mingling with the murmur of the sea caves, the lapping of the shore. Hal thought that if the village had been showing lights, they surely would have been visible from this manor house on the hill.

The starlight was not bright enough to show where the stone gate was. No doubt he could have found it by walking until he saw—or more likely struck—the wall surrounding the manor house lawn, but after that it would be more difficult. Hal imagined trying to follow the twisting dirt path of this automobile-free island through the rocky and uneven ground of the ancient forest in this moonless night, and decided it would be foolish.

He said, “I think one of the things I barked my shin on was a cellar door. That cannot be locked, or how would Manfred get his coal? Or his bottles of wine. Or whatever it is that you Englishmen keep in their cellars.”

“British.”

“What?”

“I am Cornish. From Cornwall. Not English.”

“Isn’t that part of England?”

“Just like Canada is part of America, yes. And I don’t know whence the
Sercquiais
get their coal. Brought in by boat from Guernsey, I suppose.”

She laid her hand on his shoulder. He gave it a comforting pat. They walked through the starlit gloom. He found the slanted wooden trapdoor leading into the cellar as he had before, by barking his shins on it. He stooped and tugged on the handles. The door rattled loudly and loosely in the frame, but did not open.

“This is illegal, you know,” he said.

She said airily, “Manfred has no one to blame but himself. Am I supposed to sleep on the wet grass all night? Let’s go in together and find a couch. I wouldn’t mind a hot bath, or something to eat. We are entitled to some comfort, are we not?”

Hal hesitated, startled. In the gloom, he could not see her expression. He realized that he must be imagining something in her words that was not actually there.

He tugged against the doors, listening to the loose, metallic rattle. The doors could be pulled apart enough for him to thrust his fingers inside, but not his hand. He felt along the doorframe, but could not find whatever latch or chain was holding it shut.

“This does not seem very secure. If I had a crowbar, I might be able….”

She handed him his walking stick that she had been carrying for him. He hefted it.

She said, “You don’t think it will snap, do you? The stick, I mean. It’s quite heavy.”

He absentmindedly fingered the streamlined hawk head of the handle. “My grandfather’s. Took it off a German officer he’d killed in the French Alps during the war. The center was bored out and filled with some wonder alloy made by Nazi science. Whatever it is, it never sets off metal detectors in airports.”

“I don’t want to see an antique suffer damage.”

“Things were built more solid in the old days.”

“And they spoke more correct as well,” she said dryly. “But seriously, one of these buildings behind must be the woodshed. Wouldn’t it be more prudent to find an axe, instead?”

“Grampa told me it would never break as long as my heart was pure.” And he jammed the heel of the cane between the loose-fitting door leaf and the stone lip, then shoved mightily with both hands.

There was an alarming snap, sounding, to his ears, almost like a thunderclap. A bright flash of lightning dazzled him. The door flew up suddenly, and violently, and the cane handle came loose in his hands. He fell backward, surprised by the sudden lack of resistance, and landed heavily onto the grass.

“Well, I guess my thoughts were not pure after all,” he said, chagrined. “My cane snapped in two.”

Laurel approached rapidly in a rustle of silk. She knelt and leaned over him. Her hands felt soft and warm against his chest. Her hair was slightly mussed, for several long, black locks now escaped their futile pins, and when she stooped over him, the stray locks formed a temporary tent between her face and his. For a wild moment he thought she was going to kiss him, and he almost began to lift his face toward hers. But then he realized she was only straining to see him in the gloom.

She straightened up, throwing her loose strands of hair back impatiently. “Are you all right? What happened?”

He stood up, avoiding her eyes as he brushed off his trousers, blushing with the embarrassment of a disaster narrowly avoided. He reminded himself how great a friend, how loyal and devoted, Manfred had been for years, how Laurel trusted him, relying upon him to be the gentleman. He was glad for the darkness, happy that Laurel could not see his face and, thus, could suspect nothing of his shame.

It had been too close a thing. Over the years, he had become accustomed to the wittily dismissive put-downs she delivered to any gentleman with the gall to favor her with unwanted attention. He shuddered at the thought that, but for the accident of the lateness of the hour, he might have been her next target.

“I broke my….”

But the walking stick was whole and hale in his hand, and as he ran his hand over it in the dark, he could feel no scratch or break in its surface.

He gave a low whistle of surprise. “Grampa was right. Remind me to listen to my elders, eh?” Hal turned to her. “What was that flash of light? I thought maybe the metal core of the cane struck against a chain or latch, or…no, that was no spark! It was like a flashbulb going off.”

“I did not see any light,” Laurel said, surprisingly. She was already going down the stone steps, her knees and hips vanishing under ground.

In the starlight, he could see very little of her, aside from her slender silhouette, and the mass of hair that was escaping its confinement.

“Coming…?” she called lightly. “I don’t want to start my life of crime all alone.”

“You must have seen it! It was like an explosion!”

“Perhaps you hit your head,” she said over her shoulder, as she descended. “I could use a light right about now. This coal cellar at night is as black as a…well, dear me, I am not sure I can think of an apt metaphor at the moment.”

She disappeared from view. He walked down the stairs after her, tapping with his walking stick like a blind man’s cane.

“Mind your head!” she called back to him. “I think people were shorter back when this was built. Or perhaps the lord of the manor liked seeing his serfs with bruised scalps.”

The roof beams were evenly spaced, so he learned to duck them after three or four brain-rattling collisions.

In the pitch darkness, he was acutely aware of what his other senses told him: he felt the warmth in the air, heard the click of her heels, the sigh of her breath, and breathed in the scent of her hair. His collar seemed suddenly tight. As he loosened it, he found himself wondering if perhaps it would have been wiser to dare the darkness and return to the inn.

After a surprisingly long period of groping over dusty boards, bumping into knee-high obstacles, tripping over bulky objects that smelled of rusted iron and cobweb, Hal heard Laurel cry, “I’ve found the stairs!”

“You are sure they are not the ones we just came down?”

“No.” He heard a hollow knocking noise. “These are wood.”

And he heard the rattle of a doorknob. He stepped closer, bumping his nose into something feminine, round, and silken. At the same moment, she cried, “No Dens!” and fell backward onto him. He staggered but caught her, just as she was turning to grab at him for support. The stairs must have been as steep as a ladder, and she must have been very high on them, because when she turned to grab for him, her arms went over his head.

He caught her awkwardly, with his hands high on her thighs, as she flopped over onto him, nearly toppling him over. Absurdly, ridiculously, appallingly, he found himself carrying her Tarzan-style, her backside in the air, her stomach resting on his shoulder, and her head hanging down his back. His walking stick clattered to the cellar floor. He heard it roll across the stone slabs, lost somewhere in the utter darkness.

He let her down quickly, stammering an apology. But there was no way to put her feet on the floor that did not involve a very close embrace. The softness of her curves pressed against the hard planes of his body as she slid down him. His hands still encircled her slender waist.

“Sorry,” he murmured, taking a rapid step away from her. “You startled me!”

“We do seem to keep bumping into each other!” She laughed in her throat, “Maybe it is animal magnetism. Are you North, or South? In any case, you can try the stairs next. There is some sort of net or booby trap over the door. Be careful. It is locked, but,” her voice became a mocking purr, “a great brute like you should be able to force it open.”

Her hands pushed him gently forward. They were so small and light-of-touch that he doubted she could have budged him had she shoved with her full strength. Still, he allowed himself to be pushed where she wanted him to go. His foot found the walking stick, almost tripping him as it rolled under his heel. He stooped and took it up. He used the stick to tap on the stairs and then on the door. Waving his hand in the air, he felt the wooden panels and then the knob. It turned easily under his hand. The door opened with a creak. The air beyond was dusty and cool, but free of mold; somehow he could sense it was a larger area than the cellar.

He waved the walking stick before him, encountering air. “What did you bump into? There is nothing here.”

“Something shoved me back. It felt like a mattress. Maybe it fell. Don’t look at me like you don’t believe me!”

He said, “You can’t even see my face.”

“Women’s intuition. I can feel your dubiousness.”

“Is that even a word?”

“Perhaps not in America. Don’t they instruct you in the English language at Oxford?”

There was no light in this room either. They encountered no furnishings, but Hal’s stick clanged loudly onto the box-like metal surface of what might have been a stove, and Laurel said she found hooks in the ceiling, as well as bins and shelves. She said it must be the kitchens.

He heard her opening and shutting drawers. He touched the wall, found the door, and opened it. Beyond was a room whose narrow and high window slits held stars, but the starlight was too weak to find its way to the floor. They were still in the dark.

She came and stood behind him, her hand soft on his shoulder.

Hal automatically put his hand on the wall next to the door, as if expecting to find a lightswitch there, and his fingers fumbled long enough that Laurel, hearing his nails scrape the surface, said, “This house was built before Mr. Edison’s lightbulb, remember? Or I should say Mr. Swan’s. Did you know he invented the lightbulb before your American Edison? And yet, we Brits get none of the credit.”

He uttered a small laugh. “Well, I remember, but my fingers don’t. Which way shall we go? The air here is stuffy. I’d like to find a window. None of the first floor windows look like they can be opened. This place was built for a siege.”

She said, “Well, the first Seigneur was supposed to drive out pirates, so I suppose he needed a strong house. And we will need a lamp. I found nothing in the kitchen drawers at all, no candles, no silverware, no convenient box of matches. We should find the chamber with the lit window we saw.”

He said, “That was an upper floor of the North Wing.”

“Manfred told me once there are no less than sixteen staircases here, not counting the ones in the towers. We should be able to stumble across one.”

He turned left and walked. He took four steps, put his hand out, and just so happened to find the doorknob immediately.

“Huhn!” he said. “That’s funny. I found the door.”

The silken rustle followed him. It struck him as sad that modern women in modern dress, wearing trousers or dungarees, were not accompanied by that seductive, almost dangerous, whisper of silk when they moved. In the darkness with the dark-haired beauty, the mere sound seemed unbearably sensual.

“What’s funny about it?” she asked.

“My fingers knew where it was. The door, I mean.”

“Maybe they have déjà vu,” she said in her mocking, slow drawl. “Or you have a psychic power, but it does not reach up past the wrist.”

He said, “I don’t know. I had the feeling, earlier, as if I had seen this house before.”

“Manfred must have described it to you in a letter.”

“No, his letters were mostly about the legal difficulties of moving in, getting the place ready, the reading of the Will, that sort of thing. He told me this house has ‘great character’ and he’s been bewildered each time he enters. You can start from anywhere and get to any room two or three ways. Manfred says he gets lost in here even in the daylight. And he never gets lost, and never forgets an appointment.”