The Seance (41 page)

Troubled by this encounter, I went in search of Edwin, whom I found in the gallery, standing disconsolately at the far end of the room, contemplating the entrance to the priest’s hole.

‘Why could you not confide in me?’ he asked as I came up. ‘Did you think I too would not believe you?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘it only came to me last night.’

‘And you cannot tell me any more?’

I hesitated.

‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘but not where others may hear. What are you doing?’

‘There’s something wrong about this,’ he said. ‘The space within is no larger than a coffin standing on end; you could not endure more than a few hours in such confinement, whereas most of these hiding-places were built to conceal a man for days or even weeks at a time. If only I had time ... but the coaches will be here at any minute.’

I was wondering whether to suggest that he and I might remain a little longer, when matters were taken out of our hands by St John Vine. Only one of the coaches had arrived; a shaft had broken on the other when it was about half-way from Woodbridge. We followed him down the stairs and out on to the weed-strewn forecourt, where Dr Davenant, his eyes once more concealed by tinted lenses, was conversing with Vernon Raphael. Even the nearest trees were wreathed in mist; the air was still,
but so bitterly cold that to breathe felt like inhaling splinters of ice. Of course they wanted me to take one of the four available seats, but I declined, on the excuse that I had promised to look out some family papers for Mr Craik.

‘Mr Rhys has kindly offered to remain with me,’ I said, uncomfortably aware of Vernon Raphael’s sardonic expression. ‘You may tell the coach to return for us at three o’clock.’ My heart sank as I realised that one of the others would have to stay behind as well, until Dr Davenant resolved the difficulty by announcing that he would walk. ‘I want the exercise,’ he said, ‘and will probably reach Woodbridge long before the rest of you.’

No one tried to dissuade him, and half an hour later, Edwin Rhys and I were alone in Wraxford Hall.

I had already resolved to tell Edwin everything – except for my belief that I might be Clara Wraxford – and as soon as I had secured his promise of secrecy I brought out the other papers and sat with him by the library fire, wondering if I should ever feel warm again. With the rest of the party gone, the stillness of the Hall was so oppressive that I found it hard to raise my voice above a whisper. Edwin asked many questions as he read, and seemed to warm to my theory as we talked.

‘You must forgive me if I still doubt,’ he said, as we made an impromptu luncheon of bread and cheese and potted meat: ‘there is so much that I had never even considered. But supposing you are right, and Magnus was responsible for all of the deaths, including Mrs Bryant’s; how did he come and go? There must be some secret way into the gallery; it is the heart of all the devilry that has been done here. That bolt-hole that Raphael uncovered may be the entrance to it.’

There was still an hour to wait after we had dined – the mist, I noticed uneasily, had grown much thicker – and so we returned to the gallery, where Edwin began to rummage through a tin box standing in the alcove near the armour.

‘I asked Raphael to leave this, just in case . . . he didn’t tell us he’d brought a second thunderbolt,’ said Edwin, holding up a greyish cylinder with what appeared to be a tarred length of string attached to one end. He replaced them carefully, took out a wooden mallet, and began to explore the hiding-place. Despite the cold, I watched whilst he tapped and twisted and probed at the brickwork. The echoes sounded horribly loud. Ancient Wraxfords, their faces blurred by the grime of centuries, glared down upon us; the light from the windows above the portraits was a dim, featureless grey.

‘The point about these refuges,’ said Edwin, ‘is that they were built to withstand direct assault; there are accounts of walls being half demolished whilst the fugitive, a foot away from the pickaxes, remained undiscovered. Brute force only jams the mechanism; it is a matter of finding the trick of it.’

The walls appeared to be solid brick; I could see no possible opening anywhere.

‘What makes you think there is anything to be found?’ I asked.

‘The position of that tomb, to begin with. Why would anyone place a sarcophagus inside a fireplace?’

‘Because it is not really a tomb?’

‘You may well be right, though I wasn’t thinking of that; those padlocks haven’t been disturbed in decades; they are rusted solid. No; because it ensures that no one will light a fire. Which means there is something inside that chimney to protect.’

In the exercise of his talent, Edwin was a changed man, confident and assured as he had never seemed before. He was using the mallet and a short metal bar, testing each brick in turn. I wished there was something I could do, other than wait and shiver, and try to shake off the sensation of being watched. Though he was not striking the bar especially hard, every blow of the mallet echoed like a volley of gunshots, and sometimes it seemed to me that I could hear footsteps behind the echoes. The light, too, seemed to be growing perceptibly dimmer, though it was not yet three o’clock.

‘Eureka!’ cried Edwin. He had worked his way down to the foot of
the inside wall, and was kneeling on the floor. Now as I watched he removed a single brick, reached into the cavity (which I should not have liked to have done), and after a brief struggle drew out a scarred wooden rod about the size of a candle.

‘That’s odd,’ he said. ‘This is a locking pin, which you would only expect to find in place if there was someone inside. I had to crack the mortar, you see.’

I did not quite see, but I caught the note of unease in his voice.

‘You don’t think . . .’ I began.

‘Surely not.’

He grasped the edge of the opening he had made. With a rasping, grating sound, a section of brickwork like a low, narrow door swung outward; a cloud of dust and grit rolled out into the gallery and settled slowly around us.

‘Well,’ he said, coughing, ‘there’s certainly no one in here – no one living, at any rate.’ He lit his lantern, and I saw through the floating dust a narrow stairway of brick, spiralling upward into darkness.

‘You see—’ His voice was cut off by a noise from the direction of the library. We stood for a moment listening; the sound was not repeated. Edwin stooped, picked up the mallet, and strode the ten paces to the connecting door. I followed, not wishing to be left alone.

There was no one in the library, and no apparent cause for the sound until I saw that the pages of John Montague’s manuscript, which I had left on the seat of a cracked leather armchair, were now strewn upon the floor beneath, with Nell’s journals amongst them.

‘A draught, perhaps,’ said Edwin. But the air was completely still.

And something else had changed. Outside, where the trees should have loomed a mere fifty yards away, there was nothing to be seen at all; nothing but dense, fleecy vapour, sliding across the glass.

‘Will the coachman be able to find us?’ I whispered.

‘I don’t know; we must hope it lifts before dark. In the meantime, we may as well find out where those stairs lead.’

With a last worried look around the library, he led the way back to the gallery. As he was about to step into the opening, I was seized by panic.

‘What if you are trapped in there?’ I said. ‘I won’t know how to get you out.’

‘We can’t both go,’ he said, ‘just in case...’

‘Then I shall,’ I said, ‘at least a little way up, while you keep watch. Truly; I shan’t feel so afraid this way.’

I took the lantern from his reluctant hand and stepped over the threshold, into a cylindrical chamber no more than three feet wide. Dust and grit lay thick upon the stone floor. I shone the beam upward, but could see only the returning spiral of the staircase.

‘I shall have to go up a few steps,’ I said.

‘Then for God’s sake be careful.’

Testing each stair as I went, I moved awkwardly upward, afraid of tripping over my skirts. Musty air stung my eyes; there were cobwebs draped about the walls, but they looked old and brittle, and nothing moved when I shone the lantern over them. This, I thought, was how an ancient tomb would smell, a tomb that had been sealed for hundreds of years, where even the spiders had died of starvation.

I had completed at least two full spirals before the stairs ended at a low wooden door, set into the wall to form a ledge just wide enough to stand upon. My hair brushed against the stone roof of the chamber. I glanced back down the stairs and was seized with a fit of dizziness so that I had to grip the door handle to prevent myself from falling. The handle turned in my grasp; the door creaked open.

It was a room, or rather a cell, perhaps six feet by four, the roof only a few inches above my head. The door opened inwards to the left, leaving just enough room for an upright chair and a table placed against the opposite wall. Upon the dusty surface of the table were a decanter, a wineglass, two candlesticks, an inkstand containing half a dozen quill pens, also thickly covered in grime; and a glass-fronted
case, two shelves high, containing what looked like thirty or forty identical volumes.

There seemed to be no other furniture, but as I stood staring at the desk I became aware that my lantern was not the only source of illumination. Along the wall to my right were half a dozen dim, narrow strips of light. I took a tentative step forward, felt an icy draught upon my face, and realised that the secret room and its stairwell had been built across the width of the chimney, with slits for ventilation running through the outer wall.

Three more steps brought me within reach of the bookcase. Through the dusty glass I saw that there was no printing on the spines; they were leather-bound manuscript books, labelled only by year, and shelved in order from 1828 through to 1866. I set the lantern upon the table, tugged at the right-hand door until it opened with a shriek of hinges, and drew out the last volume.

It was a diary, written in a crabbed, shaky hand, but legible enough.

5th January 1866

Duke and Duchess of Norfolk left this morning; due at Chatsworth tomorrow. Duchess paid me the great comp
^t
of saying that the hospitality at Wraxford Hall surpasses any she has received this season. Only eighteen left in the party until Lord and Lady Rutherford arrive on Saturday. Weather inclement but the younger gentlemen continue to ride. Spoke to Drayton about champagne ...

I read on through entry after entry meticulously describing a series of grand house parties that could not possibly have occurred. The Hall of Cornelius Wraxford’s imagination – for who else could have written this? – was surrounded by rose gardens, rockeries, ponds, croquet lawns and archery fields, lovingly tended by a small army of gardeners. Grand banquets were held each night in the Great Hall, attended by the cream
of English society; shooting parties roamed through the coverts of Monks Wood. I tried several more volumes and found that they were all the same, a daily record of a magnificent life unlived, whilst the actual Hall sank deeper into decay.

Edwin’s voice, muffled but plainly anxious, echoed in the stairwell. I had gone straight to the bookcase without looking round, but now as I turned and raised the lantern, I saw a bundle of old clothes lying behind the door.

Only they were not just clothes, because there was something in them; something with shrivelled claws for hands and a shrunken head no larger than a child’s, to which a few tufts of scanty white hair still clung. The mouth and nostrils and eye sockets were choked with cobwebs.

I do not think I fainted, but my next memory is of Edwin’s arms about me and his voice reassuring me, somewhat unsteadily, that everything was all right.

‘We must not stay here,’ I said, disengaging myself. ‘Suppose someone locks us in?’

‘There is nobody here, I promise you. And yes, I think it is Cornelius.’

I picked up the last volume of the diary and, averting my eyes from the ghastly object behind the door, followed him shakily down the stairs and through to the comparative warmth of the library. The fog outside was as impenetrable as before.

‘It is only half-past three,’ said Edwin. ‘He may still find his way here.’ But he did not sound as if he believed it.

‘And if not?’

‘We have food and coal enough for the night; let us hope it won’t come to that.’