I watched him during breakfast while Miss St. Claire talked to him about the shame of such a grey and drizzly day when she wanted so much to explore Robin Hood’s Bay. Mr. Brandon talked to me about the birds he had heard on the moors that morning. But the birds were not something I wanted to share with Mr. Brandon.
Not once did Henry look directly at me during breakfast, and in a moment of panic I wondered if I had imagined it all last night. Or if he had changed his mind and was not going to help me after all. But when I stood to leave the room, excusing myself to Mr. Brandon, I suddenly discovered Henry standing too, and when I walked to the door, he called my name softly. I paused and turned, wondering what he was about.
“You dropped this,” he said, handing me a handkerchief I was certain I had not dropped.
I took it, though, and thanked him, and he turned around and walked back to the table. Miss St. Claire shot me a curious look. I slipped the handkerchief into my pocket and hurried from the room. I turned two corners before slipping into the first empty room I found. It was the library, and at this hour of the morning, it was completely empty. Turning my back to the door, I carefully opened the folded handkerchief. A small piece of paper lay inside, folded as well. When I opened it I recognized Henry’s neat handwriting.
Meet me at the entrance to the secret passage at midnight tonight.
L
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I spent the entire day scouring Blackmoore’s rooms and corridors for any hint of a secret passageway. It was truly an enormous house. I passed Henry in the hall once in the east wing, that afternoon. He paused long enough to smile and say, “Have you found it yet?”
“No!” I whispered. “Won’t you just tell me?”
He shook his head, stubborn as always, and smiling with mischief.
“You have bothered me about this for so many years, Kate. You will have to find it yourself.”
As he started to walk away, I said, “Just give me a clue, then.”
He looked back, and although I was sure he was not going to help, at the last moment before he turned the corner he said, “It is behind a painting.”
L
There were hundreds of paintings at Blackmoore. I searched every room and corridor in the top two floors of the east and west wings. The other rooms in the west wing had clearly not been used for some time.
The furniture was covered in sheets, and dust motes hung in the air. I was not so bold as to enter any of the rooms in the east wing. Surely Henry would not have sent me on a quest to intrude on others’ privacy that way.
After hours of exploration I concluded that the upper floors of the house did not hide any secret passageways.
Then it was time for dinner, and I had to hurry to change and have Alice do my hair so that I was presentable. Dinner lasted much too long, and I sat by nobody interesting, thanks to Mrs. Delafield’s seating ar-rangements. As the ladies left the dining room, I stayed toward the back of the group, and when everyone else turned right toward the drawing room, I turned left and hid just inside the door of the library. There were plenty of paintings there, and I had not had a chance to look in all the rooms of the ground floor yet.
The library, though, proved to be a disappointment, as did the large 138
entry hall and the corridors leading off it on both sides. Finally there was only one room left: the second music room. The bird room.
I stopped in front of a painting hanging on a wall covered in dark wood paneling. I stared at it, amazed that I had not noticed it before. It must have been the bird and the pianoforte that had caught my attention before to make me overlook this work of art.
It was Icarus. I knew it immediately. His father was tying on the wings he had created for him and pointing toward the sky with a look of disapproval, as though warning Icarus not to fly too high. It was a beauti-ful rendering—an original, it appeared, by Anthony Van Dyck, according to the signature in the corner.
I touched the frame and felt still for the first time all day. And then the frame moved, and the wall swung out toward me, revealing the secret passageway.
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Chapter 18
I stole out of my room at ten minutes before midnight, using a candle to light my way down the back stairs to the bird room. It was dark and empty, the bird quiet in its cage. I sat on the bench in front of the piano-forte and nervously waited, straining to hear footsteps. Finally, when my heart had begun to race with nervousness that he was not coming, the door silently swung open and Henry walked into the room.
“You found it,” he said in a low voice, quiet for this quiet, dark night.
“Of course.” I could not keep the pride from my voice. I stood and looked up at Henry, taking in what I could see of him in the candlelight.
It was enough to see his dark hair and the flash of his smile and a hint of excitement in his eyes.
He held up a shuttered lantern. “We won’t need the candle.” I followed him to the Icarus painting and watched as he slid his hand behind the frame and pressed the switch I had accidentally triggered earlier.
The wall swung open, revealing a dark emptiness. Henry lifted the lantern and moved a shutter so that a ray of light shone, and with another grin and a gleam of excitement in his eyes, he led the way into the darkness.
I had not explored the passageway at all earlier, afraid I would get dirty and have to explain my appearance to another guest or—heaven 140
forbid—to Mrs. Delafield. Now, though, I followed Henry and the light he carried, ducking when he warned me to, easing around a tight corner, feeling the walls change from stone to earth as we climbed down a tight spiral staircase for what felt like a long time. I forgot to count the steps, but I thought it was not quite so far as the climb down to the beach had been.
The passageway had taken us through the house, and now we were in an underground tunnel that was shored up by wooden support beams, the walls and floor earthen, the walls occasionally holding a bracket for a torch. I touched a few of the torches, thinking of Alice and smuggling.
But the torches all felt as cold as the walls around us. Unused, then, at least recently.
We must have walked half a mile underground when we came to another stairway. Henry took me up the stone stairs. I followed the light he carried low so that it illuminated his steps, for me to see. The stairs carried us up and up. He turned his head and whispered, “We’re almost there.” I was panting, feeling the burn in my leg muscles from the climb. And then he paused, boots still on the steps before me, and I heard a dusty, protest-ing creak. A breeze chilled me, and then Henry’s boots moved again, until they disappeared into a square of starlight.
I paused, my head at the opening of what must have been a trapdoor.
Above me stretched the night sky streaked with starlight. I grasped at the sides of the opening and was surprised to feel grass beneath my fin-gers. Surely we had climbed higher than mere ground level. Then Henry reached down to me. I put my hand in his, and he pulled me up the remaining steps. I emerged, wide-eyed. It was certainly grass beneath my feet. But we were encircled by a crumbling stone wall, and there was nothing but the sky to see beyond it. No trees. No ocean. No moors. I looked at Henry in confusion and saw the strangest expression on his face, which was half-lit by the lantern he held aloft. He seemed both excited and nervous. I had seldom seen Henry nervous. His lips were closed tight, and his eyes were too darkened by the flickering shadows of the lantern for me to see them clearly.
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J u l i a n n e D o n a l D s o n “What is this place?” I asked him, walking cautiously forward, not sure if the ground would hold me, for this place seemed to defy the rules of nature.
“Come see,” he said, walking toward the stone wall. I followed him.