With the house to herself, Lucy knew precisely how she was going to spend her time. The initial thrill of discovery had dissipated, and in its wake lay the realisation that it would be a terrible folly to rush now into telling Edward about the priest holes. The floor plans were centuries old; it was entirely possible that the chambers had been sealed up years before, or else that the plans, though mooted, had never been put into place. How embarrassing it would be to make a big announcement only to discover herself in error! Lucy did not like making errors. Far better to investigate the secret hideaways herself first.
Once Emma had been sent packing and Lily Millington was little more than a flame-coloured speck on the far side of the meadow, Lucy pulled out the floor plans. The first chamber appeared to form part of the main staircase, which seemed so unlikely that Lucy thought initially that she must have been reading the plan incorrectly. She had climbed the staircase at least a hundred times by now and sat to read more than once on the elegant bentwood chair by the window; aside from a pleasant warmth where the stairs made their turn, she hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary.
Only when she fetched the magnifying glass from the cedar desk in the library and began to decipher the letter did Lucy find the instruction that she’d been lacking. There was a trick step, the letter said. The first rise after the landing had been constructed so that it tilted, when triggered properly, to reveal the entrance to a small secret chamber. But be warned, continued the letter: for the design of the trapdoor was such that in order to remain discreet, the hidden mechanism could only be triggered from the outside.
It was like something out of one of those newspaper serials for schoolboys and Lucy ran to investigate, pushing aside the chair as she knelt on the floor.
There was nothing visible to suggest that the staircase was anything other than it appeared, and she frowned again at the letter. She studied the description, which included a sketch of a spring-operated latch, and then smiled to herself. Pressing each corner of the wooden rise in turn, she held her breath until finally she heard a small click and noticed that the panel had jutted out of position slightly at the base. She slipped her fingers into the newly revealed crack and lifted, sliding it into a recess beneath the next step. A slim, sly opening was revealed, large enough – just – to fit a man carrying no extra weight.
Lucy only considered for a split second before slipping down into the cavity.
The space was tight: not high enough for her to sit unless her head was bent so far forwards that her chin was touching her chest, and so she lay down flat. The air inside was stale and close; the floor was warm to the touch, and Lucy supposed that the chimney from the kitchen must run at an angle beneath it. She lay very still, listening. It was startlingly quiet. She shuffled sideways and pressed her ear against the wall. Dead, wooden silence. Solid, as if there were layers of bricks on the other side.
Lucy tried to envisage the design of the house, wondering how that could be. As she did, the realisation that she was lying in a secret chamber – designed to keep a man concealed from enemies bent on his destruction, with a trapdoor that might ease closed at any moment, leaving her alone in a pitch-black space, drowning in thick, broiling air, no one aware of what she’d found and where she’d gone – began to push in on her from all sides. She felt a sudden panic constricting her lungs, her breaths becoming short and loud, and she scrabbled into a crouched position as quickly as she could, hitting her head on the ceiling of the chamber in her rush to get free.
The second hideaway was in the hallway, and that was where Lucy was now. It was a very different prospect: a concealment within the wainscoting, tucked behind an ingenious recessed sliding panel that could be opened, thankfully, from inside or out. The space inside was not large, but it had a different feeling entirely from the stairwell chamber: there was something comforting about this hiding place. It was not truly dark, for one thing, Lucy noticed, and the chamber’s panel was thin enough that she could hear through it.
She had heard when the others returned from the river, laughing as they chased one another through the halls; she had heard, too, when Felix and Adele had their hissed spat about a joke (according to him) that had gone wrong (according to her); and she had heard the first great clap of thunder that rolled up the river and seized the house. Lucy had just decided to climb out of the space, and had her ear pressed close against the panel to make sure there was no one in the hallway to see her appear and discover her secret, when she picked out Edward’s footfalls approaching.
She considered emerging into his path and surprising him, and was wondering whether it might not be the perfect way to reveal to him the priest holes, when she heard him say, ‘Come here, wife.’
Lucy stopped still, her hand on the panel.
‘What is it, husband?’ Lily Millington’s voice.
‘Closer than that.’
‘Like this?’
Lucy leaned against the panel, listening. They did not say anything else, but Edward laughed softly. There was an edge of surprise to it, as if he had just been told something unexpected but pleasing, and someone inhaled sharply, and then—
Nothing.
Inside the hiding place, Lucy realised that she was holding her breath.
She released it.
Two seconds later, everything went black and a great rumble of thunder shook the house and the ancient earth beneath it.
The others were already in the dining room by the time Lucy arrived. A candelabrum stood in the middle of the unlaid table, nine long white tapers smoking towards the ceiling. The wind had picked up outside, and although it was summer the night was cool. Someone had lit a small fire, which flickered and popped in the grate, and Edward and Lily Millington were sitting by it. Lucy went to the mahogany armchair on the other side of the room.
‘Well, I’m not frightened of ghosts,’ Adele was saying, perched beside Clare on the tapestry-covered sofa that ran against the longer wall; it was a topic to which the pair returned frequently. ‘They are simply poor trapped souls seeking to be set free. I think that we should try some table-turning – see if we can invite one in to join us.’
‘Do you have a talking board with you?’
Adele frowned. ‘I don’t.’
Edward had his head bowed close to Lily Millington’s and Lucy could see his lips moving as he spoke. Lily Millington was nodding every so often and, as Lucy watched, she reached up to run her fingertips along the edge of his blue silk neck scarf.
‘I’m famished,’ said Thurston, pacing behind the table. ‘Where on earth is that girl?’
Lucy remembered Emma saying that she was going home to put her feet up. ‘She planned to be back in time to serve the dinner.’
‘Then she’s late.’
‘Perhaps the storm has waylaid her.’ Felix, standing by the rain-streaked window, craned to see something up on the eave. ‘It’s bucketing down. The drain’s already overflowing.’
Lucy glanced again at Edward and Lily. It was possible, of course, that she had misheard them in the hallway. More likely, though, that she had simply misunderstood. The Magenta Brotherhood were always adopting different pet names for one another. For a time, Adele had been ‘Puss’ because Edward painted her in a scene with a tiger; and Clare had once been ‘Rosie’, after Thurston made an unfortunate miscalculation with his pigments and gave her too much flush in her cheeks.
‘Every self-respecting house has a ghost these days.’
Clare shrugged. ‘I haven’t seen one yet.’
‘Seen?’ said Adele. ‘Don’t be so old-fashioned. Everybody nowadays knows that ghosts are invisible.’
‘Or translucent.’ Felix turned back to face them. ‘As in Mumler’s photographs.’
And A Christmas Carol. Lucy remembered the description of Marley’s ghost dragging his chains and padlocks; the way Scrooge could look right through him to the buttons on the back of his coat.
‘I suppose we could make a talking board of our own,’ said Clare. ‘It’s only some letters and a glass.’
‘That’s true – the ghost will do the rest.’
‘No,’ said Edward, looking up. ‘No talking board. No table-turning.’
‘Oh, Edward!’ Clare pouted. ‘Don’t spoil the fun. Aren’t you curious? You might have your very own ghost here at Birchwood, just waiting to introduce herself.’