It might be a trick. Let’s allow Maud to escape, Thomasina and Simon might have said. Let’s pretend one of us has gone away–we’ll pretend you’ve gone away, Simon, shall we?–and let’s leave her door unlocked, and hide on the stairs and watch her think she’s free. Then, just as she gets to the door, just as she thinks she’s going to walk free in the park, we’ll pounce. Yes, Maud could just imagine those two behaving so sneakily, but she was not going to be caught like that, not she! She was going to be too clever for Master Simon and Miss Thomasina!
Presently she heard the clanking plumbing in Quire’s bathroom one floor down. Pressing her ear against her door she heard the bathroom door open and close, and footsteps going down the stairs. A few moments later she heard the big main door opening. Was it Thomasina going out? Maud darted to the window. She had to be careful, she would not put it past Thomasina to watch the window from below. Sneaky. Sly.
No, it was all right. There Thomasina went, striding out as she normally did, wearing her woollen cloak with the hood. It was not especially odd for her to be out in the hour before lunch but it was unusual. She had quite an orderly pattern to her days and this time of the morning was generally devoted to correspondence. Dull stuff Maud had always thought it, but Thomasina had been strict about it, and said these things had to be done.
Against the grey morning she looked very formidable indeed. It was like a pen and ink sketch. If Maud had been going to stay in her prison she might have wanted to sketch it and use the Indian inks which Thomasina had bought for her.
But there was no time for that. The door of her prison was unlocked, she must take advantage of Thomasina’s being out of the house. Mrs Minching would be in the kitchen preparing lunch, and the two young maids would be with her.
Her heart thudding with excitement, Maud wrapped herself in her own woollen cloak–the very cloak she had worn that other night when Thomasina had found her hiding at Charity Cottage–and pulled on a pair of stout walking shoes.
She opened the door very carefully, and began to creep down the stairs.
After Thomasina had emerged rather shakily from the bathroom, she made the decision to put this nonsense to rest once and for all. She would go out to Twygrist this very morning, and go down to the kiln room and make sure Simon was dead.
The prospect of definite action steadied her, and her insides were immediately calmer. Once outside in the good bracing fresh air, she felt even better. She walked at a smart pace across the park–Charity Cottage’s little garden was looking very nice. Someone–most likely Cormac Sullivan’s daughter–had planted a lavender bush near the door.
She went on down the lanes. Twygrist, when she reached it, looked exactly as it always did. Of course it does, thought Thomasina. What did you expect? She glanced about her to make sure no one was around, and then unlocked the door and stepped inside.
It was an eerie repetition of her visit of three days ago. She lit a candle again, and went across the wooden floor to the lower waterwheel and through the narrow door behind it. The creakings and rustlings went with her–Thomasina shut them out because she was no longer worried by Twygrist’s macabre echoes; she was concentrating on what might be ahead.
She would not have been surprised to find the steel doors open–by now she would not have been surprised at anything–but the doors were as tightly closed as she had left them. She pressed her ear to the surface, trying to listen for any sound from within, but there was nothing. Or was there? Wasn’t that a faint tapping from the other side?