“I have been dying for you to say that,” Stephen told her. “But in a slightly different context.”
She waggled her brows. “Your chances will improve dramatically if you just solved the next clue.”
They were out of the Great Hall in a flash, ascending the spiral stair and racing down the corridor to the storage pantry. The room was small and cramped, and contained two large pieces of tall, heavy furniture. Stephen tilted the farthest one and dragged it out of the way. Behind it was a waist-high crawl space not much wider than Elizabeth’s hips.
“You didn’t think to tell me this was here?” she demanded.
“I did tell you,” he objected. “Sort of. I told you about my whispering walls. You knew there were listening tunnels all over the castle.”
“But I thoughtyouput them in.” She gestured around them. “How did you even find this place? Do you have a storage pantry obsession? Why would you run around turning the furniture upside down?”
“I was bored,” he protested. “When I’m bored, I turn everything around me upside down. You’re lucky I didn’t turn this into a murder room.”
“We don’t know that itisn’ta murder room,” she told him haughtily, and immediately crouched to poke her head inside.
It didn’t murder her. The tunnel was definitely a clue, and Stephen had been the one to find it. Elizabeth was both grateful and vexed.
“Stay here,” she said. “I’m going in.”
Had she thought the width was larger than her hips? Not by much. Her thighs squashed against the wall as she duck-walked through the tunnel, hunching her shoulders and crouching her head to avoid concussing herself on the uneven stone ceiling.
After six feet of waddling and three minutes of cursing, she emerged on the other side and stood to find herself in the middle of a room smaller than the pantry she had just exited.
Smaller and considerably darker. No windows in a secret room after all.
“What did you find?” came Stephen’s disembodied voice.
“No idea,” she called back. “Can you bring a candle?”
“One moment.”
“A real candle,” she added quickly. “Not some two-hour contraption that eventually lights a small flame.”
He either ignored this, or was already gone.
She reached out in the darkness to touch the walls of her new enclosure. The area was large enough to fit a two-person sofa, though there did not appear to be any furnishings inside. The walls were bare of shelves or framed artwork, and the floor held no rug.
If there was a clue here, it wasn’t anywhere obvious. She sighed and pulled out her trusty dagger. At least she wasn’t exploring another latrine.
An orange glow flickered inside the tunnel, followed by the shuffling of Stephen’s feet. Soon, he emerged holding an oil lamp—significantly brighter and more resilient than the candle Elizabeth had requested.
She kissed his cheek. “Thank you.”
He held the lamp higher and let out a low whistle. “Well… this certainly isn’t the Louvre.”
Every surface of the secret room had been whitewashed, and then painted over with untrained hands. The two longer sections of the rectangular pantry contained murals of some sort of beach scene, both signed by the countess.
The narrower two walls were painted by an artist who didn’t even attempt a realistic landscape. Instead, asymmetrical spiral seashells in fantastical colors swirled over the whitewashed surface in an array as random as snowflakes. This masterpiece was signed by none other than the prior Earl of Densmore himself.
“Finding this clue would apparently not have been nearly as hard for the earl as it was for us,” said Elizabeth. “He helped to make it.”
“What do these designs mean?” asked Stephen.
“I don’t know,” she said in bafflement. “I don’t think the earl knew, either. Maybe their secret seaside watercolors didn’t become a clue until later? I suppose I’ll have to sleep on it.”
“Before you do…” Stephen’s gaze latched on to hers with intensity. “Are you free after supper?”
She narrowed her eyes. “Why?”
