Sophie looked up from her knitting. “Hello, Angela. I am afraid it’s just me today. Kate is in bed with a headache. Mrs. Overtree may join us later, but Mr. Overtree has a trifling sniffle, so for now she won’t leave his bedside.”
Miss Blake peeled off her gloves. “That’s all right. This will give you and I a chance to become better acquainted.”
Why did that notion make Sophie nervous?
“Would you like to read one of Kate’s magazines,” Sophie offered halfheartedly, “or perhaps play a game of draughts?”
“I think not, thank you. Were it not such a dreary day I would suggest a turn about the grounds.” Her green eyes lit. “I know. I will take you on a tour of the house.”
“That is very kind,” Sophie replied. “But Mrs. Overtree has already given me the complete tour and named every ancestor in every portrait, I assure you.”
“Oh, I doubt she has shown you everything.” Again the woman’s green eyes glinted in her narrow, freckled face. “Come. I think you will enjoy it.”
Sophie set aside her needles and yarn, and rose. “Very well. I would like to stretch my legs in any case.”
Miss Blake led the way across the hall, pointing out the jester mask high on the wall in the musicians’ gallery. “Have you noticed that before?”
“Yes, why?”
“You’ll see.” Together they climbed the stairs, Angela pausing to pick up a candle lamp on the landing.
Sophie asked, “Where are you taking me?”
“It’s a secret. You like secrets, don’t you?”
“Not especially.”
“Well you certainly have some.” Angela lowered her voice. “And so do I....”
Miss Blake walked past the family bedchambers and around the corner. The corridor ended in a small alcove with a window seat overlooking the hedge maze below. There, as in most of the house, the paneled wainscoting rose over six feet tall, half the height of the rooms.
Miss Blake turned to her left, to a wall that looked like every other, slid her fingers behind a carved filigree, and pulled. A three-foot-by-five-foot section of wainscoting swung toward her like a small door, revealing a narrow chamber within.
Sophie inhaled a breath of surprise.
“This is an old priest hole,” Angela said. “Many old houses have a secret room or passage, to allow someone to hide if he were, say, a priest during the reign of Elizabeth the First, or someone who found himself on the wrong side between Charles the Second and Cromwell.”
Angela stepped in, gestured for Sophie to follow, and then pulled the paneled door closed behind them. Inside the room, there was no paneling, but rather exposed timbers on the walls and beams on the ceiling above. One small window high on the exterior wall added to the candle’s light, illuminating a single bed, tiny table, and a cross on the wall.
“Wesley and I used to hide in here as children and pretend his nurse was one of Cromwell’s roundheads, come to kill us.”
Sophie looked around the dim, stark room, trying to imagine hiding there for any length of time. “My goodness. That’s rather... frightening.”
Miss Blake nodded her agreement. “Yes, deliciously so.”
Sophie traced her fingers over one of the timbers. “Look. Someone’s carved their initials here.W.D.O. + J.A.B.”
“Very observant.”
“Wesley plus... Who’s J?” Sophie asked, the name “Jenny” going through her mind once again.
“Jane, I believe. One of the girls he used to admire. But never mind that now. That’s not what I brought you here to see.” Miss Blake stepped to another of the broad timbers running vertically along the interior wall. “There used to be a back passageway and stairs for the servants to use, to slip in and out of the family bedchambers without being seen,” she explained. “But the house has been altered over the years, so access became difficult and they fell out of use. But you can still get to them through here.”
She bent, grasped a nail near the bottom, and pulled. The entire long beam lifted from the floor on a hidden pivot, revealing a narrow passage about fifteen or sixteen inches wide.
“If the house was being searched, a man could escape from this room either into the corridor we came from or through this passage, depending on which direction his pursuers were coming from.”
Miss Blake eyed Sophie’s middle dubiously. “Perhaps I should have given you this tour earlier. I hope you shall fit.”
