“Nothing messes with a thermal scope like heat.” Tom flopped flat on his back on the rug, breathing heavily. “Only one of them was firing just now, and I guess he was firing blind.”
“Can we barricade the house?”
“Not in the five minutes it’ll take for them to figure out where we’ve gone. There are thirty rooms on the ground floor, hundreds of windows they could break. Come on, let’s grab some water.”
“Oh God, yes!” They snuck along the servants’ corridor. She felt much better with a stone wall at her back. “A moat and drawbridge could have been useful.”
“The river was diverted into a moat at one point,” he said as they crept into the kitchen. “There’s bottled water in there.” He pointed at a cupboard. “Would you mind?” He opened the pantry, grabbed a couple of shopping totes, and tossed one in her direction.
She found the water by feel rather than sight, while he loaded packets of things into his bag that she hoped like hell were edible.
“The original abbey might have had fortifications. Back then, installing windows on the ground floor would have been unheard of. People were a lot more trusting by the eighteenth century, when it was rebuilt.”
“How naïve of them.”
“These guys might have been snooping around lately, but they don’t know this place like I do. Nobody alive does.”
As they left the kitchen, Amelia opened a bottle of water, and they shared it. Forget eighty-year-old wine—Amelia was ready to declare regular old water the most precious drop ever created. Tom pulled a small box from his tote and drew out a tray of pills. “Painkillers?”
“God, yes,” she said, taking them.
They crept up the main staircase. Amelia refused to meet the eye of the countess in the tapestry, though she could feel the woman’s gaze on her. At the top floor, Tom led her through a maze of rooms, some lit, some not. They came to a door she hadn’t noticed before—unless it was when they were high on lizard snot—and he opened it. As they entered, cold air walloped her cheeks. The moon loomed above a progression of thick wooden rafters. The collapsed roof. They were inside the whale. She could smell and hear the fire in the stables.
“This is the oldest part of the house—the former abbey,” Tom whispered. He opened another door. It squeaked and he stilled, listening. “After you,” he said, a few seconds later. He followed her into a musty room, though it at least had a ceiling. Amelia could make out a four-poster bed, a rug, and a scattering of furniture. “The yellow room. We used it as a guest room before the roof came down in a storm a few years ago.”
“We’re hiding here? But they’ll come, they’ll find us.”
“No,” he said, crouching in front of a cabinet, “we’re hidinghere.” He removed a wooden panel that lay across the bottom of it, leaving a low rectangle-shaped dark gap.
“In a cabinet?”
“Not quite.” His voice strained as he shimmied in. He completely disappeared.
“Are we going to Narnia? This is quite the literary tour.”
He laughed quietly. “No. Although there is another room where a wardrobe leads to a secret passageway. Eddie and I used to playThe Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobein there. Can you hand me the food and water?” She couldn’t completely see where she was passing the bags to, but his hands emerged from the blackness to draw them in. “Now you. Bit of a squeeze, I’m afraid. Best way is to lie sideways and shimmy in. I’ll guide you. Make sure you don’t leave anything out there.”
A door slammed, and her breath hitched.
“The floor below us,” he whispered. “Probably the ghosts.”
“Let’s hope.”
“Careful, it steps down a little,” he said as she climbed in, passing clean through where the wall should rightly be. “Don’t stand up.” He reached past to pull the panel back into place. “Sit while your eyes adjust.”
There wasn’t much to adjust to. It was less a room and more a box—a cell, in fact—the size of a small elevator but half the height, with a small window. Moonlight stamped the shadowof the windowpanes onto the wall opposite, in a sharp grid. Outside, clouds scudded over a pearly moon. They were sitting on a small mattress with a quilt spread across it. “What is this room?”
“It’s a priest hole from the sixteenth century,” he said, slotting in beside her. “I hope you’re not claustrophobic. It’s a space built for one.”
“More of an agoraphobe, myself. You folks kept your priests in holes?”
“For the priest’s protection. It was during the Reformation. Catholics created a network of safe houses—safe holes—around the country for Jesuit priests. They would sometimes hide in places like this for weeks.”
“Ah, the Refurbishment.”
“The what?”
She shook her head. “The tour guide said there was a ghost priest who clicks his rosary beads. He hid here?”
