A hinged door in the floor opened. Darkness gaped below. “Wait here,” he said.
He lowered himself through the hole. There were no steps, so he dropped down. There was a cellar after all, one so low ceilinged he had to bend his shoulders to move about. A small window high on one wall must have been what Padua saw last night. The vaguest light leaked in, but it was enough to show the lamp on a table nearby.
He went over, found the flint, and lit the candle in the lamp. The cellar took on form. Shapes and shadows stretched into view.
“What is down there?” Lance’s loud whisper poured through the hole.
“Stay there. It is not large enough for all of us.”
Silence. Then a few scrapes, huffs, and boots landing on the cellar’s dirt floor.
“I said to wait.”
Lance ignored him. He looked around the cellar, then advanced on a corner. “What is this here? Some kind of machinery.”
“It used to be an ironmonger’s or some such factory.”
“This is iron, that is certain. Bring that lamp here.”
Ives carried over the lamp. The machinery’s parts jumped out of the dark. He looked at it and knew at once what it was. “Shit.”
Lance played with the wheel and poked at the roller. “Is it a press? It is rather small.”
“It is a rather small cellar.”
“You make a good point.”
“How heavy is it?”
Lance set his arms under it and tried to lift it. “Heavy, but not immovable.”
Of course not. Men had to carry it in. Which meant men could carry it out. Ives set down the lamp. “Let us see if we can hoist it up to Gareth.”
“You are going to steal it?”
“I am. Since you insisted on coming, so are you.”
Lance did not argue. “I hope you know what you are doing.”
Together they lifted the press and carried it to the hole in the floor. Straining, they pushed it up throughthe opening. Gareth helped from his end, until the press rested on the stable floor.
“There is a door to the garden, near the carriage,” Ives said. “Can the two of you take this out that way, and hide it? Just tuck it under some shrubbery for now.”
Gareth gave him a direct but curious look. Then he extended his arm for Lance to use to get out.
Up above, Ives heard them shuffling along the floor toward the carriage room. He returned to the lamp. He carried it back to where he had been, near the window.
It cast its glow over the wall, and the two objects he had seen there when he first lit it. A good-sized wooden box sat on a large trunk. He set down the lamp and threw the box’s top back.
It contained thin metal plates, stacked one atop the other. He ran his fingertips over one, and felt fine ridges and depressions. He lifted it and held it to the light. The ghostly image of a banknote showed.
He lifted the whole box and set it on the table with the lamp. Then he opened the trunk. Its contents surprised him less. Paper filled it. Half was blank. The other half consisted of sheets with six banknotes, each sheet about the size of the bed on that press that had just been carted away.
Padua had not only been correct, she had been completely correct, more totally than she guessed. The counterfeiters were not only connected to this house. They had worked here, right in this cellar.
He gazed at the irrefutable evidence of that. Evidence that, if Hadrian Belvoir’s ownership of this propertybecame known, would send him to the gallows for sure. It would be assumed he was not the dupe of a whale, but the whale himself.
And Padua... He shook his head. He did not have to speculate how it would look. She had announced she was taking her father’s place. She lived in the house right now.
