“Down we go,” the woman said with a cheerfulness that gave Amelia goosebumps. Mavis climbed down; then Hilda jerked her head at Amelia and Caleb.
“Your turn. Inside.”
“Look, we’re just historians,” Caleb told her anxiously. “We’re not interested in anything that’s less than a century old, and of course you’remuchyounger than that.” He smiled, but both the night and Hilda’s mood were too dark for it to have any effect, so he pressed on with increasing desperation. “We don’t care about you burying treasure, and I promise we won’t tell any—”
“In. Side.” Hilda’s punctuation made an inarguable point.
“We aren’t going to hurt you,” Mavis called out from below.
“So long as you do what we say,” Hilda added.
Caleb squeezed Amelia’s hand, then released it. He began to climb slowly down the ladder. “Oh God!” his voice arose from the darkness, and Amelia gasped at the horrified sound, fear shooting through her. “There arespiderwebs!”
“Tsk,” Hilda said contemptuously. She gestured to Amelia. “In you go. Sounds like he needs someone to hold his hand.”
Hoisting her skirts, Amelia began the descent with all the Tarrant courage she could muster.Spiders are more scared of me than I am of them, she silently chanted. This helped herabout as much as it always had—which is to say,aaaahhhhh, arachnids!—and when she made it to the tunnel floor she could not restrain herself from reaching through the darkness to hug Caleb, both assuring herself of his safety and steadying her own nerves.
“There, there,” he said, patting her back. But his voice was more high-pitched than usual, and he felt softer than she recalled, and two seconds later she realized she was in fact hugging Mavis. Pulling away, blushing so fiercely it was a wonder she didn’t light up the whole tunnel, she murmured a hasty apology.
“It’s fine,” the woman assured her, wryly amused. “Being kidnapped is harrowing, I’m sure.”
Hilda came down the ladder, pulling the hatch shut behind her, and the group moved into the tunnel. Packed dirt lay beneath their feet, but wooden buttresses had been established to keep the walls and roof from crumbling, and there was enough space to walk comfortably upright. Indeed, other than the mustiness, the spiderwebs, and the whole fact of it being a secret underground tunnel leading possibly to their doom, Amelia found it really quite interesting, historically speaking. Before long they arrived at a second ladder, at the top of which a hatch opened to another tunnel, only this one featured wooden floorboards, and wooden walls, and the musty smell was somehow more civilized. Amelia concluded that they were inside the manor.
“Secret passageways!” she exclaimed with the delight of one who had solved a mystery. She recollected not only the door that had suddenly opened in Sir Nigel’s study but also how Lady Ruperta and her housekeeper had disappeared in a corridor without exits, and her mind started running ahead of her,even while she inched carefully, slowly through the dark between Caleb and Mavis.
“Keep quiet!” Hilda ordered in a severe whisper. Muted household sounds could be heard through the walls, suggesting the servants’ realm was within hearing—and possibly rescuing—distance. Amelia considered shouting for help, but that seemed more likely to get her a spade applied forcefully against her head than a rescue.
And so they trudged on along passageways and up a crooked flight of stairs. Amelia could not help but feel rather thrilled, despite the circumstances, to be experiencing a secret escape route that might have been created long ago in case of war, or for Catholics needing to evade religious persecution.Throckmorton would love this,she thought, and a welter of emotions tumbled through her—fear and fascination and, most confusing of all, a kind of melancholy fondness for the medieval studies professor that suggested she was suffering from oxygen deprivation in such an enclosed space.
At last, Mavis halted beside a blank wall. From its other side came the sound of a voice speaking in an unusual cadence, as if chanting. Amelia’s stomach clenched.
Tap-tap, tap-tap, tap, Mavis knocked against the wall.
Nothing happened.
“It’s supposed to betap-tap-tap, tap-tap,” Hilda whispered from the rear.
“I don’t think so,” Mavis said, and reproduced her knock. Still, nothing happened.
“I’m telling you—” Hilda’s whisper increased in volume.
“And I’m tellingyou, I know what the secret knock is,” Mavis snapped.
“Obviously not,” Hilda answered snarkily.
Mavis glared at her through the dim lantern light with such a ferocity that Amelia and Caleb prudently shifted back, pressing themselves against the wall.
“Shall I knock the code against your head, to remind you of it?” Mavis suggested.
“You cantry,” Hilda said, raising her spade. “Alternatively, you can trytap-tap-tap, tap-tapagainst the wall, like a sensible person would do, it being the CORRECT secret code.”
Wincing at Hilda’s choleric tone and obvious capital letters, Amelia groped for Caleb’s hand in the darkness. He caught hers in a strong, reassuring grip, and she knew that, with him at her side, she could survive belligerent lady farmers, claustrophobic dark passages, and whatever existed behind the wall (although perhaps not spiders).
“I’ll do it just to prove you wrong,” Mavis said. Without shifting her gaze, she reached out and knocked as Hilda had suggested.
Nothing happened.
“Ha!” Mavis declared triumphantly. The sound echoed like desperate ghosts through the passageway. “Wrong!”
