Page 25

* * *

She was in the scullery. Standing at the stone basin, scrubbing a pot, by the sound of it. She didn't turn when he approached the doorway, but her shoulders stiffened, the scrubbing slowing for one beat before resuming at twice the speed. They'd been careful with each other since the orchard. Then again since the kitchen. Polite. The politeness was worse than the silence had ever been.

He stopped. Leaned against the doorframe.

"I'll be in the tunnel," he said.

She scrubbed.

"If you need anything brought up, ask now and I'll do it before I go down."

The scrubbing paused. She didn't turn. "I have no need at present."

"Fine." He pushed off the frame. "And don't come down after me. The ladder is dangerous."

"I have done it once already if you recall."

"You were lucky. Don’t try the second time and expect your luck to hold. If you need help, ask for it instead of risking your neck."

Her hands stilled. "It is my neck to risk. I shall hang upside down if I feel like it."

He lifted a brow. "Not very ladylike."

"Have you not learned by now? I am no lady."

He chuckled at that. "I’ve noticed.”

Whatever she deduced made her neck flush.

“Stay out of the tunnel." He started to walk away.

"Bastard!"

He laughed again. It felt like a rope fraying.

* * *

The tunnel was cold. Well-shaft cold. Black, except for the lantern, which pushed the dark back a few feet in every direction and no further, so that he moved inside a small, shifting room of light with the darkness pressing against its walls. The smell was the same as it had been for twelve years: wet stone and turned earth and, underneath, the faint sour sweetness of decomposition. It would have troubled a man with a cleaner conscience. Kit breathed through it and kept moving.

He hung the lantern from the iron hook near the ladder and checked the passage. The tunnel mouth was at the far wall, behind the rotten crates he'd arranged to look untouched. He pulled them aside. The boards were warped and damp but holding. For now.

He hooked the lantern over his arm and climbed down. His boots hit packed ground, and he crouched and ran his hand along the tunnel's edge. Stone on three sides, dressed by hands three centuries dead, the chisel marks still visible under his fingertips. Earth on the fourth, where the old foundation met raw ground and the monastery ended and the world began. A draught moved through the passage, slow and steady, carrying the smell of rain and orchard soil.

He measured it with his stride. The passage ran straight for forty feet, then curved east towards the orchard wall. Wide enough for two men abreast. High enough to stand in. Dry, mostly, where the vaulting held. He checked the timber props he'd placed last month. Still solid. Still plumb. The tunnel was sound.

He turned back. Twenty feet from the ladder, where the tunnel widened before the first curve, he'd built the barrier: loose stone stacked dry, floor to ceiling, six feet deep. Behind it, the passage was blocked a second time. The grave. Four feet of packed earth over what was left of the man.

Two obstacles. Both his. He'd dug the grave and stacked the wall and sealed the tunnel shut, and now he needed to dismantle his own barrier stone by stone and move the remains somewhere Reeve's men wouldn't look. All without Audrey hearing what shifted beneath her floors at night.

A crash. A sharp cry. The clatter of wood on stone.

He was on his feet before the sound had finished. He crossed the cellar in four strides and found her at the base of where the ladder had been. It was lying beside her now. She was crumpled on the wet floor, her cane three feet away where it had bounced off the bottom rung. She was on her side, her bad hip underneath her, one hand braced against the flagstones, her face white with pain.

"Christ." He dropped to his knees beside her. "Don't move."

"I'm fine."

"You're hurt, damn you. Lie still." His hands moved over her, checking: the hip, the ribs, the wrist she'd caught herself on. Nothing broken. Bruised and shaken and furious, but nothing that would need a physician.