“Avaon, son of Talyessin, splashing water over Arthur and his bishop,” he said. “Very nice, too.”
“Right!” she carolled, kneeling up to rest her hands on the back of the sofa and raising her face for another kiss. Math obliged.
“Now, what about lunch?”
“Is it too hot for soup?”
“Salad might be better.”
“All right, and sandwiches?”
They were in the middle of the meal when the knock came on the door. Math opened it to a heavy-set man whose face and hands and clothes were blackened with soot.
“Math,” he said. “It’s about that area we’re clearing.”
Elain was still sitting at the table, but it seemed to her that she felt Math tense. “Yes?” he prompted.
“We’ve found something I think you’ll be wanting to have a look at. Maybe you’d better come.”
* * *
The cellar was in an L shape, like the house, though smaller in extent. Under the main part of the building, the floor had been dug deeper at some time, and the walls lined and electricity installed. Here were the laundry room and the storage rooms of the hotel.
But the space under the longer wing, in which the fire had occurred, was low and dark and narrow, and had never been modernized. Where this section met the other, through a door space in a thick stone wall, two steps led up to a higher floor level, while the ceiling height remained the same. The men had to stoop, it was black and dirty, and there was no light. George pulled out a flashlight. The stone walls were original, and the long narrow space was nearly empty. Ahead, where fire had destroyed half the wing, sunlight filtered down through the burnt ceiling, giving the scene the curious unreality of a war photograph.
Elain had never returned to the house where her parents had died. She shuddered a little, wondering if it had looked like this, desolate with destruction and loss.
Everywhere there was the evidence of the work going on: stacks of burnt timber, tarpaulins, props, jacks and other equipment. As well as the workmen, all of the hotel guests were standing around, turning to look in their direction as Math, Elain and George arrived.
Math shook his head wearily when he saw them. “Are you all crazy? What the hell are you doing down here? This stuff could come down on your heads!”
“Oh, but, Math!” Davina cried faintly. “I believe you should stop them! They mustn’t go in there! Please listen!”
Math looked at George. “They weren’t here when I left to find you, I swear, Math.” He turned on his young assistant. “Somebody must have been spreading the news.”
The alarmed underling began to stammer a denial, but Davina overrode him. “No, no! No one told us! I was drawn, Math! I scented danger. Please listen!”
Math snorted. “If it had kept you away, I’d understand better. Now, I want everybody not part of the work crew out of this area immediately, please. If you must stay around, you’ll have to stand well away from the fire area.” He spoke quietly, but there was no doubt he meant it. Vinnie, Davina, Rosemary and Jeremy filed carefully through the debris and into the unburnt portion of the basement, where they stood, as expectant as children, watching. Math turned to Elain. “You’re staying here?”
She nodded firmly. The smell of fire was strong here. If there was any danger she wasn’t leaving Math in it. Her father was all the men she intended to lose to fire.
He seemed to understand. “All right,” he said. “Stick close to me. I want you where I can grab you if anything goes wrong. George. How much danger is there of any of this coming down?”
George shook his head. “Not much. We’ve been and cleared out the loose stuff above. What’s left is solid. Today we’ve been in here checking the foundations. This looked pretty bad, you see.”
Light splayed onto a portion of the right-hand wall, where it had buckled into a concavity. Math frowned. “What the hell caused that?” he asked.
“Well, it’s right where the petrol cans were, Math, so the explosion would have been pretty concentrated there.”
“Not concentrated enough to blast a stone wall into solid earth!”
George nodded. “That’s what I thought. We went very carefully in case we were wrong, but there’s no doubt about it. It’s not solid earth behind, you see. It’s a hidden room, or a passage.”
Chapter 13
“Math!” The voice came from the darkness behind them. “Math, it’s dangerous, I feel it! There’s evil coming from a very long time ago. Don’t go in.”
“Thank you, Davina. I’ll use my own judgement. First I’ll find out what it is.”
George was leading him along the wall, back up towards the unburnt section, where a large cupboard, charred with heat, leaned drunkenly against the stone. “We tried to move this, you see.” He slapped the wood, and the blow produced only a dull thud. It was a very solid piece of furniture. “It doesn’t move, not with four of us lifting.”
“What’s it fixed to?” asked Math. “A door, you think?”
“There would be bolts if it were fixed to the stone. If it’s a door, it may be the heat has melted the hinges. The only way through is with an axe.”
“All right,” said Math.
“Math!” Davina pleaded. She had crept close behind him to stare at the cupboard. Math turned and put a hand on her elbow.
“What exactly do you feel?” he asked.
Put on the spot like this, the psychic became nervously uncertain. She shuddered. “Something evil locked up in there.”
“You may well be right,” he said. “It’s possible that what we are going to find is a body that was immured. But it’ll be several centuries old—a skeleton—and I’m not worried about that.” Elain suddenly remembered the story of Jessica. So Math was thinking she might, after all, have been walled up with death in this tomb. She shuddered. “If you find the prospect unpleasant,” Math was saying, “perhaps you should leave.”
“No, you don’t understand. A deeper—a spiritual evil!”
“If there’s a spiritual evil in the cellar of my house,” Math said flatly, “I want to know about it.”
Behind him, in a crack like doom, a workman’s axe came thundering down to splinter the ancient wood.
* * *
The shattered wood was cleared away, exposing a doorway about four feet high and two feet wide cut into the stone. Beyond was darkness. There was no keeping anyone back now. They all drew close, residents and workers, crowding around the strange secret entrance with murmurs of amazement. The bright light of the flash pierced the dark and fell on a stone wall two feet behind.
“That’ll be the true foundation wall,” George said matter-of-factly.
Math took another flashlight from the hands of one of the workmen. “Let’s see if there are any bones,” he said, stooping down to step inside the dark space and flashing the light ahead of him. He went left, and George followed him.
Both men disappeared from sight. “Aha,” they heard George say, and then they all pushed in behind.
It was dark and spooky, a narrow passage running the length of the burnt wing of the hotel behind the damaged wall, down towards the burnt-out end and in the direction of the hill. The lights of the two men played eerily over the stone walls, floor and ceiling and into the darkness ahead, casting their shadows blackly down the passage towards the others.
“A passage!” they were all murmuring in awe. “It’s a secret passage!”
“Oh, I say!” Jeremy said, in the mock child’s tone of excitement the English always seemed to use when there was adventure afoot. “Come on, Famous Five! I wonder where this leads!”
Math turned to look back at them, and shrugged. There was no point trying to keep them out, and his shrug seemed to say he knew it. They were like dogs who have the scent, even Vinnie.
As Elain moved to catch up with him, her foot struck something, and she smothered a shriek. “What’s that?” she gasped. “Is there another light?”
Behind her, one of the
young workers started guiltily. “Oh, yes, I have one in my belt.” The light was not strong, but it enabled them to see what her foot had found. Over a small grey mound of what looked like earth, flapped the remnants of a cloth. Elain bent closer. “It’s a sack of cement or something,” she said.
Vinnie, whose eyes were excellent despite her age, eagerly bent over and examined the manufacturer’s logo on the rotting cotton sacking. “Not cement,” she said. “That’s flour. A half-hundredweight sack of flour. I remember those from before the war.”
Math and George had come back at Elain’s call, but there wasn’t much to see or say about a sack of flour, not when they had been half expecting human bones.
“There may be rats,” Math warned.
But though there were shudders, they all continued, and soon everyone could feel a cold draft around their ankles. George and Math were muttering to each other. Suddenly under the beam of the torches the mortared stone walls changed into rough rock and earth, and the passage was a passage no longer, but a tunnel.
“We’ll be under the end wall of the house now,” George said.
“What is it, Famous Five?” Jeremy called, still in that excited but stalwart twelve-year-old voice. “Is it a gold mine?”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” Rosemary said repressively. “Anyone can see it’s a tunnel.”
“Right.” Math’s flash futilely tried to pierce the gloom ahead. “I suppose it leads up to the fortress.” He turned. “Everybody stay here for the moment, or go back.” When there were mutinous sounds, he said, “There’s not enough light. You might break a leg. And there may well be bats.”
The women shrieked a little, and even the young workman with the light shifted uncomfortably. Jeremy merely said, “Golly, the Famous Five aren’t afraid of a few bats!”
Math grinned, just visible in the darkness. “Nevertheless,” he said. He squeezed Elain’s hand as he left them.
He and George went slowly down the tunnel, and the rest were left in the small pool of their own light against a sea of blackness, watching those other lights get farther and farther away and the two shadows stretch longer and longer behind.
“Did you know this was here, Vinnie?” Elain asked.
“No, I don’t think my father can have been told about it when he purchased. There would have been no reason for him to keep it secret from me.”
“Perhaps it hasn’t been used for centuries,” Davina said.
“That sack of flour can’t be that old,” Vinnie pointed out. “It certainly was put there this century.”
“It’s terribly exciting,” Jeremy said. “The Famous Five are going to be kept busy exploring this summer, aren’t they?”
“It may be extremely dangerous,” Rosemary said dampingly. “I am surprised that Math has allowed us even so far. He would be responsible, of course, if anything should happen to any of us.”
“I warned him.” Davina’s voice rang hollowly, and abruptly the atmosphere seemed frightening, even hostile.
“Someday someone is going to have to tell me who the Famous Five are,” Elain said. “I seem to be missing out.”
“They were the protagonists in some rather unfortunate children’s adventure stories. Enid Blyton,” Rosemary informed her in a clinically disapproving tone. “Much condemned today for racism and snobbism, among other things.”
“Gol-lee, Famous Five!” Jeremy exclaimed helplessly.
“But a world of delight, of course, when one was a child,” Vinnie said. “I was too old for them, but my younger sisters adored them. And the writer was certainly not more racist or sexist than the times she lived in. It does seem hard to blame one person for the sins of an entire culture.”
“Think of all the twentieth-century writers who will be condemned in the future for homophobia,” Jeremy agreed. “But people don’t notice it particularly now. It’s just an expression of their own unconscious views.”
Between the two of them, Rosemary was somehow silenced. Elain would have given something to see her face, because it was clear she didn’t like it when her pronouncements were challenged.
Suddenly the distant light was reflected back from the darkness as it fell on stone. “They’ve reached the end of the tunnel,” Rosemary guessed. Math and George stopped, and the murmur of their voices came back down the tunnel. Then they turned and retraced their steps. The others waited for them in silence.
“There’s a rockfall,” said Math. “It’s impassible.”
“You mean it goes on behind?” That was Davina.
“Do you think it originally led up to the fortress?” Elain asked.
Math shrugged. “Maybe. Hard to tell just when it was built.” But he wasn’t concentrating on what he was saying, Elain could see. He was thinking of something else, something that worried him. “Let’s go,” he said. His hand caught Elain’s in passing. “All right?”
She murmured an affirmative, and he let her go. Math and George led them back up the passage, and as they all drew close to the grey-shadowed rectangle cut into the wall on the right, the lights fell on something beyond. The passage ran both ways from the door. Math and George had naturally taken the left when they entered, but they could, it appeared now, also have gone right.
The passage was shorter in this direction, running only a few yards to a stone wall, where this wing of the house met the other. But it wasn’t the wall that interested them. In front of it, both sides of the passage were lined with boxes and sacks, all in an advanced state of rot. Rusted tins were falling out of broken cartons, and seeds and powders spilled from burst sacks.
“A forgotten cache, by the look of it,” said Math, playing his light along the earth floor. “Somebody expecting a siege.”
“From whom?” Jeremy demanded. “This looks interesting, Famous Five. This stuff is too modern for Owen Glendower!”
They were all silent a moment. It was left to Vinnie to answer. “From the Germans, of course,” she said softly, in a tone of wonder. “This must have been here since the war. The last descendant of the old family died in 1942, and the place was boarded up. Nothing was done till after the war, when the estate sold the property to my father. I suppose these things had been put here before rationing came in, and when the owner died were simply forgotten.”
* * *
They were all black with soot when they returned up the staircase and into the kitchen. Jan shrieked when she saw them. “You’ll be tracking that all through the place!”
So they took their shoes off and carefully crept to their rooms like naughty children.
In Math’s flat, Elain got the bathroom first. She caught sight of herself in the full-length mirror. Her clothes were smeared. She hoped biological detergent would get the dirt out.
She stripped off, showered and then, wrapped in a towel, came out to shove everything into the washing machine. Math had stripped in the kitchen, and his clothes were already in the machine. While he took his shower, she started the machine and slipped on a cotton dress.
By the time Math came out of the shower, Elain was bursting to talk about what they had found. “What do you think? Has it been there ever since the fortress was built? Who built it?” she demanded when they had settled down to the remains of the meal they had abandoned two hours ago.
“The passage must have been constructed either with that part of the house, or shortly afterwards, I suppose,” Math said. “But I’d give something to know why. Was the tunnel already there?”
“Well, at least now we know how Jessica got into the house,” Elain said.
Math’s teeth tore into a bit of bread. He looked at her. “You’re right. Of course.”
“And maybe it was the secret passage that the stonemason had to wall up, and not Jessica at all.”
“There’s another problem solved, too,” Math said softly.
“What?”
“Where the petrol came from that started the fire.” He drank a sip of wine and smiled as Elain soundlessly opened her mouth.
“But it leaves one question unanswered.”
“But—”
“Who was it who moved the petrol cans from the passage? And why did they want to burn me down?”
* * *
“What?” shrieked Elain.
Raymond cursed. “You nearly deafened me, Red! This line’s bad enough as it is. You heard me, but I’ll repeat it. The forensic experts say the tapestry never burned.”
“That’s impossible! How would they know anyway?”
“A fair bit can be learned from charred cloth. There was cloth where the hanging had been, but the samples prove that it was not fifteenth century, and it was not a tapestry. Plain old twentieth-century cotton.”
“What are you saying—that it was rescued from the fire and Math is lying about it?”
“It seems more likely, my dear,” Raymond said gently, “that it was removed before the arson.”
That pointed unerringly to Math. Who else would have had the opportunity to remove the tapestry? “I don’t believe it,” she said. “Their loss assessor probably picked up the wrong fabric. Maybe there was a protective cloth hanging behind.”
There was a short pause. Then Raymond cleared his throat. “Ah...you wouldn’t be getting personally involved here, would you, Red?” he asked uncomfortably.
“Well, I’m living right here,” Elain said hurriedly. “Naturally I’ve got friendly with them all.” She coughed. “But that’s not the point. It’s not clouding my judgement, if that’s what you mean.”
“That’s what I mean, Red.”
“Anyway, if the tapestry wasn’t burnt, why doesn’t the company just say so? All they have to do is refuse to pay the claim for the tapestry. It doesn’t prove arson. It doesn’t prove the rest isn’t a legitimate claim.”
Raymond sighed. “It shows,” he explained slowly, “that someone knew the fire was going to take place. And a fire that someone knows is going to take place, Red, is called arson.”
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