. . . . .
October 18
Dear Kit,
My father says he has learned that you caught the typhoid from a maid—or at least that is what I think he implied, as she has since died of the same disease now afflicting you. If I understand what he told me correctly, apparently she was already ill when she brought you a glass of water, and she must have somehow infected that water. Not being a physician, I am afraid it is something of a muddle to me, so perhaps I have my facts wrong. I am not sure which I am sorrier about, the death of the maid—for it is always sad when anyone dies, unless of course that person is perfectly villainous—or that she somehow infected you before her own passing. My father does say that so far no one else in your household appears to have been infected, and I suppose for that we must all be grateful, but my father also says your fever is very high now and that it is said you have periods of delirium.
You know, when I first met you, I cannot say that I liked you very much. First, you had the nerve to be bored at my family’s party. Then you accused me of being the sort of girl who would do needlepoint and—worst sin of all!—you beat me at chess. But things between us have changed since those early days.
Do you know, I don’t think I ever had a friend before I met you? I should be very sad if you were to die.
But let us not talk now of death. I refuse to allow myself to think that such will be the outcome here! So, instead, let me tell you something of my aunt. No one outside of my parents and me know her whole story, but since you are indeed my friend, I cannot see the harm in sharing it with you now. When Aunt Helen and Mother were born …
Your friend,
Lucy
. . . . .
October 25
Kit,
A peculiar thing happened today.
Everyone else was out of the house, Aunt Helen and Mother having departed before I even arose, and I grew bored. The book I was reading did not interest me, we know how I feel about needlepoint, and after spending some time at the chessboard by myself devising a strategy for beating you when next we play, I decided to take myself for a little stroll. Usually, I do not go anywhere by myself, but I decided that just this once there would be no harm in going to the park in the middle of the day unattended. I can hear you admonishing me for my lack of caution—no doubt, if anyone here knew what I was planning, I would have been tied to the bedpost!—but I sneaked out all the same, wearing an old dress and with my bonnet shrouding my face in such a way that I might not be recognized.
The park was lovely. You really must get better soon so that you can see it in all the riot of color it is now. I strolled around the perimeters, watching the children play, watching nannies with babies, people walking in twos: mostly women together, but there were a few pairings that were man and woman. It was one of these latter pairings that finally caught my eye.
Seated on a bench was one of the women from my household. She was wearing a dark cloak, befitting the weather, and beside her was seated a man. At first I thought it was Mother, and I was wondering what she was doing talking to a man in the park that was not my father, but then I realized it could not possibly be her; she would never do such a thing. I was standing off to the side of the bench and the man was between us, his back facing me. From the way they were seated together, almost intimately, I felt certain that this was not their first time meeting each other. For some reason, I decided I did not want Aunt Helen to see me there—or perhaps it occurred to me that she might not want me to see her there—so I stepped back out of her view.
The two appeared to be engaged in a rather heated discussion, judging from the expressions I could glimpse on Aunt Helen’s face, but I could not hear any of the words, for they were whispering. It was all very frustrating. I could see nothing of the man, save for his back: a coat, of poor quality both in fabric and cut; unruly brown hair peeking out from beneath the back of his hat, which was also of poor quality—the hat, not the hair. Unable to hear anything, and now fearful of being seen, I quickly left the park and returned home.
Now here is the odd thing—two odd things, really. One, why did Aunt Helen not meet with this man at home? It is not as though she is not allowed to have visitors here. Two, who was he? For he was so shabbily dressed, that of one thing I am certain: he is no one from our acquaintance. I suppose, reading this paragraph over, that number two answers number one. She did not have him here because she did not think someone dressed as he was would be welcome here.
When Aunt Helen returned a short time later, I was back at the chessboard again, laying plans on how I might beat you. “How was your walk?” I asked her. “It was fine,” she said. “Did you meet anyone interesting?” I asked her. “I saw no one,” she said. As I say, it is all very peculiar.
My father says that they thought you were starting to get better but that complications have set in, that your high fever is a constant thing now. I do not wish to think about what that might mean. Do you know, I never did get to see that tunnel you claim runs beneath the earth, connecting your home with mine? My father is almost always in his study when he is at home. And, even when he is not, I fear that if I were to enter his study by myself to access that tunnel, I would surely get caught. But if you will only get better, I will steel my bravery and give it a try.
Please get better, Kit. Please.
Lucy
. . . . .
November 1
Dear Lucy,
I am feeling much better now. I am fairly certain it was your letters that kept me alive.
Thank you.
Kit
• Eighteen •
With each day that passed, Kit got a little better, a little stronger.
But his mother was still concerned, lest the excitement of visitors cause him to turn for the worse again, and so I was not permitted to see him, nor was he permitted to leave the house. And so we had to content ourselves with letters back and forth.
At last, two weeks to the day after receiving my first letter of reply from him, I received the following:
Dear Lucy,
I have lived. Now it is time for you to fulfill your end of the bargain. Meet me tonight in the middle of the tunnel after our households are asleep. Say at two a.m.? Don’t forget to bring a candle to light your way. It is dark down there.
Kit
. . . . .
The remainder of the day passed in a sea of anticipation and anxiety: anticipation over finally seeing Kit again, particularly after the intimacy of our letters, anxiety over going down into the tunnel.
It was difficult to assess which emotion ran stronger.
It was not as though I’d ever considered myself to be a fearful person, but the idea of being beneath the earth did put fear in me. What would it be like down there? Would it be cold? Damp? Would there be rats? What if Kit slept through the appointed time or fell sick again, grew delirious, and I became trapped somehow with no one knowing where I was? I could die down there!
The idea of getting caught was not pleasant either.
For it seemed easy for Kit to propose what was to him a simple thing—Meet me tonight in the middle of the tunnel after our households are asleep. Say at two a.m.?—but it was far more difficult for me to achieve in practical terms. Sometimes, our household was awake well into the early hours of the morning, what with guests and such. And even if there were no guests, what if my father, unbeknownst to me, was at one of those critical junctures he seemed to have more and more often in his writing? What if I thought he went to bed with the others, but he stayed up late instead to work, enabling him to catch me red-handed—or, red-footed might be more accurate—as I tiptoed into his sacred study with the intent of doing something he would no doubt disapprove of? What if he was asleep, what if they were all asleep, but what if I barked my shins against some inconveniently placed piece of furniture, involuntarily let out a cry of pain, roused the house around me, and, and, and …
I was working myself into a state.
This
had to stop.
So I went about my business, pretended it was just like any other day, even did needlepoint to innocently pass the time.
When I thought, with excitement, about seeing Kit again, the clock moved at the pace of a tick waiting a long time for its companion tock. But when I thought, with trepidation, of what I was going to have to do in order to see Kit, the twin hands sped around the clock face as though trying to see who would win the race.
“You are in an odd mood today,” Mother observed at teatime. “I have never known you to take up your needlepoint before without someone insisting you do so first.”
“Are you all right?” Aunt Helen asked at dinner. “You do not seem yourself.”
“Perhaps you should go to bed early,” my father suggested. “I know you have had no contact with Kit in weeks, but there has been typhoid in the neighborhood. It would do you well to get more rest.”
“An excellent suggestion,” I agreed, grateful for the excuse to escape those six prying if loving eyes. Two more, and they could have been a spider.
Alone in my room, I paced, paced, paced. Then, realizing that someone might come to check on me, I put on my nightdress and climbed into bed.
And there I waited, waited, waited.
Thankfully, there were no guests that night, and before too many hours had passed, I heard the household preparing to put itself to sleep.
“I thought you would be asleep by now,” my father said. “Good night.”
“I’m sure you will feel better in the morning,” Mother said. “Good night.”
“Are you sure you aren’t up to something?” Aunt Helen said.
“Good night,” I said.
I lay in the half dark of the moon-filled room, drumming my fingers against the top sheet.
You would not think that a person could be filled with so much anticipation and dread and have sleep threaten to take over all the same, yet I wound up having to pinch myself repeatedly over the next few hours, sometimes quite hard, to keep myself awake. In the end, by the time the clock called me to get out of bed at half one in order to begin my preparations, I had pinched my cheek so many times on one side, I probably looked as though I had been attacked by spiders there.
I removed my nightdress, located a day dress that was in such deplorable condition—it seemed that I always spilled whatever I was eating on it whenever I wore it—that, should it get dirty in my foray into the underworld, no one would notice it missing if I burned it in the fireplace afterward. Then I took a large dark-haired doll that I hadn’t played with in many years and tucked it into bed with its back to the door, using pillows artfully placed beneath the sheets to create the impression of a body so that on the off chance one of the adults rose in the night to check on me, they would be fooled when they peeked in at the door.
It seemed too risky to put on my boots just then—I feared making a clumping racket in them as I negotiated the stairs—and so I tiptoed my way gingerly down, boots in one hand. Nor did I dare to put them on, I warned myself, until I had attained the safety of my father’s study, only stopping briefly along the way to light the tallest candle I could find from one of the wall sconces, taking it with me.
Just as I was slowly opening the door to my father’s study, I experienced a moment of heart-stopping fear when I imagined I heard a noise coming from within. For the first time, it occurred to me that I might not be the only one in the household capable of traversing the floors on cat’s feet, capable of hiding on stairs unseen and unheard. Perhaps my father had risen in the night and, unable to sleep, had gone back down to do some work, tiptoeing as I had done so as not to rouse those who yet slumbered in Orpheus’s arms?
And was that a light under the door?
But, having already partially turned the knob—if someone was inside would they have seen or heard that?—I saw no choice but to turn it the rest of the way, pressing the door open.
My heartbeat returned to something approximating normal when I saw that, thankfully, the room was empty.
The clock on the wall said I still had ten minutes remaining and I took the time to look around the room, thinking how different, how odd it looked without my father in it. Finding a holder in which I could rest my candle, I sought to choose a seat where I might rest while lacing up my boots.
Stealing rare opportunity, I chose my father’s big chair behind his desk.
How unusual it felt to sit there, I thought, settling cautiously into the leather cushion of the seat as though it might reject me somehow. How extraordinary—how magical! This was what my father saw when he looked out at the world; this is where he sat when he created worlds, ordering them as he pleased.
I wondered what it must be like to be him.
But there was no time for such meditations, no time for any more thoughts, for my boots were laced, my candle had been taken up again, and I had pulled open the trapdoor—drat! that creak was loud!—and was lowering myself down the stairs.
The stairs were narrower and steeper than expected, but at the bottom was a small cellar, just as my father had always said there was.
I did not tarry in this room for long, however. It was small, dank, and had dark corners that were the stuff of nightmares. If rats lurked down here, no doubt they collected themselves in those corners.
I was not here to see rats. I was not here to see this room. That door, right across on the other side: that is what I had come here for.
The door looked so old, it might have been there even before the house built over it, and its hinges creaked with the sound of an animal surprised at being attacked when I forced it open. Apparently, with the exception of Kit’s use of it when he had first discovered this place, no one else had used it for a very long time.
It’s hard to say what I expected to find on the other side—no doubt a room similar, if longer and narrower, than the cellar had been. But such was not the case.
I held the candle up, moving it in every direction. The floor, the generously spaced walls, the ceiling soaring overhead when I had expected to be cramped into a humpbacked position—all was fashioned out of wide, flat stones, and good quality stones at that, placed with great care. Yes, the stones were cool beneath my fingers, but not cold, not damp. A lot of time, effort, and expense had gone into building this place, but who had done so? And why?
I held the candle straight ahead of me and walked on toward my destination, now hearing a matching echo to my tread coming from the exact opposite direction, echoing louder and closer with each step.
. . . . .
We met in the middle.
No, I had not brought a measuring device with me, nor did I know how far behind him his end of the tunnel stretched; and yes, he was far taller than I was, so his stride being far longer than mine, if each of his steps had echoed mine, then he had covered more ground to get to me than I had to get to him.
Still, that is the way I thought of it: we met in the middle.
In the glow of our candles, I saw how much thinner he’d become since I’d last seen him, how much paler his face—the typhoid had robbed him of so much. Still, when he smiled, he was every inch Kit.
“You made it,” he said, his grin shining behind his own candle.
I had not realized until that moment how much I had missed him, how happy and relieved I was to have him still in this world. All my life, I had been unaccustomed to having a friend close to my age in the neighborhood. Mostly, I moved in a universe where everyone was an adult, leaving me to feel like the lone visitor from another planet. I had not realized until that moment how much less alone he made me feel.
I wanted to reach out to him, touch him to make sure he was really there, embrace his thin shoulders.
But I couldn’t do that.
We may have been friends, but it was not as though he was another girl whom I might touch either casually or even with warmth.
So instead I contented myself with a saucy, “What? Did you think I would prove too much of a coward in the e
nd?”
“Never,” he said with a twinkle, “but I did think you might sleep through it.”
It was a good thing, I thought, that the candles probably did not give off enough light for him to see my pinched cheek.
“What are those marks on your cheek?” he asked.
Blast.
“It is nothing,” I said. “Tell me”—I swept my candle, indicating the space around us—“do you have any theories as to how this place came to be?”
“Indeed, I do.”
“And are you going to share them with me? Or do I have to stand here and guess?”
“I think that, once upon a time, someone in my house and someone in your house loved each other very much. But, for whatever reason, they could not permit themselves to meet aboveground. And so this place was built, with great love and determination.”
“Kit Tyler!” I laughed. “Who would have ever thought it? You are a romantic.”
He did not blush as I thought he might at my teasing. Instead he asked, “Would it be so awful if I were?”
I had no comfortable answer to that.
“Why did you want so very much for me to see this place?” I asked.
“Because you have known about it ever since I first told you about it—how long ago was that?—and yet this is the first time I have persuaded you down here. I think it’s healthy to have curiosity, don’t you? You should have more of it.”
“I only came this time,” I said, “because I made that stupid bargain with you when I thought you might be dying. Now I regret my haste.”
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