Faith was waiting for him, pale in the moonlight and hugging her dressing gown round her. She followed him obediently as he made his way to the deeply-recessed window at the head of the stairs.
Audley handed her the brief-case and the torch. Very gently he released the heavy iron catches which held back the shutters and closed out the moonlight. Then he took the left-hand catch and began to turn it anti-clockwise.
Oh God, he prayed, it's always worked before–let it work now!
He gritted his teeth and pulled. Very slowly, and with the smallest subdued rumble, the whole section of the wall between the window and the carved oak newel post which ran from floor to ceiling began to pivot outwards. Behind it was a second wall of smooth stone, broken only by a narrow aperture set low down in the outer corner.
'In you go,' he whispered. 'Crawl along for about ten feet and you'll come to some stone stairs. Wait there–and mind your head!'
She stood irresolutely, looking from him to the pitch-black hole.
'Where does it go?' she whispered back urgently.
'For God's sake, don't argue–remember Morrison!'
Reluctantly she bent down and wriggled into the aperture, shining the torch ahead of her. For a moment Audley stood in the darkness, straining his ears. The geese had temporarily run out of abuse, and the silence was thick and heavy. Then from somewhere below him, inside the house, there was a muffled click.
Audley pulled the wall almost shut and eased himself backwards into the hole. Mercifully it was always easier to shut than to open. He reached up and felt for the iron ring on the inner face, and then fumbled for the locking bar. They could turn the iron catch until domesday now.
Awkwardly he crawled backwards along the cold, dusty stone floor until he was able to lift his head and turn round at the foot of the flight of stone steps. Faith was sitting hunched about halfway up.
She shone the torch into his eyes.
'David, I'm not going a step further until you tell me where the hell we are.'
'We're perfectly safe now.'
'I don't care how safe we are. Where are we? What is this–place?'
'It's a priest's hole.'
'A priest's hole?' She shone the torch around her. Cobwebs and dust and rough stone.
'Go on up the stairs. But mind your head until you get to the top. There's a room there.'
At the top of the steps they emerged into a tiny room, barely big enough for the polythene-covered mattress which was its sole contents, apart from a pickaxe and a battered pewter candlestick with a new candle in it and a box of matches beside it. The room was doorless and windowless, but there was a faint draught of air from two small pigeon holes. It was dry, but cold.
Audley lit the candle and turned off the torch. Then he stripped off the plastic covering from the mattress to reveal an old army blanket.
'Wrap that round yourself,' he said, squatting on the end of the mattress.
She looked at him in the light of the spluttering flame. From her expression he was not sure whether she was going to burst into tears or laughter.
'A priest's hole! I've never seen one before!'
She wasn't going to cry.
'It's not surprising, really. It's an early sixteenth century house, and this was an obstinately Catholic district. Once it was a much bigger house too–we're living in what used to be the servants' quarters, next to the old barn. The rest was burnt down years ago.'
'David–it's romantic! Did the secret pass from father to son, right down to you?'
'Quite the opposite, I'm afraid. My family didn't move here until the Prince Regent's time, and no one told us any secrets. I'm probably the first person to know about this room for centuries. And I only found it by accident.'
'By accident? You opened that crazy door, or whatever it was, by accident?'
'Nobody opens that door by accident, Faith. It's designed not to be found even if you're looking for it.
'No, they built this room by adding a false wall to the end of the barn, where it joins the house. Except for this room and the passage to it, that wall's over ten feet of solid masonry, only the barn's so long you don't notice it until you measure it accurately. And that's how I found it.'
He pulled his dressing gown tightly round him. In the little stone box of a room spring had not yet begun to thaw out winter.
'I had an idea of building a squash court in the barn. It cost too much, but I found out that the outside length didn't match the inside one. I had a feeling that there might be a room here then–no one builds walls ten feet thick. But I couldn't even find an echo. I had to cheat in the end–I broke through the roof, and then through the ceiling.'
He pointed to an irregular patch of new plaster above her.
'So I learnt how the door worked from the inside: the catch turns a diagonal bolt on a ratchet. But you can lock the bolt from the inside–and there were dressed stones ready to pile up in the entrance hole so there wouldn't be any echo there if the priest-hunters started knocking around.
'And the whole wall there is wedge shaped–the false wall–and built on an iron plate. The old owners probably had servants to help swing it out, but I've fixed a little roller at the bottom, underneath. And the whole thing pivots on the newel post. It's–rather clever.'
She smiled at him in the candlelight. 'There was a good Catholic David Audley in Elizabethan times, obviously! Did you find any relics in here?'
'Relics?' He stared at her. It was hardly the moment to admit that he had actually hoped for long-lost treasure, and had been bitterly disappointed at finding only a few bits of worm-eaten wood and a candlestick. 'No, I'm sorry to say that the hole was very empty.'
'And this mattress? Is that a precaution against … visitors?'
'Good God, no! This sort of thing's never happened to me before. I simply slept in here one night, out of curiosity. I never thought I'd have to take refuge here.'
'Who are they, David–those men outside?'
'I haven't the faintest idea, Faith. This is out of my experience, I'm afraid. But after what happened this afternoon–after what may have happened, I mean–I didn't fancy staying to find out. I know that's not very heroic–but I'm just not heroic …'
She put a hand on his arm. 'But very sensible. And far too good-natured to remind me that you had me hanging round your neck anyway!'
She was certainly an understanding wench, thought Audley. And more than that!
'If I'm not heroic, then you make up for it,' he said.,'Not many young women I can think of would sit here as cool as you are with three Russ—' He stopped too late.
'Russians?' She completed the word for him. 'Is that really what you think they are?'
He shook his head uneasily.
'It doesn't add up, Faith. It just doesn't add up. Morrison–and now this. And all for a heap of museum loot–I don't care how valuable you say it is.'
She sighed. 'You still don't understand, do you, David? If it was some silly plan for some silly rocket, or the details of a secret treaty, you'd believe it at once. But with something that is truly worthwhile you just can't believe your eyes. Well, perhaps your high-up Russian doesn't have such schoolboy values. Perhaps he thinks this is more important –and naturally he doesn't trust you!
'But we've been all through that, haven't we! And as for being cool — I'm absolutely frozen! How long do we have to stay in this arctic hole? Your old priests must have been made of stern stuff.'
He stood up stiffly. Another hour might be enough, but in the meantime he ought to try to make her comfortable.
'Here–you stretch out on the mattress, and I'll wrap the blanket around you,' he said.
'What are you going to do?'
He wrapped the loose ends of the rug round her legs. 'You try and snatch some sleep. I'll be quite all right sitting against the wall.'
Actually he was not all right. The unevenness of the wall gouged into his back and the cold stones spread their chill through him. He hunched his shoulders
and wrapped his arms tightly across his body.
'David?'
He grunted.
'What's the pick for?'
The pick?' He tried to think. 'Just insurance. If the door jammed we'd have a job getting out.'
'Couldn't we shout through the air holes?'
'The air holes have got a double right angle in them. It might be days before anyone heard anything.'
She shivered, and he relapsed into unhappy silence. The door jamming had been his special nightmare in the past. That it had worked at all had always rather surprised him. If it failed now, forcing him to hack his way out–that would be the ultimate humiliation. Was it Murphy's Law or Finagle's Law that recognised the malevolence of inanimate objects towards human beings?
'David?'
He grunted again, miserably–what could the woman want?
'Your teeth are chattering.'
He gritted his teeth. 'Sorry.'
There was a pause.
'You can come in with me if you like, under the blanket.'
Audley sat bolt upright, unable for a moment to believe his ears. But there was no mistaking the invitation: she was holding up the edge of the blanket. The flame of the candle flickered and her shadow danced on the wall behind her.
At length he shook his head.
'I'm cold and I'm tired and I feel a hundred years old, my girl. But I'm still flesh and blood. And when I crawl under a blanket with a woman it'll never be to stop my teeth chattering. You just try and go to sleep.'
She raised herself on one elbow, looking at him.
'I'm cold and tired too, David. And I'm frightened and I've mixed myself up in I don't know what. And I think my father stole something so big it makes me sick just to think of it … And–and I'm flesh and blood too.'
She tossed back her pale blonde hair and he saw with surprise that same curiously haughty stare which he remembered from the churchyard. Yet the offer of comfort in exchange for comfort could hardly have been more explicit. Bafflement, rather than any last ditch shred of conscience or caution, held him back.
She wasn't wearing her glasses!
The contradiction which had plagued him since she had knocked on his door the previous night dissolved: it wasn't haughtiness–she simply couldn't see him clearly!
Without stopping to analyse the curious mixture of relief and lust and protective affection, he reached out for her, and she met him halfway, and more than halfway.
'You silly, silly man,' she whispered in his ear.
He pressed her gently backwards, feeling the old, long-lost excitement: the softness and firmness of her small breasts, the length of her, the smell of her hair mingling with the faint perfume he had sensed in her room.
She was shrugging herself out of her dressing gown, out of her nightdress–as it came over her head, loosing the pale hair, he felt the skin move over her ribs, skin that impossibly combined warmth with coolness.
The candle was extinguished suddenly–knocked over, snuffed out, it no longer mattered. And the tiny secret room was no longer cold: it was no longer tiny and no longer a room. It was a velvety nothingness moving in its own time and space, starless and endless, with nothing outside it or beyond it, spiralling into infinity.
And then she was holding him tightly and he felt the rough blanket on his shoulders and the sweat prickle on his chest, and he lay holding her until the darkness stopped revolving around them.
She moved into the crook of his arm and he reached across her to feel for the candle.
The matches spilt as he fumbled for them, one-handed, and he struck one against the stone wall. She lay unmoving beside him with the blanket drawn down, unmoving, strands of hair lying damp across her forehead.
'It can't happen often like that, can it?' she said slowly, without looking at him. 'It can't be so good?'
'I don't know. Never before for me.'
'Nor for me.'
Maybe it was only once in a lifetime, he thought. Maybe only when the need and the desire and the fear are united in exactly those proportions. And the person?
He looked down at her again, and then drew the blanket over that little schoolgirl's bosom, so different from his old imagined ideal.
My God, he thought: what have I done? I've laid John Steerforth's daughter–maybe got him a grandchild!
She turned towards him, with a small, satisfied smile which faded directly into seriousness as she saw his expression.
'Was I a disappointment then?' she said.
'You know very well you weren't! But that doesn't make it—' he searched for the word '—right.'
It was the wrong word, and she laughed.
'Dear out-of-date David! If it's like that it has to be right. That's what it's all about!'
'It's not right to mix business and pleasure.'
'Business and pleasure ought to be mixed–why on earth shouldn't they be? And it was my fault, anyway. You only did what you had to, in the line of duty.'
She was mocking him, and she was wholly irresistible now. He kissed her softly on the mouth, then on the breast, and took her in his arms again and lay still beside her.
'That wasn't in the line of duty, David,' she said very quietly.
'No, Faith. That was just for me.'
'Then I think I'll go to sleep, David, because nothing nicer can possibly happen to me now … and I couldn't possibly be safer anywhere than here, could I?'
She snuggled against him.
'You don't think those old priests would mind, do you? Mind our doing this–here?' she said drowsily after a while.
Audley considered the possibility. They had been men of the world, although they had renounced all the good things for the dangers. They must have understood human fears and needs better than those who had no need of such refuges. This sin, of all sins, they could absolve and forgive: the sin of love.
'They'd understand,' he said soothingly. 'Go to sleep.'
VIII
In the end he had drifted off into an exhausted sleep, no longer cold but wedged uncomfortably with one shoulder against the wall to ensure her comfort. And when he came slowly back to wakefulness he found that he was neither able to reach the torch–the candle had guttered out–nor see his watch, which was on the wrist of the arm she was using as a pillow.
There were nagging aches in his shoulder, back and legs, and a larger uneasiness in his mind about the day ahead. But with this girl in his arms he could not feel unhappy any more, and he delayed moving until he was sure of the faint reflected glimmer in the pigeon hole in the outer wall–that was as close as the room ever came to daylight.
Even then, when he had woken her, he managed to get her dressing gown over her shoulders and into his own before switching on the torch: no harm in salvaging a little dignity on such a morning after.
When he was sure she was fully awake he explained his plan of action.
She nodded. 'What you're saying is that it comes down to burglary, booby-traps or–what do you call them -bugs?'
'Most probably bugs. At least on the phones. They've invented some extraordinary little devices–and I wouldn't know where to look for them. We shall have to get the experts in to search the place. As soon as I've dressed I'll walk down the road to the phone box and get some help.'
He felt his way gingerly down the narrow stairway and carefully drew back the long iron bolt. The door-wall swung open easily, with only that same subdued rumble.
The house was perfectly silent, with the morning sunlight streaming in through the windows to dispel the memory of the night's events like a dream. Nothing was disturbed, nothing out of place. He had to tell himself that the three shadows on the lawn had not been imagination. And then the distant raucous screams of the geese reminded him: now he felt an absurd gratitude to those ridiculous, bad-tempered creatures.
There was a reassuring matter-of-factness about the department's duty man, to whom he explained matters ten minutes later. It might have been an everyday occurrence–perhaps it was, for
all he knew!
He didn't question Audley's going to earth in his own house, either. Which was just as well: that was one secret he intended to keep, now it had proved its value.
'Forty minutes – we'll have a team with you then, Dr Audley. Er–yours is an old house, isn't it?'
He said it was, wondering how they knew and why it was important.
'No cover story's going to be very convincing on a Sunday morning, but we'll do the best we can. We'll send you a team of woodworm, dry rot and damp-proofing specialists,' said the duty man, answering his unasked questions. 'At least they'll make a nice change from electricians and gas men. They'll be with you on the dot!'
He found Faith hunched over the kitchen table, still in her much-crumpled dressing gown, nursing a mug of tea. She looked somewhat battered, with dark rings under her eyes and hair unbrushed, a far cry from yesterday's cool, self-confident self.
She gave him a bleary version of the now familiar shortsighted-haughty stare, which forced him to smile inwardly.
'I took a risk and plugged the kettle in,' she said hoarsely. 'Without a cup of tea I'd have died anyway, so it was a necessary risk.'
Unaccountably Audley felt on top of the world now, better than he had felt for days. But it would be too cruel of him to admit it at that moment.
'I don't feel very spritely myself, to tell the truth,' he lied.
She raised her eyes from the mug.
'To tell the truth, I feel thoroughly—'
She stopped in mid-sentence, realising too late the implication of what she was saying, but making things much worse by leaving the sentence in the air.
He couldn't stop himself from laughing as the colour spread across her cheeks. She buried her face in her hands, and for a cold moment he thought she was weeping. Then he realised her shoulders were shaking with laughter, not tears.
Evidently laughter was the therapy she needed, and it was reassuring to discover that she could laugh against herself. It seemed perfectly natural to take her in his arms, without passion or urgency. She melted against him momentarily, and then held him away from her, shaking her head.
The Labyrinth Makers Page 10