A Matter of Loyalty

by Anselm Audley

  ‘Do you know where the priest hole is?’

  She shook her head. ‘I’ve looked for it, shan’t pretend otherwise, but never found it. Plinth’s your man for this. He was in service here forty years and more. It was his business to know everything.’

  ‘The Selchester priest hole was Nicholas Owen’s work,’ Leo said.

  ‘Who?’ Hugo asked.

  ‘He was a carpenter, a recusant, and a genius at hidden rooms, false panels, double walls and such. The searchers could be very thorough and sophisticated. They’d take a week to comb a house, measure everything to see where there were unexplained spaces, but some of Owen’s priest holes were never found. The Throckmortons had one, up in Warwickshire, went undiscovered until the late nineteenth century.’

  ‘I’ve been there,’ said Freya. ‘They’re distant cousins, all these Catholic families marry one another. It’s not nearly as complicated a building as the Castle. You could probably hide a whole secret apartment up in the roofs here. They searched the Castle for a week after the Babington Plot, I know that. There was a Jesuit in the attic, the seventh Earl’s brother, but they never found him.’

  ‘See what you can find in your books,’ said Leo. ‘Get Polly to help you. She’s been trailing about the fields long enough, she must be exhausted. She’ll keep a secret. I shall take myself to the George & Dragon to find Plinth.’

  ‘I’d best come with you,’ said Mrs Partridge. ‘He knows me, he won’t ask too many questions.’

  ‘Such a nuisance, having to do all of this sub rosa,’ Hugo said. ‘At least we know it must be on the east side of the Castle, that’s where you found all the darts. I shall take myself off to the upper floors and sing lays like Blondel seeking the Lionheart. Perhaps Georgia will join in the chorus.’

  Leo said, ‘Be sure to sit upon the ground every so often, tell some sad stories of the deaths of kings, and give that leg of yours a rest.’

  ‘I shall be all three Richards at once,’ said Hugo, with the ghost of a smile. ‘Come on, Magnus, let’s see if you’re more use than that bloodhound.’

  Scene 5

  Coming back past the Lodge with Plinth beside him, Leo was flagged down by Superintendent MacLeod.

  ‘Could I impose upon you for a lift up to the Castle, Father Hawksworth?’ he said. ‘I’ve sent both my cars off, and the cast are trickling in. I’d like to get a head start on interviews.’

  ‘Of course, Superintendent, jump in.’

  MacLeod sat himself in the back, and Leo roared off up the drive. ‘Excellent car, this,’ he said approvingly. ‘Good day, Mr Plinth, Mrs Partridge. Gathering reinforcements?’

  Leo made a swift decision. ‘We think it’s possible she got herself locked in a priest hole, Superintendent. There’s one hidden up in the roofs of the Castle. She knows it exists, and if she’d found it while looking for somewhere out of the way, she might well have been unable to get out. They were designed to muffle sounds.’

  MacLeod gave him a keen look in the mirror. ‘I should say it’s worth a try, but I’m not so comfortable with this running away as I was. It’s too cold for a girl to have spent the night outside, and if she’d gone to friends I’d have expected to hear by now. Sir Archibald is a little concerned she might have been kidnapped. It’s that missing bicycle, you see. There hasn’t been sight nor sound of her on any of the roads around Selchester. I didn’t like to broach the subject with Mr Hawksworth yet, but I wondered what you thought.’

  ‘I should say that was worth following up,’ said Leo, ‘although relations between her and Hugo have been a little strained this week. Do you have any particular reason to believe she might have been abducted?’

  ‘Mr Hawksworth is currently involved in some rather sensitive Government business,’ said MacLeod. ‘It’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that someone might be attempting to put pressure on him. Nor, for that matter, that he’s had some form of ransom demand he daren’t share with us, for Miss Georgia’s safety. It’s a familiar enough modus operandi in kidnapping cases.’

  Leo met his gaze. ‘If this were the case, it would be better for you to come to your conclusions quite independently of Hugo.’

  MacLeod nodded. ‘Thank you, Father Hawksworth. You’ve been most helpful.’

  He let himself out at the door and headed off towards the ballroom. The circle was packed with cars again, searchers and cast members all together, sometimes double-parked for lack of room. It would be a job to disentangle. There was Vivian Witt, dressed more for the search than for the rehearsal, talking to the Pearsons, Stanley Dillon, Daisy, and a pale woman Leo didn’t know. Daisy was pointing over towards the gardens, tracing out their route of the night before.

  ‘I see a number of his late lordship’s connections are involved,’ said Plinth as he got out of the car. ‘I had wondered if this had something to do with him.’

  ‘With the murder?’ Leo asked. Both Vivian and Stanley had fallen foul of the late Lord Selchester’s nastier ways.

  ‘You don’t work for a man such as his lordship without getting to know him better than he suspects,’ said Plinth, closing the Lago’s door with care. ‘He mixed with unusual people, and I can’t help noticing there are plenty of them around at the moment. Miss Witt and Mr Dillon there, and I’ve seen her before – she visited his lordship a few times. That gentleman who makes out he’s a journalist, he’s been in town too.’

  ‘Today?’ Leo asked.

  ‘He stayed at the George on Friday night, said he was on his way down to see friends in Cornwall,’ said Plinth. ‘Chattier than usual, if you ask me. Took himself off yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘What time, Plinth?’

  ‘About one, I should say. Took lunch in the parlour, then off in that big black car of his.’

  ‘A Vauxhall?’

  ‘I didn’t note the make, sir, but I couldn’t say otherwise.’

  ‘Well, well,’ said Leo. ‘And you say you know him.’

  ‘He’s stayed at the George a few times, not a talkative gentleman, but I saw him once before the war. He belonged to the part of his lordship’s life which was lived in London, if you’ll take my meaning. His lordship kept a town house, but not a big one, nor a big staff, and the estate steward didn’t have anything to do with it. He dealt with all the accounts himself.’

  They turned to go in when something else struck Leo. ‘Who else did you say visited his lordship? Was it her?’ He nodded towards the pale woman.

  ‘Not her, no, that’s Mrs Rothesay. It was that one, talking to Miss Witt. Miriam her name was, or something like it. Came over as a refugee, from Austria I believe, just before the war. Some diplomatic connection of his lordship’s. He offered her hospitality while she found her feet here, so to speak.’

  ‘Was his lordship often generous like that?’ Leo asked.

  ‘I shouldn’t say so,’ said Plinth. ‘To his own sort, yes, you couldn’t fault him on that. But one came to see, in time, that the other sort, the likes of Miss Witt and Mr Dillon, it was more a question of what they might do for him. They didn’t often like it, if you catch my meaning.’

  ‘Did she?’

  Miranda caught their gaze, and gave Leo a nod.

  ‘I should have said they got on well, he was much taken with her. But she was a stranger in a foreign land, and quite dependent on him. People can be very good at keeping up appearances, when they’ve nothing else.’

  Scene 6

  In the faint hope of a miracle, Freya had knocked on the door of her cousin’s room. Polly was still up in the New Tower, flicking through Freya’s books on the Castle. Not somewhere she wanted prying eyes, but it was out of the way, couldn’t be helped. The job of tracking and recording all the cars had been entrusted to a joint team of Emerson and Árpád in one of the guest rooms. They didn’t know why they were doing it, and doubtless would ask some awkward questions later, but they could at least be relied on to work meticulously.

  ‘Priest hole?’ Sonia said. ‘What on earth doe
s that have to do with Georgia?’

  ‘We think she might have been looking for somewhere to hide,’ Freya said. ‘Found it, went inside, couldn’t open the door again.’

  Sonia didn’t look at all convinced. ‘I don’t think you’re telling me the truth,’ she said.

  ‘Then we understand one another perfectly,’ said Freya, who wasn’t in the mood for her cousin’s games. ‘Do you know where it was?’

  ‘Father knew,’ Sonia said.

  ‘You’re quite sure?’

  ‘Yes. But he didn’t tell, if that’s what you’re about to ask.’

  ‘Might he have told Tom?’

  Tom had been Sonia’s brother, killed in Palestine shortly after his father’s death.

  ‘He liked his secrets, you know that very well. He might have told Tom, some sort of family tradition, but I doubt it. Not that you’d get much joy out of Tom unless you’re desperate enough to resort to a Ouija board.’

  Scene 7

  Superintendent MacLeod joined Vivian outside the ballroom. ‘Thank you for your list, Miss Witt,’ he said. ‘Much appreciated. Are you planning to continue the rehearsal?’

  ‘I shall for the sake of the professionals, but I was thinking of releasing the chorus to help with the search.’

  ‘If you’d be kind enough to gather everyone first, I shall go through them all together, and then they can go. I doubt I shall be very long. We’re just looking for anything which might help.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Vivian. ‘I saw some of them going over to the kitchen with offerings of sandwiches, we’d better gather them up. Stanley can go and get them – where’s he gone?’

  ‘I’ll go,’ said Miranda, who was just behind them. ‘Through the passageway?’

  ‘And across Grace Hall. You’ll need to go around that dreadful bear someone put to block the Hall off. Thank you!’

  ‘Is there anyone on the list who isn’t coming today?’ MacLeod asked.

  Vivian bent over the list. ‘Let’s see . . .’

  Scene 8

  ‘Listen,’ said Polly, brandishing a book from the library, as Freya came back up the stairs. Freya recognised it. She’d brought it up here mostly to look as if she were studying the family history, although there’d been some useful tidbits about Restoration England in it. ‘Keeping the Faith: The Fitzwarins and the Papacy. It’s not half bad, full of letters and messengers and secret Jesuits. Anyway, in 1586 the Earl’s youngest brother was a priest, Father Eudo Fitzwarin, and he was hidden in the Castle for four days while the priest-hunters turned it inside out. When he was an old man, in 1626, he told one of his fellow priests about it. Here, read this.’

  Freya read.

  I passed above four Days in a Hiding-Place so cunningly Wrought by the late Master Owen that were all the Legions of Satan to make Search and Inquisition until the last Days, yet would it through the Grace of God elude their wicked Purpose. It lieth in the uppermost Part of that House, which being an antient Abode greatly Altered by the Fashion and Whim of following Ages, is wrought and Joined with great Confusion even unto those Masons and Carpenters to whose diligent Care the Fabrick is Entrusted. The Entry being by means of a false Masonry, the Genius of the Design is such that a first secret Room concealeth a second, made with no Less an Artifice, so that not a Sound may reach the questing ears of impious Hereticks, further that the first being Found and Discovered to be Empty, the search may be Confounded.

  ‘False masonry,’ she said. ‘That narrows it down. One of the chimney breasts, perhaps. Shall we take a look?’

  Polly swept the book up and ran ahead, to find Hugo sitting on a chair at the bottom of the stairs to the Long Gallery.

  ‘Are you the sentry?’ she said.

  ‘More a weary traveller who walked the length and the breadth of the top floor singing his throat raw, but all in vain.’

  ‘Won’t work,’ she said. ‘It’s soundproof. There are two secret rooms, one behind the other.’

  ‘I wish I’d known that first.’

  ‘I liked your singing,’ said Freya, who had heard snatches of it on her way to and fro. ‘HMS Pinafore?’

  ‘Indeed. Not perhaps in the same class as Blondel’s lays, but considerably easier to remember. How have you found that out, Polly?’

  She brandished the book. ‘Georgia will have to be thankful to all those Papists now. The entry is behind a false masonry.’

  ‘That narrows it down, most of the rooms up here are panelled. We can start in the Long Gallery, there’s some masonry in the fireplaces.’

  ‘There are always the attics,’ Freya said. ‘She mentioned roofs.’

  ‘There are indeed the attics,’ said Hugo, standing with painful resolution. ‘Still, it must be done. Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.’

  ‘I would we had one ten thousand of those in England,’ said Freya, ‘who do no work today.’

  ‘The fewer men,’ said Hugo with a grim smile, ‘the greater share of honour.’

  ‘Father Leo was quoting Shakespeare,’ said Polly. ‘It must be contagious.’

  They clattered up the stairs and into the Long Gallery, fanning out in search of masonry to poke, prod and push.

  ‘It’s got to be here, in the attics above, or in one of the guest rooms off the Gallery,’ said Freya. ‘If you go towards the front, it’s all altered.’

  ‘Smells smoky in here,’ Polly said, attacking the middle chimney breast with a heavy old-fashioned poker. ‘I didn’t know these chimneys were used any more. Hullo, Magnus, come to help?’

  ‘He was helping me,’ said Hugo, ‘but I can’t say he contributed very much.’

  Magnus gave a let-me-in yowl, poking his nose into a corner of the fireplace.

  ‘I’ve looked there,’ said Polly.

  ‘Maybe you dislodged something,’ said Freya, worming her way in and patting her hands over the stonework. ‘Yes, you have, there’s a draught. I can feel it.’

  ‘I can’t imagine it’s that easily found,’ said Hugo, frowning.

  ‘Not originally,’ said Freya. ‘But it’s four hundred years old, and whoever closed it last didn’t need to hold off Walsingham’s priest-hunters for a week. Give me a hand, Polly. Push here.’

  There was a creak, an indignant squeal. Two of the stone panels swung back, revealing a brick-lined staircase which twisted and turned. Hugo and Freya exchanged a glance over Polly’s head, both wondering how anyone could get an unconscious girl up such steps.

  ‘I’ll go first,’ said Freya firmly. ‘We don’t know the floor is safe.’

  Polly sniffed. ‘I can definitely smell smoke,’ she said. ‘The chimney must be in use.’

  ‘The chimney shouldn’t leak,’ said Hugo, but his voice was muffled as Freya climbed the stairs. She shouted. ‘Georgia!’

  A croaky reply from behind one of the panels. ‘Freya!’

  ‘Hullo, Georgia!’ said Polly, scampering up behind Freya.

  ‘I can’t find an entrance,’ said Georgia, still muted. ‘I’ve pushed and poked and everything. Where am I?’

  ‘In the Castle,’ said Freya. ‘Up in the attics.’

  ‘That’s odd,’ said Georgia. ‘But you found one of my gliders.’

  ‘Magnus found your gliders, and then Father Leo. Come on up, Magnus. Georgia, Magnus is just here. Call him, he’s got a good nose for you.’

  Scene 9

  MacLeod was conferring with Gus in the ballroom.

  ‘Superintendent, Lord Selchester,’ said a voice from the ballroom terrace. It was Arthur Hampton-Bishop, bloodhound in tow. ‘I heard they were looking inside the Castle, and brought Morpheus here, but I think the Castle might be on fire.’

  MacLeod ran to the terrace doors. Yes, there was a small trickle of smoke on the near roof, coming not from one of the tall Tudor chimneys, but from the attic itself.

  ‘Constable Tarrant,’ he said. ‘Radio for the fire brigade at once. Everything they’ve got. A building like this, the timber will be dry as a bone. If
we don’t get a lid on it quickly, it could burn the whole Castle.’

  ‘Bucket chain?’ said Gus.

  ‘Good idea.’ MacLeod clapped his hands. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, it appears we have a more pressing matter than interviews. Anyone who’s willing to carry a bucket, please follow his lordship through to Grace Hall.’

  In the hubbub which followed, only one person noticed Jeremy Pearson detach himself from the main group.

  Scene 10

  Leo and Plinth had been in the kitchen with John Brodrick, looking at a plan of the Castle supplied by Ben. It wasn’t the best of plans – the attic storey was mostly guesswork – but John and two of his men had turned up wanting to help, so Leo had snaffled them. They were trying to narrow down the location of the priest hole.

  ‘Fire!’ Pam shouted, running through from Grace Hall. ‘Auntie, it’s something horrible, the attics are on fire!’

  ‘Hose,’ said Ben. ‘John, you can give me a hand.’

  Leo was racing for the stairs. His niece was trapped near the attics. There was no time to lose.

  He came into Grace Hall just as Gus led his bucket-carrying army through the passage from the ballroom, heading for the scullery. Because Leo came through a different door, he was the only one to see Jeremy Pearson taking himself up the main stairs.

  Leo eyed an array of pikes and halberds. ‘Do you still have a strong arm?’ he asked Plinth.

  Plinth was a perceptive man. You didn’t work for Lord Selchester for a quarter of a century without having a nose for trouble.

  ‘Strong as you need, Father Hawksworth.’

  ‘Can you pull one of those out of its display?’

  ‘Reckon I can,’ said Plinth, reaching up and wrenching a halberd free. ‘You’re expecting trouble. Where to?’

  ‘The Long Gallery, I think.’

  Scene 11

  Georgia called again. Magnus pressed his nose to the gap between one of the panels and the floor, giving another imperious meow.

  ‘Do you have a fish in there?’ Polly called.

  ‘Push along here,’ Freya said.

  ‘Freya, I really can smell smoke,’ Polly said, much more quietly. ‘I don’t think it’s the chimney. Something’s on fire.’