She had apparently seen Hasbro and taken fright. “Bite her on the ankle!” I thought, trying to project it, although I shouldn’t have. Not that Ms Peckworthy doesn’t deserve to be bitten, but Hasbro shouldn’t bite anyone simply for pleasure, his or ours.
“In fact Mr. Boskins has just been telling me that there’s evidence Mr. Hedgepeth is very much alive, and is in fact right here in Bowness, Mrs.…?”
“Peckworthy,” she told him. “Ms Henrietta Peckworthy.”
“Lemuel Wattsbury, ma’am, and Mrs. Wattsbury.”
“Pleased,” Mrs. Wattsbury said, although she didn’t sound pleased, and who would be, talking to Ms Peckworthy?
“I’ll just ask you to produce your evidence, if you don’t mind, Mr. Wattsbury,” Ms Peckworthy said. “Aunt Ricketts will insist upon it.”
“Ricketts, ma’am? Are you referring to the bone disease?”
“I certainly am not, sir. I’m referring to the maternal aunt of those three wayward children. Your Mr. Boskins left in a very suspicious hurry with his fabulous evidence. Perhaps you’ll want to call him back?”
“If you’d be kind enough to produce your document, Ms Peckworthy…”
We didn’t stop to hear the rest, but went straight back up the stairs. The production of documents didn’t interest us at the moment. The words, “They’ve gone down the lake,” kept going around in my head, and I was certain that I had seen them—that the white-haired man in the boat at twilight must have been Hilario Frosticos and the dark-haired man had been the Creeper, setting out to “try the key,” as Mr. Boskins had put it. But how long would it take them? They’d been gone for an hour at least.
We jammed pillows under the bedcovers, made the lumps look humanish, grabbed our jackets, turned out the lights, and went out through the window like the infamous criminal, one step ahead of the law.
Chapter 17
At the King’s Owl
Mr. Boskins had apparently come up through the woods, and so we would go down that same way toward the lake. The rain had stopped falling and the sky was halfway clear and very starry. The full moon was up bright enough to cast shadows, which was good, because it was the only light we had. I wish we could have brought Hasbro along. What you want on a dark night in the woods is a fearless dog with a good sniffer and sharp ears, but of course we couldn’t have taken him, not without revealing what we were up to.
So we headed downhill one behind the other, trying not to slip on the wet leaves and mud, but moving just as fast as we could. It smelled piney and cold, and it was very quiet and pretty, with leafy moonlight on the forest floor in between the trees, and the wind just barely moving the branches. Twice the path forked, but we kept to the main path, because the others were covered with leaves that hadn’t been trodden quite so flat, and so looked less traveled by.
Then just when I was beginning to wonder whether we had taken the wrong path after all, we saw a lighted window through the trees. The headlights of a car swung past some distance beyond that window—someone rounding a curve in the road, probably heading uphill from the lake. By dumb luck we had found our way to just exactly where we were supposed to be, the back of Mr. Boskins’s pub, The King’s Owl, although we didn’t know that for sure until we came out of the trees and alongside the back wall, where we peered past the corner to see if the coast was clear, which it was.
We angled down along the wall, being deadly quiet and keeping to the shadows. At the front edge of the building we hunkered down very low and peered out again, ready to slip back into the darkness of the trees if we had to. But there was no one lurking, just the empty sidewalk. Over the pub door there was a sign of a very knowing owl, no doubt the King’s owl, dressed in a nightshirt and cap and with its eyes half shut, as if it were thinking profound thoughts or were half asleep. He was holding a candle, and the flame of the candle had lit the point of his cloth sleeping-cap on fire, and so he looked considerably less profound than sleepy. Across the street there was a heavy stone wall, perhaps five feet high and wider than a sidewalk, with some low bushes along it. There was no sign of any “Old Door” although it might easily be hidden by shrubbery.
“What now?” Perry asked.
Indeed. It had seemed like a first rate idea to come down here, but we were early. Reginald Peach wouldn’t be lurking in the bushes yet. A woman carrying a package stepped out of a shop down the way and walked toward us. She gave us the suspicious eye as she passed, and so Brendan said, “Pawn to king’s bishop four,” and Perry said, “Hah! Queen takes knight, check and mate,” and the woman looked surprised and impressed that the two of them were playing mental chess, which actually they were not. It’s the sort of thing they always make up when they want either to confound someone or to impress them.
“Let’s go inside,” Perry whispered. “We’ve come this far, we’ve got to see it through.”
“Can we go in?” I asked. I had no idea. Did they let children into pubs?
“Let them try to stop us,” Brendan said, getting all glary-eyed and puffed up.
I started to point out that they could stop us quite easily if they had a mind to, but Brendan pushed open the door of the pub and walked in, and so of course we followed. A bell jangled, and a woman looked up from behind a tall little table where she was reading a magazine and asked could she help us. I said the first thing that came into my head, which was that our mother and father were waiting for us, and I nodded at an arched doorway that led into a room full of tables. She nodded back at me and then looked down at what she had been reading without another word. We walked in through the arch.
The strangest thing happened to me then. I looked around the room, which was really quite nice, with a fireplace and dark wood paneling and stained glass windows and lots of old bric-a-brac, and for one strange moment I actually expected to see my mother and father. I don’t know even now whether I really remember exactly what my father looked like, except for in old photos, but I pictured them quite clearly in my mind, the two of them sitting together at a table, looking up and smiling to see that it was us who had walked in.
I don’t have to tell you how silly that was, or that something’s being silly sometimes doesn’t matter. You’re crying over something, and someone says, “Oh, don’t be silly,” and it doesn’t help at all, even if it’s right. Being silly that way isn’t a matter of wanting to. It’s something that just happens. You wish it didn’t, but it did, and that’s that. Anyway, there were two tables with people at them. At one was an oldish couple with a sleeping bulldog at their feet, and at the other was a couple holding hands across a table and sort of blinking at each other.
Perry looked at me funny when we sat down, because he could see that I was crying now, just barely, and perhaps he could figure out why, although he didn’t say anything. I wiped my eyes and looked at the bulldog, which was a great fat thing who reminded me of Hasbro. He opened his eyes just then and gave me a friendly look, and all at once I felt much better.
A girl came in through a swinging door from the kitchen and asked Perry, “What do you want, luv?” Brendan started snickering, and she smiled and winked at him, and he got embarrassed and quiet and began to study the menu very intently.
All three of us ordered a hot cocoa, although we really didn’t want anything. When she left I took a good look around. You could see the ancient wooden timbers that the walls and ceilings were built out of, with the ivory-colored plaster in between, and wooden shelves here and there with pots and glasses and figurines and books on them. The fireplace was very high and wide and with a heavy black iron bar inside, which is called a hob and is meant to hold a kettle. The hob is the thing that a hobgoblin sits on—a hobgoblin being a fireplace goblin, which there would naturally be in an old pub like the King’s Owl.
There was an interesting door in the wall near the far corner of the room—a small wooden door, but stoutly built and with a hammered copper crest on it and a great iron latch. It reminded me of the door in the boathouse at Pea
ch Manor.
“What do you make of that?” I asked, nodding surreptitiously in that direction.
“I make a door of it,” Brendan said.
“It’s small,” Perry said. “And that means it’s old. People were smaller back in the day.”
“Back in which day?” Brendan asked. “The day of the dwarf? Don’t say something stupid and try to make it sound smart.”
“It’s true anyway,” Perry said, “whether you think so or not. The average height of a man was eight inches shorter only a hundred years ago.”
“Then how come Charlemagne was eight feet tall?” Brendan asked, “and could bend three horseshoes at once? And how about Goliath and Patrick Cotter?”
“The exception proves the rule,” Perry told him, and Brendan began to say that it proved something else which wasn’t flattering to Perry, when at that moment the very door itself opened, maybe two inches, and someone peered out. It was dark behind the door, and so you couldn’t see a face, but the light from within the pub glinted off something that might have been a very large pair of spectacles, or might have been the faceplate of a seashell helmet. The door closed almost at once, but not quite all the way, then flew open an inch or so again, and then shut again hurriedly, exactly as if whoever was behind it had noticed us sitting there and done a double-take.
We sat there staring for a moment, and then I said, “Was that Reginald Peach?”
“Maybe,” Perry said.
“It was,” Brendan said. “I’m certain of it. I’m going to look.”
But Perry and I wouldn’t let him, and before he could argue with us the waitress came out with our cocoa, and we subtly plied her with questions. She revealed that the King’s Owl was very old indeed, and had been old when her grandmother was a little girl, although her grandmother was a hundred years old and still lived in Bowness. Brendan asked if her old grandmother knew Mr. Cardigan Peach, who was a personal friend of ours, and the waitress stared at him for a moment as if she were just then seeing him for the first time. Believe it or not, her grandmother had been a housekeeper at Peach Manor nearly seventy-five years ago. More to the point, she and Cardigan Peach had been sweethearts, and used to go out rowing on the lake! The waitress, whose named turned out to be Betty, short for Betina, had been out there to the manor herself a few times when she was a child. Peach Manor, she said, was a repository of secrets, many deep and very dark secrets.
Perry said that yonder door in the wall had a Peach-like look to it, and he thought there might be a secret behind it, too. And she said that there was—and more than one secret. The pub had been built by the Peach family itself, back in the old lord-of-the-manor days, long before the time of Cardigan Peach and even before the time of his grandfather, back when the cellars were used to store contraband and were the hideout of smugglers.
“Smugglers!” Brendan said. “What kind of contraband?”
“Oh, I don’t really know,” she said. “Elephant tusks, I should think, and silk and whisky and bags of gold dust and silver and like that.” Just then the bulldog people signaled to her, and she took their money and went off. The blinky couple had already gone, and except for us, the room was empty.
Brendan stood up and walked away from the table without looking back—straight to the door in the wall. He took hold of the handle, swung the door open a crack, peered in, waved for us to follow him, and then disappeared through it himself.
Chapter 18
Beyond the Secret Door
We followed him, because what else could we do? We closed the door behind us, leaving our hot cocoa untouched on the table. Betty would think we had bolted, which we had, at least for the moment.
“We didn’t pay for our cocoa,” I said when we were safely behind the door and groping along the dim passage.
“We didn’t drink it,” Brendan said.
“But we ordered it,” I told him, “and so it’s immoral not to pay, and leave a tip, too.”
Perry said that Betty wouldn’t mind our paying when we had a chance, and that we would leave her a double tip, even if we had to come back tomorrow. The walls of the hallway were built of stone, with an electric wire running down along the center of the rough wooden ceiling and a bare bulb casting a misty glow every ten feet or so. The floor stepped downward twice before it finally opened into a cellar, just as Betty had said, which was piled with wooden crates and old furniture and cleaning supplies and beer kegs and other pubbish whatnot.
At the opposite end of the room stood yet another door, which wouldn’t open. It looked almost as if someone had tried to burn through it at some long-lost time in the past, because it was charred with black soot. The rocks that framed it were blackened, too, but burned or not the door was strong and tight. We knew it had to open, though, because whoever had looked out at us only a few minutes ago must have gone through it, and if he had gone through it, so could we.
Brendan jiggled the latch and tugged on it and pushed against the door with his shoulder. It sat there solidly, making a mockery of his efforts. Perhaps it was barred from the other side, too. Perhaps Peach had gone through it and dropped the bar in place.
“Rats,” Brendan said, which is what he always says when he’s disappointed, or, I guess, when he sees rats.
There was something about the blackened stones that made me wonder. One of them had the soot or smoke or whatever rubbed off, so that there was a ring of clean stone, maybe from hands touching it. It was set to the left of the door, along the edge—that is, about halfway up from the latch. I pushed on it hopefully, but nothing happened. Brendan and Perry very quickly caught on, however, and each of them had a go at it, but with no better luck. Then Perry picked up a piece of stick that was lying nearby and gave it a good hard shove. It pushed in maybe an inch, and there was a sound like a chain running across the edge of something hard, and a scraping noise from behind the door, which swung open now, revealing still another corridor. We stepped through and the door shut by itself behind us, and the stone moved back into its place.
There was an odd gurgling sound in the air now, like bubbles rising through water, and a weedy, musty smell that reminded me of the mud and water plants along the lakeshore below Peach Manor. There was a strange hissing noise, too, and a continual sighing, like the ocean rushing up onto a beach. We followed the tunnel downward in what turned out to be the direction of the lake, although we didn’t know it at the time, and we passed another door, set into the side of the tunnel. There was night air blowing in under it, so it must have led outside. It was barred from the inside, too.
Perry lifted out the bar and laid it on the ground. “Just in case we have to leave fast,” he said.
“Or if Mr. Wattsbury needs to get in,” Brendan said, which I hadn’t thought of.
We went on, farther into the depths of the cellar, slanting downhill all the while. It seemed to me that we must be very near the lake now. The thing about being underground, though, is that you can’t know for sure, because direction doesn’t really mean anything, just like on the open ocean. The sighing noise and the bubbling grew louder and louder until we got to yet another door, although this one was standing open. Beyond it was a high, long room that held enormous aquariums framed with rusting iron and with thick glass fronts. They stood floor to ceiling and glowed with light from overhead lamps. Tangles of driftwood rose from the sandy bottoms of the tanks, and long waterweeds waved in currents created by bubbles rising through the rocks and weeds and driftwood.
There was no one in the room, just fish in the aquariums, and so we tiptoed in, watching carefully for trouble and ready to run back down the corridor to the unlocked door.Some of the fish were perfectly immense—bubble-eyed goldfish as big as grapefruit, with orange and black scales that shimmered in the yellow light, and plate-shaped silver fish like automobile hubcaps and with wide, staring eyes. There were big, slow-moving, heavy-bodied fish that half swam and half floated, and fish the size of your hand, flat like a hand, too, that drifted like brown leav
es with whirry little fins. The lamps overhead cast shifting shadows across the driftwood and waterweeds and sand so that the room was full of movement and staring eyes.
In a small room off to one side stood the aerating apparatus, a mechanical contraption that looked like something in a book by Jules Verne. There were four gigantic black rubber spheres or bladders inflated with air, being slowly smashed by heavy iron plates, one below and one above. The air was forced into hoses that snaked away into the aquariums, down through the water among the weeds and rock and driftwood, where the air was released and rose in bubbles, so that the water in the tanks was continually moving and the surface of the water was agitated.
One of the rubber bladders whooshed itself flat with a gasping sigh, and then the iron plate that had flattened it was hauled upward by a weighted rope hung from pulleys, and there was a sucking sound as air began to re-inflate the bladder, which swelled like a giant round lung until it was spherical again. Then the iron plate descended upon it once more and began to crush the air out of it—a perpetual motion of air coming in and air going out. From the look of it, it had been operating just that way for a hundred years.
We heard footfalls some distance away, and we hurriedly crossed the room and peered into a big hall-like room beyond. I thought it contained a single gigantic aquarium at first, an aquarium half as big as the room itself, but it wasn’t an aquarium. It was a window that looked out beneath the surface of the lake, and beyond it, just visible in the moonlit water, lay the submarine of Dr. Hilario Frosticos, hovering a foot or so off the weedy bottom. There was a wide, spiral staircase in the room, leading, perhaps, to a secret entrance at the surface.
In front of the window, striding back and forth, was Reginald Peach. He moved his hands in jerky little movements, and he stopped and looked at his pocket watch and then stamped his foot, like he was worried, maybe angry. Clearly Mr. Wattsbury hadn’t come, and that was ominous news, because it was time for him to be there.
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