That, however, was not the most interesting fact concerning its appearance.
The words ‘chamber’ and ‘pot’ were both on the library list, like ‘lamp’ and ‘shade’.
Which meant Etta was right: the list was a catalogue of some kind.
His agreement on that point was bound to make her feel happier!
‘Olive,’ he said, ‘can you ask Ugo to tell Etta to come down here? No hurry, but I think she’ll want to see this. Thanks.’
The pipes tapped and clattered as Olive did as he asked. Almanac sat on a nearby rubbish-mound to rest and think.
If the list was a catalogue, what did that mean? That someone had once thought these things precious and hidden them in rubbish where they wouldn’t be found, only for time to pass and the treasures to become a part of the rubbish themselves? He might have believed that had the list been full of the bejewelled and the gilded, but so far it was a list of ordinary things. But then why hide the catalogue?
Etta had told him that a spell needed to be written down, and that it could be hidden far from the specific effects it caused. Maybe the objects on the list would provide clues to the spell’s location.
He dug around the spot where he had found the chamber-pot to see what else he might find there, but nothing new turned up amongst the disintegrating sludge. Etta did not appear, either.
‘Did you pass on my message, Olive?’ he asked.
She tapped that she had. Still Etta did not come.
Resting on his shovel for a moment, Almanac decided that he would have to go fetch her himself. Presumably she still had the ‘irrits’ with him, as the mistress called it when she was cross with her charges, and it would take more than an imperious summons to bring her around. Being told to her face that she had been right all along would no doubt help.
When he went upstairs – passing through the kitchen, where the dishes had magically been cleaned again – and called her name at the door of the sunroom, however, she didn’t answer. Neither was she in the library.
‘I don’t understand,’ he said to no one in particular. ‘Where did she go?’
‘That I cannot tell you,’ said Ugo, ‘but she has completed her list.’
‘Ah!’ Almanac found it in the library, resting on a teetering tower of books, and eagerly absorbed its contents. ‘Yes, just as she thought. There’s “cart” and “wheel”, like she said there would be. So why didn’t she come down and tell me? I thought she’d surely want to gloat! Ugo, did she say anything to you before she left?’
‘I am afraid, my friend, that she no longer trusts me.’
‘Why not? What happened? Did she learn something from the list that … changed how she thought … about everything?’
‘I cannot say.’
The way Ugo had said ‘cannot’ twice in three sentences trumped any other suspicion in Almanac’s mind. They were in the spell’s territory now: Ugo’s tongue was magically tied.
Presumably, Etta had discovered a clue so important that she hadn’t stopped to come to the cellar and tell Almanac about it. What it was, he couldn’t guess. He could, however, assume that it was important, and she was on a mission right now. Best to leave her to it, he decided, and get on with his own task.
He glanced over the completed list again, making sure he had it memorised. Before he could put it aside, his orderly mind began to stir.
If the words found in the marked books comprised a catalogue, he wondered, what were the page numbers? A guiding instinct told him that they must be as significant as the words: he simply had to work out how.
Taking up Etta’s pencil and a blank sheet of paper, he wrote down the six words that matched items he’d found in the cellars: lamp, shade, chamber, pot, cart, wheel.
Next, he wrote their corresponding page numbers: 4, 5, 8, 9, 132, 133.
Immediately, a pattern leapt out at him. Lamp and shade, 4 and 5; chamber and pot, 8 and 9, cart and wheel, 132 and 133. Pairs of consecutive words and consecutive numbers, in the same order, even though those pages came out of different books. That was interesting.
More interesting still was the observation that words like ‘accordion’ or ‘sickle’ were on page numbers that also stood alone.
Almanac invested several minutes putting the list in numerical order. After some mistakes and crossing-outs, and then rewriting the list so it was perfectly clear, he could see how the items played out from page 4 to page 517.
The final word was ‘left’, which puzzled him until he realised that the last eight words formed a sentence, of sorts.
Right is right when no left is left.
What that meant, he had no idea.
Also, directly before this sentence-of-sorts was the word he himself had found, the one day he had spent in the library: bellows. He had found no bellows in the cellars, however.
It all meant something, but what?
So focused was he on this problem that he had quite forgotten that he was supposed to be leaving this mystery to Etta. Every bell in the house could have rung at once, and he wouldn’t have noticed.
He took his copy of the list downstairs and stared from it to the piles of rubbish and back again, asking himself what it all amounted to. Meaningless make-work or clues laid out – by Isaac the cellarmaster, he assumed – for someone to put together? He had to hope for the latter; otherwise, there was nothing to be done. But what did it mean?
A thought hit him. Maybe he was looking at it the wrong way. If the items on the list were important, that could be because of where they had come from outside the manor, rather than where they had ended up inside it. But that seemed unnecessarily obscure, even for the unknown mastermind behind this puzzle. How could Almanac possibly work out where the lampshade or cartwheel had come from?
By examining the paintings again, he thought.
But had he seen one containing an accordion? He didn’t think so …
While pursuing this thought, he stood roughly where he had uncovered the lampshade. Ten feet ahead of him and to his right was where he had left the shovel, on finding the chamber-pot. Far beyond that point lay the cartwheel.
Absently, his eyes traced the curved line connecting all three. Numbers trickled through his thoughts like stepping stones across a river: 4, 5… 8, 9… 132, 133…
‘Oh,’ he said, as everything came together brilliantly in his mind, and he knew he had the answer.
Seizing the shovel, he began to dig like a creature possessed, tossing rubbish left and right, not caring about the wheelbarrow, only about creating a narrow path. This was so much easier than reducing the total mass of rubbish on a broad front. His breathing became more rapid and the blisters on his hands threatened to sprout new blisters, but he didn’t care. He knew what to look for, and he was determined to find it.
The word ‘effigy’ was next on the list.
At last, after some tentative searching to either side of his path, which now extended twelve feet further into the cellar, the shovel thunked against something solid.
On his knees, he plunged his hands into the filth and pulled forth a wooden statue of a woman that was missing both her ears.
He grinned. Here the effigy was, in his hands. That proved he had been right to think it was significant where the objects lay now, not before. In fact, it was critical.
First had been the lampshade. Then the chamberpot. Far ahead lay the cartwheel.
The list wasn’t just a catalogue. It was a series of directions.
The list was a map.
Etta descended on the gate with a large burlap sack that clanked against her hip as she walked. It was almost too heavy for her to lift, but she gritted her teeth and pressed on. She hoped that everything she needed to open the gate was in that sack.
Her first stop after leaving Ugo had been the room upstairs where she had hidden her worldly possessions. If she was to leave the manor, she would need ordinary clothes to blend in and her mother’s hairpin to defend herself from anyone hoping to take advant
age of her. Lifting up the mattress, however, she found that they were gone. Like Almanac, she had lost everything that she’d brought to the manor, which only made her angrier – and a little frightened, too, of what life would be like when she left.
Be brave, Madame Iris had said. That was one piece of advice she could take to heart without worrying if it was intended to harm her. Be brave. She would be that, and cleverer than anyone else in the house she was determined to leave behind.
What to do next had flummoxed her for a moment, however. It was all very well to decide that she was going to leave. Working out how to do it was another matter. The locked gate lay firmly in her path, and if Silas was right, Lord Nigel wasn’t going to be sympathetic to a disgruntled chambermaid’s pleas.
Remembering Silas, she thought of the shed she and Almanac had found. The tools there would be useful for much more than gardening …
Taking herself out into the manor grounds, she had retraced their steps, losing her way only twice, and found the shed with her resolve unchecked. There, she had rummaged through shelves and under workbenches until she had collected everything that might come in handy. Finding the sturdy sack hanging by the door, she had bundled it all up and proceeded on her way.
Panting from exertion, she came to a halt at the base of the gate and dropped her burden with a grateful whoop. The gates towered over her, gleaming in the late afternoon sun, their ornate lions seeming to silently roar. The lock that secured the gate was massive and solid. Together, they looked impregnable, but she would soon see to that.
Upending the sack, she lay everything out before her. There was a screwdriver, an adjustable wrench, a hacksaw, a hammer, a file, a pair of boltcutters, a crowbar and the second shovel in case all else failed.
It seemed sensible, and reasonable, to start with the options that would do the least damage. She didn’t want anyone chasing her with a bill for repairs. Picking out the wrench and screwdriver, she decided to attack the hinges first.
The bolts were painted over, so the first thing she did to the nearest at hand was scratch away with the screwdriver until she saw iron all around. Adjusting the wrench to its widest extent, she fitted it over the massive bolt and gave it a tug. Feeling no movement, she tugged harder. And harder still. She might as well, she thought, have been trying to change her mother’s mind about being allowed to read in bed another hour, irrespective of the price of lamp oil.
Finally, she jumped in the air, gripping the wrench with both hands, and pulled with all her weight, but even the extra force of gravity couldn’t make the bolt turn.
Undaunted, she next tried picking the lock. Not that she knew how to pick a lock, precisely, but she had read about someone doing it in an adventure novel and thought it worth a try. She was owed some good luck, surely. But no matter how Etta probed with the screwdriver, she couldn’t make any part of the mechanism move.
Giving up on those particular tools, she took hold of the hammer and crowbar, and worked on trying to lever some part of the gates open, first at the join in the middle and then between two parallel bars. The gates rattled and shivered as she threw her body against the crowbar or hammered at it with all her strength, but the gates didn’t widen nearly enough for her to slip through, and none of the bars so much as shifted an inch. All she did was scratch the painted finish and startle some sheep that were wandering past outside. They scattered, baa-ing plaintively to each other in alarm.
Her next attempt involved the file, hacksaw and the boltcutters. If she couldn’t bend the bars, maybe she could cut through them. But they were as resistant to her efforts as could be. The best she managed was to snip away some gold filigree – there was no way she could make a space wide enough for her to wriggle through.
Returning to the hammer and screwdriver, she tried chiselling around the hinges, fuelled by mounting frustration, to no avail.
Finally, panting heavily, she resorted to the shovel. If she couldn’t go over, she would go under. Beneath the thin layer of gravel at the base of the gate, however, she discovered that the ground was hard as rock, and within an inch or two it actually became rock, seamless sheets of slate-like stone that barely chipped as she attacked it. Dynamite might blast through it – and if she had dynamite, digging wouldn’t be necessary. She would blow the gate to pieces with no regrets at all, and no more thoughts of repair costs.
Let Lord Nigel send her the bill, she thought, indulging that happily explosive fantasy for a moment before succumbing to despair. She was hot, dusty, and sore. Her hands in particular had suffered from the unfamiliar abuse. She hadn’t remembered the gloves Silas had mentioned until halfway through her trials, and interrupting her efforts to go and get them hadn’t seemed worthwhile. Now, she was regretting it.
What next? Returning to the manor wasn’t an option she was prepared to consider. Almanac would think Etta worse than useless for having nothing to show for her treachery than shame and embarrassment, which part of her feared might be justified. So she had to come up with another plan. Chop down one of the walnut trees in such a way that it knocked a hole through the wall? Build a giant ramp to climb up and over? Fashion a lever strong enough to pry the gates open?
Her resourceful mind turned over every possibility but always came up short. Either she lacked the resources, the strength, or the know-how. All Etta had was herself.
If only the filigree on every bar and the spikes atop the gate hadn’t been so sharp, or if she had something to wear to protect herself from the sharp edges …
Gloves, she thought in a flash of inspiration. There was a chance they would still be useful after all.
But what about the rest of her body? It was one thing to climb up the prickly filigree with gloves on, but getting over the spikes would put her at serious risk of impalement.
The sack. It was thick enough to hold all the tools without complaint. Maybe she could unstitch the seams and create a crude body-length blanket to protect her as she climbed over.
What could be easier?
She looked up at the spikes, thinking that they seemed higher and pointier than ever. ‘Easy’ would be opening the gates and walking through, but this plan would have to do instead.
Sickle, broken bicycle, pedestal, clock face.
Almanac was digging through the rubbish at a great clip now he understood the truth about it. Each item on the list took him deeper into the cellars, zig-zagging in apparently random directions. Soon he had reached the cartwheel Etta had tripped over, and from there he continued from clue to clue.
Portrait plate, telescope, candlestick, umbrella.
His back ached, his blisters’ blisters now had blisters, and he doubted he would ever smell anything other than rubbish again, but excitement drove him on. He was getting closer to something. He could sense it. Olive’s silence suggested more than disinterest. He was being watched, he knew. He could feel eyes on him from all sides.
Accordion, silver bowl, rusty sword, hat stand.
He stopped to wipe his brow and catch his wind. Behind him, by flickering candlelight, he could see that his path snaked through a section of the cellars where the ceiling was the lowest and the light seemed dimmest. If he had to guess, he would expect that patch to lie directly under the tower at the centre of the X in Etta’s map, where the cellars had been first built. The secret heart of the manor. Stormleigh.
Pulling the list out of his pocket, he scanned the objects remaining: framed print, vase, scrapbook, bellows. Just four before the cryptic final instruction: Right is right when no left is left. As yet he saw no clue as to what that final sentence might mean.
Impatient to reach the end of the list, he dug on until he had the bellows in his hands.
Now what?
Ahead of him was a wide swathe of rubbish that would take him days to clear. If he couldn’t work out what the final sentence meant, digging at random remained the only option open to him.
Right is right when no left is left.
It sounded like a r
iddle, but no amount of pondering had thus far revealed a solution. Could it be something as simple as another set of directions? ‘Right is right’ would make sense if he was making his way through the manor upstairs. Turning right would be right, as in correct, when no left turns were left, as in remained. But there were no corridors down here. No corners.
And no Etta to help him with this riddle.
Holding up his handy candelabra, whose supply of wax, he noted, was running low, he stood on a particularly large mound of rubbish and looked all around him. There was nothing unusual to be seen – just the usual half-rotted muck.
Except … something was different. From a particularly moist patch directly in front of him sprouted a stand of fine-stemmed, grey-capped mushrooms. They were tiny, the caps smaller across than the nail of his little finger, and there were just five in the clump, but he had seen nothing like them before in the cellar. There was life even down here, in this fetid, choking dump!
Not far from those five mushrooms he spotted another small patch, and then another, stretching in a line ahead of him.
Bent over like a miser looking for a dropped penny, using the shovel for balance, he followed the line until it broke into two, one leading right, the other left.
Right is right when no left is left.
At last, a straightforward solution! Here was a left turn, so that way he turned. Barely had he taken one step when a wave of disorientation crashed over him.
Almanac and the boys from his orphanage had once gone to the seaside, a treat paid for by a wealthy benefactor who had briefly wooed the mistress. Josh and the others had loved the sand and the pounding surf, but Almanac hadn’t liked it at all. The beach was hot and gritty, and while attempting to swim, he had been dumped on his head by a particularly strong wave. Sometimes, in his dreams, he relived that feeling of helplessness in the face of the ocean’s unpredictable power. For a moment, he had been a hapless speck in the grip of forces he couldn’t imagine.
He felt that same way now. The ground seemed to shift underneath him, and the roof swung about above him in a completely different direction. He dropped to one knee, disorientated, and would have fallen onto his side had his eye not caught the flame of a candle and fixed on it.
Her Perilous Mansion Page 10