Hidden (Marchwood Vampire Series #1) (14 page)

In the gloom
of the cavern, he stepped over stones, rocks, dead birds, rodents
and other fragments of debris.

‘
What is it?’ he asked, holding out his lantern and looking
directly at the spot where his father pointed. An entrance way had
been carved out of the wall, but behind it sat a huge smooth slab
of rock with a small hole through the centre of it.

‘
The entrance is blocked,’ said his father. ‘Come. Help us
push.’

Alexandre set
down his lantern and they put their shoulders against the slab.

‘
This is not going to budge an inch,’ Harold declared. ‘My
guess is the others are all the same.’

Alexandre
looked around the room and saw the same thing on all four sides –
huge entrance ways blocked by slabs of stone which had been put
into place from the other side.

‘
Look,’ Alexandre pointed to a hole in the ground that he had
almost put his foot into. It was in the corner of the room and was
much smaller than the shaft they had come down, only a few inches
across. Harold poked at it with a rod, clearing any blockages. He
dropped a small stone into it and heard a skitter as it hit the
bottom a couple of seconds later.

‘
There is a lower level!’ His father could not keep the
excitement out of his voice. ‘This legend of an underground city
may indeed be based on fact.’

‘
As long as the demons are not also based on fact,’ Harold
smiled.

‘
I want to try something,’ Papa said. ‘Pass me that rope,
Alexandre.’ He took the rope and began to feed it through one of
the holes in the stone slabs. ‘It is as I thought,’ he said after a
moment. ‘This stone slab is no more than a few inches thick and the
hole goes right through to the other side.’

‘
There must be another entrance to this place nearby,’ said
Harold thoughtfully.

‘
I think you are right, my friend. Come, let us return to the
surface.’

The two
families spent the next week in an agony of frustration; they could
not budge the stone slabs no matter how hard they tried. Gunpowder
would have been the obvious choice, but Alexandre’s father said
they must try less destructive options.

Marie-Louise
drew up a plan whereby they would search the surrounding area for
another shaft. They had managed to employ only forty three men from
the outlying villages who would help them in their endeavours. It
was a simple, but monotonous job. With sharpened sticks they would
test the ground, tapping and prodding inch by inch, to try to find
another opening. Isik’s guards would also join in the search.

Victoria
reasoned that if she were to build an underground city, she might
first try to dig where water had already begun to erode the rock –
in a cave. And so the workforce split their time between prodding
the ground and hunting for caves. To ensure everybody did a
thorough job, a large bonus was offered to the person who found the
entrance.

The weather
was wet and cold and, after the initial excitement, boredom set in.
Hours turned into days and days turned into weeks.

*

Thinking. This
was something Alexandre had never really done much of back home in
Paris. There had always been too many things to do and too many
people to see. No time to reflect and ponder the universe. It was
amazing how one grew to enjoy letting one’s mind wander over the
views and the meandering, circling questions in one’s head – mainly
questions about Leonora.

At first he
had grown restless, wanting to move on to the next view and the
next thought. But then, as the days unwound he came to realise it
was entirely feasible to allow oneself the luxury of wallowing in a
single idea for as long as one could. It was liberating to realise
time was not his master anymore. No omnibus to catch, lectures to
hurry to, dinner engagements to be late for or errands to run.

Everybody
worked hard here, but clocks were not watched. Of course, Papa was
conscious of the passing of time and worried about finding another
entrance but, in the day-to-day scheme of things, life just
unfolded.

Nor did
Alexandre mind the monotony of the work, or the continuing soggy
weather. It suited his mood. He almost enjoyed his misery over
Leonora. He felt … not quite love, but almost.

He longed for
a solitary look from her, for a small morsel of affection.
Something to indicate she did not actually hate him and that there
may be a chance for reconciliation. He burnt up with images of her
long white neck, her slender arms and those pale, dark rimmed eyes
that flashed scorn whenever she happened to catch his eye. He had
never before felt so consumed with thoughts of someone else.

She worked as
hard as any man and was always the first to volunteer for an
unpleasant or dangerous task. She was so far removed from the
Parisian girls he had grown up around. A true original. What his
friends would probably class as an ‘eccentric’. She was his
beautiful eccentric. Well, not quite his, but there was still
time.

How could he
make her talk to him again? He stabbed his stick moodily into the
ground and thought hard about what he could do to win her back, but
his mind was a jumble of thoughts and feelings. He could not think
clearly. He needed a confidante, someone to talk to.

Isobel would
ordinarily have been his first choice, but she still wasn’t
speaking to him, especially now the weather was so vile and they
all had to pull their weight in the search process. As it was,
neither girl would have anything to do with him, taking great pains
to avoid being in his company. He might as well have been infected
with the plague. His back now ached from bending and he stretched
his arms above his head.

‘
Aarghh!’ he growled in frustration and the other workers
looked up at him in surprise. He jabbed the stick into the ground
again with such force it snapped in two and a splinter of wood
stuck into his finger, drawing blood.

‘
Damn it to hell!’ He threw the stick down and strode back to
the camp.

One morning,
soon after, Alexandre found himself working near his sister. He was
pleased for the chance to try to patch things up and hoped she
wouldn’t walk away.

‘
So, Belle, are you ever going to forgive your errant
brother?’

Isobel glared
at him, dropped her shoulders and rolled her eyes. ‘Oh, Alexandre,
it is such hard work being cross with you!’

‘
Then am I forgiven?’

‘
Yes. But only because it is too tiring to keep ignoring
you.’

‘
Oh, I am relieved. It has been a difficult time with both you
and Leonora against me.’

‘
Yes, what did happen with Leonora? First she disliked you,
then she really fell for you and now she seems to despise you more
than ever. She will not open up to me, even though I have tried to
prise it out of her. Why is she now so set against you? Whatever
did you say to her on the journey?’

‘
I made an error in judgement.’

‘
Errors in judgement seem to be your forté at
present.’

‘
I know.’

‘
So? What was this monumental error that sent the beautiful
Leonora running from your open arms?’

‘
I ... I told her about ... about Paris and the
ball.’

‘
Oh, Alexandre! You didn’t. You actually told her about Lily
Bouvier? Do you have soup for brains?’

‘
I know, I know. I am an imbecile.’

‘
I cannot disagree with you there, brother.’

‘
Do you have any words of advice for me? Any way in which I
can win back her heart?’

‘
Pray?’

‘
Is all hope lost then?’

‘
Let me think on it.’

After days of
drizzly damp weather, the spring sunshine had returned and it was
really rather pleasant to stroll along together with no animosity
between them. Birds chirped in the trees under a clear blue sky.
They walked in silence for a few moments along stony ground which
rose up on one side into a steep white escarpment.

‘
What is it we are actually supposed to be looking for?’
Isobel asked.

‘
Did you not listen to Papa at all?’ Alexandre asked and she
gave him a look, so he went on to explain. ‘We are to try and find
some type of entrance in the rocks. A cave or a sealed doorway.
Anything which may lead down into the cavern.’

‘
But there are rocks everywhere,’ she replied.

‘
Yes, but
caves
. We must look out for
caves
.’

‘
This is all so boring. But at least the rain has decided to
leave us alone for the time being and my hair is not frizzing to
oblivion.’

‘
So will you speak on my behalf? To Leonora, I
mean?’

‘
I will try, but she is very close-lipped about you. I have
already tried to find out what happened, but she changed the
subject and gave me a cross look.’

‘
Thank you, sister. And I am sorry you are not happy to be
here. I will try to make it more enjoyable for you.’

‘
Hmm,’ she replied, giving him a sideways glance.

*

Nothing
appeared to be yielding any results for anybody. Not with Alexandre
and Leonora, and certainly not with finding another entrance. Not
prodding the ground, nor searching in caves. It all seemed
hopeless. It was now mid May and Didier’s fears of failure
worsened.

It was Harold
who came up with another possible solution:

‘
If there is an underground city in the legend and we have
found a part of this city, then some of the legend must be based on
fact. We need to hear the whole legend from start to finish and,
somewhere in the telling, it may make mention of a location. You
never know, there may be a nugget of detail in the old stories that
will point to an entrance or give us some kind of clue.’

‘
Isik,’ Didier turned to the Turk, who was listening quietly.
‘Do you know of anyone who might know the ancient tales in their
entirety?’

‘
I will find out. But I am sure they will not wish to speak to
you about this. Do not forget, most people are praying you
do
not
find the
entrance. I doubt they will want to help.’

‘
All the same, it cannot hurt to try.’

After a few
days of asking around and greasing palms with coins and favours,
Isik was told of an old woman, said to have lived for more than a
century, who knew the legends word-for-word. She lived in a
village, a day’s journey on horseback to the north and east.

‘
Papa,’ said Alexandre. ‘I wish to travel with Isik to find
this woman.’

‘
My son, I am sorry but the answer is no. We need every pair
of hands here.’

‘
You can easily do without me here. I am making not one jot of
difference to the search.’ Alexandre was determined to persuade his
father. He had started to feel confined and frustrated, needing to
escape from the claustrophobic atmosphere of the camp where
everyone was miserable and disheartened. Even Jacques’ and
Freddie’s high spirits had been dampened of late. And seeing
Leonora’s icy features everyday was making him irritable. Maybe a
day away would give him some relief.

‘
I know you are a grown man, Alexandre and I do not want to
restrict you, but there is no way on God’s earth your mother will
let you go off into the Anatolian desert without us.’

‘
But we will be armed and away from the main routes. We will
be safe. Papa, please, I am not a child. You can persuade her
...’

‘
Enough.’ He held up his hand. ‘Let me think on
it.’

At these
words, Alexandre knew he had won. He bowed his head and left his
father alone to work on Maman who would not be at all happy with
this decision.

First thing
the following morning, Alexandre and Isik left for the old woman’s
village. As they travelled further away from the Silk Road, the
area became more heavily populated. They passed through small towns
and settlements set into towering cliffs, with hundreds of cave
dwellings and rock-cut churches. From a distance they looked like
great slabs of chalk-white honeycomb.

Pillars of
rock called fairy chimneys rose from the hillsides in between the
houses, giving a magical quality to the scenery and emerald green
grass made lush by the recent rain carpeted the lower levels.

The two
handsome men received suspicious glares as they cantered through
the settlements, but Isik reassured Alexandre it was nothing to
worry about. Travelling strangers armed to the teeth were never a
welcome sight in any peaceful village.

Alexandre had never really been given to thinking about the
greater world and where he fit into it. He usually thought about
the world and where it fit into
his
life. But travelling through the Anatolian
countryside, seeing all these people in all these villages, well
... it set him thinking about
all
the people in all the villages in all the
countries throughout the world and he thought about the
insignificance of his own petty life.

What set him
apart? What had he contributed? What difference had he made? What
had he actually put into the world? For that matter, what had he
taken out? Not a great deal, not when he thought about it.