The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (9 page)

‘How vexatious!’ she said.

Sylvia was alarmed at the thought that they might have immured themselves for life, but Bonnie whispered stoutly:

‘Never mind! The passage must come out somewhere, and if we are shut up, at least it is no worse than being shut up by Miss Slighcarp.’

They tiptoed along, through thick, shuffling dust.

The passage was exceedingly narrow, and presently led them down a flight of steep steps. It was not pitch dark; a tiny hole let in a glimmer of daylight, and, placing her eye to these holes, Bonnie was able to discover their whereabouts.

‘Now we are behind the Great Hall, I can see the coats of arms. This is the silver-gilt ante-room. Now we are looking into the armoury, those are gun-barrels. Imagine this passage having been here all this rime and my never knowing of it! Oh, how I wish Papa and Mamma were at home! What famous times we should have, jumping out and surprising them! And we should discover a whole lot of secrets by overhearing people’s private conversations.’

‘Would that be honourable?’ Sylvia doubtfully whispered.

‘Perhaps not with Papa and Mamma, but it would be quite another matter with Miss Slighcarp. I mean to listen to
her
all I can!’

They soon had an opportunity to do so, for the next peep-hole looked into the library, and when Bonnie put her eye to it she saw the governess in close consultation with Mr Grimshaw. They were at the far end of the large room, and at first out of earshot, but they soon moved nearer to the unseen watchers.

‘Poke up the fire, Josiah,’ said Miss Slighcarp, who was studying a large parchment. ‘This must be burnt at once, now that we have succeeded in finding it.’ The children heard Mr Grimshaw stirring up the logs, and realized that they must be standing beside the fireplace and that their spyhole was probably concealed in the chimneypiece. It was possible that there was another opening panel, similar to that in the schoolroom, but they were careful not to try pressing any projections, having wish to be brought suddenly face to face with their enemies.

‘Take the bellows and blow it into a blaze,’ Miss Slighcarp said. She was reading the document carefully. ‘What a good thing Sir Willoughby was careless enough to leave his will at home instead of keeping it with Mr Gripe. It has saved us a deal of trouble.’

‘Indeed, yes,’ said Mr Grimshaw comfortably. ‘And is it as you thought – does he leave everything to the child?’

‘Almost everything,’ said Miss Slighcarp. She read on with compressed lips. ‘There is a legacy of twenty thousand pounds a year to his niece, a few hundred
to
me in gratitude for my services – pah! – and some trifling bequests to servants. Mention, too, of his sister Jane, my distant cousin. Is she likely to come poking her nose and being troublesome?’

‘Not a fear of it,’ Mr Grimshaw answered. ‘I made inquiries about her when I was in London. She is extremely elderly and unworldly; moreover, she is frail and unlikely to last long. She will never interfere with our management of the estate.’

‘Excellent. I will burn this will then – there, on the fire it goes – and you must set to work at once to forge another, leaving
everything
to me. Have you practised the signature sufficiently?’

‘I could do it with my left hand,’ Mr Grimshaw said. ‘I have copied it from every document in this room.’ He drew a chair to a table at a little distance, pulled a piece of parchment towards him, and began slowly and carefully writing on it.

Miss Slighcarp, meanwhile, was tearing up and burning a great many other documents. ‘The more confusion his affairs are found to be in, the better,’ she observed. ‘It will give us the more time to make our plans.’

‘You sound very certain that he – that
the event
will take place. Suppose he should, after all, return?’

‘My dear Josiah,’ said Miss Slighcarp meaningfully, ‘the master to whom I spoke was very certain about the state of the vessel. He said she could not last another voyage. But even if that plan should miscarry, what then! Sir W. cannot be back before a year is up. We shall have ample warning of his return and can be clear away and embarked for the
colonies
before he arrives. We shall never be caught.’

‘What of the children? You will not keep them here?’

‘Not for long. They can go to Gertrude,’ said Miss Slighcarp ominously. ‘She will soon knock the nonsense out of them. Now, do not disturb me. I must master the details of this deed.’ She picked up another document and began studying it absorbedly.

The children tiptoed on.

‘Bonnie,’ said Sylvia rather fearfully after a few moments, when she judged that they were well out of earshot of the library and its inmates. ‘what did Miss Slighcarp mean when she referred to the
event
? And why was she burning my uncle’s will?’

‘I am not certain,’ confessed Bonnie, who was pale and frowning over this new evidence of Miss Slighcarp’s knavery, ‘but it is plain that she means nothing but wickedness.’

Sylvia glanced in a troubled way at her cousin. It was evident that Bonnie did not wish to pursue the matter, and they went on in silence for a while. They came to another spyhole, which looked on to a passage, and then they found themselves up against a blank wall. The secret corridor appeared to have come to a dead end.

Even Bonnie’s heart sank, for the candles were perilously low, when they heard the clink of dishes, and a familiar voice, that of James, broke into song so close beside them that they might have been touching him.

‘As I was a walking one morning for pleasure, I spied a young—’

‘Knock on the wall!’ Bonnie whispered to Sylvia, and both children began banging on the panel as hard as they could. The song broke off abruptly.

‘James! James! It’s us, in here behind the panel! Can you let us out?’

‘Laws, miss, you gave me a fright,’ James’s voice said. ‘I thought it was the hobgoblin for sure.’

They heard him fumbling on the wall, and tapped again, to show him where they were. Suddenly there came a click, and bright cold light and icy air rushed into their hiding-place.

‘I always wondered why that great knob was there on the wall,’ James said. ‘Well, laws, miss! To think of your really finding the secret passage. That’s champion, that is!’

They stepped out, and found themselves in the dairy, a brick-floored, slate-shelved room with several sinks, where some of the dish-washing was done. An outside door led from it to the stable-yard, and they could see the whiteness of the new-fallen snow.

Since this entrance, too, appeared to have no means of opening it from the inside, James arranged to leave it open, artfully moving a tall cupboard so that it partly obscured the doorway, and hanging a quantity of horse-blankets and other draperies to hide the remainder.

‘Now at least no one need get shut up inside,’ said Bonnie. ‘The bother of it is that we can do nothing of the sort in the schoolroom. It would look too queer. The person in the passage will simply have to knock on the panel until somebody in the room lets them out.’

‘But supposing it was Miss Slighcarp in the room!’

‘Goose! Of course we should have to make sure before knocking that she was not in the room. I dare say there is a spyhole.’

‘Do you go back along the passage now and look,’ suggested Sylvia, ‘and I will return to the schoolroom by the back stairs and let you out.’

This was agreed to, and Sylvia hastened away, glancing, as she passed the open door, at the stable clock to make sure that they would not be late for their meeting with Pattern. But it still lacked half an hour of five o’clock, the time appointed for the meeting.

Most unfortunately, as she neared the schoolroom door, she saw the gaunt, bony form of Miss Slighcarp approaching from the other direction, carrying in her arms a pile of linen. Sylvia was greatly alarmed when the governess swept before her into the schoolroom and deposited her burden on the table. What if Bonnie, not realizing that the governess was in the room, should have the imprudence to knock on the panel and ask to be let out of the secret passage?

‘Now, miss,’ said Miss Slighcarp coldly – since the departure of her employers she had made no slightest pretence of being pleasant to either of the two children – ‘since I am at present too busy to occupy myself with teaching you, I have brought you a task so you shan’t be idle. All these sheets and pillow-cases require mending. To work at once, please! If they are not finished by tomorrow you will come under my severe displeasure. Small stitches, mind.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ said Sylvia, trembling, trying to keep her eyes from wandering towards the fireplace.

‘I have a good mind to set that insolent child in the cupboard to this work too …’ Miss Slighcarp muttered. She moved to the cupboard door, feeling in the reticule attached to the sash of her dress. Sylvia gasped with fright. ‘How very provoking! I gave the key to James.’ Sylvia let out a long, quivering breath of relief. ‘Miss Green!’ the governess said, rapping on the door of the cupboard. ‘I trust you are repenting of your outrageous behaviour?’

There was no reply from within the cupboard.

‘Spirit not broken yet?’ Miss Slighcarp moved away from the door. ‘Well, it will be bread-and-water for you until it is. On thinking the matter over, the light in that cupboard would not be sufficient to permit her to mend the linen.’

This was no more than the truth, Sylvia reflected, for it must be pitch dark inside the cupboard.

Just as Miss Slighcarp was about to leave the schoolroom a loud, unmistakable rap sounded from inside the fireplace. Sylvia, pale with fright, sprang to the fender and began rattling the poker and tongs noisily, pretending to poke up the fire and put a few more pieces of coal on it. The governess paused suspiciously.

‘What was that noise?’

‘Noise, ma’am?’ said Sylvia innocently.

‘Something that sounded like a tap on the wall.’

‘It was this piece of coal, Miss Slighcarp, that fell into the grate.’ Sylvia spoke as loudly as she could, and rattled the fire-irons more than ever. Miss
Slighcarp
seemed convinced, and left, after a sharp glance round to make sure that James had obeyed her command to pack up all the children’s toys. Fortunately this had been done. The schoolroom and toyroom looked bleak and bare enough with all the gaily-coloured games and playthings removed, but Sylvia comforted herself by recollecting the hidden store up in the attic.

As soon as Miss Slighcarp was safely gone, Sylvia ran to the secret panel and with trembling hands pressed the carved deer’s head, praying that she had remembered the correct prong on the antlers. To her unbounded relief the stone panel slid back as before, and Bonnie, black, dusty, laughing, and triumphant, fell out into her arms.

‘Oh, is not this fun? Oh, what a narrow squeak! I had quite thought you were alone in the room, for neither of you had spoken for several moments before I tapped. Is it not provoking, there is no spyhole in this room? The first one looks out on the upstairs landing. But it is possible to hear voices from inside the passage, so long as somebody is speaking. What a mercy that you were so clever with the poker and tongs, Sylvia!’

6

AT FIVE O’CLOCK
the two children stole cautiously to the little blue powder-room, which, luckily, was in a remote wing of the great house, where Miss Slighcarp was not likely to make her way. Pattern was there already, and greeted them with tears and embraces.

‘Oh, Miss Bonnie, Miss Sylvia, my dears! What’s to become of us, that’s what I should like to know, with that wicked woman in charge of the house?’

‘
We
shall be all right,’ said Bonnie stoutly. ‘She can’t do anything very dreadful to us, but oh, Pattern, what about
you?
She will have you sent to prison if she catches you here.’

‘She won’t catch me,’ said Pattern confidently. ‘I crept in by the apple-room door when the other servants left, and I’ve fixed myself up in the little south attic on the fourth floor as snug as you please. My fine lady will never set foot up there, you may be certain. And I’ll be able to creep down from there and help you with your dressing and put you to bed and look after your things, my poor lambs! Oh that I should live to see such a wicked day!’

‘But Pattern, how will you live?’ Bonnie was beginning,
when
James came quickly and quietly into the room.

‘What a lark!’ he said. ‘The old cat nearly caught me – met me in the long gallery – and asked what I was doing. I said, going to see all the windows were shut for the night, and she said, “Yes, that’s right, we want no thieving servants creeping back under cover of dark.” Thieving! I’d like to know what she thinks she is!’

The children told him Pattern’s plan and he approved it heartily.

‘For I don’t trust Miss Slighcarp not to starve these young ones or do something underhand if we’re not there to keep an eye on them,’ he said. ‘I’ll look after their meals, Miss Pattern, if you see they’re snug and mended and cared for. But, Miss Bonnie dear, you’d best write off to your papa’s lawyer the very first thing, and tell him what’s afoot here.’

‘But I don’t know his address, James!’

‘Eh, that’s awkward,’ said James, scratching his head. ‘Who can you write to, then?’

‘How about Aunt Jane?’ Bonnie suggested to Sylvia. ‘She will surely know Mr Gripe’s address, for I have heard Papa say that Mr Gripe is in charge of her money.’

‘Ye-es,’ said Sylvia doubtfully, ‘but Aunt Jane is so old, and so
very
frail, that I am afraid the news would be a dreadful, dreadful shock to her. It might make her ill, and then she is all on her own …’

‘No, you are right,’ said Bonnie decisively. ‘It is not to be thought of. I know! We will write to Dr Morne.
He
promised that he would come from time to time, in any case, so there would be nothing odd about asking him over. And very likely he will know Mr Gripe’s direction in London.’

‘Or perhaps he can get the magistrates to commit Miss Slighcarp to prison,’ said James. ‘That is a champion notion of yours, Miss Bonnie. Do you write the letter and I will ride over with it as soon as I get a chance.’