There May Be Danger (24 page)

“Sidney, we've come to take you back to Hastry now. We must be quick. Do you think you can come with us?”

The boy only stared at her. She thought of the smiling chubby face in the photograph she had seen in the Edgware Road She would not say the child was quite unrecognisable: the width across the eyes, the proportions of nose and upper lip, were unmistakeably the same. But there was no other resemblance to that photograph in the white-faced wraith with the earth-coloured circles below the eyes, so stupefied and shrinking. Kate had sometimes pictured herself meeting Sidney Brentwood for the first time, coming to his rescue: and always, so uncalculating in the sanguine spirit, she had pictured a lively, joyous, candid boy whose friendship and trust would spring to meet her overtures.

“You don't know me yet, but you know Ronnie, don't you?”

“Ronnie,” repeated the boy hoarsely and faintly, licking his cracked lips. Yes, evidently he knew and trusted Ronnie.

“Well, Ronnie and I have come to take you home.”

Sidney had his clothes on under the blankets that lay across him. A half-burnt-down candle in a brass stick stood near his bed, and a box of matches, and also a plate on which were several apples and a half-eaten, stale-looking loaf. There was a jug of dusty water, too. Sidney was not starved, then, and he could probably walk. But when Kate told him to get up and took him encouragingly by the arm to help him, he seemed unable to rise, he whimpered that his feet hurt, and Kate, pulling the blankets away, found that his ankles were hobbled together with strong wire.

She gave one energetic curse which she hoped would find its way on to the heads of Sidney's mishandlers, and set herself to untwist one of the wire fetters, while Ronnie did his best with the other. It was a laborious job, and the impatient Kate had three broken finger-nails by the time she had loosened hers and was ready to finish Ronnie's. Kate wondered for a moment that Sidney had not managed to undo that wire himself before he became too feeble to attempt it. Then she noticed faint dark marks like old bruises on his wrists. No doubt the necessary precautions had been taken.

“Come on, son!” said Kate anxiously, for if he could not walk at all, she and Ronnie should they be intercepted, would indeed by almost hopelessly handicapped. She had had a momentary thought of leaving Sidney here while she and Ronnie went to fetch help: but she had decided that the risk for Sidney was too great. She would not let him out of her sight now till there was a fair prospect of safety for him.

He made one or two feeble steps, and would have collapsed had it not been for Kate's arm. And when Ronnie with his torch had crawled first into the aperture in the wall and had reported space for three, and Kate, subduing her galloping impatience and sense of danger, was urging Sidney to follow his friend, a sort of desperate, lost look came over the child's white face, on which even this small exertion had brought out little points of sweat, and he turned back towards his bed.

“Come, Sidney, come!”

“My net— my net—” he stammered hoarsely, and groping in his bed found and dragged out a large square-meshed net of brown silk.

“Oh, must you bring that?”

Evidently, he must. Kate rolled it up and put it under her arm; and giving Sidney gentle and unhurried directions as if he were a child of three rather than thirteen, she persuaded him to crawl after Ronnie through the hole in the wall. She followed.

The passage they found themselves in much resembled in proportions and construction the one from which they had entered the central chamber. They walked along, slowly, Ronnie ahead, and Kate supporting Sidney with an arm around his waist. But before they had gone far it became evident they were not going to have so easy a passage at this end of the tunnel. The earthen floor became rough and covered with rubble and loose broken stones, against which Sidney perpetually stumbled. And it seemed to Kate, playing her torch anxiously ahead, that the ceiling sloped lower and lower towards that uneven floor. Before long, Kate found that she could not stand upright, but must walk crouching over the thick layer of loose stones, with the sensation of the whole earth suspended over her bent head. She longed after a while, more acutely than she remembered ever longing for anything, to stand upright. She could see nothing ahead of her but Ronnie slowly and cautiously making his way along, and for all she knew this narrow tunnel might bore on for miles—to Wigmore Castle, Aberystwyth or the Garden of Eden, as Aminta had said, and she more or less on all-fours all the time!

“Can't you see anything yet, Ronnie?”

Ronnie did not answer for a moment. Kate, who had noticed that the tunnel ceiling seemed to be getting even lower, for Sidney at her side, as well as she, had to stoop now, was about to repeat the question more sharply and anxiously, when he replied in a low voice:

“Miss, I believe the tunnel's blocked.”

There was a sob of despair in his voice, and Kate acutely realised that she was not the only one of the party who felt the strain of the danger they were in. But the next moment the boy said hopefully:

“No, I reckon we can squeeze through all right!”

Kate, brought to a halt while Ronnie investigated what lay ahead of them, sat crouched against the wall beside Sidney Brentwood, She took his hand in hers, but he made no sign except a little sigh. Shining her torch down the way they had come. Kate realised that the reason this tunnel was narrowing was that it was filled with debris of stone and brick. It was not the ceiling that sloped down, but the rubble-covered floor that sloped up. The blockage ahead of them seemed to consist of a heap of stone and brick rubble and earth. Ronnie was already crawling across it, head-first, head-first, at full length; she could see the soles of his gum-boots disappearing between the blockage and the ceiling. A moment later his stooping, flushed face appeared at the opening.

“It's all right here!” he breathed joyfully. “Miss, you can stand up here! There's steps, too! I believe we can get out here!”

Kate's heart leapt. But when she tried to persuade Sidney to follow where Ronnie had gone, he became limply obstinate and despairing, shaking his head to all her coaxing.

“No. No.”

The clammy skin of his puckered forehead was wrinkled like an elderly person's. He looked as if he might faint, and Kate was in despair. She could not go through herself until Sidney was through, but to unburden herself she passed over the rubble to Ronnie the net she had been carrying under her arm.

“My net!” said Sidney faintly and despairingly.

He looked as if he were about to cry.

“Oh, Sidney, it's all right. You put your hands up there to Ronnie and he'll give you the net,” said Kate.

Sidney obeyed, and Ronnie, who had been anxiously adding his persuasions to Kate's, took his friend's hands firmly.

Kate half-lifted, half-pushed, and Ronnie, clutching his friend now under the armpits, tugged until Sidney was through, lying on a floor of broken stones and bricks, coughing and weakly shedding tears, but through.

“Gosh, Miss!” said Ronnie, stooping and looking under the ceiling-arch to where Kate crouched on the rubbly ground and prepared to follow. “Sid doesn't weigh much!”

“That's a good thing,” gasped Kate, struggling head first and at full length through the gap, to find herself lying beside Sidney on the hard, unwelcoming stones.

“That's a good thing,” said she picking herself up, her heart expanding with joy because at last she was able to stand upright, “because we may have to carry him before we've finished. I'll take your net, Sid. I'll take care of it. You hang on to me. We're nearly home now.”

Ronnie gave her an odd, intelligent look, half-hopeful, half-sceptical. Clearly he would have liked to think that her remark was addressed to him as well as to Sidney, and was true.

They were standing in a narrow circular shaft, rather like the one at Llanhalo which had led down to the passage-entrance, but half-filled in with a floor of broken stone and brick that reached up to within two feet of the arch of the entrance-way to the tunnel. A flight of narrow stone stairs, this time of spiral form, ran round the narrow well and finished some three feet above Kate's head. Above that, the shaft narrowed to little more than a chimney's size. Undoubtedly, this must be the other end of Llanhalo secret passage.

This end had been filled in with stone and debris, probably long after its time of usefulness was past, but some property-owner who did not care for mysterious secrets and relics of the dangerous past and tunnels down which people could, after all, come as well as go. Thank Heaven the debris had sunk and slipped down the sloping tunnel in the course of years and made room for passengers again, or Kate and the boys might have found themselves, after all their pains, faced with impenetrable mass of broken stone and been forced to return to the perils that awaited them at the Llanhalo end. Kate wondered if Gideon Atkins ever struggled along so far as this, whether he knew what awaited them at the top of that flight of stone steps; or whether, content with using the central chamber as a prison, he had abandoned further researches when he found the tunnel half-filled with debris, deciding that he was safe from discovery from the forgotten and deserted further end?

At the top of that flight of steps, what awaited them? The lone hillside? Or some ancient ruin whose connection with Llanhalo Abbey had been long forgotten? Probably, thought Kate, the latter; for ground level must be about three feet above her head, where the stairs ended, yet the narrow shaft of masonry continued for six feet or so above that. Utterly ignorant of where they would find themselves, they must go up and look for a way out. Well might young Ronnie have looked sceptical to hear her say “We're nearly home now!”

Once again it seemed expedient that Ronnie should go first, Sidney next, and then Kate. There was no handrail, but Ronnie did not seem to mind, gripping the rough stonework of the shaft with his left hand, and with his right assisting Sidney along behind him. At the top of the stairs, he drew Sidney up to him, and to allow Kate room to emerge upon the top stair, moved into a very narrow passage which seemed to be the only egress from the stairs. Kate, on the top stair, found herself in a narrow circular shaft of rough masonry, with little more than room for one person to stand upright, so much did the stair-shaft narrow above the stair-head. The circular shaft was broken at the stair-head by the narrow space, about eighteen inches wide, through which Ronnie and Sidney had passed. Kate followed them. They were now all three in a narrow passage, or space between two walls, not more than about eight feet long, of which one end gave on to the stair-head and the other end was blocked.

Ronnie and Kate had agreed before coming up the stairs, not to speak to one another until they had made sure of their whereabouts. But Ronnie's interrogative and amazed look, as he shone his torch up to the cobwebbed grey boards which formed the ceiling of this narrow space, down on the earthen, dusty floor and along to the end where a brick wall, roughly mortared, blocked them in, made Kate break her silence. Sidney stood between them, leaning against the wall, his eyes shut, indifferent to his surroundings, quite exhausted. Kate leaned across him and uttered intensely in Ronnie's ear:

“There
must
be a way out of this!”

“I reckon we'll have to knock the wall down,” said Ronnie, half-ironically, half-trepidantly.

They stood one at each end of the narrow place, and examined it with their torches. One wall was of rough stone, and showed no sign of having, or ever having had, an opening in it. The opposite wall was of timber and brick. The wall-plate was a great timber baulk, white with dust from ancient stone and mortar. Four heavy upright oak timbers, rough-adzed, unstained and pale in colour, supported the beam upon which the ceiling lay. The spaces between these upright timbers were filled with unplastered brick panels, dried mortar bulging between the bricks. Kate remembered what Rosaleen Morrison had told her at the Veault about the timbering of old houses. Heavy upright timbers, close together, with no cross-pieces, meant a very old building.

If there was any way out of this place, it must surely be through the timber and brick wall. But brick is an unyielding substance, and these wall-timbers showed neither crack nor hinge. Kate rapped them with her knuckles. It was like rapping the trunks of great trees.

Kate was beginning to get desperate. The thought of attempting to take Sidney back through the hazards of the underground passage appalled her. There must be a way out here! The air in this little space between two walls was none too good, and their presence seemed to have disturbed age-old dust, which was dry now in her throat and nostrils. When Sidney suddenly opened his eyes and looked at her in a lack-lustre fashion, she was alarmed at the dumb distress of his look. He sighed, and slipped down against the wall, Kate's arm supporting him, and sat on the wall-plate.

As he did so, and leant his head on his hands, Kate fancied or was it an illusion of her moving torchlight?—that the great upright timber at the back of him shifted slightly outwards at the base. Coaxing and pushing, she induced him to move a little way along the wall-plate and lean against the brick panel. As he did so, it seemed to her certain that the upright timber slipped back into position, level with the bricks.

Playing her torch over it, Kate saw now that the base of this timber was darkened and soiled and a little battered, compared with the others, as if it had frequently in its long life been kicked and pushed at. Ronnie at her side, she knelt down and pressed her weight steadily against it where it adjoined the wall-plate. It gave silently to her push, and as she relaxed pressure, slipped silently back to the vertical. Hinged, or more probably pivoted, at the top, the whole heavy timber hung from the ceiling-plate. The other two uprights were truly morticed into the wall-plate and truly supported the ceiling. This one was a false support, and formed, in fact, the hidden door of the secret place in which the three of them now stood.