Page 123 of The House of Hopes and Dreams
We were just about ready when the phone rang, and I snatched it up impatiently, to find it was Vicky.
She told me that Ella was being moved from the emergency bed to a ward in a psychiatric hospital, and gave me the name of the ward, though considering I had a bump on my forehead the size of a hen’s egg, I was hardly in the mood to send flowers.
‘Dad’s visiting her there later and I’ll probably go with him,’ she added, before asking me to tell Carey she was very sorry, though not what for.
I relayed all that to him.
‘I like her much better now she’s showing she cares for someone other than herself,’ he commented.
‘You’d better not start liking hertoomuch,’ I warned him, ‘because I know what you’re like with leggy blondes, and from now on I’m not having any of them coming within ten paces of you.’
‘Spoilsport!’
‘And now I come to think of it, I’d like to know why you were kissing Daisy at the party. I saw you, so you can’t wriggle out of it.’
‘I wasn’t kissing her, she was kissing me, and you obviously didn’t hang around long enough to see me push her away and tell her I wasn’t interested. Nelson told me I had lipstick on my face when I went back in the other room, but I thought you hadn’t noticed.’
‘With that hair, raspberry red is so not your colour,’ I told him.
‘On the other hand, jealous green suits you,’ he returned, then grabbed my hand. ‘Come on, we’d better get a shift on, because I’ve just remembered Nick and the gang are driving up today and I want to look in that secret chamber before they get here – if we can discover how to open it.’
‘The directions in the confession were clear enough: we find the top of the third linenfold panel to the right of the fireplace and then a carved boss above it.’
‘Nick’s going to love the story about finding the cavity behind the bed panel … suitably edited to protect the guilty party, of course,’ he said.
‘He’d like us to find a grisly skeleton and a bag of jewels even more,’ I pointed out, and with Fang firmly shut into the kitchen we hotfooted it to the haunted bedchamber.
It certainly haunted me more than ever now. The sounds I’d heard when I was locked in that cavity might have been the product of concussion and panic-induced imagination, but I’d never quite forget those muttering voices, the footsteps and the one, quickly cut-off scream …
After all Ella’s years of fruitless searching, it proved surprisingly easy to open the door to the staircase, though you had to press the correct side of the panel while at the same time pushing and turning one of the rose-carved bosses.
‘But it needs to be turned to the right only,’ Carey said, suiting his action to the words, and a whole section of panelling moved away, revealing the top of a stairway.
It was intact. I suppose when the panel was shut again, the top step slid back into its original position. I shuddered slightly, though that might have been the cold, dank air wafting up out of the darkness.
Carey went down first, and I gingerly followed him, loath to tread on that first step, even though he’d tested it before putting his weight on it.
But it held firm and the staircase wound tightly down through the thick walls of the old tower. The ceiling was low and Carey had to descend in a half-crouch, so that I ran into the back of him when he finally reached the bottom and immediately stopped to straighten up.
He held up the lantern and slowly turned, revealing a square room of the same size as the ones in the tower above …andthe glimmer of white bones on the stone floor, some way from the wall.
I shone my torch on it with dread, and was horrified to see not the huddle of bones I expected, but a skeleton that appeared frozen in the act of trying to crawl away.
Carey stooped over it. ‘He’s quite a distance from the opening to the shaft he fell down, so it looks like the poor devil wasn’t killed outright in the fall, doesn’t it? He’s got shattered bones, but he’s tried to pull himself towards that door over there, which must lead to the tunnel.’
I shivered again, and not just from the cold. ‘And no one came back, so he died in the dark, alone and in agony.’
‘He certainly paid for his sins. But since he’s here, then the jewels should be scattered around him somewhere. We’ll go over the floor with our torches and—’
‘Carey, look!’ I exclaimed, for as I’d turned away from the gruesome sight, my torch had revealed an ancient, dust-furred table with a not-so-ancient tin box sitting on it. Itwasold and slightly rust-spotted, but a picture of a simpering little girl holding a kitten and the word ‘Bonbons’ were much more Victorian than seventeenth century.
‘What the hell …?’ began Carey, putting down the lantern next to it and then, with some difficulty, prising off the lid. Inside was a small leather-bound book wrapped in some waterproof fabric, and pasted inside on the marbled endpapers a letter written in a familiarly bold and spiky hand. The words at the end danced before my eyes:
Jessie Kaye Revell
Mossby
1914
