Page 82 of The Book of Lost Stories
‘No, you can’t get out of it now,’ he said, and we had another long interval before we spoke again.
‘We can have our honeymoon at Priory Chase,’ he suggested. ‘It passed out of the family a long time ago, of course, but it’s a country house hotel now.’
‘I’d like that,’ I agreed. ‘I wonder if they’d let us have a look at those cellars Alys loved.’
‘I expect so. The furthest bit is under the ruins and those are a big draw for tourists staying there.’
‘We need to go before the end of the university vacation, so Tom is here to help Unks,’ I pointed out. ‘He’s already had to fill in for me while I was writing the novel, but he’s really glad of the extra money.’
‘It should all fit in very well, because it so happens that I need to be at Priory Chase on one particular evening early next month anyway, so I can kill two birds with one stone.’
‘What on earth do you mean?’ I demanded. ‘Why do you have to be there?’
‘It’s an annual meeting and I’m taking Dad’s place. He says he’s too old now to keep jetting over every year for it,’ he said evasively. ‘The house may have passed out of the family, but there is a clause in the deeds that any owner has to allow a certain small group of people to meet there, in the furthest part of the cellars, the old crypt under the ruins.’
I gazed at him. ‘You don’t … youcan’tpossibly mean that that weird secret society, the Order Alys wrote about – not the Hellfire Club one but the other, that sounds like a weird Masonic thing, all funny handshakes, leather aprons and stuff – isstillgoing on?’
‘There aren’t any leather aprons or funny handshakes,’ he said patiently. ‘It’s just a few descendants of some old families meeting together, that’s all. There are only six of them now, since I embody two family lines in one gorgeous person.’
‘So, what’s it all about?’ I asked curiously.
‘Dad swore me to secrecy,’ he said virtuously. ‘But it’s not exactly Dan Brown exciting or anything, so you won’t be missing out on any great revelations.’
‘Not the Holy Grail, or a bit of the True Cross or the Ark?’ I asked, but he just smiled at me, infuriatingly. I could only hope he talked about it in his sleep.
‘We can have a working honeymoon the rest of the time,’ he suggested. ‘You can tidy up your novel, ready for submission and I’ll turn it into a script for a TV series. It’s episodic, so it will lend itself to that really well.’
‘Sounds good to me,’ I agreed. ‘And maybe the place will inspire some ideas for another novel, because I think Regency Gothic might be my genre.’
‘Great – I’ll be marrying a bestselling novelist.’
‘You know,’ I said, snuggling up to his shoulder, ‘my findingAlys’s diary and telling the world she was the author of the Orlando Browne books, and then our marriage, linking me to the family, seems to pull all the threads of history together in a strange way.’
‘Yes, like fitting the last pieces into a very difficult jigsaw,’ he agreed.
‘A double-sided one – and we’re about to start fitting the pieces into the new picture!’
‘You always have to have the last word,’ he said, and kissed me.
