Page 49 of A Noble Affair
“You’ll let me know how everything goes with Louis?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. They were at the bottom of the stairs. This was his chance. He had to get her to agree to come. “I hope to see you at the dancing lesson before I leave, which, I forgot to tell you, is this weekend. Saturday at two o’clock. Elizabeth is going to let all the parents know.” He faced her. “Will you come?”
Instead of answering right away, Chastity pushed the door open and walked onto the gravel path leading to the gate. She stopped short and turned. “If I can bring Thomas, I’ll come.” She held out her hand and smiled up at him.
Charles took her hand in his and held it.Success.“I’m glad. And yes, I’ll make sure there’s a comfortable place for Thomas to sit.”
He was just enjoying the feel of her hand in his when she yanked it away.
“Chastity, there you are.”
She took a step back as they both looked towards the gate. “Marc,” she said.
Charles could hear surprise—and was that displeasure?—in her voice. She unlocked the gate, allowing him to enter. “Marc, I believe you remember Charl—Docteur de Brase?” The two men nodded at each other, unsmiling.
Chastity turned to Marc. “I’m surprised to see you since you know it’s difficult to meet with anyone during work hours.” Marc glared pointedly at Charles. “Difficult to meet with anyone but the parents and students,” she amended.
“I came to see if I could take Tommy out for a short walk. I wanted to get the key.”
Charles decided it was time to leave, and time to revert to being more formal. She had called him Dr. de Brase, after all.
“Good afternoon, Mademoiselle,” he said. She gave a small wave as he hit the buzzer and pulled the unlocked gate open.
“Tommy’s with Madel. It’s better for you to call first,” Charles heard her say.
“It’s so nice out,” was the answering protest. Then he was too far to hear the rest of the conversation. He wasn’t sure he wanted to.
23
With the imminent rain, it was a good night for another attempt. For days, the moon had been bright in the cloudless sky, and although that was not what had stopped him from coming, he preferred the cover of darkness. He walked around to the back of the school, looked both ways, then climbed the chain-link fence and leaped to the other side. He hurried to the line of trees, but he was not worried. No one had seen him.
He made his way to the main building and jogged down the cement steps, which led to the basement. The lock was easy to pick, but it had been even easier to ‘borrow’ the key and make a copy of it. He slid it into the lock and turned the knob, grateful the school hadn’t installed an alarm system. There was nothing to steal, he supposed, but he also credited his luck to the centuries-old building that housed Fenley. It had been there for so many years, and the school administration had every reason to believe it would be there for many more.
Cutting through the music room, he bumped into the edge of the table, which screeched against the tiles and made his heart thud. He stopped and listened, but there were no answering footsteps coming to investigate. This tomb of a building was a dream entrance to the tunnel, and he wondered how much it had been used in its day.
He crossed the computer lab and walked down the two steps leading to the boiler room, laundry room, and old servant’s quarters that were unfit for public viewing. In the laundry room, there was an ancient stone sink at the far end, a relic from a different era. He bent down and removed the trappings beneath it that hid the tunnel. It was a simple matter of removing the frayed tarp, hooked to the underneath of the sink, and unscrewing the crumbling bolts that held the grate in place. When he crawled through the opening, he turned and propped the grate back in place. Even if someone discovered the fallen tarp, the grate afforded little view. It went a few feet before coming abruptly up to a stone wall.
He took his time. His habit was to arrive at the school around one in the morning, and finish his work by four. That way he was long gone before even the earliest caretaker arrived. He had not yet had a problem, not even a close call. With the bolts unscrewed and the gate down, he crawled through the hole over to the stone wall. He felt with his fingers along the edge of it until he heard a soft click, and he gently pushed the wall sideways so he could squeeze through. Once he was past the swiveling section of the wall, he made sure to turn it back in the unlikely event someone came into the laundry room. He had learned the hard way never to take any chances.
It was a relief to move past the section with the low ceiling and get to where he could stand and stretch. He hated being cramped in that small corridor and was glad the rest of the tunnel was not like that. He walked briskly now, no longer needing a map to find his way, despite the few tunnels that shot off from the main one. He had never bothered to see where they led, but maybe one day he would.
In a short ten minutes’ walk he was there. The tunnel crossed from the school to the château directly, avoiding the detours a pedestrian was obliged to take because of the pattern of streets. He came at last to his handiwork—the wall he had been patiently chipping away at, removing the smooth rectangular stones one by one. He didn’t dare risk making any noise, so he had to work away at the mortar by hand. Then, when he was finished with his night’s work, he couldn’t leave the stones lying in a pile, but had to put them back in place. Otherwise a draft would form in the tunnel and tip off that head butler who seemed to be aware of everything that went on in the château. Jean had done his homework, and he knew these things.
It wasEtienne who sent him on this mission, reluctant as he had been at first. The former gardener was not likely ever to leave jail with murder on his record, even if he swore he had never set eyes on the prostitute. He latched on to Jean as the only other French inmate in a New York prison. Looking back, Jean realized the friendship had been staged with a goal in mind. He should not have been surprised.
They were sitting at a picnic table surrounded by barbed wire in place of trees, and prison guards standing in towers in place of birds, when Etienne first spoke of it. “The tunnel has been in place ever since the château and residence were built, but it’s been condemned for the past couple of decades. People don’t even know it exists anymore.
“You’ll have the easiest time on the end where the school is. You can slip in and out of there easily. On the end where the château is, there’s a wall.” Etienne gestured, glancing up to see that the police officer in the tower nearest to them was smoking and not paying close attention.
“Anyway, I should’ve worked harder to break through the wall, since I had the only key to the gate, instead of relying on getting out through the door.” He scowled at the memory. “You’ll need to take it down, stone by stone, and that’s going to take some time. The good news is that it’s not visible from the cellar in the château. So your only risk is the noise. Be careful. Paltier—if he’s still alive and working there—has eyes and ears everywhere in that place.”
Etienne continued in a subdued voice. “So there’s the gate, and I already told you how to get the key. That was the one smart thing I did before leaving.” He glanced up again compulsively in a way that was sure to attract the guard’s attention, Jean thought, before continuing. “There’s a room around the corner of the gate, but you don’t need anything in there. I can only imagine it’s still boarded up since I would have heard if there had been an uproar.” Jean didn’t dare ask for clarification.
“Up until this point, you’re not visible to anyone in the château. You need to open that gate, and you need to break—” Etienne started to reach into his pocket, but the guard was staring at them, so he pulled out a cigarette from his pocket and lit it.
When the guard lost interest, he reached into his pocket again and pulled out a hand-drawn map and resumed. “This.” He pointed to the rough sketch of a room with the gate on one side and a series of alcoves on another. “This is where you need to break the wall, and this is where you access the tunnel. Here. It’s yours.” He folded the map and handed it to Jean. “They had nearly finished plastering those alcoves when I was there. I hid the painting in the middle alcove when I heard everyone coming. I assumed I’d be able to get it before morning, but the investigation started right away, and I had to leave. Everything will have been sealed by now, and they obviously didn’t think to look there for the painting or I would’ve heard.”
Jean spoke for the first time after listening to this recital. “Why didn’t you just grab the painting and run out the back door? You had such a head start.”
