Chapter 10
I WANTED TO enjoy the trip to Sevenoaks more than I did. Under the arcing glass and steel roof of Charing Cross Station, I once again had this bubbling wonderment of being caught in a movie. I got to ride on a
“I’m still worried he’s going to have the cops waiting for us,” Cormac said.
“Even if they are, we haven’t done anything wrong,” I said.
“Attempted fraud?” Ben said.
“So not helpful,” I muttered.
We occupied a booth, four seats around a plastic table by a large window, and watched the scenery pass by as the train clacked smoothly on its rails. I could have let the movement rock me to sleep.
“It’s all changed and yet it’s all the same,” Cormac observed softly. He leaned close to the window and stared out, studying the world.
The city gave way to suburbs, with bits of countryside scattered between them, distant green hills and stands of old trees, villages with square brick houses, tiny train stations with only a small length of platform. The stop Parker directed us to was one of these.
Parker was waiting for us by a nondescript sedan, a blue Renault. No police in sight.
“Thanks for doing this, Mr. Parker,” I said.
“Call me Nick, please. Are we ready?”
Nick drove us away from the village along a curving road lined with hedgerows. Several side roads took us past shops, gas stations, then farmhouses, then nothing but open pastures. Here was the postcard landscape I’d been looking for. Finally, we turned onto a drive marked by tall brick pillars that must have once held up gates, but the gates were gone. Past the pillars, we continued on a gravel drive for another quarter of a mile until we approached an honest-to-goodness manor house, three stories of pale stone, rows of sashed windows, peaked roofs and narrow clay chimneys reaching up, and wide steps leading to a porch with a pair of columns marking the front door. The car stopped at the base of the steps.
“It’s not Pemberley, but it serves,” Nick said, regarding the edifice with obvious fondness. We all climbed out, us three Americans gaping and Nick watching us gape.
“Amelia says that there used to be hedges and flower beds on that side of the house.” Cormac pointed to a stretch of pasture-like lawn that sloped to a border of thick trees.
“The grounds suffered some neglect between the wars. My great-great-grandfather—Amelia’s brother, I think—lost his eldest son in the First World War and never really recovered. It’s a common story, I think. In his case, he turned his attention from the property and put his time and money toward charities, causes and memorials and the like.”
“His eldest son—James? He was just an infant when I left,” Cormac murmured, then shook the spell away.
Nick pursed his lips, bemused, then continued. “We’ve kept up the tradition rather than reestablish the gardens. Especially since the boys in the family have taken to playing cricket on the lawn.”
Cormac turned a smile that wasn’t his. “The house looks just the same,” he said, studying the façade with a narrowed gaze.
“Shall we go inside?” Nick led us up the stairs and drew a ring of keys from his pocket.
This place had some similarities with Ned’s two houses. There were bookshelves; old-fashioned wallpaper, textured and covered with flowers; collections of antiques that looked rich to my eyes. The windows had long drapes on brass rings, and carved wood trim surrounded the doorways. Where Ned’s houses were opulent, this was homey, lived in. It didn’t feel like a museum, and no servants lurked nearby. A box of plastic toys, trucks and balls and things, sat in a corner of the foyer.
“The house is shut up most of the time,” Nick said, opening drapes in the front sitting room to let in light. “We spend most of the year in London. We come here on weekends and holidays.”
Cormac moved around Parker and headed unerringly to the back of the house; he didn’t have to ask or be shown where he was going. We followed, but couldn’t match his urgency.
The kitchen was a blend of antique and modern. A brick fireplace stood against one wall, but it seemed decorative, with copper pots and wrought-iron tools hanging around it. A gas stove had replaced the open flame. Cormac—Amelia—looked around for a moment, then went to a whitewashed closet, moved a wooden table, and forced open a door that had been painted over. He revealed a narrow staircase, which he climbed, again without hesitation.
I ducked in behind him. He’d taken his mini-Maglite out of his pocket and shined it ahead, to the darkness. The staircase went up two stories, the height of the house, curving around narrow landings, but the other doorways had been sealed off with squares of plywood. By the time we got to the top, this felt like a cave, smelling of dust and old wood.
The staircase ended in a smallish trapdoor set into the ceiling. Cormac shoved at this a couple of times, but it didn’t move.
“You’ll need a key,” Nick called up. Cormac flashed the light down past me; Ben and Nick had followed us up the stairs. The latter held his hand out, offering a small, ancient iron key, which I took from him and handed to Cormac. Light in one hand to guide him, he fitted the key into the lock and jiggled it. The mechanism must have been stiff beyond reason—he wrapped his whole hand around the key to get enough leverage to turn it. Finally, though, it clicked, and the attic door popped with a puff of dust.
He swung it open and went inside.
The attic was exactly how I imagined the attic in an old English manor house to be like. The slanted ceiling, bare wooden framework exposed and decorated with dust and cobwebs, forced us to stoop. All along the short walls, and in islands throughout the space, stood wooden crates, antique leather traveling trunks, abandoned pieces of furniture—small tables, worn-out chairs, cabinets, more trunks, some draped with graying, dust-covered drop cloths, some not. Also stored here were odds and ends—coat trees, some with coats on them; a stack of round hatboxes; a pair of saddles set one on top of the other; a weathered sign with a boar painted on it that might have come from a pub. Hazy light seeped in through a ventilation grating and gave off a ghostly, otherworldly gleam.
Nick was right, the family seemed to have kept everything. Surely we should have expected the house and anything inside it Amelia was looking for to be destroyed—nothing survived that long, did it? But here we were, in a country where a two-hundred-year-old building was on the young side.
We crowded into the attic, lingering by the door while Cormac went to one end and counted off boards in the framework, then stopped and counted again. Giving a curt nod, he hauled a large travel trunk, almost as big as he was, away from the wall. The thing must have been full of more artifacts, and my hands itched, wanting to dig through it. But he ignored it. Kneeling, he felt around the floorboards, searching by touch.
The heat closed in; the air was thick, ripe, and didn’t move at all. I wanted to pace, but there was no room. Claustrophobia threatened; Ben and Nick blocked the stairs. Nick was fidgeting, tapping fingers on the edge of the open trapdoor.
He whispered, “If this has been a mistake—”
A tiny click sounded, and a square of the floor—flush with the other boards and invisible—lifted out. From the cavity, Cormac drew out a polished wooden case the size of a shoebox and bound in brass, coated with a film of dust. He set it aside, put back the section of the floor, and pushed the trunk back in place. Tucking the treasure box under his arm, he returned to the trapdoor.
Nick looked wonderingly at the box. “I had no idea. No one did.”
“That was the point,” Cormac said and gestured down the stairs—he couldn’t exit until they did.
Nick guided us back to the kitchen and offered a place on a stainless steel prep table.
I imagined a situation where the box had a key that Cormac and Amelia would now have to hunt down, but it didn’t. It did have a trick to unlocking it, though, and Amelia remembered. It was a kind of puzzle box; he ran his fingers over it, sliding a brass knob at each of the corners until the latch at the front of the box clicked, and the lid
