Was that where the menace hid? Were we being spied upon by some long-dead entity or something-someone- wickedly alive? The door appeared to be cracked open, and I braced myself to creep across the floorboards to take a look. Anything was better than this quivering uncertainty. But at that moment, Betty exclaimed that she had found it.
“This is the fifth panel, and here’s the third rose on the right. I’m turning it clockwise as instructed. Oh, my God! Look!” At her touch, a rectangle of wainscoting swung open to reveal a shadowy void within.
“Why didn’t we think to bring a torch?” I bemoaned.
“We’ll have to feel our way around.” Betty stepped heroically inside.
“Smells musty,” said Mrs. Malloy, teetering after her, “but not unbearable, the way you’d think if there was a body.”
“He could have mummified.” I brought up the rear. “This is like being in a lift. Ben would have the most awful claustrophobia even with the door open.” It was the wrong thing to have said. I had just finished squeezing my elbow into Mrs. M’s middle when, as if in response to “Close sesame,” we heard a creak, followed by a groan, and found ourselves swaddled in utter darkness.
“Nobody panic!” The words squeezed their way out of my throat. “It must have swung to, but it won’t have shut completely. No door could possibly be that wicked.”
Apparently this one was. No amount of pushing, shoving, frantic banging, or nasty name-calling would persuade it to relent.
13
Mrs. Malloy, Betty, and I took turns exhausting ourselves, despite knowing it was absolutely the worst thing we could do, given that air was severely rationed. A national shortage, I supposed. I forgot about Mr. Gallagher. Indeed, it seemed to me that all the memories of my life till this moment were seeping from me. I struggled to think about Ben and our children, but they were fading. I sagged against Betty, but she wasn’t there. She had crumpled to the floor. I could feel her grasping my calves, her hands clutching… then letting go. How sad for her, how anguishing for Tom that he was to lose another wife in an accident, how terrible for dear Ariel. Would she ever recover from this further devastation of her childhood? Would it be any comfort for her to know that there were now three more faces looking down at her from heaven? I tried to come up with a prayer, but all I could manage were some starts and stops of Mrs. Malloy’s poems. There was life left in her. I could feel her gyrations. A funny time to be doing her daily exercise routine, I thought with woolly affection. It was now, as the windows of my life were fogging up, that it came to me in a sort of vision why the man who handed Betty the egg and spoon had seemed familiar. He was the walker I had seen with the black-and-white sheepdog. I had a further revelation about his voice and his mismatched ears. A mosaic of scattered pieces of information floated together. I could be wrong, but I didn’t think so. How to prove it, though; that was as ever the question. And the difficulties would increase monumentally when I was dead.
“You’re not going to die.” The clouds parted as Mrs. Malloy’s voice boomed down on me from the sky. “None of us is. Now, move aside, there’s a good girl. I had a bit of a tussle getting that underwire out of me bra. But it’ll do the trick, see if it don’t. Ed the locksmith’s got nothing on me when the situation’s desperate.”
“That priest couldn’t get out, the one Lady Fiona told me suffocated in here,” I croaked, by way of encouragement.
“That’s a man for you; they don’t have our stamina. He’d probably never got locked out of the house after sneaking off at night as a teenager. Virtue isn’t its own reward; it’s a bloody handicap. Make yourself useful, Mrs. H.” She was barely panting. “See what Betty’s up to.”
“I can’t see, but I think she’s passed out on the floor.”
“I’m hurrying. There! I’m pushing the wire down a crack. It’s hit something; it must be the catch. Careful, I mustn’t lose me concentration.”
“Please don’t.”
I waited, desperately hoping to hear a productive click, but I couldn’t. Suddenly there was noise outside. Voices raised in panic, footsteps stumbling around. We were going to be rescued… if anyone out there knew how to open the panel. The fog returned, I felt my legs buckle, and then that same unearthly voice, the one that had spoken through the clouds, echoed through my head.
“That’s it! The click! The bleeding pearly gates is opening.”
Oh, dear! I thought, while falling forward. How many hours would Mrs. Malloy get in the heavenly slammer for swearing in front of St. Peter?
Obviously, there was a mistaken notion that I had led a blameless life. I was adrift in sunlight. There were no scolding voices, only one that was as gentle as a lullaby. I knew who was talking; it was Ben. How lovely of him to come after me, I reflected drowsily. But really he shouldn’t have left the children! They needed him and I was quite safe here. I opened my eyes to find myself lying on a sofa in the drawing room at Cragstone.
“Are you back, sweetheart?” Ben asked, with a catch in his voice. He was seated in a chair beside me.
“Have I been laid out?”
“You fainted.”
“How are-?”
“Tom fetched the doctor for Betty. She’s going to be fine. At the moment she’s as badly shocked as you are.”
“No, I’m not.” I sat up and kissed him absently. “What about Mrs. Malloy?”
“Right here.” She came out of nowhere to stand over me. “A rare fright you’ve given us, Mrs. H! I thought you was gone and I’d never get to tell you I broke that pink vase you searched high and low after.”
“That hideous thing?”
“The one my mother gave you?” Ben was laughing at me. I could feel the relieved exhilaration through his touch.
“The reason I kept quiet,” said Mrs. M, “is that I did it on purpose.”
“Thank you for that.” I squeezed her hand. “As well as for saving my life and Betty’s.”
“Now don’t go getting all soppy! If I hadn’t managed, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. The troops were already there.”
“What troops?”
“Tom, Ariel, myself.” Ben kissed my forehead. “Along with Mavis and Eddie.”
“Her son?”
“I’ll explain,” said Mrs. Malloy, sitting down in a chair across from us. “That’ll speed things, since it’s me that had a proper talk with Mavis. Not that I’m blaming you for being out cold for over an hour. It’s like this, Mrs. H; she’s been bringing the boy to work on the q.t., seeing as how Betty had said she couldn’t. It’s been easy for her to slip him into the house unnoticed, because she comes in her car and parks close to the passageway outside the door that’s left unlocked, there being no key. What she does is take Eddie up the back stairs to the west wing. She’s drilled it into him to keep out of sight should anyone go up there. Today, when he heard us coming, he got in that big wardrobe.”
“Go on,” I urged.
“Seems he was peeking out and saw you, me, and Betty go into the priest hole.”
“He must have been startled.”
“ ’Course he was, being only seven. Scared him, it did, when he heard us pounding on that door to try and get it open. But he kept his head on straight. Quite the little hero, our Eddie. He raced downstairs to tell his mum. Being Mavis, she didn’t waste time asking a lot of questions. She found Tom, who was with Ariel and Mr. H, and they all came up on the double.”
“That little boy deserves a medal,” I said.
“Not quite the way Mavis sees it. She says he’s a real scamp. He’d get bored playing with Mr. Gallagher’s old toys in Nanny Pierce’s room and sneak downstairs. She caught him there a few times.”
“It must have been him who took your toffees.”
