Before Montpelier Plantation became a school in 1868, it was a working vegetable farm. The old wooden Homestead had been the original farmhouse since the previous century, but in 1858 Virginius Stringfellow had started to build himself an extensive plantation house two hundred yards away. He and his sons had raised the walls and the roof and had roughed out the interior just before the Civil War started, and the house had stood like a ruin until 1868, when ex-Captain Stringfellow, his men, and their families decided that if the South was going to rise again, it needed to be well educated.
The first schoolboys lived in the old brick-and-log kitchen while the unfinished Big House—now renamed Main Hall—was completed. It took five years for Captain Stringfellow, his five sons, and the schoolboys to get the place habitable, a big, square three-story box of a building with a dozen classrooms and a barracks dormitory in the attic. In 1905 the enterprising Stringfellow clan added a wing and built a modest library; in 1920 they added another wing; and in the late 1920s, just before the stock market crash of 1929, they completed a major capital campaign that raised the roof of the entire building, added another entire floor plus an attic, and modernized the plumbing, wiring, and heat. That same campaign was responsible for the building of the current library building and a mammoth gymnasium, which subsumed several of the older outbuildings on the property. (Lost to the gym were the original library and the old kitchen, the school’s first dormitory.) It was the last great triumph for Captain Stringfellow, who died riding a horse in 1930 at the age of ninety. He had been the school’s only headmaster for sixty-two years.
During the 1930s Montpelier School did little building, but it accomplished something much more important: it established a reputation. By now it had a student population of 150 boys in grades seven through twelve. Talented alumni who could not get good jobs came back to the school to teach, and before long, word spread through Virginia and the Carolinas, then later to Georgia and Tennessee, that Captain Stringfellow’s school was a good one. For years, graduates of the school had attended colleges like the University of Virginia and the University of North Carolina, but by 1940, Princeton, Williams, and Yale were attracting Montpelier alumni. In the 1940s and 1950s, the school built a series of residential houses and expanded its student population to 300. It reached its current size of 360 students and fifty faculty members in the mid-1960s. And now, with graduates enrolling in every school in the Ivy League, the Montpelier School is one of the most prestigious boarding schools in the country.
It sounded good on paper.
Clipped to the newspaper article was what looked, at first, like a large piece of scrap paper. When he looked again, Greg could see it was an old blueprint. Or rather, it was a copy of an old blueprint, with which somebody had done a lot of work. It had round, brown coffee stains around the edges, penciled computations, and all kinds of lines drawn from nearly every corner and every wall. Most of the lines were scratched out or partially erased.
The drawing itself was of two rectangular rooms, the ground floor and the basement of one building. The dimensions were 20’ x 30’. The upper floor was dominated by a gigantic fireplace along what Greg assumed was the northern wall, since it was at the top of the page, with a door on the east wall, and a total of three windows in the other two walls. Opposite the fireplace stairs led down to the clearly labeled cellar, a room with no windows and only one door.
He looked at that door in the cellar more closely. Where the hell could it be leading? It opened onto a little hallway of some sort, one that peeled off toward the left-hand corner of the page—southwest, if the top of the paper was north. But the strange thing was that the hallway seemed to just open up into the ground. Was it a larder of some sort? He turned the sheet over to look for some kind of identifying label on the plans, and what he read momentarily confused him. Someone on the back had written in pencil GYMNASIUM.
He looked back at the drawing. This couldn’t be the gym. The gym was huge. Had there been an old gym at Montpelier? Why would they have a fireplace in the gym?
Oh, yes. He had it. Why would somebody clip this drawing to that article if there weren’t a connection? What he was looking at, he realized with delight, was one of the older outbuildings absorbed by the new gymnasium.
The old caretaker’s cottage. It had to be. The dimensions were right, and the place still had a fireplace. And that hallway leading off from the cellar could be a closet, or it could be a larder.
Or it could be a tunnel. His heart went into a tap dance.
Okay, okay, now don’t panic. Think clearly.
What if it was a tunnel? What would the tunnel connect? He closed his eyes and pictured the fireplace in the lobby of the gym. It was on the south end. So if he twisted the drawing around with the fireplace on the south, then the tunnel led off across the Quad toward Stratford House.
That made no sense.
Why would the caretaker’s cottage have a tunnel at all? And why would it lead to Stratford House? The outer houses weren’t even built until twenty years after the gym got finished.
For a moment he
