Francis Coade held out his hand and said, ‘How do you do,’ in a thin, raspy voice, with an accent that sounded more Cornish than Devon. ‘I gather your priest’s hide is really quite something.’
‘Well, it’s pretty big, as priest’s holes go,’ Rob told him. ‘When you consider how long we’ve lived in this house, I really don’t know how we failed to realise it was there. But it’s disguised really cleverly. The windows on the inside are identical to the windows on the outside, so that you wouldn’t immediately guess there was another room in between them.’
He led the way upstairs. As he followed close behind him, Francis said, ‘I’ve seen many a priest’s hide around this part of the world, a dozen at least, because of course St Mary’s church was Catholic when it was built – around 1250, long before the Reformation. Most if not all of those hides were constructed by Nicholas Owen.’
‘John Kipling thinks he built this one, too. It’s so well hidden that we only found it by accident.’
‘It’s interesting that it’s so large. Nicholas Owen’s closets tended to be tiny. Stifling, some of them, so that the priests who were hiding inside them would sometimes suffocate. He made two at Stoke Climsland House and they were concealed inside the pillars in the entrance hall. There was only enough room inside each pillar for a priest to stand up straight, with his arms by his sides, and he may have had to stay shut up inside it for hours – if not days. Nothing to eat, nothing to drink, and nowhere to relieve himself.’
Rob unlocked the end bedroom and opened the door. Before he went in, Francis stared at the stained-glass window and said, ‘My God. Who has a window with the Devil in it? And his pack of Whist Hounds, too.’
‘Whist Hounds?’ Vicky asked him.
‘“Whist” means weird, or eerie,’ said Ada. ‘Anything that gives you the willies.’
‘It was the Whist Hounds that gave Conan Doyle his inspiration for that Sherlock Holmes story, The Hound of the Baskervilles,’ added Francis. ‘Old Dewer’s pack, though – they were supposed to be fifty times more ferocious than that. So the legend goes, they used to rush around the villages all about Dartmoor, sniffing out unbaptised babies, dragging them out of their cribs and tearing their lungs out so that they could never breathe a word of devotion to God.’
‘Timmy’s been christened,’ said Vicky. She realised as soon as she said it how fatuous that sounded, because the Whist Hounds weren’t real, but Rob put his arm around her shoulders and gave her a comforting hug. He understood that Timmy being baptised had given her one less threat to worry about, even if that threat was supernatural dogs.
They went into the bedroom. Francis looked around it, breathing deeply, his blind-looking eyes flicking from the ceiling to the floor to the wine table with all its cobwebby candlesticks.
‘I can distinctly smell something. Something tangy.’
‘We could, too. We reckon it smells like that aftershave, Old Spice.’
‘I can feel something, too. Some kind of atmospheric disturbance. It’s hard to put my finger on it. It’s not like the usual resonance you can feel in a house that’s supposed to be haunted.’
‘When I was in there, I was sure I could feel someone brushing past me.’
‘Hmm,’ said Francis. He looked around some more, and then he said, ‘The hide’s behind that panelling, I presume?’
‘Yes,’ said Rob, and lifted the window seat. ‘And this is how it opens.’
Francis leaned over so that he could watch Rob lifting up the crucifix. The dado creaked back, revealing the hidden room behind it. Because the sun was shining so brightly through the stained-glass windows, the horsehair floor was dappled with red and green and yellow diamond patterns.
‘That’s an ingenious bit of engineering, that,’ said Francis. ‘But I doubt if it was made by Nicholas Owen.’
‘Really? Why’s that?’
‘Nicholas Owen may well have built a priest’s hide here, but like I say, his hides tended to be tiny, and very cramped.’
He bent down under the dado rail and stuck his head into the hidden room.
‘It’s an amazing piece of trompe l’oeil, I have to admit. But apart from its size, there’s this crucifix. Nicholas Owen would never have risked installing a lever in the shape of a crucifix. Those priest hunters weren’t only searching for priests. They were searching for any kind of paraphernalia to prove that people were holding the Roman Catholic Mass illegally – such as statues of the Virgin Mary, or rosaries, or crucifixes like this one.
‘They were relentless. That’s because they were awarded a generous bounty for every priest they winkled out and every Catholic worshipper they discovered. Even a share of their property.’
He crouched down under the dado rail and entered the hidden room. Ada and Vicky and Rob followed him, although Katharine held back.
‘This is too scary for me. I’m going back downstairs. I don’t know. Perhaps Martin will come back in a minute.’
Once inside the hidden room, Francis looked around intently – up at the ceiling, down at the floor, out of the windows. He ran his fingertips all the way along the walls and then he lowered himself down on one knee and rubbed the horsehair matting between his fingers.
‘What do you think, Frankie?’ said Ada. ‘There’s some presence here, isn’t there? Or even presences, plural. I’m sure I can sense them even now. And I don’t feel as if they’re at all friendly. It’s almost like this room itself resents us being here.’
Francis stood up straight again, letting the stray horsehairs drift from between his fingertips.
‘Do any of you have a match on you?’
‘A match? No,’ said Vicky. ‘But there’s a box in the kitchen. I’ll fetch them for you.’
While they waited, Ada lifted up her shoulder bag and said, ‘This is my conjure-bag. I’ve brought two tests with me. A mirror test, and a powder test.’
‘Why don’t you try them now?’ Francis suggested. ‘I have my
