A Brief History of Montmaray (16 page)

‘You can’t possibly agree to this,’ I said to her.

Veronica shot a glance at Rebecca and lowered her voice. ‘Sophie, you didn’t see it. The body was all ... it’s horrible. It wasn’t just self-defence. We can’t let the Germans see what he did to the body, they’ll ... You know what they’re doing in Germany to their enemies. What could they do to
us?
’

There was a sudden noise from the stairwell and then Carlos skidded into the room, followed closely by Henry. Veronica jumped to her feet.

‘What’s going on?’ said Henry, rubbing at her eyes. Carlos went over to the hearth rug and sniffed. I lunged at him and dragged him away by the scruff of his neck.

‘Nothing,’ said Veronica. ‘Just ... Rebecca thought she heard something and it scared her a bit, that’s all. Now go back to bed.’

‘Why’s the floor all wet?’ said Henry, frowning at her feet. ‘And what’s–’

‘Henry!’ shouted Veronica. ‘Go upstairs at once!’

‘Wait,’ I said. It never does any good to order Henry around, I’ve learnt
that
lesson. ‘Perhaps she can help.’

Veronica’s jaw dropped, but before she could say anything, I’d knelt down beside Henry. ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘We think the Germans may have come up here, snooping around. You know how Uncle John gets with strangers, we have to keep them away. Now, if only someone could go up to the gatehouse and keep a watch...’

‘I can!’ said Henry at once.

‘And if you see anything – they’ll probably have a torch or something – run back as quick as you can and tell Rebecca.’

‘Should I take Carlos?’ she said eagerly.

He tilted his huge head up at us. ‘Yes, he can sit at the bottom of the ladder,’ I decided. ‘Here, you can have my candle.’ I handed over the candle, bent in the middle from where I’d been clutching it, and Henry scooped up the matches from the table.

‘And if I see anything,’ she said, ‘I can give a secret signal, like a bat screech or–’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Veronica, pulling off her jersey and tugging it over Henry’s head. ‘Now go, quickly.’

‘But what are
you
going to do?’ she said.

‘Search the grounds, patrol, that sort of thing,’ I said, feeling as though I’d landed in the middle of one of her dreadful adventure books.

She nodded and then the two of them were gone.

‘Where’s Uncle John?’ I finally thought to ask.

‘In there,’ said Veronica, nodding at his room. ‘He seems to have come over all strange, Rebecca could hardly get him into bed. He’s just lying there now.’

‘Shock,’ I said knowledgeably, having first-hand experience of it now. ‘And where’s the...?’

‘In the pantry,’ said Veronica. We all winced.

‘And what, exactly, are you saying we should do with it?’ I said. It was easier to think of the body as
it,
rather than
him.
And by then, I’d begun to accept the awful truth, that hiding this was the only possible course of action.

Veronica turned away from me. ‘Well, I thought we could dig a hole in the garden or hide it in the woodshed or something,’ she said. ‘But if they search the castle – and they
will
– they’ll find it. We’ll just have to throw it off the cliff. It’s perfectly plausible that he was wandering around on the rocks in the dark, and he slipped. And the body won’t last long in the sea, they never do.’

Her voice wavered then and I was glad of that, at least. If she’d sounded cold and rational, I’m certain I would have hated her at that moment.

‘But, but what about Henry, up in the gatehouse?’ I said. ‘If she goes out onto the curtain wall, she’ll see us for sure.’

‘I didn’t mean into the Chasm,’ said Veronica. ‘It might wash up into the firewood cave if we do that. I meant around the other side. The ledge that runs below the Napoleon hole.’

I shook my head in disbelief. ‘That’s impossible!’ I said. There was – theoretically – a way down to that ledge from the castle, starting near the drawbridge, but not even Henry would have attempted that steep, narrow, slippery path at night, let alone with a heavy bundle.

‘No,’ said Veronica. ‘We can go through the tunnels.’

I stared at her, aghast.

‘One of them leads to that ledge, I’ve seen the plans,’ she said. ‘Well, a sketch, at least, from John the Third’s reign. And another tunnel heads off it. As far as I could see, it comes out in the middle of sheer escarpment, which is even better for our purposes.’

I must have turned as white as my nightgown. Veronica touched my arm.

‘I can’t do it by myself,’ she said softly. ‘And it’s probably better Rebecca stays with
him
– who knows what he might do next.’

‘The ... the tunnels under the chapel?’ I stuttered. ‘With the rats and the damp, and you don’t even know where they go ... oh, Veronica!’

I thought I’d been so brave going out through the courtyard to chase off Herr Rahn. And yet that was nothing, nothing at all compared to what she was asking now.

But even as I thought this, I knew there was no one else to help her.

‘Shoes,’ I said desperately, trying to fill my head with practical things so the terror wouldn’t overwhelm me.

Veronica frowned. She said she wasn’t sure if we should stay in our nightclothes, in case Herr Rahn came back – it would look less suspicious, we could pretend we’d been awoken again by a noise, were just having a look around. But, as I pointed out, we were going to be carrying a blood-soaked, body-shaped bundle – how could we not look suspicious? We might as well be warm and well-shod.

So I ran upstairs to grab our clothes. When I came back, Rebecca and Veronica had dragged the body as far as the Great Hall. It was long and bulky, wrapped entirely in the blanket and fastened with a bit of old rope Henry had been using for skipping. I pulled on my skirt and tied my shoelaces, trying frantically not to think about the dark spreading patch around the middle of the bundle. Then Veronica and I each lifted an end and we staggered off.

It was much, much heavier than George had been. Rebecca followed us as far as the chapel, muttering anxiously and sending wide-eyed glances over her shoulder. She had taken the man’s torch and it traced a wobbly path for us behind the altar, picking out the steps leading down to the crypt. I’d never had reason to go anywhere near it – there hadn’t been anything left of my parents to bury and my FitzOsborne grandparents had died before I’d been born – but Veronica said she’d been down there once to do rubbings of the tomb inscriptions, so she led the way, backwards. I took the torch from Rebecca, tucked it under my arm and kept my eyes on my feet as I followed, shuddering with each step.

I reached the bottom of the stairs and we set the body down. Gazing around fearfully, I saw the place wasn’t quite as horrifying as I’d imagined. The ceiling was low, but the floor was dry and smooth. Two rows of fluted pillars ran the length of the space, and between the pillars and the walls lay the stone tombs, forty or fifty of them. The nearest were carved with effigies – a crowned figure with his hands crossed over his chest, another clutching a scroll, a woman with a featureless face – but most were unadorned, inscribed with no more than a name and a date.

Veronica took the torch from me and played it over the scroll-holding figure. I edged closer and realised who it was. Why, it was Edward de Quincy FitzOsborne! I let out a breath in a near-laugh. Good old Edward! They were family, I realised, FitzOsbornes just like me – I had nothing to be afraid of, not really.

‘I wonder,’ Veronica mused aloud, setting the torch on the floor, ‘if we could...’

Then, to my horror, she curled both hands around the stone lid of the tomb and tugged.

‘What are you doing?’ I screeched. Family or not, I had no desire to see what was inside that tomb.

‘It’d save us a long trip,’ she puffed. ‘Come on, give me a hand.’

‘You can’t ... you’re not putting it in there!’ I said. ‘That’s our great-great-great-great-uncle!’

‘He’s nothing but dust by now. And he wouldn’t mind, if he knew why we were doing it.’

It was only my desire to avoid the tunnels that made me go over to help, but even with both of us pulling, the lid refused to budge. It wasn’t just the weight of the lid – it seemed to have been sealed somehow.

‘I suppose that’s one of the first places they’d look, anyway,’ said Veronica with a sigh. ‘It was worth trying, though. Well. The tunnels are supposed to be down the other end.’

We picked up the bundle again, which seemed to have grown even heavier, and stumbled on. About twenty yards on, the floor became rougher and began to slope upwards. The rows of pillars ended and several yards later, so did the crypt itself. But there was no sign of any tunnel entrance, not even one buried under rubble. I’d hoped for an archway, a lamp set into the wall, perhaps even a helpful signpost, but there was only black granite, curving overhead like a frozen wave. Veronica frowned and moved the torchlight over the rockface.

‘It’s supposed to be a square hole, large enough for a man to crouch inside,’ she said. She started to retrace her steps, shining the light into the niches I’d only just noticed, which were carved at irregular intervals into the wall. Some of them gleamed dully, the light bouncing off neat little piles of bones. I shivered as Veronica and the light grew more distant, although it wasn’t particularly cold – indeed, the air was warm and stale. ‘It has to be on this side,’ floated back Veronica’s voice. ‘Except ... oh, this is nothing but solid rock, I swear...’

I followed her, more because I wanted the light back than because I thought I’d be any help in the search. The floor smoothed out again and I read the tomb inscriptions as we paced past them. King John the Third. John the Conqueror. Benedict. King Stephen. Yet another John...

Wait a minute.

‘Veronica,’ I said. ‘Was there a King Benedict?’

‘No, of course not,’ she said, climbing on top of a tomb to shine the torch into the niche above it.

I took a deep breath. ‘Then why is there a tomb here with his name on it?’

Veronica whirled around and pointed the torch at the tomb I was indicating. ‘Of course,’ she breathed.
‘Benedict will protect the House of FitzOsborne, now and for eternity!
’

We tugged at the lid and it slid back to reveal not bones or dust or ashes, but a square of black.

‘You,’ Veronica said, beaming, ‘are a genius.’

But the warm glow of pleasure at her praise rapidly cooled. The torchlight barely made a dent in the deep darkness below the rim of the tomb. I could hear a
drip, drip
and worse, a rustling noise. Rats – no,
bats
– no, something even more repulsive...

‘I’ll go first,’ said Veronica. ‘Then push that thing down to me and you follow once I’ve pulled it out of the way.’

‘But what if the tunnel’s blocked? And then someone closes off the lid and we get stuck down there and–’

‘Listen!’ said Veronica, but my teeth were chattering so hard I could barely hear anything – not anything good, at least. ‘Put your hand down. Feel the fresh air? Smell the sea? This leads to the cliff. And think how close the chapel is to the curtain wall. Fifty yards, even less. You can walk across the courtyard in half a minute – we won’t be down there long. Look, it’s...’ She had dropped to the bottom of the hole – there seemed to be some metal rungs hammered into the walls – and was crouched down, shining her torch ahead. ‘It’s perfectly ... well, it’s a bit low but...’

If I thought any more about it, I’d never do it. I clenched my teeth, hauled the bundle of body up onto the edge of the tomb and shoved it over. Then, flinching at the thud as it hit the ground, I lowered myself down beside it.

The tunnel was, as Veronica admitted, cramped. It was also damp, icy and malodorous. The torchlight played crazily over the rough-hewn granite as we stumbled along at a crouch, scraping our elbows and knees raw. Something soft brushed against my face at one stage and I jerked my head away, smashing it into the roof of the tunnel. I felt wetness trickle down my forehead then, but I didn’t stop to wipe it away – I think I was afraid that if I halted, even for a second, I’d give in to the hysteria building up in my chest, fall down in a screaming heap and never get out of there.

Finally, after what seemed like hours, the tunnel widened and split. One fork led off at an angle; the other continued more or less in a straight line.

‘This one,’ said Veronica, nodding to the right. I didn’t argue, even though I was terrified we’d end up wandering in a never-ending circle down here. But she was right, as always – a few yards on, she came to an abrupt stop and I staggered, almost falling lengthwise over the bundle. I thrust my head forward and realised where we were.

The tunnel mouth opened halfway up the west face of the cliff on which the castle was built. I peered downwards, careful not to lean out too far. A ledge, about a yard wide, lay below us. Veronica tested it with her foot, then crawled out onto it and felt for the edge.

‘It’ll hold us,’ she said and we dragged the bundle out and laid it on the rock. I’d been so anxious about our trip through the tunnel that I’d managed to put aside the thought that we’d been dragging along with us a person, a dead one, a murdered one. Now I was forced to think about it all over again. I hadn’t liked Hans at all, but he probably had a mother, a sister, maybe even a wife or fiancée, and they would never get to visit his grave or even know how he died. It wasn’t
his
fault that he’d ended up like this. My eyes filled up with tears.

Meanwhile, Veronica was undoing the rope and unwinding the blanket.

‘What are you doing?’ I said, blinking hard.

‘We’re pretending he fell off a cliff, and he wouldn’t have done it tied up in a blanket,’ she said. ‘Now give me that torch.’

‘You’re not throwing that away!’ I yelped, snatching it back. ‘What if his body washes up without it?’

‘You said it wouldn’t! You said the sharks would eat it! Anyway, he could have dropped the torch somewhere! How are we going to get back without any light?’ My voice sounded so high that I didn’t recognise it. Veronica looked ready to slap me and it probably would have been a good idea.

‘He wore it strapped into that holder, it wouldn’t have fallen out!’ she snapped. ‘And we can’t take it back to the castle – what if they find it? How do we explain why we have it?’