‘The royal menagerie,’ explained Evett. ‘Where the King keeps his wild animals, and I am not referring to Buckingham. I mean real ones – tigers, apes and other nasty creatures. I hate them.’
Chaloner regarded him in surprise. ‘Why?’
‘Foul, stinking things, all fleas and claws.’ He jumped when something roared. ‘Have you never been? Many Londoners visit it on Saturdays, for something to do.’
Chaloner hoped Metje would not ask to be taken. He disliked places that were difficult to get out of, and the Tower’s gates, drawbridges and walls made him distinctly uncomfortable.
‘Wade works here,’ said Evett, pausing in a way that suggested he was not happy about entering it, either. ‘I do not know how I can show you around without him guessing what we are up to.’
‘Tell him I am a surveyor,’ said Chaloner, who had anticipated such an eventuality. ‘I borrowed some instruments from my landlord and know enough about the subject to fool most people.’
‘No,’ said Evett. ‘That is boring. We will say you are looking for mushrooms.’
Chaloner gaped at him. ‘In December? But if you think surveying is dull, then hopefully other people will, too – and they will leave us alone. The point is to be unobtrusive, and that will not be the case if folk think we are on a fungus foray at this time of year.’
Evett took a deep breath, as if to fortify himself, then shot through the building known as the Lion Tower, running harder still when his pounding footsteps elicited a cacophony of grunts, snorts and growls from its furred occupants. The drawbridge in the Middle Tower led to the causeway that crossed the moat, where three dead cats and a sheep floated in the poisonous waters below. Then came the Byward Tower, a gatehouse set into the massive curtain walls.
‘No weapons are allowed from here on,’ said Evett. He beamed at the soldier who came to disarm them. ‘Good morning, Sergeant Picard. We have come to look for fungus.’
Chaloner shot the captain a withering glance, but the guard just grinned. ‘You have come to the right place then, sir. There is a lot that is rotten around here.’
Evett was meticulous, and showed Chaloner all the areas he had dug with Wade and Pepys. At first, people were interested to know what sort of fungus they expected to find, keen to be told whether it represented any danger, but drifted away when Chaloner began a ponderous series of measurements that involved standing still a long time, then writing a figure in a notebook. When the last had left, he listened again to the description of the treasure’s hiding place, and agreed that there was only one serious possibility: a cellar in one of the smaller towers near the main gate. It was the only one that contained a ‘central grey stone arch with a single red brick in its middle’.
Although Evett had refilled the trenches he had excavated, his workings were still visible. He told Chaloner his pits had been waist deep, and the agent was forced to acknowledge that the treasure was unlikely to have been buried there – Barkstead had been in a hurry in his last night of office, and would not have had time to scrape out more than a foot or two, especially since the earth was hard packed and difficult to move. Chaloner stood in the undercroft and studied his surroundings carefully, while Evett sat on the stairs with Sergeant Picard, discussing the latest Court masque.
The cellar was low and dark, with cobwebs falling like curtains and a floor so ancient that centuries of filth had raised it by several feet. Chaloner’s head brushed the ceiling in places, while in others, he was obliged to drop to hands and knees. He crawled for some distance, and when he glanced back, he could see no light from the door, only a vast expanse of blackness. The air smelled foul, and at one point, he discovered a skeletal hand. He scratched a shallow hole with his dagger and reburied it, not liking to think of the poor soul who had died in such a place.
As he explored, he thought about his uncle’s treasure. The Banqueting House was a far more sensible hiding place than the vaults of the Tower, because coins under a flagstone were a lot easier to retrieve than butter barrels buried in London’s most inaccessible fortress. He recalled a story Temperance had recently told him about a Royalist who had put a hoard in his dead wife’s coffin – the fellow had been delighted when he had exhumed her to find it still there.
Water dripped, sending mournful echoes rolling through the arches, and rats lurked in the darker recesses. The cellar was otherwise as silent as the grave. He could hear nothing from outside – no traffic, horses or bells – and he realised he could no longer hear Evett and Picard, either. Then the lamp went out.
Cursing, he started back to where he thought the stairs were, but after several minutes, there was still nothing but darkness. He tried to stand, but the ceiling was so low that he could not even kneel without cracking his head, and he began to wonder whether he had been going in circles. Then he felt a breeze on his face, which encouraged him because it suggested he was near the exit. He crept along until his fingers touched something soft. At first he thought it was a rat and jerked away in revulsion, but it did not move, so he probed it more closely. It felt like hair, and he supposed someone had lost a periwig after the recent excavations. He shoved it in his pocket, and resumed crawling.
His leg was beginning to ache from the unaccustomed posture, and it protested even more when something sharp dug into his knee. Becoming annoyed, he called out to Evett, but all he could hear was his own muffled voice. He made a right-angled turn, in the hope of locating a wall, and was relieved when he bumped against one, considering a bruised skull a small price to pay for orientation. He yelled again for Evett and was astonished that what had seemed a normally sized vault when he had had a lamp had assumed monstrous proportions in the dark.
The walls were cold and slick under his hands, and the entire cellar had an ancient, disused feel to it. It occurred to him that he could be locked in it for years, and no one would ever know. Perhaps Evett had taken against him for his questions about the Brotherhood, and had decided to prevent him from asking more. Guards could be bribed to overlook the fact that the aide had arrived with a guest but had left without one, and the Tower had a history of stealthy murder. Chaloner began to feel uneasy.
He clambered to his feet and stumbled on, nose assailed by the rank, sickening smell of decaying flesh. The rats were growing bolder, and he could hear their claws on the earthen floor. He comforted himself with the knowledge that if they could get in, then he could get out, but his optimism was abruptly shattered when he trod on something soft, and his questing fingers encountered furry bodies – it was the reek of dead rodents that filled this part of the cellar and made him want to retch. He started moving again, gagging when he encountered something that squelched, then swore when he reached a dead end.
By now, he was genuinely alarmed. He called a third time for Evett, but there was no sound other than his own ragged breathing and the soft, sinister scrabbling of claws. And then he felt something that rose at an angle. The stairs! He began to climb, one hand on the wall for balance. Then he reached the door and saw a rectangle of light around it. It was closed, and he wondered whether anyone would hear when he hammered – and if they would help him if they did. He fumbled for the latch, anticipating that it would be barred from the outside. Consequently, he was startled when it opened. Light flooded into the cellar, leaving him blinking stupidly.