Maggie's mouth fell open even as her eyes went wide. «You found it? You found a secret passage?»
«A rather dank and dark little bit of ingenuity, yes, built almost directly beside the chimney, so that it would be disguised from the outside of the building.»
«I want to hear everything,» Maggie said, even as she moved to the wall beside him and started knocking on it.
«Very well,» Alex said, inspecting a rather ornate sconce beside the mantel. «I discovered the vent as I followed the sound of your voices. It was located beneath a rather large wardrobe Sterling and I shifted. Ingenious invention, that vent. Inspection showed me that it is composed of a pipe that runs straight down the wall and into the side of the fire grate, not of the chimney itself, as that would be entirely too smokey. But it's not half as ingenious as the door cleverly fashioned into the wall and hidden by the wardrobe. In fact, if the wardrobe had not been there, and if I'd looked at the wall with no real interest, I wouldn't have seen the door at all.»
«But you saw the door.»
«We'll call it an opening, shall we? Not really a door. And I saw that opening mostly, I must admit, because, upon close examination, I also saw more drag marks in the dust where the wardrobe had been moved. Recently. After our discovery of Miss Pertuccelli's stopwatch, remember, we gave up searching the remainder of the room, which is my fault. From that point, it was rather elementary to find the door… the opening—»
«Call it a zebra, if you want, and it isn't your fault. We didn't know to look for a secret passage. How did it open?»
Alex was now carefully running his fingers down the side of the mantelpiece. «A small, hidden lever just at the point where—»
There was a small click .
«Yes, at just about that point on the wall. Strange that I couldn't locate it on the other side, but I'm sure I will when I look again,» Alex said as a section of wall no higher or wider than three feet opened.
«You're right. It's not really a door. More of an opening. I should have realized. Your knees are all dusty.»
«Easily remedied. There's a stone staircase leading from this floor to the attics, or from the attics to this chamber, depending on how you want to look at things. Would you like to be amused? I know I was, watching you and Perry. You were pretending to row your boats, I believe? Very inspiring.»
«You saw us?» Maggie would have been embarrassed, but she was too curious. «How did you see us?»
«Take up that flashlight and take a peek for yourself. Although I warn you, if we wondered where the bats came from, we now know, as the roof is damaged and a passage is now open to the roof.»
«There's bats in there?»
«I believe most have adjourned to the attic by now. Still wish to go exploring? Be careful not to trip over the vent pipe, as it hugs the floor just inside the opening.»
Maggie took a deep breath, let it out slowly, then dropped to her knees and crawled into the passage, holding the largest flashlight in front of her. Once inside, she got to her feet. She trained the flashlight upward and saw the narrow, steep flight of stone steps and, higher still, a small, ragged square of what might just be the first faint light of dawn. Not that this mattered, because she sure wasn't going up there. She knew her limits. «Okay, what now?»
«Now look to your left and up, Maggie,» Alex told her. «See the light?»
Maggie lowered her flashlight, at which point she saw two pinpoints of light shining into the passage. «What's that?»
«That, my dear, would be me, shining my flashlight onto the painting above the mantel. A lovely pastoral scene that quite effectively disguises the holes. Now, point your flashlight toward the floor. See the steps?»
Maggie did as he said and saw the three or four stone steps that led up to a narrow area stuck between the false wall of the room and the wall of the building. «Two peepholes,» she called out, not really anxious to climb those steps to look through them. «I could use this in one of our books. But doesn't the chimney get in the way? Don't answer. I'm coming out. This place is giving me the creeps.»
She took Alex's offered hand after crawling out of the passage and got to her feet. «Where are Sterling and Perry?»
«I sent them back downstairs. Sworn to secrecy, of course.»
«Probably a good move. And I repeat,» she said, looking at the pastoral scene above the mantelpiece, «doesn't the flue of the chimney get in the way? Why could I see into the room?»
«I didn't look too closely—all that distracting caterwauling, you understand—but I believe the chimney itself has to be slightly corrupted in order to compensate for the secret staircase. Curved, as a matter of fact, before rising straight up. A fire in this grate would be smoky and not very robust. I imagine a guest forced to stay here in the dead of winter quickly found a reason to bid his host a fond adieu and move on to another more hospitable residence.»
«I doubt Tabby and Dennis noticed,» Maggie said, brushing her hands on her slacks. «The passage goes only from here to the attics, not outside or anything? Why do you think the guy who built this wing built it?»
«I could only hazard a guess.»
«Hazard it.»
«Very well. The majority of the servant chambers are located in the other wing, with only the one room of any real size, in addition to a few smaller rooms, in the attics of this wing. If the master of the house wished to have a mistress among the serving staff, he could hardly house her with the other female servants. He could, however, give her a chamber in this wing, then visit her at night via the secret passage. Either he climbed up or she climbed down.»
«Oh, she climbed down,» Maggie interrupted. «He wasn't going to bend himself in half to go up to her.»
«You're probably right. And nobody would be the wiser. Married couples rarely shared a chamber in those days, in any case, so no one would really know if the master of the house left his chamber for this one several evenings a week.»
«No wonder, then, the passage wasn't marked on the plans. Servant quarters didn't have fireplaces in lots of the old houses. They had to take coals from the kitchen in warming pans. But maybe the guy felt his mistress should have at least some heat as she sat in her attic waiting for him to summon her. What a prince. And now that we've had all this fun, what have we proved? Proven? Whatever.»
«I would say that we have proved that Uncle Willis could, one, hear anything that was said in this room, and two, realized that he might just be able to escape via the secret passage—once he'd found it, that is.»
«Sir Rudy said he'd almost escaped. But they must have caught him before he'd recovered the jewels from wherever he'd hid them, or they would have found them on him.»
«True. And he would be watched more closely after that. I would imagine, once he'd realized the direness of his position, he went a little mad and eventually began contemplating doing away with himself.»
«Then he hanged himself, and the location of the jewels died with him.»
«My first thought, yes, until we discovered the passage. There is, after all, no record of the passage anywhere that we know of or Sir Rudy would have been overjoyed to show it to us. As a matter of fact, I think that Uncle Willis, broken and beaten in mind and spirit, as we are made to believe, actually had the last laugh.»
Maggie looked at Alex from beneath her eyelashes. «Go on.»
«Gladly. Shall we suppose that no one ever discovered how Sir Willis temporarily escaped his attic prison? Shall we suppose that his guard may have been increased, but the secret passageway was left unguarded? Shall we also suppose that, knowing he would never truly escape, or survive for very long if he did achieve freedom, Uncle Willis roamed the house at will after everyone was abed? Possibly raiding the kitchens for cherry tarts, possibly helping himself to his uncle's port and cigars? Living, as a matter of fact, quite well.»