As I came out of the bedroom Mrs. B uttered a “Toodle-oo!” and left the building. She couldn’t have made a very good job of the vacuuming—I’d been in there less than five minutes—but I watched from behind the curtains as she and Mr. Billings left in Mr. B’s van, and I let out my breath.
Back in the lounge, the first thing I noticed was the pottery cherub. My heart sank. Putting knickknacks out for her wasn’t a foolproof plan. She’d taken something other than the sacrifice offered before now, but I was starting to think there were only two places Lennie’s phone could be.
I put the cherub back in the drawer for another day, then I took the key to the mausoleum and headed out. Across the garden, through the copse, and into the graveyard. I scanned the neighboring fields for farmers or walkers. There was a tiny figure a few fields across, but it was moving away. Lucky for me it was a weekday afternoon. These fields were often crawling with ramblers on the weekend, and dogwalkers at dawn, but now it was quiet.
I spent some time standing outside the door before I could bring myself to open it: What would Lennie be like now? Would he have putrefied? It seemed soon for that. Would rats be munching on him? Possibly. Would I catch plague or something from going in there? Also possibly. Would Lennie have come back to life and be looking for revenge? This was the least likely of the scenarios, but it was the one that gave me the shivers and had me lingering out there taking deep breaths, standing up straight, and thinking of the ancestors, also interred in there, who would be wishing me well.
I wondered if I really had to do this, or if, in fact, I could just wait until James got home and point him in the right direction, but every time I was about to give up and go back to the house, I remembered the ringtone and stayed put. I took one final deep breath and inserted the key.
This time, when I opened the door, daylight lit the scene inside, enough to be able to see the coffins on shelves lining the walls, some intact, some buckling, and Lennie, slung on the floor between them. I stepped back.
I couldn’t do it.
I had to do it.
I looked again at Lennie, sprawled as we had left him. He looked somewhat less beatific now, his face had already begun to sink into itself. I stepped back…
I took a lungful of the spring air outside and I darted in. James’s phone was by Lennie’s shoulder, easy to find; I put it in my back pocket. Then I patted Lennie down, found nothing of interest, and darted back out. I began to push the door closed but stopped. I had to admit to myself that I hadn’t checked his pockets properly. And Icould not go back to the house and forget about it if I hadn’t done a thorough job.
It took a few goes. I couldn’t take a breath in that space, so I had to step outside every time I needed to inhale, but eventually I had been through all of his pockets thoroughly. No phone. What I did find was his wallet and a small address book. It seemed a bit old-fashioned, now that everything is online, but I supposed Lennie was of that generation.
I also found one of James’s business cards. He must have given it to him at the party, although it looked quite old and battered. I took it to be on the safe side, best to sever all connections. Apart from the connection that was him lying in our mausoleum. I took the address book, the wallet, and the business card, but there was no phone.
I hurried back to the house, feeling the foul air of the mausoleum clinging to me, then on to my next job: finding what Mrs. B had taken.
I went all over the living area, I searched high and low, I even searched in places I was sure Mrs. B couldn’t reach. There was nothing that wasn’t where it should be, but I was confident that she hadn’t left empty-handed. That had never happened.
In hope rather than expectation, I took a walk around the main house, praying she had spotted an antique that might look good on her mantelpiece, but there were no gaps in the arrangements, no spots missing their dust, no dark rectangles on a faded wall. Now it made sense that she had said she thought Lennie’s bag was Mr. B’s: she thought she was about to be caught taking the phone.
I went back to the bedroom and took Lennie’s bag out of the wardrobe. I would hide it where I hid my snacks.
It is a little-known fact that Langley Hall has a priest hole, arelic from the days in which to be a Catholic priest was a very daring career choice indeed. It was shown only to the summer visitors who paid for a tour and I was on one of those tours, more than thirty-five years ago now.
Normally, adventures like the Langley Hall tour would be beyond the means of my mum and me when I was growing up, but in the summer I turned eleven, she won £50 in a village sweepstake. Langley Hall was our first port of call, obsessed with it as we were.
We arrived just in time for the tour, and within minutes we were amongst a group of around ten, following an excited guide upstairs, where we saw four-poster beds in rooms with painted ceilings, a ballroom like the one Cinderella danced in, a library with more books than our mobile library had ever seen, and cases full of jewelry. Finally the guide stopped on the staircase and asked:
“Who knows what a priest hole is?”
My hand shot into the air; this had been in the book from the library. “It used to be illegal to be a Catholic and if you had a Catholic priest in your house and he was found, he would be executed. So they made hiding places for them.”
“That’s right,” the guide said—I knew it was right! “Back in the sixteenth century Catholicism was punishable by death, but people didn’t want to abandon their faith, so the priests came to their houses to say mass and they created hiding places for them, in case the authorities came. Those places were very hard to find. Can anyone see where it might be?”
We all looked around for a clue, until the guide crouched down, pressed a panel on one of the stairs, and the step, along with the step above it, lifted to reveal a hidey-hole.
“Would anyone like to get in it?” she asked, and I did not need tobe asked twice.
There was room for me, at the age of nearly eleven, to stretch out comfortably.
“But can you imagine how cramped it would be for a full-grown man?” the guide said. “And he could be in there for hours while the soldiers searched. It must have been pitch black.” She partially dropped the stair back down. “Is it dark in there?”
“A little bit,” I said. There was still a fair amount of light getting in, but I got the picture.
“He’d be able to hear the soldiers stomping up and down; he’d hear their voices. And if the householders were taken away, he could be stuck in there indefinitely. Possibly forever.”
She lost her grip on the step then and for a few seconds I had the full priest hole experience—she was right, it was pitch dark—until she managed to lift it back up and was relieved to find me smiling.
That was one of the last tours. Lord Ashbury died the following winter, Langley Hall was never reopened to the public, and its secrets faded from memory.
