Chapter Twenty-Seven

G eorge could only conclude that when Belle looked at a room, she saw it very differently than he did. She dizzied him with her suggestions for shelves, racks, and boxes. And she horrified him with the gentle suggestion that he would benefit from a different desk.

“I don’t see how that would help!” Besides, he’d been using this desk since he was a schoolboy.

“You need a desk with lots of pigeon-holes,” she insisted, “so you have places near at hand to put your papers.”

He shook his head. He did not believe any quantity of pigeon-holes would cure his disorganization. But he did not protest. He might as well let Belle rearrange the room to her heart’s content. Then he could happily clutter it up again.

In the meantime, he kept writing. He did not yet have a title for his novel, so when he referred to it, he simply called it Secrets. But he did take the important step of writing to Mr. Sherman to explain that he had abandoned Ermintrude .

“I do not think my style is best suited for a comedy of manners,” he wrote. “I am working on something more in the line of a historical romance. I understand this manuscript may not suit Peabody & Sherman. If you do not wish to see it when it is finished, simply let me know.”

He aimed to sound nonchalant, as if it did not matter in the slightest whether Mr. Sherman wanted to see Secrets . In truth, it mattered very much. George had made such rapid progress on the novel that he would likely finish in a matter of weeks. If he needed to find a different publisher, he would like to know sooner rather than later.

On a warm Monday afternoon in late August, Hastings returned from an errand in Pendleford with two letters for George. One was addressed in his father’s familiar handwriting: bold, decisive, and slightly sloppy (much like George’s handwriting, in fact). The other was written in Mr. Sherman’s neat professional hand.

George opened the letter from his publisher first. It was short, direct, and it took a weight off his mind. Mr. Sherman agreed that George’s previous novels had not done as well as he’d hoped. He would be happy to look at George’s new work whenever it was ready, as there were still many readers longing for tales of abbeys, castles, and family secrets.

So, there was a chance for his new story. That was all George needed. He felt certain that this novel would be the one to sell, the one that would make “Alec MacPherson” a name as famous as Sir Walter Scott or Horace Walpole. To be sure, he’d thought the same thing of his previous novels, but this time would be different!

The other letter took him by surprise. His father had sent two sheets of paper, crossed so as to fit as many words as possible. George had to move closer to the window to read some of the lines.

In his last letter home, George had asked his father about the objects Roman Catholics used to say Mass, particularly after the passage of the Popish Recusants Act of 1605. As he’d expected, his father had books on the subject. He sent George verbose descriptions of chalices that could be taken apart to hid from priest hunters, golden plates, and portable altars. How could an altar be portable? George shook his head and read on.

Mr. Kirkland was indeed interested in the strange hidden cellar discovered beneath the stairs. His letter went on to discuss a man named Nicholas Owen, who built priest holes until he was arrested and executed in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot. Rather more to the point, the senior Mr. Kirkland described the location and design of various priest holes.

“Some houses contained more than one hiding place,” the letter concluded. “I recommend looking carefully inside all closets and behind shelves and paneling, especially in rooms with particularly thick walls.”

George frowned over this advice. They’d already searched this house so many times! After so many years of treasure hunting, there couldn’t be anything new to be discovered at Dogwood Cottage. Except for the strange hole in the cellar, that is. If something like that could be hidden from the house’s owners for decades, who knew what else could be in the cottage?

Until now, George had dismissed all the rumors of treasure as purely legendary. After all, the same people who claimed there was treasure hidden in the kitchen at Dogwood Cottage also claimed the house was haunted. In all his visits to the cottage, George had never seen or heard anything more frightening than a branch scraping against the window or a moth fluttering above a candle flame. He’d assumed the tale of hidden treasure was just as fanciful as the story of the wailing ghost who supposedly haunted the attic.

But his father seemed to take the possibility of a second hiding place very seriously. George read over the paragraph about priest holes, then went to look for Belle. He would be guided by her reaction. If she thought it worth their while to search the house for hidden spaces one more time, he would set aside his doubts and turn priest hunter himself.

It took him awhile to find Belle, as she had chosen to work in the garden rather than in her studio today. Rather than drawing or coloring, she was working on embroidery.

“Is that another baby blanket?” How many blankets could one baby need? Caro’s new baby would be absolutely spoiled!

Belle looked up and smiled, squinting her eyes against the afternoon light. “No, this is a tablecloth for our house.” She held it up so he could see the design of roses and briars along the border. “I thought this would be good for dinner parties.”

George sat next to her on the garden bench. “Would you like to host dinner parties?” He tried to keep his voice neutral, rather than revealing how surprised he felt.

“Not exactly.” She wrinkled her brow and thought a moment. “But we could have Mr. and Mrs. Arkwright to dine. And maybe Mr. and Mrs. Cawley. But no more than that. No large parties.”

“What about the vicar and his wife?” George suggested. It couldn’t hurt to be on Mr. Richardson’s good side. The local clergy tended to have a good deal of influence in small towns.

To his surprise, Belle shook her head. “Not the Richardsons, I think. Not unless we must. I don’t think Mrs. Richardson and I see eye to eye on... things.”

Before George could ask for clarification about what “things” Belle and Mrs. Richardson disagreed on, she changed the subject. “Is that a letter from your father?” She gestured to the folded papers in his hand. “I hope nothing is wrong at Norton Combe.”

“Oh, no. He just had a lot to say about priest holes and chalices.” He did his best to briefly summarize everything his father had packed into two full pages.

“That reminds me,” Belle said. “I got a reply from Mr. Hodges yesterday, but I don’t think I ever told you about it.” When George looked at her blankly, she clarified, “He’s the pottery collector in London. I wrote to him about that pot we found below the closet.”

“Oh, the chamber pot!” George had entirely forgotten Belle’s intention to consult some with an expert on pottery. “What did Mr. What’s-his-name have to say, then?”

“Mr. Hodges ”—she emphasized the name with a glare—“agreed it was a chamber pot, but he said that without seeing it in person, he couldn’t date it. It could have been from the sixteenth or seventeenth century, or it could have been more recent.”

“Not particularly helpful,” George concluded. He supposed it had been too much to hope for that the pot could be definitively proven as a relic from the years when the penal laws were strictly applied.

Belle shrugged. “We would probably need an antiquarian to personally investigate both the cellar and the pot to determine if it really could have been a priest hole. And I doubt this discovery is important enough to bring an expert in. But it’s interesting to know that some houses had more than one priest hole. Didn’t most of the treasure hunters here look in the kitchen?”

“Yes. That’s where the treasure was supposed to be.” Though, now that he thought about it, George could not even remember who had told him that. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing Aunt Helena would have said. On the contrary, she always discouraged the children’s interest in legends about the house. He must have heard it from one of the servants.

“Could there really be a second room there?” Belle asked. “How could it possibly be hidden so well that no one found it all this time?”

George unfolded the letter in his hand. “According to my father, priest holes could be anywhere. Under stairs, like the one we found. In attics or between floors. Hidden behind paneling or shelves.”

“Shelves,” Belle mused. “There are built-in shelves in the kitchen. Did anyone ever look behind them?”

“Not that I know of,” George admitted. “But of course there were people who searched the cottage for hidden treasure long before I was born. They probably examined all the shelves.” He caught Belle’s eye and frowned. “Do you think it would be worth looking again?”

She responded with an uncharacteristically mischievous smile. “We might as well take a look at the shelves and walls again. What could it hurt?”

“If we learned anything from the Cawley boys, it’s that looking for hiding places inside walls can hurt plenty!” George retorted. He did not know how much it had cost to repair the damage the children did to the kitchen wall, but he knew it had been a royal pain to the staff.

“I promise not to break anything.” Belle folded up the tablecloth she’d been embroidering and tucked it into a large, heavy-looking basket. George took the basket out of her hands without being asked, leaving her free to carry only her sewing basket.

Their timing was all wrong, a fact George realized only after he’d already marched into the kitchen, calling a halt to all the work. He’d forgotten dinner preparations would already be underway at this hour.

“Can I help you, Mr. Kirkland?” Mrs. Hastings’s words were polite, but her stare looked downright hostile. The fact that she stood at the kitchen table, her hand deep inside a plump duck, might have accounted for her antagonism. It was clearly the wrong time to visit the kitchen.

“We wanted to take a look at the kitchen, but we can do that after dinner, right?” George caught Belle’s eye and she nodded her assent.

They backed out of the kitchen as unobtrusively as possible. As soon as the door closed behind them, Belle began to giggle. She put a hand over her mouth to stifle her laughter.

“We didn’t think that through very carefully, did we?” George said.

She wrinkled her nose. “We did not. We ought to wait until the dishes have been washed and put away before we step foot in the kitchen again.”

Unfortunately, neither of them realized just how long it took to clean up after dinner. By the time the kitchen had been put to rights, twilight had fallen. The usually bright kitchen looked surprisingly gloomy with the fire banked and the windows full of blue-gray gloaming.

“Maybe we should wait until tomorrow?” George suggested. “It’s not terribly dark yet, but it might be better to wait for the best light.”

“There’s usually a lull in the kitchen after breakfast,” Belle told him. “If we wait until then, we should be able to search the kitchen in full daylight without getting in Mrs. Hastings’s way.”

So, they once more reluctantly set aside their plan to search the kitchen. George told himself it didn’t really matter, because he was convinced they wouldn’t find anything. As Uncle William had always said, if there were treasure in the cottage, it would have been found by now! The house had withstood assaults by destructive burglars, adventurous children, and other treasure hunters. Its secrets must have all been discovered long ago.

True, no one in the Kirkland family had known about the hiding place under the stairs, but that was an out-of-the-way space, never used for anything but storage. The kitchen, on the other hand, had been in constant use for as long as the house existed. George couldn’t imagine how anything could remain hidden in such a heavily trafficked room.

Even so, he went to bed determined to search the kitchen as soon as he could do so without disturbing the kitchen staff. After a hasty breakfast of one roll and three cups of strong tea, he sat down in his study to while away the time by writing. He meant only to finish drafting the chapter he’d been working on yesterday, but once he got to the end, he let the momentum carry him into the next chapter.

George had so completely lost track of time that when Belle hesitantly rapped at the study door, he knocked over the half-empty cup of tea sitting on his desk. “Blast!” He scrambled to sop up the mess before it ruined his manuscript. At least he had a handkerchief in his pocket this time!

“George?” Belle called. “The kitchen is free if you want to explore it with me. Or should I just search on my own?”

“What?” He pulled out his pocket watch and saw, rather to his surprise, that it was already afternoon. Where had the morning gone? “Be there in a minute!” He moved the stack of paper to a safer place and took the teacup with him, thinking he might as well return it to the scullery.

By the time he deposited the cup next to the sink, Belle had already begun studying the shelves built into the interior wall opposite the cookstove and the bread oven.

“Found anything?”

“Not exactly.” She took a step closer and removed a platter from the bottom shelf. “But doesn’t it seem like these shelves should be deeper? The walls between the downstairs rooms are quite thick. There would have been much more room for storage if they’d just dug a little deeper.”

“Maybe there are support beams in the way,” George suggested, not that he knew anything about construction. But he could see what she meant. The scullery had built-in shelves, too, but those were much deeper. It was strange that this set of shelves was so shallow. It seemed especially strange once he wandered across the room to examine the shelves near the oven. They extended much further into the wall.

He returned to Belle’s side, thinking the shelves deserved a closer look. “We should probably move all this crockery out of the way before we damage it.” Mrs. Hastings would not thank them for breaking any more of the crockery.

“Yes, let’s put these things on the table.”

Belle pulled off a pair of small jars, George reached for the biggest platter, and together, they quickly cleared the shelves. After they’d removed everything, George wondered whether Mrs. Hastings would be upset if they put things back in the wrong places. But it was entirely too late to do anything about it. He hadn’t bothered to pay attention to what went where.

He turned back to the wall and ran a finger along one of the narrow wooden shelves. The entire set of shelves seemed firmly attached to the wall. If there were any secret levers or latches here, they were well hidden.

“Is the back solid? Could there be space behind that?” Belle leaned closer, crowding him.

George sidestepped to get out of her way. As he moved, his hand slid along the wooden back of the shelf unit. Very much to his surprise, he felt the surface shift. The left side of the wooden backing swung inward by half an inch. George’s eyes widened and his heart pounded more quickly as he stared at the thin, dark crack now visible between the back of the shelves and the frame.

Belle gasped. “Could that be a door? Does it open inward?” She paused for a moment, then more practically suggested, “Or maybe the back just came loose.”

“Could be a false back.” George pushed harder, and the thin black line expanded. The wooden backing swung inward, revealing a dark, empty space behind the shelves. “Well damn! There really is another priest hole!” For one bittersweet moment, he wished Aunt Helena were still alive so he could prove to her that there was truth behind the legends after all.

“I doubt there’s any treasure, though.” Belle leaned close again, peering into the darkness.

“We need a candle,” George said. What they really needed was a dark lantern, but he doubted there was one about the house. He pulled a candle off the nearest wall sconce and lit it from the still-burning cookfire.

Holding the candle up to light the empty space, he peered between the shelves. Had this space really been used to hide people? If so, how? There would be just barely enough room for a man to sit, or stand if he were short, but not to lie down. George could not imagine spending hours in such a cramped space, let alone days.

“Is there something on the floor?” Belle asked. “At the very back?”

George squatted down and extended the candle into the space as far as his arm could reach. This close, he could clearly see what had caught Belle’s attention: a small wooden chest wrapped with metal bands.

“Well, what d’you know,” he breathed. “It’s a treasure chest!”