He had succeeded in gaining the lowest step of his carriage when my mother reappeared, quite out of breath, with Phebe in tow. The maid bore a tray with a freshly-opened brandy bottle, a decanter of ratafia, and three glasses; and my mother’s countenance, as she observed his lordship’s departure, was the apogee of outraged mortification.

Chapter 18

The Dead Spaces of the Earth

Tuesday, 1 November 1808

I awoke this morning with the idea of a boat in my dreams: a dory, easily manned by a single oarsman, that had borne me swiftly across Southampton Water Sunday evening, then turned back in the direction of the monks’ passage. Orlando must have left it hidden among the rocks of the shingle that night while he sat his patient vigil in the tunnel. Orlando had vanished. But what of his vessel?

Lord Harold might declare that his valet should fend for himself — he might devote his hours to composing letters of statecraft and policy, intended for the eyes of a duke — but I could not be so sanguine. I owed Orlando a debt of obligation, for having saved Martha Lloyd a most troublesome journey; and I did not like to think of him in danger and alone, as he had been so much of his difficult life.

I breakfasted early, then wrapping myself up well against a sharp wind off the water, I went in search of Mr. Hawkins.

“Strange talk there do be about the folk at Netley,” said the Bosun’s Mate darkly. “Old Ned Bastable swears as he saw balls o’ light hovering over t’a Abbey two nights since, and the cottagers of Hound will tell you, after a tankard of ale, that the mistress can fly through West Woods, and speak with animals in a strange tongue.”

“Young Flora has been spreading wild tales,” I observed.

“Mrs. Challoner turned Flora away,” Jeb Hawkins returned. “Said as she failed to give satisfaction. But Flora will tell any who listen that the lady is right strange. Says she looks through a body in a way that gives a Christian chills; and that there’s doings at the Lodge as will end in blood, one o’ these days. Is that why you and his lordship are forever going to Netley?

Keeping a weather eye on the place?”

“Mrs. Challoner is not a witch, Mr. Hawkins,” I said firmly. “It may be that she is nothing more than what she claims: a widow lately removed from the conflict in the Peninsula, and entirely without acquaintance in this part of the world. It is also possible that matters are otherwise. But you would do well to say nothing to anyone in Hound.”

The old seaman eyed me unsmilingly; he would determine his own course as ever he had done. He threw his back into the oars, and said, with seeming irrelevance, “I like the cut o’ his lordship’s jib. If he’s watching that woman, I reckon there’s cause. Are we bound for the passage? Or the landing near the Lodge?”

“The shingle,” I answered, “below the tunnel mouth.”

He lifted a hoary brow, but said no more; and the remainder of our voyage passed in silence.

The sun was weak this November morning — the Feast of All Saints. A chill breeze slapped the waves into white-curled chargers, and the Bosun’s Mate fought hard against a stiff current. I clutched at the edges of my black pelisse with mittened hands and thought of Lord Harold. Was he in Whitehall already, consulting at the Admiralty? Or had he sought his counsel in the gentlemen’s haunts of Pall Mall — in the card room at Brooks’s Club? Grouse season was at an end, but partridges were in full hue and cry: the majority of the Whig Great were still likely to be fixed in their country estates and shooting boxes. Parliament should not open until just before Christmas, when the foxes were breeding and all sport was at an end. He might find that his acquaintance — the men he most wished to secure — were thin on the ground in London at this season. He might, in sum, be delayed beyond his power—

The dory scraped across the shallows; Mr. Hawkins, without a word, jumped into the frigid sea and hauled the boat up onto the shingle. He assisted me carefully to land, and stood waiting for direction. I cast about me; to all appearances, the place was barren of life. A grouping of boulders — cast by Nature, or dragged into position by monks five centuries dead — screened the tunnel mouth from the notice of the inquisitive. I made first for these, peering behind them to ascertain that no small vessel lay upended there. Then I paced in the opposite direction, peering diligently through the waving grasses at the shingle’s edge, until the strand itself petered out to nothing. I turned back, to find Jeb Hawkins calmly lighting his pipe.

“Where’s his lordship this morning?” he asked.

“He has posted to Town.”

Mr. Hawkins glanced speculatively at the sky.

“Might you tell me what you’re looking for?”

“Lord Harold’s man, Orlan — Mr. Smythe — has disappeared. He and his dory were last seen in this place, and I thought that if I could find the boat—”

“Boats drift with the tide,” the Bosun’s Mate observed. “A boat might fetch up anywhere.”

“That is true,” I replied dispiritedly. In this chill and empty place, the idea of searching at random for the valet seemed ludicrous in the extreme.

Mr. Hawkins gestured with his pipe stem. “Could he’uv gone up into that there passage?”

A chill flickered at my spine. Naturally he could have gone into the passage; it was his express purpose in coming here, to spy upon the party we suspected of treason. But Mr. Hawkins knew nothing of that, and I did not like to adventure into the passage alone.

“Will you help me to open the hatch?” I asked faintly.

He knocked the bowl of his pipe against his boot, and let the ashes drift onto the sand.

“Gather yer skirts,” he told me, “and I’ll give ye a hoist.”

Mr. Hawkins, being a wise seaman, kept a bundle of tapers in his boat. Though the daylight was now broad, the tunnel was darkest pitch; and so he fetched me several of the paper twists, and lit the first with his own flint.

Then he lit another, and said: “Shall you lead the way, miss? Or shall I?”

I was too relieved at the notion of company, for the demurrals of pride. “If you do not dislike it—”

He merely grunted, and stepped forward with bent back. I gratefully followed.

The tunnel floor was much scuffed, as though an army had passed through; and I found this surprising, for Orlando was a stealthy creature and a careful one. Mr. Hawkins, never having seen the interior of the passage, could not be expected to comment. The way steadily ascended, and darkness filled in the gap behind; it was as though the tunnel mouth was closed to us, and no return should ever be possible. But I said nothing of this desperate fancy to my companion. He should have hawked and spit his disdain at my feet.

“There’s a branching in the way just ahead,” he muttered. Even Mr. Hawkins had enough respect for the dead spaces of the earth to speak soft and low.

“Left, or right?”

He swung round as he said this, and the light of his taper moved in a golden arc beyond his head. In that instant, I saw — I knew not what: a figure tall, motionless, watchful as Death. The tunnel wall was at its back, and pressed against it thus, the spectre might have avoided detection. But now I had espied it: and before I could so much as cry aloud, the figure hurtled past the Bosun’s Mate, its right hand making a vicious strike for the taper. The fragile thing spun out of Mr. Hawkins’s grasp and sputtered on the tunnel floor. In the swift current of air occasioned by the figure’s flight, my own flame flickered and went out. I felt his movement — the breeze of hurried passage — and heard the panic tearing at his lungs. As the figure darted past me, I clutched at the air — and closed on the stuff of a cloak.