Borrower of the Night - Elizabeth Peters [61]
There were only four stairs. Then the passage levelled out. I had wondered how a passage could run between the rooms of the count and countess without blocking the windows of Tony’s room. Now I understood. It was below the window level.
When I reached the end of the passage I found a variation where I had expected a repetition of the arrangement outside my own room – that is to say, steps leading up to the count’s chamber. The steps were there, but at the foot of them was a narrow opening just wide enough to admit a human body, through which the stairs went on down.
I stood on one side of the hole and meditated. I was awfully tired, and the stale air was giving me a headache. I didn’t expect to find a hiding place in these walls; they were too accessible, if not to servants, then to the innocent inhabitant of the countess’s room. Burckhardt wouldn’t hide the shrine in any place where Konstanze might have found it. So what was I after?
It was no use. Even fatigue doesn’t deaden my insatiable curiosity. With a sigh I stepped over the gap in the floor and mounted the stairs that led up.
They ended in the outlines of a door, which yielded, as mine had done, to the leverage of my handy coat hanger. It only opened an inch or so, though, and then it stuck. I put my flashlight and one eye up against the opening and saw a blank wooden surface beyond. I poked at it with my coat hanger. Nothing happened.
I knew where I was: outside Schmidt’s room. The panelling was blocking the door. There must be a way of opening the panel, but it was no use trying from this side. So I descended the stairs and instead of stepping into the passage I squeezed through the hole and followed the steps on down.
They went down for quite a distance. The walls closed in on me like the shaft of a mine. I kept feeling a weight hanging over my head – several tons of assorted walls, roofs, and floors. The air was stifling.
At the bottom of the stairs was another passage. I followed it doggedly, my flashlight trained on the floor ahead, my head pulled in like a turtle’s, to avoid the low ceiling. I went slowly because I didn’t want to fall into a hole like the one up above.
The obstruction I encountered was not a hole. At first sight it was an amorphous shape that filled the entire width of the corridor. In the dust-haunted beam of the flashlight it seemed to move. But when I advanced resolutely upon it, I realized that the illusion of movement had been caused by reflected light dancing off a metal surface. I had found Count Burckhardt’s missing armour.
Chapter Nine
THERE WAS NO ONE in the armour now. It was dismembered, helmet and greaves lying across the hollow breastplate. Behind it, the corridor ended in a wall of wood. In its surface was an ordinary door handle, made of iron, and a closed bolt. I pushed the bolt back. It moved sweetly, without the usual screech of rusted metal. When I looked at my fingertips I saw why. They were covered with a thin coating of oil.
I turned the door handle and stepped out into the Great Hall.
The western windows were dull grey squares, but the rosy light of dawn was beginning to show in the east. The room didn’t look haunted or eerie now; it was only melancholy in its faded grandeur. Pale light lay like dust on the scarred panelling; silence filled the space which had once rung with the songs of the minnesingers and the Latin of a vanished nobillty.
As I had anticipated, the door was located in the area under the stairs, where Tony had been attacked. I didn’t let the door close; I had locked my own door from the inside, so I would have to return by the secret passage.
I examined the outside of the door. There was no latch or hinge visible. The panel fitted so closely against the others that only someone who knew it was there could have found it. Finally I found a carved flower that yielded to pressure and then turned on a pivot. As it moved, so did the inner handle. I played with the flower till I was sure I knew how to operate it, and then turned reluctantly back into the hot, airless passageway.