Chapter 16

Harry had a vertiginous feeling of playing catch up. His younger sister had, in the space of five days, fallen in love and gotten herself married—and here he thought he had been going too fast with Nessa.

The reason given for the bride and groom’s nearly unseemly haste to the wedding was astonishing as well—“homicidal ghost” struck him as particularly far-fetched, though Harry himself had lived through too many close calls when nothing but sheer luck would seem to have preserved him to dismiss all assertions of otherworldliness. But it was his opinion that if there were malignant spirits at Castle Keyvnor, they more likely belonged to the living than the dead. Or to the ancient plumbing.

Whether the living were suspicious of the plumbing or not, the marriage was celebrated not in Castle Keyvnor’s ancient chapel, but in a Romany encampment on the edge of Banfield lands. It was as strange and irregular as anything Harry had ever seen—and he had been to the end of the world and back.

There was another strange and irregular thing—the absence of the groom’s grandfather, Viscount Lynwood. Adam Vail was Lynwood’s heir and the future owner of Hollybrook Park. And Black Cove. Which made the absence of his pater families notable. And problematic. And deeply, deeply curious.

As soon as the irregular celebration that made his sister the happiest of women—and his father one of the most relieved of men—reached its dancing, drinking zenith, Harry slipped away from the merrymaking and made his solitary way across the park onto Hollybrook land.

The house above the cliffs lay quiet—most of the staff were presumably helping with the wedding celebrations—but a few lamps burned inside.

Harry made a circuit of the house in the falling twilight, assessing its structure and position in the rocky landscape, in the same manner that he would have read an enemy’s strength at sea. There were no guns bristling from the windows of Hollybrook, but Harry noted the movement of light spilling through the windows onto the lawns to the library. Within, an older man—presumably the Viscount Lynwood—emerged from a door hidden in the paneling next to the chimney-piece, alone and muttering, carrying a lamp in one hand and cradling dusty bottle of brandy in the other.

The viscount was both deeply out of breath and in his cups—he spilled more illicit French brandy on the rug than into his glass. But what he did manage to pour was more than sufficient to drown his sorrows—the bottle soon fell to the floor and the old man fell to snoring into his cravat.

Harry entered through an open library window. Though stealth had never been one of his better qualities—it was an entirely useless skill aboard ship where men were quartered cheek by jowl—the viscount was too cup-shot to notice. Harry simply picked up the lamp from where it had been dropped and slipped down the darkened stairwell.

The first few flights of stairs, descending through the servants’ and cellar levels of the house, were made of wood, but soon thereafter they turned to stone, hewn out of the rock. Harry checked the compass on the head of his cane, and found it pointed southwest, toward the sea.

The steps grew narrower and steeper, until Harry lost count of the steps, and the air grew stale and musty. But the sure and steady pulse of purpose drummed through his veins, lending him enough strength that his leg very nearly ceased to pain him.

At last, a fresh breeze of salty air wafted up the tight staircase and he finally came out into a high, naturally vaulted cavern. A dry rock floor sloped down to sand nearer to the cave’s entrance to the southwest. Harry checked his timepiece—the tide was on the ebb and the cave’s entrance below the high tide line would not be passable for nearly another hour.

He began his inspection of the rows of neatly stacked barrels of French brandy and larger casks of wine stored well above the waterline, row upon row. There was nothing out of the ordinary—no flour or grain.

Harry contemplated a tun of vin ordinaire, wondering what he had missed, when he felt a cooler draft of air that raised the hair on the nape of his neck. If he were another man, he might have blamed the eerie chill on the ghost of Black Cove, but his well-honed sense of logic urged him to wet his thumb and follow the thin thread of moving air to an angled fissure that concealed a narrow, gated passage. The rusted iron gate was closed, but not locked, and the long passage sloped slowly upward—and according to his compass, back toward the south. Back toward Castle Keyvnor.

Harry raised the lantern, considering, but already his feet were moving, as if an unseen ghost was pushing him, guiding him onward. He followed the tunnel four cable lengths through the rock, until it finally opened into a low-ceilinged storage room packed tightly with an odd assortment of old casks, kegs, and crates.

Harry’s already chilled hackles rose instantly, for there was a particular sort of familiarity to the goods that made his blood run cold—he had overseen the lading, un-crating and stowage of similar casks and boxes upon his own ships. There was a stack of half-casks thick with dust and the words “Loire et Cher” stenciled on their lids, while another batch, less thickly covered, were imprinted with “Yonne”—French-mined amber flints of various sizes for muskets, pistols and cannon.

On the other side of the cavern, barrels marked “Essonne” for the mill outside Paris— standard hundred-pound kegs of black powder. And all along one wall were crates about five feet long, stacked five deep, and marked “Charleville-Mézières”—French 1777 model muskets from the armory in the Ardennes. Guns he had faced standing on the quarterdeck of his ship, the target of sharp-eyed enemy shooters stationed in the mast tops.

All covered in dust, with the exception of three crates set at a right angle to the others, marked “Maubeuge” after the arsenal in northern France, closest to the Channel and transport to Cornwall.

Harry wielded his cane like an oaken handspike and pried open the corner of one of the long crates to prove to himself that he was right. And there they were, just as he had anticipated—French flintlock muskets, nestled in straw and packed two dozen to a case. With eight stacks, two deep and ten crates high, there were nearly four thousand guns gathering dust within the dark. Enough guns for a bloody army.

Harry’s eye went back to the lettering marking the open crate—Maubeuge, the armory closest to the port of Boulogne, where Napoleon had some years earlier gathered his Army of the Ocean Coasts. The original plan to cross the Channel and invade England had been abandoned over ten years ago—the forces gathered at Boulogne dispersed across France into the Grande Armée.

Understanding hit Harry harder than French chain shot ever had—the plan clearly hadn’t been abandoned. It had simply been changed. In this cave far beneath Castle Keyvnor, Harry was standing amidst the munitions that would supply an invasion of the island fortress of England.

Nessa hurried through the churchyard in time to see Cods sweep through the lichgate and through the village at such a clip that even long-legged Nessa had to run to keep up. She kept to the edges of the lane, hugging the lengthening shadows, rapidly trying to formulate a plan—she would follow Cods to the castle, and then enter through the kitchens where she could send for Harry, and tell him of her suspicions.

But before he reached the bridge that led across the dry moat to Keyvnor’s portcullis, Cods veered off into a stretch of parkland that sloped away from the foot of the castle cliffs, a dark figure merging into the green and black background.

Nessa halted on the edge of the path, debating whether she should follow Cods or continue to the castle to find Harry. But the castle was dark and silent—clearly no wedding celebration was taking place there. Perhaps the wedding was held at Hollybrook Park—the direction that Cods was now heading.

She felt propelled after him, as if the roaming hosts of Castle Keyvnor were urging her on. So she tore after him, until a light flared like a beacon in the near distance—Cod’s lantern illuminating the velvet night to reveal the mossy headstones of the Banfield family graveyard. For a moment, doubt washed over Nessa like a cold rain—perhaps she and the ghosts were wrong. Perhaps the curate had come all this way just to pray. But what she heard was not prayers, but the rattle of keys and the metallic shriek of the rusty gate of the mausoleum being opened. And then the light from the lantern winked out, seemingly to be swallowed whole by the cliffside.

Cods had disappeared into the mausoleum.

Nessa crept closer still, listening intently and staring into the dark—there was no sound, no light. She ventured closer until she could smell the cool and damp of the mausoleum air—it smelt of death and decay and…salt. The fresh salt air from the sea below the cliffs.

There had always been stories, half-forgotten rumors that the whole of the coast was riddled with hidden passages and connected by underground tunnels—there was even a rumor that a passage led directly from the low tide mark at the harbor straight into the cellar of the Crown & Anchor public house.

Castle Keyvnor had always stood apart from those stories—it had been well known in the village that the old Earl Banfield disapproved of the trade and took no part in it. But neither had he interfered. And his castle had stood upon the cliffs above Bocka Morrow for centuries—the medieval fortress could harbor secret, ancient passages even if the current titleholder had no use for them.

As proof, the lock on the gate, now that Nessa got close enough to inspect it in the falling dark, was new. And it seemed Cods, the parish curate, and not the heir of the Earl of Banfield, had the keys.

Fortunately for Nessa the bars were old and wide. And she, who had always been judged too tall and too gawky, was just lathy enough to squeeze herself through and into the mausoleum.

What she thought she might do, with no light and no way of stopping Cods, Nessa did not know. But she had come too far to stop and she could follow the sound of Cod’s leather-soled shoes slapping rhythmically against the stone steps as the stairway led her down, down into the dark earth.

The air grew saltier, and then cold, and colder still. In the endless dark, Nessa started to see bits of blue and red at the corners of her vision, as if she were beset by the ghosts rumored to inhabit the castle. A cold blast of air chilled the back of her neck and alarm raised goosebumps all down her spine, but it was as if the spirit of the place were urging her onward, compelling her to act as a witness. To find out exactly where Cods had gone, and who he had gone to meet, before she turned back to report her findings.

But it was one thing to be determined—to know what was right—and another thing entirely to find the courage to push on through the dark. But perhaps, she had more determination than she knew. Perhaps, it had been determination that had kept her dreaming through each boring day before Harry had come back that had kept her copying sermons without giving into despair. Because she kept onward, down the steep stair until, finally, a slight glow of light beckoned.

Nessa slowed and made the last few steps with the utmost caution, pressing close to the wall, listening carefully for any sound that might indicate where Cods had gone.

There was nothing but the distant lapping of water against rock. Nothing but a sudden, silent rush of movement, before a hand wrapped itself around her mouth, smothering the life from her.