92 
Decline

For the rest of the month never had a sick man two such devoted friends to nurse him as Amanda and Stirling. Everyone warned them to be careful, for the disease was well known to be highly contagious.

“I have spent my whole life thinking of nothing but myself,” was Amanda’s reply. “It is time I thought about someone else.”

And for Stirling’s part, if medicine was the profession he loved and had chosen to follow, how could he run from the first difficult case to present itself?

For the first week after the diagnosis, Jocelyn and Amanda took turns spending the night at the Hall to be near in case Geoffrey’s condition worsened noticeably.

As the bank’s business had grown, Geoffrey had hired two new employees, including an assistant, Welford Miles, who had almost as many years experience as he himself. Therefore, Geoffrey’s absence caused no disruption to business and was not even reported to London. Stirling met with Miles to apprise him of Geoffrey’s condition, passing along the message that when he was up to it, he would send for him and they would confer about whatever needed to be discussed.

Within a week Geoffrey was back on his feet, though did not plan to resume his duties at the bank until cleared by Dr. Armbruster. Either Amanda, Jocelyn, or Stirling continued to call on him and sit with him every day. But though he could move slowly about inside with relative ease, Geoffrey’s strength did not improve as they had all hoped, and his cough remained extremely troublesome.

It continued to rain, lightly but incessantly. The wind that had heralded the storm soon dropped to a light breeze, but the thick grey mass of cloud water settled over England like an unmoving heavy blanket and continued to pour down, not buckets, but cupfuls of water, day after day, night after night, without a letup. Again rivers and streams filled, and the ground became soggy and waterlogged like an overfull sponge.

All at once for no visible reason, Geoffrey took a sudden turn for the worse. The day had begun well. He ate a tolerably adequate breakfast, dressed and read most of the morning, enjoyed the Times crossword puzzle with a laugh or two, even conferred with Miles, who had been coming to the hall with a report every several days about noon.

In midafternoon, however, a wave of light-headedness and nausea came over him.

“I am feeling tired, Wenda,” he said as she brought him afternoon tea. “I think I shall go to my room for a rest.”

“Shall I send for Dr. Armbruster?” she asked.

“No . . . I am fine. I just need a little nap.”

Jocelyn called later in the afternoon. But when Mrs. Polkinghorne informed her that Geoffrey was sleeping, she left without disturbing him.

No one saw him again that afternoon.

The rain continued to pour down. In the middle of the night, suddenly Geoffrey awoke from the sound of a great breaking crash somewhere above him.

Trying to gather his wits, he coughed and hacked painfully, groped for the light beside his bed, then rose, tried to clear his head, and pulled on his robe.

He went to the window. Apparently the rain had finally stopped. He turned back into the room and, between violent coughing fits, tried to listen.

Upstairs, he was sure of it, there was water dripping somewhere inside the house.

On uneasy legs, he made his way out of the room into the corridor, turned on a light, and followed the sound up to the second floor. He was far too weak for such activity, but curiosity over the persistent mystery of the strange dripping sounds gradually gave him energy to continue the search.

Struggling to the top of the stairs, he made his way along the north wing. Ahead in the dimly lit corridor he saw what seemed to be the glittering of falling water droplets. Was his mind playing a trick on him? It looked like it was raining inside the house!

He shuffled forward weakly until he came to the source of the sound that had awakened him. Wherever the rain had been leaking into the house from above, it had apparently worsened suddenly, then accumulated throughout this storm to the point where the ceiling above, roughly between the library and the armory, could no longer contain the weight. On the floor in the middle of the corridor was splattered a water-soaked pile of lathe and plaster that had crashed down from above.

Geoffrey looked up to see a hole in the ceiling a foot or more wide. From it water continued to trickle onto the floor in front of him.

The loose tile on the roof must have finally given way. But, he thought, if the roof had been slowly leaking all this time, why had they seen no water in the garret directly above where he now stood? How could the water get from the roof through to this corridor . . . without first making a mess in the garret?

He couldn’t worry about that now. If something wasn’t done within another hour, the water in this pile of plaster would leak down onto the first floor and create a dreadful mess on carpet and furniture and ceiling. He had to try to find a way to clean it up. He could go rouse Wenda. But she was working hard enough already and would only scold him for being out of bed. He would do it himself.

Geoffrey glanced around. He would try the guest room across the hall. Soon he had gathered every available towel and sheet and brought them to the scene of the minor disaster. Within thirty minutes he had the mess tolerably cleaned up, though the carpet would need to be cleaned or replaced. Thankfully by now the dripping from above had stopped. If it began to rain again, he would have to put containers down to catch it.

He carried the wet towels and sheets and cleaning bowl in which he had placed the broken bits of wood and plaster to the empty guest room. He put the bowl on the floor and dumped the wet things on the bed to be seen to in the morning. It wasn’t the best solution, he thought as he walked out of the room, breathing heavily and surveying the scene again, but it should keep the damage from spreading.

Feeling energized from the work, and hardly realizing his danger, Geoffrey continued to puzzle over the dry garret. He looked up into the wet hole in the ceiling. Why had they seen no evidence of this leak all this time?

Perhaps it had not developed to that extent when they were last in the garret. He would check it again.

He turned, walked to the library, through the panel in the wall, struggling finally as he climbed up into the secret garret room Amanda had shown them.

Glancing about, he saw that it was still dry. How could it be? They had heard dripping behind the wall. The leak must be directly below him.

He left the garret room, retracing their steps from that previous occasion, to the tower and finally, as Geoffrey thought, to the opposite side of the wall he had just left.

But here too everything appeared completely dry.

He stood looking about in mounting bewilderment. Had he not just cleaned up a great mess directly underneath this very spot? The leak had to be coming through the garret from the roof down to the corridor below . . . but where!

Still puzzling over the strange incongruity, Geoffrey returned to the corridor below and stared up yet again into the black vault where the ceiling had broken through. There was only one way to find the source of the leak. He had to get up into that hole. He would get a ladder and have a look for himself.

The next moment he was on his way back to the library, returning two minutes later dragging the five-foot stepladder used to reach the highest of the library’s bookshelves. Struggling with it as quietly as possible, and at last beginning to realize that he had taxed his body far too greatly, he managed to stand it up under the hole. All that remained now was something to see with once he got up there.

He hurried back down to his bedroom, stopping several times to lean against the wall for a brief rest, returning a few minutes later with a kerosene lantern. Grasping it carefully with one hand, he made his way cautiously up the ladder, then held the lantern aloft over his head, stuck it up into the round black void and chipped away a few wet, loose pieces of plaster so he could get his head up through the hole as well.

He was dangerously high on the ladder. He knew he was weak, that his legs were wobbly, and that what he was doing was risky. But he had to find out what was up there!

Grasping the wet edge of the ceiling hole with his free hand for balance, although the plaster and lathe would never support him if he fell, he cautiously now extended his right foot to the top of the ladder, then slowly followed with his left. Carefully he stood and tried to extend shoulders and chest through the small opening, which he had now managed to enlarge to some fourteen inches in diameter. When his head was through the ceiling, he glanced about in the eerie flickering light of his lantern.

He had not broken through to the garret at all, or at least not to any part of it he had ever seen. He was looking up into a narrow chamber no more than three feet in width, stretching above him to the uppermost outside roof of the Hall, from which an occasional drip continued to fall on his head. This was the garret all right, but somehow a portion of it walled off from all the rest.

And as he glanced about, what he saw next took his breath away.

He had finally begun to hallucinate from his weakened condition, or else he had discovered a mystery connected to this place that no one else in all the world could possibly know about.

A hidden storage vault!

Eyes still wide and brain reeling from the discovery, he climbed down a few minutes later and hurried again to the secret room of the garret. There he knocked and pounded against the only wall that could possibly connect with the tiny chamber he had found. Yes, he could hear behind it now what sounded like hollowness.

It was a false wall!

No wonder they had never seen the leak from the garret room. This wall and that of the tower corridor were not the same at all as they had always assumed! The two walls had been separated by a three-foot wide space, creating the vault he had just left. Had this been the intent of the mysterious construction Amanda had told them about which had been carried out by Mrs. McFee’s great-grandfather, a construction designed to hide this small three-foot storage chamber so that its cache would never be discovered?

And it might never have been, thought Geoffrey, had not a rainstorm brought a leak to this exact spot and had not a loose tile of the roof finally given way, sending the storm tumbling straight down into the second-floor corridor.

But how to get into the hidden vault from here? This garret room must have been intended as the entry. There had to be access to it of some kind.

Excitedly Geoffrey probed the floor at the base of the false wall with his fingers, knocking, pushing, and feeling about. His excitement seemed to give him a new injection of energy.

There . . . he felt a tiny bit of wet along the base of floor and wall. Frantically he now pounded and pushed and scraped. All at once he felt one of the floorboards give way a little at the corner. He pressed down. Three feet away the other end popped up an inch. As it did, the corner end sunk below the level of the floor.

Geoffrey tried to lift the board, but it was still connected somewhere.

He continued to push and pull at the curious floorboard. Now he felt it slide a quarter of an inch as the corner end slipped beneath the wallplate.

Pushing now with more force against the raised end, the board slid farther along some hidden track. But it had grown difficult from lack of use and did not slide smoothly. Geoffrey pushed with all the limited strength he possessed until he had slid it some twelve inches. The effort taxed him. He paused to grab his handkerchief, coughed terribly three or four times, then bent down to examine the opening under the board.

Hidden in the floor beneath it had been constructed a small, concealed brass lock.

This was obviously the means of entering the invisible vault behind the wall. How, he couldn’t immediately see—probably by some unseen panel in the wall that the lock released.

And why not? The fellow Kyrkwode had been a master of such ingenious devices. The place was full of them!

Staring at the lock, Geoffrey coughed again. But where was the key?

The only keys he knew were on the key ring in the tower. He closed his eyes and sighed. He was too fatigued to investigate further.

He would try them later. He had to get back to bed. He had made a remarkable discovery; that was enough for now. He would investigate the lock in the morning.

Exhausted and hacking, he slid the floorboard back in place, then made his way down the corkscrew staircase out of the garret room, back through the labyrinth to the library. As he went he was thinking of the consequences of what he had just found. No one must know of it yet, especially his father. He must cover up the evidence of the discovery while determining what to do about it.

With great effort he managed to clean up the additional mess he had made, then dragged a piece of rug from the guest room over the stain in the hall carpet.

But what about the hole in the ceiling?

He had to cover it up with something. A blanket, he thought.

But how to tack it to the ceiling?

A hammer and some small nails would do it. The next moment he was on his way creeping down to the storeroom next to the kitchen to fetch them.

Within five minutes he was again on the ladder carrying out the final part of his clean-up operation.

But tacking the blanket to the ceiling robbed him of his last ounces of strength. He nearly collapsed as he feebly climbed down, replaced the ladder, and staggered back to his room. He was exhausted and growing faint. But he knew well enough that if something happened to him, his father would be here the next day to take possession of the Hall. And he mustn’t let his father come here and find this.

But someone had to know what he had found, thought Geoffrey. And that could only be one person.

That person was not his father . . . but his cousin. He must tell Amanda!

He struggled into his room, coughing constantly by now, but trying his best to mute the sound with his handkerchief for fear of waking Mrs. Polkinghorne. He sat down at his writing desk and took out a piece of paper. With quivering hand he made a crude drawing, then followed it with a brief letter.

A terrible paroxysm of coughing finally shook Geoffrey’s entire body and forced him to stop. His lungs felt like they were exploding. He groaned in exhaustion, rose, wobbled a few steps, and fell onto his bed. As he removed the handkerchief down from his mouth, the red-stained mucus all over it told him what he knew Dr. Armbruster had long feared.

Gradually he fell into a fitful sleep.