Page 39 of Unmasking the Silver Heiress
"The drowning doors, remember?" he said, whipping around to grip Nathaniel by the shoulders, his eyes wide and blue. "We found those doors by the gazebo and your father said they covered an old well pit and that if we opened them, we'd fall in and drown. He put sod over them so we wouldn't find them again."
"Why would the entrance to a cellar be so far away from the house?" Nate asked skeptically. "It makes the most sense that it actually was a well."
"Well, the grounds are older than the house, aren't they? It's worth a look, anyhow. Come on!"
And he had been correct. After a bit of prodding around in the soft grasses beyond a rotting gazebo, they did indeed find hatch doors covered in a layer of earth.
"It's lucky we went looking for it now and not once the snow starts up," Nate pointed out as he helped his cousin dig away the layer of dirt and dry grass that covered the hinges. "Once the ground had frozen, we would have had to wait until spring to do anything."
"It's locked," Kit observed with a frown. "You reckon your father's spirit will swoop down and box my ears if I just shatter the padlock?"
"He might at that," Nate replied, rubbing at the back of his neck. "But I don't fancy going in search of some rusted old key that likely doesn't work anymore. Do you?"
By way of answer, Kit simply brought his spade down twice on the thinnest part of the lock until the rusty iron gave way beneath it. The two of them exchanged a look, both feeling like they were breaking a sacred rule by doing this, especially after having been explicitly warned against it. Twenty years is nothing when it comes to the fear of a father's wrath.
One of the hatch doors was so decomposed that it lifted clean away from its hinges with a pitiful splintering creak. If not for that stark reminder of the fragility of wood over time, they might not have bothered to return to the house for a new ladder—one thathadn'tbeen sitting in a dank tunnel for half a lifetime. So, in his way, perhaps Walter Atlas was looking out for the boys after all.
"It doesn't smell half as bad as I anticipated," Kit commented, using the shaft of late-afternoon sunlight to spark a flame for the lanterns he'd brought down. "I expected an ungodly reek of mildew."
"I'm surprised there isn't a layer of water up to our knees, myself," Nate replied, leaping off the bottom rung of the ladder. "It's cold down here, but dry. What on earth?"
"Well, the French woman said there were vintages in barrels down here, didn't she? That'd make sense. They could be ignored for years at a time without fuss."
"She did," Nate confirmed, but something was still niggling at his brain. He took one of the lanterns and held it out, getting a view of the room around them. He couldn't see it all. It was significantly larger than a simple wine cellar.
He thought he could make out the shapes of a lighting system to illuminate this space as well as any room in the manor. There were indeed wine barrels here, stacked horizontally in a large trellis shelf against the wall, but that was hardly the only thing being stored in this enclave.
Long wooden boxes were stacked against one another from wall to wall, and there was a shelf with an assortment of strongboxes that weren't as accommodating to Kit's methods of brute force as the padlock without had been.
"Christ Almighty, how big is this place?" Kit marveled, sounding progressively farther away. "Look here, there's a tunnel passage."
Nate picked his way over to his cousin, careful with his footfalls to avoid anything that might break or burst or otherwise behave in an unpleasant manner. Kit was standing at the mouth of a long passageway, his lantern held out in front of him like some painting of a mystic, his golden hair in halo from the firelight.
"Well, then?" Nate asked, clapping his cousin on the shoulder. "Let's see how far it goes."
"Oh, is that what we're doing?" Kit mocked, his disbelief unable to override his sarcasm as Nathaniel swept past him. "What has gotten into you today? Stop walking so fast!"
Nate smirked to himself, pleased that for the first time since he'd been back, he was the one rattling the other. Kit's footsteps echoed against the stone walls as he chased after, coming up alongside his cousin with his breaths a little shallower than he was likely proud of.
"It is damned cold down here," Nate observed. "There could be a larder, I suppose. Cheeses and such would keep very well down here in the cooler months."
"I don't think a dairy locker has ever been quite this clandestine, Nathaniel," Kit replied dryly. "Whatever was going on down here, it was not a spot of brie to hold till spring."
"I'd like to assume it's harmless until we have proof to the contrary," Nate said, though he did not really mean it. Something had been going on here, clearly, something his father did not want them to discover.
"I can smell brine," Kit said, giving a theatrical sniff into the air. "Do you smell it?"
"Yes." Nate frowned, holding his lantern as far out in front of him as he could, though it was nothing but darkness for a long stretch ahead of them. "I would bet my last penny that this empties onto the shore somewhere."
"Ah. That'd explain the wine being French, wouldn't it, now?" Kit replied with a sigh. "You think it was your father?"
"It must have been both of them," Nate said slowly, nodding with his head that they should head back. "It would explain why they would travel to Calais in the early days of a war, I suppose."
"For black-market wine? I'm no sommelier, Nate, but I think that's a little unlikely, especially with Alice in arms."
They walked in silence after that, both likely attempting to unravel this new thread of information, which appeared to lead directly into a big, incomprehensible snarl. How would they even go about indexing the contraband stored down here without alerting the suspicions of the staff? It was obvious from the crates they'd seen that this was not just a matter of wine.
"Are you going to tell her?" Kit murmured, low enough to avoid the cave capturing his voice and throwing it back at him.
