Uneasy Lies the Crown_A Lady Emily Mystery by Tasha Alexander

Author:Tasha Alexander [Alexander, Tasha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B079DVFV8X
Publisher: Minotaur Books
Published: 2018-10-30T00:00:00+00:00

1901

25

As Colin had suspected, the yeoman warders balked when Jeremy and I arrived at the Tower. The wretched Inspector Gale had ordered them to keep me away from his investigation. Jeremy, in his most pompous drawl, explained that we had come to call on Mrs. Rillington for tea, after which he hoped to see some of the more gruesome bits of the place.

“You know, Sir Walter Raleigh is an ancestor of mine,” he said to the guard. “I figured it was time I took some interest in his imprisonment and execution.”

“Is that so, your grace?” The guard stood up a bit straighter and looked rather impressed. “If you’ll just sign the register here, you can go straight to Mrs. Rillington.”

We did as instructed. As we walked toward the Rillingtons’ rooms, I took Jeremy’s arm and leaned close to him. “I had no idea you were descended from Raleigh.”

“Oh, I’m not. It’s just that he was the only person I could remember who had been held here who embodies any of my own dashing qualities. I knew the guard would like it.”

“You are a terrible person.”

“Thank you for noticing.”

We paused for a brief tea with Mrs. Rillington before the three of us set off on our exploration. Many of the passages marked on the map were now so well-known that they could hardly be called secret, but others so thoroughly disguised, I wondered how anyone could find them. There were trapdoors leading to long underground corridors that joined the buildings within the Tower and cunning mechanisms that opened hidden tunnels. Jeremy was particularly taken with a clever system that revealed a staircase behind what looked like a solid stone wall, while a tunnel that went all the way beneath the now-empty moat fascinated me.

“The staircase is much more interesting,” Jeremy said.

“Yes, but the tunnel proves that there are still ways into the Tower that allow one to avoid detection by the guards,” I said.

“Except that the end of that passage is now locked,” Mrs. Rillington said. “If we follow it all the way, you’ll see that an iron door prevents anyone from entering through it.”

“That does not mean there can’t be another that remains accessible.” Undaunted, I gripped a candle firmly in my hand and set off to make a methodical exploration of the passages that went from tower to tower, below the ground. For the most part, this proved straightforward. The tunnels allowed for access primarily to dungeons and prison cells, but further scrutiny revealed less obvious branches of them. The mechanism that hid Jeremy’s beloved staircase was used down here, too, and careful inspection of the tunnel walls enabled us to discover three paths not on our map. The first took us to a rickety helical staircase that led to the undercroft of the White Tower. The second ended abruptly at a wall of dirt, as if the medieval excavators had tired of the project and abandoned it.

The third, however, stunned and horrified me.

We had already burned through two candles apiece.

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