THE MYSTERY OF MARGARET KNUTTON
WE returned to the Manor, and Seal, refreshed by his lunch, seized a
crowbar and wielding it with his great strength announced himself ready
to assist us.
Like ourselves, he felt certain that, the treasure being hidden
somewhere in that house, diligent search would have its reward. So he
started on his own account tapping walls and investigating loose boards
and hollow wainscotting.
We had seen no more of Bennett. He had come to the Plough probably with
the object of ascertaining who we were, and had departed as quietly as
he had come. Indeed, we should have been in ignorance of his visit had
it not been that the skipper had recognized his voice. Job Seal had a
very quick ear. He had told me long ago on board the _Thrush_ that if he
heard a man’s voice once he could recognize it again years afterwards.
Sometimes partial blindness goes with that faculty, but not so in Seal’s
case. No man had quicker eye or ear.
After half an hour’s search the skipper hit upon a likely spot which we
had overlooked. At one end of the corridor, which upstairs ran the whole
length of the house, was a small diamond-paned window, while at the
other was a blank wall. The latter, when tapped, gave forth a hollow
sound. There was a second spot of which we had also suspicion, namely,
at the side of the fireplace in the modernized dining-room below.
Upon the latter we commenced first, all three of us working with a will.
The afternoon was hot, therefore Seal threw off his coat and vest,
rolled up his sleeves, and, blowing like a walrus, wielded the hammer
necessary to drive the chisel into the wall.
Before long we had broken into the hollow, but again only disappointment
awaited us. It was merely one of those little long cupboards which are
so often seen beside the fireplaces in old houses. Upon the shelf within
was plenty of dust, but only one object, a well-preserved halfpenny
bearing the effigy of King Charles II.
“That’s for luck!” Seal cried humorously. “Let’s try upstairs, lads.”
So up we went, all three of us, and attacked the hollow place in that
outer wall. The task was not so easy as that we had just concluded, for
it seemed that only a small portion of the wall had been filled with
plaster, the rest being very hard concrete, which we had to chip out
laboriously with hammer and chisel.
The skipper was, however, enthusiastic in his new sphere. From
navigating the _Thrush_ he had turned housebreaker, and the fact that
the treasure might be there concealed added a keen zest to the work of
investigation. He worked, puffing and blowing, until the perspiration
rolled off his great furrowed face. The part he had attacked was a
particularly hard piece of concrete, which he was painfully chipping
out. The plaster we had already removed disclosed a sheet of rusty iron,
probably placed over a door, and its discovery had excited the skipper
greatly. He expressed himself confident that we were on the verge of a
discovery. And so we were.
The dust we raised was suffocating, while the chips of concrete flying
in all directions proved a source of considerable danger to one’s eyes.
A piece went into Reilly’s left eye, but we quickly dislodged it, and we
continued to work on, eager to ascertain what was concealed behind that
iron-cased door.
The previous door we had opened had been a labour in vain, but the iron
upon this one had raised our hopes, and we all worked with a will,
cutting out of the wall a piece nearly four feet square.
Seal with our long crowbar attacked the iron itself. When he struck it
the hollow sound was like an explosion.
“There’s a room in here, I’m sure!” cried the skipper.
Then, while we continued, he set to work with the measuring tape, taking
the distance from the door of the room to the wall we were attacking,
and afterwards measuring inside the room from the door to the end wall.
He found a considerable difference in the measurements, by which his
excitement was increased.
We worked on without breathing space, for the eager anticipation was
contagious. Yet we were compelled to progress by slow degrees and to
chip away bit by bit of that hard concrete which they knew how to make
so well centuries ago. It was almost as durable as stone itself.
At last we had cut it all away, and the dark iron-cased door stood
revealed to us, looking like a modern fire-proof safe, only that it was
not green and had no brass handle.
“Je-rusalem!” exclaimed the skipper, “I really believe this is the
actual place! Look how carefully it’s been concealed! And the iron door,
too. Let’s have it open, lads, if we have to pull down the bloomin’
house to get at it. We’ll get the best of Bennett and those murderous
swabs yet!”
Again with his long crowbar he attacked the door, but it was unyielding.
Gradually, however, Reilly, working more slowly and carefully, was
enabled to wedge his chisel between the iron and the stonework. Then,
after some difficulty, the skipper’s long bar was wedged in the place,
and all three of us bore heavily upon it.
Once, twice, thrice we bore down, Seal giving us a sailor’s ahoy, and
all bearing together.
At last and of a sudden with a terrific wrench the bolts gave way, and
the door flew back with a crash and a cloud of dust, disclosing a small
room which had been walled up for centuries. The old house, indeed,
seemed full of secret chambers.
Reilly lit the hurricane lamp and handed it to me, for I was the first
to enter.
The moment I crossed the threshold into the dark little place, no bigger
than a good-sized cupboard, I drew back in horror.
On the floor in the thick dust lay a human skeleton!
“What’s the matter, doctor?” inquired the captain, entering quickly
after me.
“Look!” I cried. “Somebody has been walled up here! Look at those
bones.”
Seal glanced down to the corner I indicated, and the truth was at once
revealed to him. Instead of treasure concealed there, we saw evidence of
what was probably some long-forgotten crime.
Reilly was beside me in an instant, but there was hardly room for three
of us in the narrow place. I bent down and turned over the bones to
examine them more closely. The skeleton was doubled up, as though death
had taken place from hunger rather than from want of air.
As I held the light something sparkled, and bending I saw that upon the
finger-bones stretched in the dust there still remained three splendid
rings. These and the size of the skull and certain of the other bones
quickly told me that the person immured there had been a woman.
The three rings I took in my hand and examined them out in the daylight.
They were dull and tarnished, but the diamonds in two of them were
extremely fine ones, while the third was a signet, upon which was graven
the leopard rampant of Da Schorno. With the skeleton was a quantity of
silk rags, the remains of the rich brocade dress worn by the victim at
the time she was imprisoned there.
The discovery made a deep impression upon the superstitious skipper.
Nevertheless, he assisted us to make a close and thorough search of the
place. From what we found it was evident that the unfortunate woman had
been entrapped there and shut up to die. From the remains of the ragged
and brown garments we came to the conclusion that the tragedy had
occurred back in the old Elizabethan days, for there were the distinct
remains of a ruffle, while scattered about were pearls from a broken
string. So long ago, indeed, had the unfortunate woman been placed there
to linger until death released her that now, open to the air, the bones
were crumbling. The hair on the scalp was still long and almost black,
while entangled in it was a small but beautiful rope of pearls of a kind
that was the fashion for women to wear in the later days of Queen Bess.
“I suppose it’s her ghost that haunts the place,” laughed Reilly, as he
assisted me to turn over the gruesome remains.
“What?” asked Seal seriously. “Is this house haunted?”
“Oh, the villagers say so,” was the reply; “but we’ve never seen
anything, and are not likely to.”
“Well, whoever placed the woman there took very good care to conceal her
whereabouts,” Seal remarked.
“Yes,” I said. “Without doubt the poor woman was entrapped and then
walled up.”
“The same as I’ve heard certain nuns were treated in the old days before
the Reformation,” Reilly said. “I’ve read of remains of women being
found walled up in convents.”
“Well, in this case death was certainly not voluntary. You see there is
no crucifix or image of any saint,” and, re-entering, I raised the
lantern and examined the rough plastered walls. Suddenly my eyes caught
a faint inscription scratched with some sharp instrument on the wall. It
told me two things: first, that the woman before her death had a light
there; and, second, it gave the name of the victim—
“Margaret Knutton.”
The writing was in that upright Elizabethan character, and below was an
elaborate flourish. There was no date, only the name, scratched probably
with one of the pieces of sharp stone that lay upon the rough floor.
My companions examined it with interest, and were of my opinion that it
had been traced by the hand of the woman before she sank and died.
Probably she had been held prisoner there for some time before her
death, because high up I discovered a small hole in the wall that seemed
to run through to the exterior and had once admitted air, but was now
blocked up. My examination, too, showed that the woman had had her right
arm broken in her youth, and that it had been set unskilfully.
The discovery was not only a complete surprise but also a bitter
disappointment, and when we all three had completed our examination of
that long-walled-up chamber we closed the door and regarded the great
hole in the wall with considerable regret.
We were playing sad havoc with the house, for scarcely a room did not
bear the marks of our chisels and crowbars.
Evening fell, and having washed at the pump we went across to the Plough
for supper. The day’s work had been unsatisfactory, and Seal was silent
and thoughtful, as was his habit when things went badly.
We had revealed one gruesome secret of the Manor House if nothing else.
We sat out in the tangled garden for an hour after our return. The sunny
place seemed to have lost its charm. The trail of decay and desolation
seemed more apparent than usual as my eyes travelled from the broken
sundial to the straggling flowers. On going indoors we smoked, the
skipper insisting that we should drink rum and hot water. The
conversation was mostly a discussion upon likely spots to be opened on
the morrow, for, although the captain had been bitterly disappointed, in
discovering bones instead of gold, he was still undaunted.
“The treasure is here, I feel sure,” he exclaimed a dozen times, in his
deep voice. “We’ll find it, as sure as my name’s Job Seal.”
The existence of those secret chambers had certainly raised our hopes,
yet we only longed for sight of that cipher plan which the drunken
Knutton had sold to our enemies. The only consolation we had was that
the plan in question was just as useless to them as it was to us.
That night, after several tots of the spirit which the skipper had
brought us, we retired to bed. The night was a perfect one, bright
moonlight without a leaf stirring, one of those calm nights when it
seems a pity to turn in.
I sleep heavily as a rule, and I must have been in bed three hours or so
when a touch on the shoulder suddenly awakened me, and I saw in the
moonlight the skipper, in his shirt and trousers, standing by me. A
revolver shone in his right hand.
“Wake up, doctor,” he whispered. “There’s something going on in this
house.”
He had already awakened Reilly, who was noiselessly slipping on his
clothes.
I started up and stared at him, as yet only half awake.
“Don’t kick up a row,” Seal urged, in a deep whisper. “Listen, do you
hear anything?”
A curious noise fell on my ear like slow sawing.
“It’s rats,” I declared. “This place is worse than the _Thrush_ for
them.”
“No, doctor, it ain’t. I know rats well enough. Where’s your pistol? You
may want it.”
I nipped out of bed, and in a couple of minutes stood ready, revolver in
hand. Awakened suddenly out of my sleep I moved mechanically, convinced
that the finding of the bones and the superstition of the skipper were
responsible for it all. But he was deadly in earnest, I saw, and I think
that aroused me to a true sense of the situation.
To move about without noise in an empty house is a rather difficult
matter, but we all three crept out into the corridor and listened.
The noise seemed to proceed from the centre room—the one wherein we had
first discovered a hidden chamber. We opened the door and entered
noiselessly.
Yes, the sound came distinctly from the secret hiding-place. Carefully
we pushed open the thick oak door and stepped inside.
The sawing stopped, but below where we stood we heard men’s voices
speaking in gruff undertones.
Our enemies were undermining the house!