“Well, here’s the old back door of the Catherine-Wheel. Ingenious, isn’t it? The wall looks solid enough, but it’s only a door built into a wooden frame and pivoted on an iron bar. There’s a simple locking arrangement, and when it’s locked no one can get in from the shore. There were some rough characters in the smuggling game, and our forefathers took precautions against waking up some fine night with their throats cut. Well, there’s the road to the shore. The cliff’s about forty foot, and we’re ten foot under ground here, so there’s another thirty foot to go before you get down to shore level. But they didn’t bring the cargoes in off the shore. There’s a cave right under here, no size but very convenient. They used to run a boat in at high tide and land the stuff where the passage comes out. So you can cut off another eight or nine feet. That leaves a twenty-foot drop, and with the help of a few steps they’ve managed a passage with quite an easy gradient. Anyone want to come along and see? I don’t advise it for the ladies, because it’s all pretty foul from not being used, and they’ll be apt to spoil their dresses. I don’t suppose anyone’s been into it a dozen times since Jeremiah died.”

Mildred Taverner, standing very near the middle of the cellar, said in that high voice of hers,

“But I thought-”

Nobody had spoken whilst Jacob spoke. Everyone listened, and when he stopped speaking there was a hush. Mildred’s “But I thought-” came right into the middle of it. When she caught herself up, everyone was looking at her. She said, “Oh!” with a sort of gasp, and stood there.

Geoffrey Taverner said, “No, I don’t think the ladies ought to go.”

Jacob moved, passing between Geoffrey and Florence Duke. He said,

“Mildred was saying- What was it you were saying, my dear Mildred?” His tone sharpened on the question.

There was confusion in her manner and colour in her face- ugly, flat colour. She said in a hurry,

“Oh, nothing-nothing at all.”

“You said, ‘But I thought-’ What did you think?”

“I don’t know-I’m sure I don’t know why I said it-it must have been the excitement. It’s very exciting, isn’t it? And my dress won’t hurt. I should like to see where the passage comes out. These patterned silks are so useful-they don’t show marks.”

In the end they all went down except Marian Thorpe-Ennington.

“Not that I’m not interested, my dear man, because of course it’s too utterly thrilling, but as this is probably the last garment I shall ever be able to buy from Worth, I really should hate to get it spoilt with slime and seaweed and things. They never really come out-too devastating. And of course the very minute Freddy goes into bankruptcy nobody will give us any more credit-so unfair, I always think. Only I can’t stay here in the dark.”

“Fogarty’s got a torch-he’ll take you back. I’m afraid we must stick to the lamp.”

One underground passage is very much like another. Jane wouldn’t have stayed behind for the world, but she had never hated anything quite so much in all her life-the dark descent, the shadows cast by the electric lamp, the smell of the cave coming up on a salt breath, the smell of decaying seaweed that might easily have been something worse. There might have been murders in a place like this-a knife stuck suddenly between someone’s ribs, and dead men’s bones left lying in the dark. It was like all the worst nightmares she had ever had, the kind where something chases you in deep places where there isn’t any light. She held Jeremy’s arm in a painful grip. He felt her heart beat as she pressed against him. His whisper at her ear had a laughing sound.

“If you’ll stop mangling my arm, I can put it round you.”

It came round her, and she held on to his jacket instead. They were behind the others. He said, “Silly!” still in that laughing whisper, and kissed the back of her neck.

The smell which she kept telling herself was only seaweed got stronger. There was an oozy feeling under foot. The lamp stopped a little way ahead, and they were called forward one by one to look out over a lip of rock and see black water moving under the light a couple of feet below. The walls of the cave went away up out of sight. They glistened with moisture. The light glittered on the water. Jane felt as if at any moment the whole cliff might tilt and drown them. The glittering and the glistening and the oozy feeling under foot began to run together in her mind. Just for a minute she didn’t know where she was, or that it was only Jeremy’s arm that kept her on her feet.

When the giddy feeling passed they were going back up the slope. She said,

“I’m all right now. Oh, Jeremy, I do hate secret passages.”

“I rather gathered that. Sure you’re all right?”

“Yes, quite.”

He let her take her weight again. They came out into the cellar and up the cellar stairs to the warmth from the kitchen door and the wholesome smell of food. The door was still half open, as it had been when they went down. There was a fragrance of coffee. Jane said close to Jeremy’s ear,

“Let’s go and see Annie Castell.”

It was quite easy to fall back and let the others go on. They pushed the kitchen door and went in, to find themselves in a big room with a stone floor and a low ceiling crossed by heavy beams. The beams had big hooks in them here and there, and in the old days there would have been hams hanging up to cure. Now there were only strings of onions and bunches of dried herbs.

Annie Castell turned round from the range. She was a heavily built woman of middle height with a flat, pale face which reminded Jane of a scone, and flat, pale hair dragged back into a scanty knot behind. At first it was difficult to say whether it was fair, or grey, or somewhere betwixt and between. She looked at them out of small nondescript-coloured eyes which had no expression at all. The few sandy lashes did nothing to shade them, and the wide colourless eyebrows showed like smudges on the pale skin. If Jane had stopped to think she would have felt discouraged. But she was too full of a sense of escape. The warm room and the smell of coffee were too heartening. She said in her prettiest voice,

“We’re some of the cousins. This is Jeremy Taverner, and I am Jane Heron. We want to say thank you for the lovely dinner, Cousin Annie.”

She put out her hand as she spoke. Annie Castell looked at it, looked at her own, wiped it slowly upon the washed-out overall which enveloped her, and then just touched Jane’s fingers in a limp, hesitating way. She did not speak at all.

Jane persevered.

“It was a most beautiful dinner-wasn’t it, Jeremy?”

“I don’t know when I tasted anything better.”

Annie Castell made some kind of a movement, but whether it was intended to be a modest disclaimer, or a mere acknowledgement of compliments received, it would have been difficult to say. For a moment nobody said anything. Then a raw-boned elderly woman emerged from what was evidently the scullery. She had a battered-looking hat on her head, and she was buttoning up a man’s overcoat some sizes too large for her.

“I got through,” she said in a hoarse confidential tone. “And if you’re really not wanting me to do the silver-”

Annie Castell spoke for the first time. She had a country accent and a very flat, discouraged voice.

“No, Eily can do the silver. You’ve done the glass?”

“I didn’t know I had to.”

“Yes, please.”

The woman bridled.

“I’m sure I don’t know that I can. Mr. Bridling, he won’t half carry on if I’m late. But there, if I must I must, and no good having a set-to about it. I’ll tell him you kept me.”

“Thank you.”

Annie Castell turned back to Jeremy and Jane.

“The coffee has gone through,” she said in her flat monotone.

They were dismissed, and, as far as it was possible to tell, without acquiring any merit. As they shut the kitchen door behind them, Jeremy said,