The Purpose of Miss Shepley

Chapter Eight (part II)

"Father busied himself painting while Mother was lying in," Earnest explained. "He liked painting... He always said he would hire a master and really study it some day."

He blinked again, and then he ate an entire slice of bread in three bites.

Lady Oakhurst breezed into the room before long. She greeted me warmly and somewhat theatrically, and then she unilaterally decided that what we all really needed this morning was a turn through the garden.

She said, "Earnest, when you've finished here, why don't you show Miss Shepley back to her room to fetch a hat?" -- and then she breezed out again.

Earnest watched her retreat, his lips pursed and his eyebrows raised.

"I think I'm supposed to beguile you with our riches now," he said, giving me a shrug and a wry smile.

"Is that what that was about..."

I finished an egg tart and laid my fork aside with a full-bellied sigh. Earnest crammed another slice of bread in his mouth, then he wiped his lips. A moment later, he was on his feet, offering me his arm.

He led me into a long hall of some kind -- it was too wide to be a hallway, really, but it was rather too long and narrow to be a proper room... It tickled at me as I looked round it, like the dressing room in my apartments.

The walls were covered with brocade in a golden yellow silk. Two gilt-framed mirrors, each big enough for a whole troop of the Lord Regent's army to use at once, hung on opposing walls, so that they reflected nothing so much as each other.

Under each mirror sat a pair of velvet settees. A little marble table was wedged between them, seemingly for no other reason than to hold a crystal vase overflowing with roses. The flowers were almost the exact same shade of buttery yellow as the velvet settees.

"My mother decorated this," Earnest said. "She's very proud of it."

"She has quite an eye..." I murmured. It was an impressive room, and I reckoned that was its sole purpose.

"She did the whole ground floor like this."

Earnest fell quiet a moment. I cast a glance up and down the room again, the implications of this statement seeping into me like flood waters.

When I turned my eyes back to Earnest, I found him watching me sidelong, mischief glinting in his green eyes.

"I say, would you like to see a secret?"

I raised an eyebrow, wary. "Is it the recipe for the pickled onions?"

"Oh, no, this is much better than that..."

Earnest gave me a terribly scampish grin, and then he grasped my hand. He led me on a twisting path through sitting rooms and servants' passages to a dining hall, oak-clad and cavernous. Great carved sideboards as tall as a man flanked a ludicrously massive table, which could easily seat thirty or forty. A fireplace big enough to roast half a steer filled the far wall.

"This is one of my most favorite things," Earnest told me, his voice almost a whisper. He led me to the fireplace and leaned against the paneling beside it. A loud click echoed through the empty room, and then the wall swung inward on some unseen axis.

I gasped.

"You have a secret passageway...? Ewert doesn't have a secret passageway!" This seemed grievously unfair.

Earnest waved me in. The door swiftly closed behind me, startling me. I had half-expected damp air and mold and crawling things, but the passageway was clean and almost cheerful. Sunlight streamed in through high windows, and a line of lamps would light the way after dark. It was not the sort of secret hole to hide outlaws and Wolves in, but merely a corridor for servants to get from one place to another quick and quietly.