18
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE WAS BUILT ATOP A craggy hilltop, and if you followed the narrow garden path down and to the left of the building’s stone facade, you might discover the small wooden door tucked into the slope itself, directly under the property. It was a mottled door, sun bleached and swollen from rain and damp, and nearly invisible in the dark, moonless night—with a small metal grate at eye level that slid open with a clank when Jack Currer knocked.
“Who’s there?” said a voice on the other side of the door. A woman’s voice, Hazel’s, feigning confidence and taking on an artificial masculine deepness to scare off someone foolish enough to intrude.
Jack raised the lantern he was holding to illuminate his face. “Don’t be daft, it’s me. Who else would know how to find the hidden door in the middle of the night to the bloody dungeon you have built into the side of a castle?”
“What’s the password?”
“Oh—er…” Jack looked down to his palm, where he had written the words in ink. Sweat made the letters bleed together. “Morto … vivios … bo—No, no, wait. Something docks?”
Hazel sighed and opened the heavy, creaking dungeon door. “Mortui vivos docent.”
Jack pushed his wheelbarrow past Hazel and into the underground chamber. “I’m sorry, I skipped my Latin lessons at Eton.”
Hazel had to press her body against the damp wall to avoid getting run over. “But clearly not your etiquette lessons.”
Jack finished pushing the wheelbarrow and let the handles fall. He exhaled from the effort and wiped his hands on his trousers, leaving a streak of ink. “Mortui vivos docent,” he repeated. “So what does it mean?”
Hazel stared at the dark mass hidden under the blanket of Jack’s wheelbarrow. “‘The dead teach the living.’ I read that in a book.”
The dungeon was lit with torches burning in the wall and a handful of gas lamps set on the workman’s table. There was no window to the outside world, save for the sliding grate in the door, which Hazel shut firmly once the door was closed and locked. On the table was a collection of strange silver tools. Some Jack recognized, like the knives and the bone saw. But others had curved edges and handles like scissors. They were a mismatched set, some already rusted, some clearly made from fine silver. The collection of a magpie who hoarded what she had been able to find.
Nailed into the wall were two pairs of manacles, where a prisoner might be strung up from his wrists. “Is this place used?” Jack asked, a little fearful. “As an actual dungeon, I mean.”
“It can be,” Hazel said.
Jack laughed.
“The truth is,” Hazel said, “I don’t think it’s ever been used for a real prisoner. It’s been empty my entire life. Until now.”
Jack picked up a small scalpel with a wooden handle and twirled it in his fingers. “Until now, when you’ve made it your own private laboratory.”
“Something like that.”
“Your mum and dad don’t mind? Their little girl sneaking out at night, under the cliffside, fraternizing with resurrectionists?”
“My father is on a Royal Navy post on Saint Helena, supervising the exile of Napoleon. My mother is”—Hazel hesitated to come up with the right words—“on holiday, in England. She never really pays any attention to me, even when she is here.” There was something about Jack’s face—the way his lip curled up at its edges, his cool gray eyes that seemed endless, as if they were windows into an expanse of calm ocean that went for miles—that made her want to tell him things, to open up and say the things she had never said out loud. Maybe it was because she had never had anyone to say them out loud to.
“So,” Jack said, stepping closer to Hazel while the torchlight danced across his face. “You’re in a big castle, all alone. I didn’t think that ladies were ever alone.”
The unfamiliar electric shock charged through Hazel’s body, and she suddenly became aware of how foolish her actions might have been. She had told a stranger where she lived, invited him inside, and then told him that she lived without protection. Jack could be dangerous. He could be a member of a band of thieves who would arrive as soon as Jack gave the signal, and a horde of criminals would pillage Hawthornden and leave her bound and gagged in a corner.
Hazel involuntarily reached for her biggest knife on the table. “Maybe I’m not a lady,” Hazel said.
Jack flicked his eyes up and down her body, and then began to laugh with such earnestness, a genuine childlike warmth, that Hazel somehow knew his plan had never been to rob her.