Gently with the Innocents Read Online Free PDF Page A

his shoulders.
    They packed the trash back in the drawers and left the book-room to its rot. But wherever you went in that icy house you met neglect and decay. Rooms that were furnished had been left to frowst behind closed doors and jammed windows. Empty rooms, showing wormy floorboards, exhaled a doggy smell that was unmistakable.
    In a cheap wardrobe in one of the bedrooms they found a woman’s clothes hanging, below them a hand-bag and mouldy shoes. On the dressing-table, a prayer-book.
    ‘The lofts . . . they’re worth seeing.’
    Each loft was reached by a separate staircase. Three great halls under the high-pitched rafters, they suggested the carcases of long-dead whales. They were floored, and one possessed a huge hearth. The rafters caging them were rot-stained and peppered. A number had been replaced with poles of fir to which the bark was still clinging.
    Then there was the priest-hole, or something like one, which Gissing had discovered in a downstairs room. The drawers below an alcove in a wall pulled out, and lo! behind them was a small, dank cell.
    Where they’d hidden the gold?
    Gently knelt and pushed his head in. Light filtered down from a small, high window. But the alcove could have been of later construction, and was probably only intended to fill an awkward corner.
    And yet . . . one more odd thing about Harrisons.
    ‘Let’s go out into the garden.’
    Gissing led him to a cobwebbed door that clearly had not been used lately.
    From the rear, the house looked a planless jumble. The space between the wings had been filled carelessly. Grotesquely sloping auxiliary roofs made cradles for moss and even young saplings. Then, the west wing . . .
    ‘Look . . . that wing is different.’
    Standing out here, you could spot it at once. Besides being taller, the west wing was brick, while the rest of the house was timber-framed.
    ‘Older, would you say, sir?’
    No doubt of that: the stone-framed windows gave it away. And above, badly in need of pointing, reared the original chimneys Gently had noticed.
    ‘Listen . . . those curious features . . . they’re all in this corner of the house. The priest-hole, the rooms at different levels – including the one where Peachment was attacked.’
    ‘And now you see why. We’ve two different houses . . . the main part built on to something older. Sixteenth century – even fifteenth . . . perhaps going back to the Dissolution.’
    ‘You mean . . . ?’
    Gissing put on his blank look.
    Gently shrugged and shook his head. At least it was something of a coincidence that an Innocent III medal had turned up here.
    ‘Surely the house is on record somewhere.’
    Gissing’s blank look didn’t falter.
    ‘Isn’t it scheduled?’
    ‘Don’t think so, sir. We’ve got so many old drums round Cross.’
    Gently moved deeper into the grassy jungle. Every line of the house was telling the same story. Compare, for example, the firm outline of the west wing with the slight sag and tilt of its neighbour. And the stone-framed windows: three complete storeys, against only two elsewhere – with those at the lowest level bricked-up, turning a sunken room into a half-cellar.
    A house that silently seethed with history.
    And an old, muttering man shuffling about it.
    Under some rotting floorboard, behind a loose brick . . . wasn’t it possible . . . just possible?
    ‘Reckon that’s the window of the priest-hole, sir.’
    Gissing’s interest flickered for a moment.
    ‘And up there . . . that’ll be the little room. You can just see the back of the chair.’
    A tiny window with fixed, mullioned panes, and once a stout bar behind them. A punishment cell . . . a monkish prison? With an observation shutter in the door?
    The garden itself was entirely enclosed and accessible only from the house. A sizeable plot, it showed no sign that old Peachment had ever set foot there.
    ‘What’s the old brick place over by the wall?’
    ‘Don’t know, sir. But I can guess.’
    Gissing was