Chapter 4 - The Woman Behind the Wall
The gasoline ignited before Adrian could force the door open.
Flames spread across the hallway, turning the gap beneath the door orange.
Smoke entered the nursery.
I searched the walls for another passage, remembering how the archive had contained a concealed exit.
“There has to be a way out.”
Adrian lifted a chair and struck the iron shutters.
They did not move.
The flames outside grew louder.
Then someone knocked from inside the wall.
Three slow knocks.
Adrian and I froze.
The sound came again.
I pressed my ear against the panel beside the blue angel.
“Hello?”
A woman’s voice answered.
“Move the second bed.”
We dragged the bed away from the wall.
A rectangular section opened inward.
Margaret stood on the other side.
Her hair was disheveled, and a purple bruise covered her cheek.
“You’re alive,” I said.
“Not for long if we stay here.”
She led us into a narrow maintenance shaft.
We crawled through darkness until we reached an old laundry room beneath the east wing.
Margaret locked the metal hatch behind us.
“Who took you?” Adrian asked.
“Your mother’s security chief.”
“Graham?”
Margaret nodded.
“She kept me in a storage building near the southern gate. One of the groundsmen helped me escape.”
“Why didn’t you go to the police?”
“Because Graham’s brother is the deputy commissioner.”
My suspicion had been correct.
Adrian looked sick.
“How much of this did you know?”
“Enough to be ashamed. Not enough to stop it.”
Margaret sat on a wooden bench.
She had worked at Ashford Manor since before the twins were born. On the night of the nursery fire, she had found my mother carrying one infant toward the service stairs.
“Clara told me Victoria was planning to send the surviving child away,” Margaret said. “She thought Charles would expose the falsified medical records.”
“Which child survived?” Adrian asked.
Margaret looked at him.
“I don’t know.”
“You said my mother believed the wrong son survived.”
“She did.”
“Then who changed the bracelets?”
Margaret hesitated.
“Charles.”
Adrian stepped back.
“My father?”
“He wanted Victoria to remain uncertain. If she could not prove which child survived, she could not control the trust.”
“Why would he do that to his own family?”
“Because Charles Ashford loved power more than he loved either son.”
Margaret reached into her coat and removed a folded document.
It was a trust amendment.
According to its terms, the Ashford estate would pass to the verified firstborn son on his thirty-fifth birthday. If no son could be genetically verified, control of the family companies would transfer to the Ashford Foundation.
Adrian’s thirty-fifth birthday was four weeks away.
The gala would take place one week before it.
“That’s why this is happening now,” I said.
Victoria needed to prove Adrian’s identity before the deadline.
Or destroy evidence that might challenge him.
Margaret took my hand.
“There is something else.”
She told me my mother had not left the estate alone in 1997.
She had taken a baby.
My heart began pounding.
“What baby?”
“One of the twins.”
“That’s impossible. Adrian grew up here.”
“One child remained here. The other was taken through the southern gate.”
“But you said one died.”
“That was what we were told.”
Margaret’s eyes filled with tears.
“The coffin was never opened.”
The room fell silent.
Two infants.
One supposed death.
One child at Ashford Manor.
One child carried away.
“Where did my mother take him?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Charles caught her before she reached the road. There was an argument near House 17.”
The number struck me like a bell.
“My mother told me to run to House 17 on the night she died.”
Margaret nodded.
“It was an old gatekeeper’s cottage. Charles used it for private meetings.”
“Is it still standing?”
“Barely.”
Adrian checked the time.
“We should go before my mother realizes we escaped.”
We left the laundry room through a tunnel leading to the gardens.
Snow had begun falling heavily.
House 17 stood beyond the tree line, half hidden by dead ivy. Its windows were boarded, and the roof sagged beneath the snow.
My brass key opened the front door.
Inside, the cottage had been abandoned for years.
We found a table, a rusted stove, and a wall covered with children’s height marks.
The highest line was dated twelve years earlier.
The year Charles supposedly died.
Adrian ran his fingers over a name scratched into the wall.
Nate.
Someone had lived there.
Recently enough to reach adulthood.
In the bedroom, we discovered medical supplies, newspaper clippings about Adrian, and dozens of photographs taken from a distance.
Adrian leaving his office.
Adrian attending university.
Adrian standing beside Victoria at Charles’s memorial.
The final photograph showed me entering Ashford Manor two days earlier.
On the back, someone had written:
She has the key.
Tonight, she learns which brother deserves the name.
A floorboard moved behind us.
May you like
A man stepped from the shadows.
He looked almost exactly like Adrian.
