“Someone loved it once.” I turned my attention back to the great instrument and ran my hand over the wood as we drew the cover over it to put it to bed.

“Place used to be a conservatory. A boarding school for musicians and the like. They built this addition just to house the instruments. A shame what it’s become, all quiet and dull.”

I inhaled and laid a hand over the covered instrument, feeling the warmth of friendship around me, and gave a wobbly smile. “There’s still music in these walls.”

My fleeting thought as we left was of the very distant music I’d heard on that sleepless night on duty. There was a pianoforte here. Perhaps I hadn’t imagined the music after all.

But who had played it?

Bridget pulled me back in the dark tunnel while the others went on, and we turned a different way and up a few rickety wooden steps. “The priests used this as a lookout to see when the sentry seeking them out had gone and it was safe to come out of hiding.” We climbed up directly into a high clock tower that was open to the night air. Four clockfaces as tall as me stood sentry over the vast moors beyond. I watched the clock mechanism click and turn, driving the hands around.

Bridget looked over the ticking gears in the center of the room, relaxing as she watched all the wheels turning each other and the rods leading up to the clock. “I like it here.” Bridget settled herself onto a bench, body slumped against the wall. Her foot tapped the rough wood floor in the slow, steady rhythm of the clock. It seemed to have melted her nervous energy.

“Surely if there’s a priest hole, it leads to an escape, doesn’t it?”

Bridget shook her head, eyes closed. “The tunnel has a door on each floor, and it lets out in that music room. Used to be a tiny little space for him to hide, barely a closet, but it was knocked down and expanded by the conservatory into that great room. And there’s no exit from there except the main doors into the front hall, but those are locked up tight.”

I heaved a giant sigh and settled back against the wall.

“Before you go making any more excuses, there are tools up here to work on the clock. Plenty of them. You can help yourself, then bring them back when you’re done.”

I sat still, delighting in the steady beat resembling the metronome of my childhood practices, taking comfort as if leaning against a mother’s heart.

“How did you find this place? The addition, the tunnel, the passageway to the clock tower.”