Only a Monster(Monsters #1)(70)

‘Royal escape route.’ Aaron sounded grudgingly impressed. ‘Every palace has one.’

‘Quickly,’ Tom said. He bent to pick up Frankie. ‘Before someone else comes in.’

One by one, they slipped into the room behind the cabinet. Joan was last to step into the dark space. She pulled the cabinet shut behind her with another click—and just in time. Muffled voices sounded through the wall a moment later.

The darkness was complete. Joan could hear her own breaths and the muffled voices from the party outside. She could hear Ruth fidgeting beside her, dress rustling.

Tom’s voice sounded, barely audible. ‘Forgot to bring a torch.’

More rustling, and then an illumination revealed Aaron holding his phone. ‘This won’t last,’ he warned. ‘Battery’s almost gone.’ He held it up.

Joan had thought that they’d entered a narrow space—had been hunched a little to accommodate it—but now she saw that they were in a vast room with red-draped balconies and wooden pews. High above, the ceiling seemed to be covered in gold leaf. The palace chapel, she thought wonderingly. King Henry had married Anne Boleyn here.

‘Come on,’ Tom whispered. ‘We won’t have long before the gate closes.’





SIXTEEN




In spite of the danger, Joan couldn’t help but feel a guilty wonder as Tom led them out of the chapel and into the palace proper. She’d always loved history. And, stripped of the showy costume of monsters, this real, lived-in part of Whitehall felt more of a marvel than the fire-breathing statues of the great hall.

These dark spaces were the suites of Charles II and his mistresses. The walls were draped with rich tapestries of men on horseback and women in long gowns. The beds were as ornate as cakes—all chocolate curls and flourishes. Some of the sheets were rumpled, as if their owners had just gotten out of bed.

There was a strange air of suspension about each room. Letters and ink lay carelessly on desks. Doors were ajar.

‘How can the Monster Court be inside Whitehall Palace?’ Joan whispered to Tom.

‘It isn’t always,’ Tom said. ‘Sometimes it manifests in other places. They say that the King steals these places for a frozen moment.’

‘How?’ Joan said, but Tom only shook his head. ‘And where is everyone?’ Joan asked. ‘Where are all the humans who live here? Shouldn’t they all be here too?’ Tom shook his head again, as if he didn’t know.

They walked through curtained spaces, guided only by the light from Aaron’s phone. They all fell silent as they entered a room with its curtains flung wide. The view through the window was the Thames under a bright moon.

The river was closer than Joan would have expected. She remembered reading that the river had been higher in the past. Aaron made an unhappy sound. Joan felt it too. There was something disturbing about the scene—beyond the height of the river. It took her a second to understand what it was.

Nothing was moving outside. The river was frozen—every ripple still. Moonlight lay along it like spilled milk. Trees and low buildings were dim outlines on the other side of the bank.

‘I hate this place,’ Ruth whispered.

‘The timeline hates it too,’ Aaron said. ‘I can feel it.’

‘I always thought that the King was just a man,’ Ruth said. ‘But this kind of power is . . . I’ve never heard of anything like it.’ She gazed out at the frozen river. ‘What if everything they say about the King is true? What if he can see everything?’

‘He can’t,’ Joan whispered back, with more confidence than she felt. ‘Or we wouldn’t be here. We wouldn’t have got this far.’

Ruth shook her head. She was still looking out at the view. The window’s reflection made her face ghostly. ‘There’s something wrong about this,’ she whispered.

‘This place—’ Joan started.

‘Not just this place,’ Ruth said. ‘There’s something wrong about all of this. I feel as if we’ve got something wrong.’

‘What do you mean?’ Joan said.

‘I don’t know,’ Ruth said. ‘I don’t know. It’s just a feeling.’

Joan didn’t know what she meant. To her, this seemed right. Gran had given her a key to the Monster Court. And now they were here. Now they were achingly close to bringing their family back to life. ‘We can’t stop now,’ she said. ‘We’re almost there.’ She looked at Tom for confirmation.

He nodded. ‘We’re near to the lion’s den now.’

But Joan started to feel the wrongness too as Tom led them down a long stone gallery, half open to a formal garden. In the garden, there were statues of animals on pedestals—a chained leopard in carnival colours, a unicorn with a horn as sharp as a sabre—dozens of them, garishly painted and gilded.

‘Where is everybody?’ Joan asked him again. ‘Where are the people who live here? Where’s the King?’

‘The King is never seen,’ Tom said. When Joan turned to him, he said: ‘When he wants something done, he sends a member of the Monster Court in his place.’

Joan remembered the story Aaron told. ‘Like Conrad?’ she said. The man who’d executed Aaron’s cousin.