Amanderella and the Mystery of the Silent Statue.Chapter 3.

Chapter Three.

 

The First Puzzle.

 

Amanderella remained crouched on the smooth stone, her grey travelling dress pooling around her boots.

If someone regularly does something, it leaves a trace, she reasoned. Werlyn was eccentric, but he was not a ghost; he had to get back into the house after his turns in the garden. The clerks from Scroggins, Shooter, Burnet and Bobble had missed it because they were looking for locksmiths' work. They were looking for something obvious.

She leaned closer to the iron-hard oak, right where it met the worn flagstone at the bottom right corner. There, hidden under the shadow of what looked like a deeply rooted tuft of groundsel, the stone wasn't grey. It was dark, almost black, with a faint, greasy sheen.

Amanderella peeled off her right driving glove and touched the groundsel with her bare index finger. It didn't feel like a plant stem. It felt smooth, slightly waxy, and left a faint residue on her skin. She brought her finger to her nose and sniffed. Not earth. Not sap. Something… manufactured, with the unmistakable smell of machine oil.

She straightened slowly. “That,” she said, “is not a weed.”

Sir Cottam blinked at it. “My dear, it is groundsel. I have been pulling it out of my own garden for forty years.”

Amanderella shook her head. “Real groundsel bends. This one flexes. And it is entirely too regular. It was made to look like a weed. This is the exact mixture of grease used by gardeners to clean and rust-proof their tools. Werlyn hasn’t used a key to open this door. Every time he came in from the garden, he used the iron tip of his spade, or perhaps the metal corner of his wheelbarrow, to press a hidden release near the ground. Decades of scraping his oily garden tools against that exact spot has left a dark, unmistakable smudge on the stone.”

She stood up, dusting her hands, and looked down the weed-choked path toward the overgrown lawn. For a good five minutes, she said nothing at all. Sir Cottam watched her with a puzzled expression, but he kept his peace. Instead, he bent to inspect the tip of his gold-topped cane, brushing away an imaginary speck of dirt with the air of a man grateful for something to do with his hands.

Amanderella crouched again, following the false weed to where it disappeared between two stones of the step. Now that she knew what she was looking for, she could see the faintest metal ring around its base, disguised under a smear of dirt and a few carefully glued grains of gravel.

“It’s a lever,” she said. “Werlyn hid a lever in the weeds.”

Sir Cottam stared at her, then at the groundsel, then back at her. “Why on earth would anyone hide a lever in a weed?”

“Because,” Amanderella said, “no one ever looks at weeds.”

She gave the stem a firm twist. Nothing happened. The mechanism refused to budge.

“Sir Cottam,” Amanderella said, her voice crisp in the heavy afternoon air. “Where exactly did you say the villagers found poor Werlyn and his wheelbarrow?”

Sir Cottam cleared his throat. “In the front garden. Just there.” He pointed vaguely toward the tangled clumps of grass. “Near the sundial. He had apparently been trimming the lavender. Or attempting to. He was not a natural gardener.”

Amanderella’s eyebrow lifted a fraction. “Then why was he out gardening at all? The borders look as though they’ve been abandoned since the reign of Queen Victoria.”

Sir Cottam winced. “He insisted on doing it himself. He claimed the garden ‘spoke to him’. Personally, I think it shouted. He preferred things untidy, said it felt more honest. Though between you and me, I suspect it was simply a grand excuse because he didn’t have enough money left to pay a proper gardener.”

“So,” she said, filtering out the gossip, “he was not standing on the steps when he died.”

“No,” Sir Cottam said. “He was a good twenty yards away.”

Amanderella nodded once, sharply. “Then the lever is jammed because Werlyn never returned to reset it.”

Sir Cottam stared. “Reset it?”

“Yes.” She gestured to the false weed. “This mechanism is not a simple release. It is part of a sequence. A puzzle. Werlyn would have pressed this lever after completing a first step elsewhere. But he died before he could return and complete the cycle. And because he didn’t reset it, the mechanism is locked.”

Sir Cottam looked faintly ill. “So, the door is stuck because Werlyn died at the wrong moment?”

“Exactly.” Amanderella rose, dusting her hands once more. “Which means that the first step is not here at all. Werlyn would never put the first step where a casual visitor might stumble on it. It must be somewhere in the garden. Somewhere he would naturally pass with his wheelbarrow. Somewhere he would touch every day without thinking.”

Her eyes swept the weed‑choked path, the overgrown lawn, and the tangle of lavender and nettles. She marched across the uneven grass toward the sundial, her cane-tapping companion sinking slightly into the soft earth behind her.

Sir Cottam paused beside the stone dial, peering down at the shadow. Then, with a small frown of concentration, he drew out his pocket‑watch and compared the two. “Well,” he said, adjusting his spectacles, “either my watch is slow, or this sundial is fast.” He looked up at Amanderella with the hopeful air of a man who believes he has contributed something useful.

Amanderella regarded him for a moment, one eyebrow lifting a fraction. “Or,” she said gently, “Werlyn never set it at all. Be that as it may, this sundial is too far away from the porch. It would require an immense system of rods and levers under the path to connect the two, and the ground shows no sign of that level of excavation. The question is: what did he do?”

She turned her back on the sundial, walking over to where the standard wooden garden wheelbarrow sat abandoned. She examined it carefully, but it was just a regular barrow, stained with soil and age.

Suddenly, she clicked her fingers. She bent down, scanning the ground with the practised eye of someone who notices what others miss.

“There,” she said. “There is a shallow groove in the earth.”

It was barely visible beneath the tangle of nettles, a deep rut worn into the soil by years of a heavy wheelbarrow wheel bumping over the exact same stone. Amanderella knelt beside it. The flagstone embedded in the bottom of the rut was slightly lower than the others, and significantly smoother. When she pressed her fingertips to its edge, it rocked, just a fraction, on a hidden pivot.

She smiled. “Werlyn didn’t need a long, complicated mechanism under the path, Sir Cottam. He used gravity. When he rolled his heavy wheelbarrow over this specific stone, his weight depressed it. That released the safety catch on the lever by the door.”

Sir Cottam stared. “So, the first step is… here?”

“Here,” Amanderella confirmed. “Right where he always walked.”

She stood up and placed her full, deliberate weight onto the pivoting stone.

A deep, satisfying clunk echoed from the threshold. Up on the porch, the false weed‑lever twitched.

Amanderella returned to the steps, grasped the disguised metal stem, and twisted. This time, it moved smoothly and cleanly, exactly as Werlyn had intended.

The seamless oak door groaned, shuddered, and began to swing inward.

Sir Cottam stared at the widening gap, his mouth slightly open, his cane frozen mid‑air. He looked from the dark interior back to the muddy rut where Amanderella stood, utterly dumbfounded.

"Good heavens," he breathed, wiping a sudden bead of sweat from his forehead. "In all the years I visited Werlyn, and heaven knows I was the only soul he let across the threshold, he never once greeted me outside. I always arrived at the front, rang the bell, and there he'd be, waiting in the hall as though he'd never left it. I never saw him do this. Not once."

He looked at Amanderella with a newfound, slightly alarmed respect. “To think I walked right past that stone a hundred times, and all the while the key to the place was nothing more than the weight of a gardener’s barrow.”

The interior hall was lit by a row of neat electric wall lamps, their steady glow falling across the polished floorboards. Werlyn had clearly preferred light he could control, especially in an entrance with no windows at all.

Amanderella stepped over the threshold, her eyes adjusting to the softer, artificial light. “Werlyn understood human nature, Sir Cottam. A lawyer looks for a lock; a thief looks for a window. Neither of them ever looks at the ground where a man works.”

The air inside was cool, still, and faintly metallic. It wasn't stale, but rather undisturbed, as though the house had been sealed like a tomb for years. Sir Cottam hovered anxiously behind her, unwilling to enter until she pronounced it safe.

“When I visited,” he whispered, his voice hushed and hollow, “Werlyn was always here. Always. Standing just inside the door, waiting for me. I never saw him come from anywhere else. He would greet me, take my coat, and show me straight into the drawing room.”

Amanderella nodded, her gaze sweeping the interior. “Then he never meant you to see anything beyond this point.”

She stepped aside so Sir Cottam could see properly. The hall was barely ten feet deep. Beyond it lay a corridor: long, straight, narrow, and entirely featureless. There were no doors. No alcoves. No windows. Just two smooth walls of dark wood panelling and a strip of worn flagstones running into the gloom.

Sir Cottam blinked. “Good heavens. I don’t remember this at all.”

“You wouldn’t,” Amanderella said. “Werlyn controlled exactly what you saw. He kept you in the hall, positioned his body carefully, and made sure you never looked past him.”

Sir Cottam swallowed hard. “But… surely I would have noticed a corridor this long.”

“Not if the drawing room door was always open,” Amanderella said, “and if Werlyn stood directly in front of the view. People see what they expect to see, Sir Cottam. You expected a normal country house hall, so that is all your eyes registered.”

She took a few deliberate steps into the passage. Her heels clicked softly on the stone. The sound echoed strangely, not loudly, but with a faint, metallic tone, as though the walls behind the wood panelling were completely hollow.

She ran her fingertips along the panelling. It felt smooth, cold, and perfectly ordinary. Or at least, it seemed so at first sight.

“This corridor,” she said quietly, “is exactly what it appears to be.”

Sir Cottam frowned, peering over her shoulder. “A corridor.”

“Yes. A very long one. With absolutely no doors.”

He looked along it, suddenly startled. “Good heavens. So, there aren’t.”

“In a house this size,” Amanderella said, “that is highly unusual. A corridor that leads nowhere is unusual to say the least.”

She took another step forward. Nothing shifted. Nothing moved. Nothing revealed itself. Just the blank corridor, stretching onward into the shadows.

“This is beginning to be most interesting,” she said, a small smile playing on her lips. “Werlyn wants us to walk it. And he wants us to believe nothing will happen.”

Sir Cottam looked down at his shoes, as though hoping they might offer some legal advice. “Let’s hope he's right,” he muttered quietly.