Le preceded the party with his lighted taper, and they followed him down the steep and narrow stairs, and found themselves last in a dark, circular room, with strong, iron-bound doors around its walls. Some of these had fallen from their hinges, showing openings into still darker recesses.
Le, with his taper, crept along the wall exploring these, and found them to be dark cells, scarcely with space enough to hold a well-grown human being. Many of them had rusting staples in the walls, with fragments of broken iron chains attached.
Even the young midshipman shuddered and refrained from calling the attention of his companions to the horror.
But he made more discoveries than these. Groping about the gloomy place with his wax taper, he came upon various rusted and broken instruments of torture, the thumbscrew, the iron boot, the rack, all of which he recognized from the descriptions he had read of these articles elsewhere; and there were other instruments that he had read of, yet knew at sight to be of the same sort; so that at last, when he came upon the grim headsman’s block, it was with a feeling of relief.
“What are those things, Le?” inquired Odalite, following him.
“Oh, rubbish, dear. Be careful where you step, you might fall over them,” he replied. “And I think we had better leave this place and go to the upper air now,” he added, groping along the walls to find the door at the foot of the stairs down which they had come.
He found the place, but found also something that had escaped his notice. It was a niche in the wall beside the door. The niche was about six feet high and two feet broad; the opening was rough and ragged at the sides, and there was a pile of rubbish at the foot, which on examination proved to be fallen stones and mortar.
Le trimmed his taper until it gave a brighter light, and then referred to his guidebook and unadvisedly read aloud from it:
“‘In the Torture Chamber. Cunigunda. At the foot of the stairs leading down to this dreadful theater of mediæval punishment stands, in the right side of the wall, a curious niche, high and narrow, which was once the living grave of a lovely woman. About fifty years ago the closing front wall of this sepulcher fell and revealed a secret of centuries. A tradition of the castle tells of the sudden disappearance of the Lady Cunigunda of Enderby, the eldest daughter of the baron and the most beautiful woman of her time, for whose hand princes and nobles had sued in vain, because her affections had become fixed on a yeoman of my lord’s guard. In the spring of her youth and beauty she was mysteriously lost to the world. Her fate would never have been discovered had not the closing wall of the niche at the foot of the stairs in the torture chamber fallen and disclosed the upright skeleton and the stone tablet, upon which was cut, in old English letters, the following inscription:
CUNIGUNDA,