“With the steel and with the poker—grinding the bricks into dust, and mingling the dust with the ashes of the fire, so that the warder himself carried them away.”
“And why not escape this way?”
“Because, in the first place, the door of that room is kept locked; secondly, because it opens also into the same corridor, and at the end of that corridor is the guard-room, where there is always a warder. Your bell rings in that room.”
“How did you learn all these things?”
“How did you learn all the little traits of human nature, which the reviewers say you put in your book? By observation, of course. I had to walk along that corridor to reach the grounds, when I was allowed to go out.”
“But you could bore a hole into the corridor?”
“Yes, and the bits of broken plaster would tell the story—that would be simple. Besides, to what end? Once I thought of boring under the corridor.”
“How do that?”
“By lifting up one of the planks of the floor here; there is a space between the flooring and the ceiling, and that corridor has a kind of tunnel along under it. What for? why the hot-water pipes, to warm the cells, are carried along it—the cells of the violent, whose rooms have no fire-grates—that is of no use, for the tunnel at one end comes to the furnaces, where there is usually a man, neither could I get through the heat. At the other there is the thick outer wall of stone, and just beneath is Theodore’s own room—his ears are sharp. Useless, my friend. This knowledge of the premises seems to you wonderful, simply because you have been here so short a time. Why, I have never seen the outside of this side of the building, except a partial glimpse when I was brought, gagged and bound, in a closed carriage; yet look at this.”
He handed to Aymer a sheet of paper, on which was an elevation plan.