Page 37 - Hotel Tunnel's 100 Years of History

the house allowed more freedom, had observed during his duties in and out of the house that this basement, as something remote, was never at- tended to. It is likely that the guard on this side of the house, on the very busy Adelgatan, mostly walked between the house's main staircase and its corner at Kansligatan. The decision to escape this way was immedi- ately followed by action. Since access to the Ulfeldt's bed chambers was almost completely granted to D'Aranda, their plan could be carried out unnoticed. On one of the nights before the 15th of July, D'Aranda made a hole in the floor's truss bottom, which could be done without much difficulty, since the ceiling was not vaulted like in the northern cellars, but was made of timber. On July 15 or 16, the escape took place, it is
not known which day, probably in the afternoon, when the guards were having their lunch and the guard at Adelgatan may have been away for
a while. All in all, Ulfeldt, who was pale and weak from his long illness, and disguised by a priest's clothing provided by D'Aranda, unrecog- nizable, practiced at the appointed time, after an emotional farewell to Leonora Christina, with D'Aranda's help through the hole in the floor to the basement below - corresponding to the current fruit and game cellar - and after this basement "connected to another and third", as it is called in a story, the fugitives reached the eastern basement under the trapp- gavelhuset. Ulfeldt and D'Aranda thus entered the current old 700-year- old cellar vaults through a door, now located where the entrance to the
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