Justice Hall Page 10

  “The stairs were bricked over, some time in the early nineteenth century. It wasn’t until about thirty years ago that Marsh’s father had the bricks down—some project Phillida’s mother had in mind for the stillroom near the kitchens. That tunnel was built by the second Duke in the 1750s. Seems he had a peculiar aversion to the continual passing of servants through the main rooms. This was his attempt to cut down the traffic. It comes out in the kitchens, or did, until it was blocked off. I remember when they had the bricks down; it was just before Marsh went off to Cambridge, so I must have been eleven or twelve at the time. I was here a lot, then, even though no-one much liked his stepmother. But they didn’t use the tunnel very long; after two house-maids fell on the stairs, the duke had the wine moved and locked it up again. It was probably the same reason that the end was bricked up in the first place, even though servants were cheap then.”

  I could well believe those stairs would bring brisk-moving house-maids to grief. They were soldiers’ stairs, narrow and turning so as to be defensible by a single swordsman. Not that the original builders could have anticipated much swordplay, against enemies pouring into the house from the depths of the crypt.

  With a last reluctant glance at the enticing fragments of Roman mosaic, I followed my guide up the steep stairway. At the top, Alistair shut down the lights and let me pass so he could lock the small door. As I reached for the latch on the door through which we had entered, I glanced at the smaller door’s twin and asked him where it went.

  “Up,” he said, unnecessarily. “To the roof, eventually. Justice is riddled with nooks and crannies. When Marsh and I were children, we used to crawl all over the place—lock each other in obscure rooms, hold pitched battles in the tunnel, stage duels up on the roof leads. It’s a wonder we weren’t killed a hundred times. Once I was climbing these stairs and Marsh was waiting on the next level with a claymore in his hand. Another time he rigged a trap that would have shot me out over the battlements if I hadn’t seen it.”

  “Good training exercises,” I commented. I ducked my head under the outer door frame to get back into the hallway at the end of the 1612 staircase; when I straightened, I found myself the target of two pair of pale and accusing eyes.

  They belonged to a boy of perhaps eight and a girl a couple of years older; between their haughty expressions and the shape of their facial bones, there was no doubting their parentage: These were the Darling children. By the looks of them, no name could be less appropriate.

  “What were you doing down there?” the girl demanded.

  “Who are you?” the boy chimed in.

  “You’re the friend of Uncle Marsh,” the girl said to me, and then to her brother, “She’s one of the friends of Uncle Marsh.”

  “She doesn’t look like a friend of Uncle Marsh.”

  “How would you know?” she retorted. “The only friend he’s ever invited here was that small man with the yellow hair who came when Mother and Father were in London.”

  “He had a motor-cycle,” the boy informed me, sounding impressed.

  Alistair had finally got the key to work and came out of the broom closet to rescue me. “What are you two doing here?” he grumbled. “Where is your nurse?”

  “Miss Paul’s a governess, and she’s lying down with a head-ache.”

  “I am not surprised. You go along back to the school-room and play.”

  “Aren’t you going to introduce us?” The child even sounded like her mother.

  Alistair glared at her, then gave in. Turning to me, he said, “Lenore and Walter Darling.” It sounded less an introduction than the identification of two possibly noxious varieties of local wildlife. “This is Miss Russell. Now be gone.”

  Lenore Darling ignored him imperiously. “Are you of the—”

  “The Bedfordshire Russells?” I finished for her, rather fed up with the question. “Do I look like a Woburn Russell?” The family had been called “grander than God.”

  “Actually, no,” the girl admitted, and went on before Alistair could resume control. “I ought to warn you not to say anything about Peter Pan. My brother might kick you.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Peter Pan. The play by Mr Barrie?”

  “I don’t know it, sorry.”

  “Oh, that’s all right, then. It’s just that the family in the story is named Darling and my brother thinks Mr Barrie should have been stopped from using the name. Walter gets quite cross when someone makes a joke about Tinker Bell or the Lost Boys.”

  Characters from a children’s play, I deduced, and wondered how we were to be rid of these two. Alistair’s flat commands fell on deaf ears. Perhaps he proposed to bind them to a newel post?

  He turned down the corridor leading up the wing towards the front, and when the two children stepped off the stairs to follow, he whirled and went back to loom over them.

  “I. Said. No.” It was like speaking to a pair of stubborn puppies. They dropped their eyes to study the toes of their shoes; Alistair took this as a sign of obedience, and gestured for me to continue. I thought, however, the meekness was an act, and indeed, as we went along our way we could occasionally hear a stealthy step, trailing a safe distance behind.

  This evidence of insurrection annoyed Alistair, enough to distract him from his lectures on Justice Hall’s history and architectural styles. We moved rather rapidly through a drawing room done in pale, chilly blues, then a trophy room packed with the stuffed heads of large animals, the stuffed bodies of smaller creatures, and case after case of exterminated butterflies and beetles. This room opened onto an orangerie, with tiled floor and murals of picnicking black-haired aristocrats, and then a conservatory, inhabited by one enormous tropical vine with huge yellowed leaves pressing up to the glass, a dying palm tree, and not a lot else. We pushed our way through the dank, deserted glass house to the far end, where a door opened into the billiards room.

  There Alistair prepared to lay in wait for our persistent tail, standing terrible and stern with arms folded, ready to explode when they crept through the door.

  I touched his arm. “They’re doing us no harm. They must be restless for distraction here.”

  “I do not like to be followed.”

  Or disobeyed. “Of course not. But think about it: If you don’t allow children to practise following and watching, or to rig traps out over the battlements, where will your friend Joshua get his next generation of spies?”

  He reared back, stared at me in astonishment, stared at the still-vacant doorway, then gave a loud bark of unexpected laughter and reached out to clout me hard on the shoulder.

  “That is good, Mary,” he said, chuckling. “I do like the idea of two generations working for Joshua. Very well; we shall permit the brats to practise their skills on us. Just so you remember never to say a thing in this house that you do not want to find its way into nursery and servants’ hall before nightfall.”

  Much cheered and able now to concentrate on his task, he led me through the public rooms on the ground floor, tossing out tit-bits about the various dukes, duchesses, and powers-that-be of their times. The Prince of Wales had descended on Marsh’s father for a few days of slaughtering birds, bringing with him half the court and despoiling the countryside of anything with feathers (to judge by the photographs commemorating the occasion). The current King had dropped in for tea on the terrace one sunny summer afternoon, which as obligatory social events go must have proved a bargain by comparison.

  One long corridor, wrapping around the back of the dining room, chronicled a period of about ten years during which Justice Hall had stepped into the centre of the social whirl. Dozens of photographs, all eight inches by twelve and identically framed, recorded one week-end after another. The guests were assembled on croquet courts or picnic grounds, arranged up the great staircase in the Hall or around a leaping bonfire in the out-of-doors, posed with artificial spontaneity around a card table or with the day’s tally of birds laid out in neat lines at their feet.
Some gatherings were as few as eight or ten guests, others a dozen times that, but all the groups looked as if they were having a good time.

  “Marsh’s stepmother enjoyed entertaining,” Alistair said, seeing me stopped in front of one panorama of at least fifty people in fancy-dress, masks in hand. Professional beauties, members of Parliament, one well-known tycoon, and three royals, with a handful of actors for leavening.

  “Must have been quite a time.”

  “We were already in—we were out of the country by then,” Alistair amended, mindful of ears. “This particular one, I believe Phillida wrote Marsh about. Yes—there’s Darling.” Indeed, the handsome young man, tall and slim and blond in the fancy-dress costume of Napoleon, was standing at her side. We went through the dining room, Alistair pointing out the Cellini ewers and the Adam plasterwork, a fairly uninhibited painting by Caravaggio and a somewhat dim one on the opposite wall by Van Eyck, a huge cabinet displaying several hundredweight of identical Sèvres porcelain, and an attractive but incongruous inlaid screen taking up one corner of the room, no doubt the booty of some family member who’d spent time in India. At the moment it was screening from our eyes two fledgling spies, which fact Alistair either did not notice or, considerably more likely, chose to overlook.

  The dining room gave way to a music room of Jacobean plasterwork painted in orange and white, rather like plunging into an enormous bowl of apricot cream; then another drawing room, its walls completely taken up with a series of paintings depicting some momentous historical event that appeared to have involved a landing on a storm-swept beach followed by a lot of red-clad men riding horses with huge hindquarters up a hill towards a vaguely Germanic castle. After this room came the Great Hall, and up its stairway we went, to pass through the columns of chocolate-and-cream alabaster into an absolutely stunning long gallery.

  The gallery glowed with light and felt warmer than its actual temperature. Its walls combined a pale yellow silk with white detailing and a collection of family portraits that somehow contrived to look like affectionate friends rather than the stern eyes of a disapproving Past. One could almost imagine them joining in the conversations of family members taking their exercise beneath that densely intricate plaster ceiling, strolling up and down the whole bright length of the room while the rain or snow came down on the terraced gardens outside of the mullioned windows, turning the curve of Justice Pond to a thing of pewter solidity. There was even, I saw, a folly on the top of the distant hill, crumbling artistically.

  One of the primary reasons for country houses of this sort, I reflected, has always been intimidation. Less a family home than an assertion of power, the country house was the focus of the estate’s energies: The more powerful the landholder, the grander the house. Badger Old Place might be an organic extension of the countryside—its roots old as the hills themselves—but where it was an essentially domestic piece of architecture, Justice Hall was military history in stone and mortar, a weapon from battlement to Great Hall, intended to keep the peasants and all potential enemies in their place. Well, it was certainly working on me: I was well and truly intimidated, and feeling more and more like a country cousin with cow dung on her boots. Since the invention of Culture in the sixteenth century, these people had been skimming the cream off European art and artistry, bringing it here for the pleasure of the few, perfecting the art of being first and foremost. Lady Phillida drew to herself an aura of privilege in the same way the long gallery drew light; I crept along its edge, feeling every inch the mongrel parvenue.

  Holmes came from country squires—minor squires, true, but at least he spoke the same language. I, on the other hand, was the result of a cross between Jewish merchants and American tycoons: half outsider, half nouveau riche, completely beyond redemption.

  I escaped the beautiful room wondering how many more priceless works of art and exquisite vistas were going to sear themselves onto my soul before the tour was over. We entered a state bedroom hung with silk hand-painted chinoiserie wall covering and the matching silk bed hangings; from the door came the brief sound of footsteps crossing the bare boards at the side of the carpet down the centre of the long gallery. Alistair came to a halt and raised his voice.

  “Were a person to wish to follow another without being noticed, he might do well to remove his shoes.”

  Utter silence radiated from the long gallery. Then a small voice called back, “We’re not allowed to remove our shoes. It makes Miss Paul quite cross.”

  “Life is full of decisions,” Alistair commented. Having delivered himself of this philosophical dictum, he went cheerfully on into the next room.

  The sound of footsteps ceased to dog our heels.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The skirmish with the two children had restored Alistair to something approaching good humour. As we wended our way through the state bedrooms of the central block he would pause for a moment, then continue with a look of amused satisfaction. It came back to me that one of the man’s quirks had been the occasional pleasure he took at being bested, especially in the areas of his own expertise. He had once laughed aloud when my thrown knife had nearly taken him in the throat—a reaction I attributed at the time to astonishment, but which was now looking like a sort of generosity of spirit that I had not suspected.

  At the turn of the corridor that led into the east wing, he stopped. “These are the family’s rooms. Nothing of interest.”

  I could hardly insist on poking my nose into private bedrooms, although I should have been interested to look at Lady Phillida’s dressing room. One can learn a great deal by studying a woman’s cosmetics and medicine cabinet.

  Instead, we doubled back (causing a short flurry of panicked whispers and hasty movement) to retrace our steps through the gallery (ostentatiously ignoring the unnatural bulge of the curtains in one room) and past the genial ancestors to a door at the other end. This opened into the room Marsh had referred to as the “green library,” although there was nothing particularly green about it.

  But it was certainly a library, rather than a room with decorative books and well-used sofas. Shelves lined the walls, unbroken but for five windows, two doors, and a fireplace with a portrait above it. Free-standing bookshelves of a subtly newer appearance extended into one end of the room, creating three bays that filled a third of the library’s floor space. On the other end, under the windows, were two long mahogany worktables and a trio of leather armchairs, all of which were equipped with reading lamps.

  I felt instantly at home, and wanted only to dismiss Alistair, along with the rest of Justice Hall, that I might have a closer look at the shelves. I had to content myself instead with a strolling perusal, my hands locked together behind my back to keep them from reaching out for Le Morte d’Arthur, Caxton 1485 or the delicious little red-and-gilt Bestiary, MS Circa 1250 or . . . If I took one down, I should be lost. So I looked, like a hungry child in a sweet shop, and trailed out on my guide’s heels with one longing backward glance.

  A boudoir, a school-room with battered ink-stained tables and a lot of out-of-date equipment, a similarly disused nursery (explaining the children’s lack of enthusiasm), then the suite of rooms Holmes and I had been given, followed by a smaller, unoccupied suite. Marsh’s rooms were at the end of the wing, overlooking the terraces and the end of the long, curving Justice Pond; then we were at the carved stairway again, with Alistair leading the way down.

  Back on the ground floor we passed through the strung-together salons and dining rooms behind the Great Hall, working our way through the central block to its northeastern corner, where it connected with the stable wing. The estate offices were located here. Marsh was still occupied—not with Hendricks the cow-man, but with an authoritative voice connected to a ruddy face, whose lack of deference placed him as the estate steward. The voice—something about a low pasture wanting drainage—broke off when Alistair put his head in.

  “Give us twenty minutes,” said Marsh’s voice, and Alistair withdrew, to continue into
the block of stables. This was little more than a hollow square, with a quarter acre of cobbled courtyard flanked on three and a half sides by the enclosed stables. Most of the boxes were scrubbed and empty, but the rich odours of straw, ammonia, and dubbin pulled us down the row to the remainder of Justice Hall’s equine populace, to the hunters and hacks and the huge, placid draught horse with the leather boots for lawn-mowing hanging over its stall, and a pair of fat ponies so venerable they might have carried Lady Phillida as a child.

  We had lost our pair of spies, I was glad to see. Probably they had decided that the current surface was not suited for stockinged feet, and been unwilling to risk the wrath of Miss Paul. In any case, the back of my neck ceased to itch, and we could relax our tongues a fraction as we made our way down the spacious, old-fashioned horse boxes.

  “I should like to see the effects left by Marsh’s nephew,” I told my companion, although I kept my voice low.

  “Why?”

  A reasonable enough question, to which I had no ready answer. “Holmes asked me to look at them,” I replied, which seemed to satisfy Alistair. More than it did me.

  The last box was filled by a great gorgeous stallion, his bay coat as polished as one of the tables in the Hall, haughty and unwilling to give us mere humans more than a glance. He filled the eye, the epitome of Horse, and he well knew it. I wondered uneasily if this was a recent acquisition; horse-breeding is a long-term occupation.

  “Does it belong to Marsh?” I asked Alistair.

  “No. Darling intends to build up a stud here. Or he did; things are somewhat uncertain now.” The thwarting of “Spinach” Darling was clearly cause for satisfaction. I had to admit, however, that as gentlemen’s occupations went, this at least was well timed. The wholesale slaughter of innocents in the trenches had extended to England’s requisitioned horseflesh as well; four years of loss had still not been overcome. Any offspring of this gleaming animal would bring a good price at auction.