Justice Hall (13 page)

I did indeed.

“And over the week-end, particularly when the house guests arrive, listen and watch closely. Map out currents, as it were. And before you protest that you do not know what we are looking for, I am aware of that minor problem, and can only trust that you have sufficient mental flexibility to work a case that is not yet a case.” He swung the rucksack over his shoulder, and then, with his hand on the door-knob, paused. “But, Russell? Watch yourself. I believe that as the investigation develops, we will find that these placid waters have been concealing any number of powerful tides.”

He closed the door on my “good-bye,” leaving me alone with Justice and her populace.

   When Holmes had driven off for the day—or the week—Alistair and I descended the decorated stairway and passed through a door set into the wall opposite the foot of the stairs, nearly at the end of the old, western wing. It led to a tiny room, little more than three doors and a scrap of wall. Alistair closed the first door behind us, then sidled past me to that on our right, which was tiny, off-square, and locked. He had the key, an object no more than a century old.

The door opened onto another set of stairs, although these were of stone, narrow and steep and treacherously uneven, spiralling down into the depths beneath the house. Electric light bulbs had been strung from metal staples along the wall.

The wall against my right shoulder was worn smooth by ten thousand passing shoulders before me. The stairs ended at a corridor with an arched roof and a floor so worn, the dip in the centre nearly duplicated the ceiling in reverse. The walls brushed our shoulders as we passed, single file, then turned to the right, and the narrow passage opened into a room.

In the recent past, it had been used as a cool storage room for barrels of wine and kegs of beer, but it had not been built for that purpose, and no doubt the servants were relieved to have given it up. It had been a chapel, I thought; its groined arches still bore traces of a plaster finish, and beyond it the dark maw of a tunnel, suitable for the passage of individuals less than five and a half feet tall.

Alistair stood and allowed me to explore the space without comment. I stepped behind one of the dusty barrels; when I spoke, my voice rang hollowly against the stones.

“This part of the foundation is old,” I observed in surprise. “Those arches have to be Norman.”

“This part of Justice is built on the foundations of a Mediaeval abbey,” my guide told me. “The family owned the land adjoining the abbey; after Dissolution, the second earl, who was a friend of the king, arranged to have the abbey grounds added to his. Seems the abbot had spoken treason against Henry, so they hung him from one of the trees in the park. He was actually a relation of the family—nice irony. The monks would have had a mill on Justice stream, and taken fish from the Pond. Marsh thinks this was the crypt. Within a few years, it was in use again as a chapel, only this time in secret, for the earl’s wife remained a Roman Catholic. But before it was an abbey—”

“—it was Roman,” I exclaimed.

Alistair came around the corner into the adjoining room and joined me in staring down at the scrap of mosaic flooring revealed when a small patch of the cracked Mediaeval tiles had been rucked up.

“Before that, Roman,” Alistair confirmed.

“How on earth did this just stay here?” I couldn’t believe some renovator or antiquarian had not got his hands on it—heavens, if
my
fingers itched to see what lay beneath those tiles, why hadn’t some duke along the way decided to have a look?

“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.