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The Empty Frame
Ann Pilling
A chilling ghost story from award-winning novelist, Ann Pilling.Sam, Floss, and their foster brother, Magnus, spend their holidays with cousin M. at The Abbey. On their first night, Magnus hears a woman crying and when he goes to investigate he discovers that the sixteenth-century portrait of Lady Alice Neale, hung in the Great Hall, is now just an empty frame. Magnus shares his secret with the others and soon they are drawn into a web of family mystery and murder.Ann Pilling has written a mystery novel of subtle twist and movement; fascinating historical detail entwined with a familial story which will tug at the heart-strings.
The Empty Frame
Ann Pilling
For Joe, with love always
There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment.
1 John 4, 18
The Admiral relates how he was sitting up late one night with his brother, over a game of chess, in a panelled room overlooked by the portrait of Lady Hoby. “We had finished playing, and my brother had gone up to bed. I stood for some time with my back to the wall, turning over the day in my mind. Minutes passed. I suddenly realised the presence of someone standing behind me. I tore round. It was Dame Hoby. The frame on the wall was empty. Terrified, I fled the room.”
from The Story of Bisham Abbey
by Piers Compton
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#uc131d50e-262c-5a6a-9731-a1f061633122)
Title Page (#ude96b464-9f2f-5b47-b845-12431cf20869)
Epigraph (#u501176e0-68d0-5358-8de7-e08108b87f55)
CHAPTER ONE (#ua8e55a3b-f2fc-54f9-b5fb-cdec2c1e5262)
CHAPTER TWO (#ub60b5311-b4e5-5aed-a78d-ec103de74464)
CHAPTER THREE (#u1d525bfa-804e-533d-a7c9-402cb4cd07e5)
CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
AFTERWORD (#litres_trial_promo)
By the same author (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_d74fbaa6-225a-51f8-b141-f1a2e51d7062)
Floss was fed up. She was looking at herself in the mirror and she didn’t like what she saw, neither her mop of dark hair, so frizzy and so coarse (“panscrubbers” a boy had said once) nor her stupid little nose, nor the fact that she was too short to be an actress and seemed to be putting on weight. She didn’t even like her name.
Floss was short for Flossie, and both were short for Florence. She hated all her names this morning, she wanted something dignified and mysterious, a name like Hepzibah or Beatrice, something with history behind it.
“Sam, what do you think Lady Macbeth’s name was?” she asked her brother, who was sprawled across the floor looking at a map. He too was stocky and short and he too had pan-scrubber hair, though it didn’t seem to bother him.
“Dunno. Mavis I should think.”
Floss threw her book at him. It was Mum’s Complete Shakespeare, it was big.
“Ouch! For heaven’s sake, Floss.”
“Sorry.” She rescued the book, relieved to find that it was still in one piece. “It’s just that I’m so depressed. I’ll never get this part. My hair’s not right and I’m too short. They’ll give it to Anna Houghton. She’s tall and she’s got the most brilliant hair.”
“Looks aren’t everything,” Sam said. “Anna Houghton’s dim, anyhow. I bet she doesn’t understand what the play’s about. Which bit are you doing, anyway?”
“The sleepwalking scene, where she comes on wringing her hands, when she can’t get rid of the guilt about them having murdered the old king. It’s funny, when they actually kill him she’s the strong one. Macbeth behaves like a real wimp. But when things start catching up with them she’s the one that goes mad.”
“And what happens?”
“She kills herself – but not on the stage.”
“Glad about that,” Sam said. “I don’t fancy watching you do that to yourself. Go for it anyhow, that’s what Mum and Dad said. I bet you’ll get it.”
Floss curled up again in her chair and tried to get the lines into her head. Their year was putting on Scenes from Shakespeare for the school’s Christmas drama competition, and she wanted to be Lady Macbeth. She had planned to get the part word-perfect by the end of the summer holiday, but now they were going away and she wasn’t sure she’d be able to learn all the lines. Perhaps she’d relax, instead of swotting up Shakespeare. The audition might be too nerve-racking. Anyhow, there was Magnus. Mum and Dad had said they must look after him.
“Do you think it’ll be all right, going away with Magnus?” she asked Sam. At first he didn’t answer, merely crouched lower over his map. Magnus, the boy their parents were fostering and who now lived with them, was a subject they found it difficult to discuss. They both had strong feelings about him.
“It’s on a river,” he said, “quite a big one. It looks like a tributary of the Thames. There’ll be boats I should think. It’ll be great if this hot weather keeps up. There’s a swimming pool too.”
“But what about Magnus? I don’t think he can swim.”
“He’ll be fine. We can teach him,” Sam said easily. He was the unflappable type, a good foil for Floss who tended to panic.
“What do you really feel about Magnus living here?” Floss asked him, shutting the book. She was definitely abandoning Shakespeare for the day.
Sam folded his map up, very precisely and slowly. Then he took in a deep breath and let it out, also very slowly. “I’m not sure,” he said. “It’s not that I don’t like him. I mean there’s nothing to dislike, is there? He hardly ever speaks.”
“No, but when he does it’s something he’s really thought about. Have you noticed? I think he’s rather clever.” The truth was that Floss thought Magnus quite amazingly clever. When he came out with his quick, precise observations she felt like a dinosaur plodding around in gum boots.
“Well of course he’s clever,” Sam said. “But then, his father was some kind of genius wasn’t he, in a university?”
“I think so. I wish we knew a bit more, though. I mean, I know it’s awful, how he’s been treated, but we’ve got to live with him.”
“Well, I’m not sure I’d go round telling people about my mother going to pieces, when my father had just walked out without a word, and had never come back. They sound weird. That’s when his mother started doing strange things, and ill-treating him, according to Dad.”
“But why did nobody know?”
“Well, I think she, sort of, withdrew from everybody, with Magnus. She actually went to live in another town, where no one knew her. His father had been teaching him at home, so his school wouldn’t have missed him and I suppose outsiders didn’t want to barge in. I mean, they must have been very respectable, not the kind of people social workers are asked to investigate, unless someone tells them to.”
“And nobody did?”
“No, not until it was too late, not according to Mum and Dad.”
“I wonder why the father walked out?”
“Dunno, but I don’t think he went off with someone else. Dad said he’d got very stressed-out, about his work, he said it was all that mattered to him. He was obviously an unbalanced kind of person. That’s why he pushed Magnus so hard, at his lessons. I should think it’s why he won’t always co-operate now, at school. He’s digging his heels in. Don’t blame him either.”
“He’s getting a lot better though.”
“Yes, I know.”
“But why didn’t the mother protect Magnus more? That’s what mothers do.”
“Perhaps she was frightened of the father. She can’t have been very tough, she’s had some kind of mega mental breakdown now, that’s why he can’t go to see her.”
“Poor old Mags. You do mind him being here though, don’t you, Sam? Why?”
Sam sat back on his heels. “I don’t know,” he said. “I didn’t think it would matter so much. I know Dad and Mum care about us just the same but it feels different now, that’s all. It’s how I feel. I can’t help it.”
Floss said, “But Sam, he cries in the night, he really sobs. It’s awful.”
“I know.”
“The fostering person told Mum and Dad he’d been beaten, and shut in cupboards, things like that. And when she was ill his mother made him do all the housework. He was only little, it went on for ages. How could she?”
“I’ve told you, because she was sick, in her mind. They don’t keep people in hospital for nothing. They must think Magnus is better off with us, for now.”
Silence fell in the shabby, familiar sitting room. Privately, both sister and brother had minded the coming of Magnus, an eleven-year-old boy to whom these terrible things had happened, but they’d promised their parents that they’d try to make him feel welcome. And they were trying. It was hard though, with somebody so unresponsive.
“He won’t be with us for ever,” Floss said firmly.
“No.” But Sam didn’t sound very convinced. His parents had big hearts. He suspected they would hold on to Magnus, if it was humanly possible.
“Well, this holiday might help,” Floss said, perking up. She had more or less decided not to audition for Lady Macbeth and at once she felt a lot more cheerful. “Tell me where we’re going, again.”
“Why don’t you look it up for yourself?” Sam said, putting his map inside a folder labelled ABBEY in neat, square printing.
“I’ve not had time, with the play and everything. Come on.”
“Well, I’ve told you, it’s on a river,” Sam said. “Mum’s cousin sent that booklet about it, you could have read it.” But actually he quite liked telling Floss things. She was cleverer than he was, though not in the same league as Magnus. “It started as a kind of religious house, for pilgrims travelling to shrines. They used to stay there on the way.”
“Sort of – mediaeval bed and breakfast?”
“Yes. But they said prayers for you.”
“Then what happened to it?”
“Well, according to the book some monks took over, Henry the Eighth chucked them out in the end. He seems to have got quite fond of the place himself. He could sail down to it from London, on the river. Queen Elizabeth slept there too.”
Floss snorted. “Come off it. Surely you don’t believe that.”
“Why not? She slept everywhere.”
“Well, that’s what I mean. So how did Mum’s relation come to own it?”
“I’m not sure she does own it, not the whole place. There’s a man called Stickley. He’s related to her and he’s the one that seems to run it. I think it was left to them both in a will.”
“Stickley…” Floss mused. “It sounds horrible. So why did they turn it into a sports centre? It must have been gorgeous once, from that picture Mum showed us.”
“They needed money to keep it going, I suppose. At least they still live in it. Anyhow, we’ll have the run of the whole place, with luck. There’s a swimming pool, and tennis courts, and all those keep-fit machines.”
“Ugh,” said Floss.
“It might get your weight down,” Sam said slyly. “I don’t suppose Lady Macbeth went to Weight Watchers. All that wringing of hands – she was probably anorexic.”
Floss picked up the Shakespeare. This time she really would throw it at him. But then she put it down again hurriedly. Someone had crept into the room, switched on the television and was sitting in front of it, perched very neatly on a bean bag.
“Hi, Mags,” she said to the small humped figure. “Are you all packed up? The taxi’ll be here soon.”
“Yes.”
“Put in your swimming things?” Sam said. “There’s a pool and there won’t be anyone else there, with luck.”
Magnus didn’t reply but stared at the television screen on which some politicians were arguing about the dumping of nuclear waste. He was odd. He often watched the most boring programmes but if you looked closely you could see that he wasn’t watching at all but staring beyond the screen, thinking his own private thoughts.
“Come and talk to us, Mags,” Floss said gently, switching off the TV and joining him on the bean bag. As she squished down, some white pellets seeped out of a hole. Magnus picked them up and put them carefully on the mantelpiece. “It needs mending,” he said, “or it’ll get worse. I could sew it up, while your mother’s away.”
“Yes, but listen, you don’t have to. She doesn’t expect you to do things like that.”
Magnus liked doing little chores but their mother tried to discourage him. His own mother had made him do the housework. Theirs wanted him to have some childhood, before it was too late.
He was nearly twelve now, two years younger than Floss and three years younger than Sam. He was short too, like them, but very thin and bony. Now and again Floss tried giving him little hugs but he didn’t seem to like them, and besides, it was like putting your arms round the frail and delicate skeleton of a tiny bird. You felt he might crack. He had fine pale hair, an ashy gold, and deep brown eyes.
“Lovely colouring,” Mum said, the night he arrived. “He’ll break a few hearts, he’s going to be absolutely gorgeous.” And Floss, fighting with unexpected jealousy, had said “Yes”. (Nobody had ever said she was gorgeous.) But Magnus had turned away his face.
The journey to the Abbey took much longer than they had expected because they had to go on three separate trains, zig-zagging down the country. They were on their own, with Sam in charge, and they had their instructions. If anything went wrong, or they got separated, they had to phone Cousin M at the Abbey, or the airport hotel where their parents were staying. They flew out next morning to a flat in Majorca which Cousin M was lending them for a holiday. Magnus could have gone with them, he was very attached to Mum. But he’d decided to go off with Sam and Floss instead, which had pleased everybody because the main purpose of Mum and Dad’s going away had been to leave the three children to get to know each other.
It was nearly dark when a taxi drove them into the Abbey grounds. Magnus had fallen asleep and the others were trying hard not to. They were keen to see everything but it had been a very long day and they were even more keen to drop into a comfortable bed. As the taxi crunched up a long gravelled drive towards a dark hump of buildings, an owl hooted and bats swooped down towards the windscreen, then away. Sam felt excited. “It’s like a film set,” he said, “it’s brilliant!”
“Mm,” Floss muttered. She wasn’t sure. It seemed a bit spooky to her. And why had Mum’s cousin sent a taxi for them, instead of coming herself? That didn’t feel very friendly. But then she too felt a little tug of excitement. She could smell water, a lovely river smell.
The taxi stopped in front of a great arched doorway, flood-lit, with tubs of flowers on the steps. They glimpsed low buildings of pinky-yellow stone stretching away on both sides, ending in the black humps of trees pricked out by a few lights that seemed quite far away, perhaps across the invisible water.
While the driver pulled out the bags they clambered out and shook themselves straight. Magnus was still half asleep and swayed slightly as they stood waiting in the strong light while someone, dashing out, paid the taxi man and waved him goodbye. Floss half put her arm round him but she felt him shrink away. “Sorry…” she muttered. She really must remember that he didn’t like to be touched.
Then, “My dears,” said a voice, “so sorry. I had it all planned, reception committee at the station, et cett, then you got held up. Wretched trains.”
“I did phone,” said Sam. He was rather pleased with himself, getting the three of them safely halfway across England.
“My dear, of course you did, only then – Cecil. Well, it delayed his meal. Then I lost Arthur. Then a man from Shell telephoned, to try and book a conference – good news of course, but it made me even more behind. I just thought a taxi would be quicker. Now come in, for goodness’ sake. There’s food all ready. The luggage can go up later. Come and get warm. It’s always cold in this part of the Abbey.” She laughed. “I’m afraid there’s a price to be paid for all this antiquity. Still, we’ve got a good fire going.”
As they went in, under the pointed doorway, there was a click and the flood lights faded into darkness, pulling a curtain across the tantalizing theatre set of ancient glowing stone, of pillars and arches and stubby towers, of great silent trees. A huge door was pulled shut behind them and two massive bolts driven home.
“This is the original door, dears,” said the fat and friendly woman who had got to be Cousin M. “It must be eight hundred years old, if it’s a day. Now then, food.”
But Magnus interrupted. He said, “I think I’d like to go straight to bed, please.”
The woman stopped, looked at the three of them, and considered. Only then, in the low, pillared entrance hall, did Magnus, Floss and Sam get their first proper look at Cousin M and she at them.
They saw a bulky, dishevelled woman of sixty wearing mud-spattered wellington boots, jeans and a baggy sweatshirt covered with meadow flowers, and the words “Worth Protecting”. Of course, Floss was thinking, she’s a gardener. That’s what she does here. Cousin M had a plain no-nonsense face, a firm jaw, a straight, biggish nose and widely-spaced eyes of the most stunning dark blue. Floss envied these on the spot, and the hair too, which was still fair and extremely thick. It was gorgeous, heavy hair, the hair of an aspiring Lady Macbeth. But Cousin M obviously didn’t care about it. It was tied back sensibly and caught up in an old scarf.
She saw a brother and a sister so alike they could have been two peas out of one pod – shortish and square, with the same coarse, dark hair and alert rosy faces with humour playing round the mouth. That came from their mother, her younger cousin Margaret, of whom she had always been very fond. It was great that her seaside flat had been free for their little holiday. Margaret would go picking up lame ducks though, and her latest thing was fostering this child. Cousin M wasn’t at all sure about the wisdom of such an idea. Still, she liked children and these three would certainly liven the old place up.
Magnus, the foster son, was not big but he had long hands and feet which suggested he might grow tall if someone could get enough food inside him, enough sleep and enough fun… Enough love, love that wouldn’t keep getting snatched away as he was moved from one household to the next, but poured down on him steadily, like the warmth of the sun. She knew all about what had happened to him.
“You can go to bed in two ticks, dear,” she told him, ushering them into a chilly, raftered hall hung with paintings. It was dimly lit and the pictures were not much more than dark rectangles. Light came from two standard lamps set at either end of a huge polished table which stood in front of a blazing fire laid in a grate so enormous and so elaborately carved it was like a room in its own right. A coat of arms hung above the fireplace and above that a curious black waisted clock, the shape of a legless person with a gigantic round head. It was just nine o’clock. Incongruous amid all this ancientness, was an electric food trolley on casters. Out of this Cousin M produced hot bacon sandwiches, chips and warm buns. Floss and Sam fell on the food but Magnus shook his head.
The woman studied him quietly for a minute, then she drew him gently towards her. Floss took in a sharp breath, waiting for Magnus to push the stranger away, but to her great surprise he sat beside Cousin M on the floor, meek and unprotesting, with his head against her knees. Normally, he shrank away from people, as if anyone who approached was bound to hurt him.
“Floss, Magnus and Sam… wonderful names,” Cousin M said unexpectedly, surveying them all.
Floss said shyly, “Is your name Emily… or Emma? Mum never told us what the M was for.”
“Emma? Heaven’s no it’s – promise you won’t laugh?”
They promised, even Magnus. He wasn’t asleep but, from his place of safety against Cousin M’s knees, was peering up at the portraits. One was much larger than the rest, the picture of a woman with very white hands and a very white face.
“My name’s Maude.”
In spite of himself, Sam snorted. This was catching and Floss found herself tittering.
Cousin Maude laughed too. “I know, it’s hideous. I blame my mother, she really should have known better. She was a Maude too. She was friends with Gertrude Jekyll.”
“Jekyll and Hyde…” muttered Sam. It was one of the creepiest stories he had ever read, about a man who had two personalities, and whose wicked one eventually took over the good one.
“Oh no. Gertrude Jekyll was a very famous gardener. But Gertrude’s a pretty hideous name too, don’t you think?”
Floss said, “Well, my real name’s Florence and I absolutely hate it.” She felt much reassured by Cousin Maude, they both had hideous names and they both had a weight problem. What she most liked about her was the way she was looking after Magnus, as if she understood all about his troubles and his shyness, without having to be told.
Suddenly, he came to life. “Who’s that lady?” he said, pointing to the portraits.
At first Cousin M didn’t answer. It was very quiet in the vast timbered hall, no sounds but the leap of flame round burning logs, the snap of the fire and a series of clicks as the electric trolley, now unplugged, cooled down. Sam couldn’t understand why it felt so cold, the fire was huge but there was a definite chill all round them.
They waited and eventually Cousin M got up, walked across the floor and pressed a switch.
A strip light over one of the paintings flickered into life then steadied, and the three children stared. The picture was enormous, dwarfing all the others. A heavily-ornamented gilt frame, wreathed in leaves, flowers and berries, contained the full-length portrait of a young woman. She was dressed all in black except for a long white stole, like that of a priest, which was draped round her neck and fell on both sides to the hem of her dress, ending in gold fringes. She held black gloves, similarly fringed, and there was a little dog at her feet which, like her hands, looked impossibly thin and narrow.
“Is it Elizabeth the First?” said Floss. “She’s got red hair and her face is – well, it looks awfully like her.”
“No. But they were friends,” Cousin M said. “The Queen stayed here, when she was young, in fact they made a special Council Chamber for her, she came so often. You can see it tomorrow. That’s why there’s a coat of arms over the fireplace.”
“That dog’s cowering,” Sam said.
“I’m not surprised,” Floss muttered. “She has rather a cruel face. She looks—”
“Calculating?” Cousin Maude suggested.
“Yes. That’s exactly it.”
“Tell me about her,” said Magnus. Cousin M had come back to her seat by the fire. He’d moved to a rug and was sitting on it, cross-legged, staring intently into her face. What he’d said sounded a bit like a royal command and he had a fixed staring look of total concentration on his face, which Floss and Sam had become familiar with.
Cousin M looked down at him. “I don’t know very much, dear. Her first husband was much older than she was and very ambitious, I suppose that’s why there’s this connection with royalty – I think they had a kind of mini-court here, in the summer.”
“But she looks ambitious,” Floss said.
“She does. But I think she mellowed in her old age. The husband was a bit of a tyrant and I think she probably went along with it all. They do say she did things she lived to regret.”
“What things?” demanded Magnus.
Cousin M blinked up at the portrait. “I really couldn’t say, dear, it’s all speculation, it all happened so long ago.”
“What happened?”
“I honestly don’t know what those two got up to.” She laughed. “I’m just the gardener round here.”
Nobody was fooled. Whatever Cousin M knew she was going to keep to herself.
Magnus’s eyes followed her as she went to switch off the strip light. “She has cruel hands,” he said, as the portrait disappeared into the shadow. “They’re like spikes.”
“It’s bed time,” she said. Her voice was soft but Magnus knew it meant business. And he didn’t mind at all. He felt safe with her. “Come on,” she chivvied gently, “we can talk about everything in the morning.”
In the entrance hall, they discovered that their pile of luggage had been removed. Cousin M looked embarrassed. “Cecil must have taken it upstairs for you, that’s good.” But she spoke as if she meant the very opposite, as if she minded that Cecil, this remote cousin of Mum’s, who owned the Abbey together with Cousin M, had not bothered to come and speak to them.
“He goes to bed early,” she explained. “He’s a very early riser. He has his swim at six o’clock.”
“Can we swim?” Sam asked.
“Oh, I should think so. I’ll have to talk to Cecil. He’s in charge of that side of things. Listen, dears, I’m sorry he’s gone to bed. He was annoyed with me, for getting so behind. He likes to stick to his routines. We were all up to schedule until Arthur disappeared.”
Floss suddenly remembered that this man Cecil’s surname was Stickley. He sounded like a Stickley, like a dried-up, withered old stick. She said, “Is Cecil our cousin as well?”
“I suppose he must be, about a million times removed,” said Cousin M, stopping at the end of a long passage way and turning left at the bottom of a staircase. On the wall, a neat modern sign said To Turret Dormitories.
“So Cecil’s a sort of cousin,” Magnus said slowly. He liked getting an absolutely clear picture of everything, in his mind. “So who’s Arthur?”
“My boyfriend,” Cousin M said. “You’ll see him in the morning.”
Now Magnus had seen the word “dormitories”, which suggested beds and therefore sleep, he seemed to have found a spare bit of energy and he began to climb the stairs. They were not ordinary stairs either, they were a stone spiral, enclosed within the fat tower they had seen at the corner of the Abbey buildings before the floodlights went off. He climbed quite enthusiastically, chatting a little to Cousin M. “There is Arthur here, and there is Cecil,” he said quaintly. “But who is that lady in the portrait?”
“Oh, don’t you worry your head about her,” said Cousin M. She still seemed reluctant to say any more.
“I’m not worrying,” Magnus said firmly. “I’d just like to know.”
“Well, her name was Alice, Lady Alice Neale. The Neale family lived here in the days of Elizabeth the First, and for quite a long time after that.”
“And what did you say she’s supposed to have done?”
“I didn’t say, dear, because I don’t know.” Cousin M had gone on ahead of him, rather quickly. Her excuse was that she needed to switch more lights on.
Magnus had now got the message. There was to be no more discussion of the lady in the portrait tonight. “Alice… it rhymes with malice…” he said, quietly, as they clumped up a third flight of twisty stairs. Then he added, but only very softly, “It’s like her hands. It’s like her horrible claws.”
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_41add32c-e797-57fd-819d-881c5492454b)
Their bedroom was on the fourth floor of the fat tower, the top room of four which lay one beneath the next like the slices of a Swiss roll. Cousin M called it a dormitory and it was one of several that had housed the children who used to come to the Abbey for very expensive courses, to learn how to play professional tennis and to swim – to Olympic standard. The children did not come any more. Cousin M said that people no longer had the spare money to pay for such things.
Magnus only knew about dormitories from school stories and so he had imagined a huge long room with rows of iron bedsteads, and a few old-fashioned washstands down the middle where you washed in icy-cold water while prefects hit you with bunches of twigs. His own life had been so full of torments that he was always escaping into books, where he sometimes found more. But this dormitory was just a round, low-ceilinged room with four divan beds. Each had two pillows and a plump-looking duvet covered in a blue-grey fabric with birds on, and there were screens on casters which could be rolled round each bed, to make everything more private, “modesty screens” Cousin M called them. These were a relief to Floss. She’d not wanted to be put in a room on her own but she certainly did have her modesty.
The floor was covered in soft blue-grey carpet and the bird pattern was on the curtains too. By each bed was a white-painted locker on which stood a greyshaded lamp. “Sorry it’s a bit on the feminine side, you two,” Cousin M said robustly to Magnus and Sam. “We didn’t decorate it like this, the company who took over the Abbey for the sports centre project absolutely insisted.”
“We don’t mind, do we Mags?” said Sam. “I expect Floss minds more. Lady Macbeth wasn’t into prettypretty.” Floss kicked him.
“It’s called �Dove’. I think that’s why it’s these colours,” Magnus said sleepily.
They had noticed, as they’d climbed up and up, that each of the turret dormitories had the name of a bird – Eagle, Kestrel, Plover and Dove.
“There’s a beautiful dovecote here,” said Cousin M, switching on the bedside lamps and turning back the duvets. “It’s unique. There isn’t another like it in the whole of England.”
“Does it have a potence?” asked Magnus. He had chosen the bed by the fireplace and was pulling his screen into position, before putting his pyjamas on.
“A what?” Sam shouted, over the top of it.
“A potence. It’s a ladder,” Magnus explained, rather pityingly, emerging a few minutes later in his night clothes. “It revolves, so that you can go round inside and collect the eggs.”
“My goodness,” said Cousin M, admiringly, “how on earth do you come to know a thing like that? I didn’t. Someone had to tell me.”
Magnus shrugged and went back behind his screen. “Oh, I just knew,” he muttered.
“His father was very, very clever,” Floss whispered, “and he educated Magnus himself. He knows the most amazing things.”
Magnus came out again wearing slippers and pushed his screen back against the wall. “There is a – a potence, Magnus,” said Cousin M. “I’ll show it to you in the morning. Or perhaps you can show it to me. It doesn’t work properly. You could try mending it. I think I’ll leave these windows open a bit, it really is very stuffy. You don’t expect it, somehow, coming up from that chilly old hall.”
“Is the hall always chilly?” asked Magnus. “It shouldn’t be, the ceiling’s quite low.” He was staring hard at Cousin M; he wanted information.
But she treated this as a casual enquiry. “Well, I often find it a bit chilly, dear. Why?”
“I just wondered.”
“Anyhow, you’ll be toasty warm up here,” she went on. “Too hot, if anything. Now, I’m sorry about the bars, I know it makes it look a bit prison-like, but it’s quite a long drop to the ground. I think this was a nursery in the old days and they usually barred the windows.”
“Actually, these bars are quite new,” Magnus said, examining them. “Look, they’ve got modern screws.”
Cousin M now looked exasperated, even a little cross. She took refuge in drifting about the dormitory, straightening the bedcovers and puffing up the pillows. “You can dump any extra things on this spare bed,” she called over from a corner. Then, “Well, now, what is this?”
The three of them gathered round her and looked on the fourth bed. There, neatly curled in the middle, with soft grey billows of duvet puffed up round him, was a little ginger cat. He seemed all tail and he had made a perfect circle. When he heard Cousin M, he lifted his head, blinked, yawned, mewed a little mew then buried his nose in his tail again.
“Should I take him away?” Cousin M said, stroking his ears very gently. “He’s had a big day. Caught his first mouse, by the river. That’s how he got lost. He’s exhausted.”
“Let him stay,” Floss begged, delighted that the bed he’d chosen was next to hers.
“All right. But I’ll leave the door open, and if he’s a nuisance just chuck him out. He’ll find his way down to the kitchen, only he just loves people. And now he’s got three new ones to talk to.”
“What’s his name, Cousin M?” Floss could already feel herself falling in love. The cat was mildly purring in its sleep.
“Arthur.”
“But that’s… your boyfriend.”
“Exactly.”
Cousin M grinned. “Sleep tight, and God bless you all. No rush tomorrow. Get up when you like.”
“Isn’t she great?” Floss whispered to the others as they lay in the dark. Arthur had already crossed over from his bed to hers, squeezed under her modesty screen and was burrowing under the duvet, settling into the special warm place in the crook of her knees. “She’s put lovely flowers in the fireplace, and everything.”
“Yes.” It sounded as if Sam was nodding off. He could smell the light, frail scent of the flowers as he lay there peacefully, and the smell of the river across the grass, and a very faint smoky smell that must be coming from the chimney flue. “You OK, Mags?” he whispered, but there was no answer. Seconds later they both heard him snoring gently.
Somebody was crying, a sound with which Magnus was all too familiar. His mother had cried all the time after his father had walked out, and children had always cried in the Homes where he had been temporarily dumped when they first discovered how ill his mother was. Now, when babies cried in supermarkets and their mothers took no notice, he couldn’t stand it; he had to run away. This terror of crying seemed to be connected to an invisible main cable that went right down through the middle of him. If it were activated he felt he might die. Magnus did not understand this part of himself; all he knew was that any kind of crying was painful for him. He only ever cried in secret.
The crying was that of a woman. She had a low voice, quite deep, and she was sobbing. There were no words. He sat up in bed and his hands met warm fur. Arthur was doing his rounds, first Floss, then Sam, now him.
Magnus could just see the shape of his little head. His ears were pricked up and his fat little tail was erect and quivering. His fur was a stiff bush and he was making a curious sound, not a mew and certainly not a purr, but a kind of throaty growl, the sound of a beast that is suspicious and uncertain, possibly afraid. The low sobbing went on, though fainter now and already fading away. But the cat did not stay with Magnus. It shot off the duvet, plunged through the open door and vanished into the darkness.
It was cold in the turret room now, cold and chilly like the Great Hall, and Magnus’s duvet felt clammy and damp. It had been hot when they’d switched their lamps off and they’d all flung their bedding aside, to get cool. The cold he now felt was like mist, in fact he could see a sort of mist in the room, lit up by some faint light. The source of this light was a mystery to him because all was dark outside; perhaps the mist had its own light. He watched it. It was like a fine piece of gauze, or a wisp of cloud, wreathing round upon itself, unfolding and refolding until, like a square of silk in the hands of a magician, it vanished into thin air leaving a coldness that was even more intense than before.
He listened again for the crying noise. It was so faint now it was no more than a sad little whisper; it had almost become part of the dissolving misty cloud. But the woman had not gone away altogether. He could still hear her, though only very faintly, and she was still in distress. Magnus decided that he must try to find her. He had to stop that crying.
But first he felt under his pillow where he always kept two things: a green army torch and a heavy black clasp knife. These things were secret treasures and absolutely nobody knew about them but him and Father Godless, who had given them to him long ago, or so it felt to Magnus.
It was awful that “Uncle Robert”, which was what Magnus had called the kind old priest, should have had the surname “Godless” – though the old man had laughed about it. Magnus would have changed it, like people sometimes do when their name is Shufflebottom, or Smellie. He’d got to know the old man while staying with his first foster family, after they had taken him away from his mother. He was one of the priests in the church they went to. He lived in an old people’s home, now, near London, but he sometimes wrote to Magnus, and occasionally sent him presents.
He’d given him the torch because he knew Magnus got scared in the dark and he’d given him a little Bible, too, with tiny print and a red silk marker. He’d called it “the sword of the spirit which is the word of God”. But he was a very practical old man so he’d also given him the knife. This knife, like the torch and the Bible, had accompanied him on dangerous missions in the war when he’d been a soldier.
Magnus got up and felt for his dressing gown. It lay ready on his bed because he sometimes got up in the night, to go to the lavatory and, in this turret block, the main bathroom was four floors down. He liked his dressing gown. Floss’s mum and dad had given it to him. He liked its bold red and blue stripes and he liked its deep pockets. Into one of these he now slid his clasp knife and into the other the little red Bible, because he was scared. The gold cross stamped deep into the front of it might give him some protection. You could wave crosses at vampires and it was supposed to shrivel them up.
He slipped through the door and made his way down the stone spiral of stairs. Each landing was lit by a small spotlight, but in between the floors there was a deep darkness. His heart bumped as he picked his way down the smooth cold treads, his ears strained for the sound of the weeping voice. He could still hear it, though it was very faint now, and it seemed to come and go as if the troubled woman was wandering about, all over this rambling place, coming near to him and then withdrawing when she did not find what she sought.
He knew where he was going and he made his way unerringly down the twisting stairs then out into the low arched entrance hall where Cousin M had greeted them. This was dimly lit by an occasional spotlight, and he could see now that there were lights in some of the flowerbeds. Through curious low windows, the shape of half-closed eyes, he could see lawns manicured with light-dark stripes where the mower had gone up and down, and the glint of shifting water and the great trees standing like silent sentinels.
The door to the Great Hall where Cousin M had fed them was ajar, but only a crack. Magnus pushed at it and the vast slab of whorled timber, many centimetres thick and patterned with marvellous iron traceries, swung open silently. Then it gave a single, sharp creak, a sound not particularly loud but deafening in the vast room hung with its rows of gilded portraits. At the table, by the fire where they had eaten their sandwiches, a man sat in front of a chessboard. At the creak of the hinges he turned his head sharply and, seeing the small boy in the doorway, got abruptly to his feet, sending two of the chess pieces rolling across the floor. He touched a bank of switches by the fireplace and lights came on everywhere. Magnus was terrified but he stood his ground as the elderly man, who walked with a slight limp, strode purposefully towards him.
It was his first meeting with Colonel Stickley, the mysterious relative of Cousin M’s who had gone off to bed without greeting them. Magnus never forgot that moment, the tall spindly figure limping across the cold chequered floor, the sudden harsh light after the reassuring darkness, and what that light revealed – row upon row of faces, priests and soldiers, men in university robes posed self-importantly over open books, women in wimples, children playing with cats and dogs and with curious toys, such as you only ever saw in museums. So many faces looking down upon the modern man and the modern boy, each from their own little corner in the greater sweep of history. But the face he had come to see was not among them. The huge gold frame, containing cruel Lady Alice of the thin white hands, was empty. He found himself looking up at a blank black rectangle.
Did the Colonel see? Magnus could not decide because, instantly, the old man had interposed his own tall, stooping figure between the boy and the painting, had bent down and thrust his whiskery face at him. “Humph! What’s this? Are you sleepwalking or something?”
Magnus, smelling pipe smoke and whisky, suddenly burst into tears. The crying of the woman which had brought him here had most definitely ceased now, and the painting was most definitely blank. These two things belonged together, of that he felt certain. But how they belonged he did not understand. She had looked so cruel, the Lady Alice Neale. It could surely not have been Lady Alice that wept. But where had she gone to, slipping out of her gilded frame and leaving the canvas empty? None of it made sense. He suddenly felt bewildered and lost, and he very much wanted to go back to bed.
The Colonel looked down at the snivelling boy, inspecting him through small round spectacles as, Magnus felt, one might scrutinise some botanical specimen under glass. Then, very awkwardly and stiffly, he stretched out his hand and laid it lightly on the boy’s shoulder. “Stay there young man,” he said, then he went round the hall switching off all the main lights. Magnus could hear him talking to himself, he seemed to be complaining about Maude. “Mad woman, my cousin. What did she want to put you up there for, four floors up? I told her not to but the woman wouldn’t listen. It’s not civilised. No wonder you lost your bearings. Come on, I’ll have you in bed in two shakes of a donkey’s tail. I’m going to see about this in the morning, get you moved. Are you up to walking up all those wretched stairs? Want a fireman’s lift? My son always liked a fireman’s lift, cheeky little beggar.”
Magnus suspected that a fireman’s lift, one of the few terms with which he was not familiar, involved being carried back to his room over the old man’s shoulder. “I’m all right,” he said firmly. “I’d just like to go back to bed. Sorry if I frightened you.”
The Colonel gave a dry laugh. “You didn’t frighten me, young man, I often sit up late. Can’t sleep y’know, it’s my age. All right then, follow me, and mind where you put your feet, the lighting’s not good along these corridors.”
But as they left the hall something made Magnus look back. He said, “You’ve left one of the lights on.”
Colonel Stickley turned round. “So I have, and the Lady Alice won’t like that. Beautiful young woman but she had quite a temper, they say, quite an old paddy.” He clicked a switch and Magnus saw the tall woman in white and black with the thin little dog at her feet fade into the darkness.
As they went along the corridors towards the turret stairs, he saw two tapestries hanging on a wall, lit by a solitary lamp. One portrayed Pontius Pilate washing his hands in a bowl of water. A soldier stood by with a scarlet towel and Jesus, in a corner and already wearing his crown of thorns, was looking on, sadly. The other showed a scene from the Old Testament. Father Robert had told him the story, about Balaam’s donkey who was beaten because he disobeyed his master. Knowing that he was in the presence of an angel of God, the poor beast had lain down in the road and would not budge. Here, in ragged, faded threads, was that donkey, flattened, with its ears sticking out at right angles, as if something had run over it, and a great ball of shimmering light that was the angel. It was only a glimpse as the Colonel, puffing slightly, started to mount the spiral stairs, but it made Magnus think of Arthur, the little cat. Animals were sometimes more sensitive to the big, deep things than human beings were, and Arthur had been plainly terrified when the crying began. Like Balaam’s ass, the cat must have suddenly picked up a very strong presence, and he had fled from it. It was definitely not good, like the angel, but perhaps it was not totally bad either. All Magnus knew for certain was that it was very troubled. Its grief was great and it had wept human tears.
But how could it have anything to do with that hard-faced woman in the gold frame, the woman who had, he was sure, been out of it when he’d first come into the Great Hall and found the Colonel playing chess? And had Colonel Stickley known that the woman had gone from the frame and was that gruff, calm treatment of Magnus all a sham?
As the Colonel said goodnight to him and he snuggled down into his bed again, he once more felt afraid. He wanted some arms round him. Why hadn’t he gone to Majorca with Auntie Win and Uncle Donald? He felt round in the bed. Perhaps Arthur had crept back and was waiting for him, a warm purry presence, but the cat was not there. So he turned on his side, burrowing down as Colonel Stickley limped down the stairs, still muttering to himself. “Flowers in the fireplace,” Magnus heard. “Whatever next… for three children. Is this the Hilton Hotel? Humph, I’m not clearing the mess up. It’ll be that damned cat.”
But a cat as small as Arthur could not have achieved the complete wreckage that now lay in the grate, a wreckage Magnus had not seen as he’d climbed thankfully and hurriedly into his bed. Cousin M’s beautiful arrangement of wild peonies, set in the fireplace in their honour, lay in ruins. The simple green vase that had held them was smashed and it looked as if some of the smaller pieces of glass had been ground into powder. The flowers themselves had been torn from their stalks and dismembered, petal by petal, and they lay upon the dark polished floor of the tower room like big flakes of snow.
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_5a49db88-5288-51bb-b0dc-ee25aa8ac0f0)
Cousin M, coming into the turret room next morning, saw the flowers scattered in the grate, knelt down and, without comment, began to pick them up.
“It wasn’t me, I didn’t knock them over,” Magnus said defensively, sitting up in bed. He’d become very used to people telling him off for things he hadn’t done.
Cousin M showed no reaction. “It’s all right dear. It’s a shame about the vase though, it was a pretty one. Perhaps the children’s mother could get me another. It came from the old glass factory near my flat in Majorca.”
Sam and Floss had woken up too. Through the barred window they could see a square of cloudless blue sky, sun shining on a sheet of water. The day suddenly felt good.
“Don’t know if you’re interested, but there’s breakfast down below,” Cousin M said casually, tidying the bits of glass into a heap. “Mind you don’t cut yourselves on this. I’ll bring a dustpan.”
“Did Arthur knock the flowers over?” asked Floss.
“Probably. He doesn’t know his own strength, that animal.” But Magnus, who was observing her very carefully, didn’t believe a word of it. It was quite obvious to him that this kind of thing must have happened before and she’d got used to it. Her studied matter-of-factness did not fool him at all.
“I’m very interested in breakfast,” announced Sam, suddenly smelling a faint bacon smell which he decided must be coming up the chimney flue. The sandwiches and buns of the night before now seemed a very long time ago.
“Well, get ready and come down. We’ll be in the hall. When there are just the two of us we usually eat in the kitchen but you’re a good excuse to do things properly. I’m afraid the Colonel doesn’t like the way I slob around in my gardening things.”
While they were cleaning their teeth, Floss said to Sam, “Do you think Mags is all right?”
“Seems to be. Why?”
“I’m sure he was crying again, in the night. It woke me up.”
Sam shrugged, then made a great business of rinsing and spitting. He half-believed that a noise had woken him too, the voice of someone in distress. It hadn’t sounded at all like Magnus, it had sounded too adult. But he was a very sound sleeper and he had finally concluded that he was almost certainly dreaming. He’d snuggled down in the bed until he’d fallen asleep again.
Floss had lain awake for some time too, but the sound she’d thought was Magnus had faded away in the end. The other thing she remembered was feeling very cold. “Do you think Cousin M has got any hot water bottles?” she said, as they climbed back up to Dove, to collect Magnus for breakfast. “My feet were like ice, last night.”
“You could ask her,” said Sam. Then he added, “My feet were cold too. I put some socks on. It’s funny, how it suddenly went very cold. It was cold down in the Great Hall as well. And yet our dormitory’s a warm little room compared with the others, according to Cousin M. That’s why she’s put us up there. She said that Colonel Stickley was cross about it, apparently. He told her off. He said we should have been in one of the portakabins.”
The long oak table by the fireplace was set for breakfast with a checked cloth and neatly folded napkins. As Cousin M seated them all Colonel Stickley came in with a loaded tray. He presented an interesting contrast with Cousin M who was wearing her grubby gardening clothes of the night before. He looked very formal and very smart in a tweed suit with a waistcoat and a watch chain across it, a silk handkerchief tucked into the top pocket and brown brogue shoes polished to a mirror gloss. “He’s a bit of a smoothie, isn’t he?” Sam whispered to Floss, as they sat down. “What is he doing frying breakfast for us lot? Don’t they have servants in a place like this? Where’s the cook?”
Cousin M said, sticking spoons into pots of honey and marmalade and manhandling a very large teapot, “Let’s have a few introductions. Cecil, this is Sam, Floss and Magnus. This is Colonel Stickley, children.”
Embarrassed, and unused to formal introductions, the three of them made vague mumbling noises and took refuge in their bowls of cornflakes. “Stick insect,” thought Sam, watching the colonel’s long legs arrange themselves neatly under the table. The old man did not smile, nor did he look in their direction. The business of the moment was breakfast and he was concentrating on that.
Magnus, who was sitting with his back to the fireplace, thought he knew why Colonel Stickley was ignoring them all. It was because of the episode the night before. He’d been quite friendly in the end, in a stiff, grandfatherly way, helping him up to bed, but he was very different this morning. Magnus was determined to talk to him in private but he would have to find the right moment.
He chewed his cornflakes and ran his eyes along the rows of portraits. The Lady Alice Neale, in her black dress, was back in her frame. There were the thin, unkind lips and the cruel hands, there was the little dog. He did not dare look from the portrait to Colonel Stickley. It was obviously better for now to go along with the pretence that the two of them had never met before.
Instead he said, “Who is the big fat man?”
Colonel Stickley glanced along the rows of painted faces and removed a sliver of food from between his teeth. “His nickname is Burst Belly,” he said. “He was a monk, head of this place, once. He was in charge of the Black Canons. Henry the Eighth got rid of them and he didn’t much like it. So he put a curse on the Abbey, or so people say.”
Floss and Sam looked up at Burst Belly too. He was a huge and ugly man wearing the black and white robes of a priest. The white part of the costume was lacy and frilled like a Victorian night gown, incongruous under the flat silver cross which hung round his neck.
“Good name for him, wasn’t it, Burst Belly,” Cousin M remarked, buttering her toast thickly and heaping on the marmalade. “He obviously ate too much, like me. I do love food, don’t you?”
Floss said, “I don’t like his face. It doesn’t look exactly… well, holy, to me. It’s not the kind of expression you expect in a priest. Did he really curse the Abbey?”
“That’s the story,” said Colonel Stickley. “But who knows? It’s certainly had a sad history. If you look at all the families that have lived here, you’ll see that nobody stayed around for very long. Things tended to happen to people.”
“What sorts of things?” demanded Magnus, and his voice was unnaturally high and shrill. It was the voice he unconsciously seemed to develop when he was really concentrating on something. It irritated the other two.
“Shh, Mags,” said Floss, and pressed his foot under the table.
But Magnus seemed not to have heard. “That’s what you told us,” he informed Cousin M.
Cousin M blinked at him. “Me, dear? What did I tell you? I’m afraid you’ll have to remind me.”
“You said yesterday that Lady Alice did things she lived to regret; that’s exactly what you said, those were your exact words.”
Floss was now pressing down on Magnus’s feet just as hard as she could because she knew it was a dangerous moment. If they didn’t somehow change course, he would start crying, possibly even screaming. It had happened just once or twice, and it was frightening. It seemed to be something to do with the stresses of the awful life he’d had, shut away in the unfamiliar house with his sick mother, wondering what had happened to his father.
But Colonel Stickley, not knowing what was going on under the table, actually helped matters by glaring at Cousin M, rolling up his napkin and standing up. “End of subject,” he announced crisply. “Now then, I have a very busy morning, but if you’re prepared to come with me now I will show you a little of the Abbey, so you can get your bearings for the day.”
Cousin M said in a nervous voice, “Why don’t you let them go round on their own, Cecil? You’ve so much else to do and I’m sure they’d be happier poking round independently.”
Sam said, “We’ll be fine, sir, we won’t touch anything.” He was dying to get away from Colonel Stickley.
“I shall take you round,” he said frostily. “�Poking about’, as you call it, is precisely what I do not wish to encourage,” and he produced a bunch of keys from his pocket. “The public still use this place from time to time, Maude, in spite of our present circumstances. There are all kinds of hazards in an old building like this. I’d like them to see exactly what’s what.”
“Very well, Cecil,” Maude said meekly, then, to the children, “I’ll be in my garden this morning, dears, if you want me. It’s the walled garden, beyond the dovecote at the end of the Long Walk. Otherwise, see you at lunch.”
“At twelve-thirty,” said Colonel Stickley, “and it’s… nine o’clock now.” He consulted a large gold pocket watch, tapped it and dropped it back into his waistcoat pocket. “I will meet you in the entrance hall in ten minutes, after you’ve rinsed off your breakfast crumbs. I shall go and do the same.”
Floss and Sam exchanged disappointed looks, shrugged silently at each other, then set off obligingly for their turret room. But Magnus lingered. In between the pictures of Burst Belly and the Lady Alice Neale was a tiny portrait of a young boy. Magnus hadn’t noticed it the night before but now sunshine was filtering through small leaded panes and a square of barred light was shining on it. He was almost certain that it was a boy, though the child was very prettily dressed in a lacy ruff and had longish golden curls. Between two fingers he held a white, many-petalled flower.
Magnus said, “Is that a peony?”
The Colonel glanced up at the little painting. “I wouldn’t know. Flowers are Maude’s department. Why?” he demanded quite sharply. “I must say you ask rather a lot of questions.”
Magnus was not put off. He was collecting information. “Well, she put some flowers like that in our room, and the cat knocked them over and broke the vase. Where is Arthur, by the way?”
“I’m sure I don’t know. Cats aren’t my department, young man. Asleep somewhere, I suppose, it’s a nice life. I must get on, I’ve a great deal to do this morning. Rinsed your hands, have you?”
Ignoring this Magnus said, “Who is that boy in the painting? Is it a boy?”
“It is. And we don’t know. He might have been a son of the Lady Alice. She was married twice and she had several children. If it is a son of hers, then he wasn’t born here. He’s not in the parish records, and he’s not included in the family memorial, down in the church. Seen the church, have you? Rinsed your hands?” he repeated.
“Just going to,” muttered Magnus, but he didn’t. His hands were perfectly clean. Instead he went into the entrance hall and stood by the tapestries, Balaam’s donkey and its meeting with the angel, Pontius Pilate washing away his guilt. That set him thinking about the woman in the night again, the woman who’d cried, and about the misty coldness, and how Arthur had fled in terror. Who was the pretty child with the flower between his fingers, and who had smashed Cousin M’s vase of green glass and torn her peonies to pieces? He had come to a conclusion about Cousin Maude and Colonel Stickley. They were both pretending. Both of them knew that all was not well in the Abbey but neither of them was prepared to say anything. This thought rather excited Magnus, but it also made him afraid. He’d quite like to talk to Floss and Sam about it, but would they laugh at him? He suspected that the best person to talk to would be Colonel Stickley, if he could get him on his own, and in a good mood – if the old man ever had such things.
Colonel Stickley was obviously determined to show them as little as possible of “his” Abbey. He’d made it clear at the beginning that he thought of it as his, even though Mum had told them that it was Cousin M’s money which had saved it from being sold. It was obvious that they were not to see a lot of the rooms.
“What’s in there?” they kept asking, as he hustled them past intriguing doors bristling with ancient nails and bolts, and very firmly shut. “Can we just have a peep?”
“Absolutely nothing of interest”, the Colonel would say or “just household rubbish”, or “the domestic offices”. And the faster he hurried them on the more they wanted to linger and to explore.
What they saw were the public or “show” rooms; those rooms which were on view to possible clients, for firms to use when they held conferences at the Abbey – a money-making scheme which, like the sports centre, had almost ground to a halt.
“Why don’t people come any more?” asked Magnus.
Floss glared at him and Sam tried to get near enough to give him a kick. “Don’t keep going on about it, Mags, it’s tactless,” he whispered, holding him back as Colonel Stickley unlocked a door labelled “Council Chamber”.
But Colonel Stickley had heard. “Ask away,” he said. “We’re in a recession, young man, everybody is tightening their belts. People don’t have the money for luxuries any more. Our charges are high, naturally, because we give a very high quality of service, but there isn’t the money to pay for it. QED,” he added.
“�As has been demonstrated’,” said Magnus. “�Quod erat demonstrandum’.”
“Stop showing off,” Floss hissed at him. “It’s getting on my nerves.” In the atmosphere of the Abbey Magnus definitely seemed to be coming out of his shell and to be more confident. He was talking more and asking most of the questions. She supposed this was better than sitting in silence all the time but she was finding it irritating, particularly when he paraded his knowledge in front of Colonel Stickley.
But the old man didn’t seem to have heard. “I don’t mind the place being empty for a few months,” he said. “I quite like it to myself, actually. All those tennis-playing brats were beginning to get me down.”
“Thanks a lot,” mouthed Sam to Floss, as they stepped inside a large panelled room on one wall of which was a small bay window with a cushioned seat and a view of the river. There was another huge fireplace with a coat of arms above it.
“This room was improved,” he told them, “for the young Elizabeth the First. She was a friend of Lady Alice Neale. It’s not very likely she held councils here, but that’s why they enlarged it, just in case.”
“What a waste,” said Sam. He disapproved of the Royal Family. “It’s like putting new lavatories into places when the Queen’s only going to be there for about five minutes.”
“But even royalty has to go to the lavatory,” Magnus observed solemnly.
Floss started to laugh but the Colonel didn’t seem to notice. “They raised the floor in this room,” he said. “It would have been much lower, originally. They really did do their best to get the Court to come here. They were obviously very ambitious, and it worked. The husband became a major diplomat. Anyhow, that’s about it, really. Pleasant room for a spot of reading or sewing, not to mention the royal comings and goings. Come along then, we’ll do the lower floor next.”
Floss and Sam set off in front of him. They were bored with these empty rooms. “Do you think we could slip away?” Sam suggested. “He’s obviously not going to show us much else. I’d rather come back when he’s out of the way, when he goes off to London or something.” The gardens and the river looked much more tempting than this series of empty rooms and, so far as he was concerned, the sooner the grand tour was over the better.
As the Colonel pulled the heavy door shut behind them, Magnus, hanging back for a final peek, was aware of a rush of cold air. It was not the general cold of an ancient, thick-walled dwelling, that retained its delicious coolness on a day of sun, it was a more precise, sharp cold; it was enclosed in time, like a phrase of music, or a sentence. And he distinctly saw, as the closing door filled the sunlit space beyond, the figure of a woman moving across the Council Chamber from right to left. Her Elizabethan dress was pure white and round her neck hung a broad, black priest-like stole. She was carrying white gloves and she continually twisted them in her hands, as if they were a handkerchief. He could hear a sobbing noise. He was unable to see the apparition’s feet. These were cut off from his view above the ankle, as if the rest of her was moving along at a lower level, about a foot below his eye.
Magnus cried out, then clapped his hand across his mouth. The Colonel looked down sharply. “You all right, young man? Got a pain? Shouldn’t bolt your food, you know.”
He said, “You’ve just locked somebody in. There’s somebody in there, a woman. Listen, she’s crying, can’t you hear her?”
Colonel Stickley stared at him, grimaced, pulled at his moustache then stood very still. The sound, though muffled through the thick oak door, was the same sound that had woken him in the night, the anguished sound of inconsolable weeping that Magnus had been unable to bear. And he could not bear it now. He clapped his hands to his ears and screamed, “Stop it! Stop it, can’t you!”
The Colonel dropped his bunch of keys and shook him vigorously. “Come on now, no hysterics, there’s no need for that.” But his voice was quite gentle. This was the foster child, the boy whose father had walked out, never to be heard of again, and whose mother had lost her mind, the child who’d never had a childhood. “Wait there,” he said, and he limped off after Floss and Sam. “I just have to oil a lock,” he called after them. “Make your way down to the buttery. We’ll be with you in a jiffy.”
Coming back to Magnus he picked up his keys, unlocked the door of the Council Chamber and steered him into the room. “See for yourself,” he said, “go on, investigate. Climb up the chimney and pull up the floor boards. It’s all been done before, you know.” His voice, no longer brisk and soldierly, was wavering, that of a tired old man. It was almost as if he wanted to cry now.
Magnus stared into the room though he knew perfectly well that he would not see the woman in white. She belonged to another time, to a time when the floor of the Council Chamber had been lower. She had been walking on that floor which was why she had seemed to him to have no feet. These were the simple mechanics of ghosts. Magnus knew all about them from old Father Robert, whose church had once been inhabited by an unhappy spirit which he had laid to rest with his prayers. The mechanics were not what scared him, they were just about two kinds of time getting muddled up. What was frightening was how he felt about the two women – the one who had cried in the night and the one he had just seen gliding across this room. Each spectre had brought the awful coldness with her, a cold that went into his very marrow and felt like death. And the coldness was part of her pain, of the grief which troubled her so. In a way he didn’t fully understand, it was as if her pain had joined itself to his. He was suffering as well, which was why he’d had to stop the noise of the crying.
Were there two women or were they one and the same person – the woman in the night, who he believed must have been Lady Alice, because her frame had stood empty, and now this other woman, all in white? Magnus could not begin to work out what was happening. He felt as if the top of his head was coming off, through too much thinking.
A hand descended on to his shoulder. “As you see,” Colonel Stickley informed him, “the room really is empty. There is nothing going on here and there never has been. All this talk of ghosts is all silly rumour, put about by people who are trying to ruin my business because they want to get this place from me. Do you understand, boy… what’s your name?”
“Magnus.”
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