We climbed a full circuit, then stopped at a narrow landing; the stairs continued their spiral up into the darkness. Iris’s candle illuminated a tiny door, its frame topped by another collection of candles and match-boxes. The latch seemed to be little more than a stiff wire jabbed into a tiny hole, but it gave Iris some difficulty. She poked and prodded away, experimenting with marginally different angles and degrees of force, until one finally worked. With a click like that of the first door, the wall gave. She pushed, leant out to survey the room beyond, hopped down, and turned to help me climb out.
It was a jib door, I saw when it was shut again, its seams rendered invisible by a square of wood trim, the same as any of those mounted decoratively atop the wall-paper all around the room.
We were in a bedroom—Marsh’s quarters before and now after his nephew’s time, bearing traces of an undergraduate’s personality. The room felt old, as the library and the billiards room below had not, all stone and rough-hewn black beams. One of the two Hughenforts had liked art deco, as testified the four lamps in the shapes of vines, leaves, and nymphs, although the wall-paper and Turkey carpet were probably half a century older. It was a shadowy chamber, in spite of the two windows: black wood, burgundy-coloured velvet drapes, and gloomy paintings.
Oddly like the interior of a Bedouin tent, in fact.
Iris swept the room with a disapproving gaze. “It was certainly more cheerful when Marsh was an undergraduate. And I can’t imagine Gabriel living with those paintings—Phillida must have moved them in here to get them out of the way. And those curtains! This was a sort of lumber-room when we were children. Marsh claimed it for his day-room as soon as he discovered the stairs, although his mother wouldn’t allow him to sleep here.”
“Because of the stairs?”
“Actually, I don’t think she knew they were there. No-one did—that was the appeal. I think it was simply that the room was not appropriate in her eyes for a child. One can rather see her point, although at the time we all thought her terribly unreasonable.”
“As far as you know, this stairway is not common knowledge?”
“I shouldn’t think so. You saw the candles—those have sat there gathering dust for a long time. Our generation knew, but we also knew if we told, it would have been blocked up. Gabriel may not even have discovered the door’s existence.”
“Well, I should be quite careful about using the stairway when the Darling children are about the place, if you wish it to remain a secret. They are highly inquisitive, not terribly well supervised, and fond of hiding in odd places.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
With a final glance to see that the jib door was invisible, Iris crossed the room and put an eye to the more ordinary door leading into the corridor. Satisfied, she pulled it open, and in a moment we were at our own rooms, hers on the other side of Marsh’s dressing room, mine next from hers.
“I’ll ring and ask that tea be sent up for us both,” she told me. “We can be naughty and hide out in our rooms until dinner. Enjoy your bath,” she added, and like two truant schoolgirls, we evaded our social obligations until the clamour of the gong recalled us.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I girded myself for the dinner as grimly as any young knight girding for a tournament—and as painfully aware of my inferior equipage and relative inexperience.
To make matters worse, the only members of the party absent when I reached the drawing room were Marsh and Iris. I stood in the doorway, alone in my second-best dress, looking up at the furious murals of battle on the walls and feeling eleven sets of eyes come around to rest on me. My fervent impulse was to turn and sprint for the safety of the Greene Library; instead I stiffened my spine, put on a smile that Holmes would have admired, and went forward to greet my hosts and their guests.
Lady Phillida’s introductions were, for my purposes, woefully inadequate. Not that she was trying to exclude or patronise me—indeed, I believe it was the opposite, that her casual, first-name introductions were an attempt to make me feel welcome, as if I were already on the inside of her circle and she was merely reminding me of people I already knew. In fact, her method had the opposite effect, leaving me uncomfortable about addressing anyone by name, yet incapable of asking who they were and what they did. The structures of traditional formality have their uses.
By the time Iris and Marsh arrived, I had met Bobo, Peebles, Annabelle, Jessamyn, and the seven others, and knew nothing whatsoever about any of them beyond what I could glean by my own senses.
“Peebles,” for example, was a dissipated individual with artificially blackened hair and moustaches whose compulsive double-entendres and caressing lips against the back of my hand at introduction made clear his devotion to the sensuous life, even as the chemical odour his pores exuded told me that champagne was not the strongest stimulant in which he indulged. Aristocrat, I mentally added when one of the men addressed him as “Purbeck”; there was a Marquis of Purbeck, I remembered.
“Bobo” was clearly an actor, as theatrical here beneath the chandeliers as he would be under spotlights. There were also two watchful London businessmen (who winced slightly at being presented as “Johnny” and “Richard”) and a pair of German immigrants in expensive suits.
The three remaining guests were women, but not quite ladies. Their accents wandered up and down the social scale, and even before Marsh came in with Iris and fixed them with an icy glare, I had already decided that they were there to entertain the gentlemen. In one manner or another. (And, watching the actor circle around Peebles, I suspected that he had been brought for essentially the same purpose.)
When we went in to dinner, I was cut off from my two comrades, and found myself seated between Bobo and one of the Germans. As I tipped my head to permit an arm to snake forward and fill my glass, it occurred to me that, four years earlier, I would never have believed that I might one day positively crave the presence of Ali Hazr as a dinner companion.
Because the actor spent the entire meal talking across the table at the Marquis, and the German on my right was more interested in his countryman to his own right, I spent the meal in isolated splendour. Drinking rather more than I ought, true, but listening as well, and watching everything.
The seating arrangements were wildly unconventional and most provocative. Marsh and Iris were at one end, with Sidney and Phillida at the other: Which end, a person was left to speculate, was the superior? And Marsh played along with it: When the wine was brought to the table, he diverted its steward to the other end with a nod, leaving Sidney to taste and approve. Iris glanced at him, saw the hidden amusement behind his face, and relaxed.
The servants, however, were clear as to where authority lay, so that when a footman entered with a message, he went first to his duke for permission before circling the table to where Sidney Darling sat. Darling excused himself and followed the man from the room, returning with the faint bulge of a crumpled telegram distorting his elegant pocket and a thoughtful look distorting his elegant features. He went to the two Germans and bent to tell them something in a voice too low for me to hear, then straightened and was heading for his pair of London businessmen when Marsh’s voice stopped him.
“Have you news, Sidney?”
Darling hesitated, glanced at Johnny and Richard, then returned to his vacant chair to sit down beneath the concerted gaze of the table before answering his brother-in-law.
“There was a demonstration today in Munich, an attempt to proclaim a national dictatorship. Police fired on the crowd, a dozen or more people were killed. General Ludendorff gave himself up for arrest. Herr Hitler was injured and has escaped.”
“What will all this mean for your business interests?” Marsh asked, all friendly interest on the surface.
Darling’s answer had too much frustration in it to be anything but the truth. “I don’t honestly know. We have friends on both sides.”
“So you intend to wait and see who comes out on top, then make your arrangements wi
th them, trying in the mean-time to avoid creating enemies inside either camp.”
Darling flushed, more at Marsh’s tone than the actual words, but he did not argue with the analysis, merely clenched his jaw, inclined his head, and picked up his fork. The German on my far right, however, was disturbed by this exchange, and he turned to my neighbour to whisper urgently in their native tongue, “But he told us the duke would support the project, that—”
I don’t know if the man to my right kicked him or gestured him into abrupt silence, but the question cut off in the middle, and the table talk was wrenched back into innocuous paths. But the quick protest had given me something to think about: As I had suspected, Darling’s plans in Germany rested on the financial support of Justice Hall. Marsh not only knew this, I saw, but had just declared that although Darling might perform as the master of Justice Hall, master was he not. The duke had publicly and knowingly cut Darling’s legs out from under him; Darling responded with a brief inner fury followed by a summoning of civility, and the party went on.
Marsh’s taste for mischief was awakened, however, so that when eventually the interminable meal had wound to its end and Phillida was rising to lead us ladies out, a pair of bright ducal eyes flicked between me and Iris, and he said, “I imagine my two feminist companions will choose to stay for the port?”
It was command, not question; we stayed. Phillida could do nothing but usher her three entertaining ladies from the room, leaving behind seven variously startled men, two highly amused women, and a trouble-making duke.
The port was waiting in the library, a pair of noble and cobwebby bottles with the equipment to decant them laid out like an array of surgical tools. As we came into the room, Marsh waved at the display and said, “Sidney? You care to do the honours?”
Another man, with another voice, might have been restoring his sister’s husband to authority, with a tacit apology. Or with a slightly different emphasis, might have been condemning Sidney to the humiliating position of mere wine steward. With Marsh, it could have been either, or both. It might only have been a simple admission that Sidney would do a better job of it—and even I could not tell which attitude he intended. Sidney certainly had no idea. I could see the moment when the man decided that there was no point in taking umbrage, that making the most of an uncertain situation would impart the most dignity. He nodded graciously and took up the tongs, to heat them in the glowing coals (although the emphasis with which he thrust the long-handled implement into the fire made me suspect that he was visualising applying their prongs to the neck of his brother-in-law, not the neck of the bottle).
Red-hot tongs, cold wet cloth, the clean snap of the bottle’s neck, and the painstaking decanting of the dark liquid through a silver sieve: Men have more rituals than women have hair-pins. Then the cigar ritual followed, and talk made awkward by the presence of two ladies and a duke who was not One of Us; it was no wonder the men drifted away to the billiards table and left us in possession of port and fire. Long before the women rejoined us, the limits of conversational topics among the men had been firmly established, enforced by sharp, eloquent silences during which stern looks and gestures were exchanged, and by the occasional clearing of throats. Germany’s politics were forbidden, its art and music allowed (although the Marquis’s knowing reference to some night-club elicited two simultaneous throat-clearings); business of any kind was out, which meant that horses and horse-racing were permitted, whereas stud fees and auction houses were not.
We three sat listening through the open doors to this verbal dance as it smoothed out from its stilted beginnings, and I could see that any opportunity for learning more about the Darling situation was probably gone for the night. I was just about to take my leave of the duke and his unlikely duchess when Marsh’s head came around and he fixed me with a look in which swirled meaning and mischief.
“What would you say to a game of darts, Mary?”
I puzzled for a moment at the overtones behind the question; when I caught his meaning, the surprise of it knocked a sharp laugh out of me.
Once upon a time, Marsh and I had teamed up to cheat an unsuspecting village of their hard-earned savings, linking his gift for smooth patter with the unexpected accuracy of my throwing arm. If I understood him aright, he was proposing to set up his brother-in-law’s friends for a similar fleecing. I was sorely tempted, not only for the pleasure of the thing in itself but for the joy of forging an alliance with Marsh Hughenfort; reluctantly, I had to decline.
“Marsh, I would absolutely adore playing such a game with you, but I think I had better put it off for the moment. Perhaps at the end of this week-end, when everyone is more . . . relaxed?”
His eyes were dancing when he agreed, and I went to bed, well pleased.
Saturday dawned clear—and I do mean dawned. The house broke its fast early, despite the late night, with a breakfast that would have done a Victorian household proud. The previous night’s quartet of entertainers were conspicuously absent, either allowed to sleep in or, I thought more likely, already bundled up and got out of the way. Nonetheless, their numbers over the groaning buffet table were more than made up for by friends and neighbours—and, I saw to my amusement, by the wives of the gentlemen in our party of the night before—gathered to spend the day trudging across frozen hillsides and firing expensive shotguns at our host’s carefully raised and artfully driven birds.
I have, I hasten to say, nothing against a shoot. As an enterprise, it is no more silly or time-consuming than many. The objective viewer may find it incongruous for a landowner to rear, coddle, and set free hundreds of birds just for the challenge of shooting them out of the sky and picking lead shot out of one’s food; however, one could argue that (other than the occasional cracked molar) it is little different from raising chickens for the family plate, with the additional benefit of fresh air and open skies for bird and shooter alike. There even exists the narrow—very well: minuscule—chance that some of the nurtured birds may escape the flying lead to assume their ordained state in nature. Even the man with the gun appreciates a crafty escape.
I say “man” advisedly, for generally speaking, women were permitted to spend the day of a shoot at their leisure, perhaps joining the shooting party for a picnic lunch alfresco and lingering to witness the next drive before being packed off home for tea, a long bath, and preparation for the travails of dinner. Certainly Phillida and the visiting wives planned such a calendar, along with a number of the morning’s newcomers who were hardly dressed for a day in the open.
I was waiting my turn at the buffet, smiling absently at strangers and anticipating a day of literary pleasures under the watchful eye of Obediah Greene. (What to wallow in first? A folio today: The byble in Englyshe, 1540 with the signature “O. Cromwell” inside? Or perhaps the 1624 Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, and Severall Steps in my Sicknes? Or—) I looked up, startled, as my name pronounced by Marsh’s voice cut through both my distraction and the clatter of forks and knives.
“Mary,” he called. “Will you be joining us today?”
I looked across the room, saw the expression on his face, and decided that the intensity of his gaze indicated that the question had taken the form of the Latin “question expecting the answer yes.” I spooned another egg onto my plate, and kept the surprise (and, I hoped, disappointment) from my face.
“I shall be happy to, if the gentlemen don’t mind,” I answered.
“We’ll pair you with Iris then, shall we? Put the ladies together? She’s a formidable shot.”
“I’m sure that Iris is formidable at anything she sets her hand to,” I said easily, which answer seemed to please him. I took my plate to the table and bolted my hearty breakfast, then trotted upstairs to change from my decorous skirt into the tightly woven trousers I’d worn the day before. At least it looked to be dry again today. Freezing, but dry.
Downstairs, I found the shooting party beginning to drift out of the front door and down the steps to the d
rive. Neither Marsh nor Iris seemed to be among them, although another motor had just driven up and was off-loading yet more newcomers. The two males of the party retrieved guns from the boot and went to join the other warmly clad gentlemen; the females darted up the steps, clutching the sorts of bags used for knitting or needlework. The men were all involved in hearty greetings and introductions, followed by the inspection of weapons, so I went back inside. On the other side of the Great Hall I spotted the multitalented Emma, walking coquettishly at the side of an unfamiliar figure with a crooked nose and the dress of a manservant. Unwilling to shout across the echoing space to attract her attention, I speeded up to catch her before she vanished into the house. Before I could do so, Ogilby emerged from the same doorway towards which Emma and the stranger were heading. She went immediately demure under the butler’s glare, leaving me to reflect on the scant opportunities for romance among the staff of a country house.
“Mr Ogilby,” I said, when that good gentleman was in earshot. “Have you seen the duke or duchess?”
“Her Grace suggests that you join her in the gun room,” he replied, and led me there himself, to a room in the stables wing not far from the estate offices.
“Quite a lively gathering,” I commented to his shoulder.
“Indeed,” he agreed, sounding more gratified than harassed.
“Does Lady Phillida do a lot of entertaining?”
“This time of year, we are a busy house.”
“Makes for a lot of work.”
“It is satisfying to see the house full,” he explained, formal but I thought honest.
“Not as full as some of the week-ends before the War,” I said. “I saw the photographs.”
“The sixth Duke and his wife were great entertainers,” the butler agreed, sounding proud of the fact. “The gun room,” he announced, and opened the door.