The Stately Home Murder

“Go on,” urged her ardent young man.

“No,” said Mavis, less firmly.

“Be a sport.”

Mavis giggled.

They had come to Ornum House for the day with a coach party from Luston, and there was no question but that they were enjoying themselves.

Mrs. Pearl Fisher, who had come on the same coach, wasn’t quite so sure she was. Apart from her feet, which were troubling her more than a little, there were the twins, Michael and Maureen, whom she had brought with her for the ample reason that Mr. Fisher would never have forgiven her for leaving them at home. His Sunday was sacrosanct to The King’s Arms and his own armchair.

Like Miss Mavis Palmer and her young man, Bernard, she came from Paradise Row, Luston. Any student of industrial philanthropy would immediately recognise this as a particularly grimy part of that particularly grimy town. By some Victorian quirk of self-righteousness the street names there varied in inverse proportion to their amenity.

The coach had been booked from door to door—which was one of the reasons why Mrs. Fisher had put her best shoes on. What she had not reckoned with was the distance within the doors. There was no distance to speak of inside the house in Paradise Row, Luston, but there was a great deal of it once through the portals of Ornum House.

It had been an old house by the time Capability Brown saw it, and now it was an architectural nightmare. It was true to no one period, representational of nothing but a series of improvements by a series of owners. Behind the Palladian south front were Tudor bricks and behind those the remains of a donjon—a reminder that before the house there had been a castle with a great central keep.

Lord Ornum himself never forgot this.

“Those were the days,” he would sigh. “Drawbridge, portcullis, and broadsword in that order and you were all right. Keep all your enemies at bay. But now”—here he would open his hands expressively—“now to keep out the enemy”—(he was referring to Her Majesty’s Commissioners of Inland Revenue)—“I have to lower the drawbridge and let everyone else in.”

Mrs. Pearl Fisher and the twins didn’t join the other picknickers in the park.

They had their sandwiches near the little church that was not far from the house. Churches were something that the utterly urban Mrs. Fisher understood. She mistrusted large areas of grass and woodland. Grass other than corporation grass behind railings was outside her experience and such woodland as she knew in the ordinary way in Luston was no place to take thirteen-year-old twins.

“Let’s go in them woods, Mum,” suggested Maureen.

“No.”

“Why not?”

Mrs. Fisher set her lips. Like Disraeli, she never apologised, she never explained. She took a deep breath. “You’ll have your sandwiches over there by them graves.”

“I don’t want to go near the mouldy old church,” protested Maureen, but both the twins recognised the note of flat command in their mother’s voice and obediently settled themselves down among the headstones. Afterwards, while waiting for the next conducted tour of the house to begin, they went inside the church.

In view of what was to happen later, this was a pity.

True, Mrs. Fisher promptly sat down in a pew and eased off her shoes, but it was too early in what was to prove a very long day for her to have any real benefit from this short period of shoelessness. Besides, there was the discomfort of getting feet back into shoes now too small…

While she sat there Michael and Maureen scampered about the church in a singularly uninhibited fashion. Mrs. Fisher had noticed before that there had been no wonder left in either twin since they had gone to a brand new comprehensive school in the middle of Luston that had everything—including showers, which Mrs. Fisher didn’t think were quite nice. (This last opinion was in no wise influenced by the fact that there were no bathrooms in Paradise Row.)

Not unexpectedly, the chief objects of interest to the Fishers in the little church were connected with the Ornums. The family pew, for instance, with its coat of arms emblazoned on the wooden door. Strictly speaking, both family pew and coat of arms should doubtless have gone with the abolition of pew rents, but as the Earl of Ornum was patron of the living the question had—somehow—never arisen.

“Mum…” That was Michael.

“What is it now?”

“What does ‘atone’ mean?”

“What do you want to know for?” temporised Mrs. Fisher.

“It’s on this picture thing.” Michael traced out the heraldic lettering on the coat of arms with a grubby finger. “It says here, ‘I will atone.’ ”

“Does it?” said Mrs. Fisher with genuine interest. “I wonder what they got up to then?”

But Michael Fisher had by then moved on to a tomb where a stone man lay in effigy, his stone wife by his side, his stone hands clasped round the hilt of a sword.

A little stone dog lay at his feet—which Mrs. Fisher thought silly—and his legs were crossed, which privately Mrs. Fisher thought sillier still. Everyone knew you straightened out someone’s legs when he died. Mrs. Fisher, who had been in at nearly every death in Paradise Row since she married (marriage was the emotional coming-of-age in her part of Luston), lost interest in that particular Earl of Ornum who had gone to the Crusades.

Maureen was standing before a much later memorial. There was enough colour still to attract the eye to this one and a lot of gold lettering on black marble. Two figures—man and wife—were kneeling opposite each other. On either side of them was a row of smaller kneeling figures.

“Four, five, six… six girls,” Maureen called across to her mother.

“Don’t shout,” said Mrs. Fisher automatically.

“Mum, there’s six little girls on this grave thing. Aren’t they sweet? And four little boys.”

“Them’s their children,” said Mrs. Fisher. “Big families they had then.” Mrs. Fisher was one of nine herself. There was something very nice about big families. And as for the children in them—well, her own mother used to say children in big families were born with the corners rubbed off. Which was more than you could say for the twins.

Maureen wasn’t listening. “I’ve found some more children round the side, Mum, only you can’t tell whether they’re boys or girls…”

Mrs. Fisher got to her feet. “Time we was going,” she said decisively.

“What are they round the side like that for, Mum?” Maureen Fisher was nothing if not persistent. “You can hardly see them.”

Mrs. Pearl Fisher—without benefit of ecclesiology, so to speak—could guess. The tapestry of life in Paradise Row was every bit as colourful and interwoven as that of the aristocracy—only the middle classes were dull. Aloud she said, “I couldn’t say, I’m sure. Now, come along, do…”

They walked across from the Church to the House.

Maureen sniffed. “Lilac blossom everywhere,” she said with deep contentment.

“Only on the lilac trees,” her twin corrected her.

Mrs. Fisher scolded them both with fine impartiality and they joined a small queue of people who were waiting to go inside the house. It was a queue that was turned into a party with one collective sweep of the guide’s eyes.

That was Mr. Feathers.

He was a retired schoolmaster who lived in the neighbouring village of Petering. There were several guides at Ornum House and their work was done on the principle of one guide per public room rather than one guide per party. This was the fruit of experience. One guide per room ensured the safety of the room and contents. There had been lost—not to say, black—sheep in the days when it had been one guide per party.

“Is that the Earl, Mum?” asked Maureen loudly.

“No,” said Mrs. Fisher, though for the life of her she couldn’t have said why she was so sure. Perhaps it was because this man had glasses. Earls, she thought, didn’t wear glasses.

Mr. Feathers, having assembled his flock, led them into the Great Hall.