the present.
And there was still no sign of Michael.
There were pictures lining the staircase wall, small dark oil paintings in the Dutch style, which did not appeal to Mrs. Fisher though she liked the gold frames well enough, but there was a portrait on the landing at the head of the stairs which caught her eye.
Literally.
The sitter must have been looking at the artist because whichever way Mrs. Pearl Fisher looked at the portrait, the portrait looked back at Mrs. Pearl Fisher. It was of a woman, a woman in a deep red velvet dress, against which the pink of a perfect complexion stood out. But it was neither her clothes—which Mrs. Fisher thought of as costume—nor her skin which attracted Mrs. Fisher. It was her face.
It had a very lively look indeed.
And of one thing Mrs. Fisher was quite sure. Oil painting or not, the woman in the portrait had been no better than she ought to have been.
“This way, please,” called the next guide. “Now, this is the Long Gallery…”
Michael wasn’t there.
By comparison with the lady on the landing Mrs. Fisher found the portraits in the Long Gallery dull.
“Lely, Romney, Gainsborough,” chanted Miss Cleepe, a short-sighted maiden lady from Ornum village in charge of the Long Gallery, who recited her litany of fashionable portrait painters at half hourly intervals throughout the season. By June she had lost any animation she might have had in April. “That’s the eleventh Earl and Countess on either side of the fireplace in their Coronation robes for Edward the Seventh—”
“Who’s the one outside?” Mrs. Fisher wanted to know. She jerked her finger over her shoulder. “You know, on the landing.”
Miss Cleepe pursed her lips. “That’s the Lady Elizabeth Murton. She’s dead now… Now, ladies and gentlemen, if you will look back at the Coronation paintings you will see a very good representation of the Earl’s coronet…”
“This picture,” said Mrs. Fisher.
“The coronet,” went on Miss Cleepe gamely, “has eight balls on tall spikes in alternation with eight strawberry leaves…”
Mrs. Fisher, who did not in any case know what a coronet was, was not interested. “This Lady Elizabeth…” she persisted.
Miss Cleepe gave in. “Yes?”
“Who was she?”
Miss Cleepe turned back reluctantly, and said very slowly, “She was a daughter of the house.”
“What did she do?”
“Do?”
“To be put out there?”
Miss Cleepe looked confused. “She made rather an unfortunate marriage.”
“Ohoh,” said Mrs. Fisher.
“With her groom.”
“They ran away together…” supplied Mrs. Fisher intuitively.
“I believe so.”
Somewhere at the back of the party someone said lightly, “Why didn’t they just turn the picture to the wall?”
This had the effect of making Miss Cleepe more confused than ever. “Her son, Mr. William Murton, still comes here.”
Mrs. Fisher gave a satisfied nod. “That’s why she’s on the landing.”
“Yes.” Miss Cleepe paused, and then—surprisingly—ventured a piece of information quite outside her usual brief. “She has known locally, I understand, as Bad Betty.”
Mrs. Fisher looked around the rest of the party and said cheerfully, “They’re no different here really, are they? Same as my cousin Alfred. No one’s got any photographs of him any more. Or if they have, they don’t put them in the front parlour.”
“The most valuable painting in the Long Gallery,” Miss Cleepe hastened to reassert herself, “is that one over there. In the middle of the right-hand wall.”
Everyone stared at a rather dark oil.
“It’s by Holbein. Painted in 1532. It’s of a member of the family who went in for law. Judge Cremond.”
The subject of the picture was fingering a small black cap.
“It’s popularly known as The Black Death,” said Miss Cleepe.
The group looked suitably impressed. The only exception was an artistic-looking young man with long hair who held that the female form was the only subject worth painting.
Miss Cleepe paused for dramatic effect. “And it’s his ghost who still haunts the Great Hall…”
“I thought you’d have a ghost,” said someone with satisfaction.
Miss Cleepe nodded. She was absolutely sure of her audience now. “He was a judge and he sentenced the wrong man to death. His soul can’t rest, you see…”
The sightseeing party was almost equally divided into those who believed every word and the sceptics who believed nothing.
“That,” said Miss Cleepe, “is where the family motto comes from.”
“‘I will atone,’” said Mrs. Fisher promptly. She was, of course, numbered among the believers, her mother having hand-reared her on fable rather than fact.
“He doesn’t look the sort of man to let something like that put him out,” observed a man in the party. A sceptic.
This was true. The thin lips which stretched across under the unmistakably Cremond nose, a nose common to all the family portraits, did not look as if their owner would have been unduly disturbed by the odd death or two in what were admittedly stirring times.
“Ah,” said Miss Cleepe melodramatically, “but it was his own son who died. And now, whenever a member of the family is about to die, the Judge walks abroad.”
The sceptics continued to look sceptical and the believers believing.
“And next to that is a portrait of the ninth Earl as a young man. That’s a falcon on his wrist…” Miss Cleepe suddenly dived away from the party, showing a surprising fleetness of foot. She reached a priceless orrery just as Maureen Fisher was starting it spinning round.
“We got one at school anyway,” she said, “and it’s better than this.”
“No, you haven’t,” retorted Miss Cleepe crisply. “This is an orrery. What you have is a globe. That shows you the world. This is about space.”
Maureen Fisher looked sceptically at the antique inlaid wood. “Space?”
“Space,” said Miss Cleepe. She raised her voice in the manner of all guides to include the whole party, and went on, “In the olden days the ladies of the house would spend much of their time in this room. When it was wet they would take their exercise in here.” She pointed out of the far window. “On fine days they would walk in the Park—perhaps to the Folly.”
They all stared across towards the distant Folly. There was no sign whatever of Miss Mavis Palmer and her young man, Bernard. Mrs. Fisher wished Miss Cleepe hadn’t mentioned walking. For a few precious minutes—while thinking about the errant Lady Elizabeth Murton—she had managed to forget both her feet and the fact that Michael was still missing. Now they came into the forefront of her mind again.
“Who is the man in armour?” asked the earnest woman, indicating a painting near the far door. “It looks like a Rembrandt.”
“No.” Miss Cleepe shook her head. “It’s quite modern, though it doesn’t look it. The twelfth Earl—that is the father of the present Earl—was a great collector of medieval armour. You’ll see the armoury presently, those of you who want to go down there.”
“Yes,” said Maureen Fisher simply.
“The Earl had himself painted in a suit of armour which used to belong to one of his ancestors.”
They all peered curiously at the painting of the helmeted figure.
“Sort of fancy dress?” said Mrs. Fisher dubiously.
