The door opened onto another set of stairs, although these were of stone, narrow and steep and treacherously uneven, spiralling down into the depths beneath the house. Electric light bulbs had been strung from metal staples along the wall.
The wall against my right shoulder was worn smooth by ten thousand passing shoulders before me. The stairs ended at a corridor with an arched roof and a floor so worn, the dip in the centre nearly duplicated the ceiling in reverse. The walls brushed our shoulders as we passed, single file, then turned to the right, and the narrow passage opened into a room.
In the recent past, it had been used as a cool storage room for barrels of wine and kegs of beer, but it had not been built for that purpose, and no doubt the servants were relieved to have given it up. It had been a chapel, I thought; its groined arches still bore traces of a plaster finish, and beyond it the dark maw of a tunnel, suitable for the passage of individuals less than five and a half feet tall.
Alistair stood and allowed me to explore the space without comment. I stepped behind one of the dusty barrels; when I spoke, my voice rang hollowly against the stones.
“This part of the foundation is old,” I observed in surprise. “Those arches have to be Norman.”
“This part of Justice is built on the foundations of a Mediaeval abbey,” my guide told me. “The family owned the land adjoining the abbey; after Dissolution, the second earl, who was a friend of the king, arranged to have the abbey grounds added to his. Seems the abbot had spoken treason against Henry, so they hung him from one of the trees in the park. He was actually a relation of the family—nice irony. The monks would have had a mill on Justice stream, and taken fish from the Pond. Marsh thinks this was the crypt. Within a few years, it was in use again as a chapel, only this time in secret, for the earl’s wife remained a Roman Catholic. But before it was an abbey—”
“—it was Roman,” I exclaimed.
Alistair came around the corner into the adjoining room and joined me in staring down at the scrap of mosaic flooring revealed when a small patch of the cracked Mediaeval tiles had been rucked up.
“Before that, Roman,” Alistair confirmed.
“How on earth did this just stay here?” I couldn’t believe some renovator or antiquarian had not got his hands on it—heavens, if
“The stairs were bricked over, some time in the early nineteenth century. It wasn’t until about thirty years ago that Marsh’s father had the bricks down—some project Phillida’s mother had in mind for the stillroom near the kitchens. That tunnel was built by the second Duke in the 1750s. Seems he had a peculiar aversion to the continual passing of servants through the main rooms. This was his attempt to cut down the traffic. It comes out in the kitchens, or did, until it was blocked off. I remember when they had the bricks down; it was just before Marsh went off to Cambridge, so I must have been eleven or twelve at the time. I was here a lot, then, even though no-one much liked his stepmother. But they didn’t use the tunnel very long; after two house-maids fell on the stairs, the duke had the wine moved and locked it up again. It was probably the same reason that the end was bricked up in the first place, even though servants were cheap then.”
I could well believe those stairs would bring brisk-moving house-maids to grief. They were soldiers’ stairs, narrow and turning so as to be defensible by a single swordsman. Not that the original builders could have anticipated much swordplay, against enemies pouring into the house from the depths of the crypt.
With a last reluctant glance at the enticing fragments of Roman mosaic, I followed my guide up the steep stairway. At the top, Alistair shut down the lights and let me pass so he could lock the small door. As I reached for the latch on the door through which we had entered, I glanced at the smaller door’s twin and asked him where it went.
“Up,” he said, unnecessarily. “To the roof, eventually. Justice is riddled with nooks and crannies. When Marsh and I were children, we used to crawl all over the place—lock each other in obscure rooms, hold pitched battles in the tunnel, stage duels up on the roof leads. It’s a wonder we weren’t killed a hundred times. Once I was climbing these stairs and Marsh was waiting on the next level with a claymore in his hand. Another time he rigged a trap that would have shot me out over the battlements if I hadn’t seen it.”
“Good training exercises,” I commented. I ducked my head under the outer door frame to get back into the hallway at the end of the 1612 staircase; when I straightened, I found myself the target of two pair of pale and accusing eyes.
They belonged to a boy of perhaps eight and a girl a couple of years older; between their haughty expressions and the shape of their facial bones, there was no doubting their parentage: These were the Darling children. By the looks of them, no name could be less appropriate.
“What were you doing down there?” the girl demanded.
“Who are you?” the boy chimed in.
“You’re the friend of Uncle Marsh,” the girl said to me, and then to her brother, “She’s one of the friends of Uncle Marsh.”
“She doesn’t look like a friend of Uncle Marsh.”
“How would you know?” she retorted. “The only friend he’s ever invited here was that small man with the yellow hair who came when Mother and Father were in London.”
“He had a motor-cycle,” the boy informed me, sounding impressed.
Alistair had finally got the key to work and came out of the broom closet to rescue me. “What are you two doing here?” he grumbled. “Where is your nurse?”
“Miss Paul’s a governess, and she’s lying down with a head-ache.”
“I am not surprised. You go along back to the school-room and play.”
“Aren’t you going to introduce us?” The child even sounded like her mother.
Alistair glared at her, then gave in. Turning to me, he said, “Lenore and Walter Darling.” It sounded less an introduction than the identification of two possibly noxious varieties of local wildlife. “This is Miss Russell. Now be gone.”
Lenore Darling ignored him imperiously. “Are you of the—”
“The Bedfordshire Russells?” I finished for her, rather fed up with the question. “Do I look like a Woburn Russell?” The family had been called “grander than God.”
“Actually, no,” the girl admitted, and went on before Alistair could resume control. “I ought to warn you not to say anything about
“I beg your pardon?”
“
“I don’t know it, sorry.”
“Oh, that’s all right, then. It’s just that the family in the story is named Darling and my brother thinks Mr Barrie should have been stopped from using the name. Walter gets quite cross when someone makes a joke about Tinker Bell or the Lost Boys.”
Characters from a children’s play, I deduced, and wondered how we were to be rid of these two. Alistair’s flat commands fell on deaf ears. Perhaps he proposed to bind them to a newel post?
He turned down the corridor leading up the wing towards the front, and when the two children stepped off the stairs to follow, he whirled and went back to loom over them.
“I. Said. No.” It was like speaking to a pair of stubborn puppies. They dropped their eyes to study the toes of their shoes; Alistair took this as a sign of obedience, and gestured for me to continue. I thought, however, the meekness was an act, and indeed, as we went along our way we could occasionally hear a stealthy step, trailing a safe distance behind.
This evidence of insurrection annoyed Alistair, enough to distract him from his lectures on Justice Hall’s history and architectural styles. We moved rather rapidly through a drawing room done in pale, chilly blues, then a trophy room packed with the stuffed heads of large animals, the stuffed bodies of smaller creatures, and case after case of exterminated butterflies and beetles. This room opened onto an orangerie, with tiled floor and murals of picnicking black-haired aristocrats, and then a conservatory, inhabited by one enormous tropical vine with huge yellowed leaves pressing up to the glass, a dying palm tree, and not a lot else. We pushed our way through the dank, deserted glass house to the far end, where a door opened into the billiards room.
There Alistair prepared to lay in wait for our persistent tail, standing terrible and stern with arms folded, ready to explode when they crept through the door.
I touched his arm. “They’re doing us no harm. They must be restless for distraction here.”
