“I do not like to be followed.”
Or disobeyed. “Of course not. But think about it: If you don’t allow children to practise following and watching, or to rig traps out over the battlements, where will your friend Joshua get his next generation of spies?”
He reared back, stared at me in astonishment, stared at the still-vacant doorway, then gave a loud bark of unexpected laughter and reached out to clout me hard on the shoulder.
“That is good, Mary,” he said, chuckling. “I do like the idea of two generations working for Joshua. Very well; we shall permit the brats to practise their skills on us. Just so you remember never to say a thing in this house that you do not want to find its way into nursery and servants’ hall before nightfall.”
Much cheered and able now to concentrate on his task, he led me through the public rooms on the ground floor, tossing out tit-bits about the various dukes, duchesses, and powers-that-be of their times. The Prince of Wales had descended on Marsh’s father for a few days of slaughtering birds, bringing with him half the court and despoiling the countryside of anything with feathers (to judge by the photographs commemorating the occasion). The current King had dropped in for tea on the terrace one sunny summer afternoon, which as obligatory social events go must have proved a bargain by comparison.
One long corridor, wrapping around the back of the dining room, chronicled a period of about ten years during which Justice Hall had stepped into the centre of the social whirl. Dozens of photographs, all eight inches by twelve and identically framed, recorded one week-end after another. The guests were assembled on croquet courts or picnic grounds, arranged up the great staircase in the Hall or around a leaping bonfire in the out-of-doors, posed with artificial spontaneity around a card table or with the day’s tally of birds laid out in neat lines at their feet. Some gatherings were as few as eight or ten guests, others a dozen times that, but all the groups looked as if they were having a good time.
“Marsh’s stepmother enjoyed entertaining,” Alistair said, seeing me stopped in front of one panorama of at least fifty people in fancy-dress, masks in hand. Professional beauties, members of Parliament, one well-known tycoon, and three royals, with a handful of actors for leavening.
“Must have been quite a time.”
“We were already in—we were out of the country by then,” Alistair amended, mindful of ears. “This particular one, I believe Phillida wrote Marsh about. Yes—there’s Darling.” Indeed, the handsome young man, tall and slim and blond in the fancy-dress costume of Napoleon, was standing at her side. We went through the dining room, Alistair pointing out the Cellini ewers and the Adam plasterwork, a fairly uninhibited painting by Caravaggio and a somewhat dim one on the opposite wall by Van Eyck, a huge cabinet displaying several hundredweight of identical Sevres porcelain, and an attractive but incongruous inlaid screen taking up one corner of the room, no doubt the booty of some family member who’d spent time in India. At the moment it was screening from our eyes two fledgling spies, which fact Alistair either did not notice or, considerably more likely, chose to overlook.
The dining room gave way to a music room of Jacobean plasterwork painted in orange and white, rather like plunging into an enormous bowl of apricot cream; then another drawing room, its walls completely taken up with a series of paintings depicting some momentous historical event that appeared to have involved a landing on a storm-swept beach followed by a lot of red-clad men riding horses with huge hindquarters up a hill towards a vaguely Germanic castle. After this room came the Great Hall, and up its stairway we went, to pass through the columns of chocolate-and-cream alabaster into an absolutely stunning long gallery.
The gallery glowed with light and felt warmer than its actual temperature. Its walls combined a pale yellow silk with white detailing and a collection of family portraits that somehow contrived to look like affectionate friends rather than the stern eyes of a disapproving Past. One could almost imagine them joining in the conversations of family members taking their exercise beneath that densely intricate plaster ceiling, strolling up and down the whole bright length of the room while the rain or snow came down on the terraced gardens outside of the mullioned windows, turning the curve of Justice Pond to a thing of pewter solidity. There was even, I saw, a folly on the top of the distant hill, crumbling artistically.
One of the primary reasons for country houses of this sort, I reflected, has always been intimidation. Less a family home than an assertion of power, the country house was the focus of the estate’s energies: The more powerful the landholder, the grander the house. Badger Old Place might be an organic extension of the countryside—its roots old as the hills themselves—but where it was an essentially domestic piece of architecture, Justice Hall was military history in stone and mortar, a weapon from battlement to Great Hall, intended to keep the peasants and all potential enemies in their place. Well, it was certainly working on me: I was well and truly intimidated, and feeling more and more like a country cousin with cow dung on her boots. Since the invention of Culture in the sixteenth century, these people had been skimming the cream off European art and artistry, bringing it here for the pleasure of the few, perfecting the art of being first and foremost. Lady Phillida drew to herself an aura of privilege in the same way the long gallery drew light; I crept along its edge, feeling every inch the mongrel parvenue.
Holmes came from country squires—minor squires, true, but at least he spoke the same language. I, on the other hand, was the result of a cross between Jewish merchants and American tycoons: half outsider, half nouveau riche, completely beyond redemption.
I escaped the beautiful room wondering how many more priceless works of art and exquisite vistas were going to sear themselves onto my soul before the tour was over. We entered a state bedroom hung with silk hand- painted chinoiserie wall covering and the matching silk bed hangings; from the door came the brief sound of footsteps crossing the bare boards at the side of the carpet down the centre of the long gallery. Alistair came to a halt and raised his voice.
“Were a person to wish to follow another without being noticed, he might do well to remove his shoes.”
Utter silence radiated from the long gallery. Then a small voice called back, “We’re not allowed to remove our shoes. It makes Miss Paul quite cross.”
“Life is full of decisions,” Alistair commented. Having delivered himself of this philosophical dictum, he went cheerfully on into the next room.
The sound of footsteps ceased to dog our heels.
CHAPTER NINE
The skirmish with the two children had restored Alistair to something approaching good humour. As we wended our way through the state bedrooms of the central block he would pause for a moment, then continue with a look of amused satisfaction. It came back to me that one of the man’s quirks had been the occasional pleasure he took at being bested, especially in the areas of his own expertise. He had once laughed aloud when my thrown knife had nearly taken him in the throat—a reaction I attributed at the time to astonishment, but which was now looking like a sort of generosity of spirit that I had not suspected.
At the turn of the corridor that led into the east wing, he stopped. “These are the family’s rooms. Nothing of interest.”
I could hardly insist on poking my nose into private bedrooms, although I should have been interested to look at Lady Phillida’s dressing room. One can learn a great deal by studying a woman’s cosmetics and medicine cabinet.
Instead, we doubled back (causing a short flurry of panicked whispers and hasty movement) to retrace our steps through the gallery (ostentatiously ignoring the unnatural bulge of the curtains in one room) and past the genial ancestors to a door at the other end. This opened into the room Marsh had referred to as the “green library,” although there was nothing particularly green about it.
But it was certainly a library, rather than a room with decorative books and well-used sofas. Shelves lined the walls, unbroken but for five windows, two doors, and a fireplace with a portrait above it. Free-standing bookshelves of a subtly newer appearance extended into one end of the room, creating three bays that filled a third of the library’s floor space. On the other end, under the windows, were two long mahogany worktables and a trio of leather armchairs, all of which were equipped with reading lamps.
I felt instantly at home, and wanted only to dismiss Alistair, along with the rest of Justice Hall, that I might
