gargoyle at the corner of the fireplace, which bore a startling resemblance to a be-wigged Marsh.
As I turned to go, my eye travelled up from a massive wooden chest big enough to act as coffin for half a dozen Long Tims to a third sunburst, this of curving Saracen sabres alternating with smaller knives. Ironic, I thought—and then I noticed the smaller blade that marked the centre of the radiating steel. I looked more closely, then glanced at Marsh and Alistair. Their faces were just a bit too expressionless, which instantly confirmed my suspicion: I had last seen that particular knife decorating the belt of Mahmoud Hazr.
I wondered if the children’s dressing-up costume box held the remainder of the costume.
The chapel was located in a quiet niche of the kitchen block. Perhaps if I were a Christian, I might have found the small, melancholy little church more compelling. Since I am not, it just seemed to me unnecessarily crowded, as if the builder had laboured to distract the worshipper from the chill solitude of the ornate memorials set into the walls and standing out in the floor. Certainly between the angels, the saints, and the flocks of pelicans inserting their ungainly beaks into everything, one would think the afterlife a busy time indeed. Prominently displayed was the effigy of a young boy, its alabaster purity gleaming with innocence, the naked feet beneath its stone drapes pathetic in their vulnerability. However, I had no opportunity to peruse it or any of the myriad statues, busts, plaques, or inscriptions at leisure; the cousins had other things on their minds.
We passed the butler’s pantry, its outer door standing open to reveal a comfortable chair before a fireplace, a locked safe door the height of a man, and a desk with neatly folded newspapers on one corner and a telephone in its precise centre. The long row of old-fashioned bells stretched along the wall outside Ogilby’s sanctum, and then a wide door whose much-bashed sides testified to long years of fast-moving food trolleys.
I will admit that I dragged my feet somewhat as we approached the clatter and tumult of a kitchen coming around to luncheon. The sound of chopping and a billow of steam, a crash of pans and the crackle of an open fire, a strange, rhythmic clanking sound that called to mind a Mediaeval instrument of torture, and above it all a woman’s loud voice raised, in command and chastisement and question. I put my head cautiously around the door.
The tiny woman with her back to us could only have been the Justice housekeeper, Mrs Butter. There was a cook as well, a cowed-looking Frenchman in a white toque, who might normally have expected to reign supreme in this his rightful kingdom; but here the woman ruled. One of the under-cooks saw us and straightened abruptly. Mrs Butter whirled about to see what had so distracted her assistant, a terrible fury gathering in her pink face until she saw who the intruders were. Pleasure flashed briefly across her face before the scowl descended again, but although she struggled to maintain her disapproval of any invasion of her realm, it was a losing battle. Marsh and Alistair stood meekly studying their toes, two schoolboys acknowledging their wrongdoing without a word being said; the sight was so ridiculous, after a moment her mouth twitched, and the rigid, apprehensive workers who filled the kitchen relaxed as one and returned to their sauces, their roasting spit, and their scullery duties.
Mrs Butter folded her arms. “I suppose you’ve come down to tell me nobody served you breakfast and you’d like some bread and dripping, please Mrs Butter.”
“No, mum,” said Lord Marsh the schoolboy. “My cousin wanted to pay his respects.”
She eyed Alistair, a foot taller than she and a generation younger. “Good day to you, young man. By the looks of you, you’ve been feeding better now that you’ve left those foreign parts.”
Alistair stepped forward and kissed her firmly on the cheek, which astonished her almost as much as it did me. She became flustered, which I thought was probably why he had done it, a part of the ritual of their kitchen visit. Alistair grinned at her, she scolded and bustled off, but only as far as the morning’s baking cooling fragrantly on a scrubbed wooden shelf. She brought back a loaf, along with butter and a knife, and set about sawing off generous slices.
“Mrs Butter,” Marsh told her, “this is Miss Russell, visiting from Sussex for a few days. You must be nice to her, and let her have a slice of bread. She saved my life once.” Which was an exaggeration, although it impressed the servants.
“And nearly took mine,” Alistair added, which was not, and impressed them even more.
“You probably deserved it,” she retorted, and slapped an inch of buttery brown bread into his hand. “Pleased to meet you, miss.” My bread came on a plate, as did Marsh’s. She stood over us until the bread was no more than oil on our lips, then she took back the plates.
“If you’ll excuse me, Your Grace, luncheon isn’t going to cook itself,” although to my eyes the work had gone on unabated. She, however, whirled around and started snapping out commands. Obediently, we faded away.
“There can’t be too many kitchens like that left in England,” I said, referring as much to the organisation as to the facility itself. Marsh chose to apply my remark to the latter.
“My stepmother tried to renovate the kitchen in the nineties. It is, after all, essentially a Mediaeval room—the only thing that’s changed is the motor running the spit, which I clearly remember in my childhood being harnessed to a dog.”
After the steam room of the kitchen, the cold November house bit at us. We’d walked back past the chapel and turned into the hall, with an eye to going upstairs for a proper introduction to Mr Greene’s library, when Marsh glanced out the window overlooking the drive and fountain. Whatever he saw there first rooted him to the spot, then sent him running—
Ogilby hastened to lift his umbrella over the newcomer, but she seemed not to notice. She had eyes only for Marsh, and he, it seemed, for her. He descended the last step, opened his arms wide, and wrapped them around the woman.
I couldn’t help an involuntary glance sideways to see Alistair’s reaction; astonishingly enough, the man so jealous of his cousin’s energies and attentions had a smile on his face, and strode forward into the rain to greet her as well.
She looked remarkably ordinary for this extreme response, I thought as I watched them come up the steps (Ogilby fretting at the impossibility of keeping all three of his charges dry at once, despite the large umbrella and the closeness of the three walkers). Tall and slim, her hair cut short but not in the fashionable shingle style, wearing a skirt and coat the colour of milky coffee, with a common wool overcoat across her shoulders (not even fur trim). She looked a bit like me, in fact, had my hair been cropped short and dark—with, I saw as she entered the porch, threads of white here and there. Mahmoud’s age, more or less, in her mid-forties. No powder or lipstick, her only jewelry a gold wrist-watch and a silver band on the ring finger of her left hand; she had cornflower-blue eyes with laugh-lines around them, the vigorous step of a tennis-player and, I found in a moment, a strong and callused grip.
Marsh gave her my name, which she seemed to recognise. Then Marsh withdrew very slightly from me, to put his hand on the woman’s shoulder.
“This is Iris Sutherland,” he told me. “My . . .” He paused to glance at her, and they exchanged an expression of mischief, as at a private joke shared. He turned back to me and completed his sentence.
“My wife.”
CHAPTER TEN
I’m afraid I gaped at the woman. For a couple of seconds before my jaw snapped shut and my hand went out, I must have resembled a stunned fish.
“How do you do?” I managed.
“Quite well, thank you. Despite the foul weather. It wasn’t raining in Paris; it began halfway across the Channel, like walking through a curtain. Alistair, you look marvelous.”
She was English, but had lived long enough in France to have a fairly pronounced accent, and she presented her cheek for Alistair to salute as a European would have done. She then noticed a damp but formal presence lingering in the background.
“Ogilby, that
