It was a jib door, I saw when it was shut again, its seams rendered invisible by a square of wood trim, the same as any of those mounted decoratively atop the wall-paper all around the room.
We were in a bedroom—Marsh’s quarters before and now after his nephew’s time, bearing traces of an undergraduate’s personality. The room felt old, as the library and the billiards room below had not, all stone and rough-hewn black beams. One of the two Hughenforts had liked art deco, as testified the four lamps in the shapes of vines, leaves, and nymphs, although the wall-paper and Turkey carpet were probably half a century older. It was a shadowy chamber, in spite of the two windows: black wood, burgundy-coloured velvet drapes, and gloomy paintings.
Oddly like the interior of a Bedouin tent, in fact.
Iris swept the room with a disapproving gaze. “It was certainly more cheerful when Marsh was an undergraduate. And I can’t imagine Gabriel living with those paintings—Phillida must have moved them in here to get them out of the way. And those curtains! This was a sort of lumber-room when we were children. Marsh claimed it for his day-room as soon as he discovered the stairs, although his mother wouldn’t allow him to sleep here.”
“Because of the stairs?”
“Actually, I don’t think she knew they were there. No-one did—that was the appeal. I think it was simply that the room was not appropriate in her eyes for a child. One can rather see her point, although at the time we all thought her terribly unreasonable.”
“As far as you know, this stairway is not common knowledge?”
“I shouldn’t think so. You saw the candles—those have sat there gathering dust for a long time. Our generation knew, but we also knew if we told, it would have been blocked up. Gabriel may not even have discovered the door’s existence.”
“Well, I should be quite careful about using the stairway when the Darling children are about the place, if you wish it to remain a secret. They are highly inquisitive, not terribly well supervised, and fond of hiding in odd places.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
With a final glance to see that the jib door was invisible, Iris crossed the room and put an eye to the more ordinary door leading into the corridor. Satisfied, she pulled it open, and in a moment we were at our own rooms, hers on the other side of Marsh’s dressing room, mine next from hers.
“I’ll ring and ask that tea be sent up for us both,” she told me. “We can be naughty and hide out in our rooms until dinner. Enjoy your bath,” she added, and like two truant schoolgirls, we evaded our social obligations until the clamour of the gong recalled us.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I girded myself for the dinner as grimly as any young knight girding for a tournament—and as painfully aware of my inferior equipage and relative inexperience.
To make matters worse, the only members of the party absent when I reached the drawing room were Marsh and Iris. I stood in the doorway, alone in my second-best dress, looking up at the furious murals of battle on the walls and feeling eleven sets of eyes come around to rest on me. My fervent impulse was to turn and sprint for the safety of the Greene Library; instead I stiffened my spine, put on a smile that Holmes would have admired, and went forward to greet my hosts and their guests.
Lady Phillida’s introductions were, for my purposes, woefully inadequate. Not that she was trying to exclude or patronise me—indeed, I believe it was the opposite, that her casual, first-name introductions were an attempt to make me feel welcome, as if I were already on the inside of her circle and she was merely reminding me of people I already knew. In fact, her method had the opposite effect, leaving me uncomfortable about addressing anyone by name, yet incapable of asking who they were and what they did. The structures of traditional formality have their uses.
By the time Iris and Marsh arrived, I had met Bobo, Peebles, Annabelle, Jessamyn, and the seven others, and knew nothing whatsoever about any of them beyond what I could glean by my own senses.
“Peebles,” for example, was a dissipated individual with artificially blackened hair and moustaches whose compulsive double-entendres and caressing lips against the back of my hand at introduction made clear his devotion to the sensuous life, even as the chemical odour his pores exuded told me that champagne was not the strongest stimulant in which he indulged.
“Bobo” was clearly an actor, as theatrical here beneath the chandeliers as he would be under spotlights. There were also two watchful London businessmen (who winced slightly at being presented as “Johnny” and “Richard”) and a pair of German immigrants in expensive suits.
The three remaining guests were women, but not quite ladies. Their accents wandered up and down the social scale, and even before Marsh came in with Iris and fixed them with an icy glare, I had already decided that they were there to entertain the gentlemen. In one manner or another. (And, watching the actor circle around Peebles, I suspected that he had been brought for essentially the same purpose.)
When we went in to dinner, I was cut off from my two comrades, and found myself seated between Bobo and one of the Germans. As I tipped my head to permit an arm to snake forward and fill my glass, it occurred to me that, four years earlier, I would never have believed that I might one day positively crave the presence of Ali Hazr as a dinner companion.
Because the actor spent the entire meal talking across the table at the Marquis, and the German on my right was more interested in his countryman to his own right, I spent the meal in isolated splendour. Drinking rather more than I ought, true, but listening as well, and watching everything.
The seating arrangements were wildly unconventional and most provocative. Marsh and Iris were at one end, with Sidney and Phillida at the other: Which end, a person was left to speculate, was the superior? And Marsh played along with it: When the wine was brought to the table, he diverted its steward to the other end with a nod, leaving Sidney to taste and approve. Iris glanced at him, saw the hidden amusement behind his face, and relaxed.
The servants, however, were clear as to where authority lay, so that when a footman entered with a message, he went first to his duke for permission before circling the table to where Sidney Darling sat. Darling excused himself and followed the man from the room, returning with the faint bulge of a crumpled telegram distorting his elegant pocket and a thoughtful look distorting his elegant features. He went to the two Germans and bent to tell them something in a voice too low for me to hear, then straightened and was heading for his pair of London businessmen when Marsh’s voice stopped him.
“Have you news, Sidney?”
Darling hesitated, glanced at Johnny and Richard, then returned to his vacant chair to sit down beneath the concerted gaze of the table before answering his brother-in-law.
“There was a demonstration today in Munich, an attempt to proclaim a national dictatorship. Police fired on the crowd, a dozen or more people were killed. General Ludendorff gave himself up for arrest. Herr Hitler was injured and has escaped.”
“What will all this mean for your business interests?” Marsh asked, all friendly interest on the surface.
Darling’s answer had too much frustration in it to be anything but the truth. “I don’t honestly know. We have friends on both sides.”
“So you intend to wait and see who comes out on top, then make your arrangements with them, trying in the mean-time to avoid creating enemies inside either camp.”
Darling flushed, more at Marsh’s tone than the actual words, but he did not argue with the analysis, merely clenched his jaw, inclined his head, and picked up his fork. The German on my far right, however, was disturbed by this exchange, and he turned to my neighbour to whisper urgently in their native tongue, “But he told us the duke would support the project, that—”
I don’t know if the man to my right kicked him or gestured him into abrupt silence, but the question cut off in
