gilt rail at about waist height, with vertical rods below the railing, and doors at both ends.
Troubled by a vague sense of something missing or wrong, I moved on through the dining-room, between a long oak table with chairs for a dozen people, and a massive sideboard laden with tarnished serving dishes and candlesticks. With the drawing room closed off, it would be pitch dark in here. But when I got the shutters in the end wall open, daylight filled the room. I found myself looking down on to a flagged courtyard, surrounded once again by an impenetrable tangle of greenery.
The land on which the house was set evidently sloped downwards, for the window was at least ten feet above the ground, but the view beyond the courtyard was obscured on every side by rampant, towering foliage. Weeds sprouted between the flagstone^. Below and to my right, a long, narrow conservatory had been built out along the rear wall of the house. From the far side of the courtyard, a path continued a few yards further, towards what looked like the remains of an ancient gazebo or summerhouse, half buried beneath a canopy of nettles.
I pressed my face against the glass, but could see nothing more. There were no bars on these windows, and no visible locks or bolts, but neither side would budge. I went on through a door to the right of the windows, on to a landing from which a wide staircase descended. A narrower flight ran steeply up to another half-landing on its way to the floor above. There were several other doors to choose from, but I went on down, hoping to find a way out on to the courtyard so that I could see the house from the outside.
I found a small parlour or breakfast room, immediately below the dining room, with shuttered French windows opening-or rather refusing to open-on to the courtyard. Behind the parlour was a small kitchen-1920s or 30s, I thought-three-burner gas cooker, chipped porcelain sink, wooden cupboards and benches. Mixed crockery, also chipped and cracked, that looked like the remnants of expensive services. A few tins rusting in the food cupboard, labels long gone.
The main house door next to the parlour was painted a drab black. It appeared to be locked and bolted. To the right of that was another set of French windows, also locked, into the conservatory. Peering through the glass, I saw a long trestle table crammed with pots and seed trays from which a few desiccated sticks protruded. Garden tools leaned against walls and benches. An old wooden barrow stood blocking one of the aisles.
No other doors. The stairs continued on down, back in under the house. Daylight slanted down the stairwell on to a patch of stone floor. From where I stood in the entrance, the original kitchen extended out to my left. An ancient black range with a corroded flue; brick walls; a scarred worktable; canisters rusting along a wall shelf in descending order of size. The air down here was colder, and distinctly damp; the ceiling was only a foot above my head. I took a few uneasy steps into the gloom. There was a doorway in the opposite wall, opening onto darkness.
I RETREATED UP THE STAIRS TO THE LANDING, TOOK THE first door on my left, opposite the dining-room, and was greeted by the warm, faintly sweet smell of printed paper and cloth boards, dust and leather and old bindings.
The shutters-polished wood here, rather than painted-opened into a library as imposing as the drawing-room. Tall bookcases rose like pillars between four high, narrow windows in the rear wall of the house. Around the other three sides of the room, a mezzanine gallery had been built about seven or eight feet above the floor, giving access to a second tier of shelves, with cases built out like piers from the recessed shelves below, so that the books in the lower section were housed in a series of alcoves. There was an open spiral staircase at the far end of the room, leading up to the gallery; a chesterfield and two cracked brown leather armchairs stood below the windows. The centre of the floor was taken up by a massive table covered in worn green baize, with four high-backed library chairs ranged around it. Several large blank sheets of what looked like butcher's paper had been left at one end of it, with a folded chessboard and some sort of child's toy on top of the pile.
I wandered along the cases, pulling out volumes at random. Blue books, parliamentary papers, regimental histories, accounts of military campaigns and naval battles, gazetteers, clerical lists, law lists, county histories and so forth, occupied an entire wall. A nineteenth-century gentleman's library. Belonging to one J.G. Ferrier… and a G.C. Ferrier… then a C.R. Ferrier, in thick, greyish ink on the flyleaf of A
I moved on to the next wall. Literature: Greek and Latin, all J.G. Ferrier; the standard English poets, mostly in nineteenth-century editions inscribed by J.G. and G.C… until I took down one of several disintegrating Byrons and found 'V. Ferrier/ Jan. 1883' on the flyleaf in a clear, spiky hand. And in the next alcove, in a well-worn copy of Balzac's
HALF AN HOUR LATER, THOUGH I HADN'T EVEN STARTED ON the mezzanine gallery, I knew that Viola Ferrier had become Viola Hatherley some time between 1887 and 1889; that she often marked passages in her books, but did not annotate beyond an occasional cryptic reference such as v.
Suddenly overtaken by a lurching wave of fatigue, I sat down at the central table. Filaments of dust drifted in the light from the four great windows on my right.
From my perspective, the gallery formed an elevated U, with the spiral staircase immediately to the right of the windows. At the corresponding point on the opposite side, just before the end wall, one of the bookcases seemed to have been set back into the side wall at a considerable angle. No; a dummy bookcase, disguising a low, narrow door, like the ones on the galleries in the old Round Reading Room. Odd that I hadn't noticed it before.
Idly, I reached over to the stack of paper and picked up the toy. It resembled a miniature tricycle, four or five inches long, with two polished wheels at the back of a boat-shaped platform of the same dark wood. But instead of a front wheel, the stub of a pencil had been pushed through a hole at the front, point downward, and secured with a rubber band.
I put down the toy and opened the chessboard. Only it was not a chessboard. Instead of squares it had YES in the top left corner, next to an image of the sun, and NO opposite, next to the moon, above the letters of the alphabet set out in two shallow horseshoe arcs, then the numbers 1 to 10, and below that, GOODBYE. The William Flud Talking Board Set. John Waddington Ltd, Leeds & London, permitted user of the trade marks Ouija, William Flud and Mystifying Oracle.
Now I knew what the tricycle was. I leafed through the sheets of paper, but they were all blank. After a little practice with the-plechette?-no, planchette-I could produce legible words. On a clean sheet of paper I wrote
in large, spidery letters, and set the planchette below the W, with my fingers resting lightly on the wooden platform.
I DIDN'T-DID I?-SERIOUSLY EXPECT IT TO ANSWER. YOU needed at least two people, anyway. But I did have to find the answer myself if I possibly could. Because clearly Miss Hamish had given me the keys as a sort of test. To prove myself a worthy heir to Ferrier's Close and Staplefield. She had all but said so on the last page of her letter.
But suppose-just supposing-I were to discover that my mother really had murdered her sister? I would have to live with the knowledge for ever; it would poison my reunion (as I often found myself thinking, perhaps because of
