The Stately Home Murder

by Catherine Aird

  “For all we know,” said Mr. Feathers in a mock-sinister voice, “there may be someone there now, watching us.”

  What the reaction of his listeners to this suggestion was, Mr. Feathers never knew. At that very moment there was a terrible screech. It rang through the great hall and must have come from somewhere not far away. It was eldritch, hideous.

  And utterly inhuman.

  It was almost as if the sound had been deliberately laid on as a Maskelyne-type distraction, because when it had died away Mrs. Fisher became aware that Michael had completely disappeared.

  2

  Whatever else was in short supply in Paradise Row, emotion and drama were never stinted.

  “Whatever’s that?” gasped Mrs. Fisher, clutching her heart and looking round wildly. “And where’s my Michael?” She pointed. “Over there, that’s where it came from.”

  “Outside anyway,” said a thin woman in sensible shoes, as if this absolved her from any further action.

  “Sounds to me as if someone was being murdered,” insisted Mrs. Fisher.

  Mr. Feathers shook his head. “Peacocks,” he explained briefly. “On the terrace.”

  Mrs. Fisher was unconvinced. “Peacocks?”

  Maureen Fisher had already gone off in the direction of the noise and was starting to climb on a chair the better to see out of the window.

  This galvanized Mr. Feathers into near frenzy. “Get down, girl,” he shouted. “No one’s stood on that chair since Chippendale made it and you’re not going to be the first.”

  Maureen backed down. “I only wanted to see …”

  “Gave me quite a turn, it did,” declared Mrs. Fisher generally, looking round the party in a challenging fashion. Wherever she looked there was indubitably no sign of Michael.

  The earnest woman—she who carried The Guide to Calleshire—and who had hardly done more than start at the noise, smiled distantly, and the whole group began to move towards one of the doors leading off the great hall. Mr. Feathers promised there would be another guide upstairs, made absolutely sure Michael Fisher wasn’t hiding anywhere, and then turned back to his next party.

  Mrs. Fisher, thinking about her feet and her Michael, shuffled along in the group towards the staircase. In Paradise Row a bare wooden staircase meant you couldn’t afford a carpet. In Ornum House it obviously meant something quite different. For one fleeting moment it crossed Mrs. Fisher’s mind how wonderful it must have been to have swept down that staircase in a long dress—and then someone trod on her toe and instantly she was back in the present.

  And there was still no sign of Michael.

  There were pictures lining the staircase wall, small dark oil paintings in the Dutch style, which did not appeal to Mrs. Fisher though she liked the gold frames well enough, but there was a portrait on the landing at the head of the stairs which caught her eye.

  Literally.

  The sitter must have been looking at the artist because whichever way Mrs. Pearl Fisher looked at the portrait, the portrait looked back at Mrs. Pearl Fisher. It was of a woman, a woman in a deep red velvet dress, against which the pink of a perfect complexion stood out. But it was neither her clothes—which Mrs. Fisher thought of as costume—nor her skin which attracted Mrs. Fisher. It was her face.

  It had a very lively look indeed.

  And of one thing Mrs. Fisher was quite sure. Oil painting or not, the woman in the portrait had been no better than she ought to have been.

  “This way, please,” called the next guide. “Now, this is the long gallery …”

  Michael wasn’t there.

  By comparison with the lady on the landing Mrs. Fisher found the portraits in the long gallery dull.

  “Lely, Romney, Gainsborough,” chanted Miss Cleepe, a short-sighted maiden lady from Ornum village in charge of the Long Gallery, who recited her litany of fashionable portrait painters at half hourly intervals throughout the season. By June she had lost any animation she might have had in April. “That’s the eleventh Earl and Countess on either side of the fireplace in their coronation robes for Edward the Seventh—”

  “Who’s the one outside?” Mrs. Fisher wanted to know. She jerked her finger over her shoulder. “You know, on the landing.”

  Miss Cleepe pursed her lips. “That’s the Lady Elizabeth Murton. She’s dead now.… Now, ladies and gentlemen, if you will look back at the coronation paintings you will see a very good representation of the Earl’s coronet …”

  “This picture,” said Mrs. Fisher.

  “The coronet,” went on Miss Cleepe gamely, “has eight balls on tall spikes in alternation with eight strawberry leaves …”

  Mrs. Fisher, who did not in any case know what a coronet was, was not interested. “This Lady Elizabeth …” she persisted.

  Miss Cleepe gave in. “Yes?”

  “Who was she?”

  Miss Cleepe turned back reluctantly, and said very slowly, “She was a daughter of the house.”

  “What did she do?”

  “Do?”

  “To be put out there?”

  Miss Cleepe looked confused. “She made rather an unfortunate marriage.”

  “Ohoh,” said Mrs. Fisher.

  “With her groom.”

  “They ran away together …” supplied Mrs. Fisher intuitively.

  “I believe so.”

  Somewhere at the back of the party someone said lightly, “Why didn’t they just turn the picture to the wall?”

  This had the effect of making Miss Cleepe more confused than ever. “Her son, Mr. William Murton, still comes here.”

  Mrs. Fisher gave a satisfied nod. “That’s why she’s on the landing.”

  “Yes.” Miss Cleepe paused, and then—surprisingly—ventured a piece of information quite outside her usual brief. “She was known locally, I understand, as Bad Betty.”

  Mrs. Fisher looked around the rest of the party and said cheerfully, “They’re no different here really, are they? Same as my cousin Alfred. No one’s got any photographs of him any more. Or if they have, they don’t put them in the front parlor.”

  “The most valuable painting in the long gallery,” Miss Cleepe hastened to reassert herself, “is that one over there. In the middle of the right-hand wall.”

  Everyone stared at a rather dark oil.

  “It’s by Holbein. Painted in 1532. It’s of a member of the family who went in for law. Judge Cremond.”

  The subject of the picture was fingering a small black cap.

  “It’s popularly known as The Black Death,” said Miss Cleepe.

  The group looked suitably impressed. The only exception was an artistic-looking young man with long hair who held that the female form was the only subject worth painting.

  Miss Cleepe paused for dramatic effect. “And it’s his ghost who still haunts the great hall …”

  “I thought you’d have a ghost,” said someone with satisfaction.

  Miss Cleepe nodded. She was absolutely sure of her audience now. “He was a judge and he sentenced the wrong man to death. His soul can’t rest, you see …”

  The sightseeing party was almost equally divided into those who believed every word and the skeptics who believed nothing.

  “That,” said Miss Cleepe, “is where the family motto comes from.”

  “‘I will atone,’” said Mrs. Fisher promptly. She was, of course, numbered among the believers, her mother having hand-reared her on fable rather than fact.

  “He doesn’t look the sort of man to let something like that put him out,” observed a man in the party. A skeptic.

  This was true. The thin lips which stretched across under the unmistakably Cremond nose, a nose common to all the family portraits, did not look as if their owner would have been unduly disturbed by the odd death or two in what were admittedly stirring times.

  “Ah,” said Miss Cleepe melodramatically, “but it was his own son who died. And now, whenever a member of the family is about to die, the Judge walks abroad.”

 
The skeptics continued to look skeptical and the believers believing.

  “And next to that is a portrait of the ninth Earl as a young man. That’s a falcon on his wrist …” Miss Cleepe suddenly dived away from the party, showing a surprising fleetness of foot. She reached a priceless orrery just as Maureen Fisher was starting it spinning round.

  “We got one at school anyway,” she said, “and it’s better than this.”

  “No, you haven’t,” retorted Miss Cleepe crisply. “This is an orrery. What you have is a globe. That shows you the world. This is about space.”

  Maureen Fisher looked skeptically at the antique inlaid wood. “Space?”

  “Space,” said Miss Cleepe. She raised her voice in the manner of all guides to include the whole party, and went on, “In the olden days the ladies of the house would spend much of their time in this room. When it was wet they would take their exercise in here.” She pointed out of the far window. “On fine days they would walk in the park—perhaps to the folly.”

  They all stared across towards the distant folly. There was no sign whatever of Miss Mavis Palmer and her young man, Bernard. Mrs. Fisher wished Miss Cleepe hadn’t mentioned walking. For a few precious minutes—while thinking about the errant Lady Elizabeth Murton—she had managed to forget both her feet and the fact that Michael was still missing. Now they came into the forefront of her mind again.

  “Who is the man in armor?” asked the earnest woman, indicating a painting near the far door. “It looks like a Rembrandt.”

  “No.” Miss Cleepe shook her head. “It’s quite modern, though it doesn’t look it. The twelfth Earl—that is the father of the present Earl—was a great collector of medieval armor. You’ll see the armory presently, those of you who want to go down there.”

  “Yes,” said Maureen Fisher simply.

  “The Earl had himself painted in a suit of armor which used to belong to one of his ancestors.”

  They all peered curiously at the painting of the helmeted figure.

  “Sort of fancy dress?” said Mrs. Fisher dubiously.

  “You could say that,” said Miss Cleepe. “Now, if you’ll all go through that door there and then round to the right …”

  Mrs. Fisher shuffled along with the crowd, uneasily aware that Maureen was getting bored and—which was worse—that Michael still wasn’t anywhere to be seen.

  “Perhaps,” suggested Maureen cheerfully, “the ghost’s got him.”

  The next room was the solarium.

  “The what?” asked Mrs. Fisher of the woman beside her.

  “Solarium,” said the woman.

  “What’s that?”

  The next guide explained, and then passed them along to the main bedroom. The lady in charge of the bedroom was a Mrs. Nutting.

  (“Job for a married woman, that,” his Lordship had declared. “No use putting Miss Cleepe there.”

  Charles Purvis had agreed and had found Mrs. Nutting.)

  Mrs. Nutting was well aware of the main points of interest in the bedroom.

  No, the present Earl and Countess did not sleep in the fourposter.

  Yes, fourposters were rather short.

  And high.

  The ceiling was very beautiful.

  Yes, it was like lacework.

  Or icing.

  The bobble was the Tudor Rose.

  It was called pargetting.

  Maureen Fisher tugged at her mother’s sleeve. “Them curtains round the bed, Mum, what are they for?”

  “Warmth,” replied Mrs. Fisher tersely, her eyes for once on the guide.

  For Mrs. Nutting had moved across to a corner of the bedroom towards a great mahogany cupboard. More than half of the party expected a wardrobe full of robes—ermine at least. What was inside the cupboard was a miniature bathroom.

  “The twelfth Earl had it put there,” said Mrs. Nutting. “Of course, you can’t lie down in the bath, but it was as good as the old-fashioned hip bath of the day. You see the wash-hand basin first and then round to the right—the bath itself.”

  Mrs. Fisher was enchanted.

  She wasn’t one of those who was ambling through the rooms of the house in a pipe dream of vicarious ownership. She didn’t see her own home as a minuscule of what she saw in Ornum House. She didn’t even have any reproduction furniture on whose quality she could now congratulate herself.

  Nor was she seeking to reassure herself that the gap between the Fishers of this world and the Ornums was small—she knew it wasn’t. And two minutes ago she would have sworn she wasn’t going to go back to Paradise Row and change anything.

  But a bathroom in a cupboard.

  There was room for a cupboard in Paradise Row but not a bathroom. She moved closer.

  “Before then,” expanded Mrs. Nutting, “hot water was brought up here in great copper jugs, but the twelfth Earl designed this himself and had it fitted here. It hardly takes up any room at all …”

  That was true.

  The party, sheeplike, started to follow their leader towards the bedroom door. Mrs. Fisher was the last to leave. She was studying the miniature bath.

  There was still no sign of Michael. She hardly took in any of the drawing room for thinking about him.

  “Originally the withdrawing room,” explained Mrs. Mompson, the over-refined widow of a former doctor of Ornum who was graciously pleased—as she herself put it—to “help out the Earl with the visitors.”

  “Not, of course,” she added, “a room in which actual drawing was done.”

  Mrs. Fisher did not listen. Gnawing anxiety about Michael had succeeded mild concern. Whereabouts in this vast house was he, and, more important, what was he up to?

  After the drawing room came another room, smaller but made infinitely charming by a most beautiful collection of china and porcelain. It lined the walls in cleverly illuminated glass cases. Momentarily—only momentarily—Mrs. Fisher was glad that Michael was out of the way of harming it.

  Those members of the public who had come—whether they admitted it or not—hoping for a glimpse of “the family” never knew—never even suspected—the woman in charge of the china.

  “Very early Wedgwood mostly,” said Miss Gertrude Cremond, cousin to the present Earl. She had a gruff voice which carried well and, in spite of the heat, wore an old cardigan. “Some Meissen and Sèvres brought back by the family from the Continent on their travels. Grand Tours and so forth …”

  This was her private joke.

  “And a little Ming bought in when they could afford it.”

  This was her public joke.

  She was a vigorous woman of indeterminate age. She had played hockey for Calleshire in her youth and still looked as if a distant cry of “sticks” would distract her from the business in hand. She had never married and now her home was with her cousin, the Earl. She looked after the china and did the flowers and the myriad of other small inconsequential tasks that were at one and the same time above and beyond the housekeeper but too mundane for the Countess.

  She did all the china herself and very occasionally in the crowd found a kindred spirit.

  Not today.

  “Lovely, isn’t it?”

  “We have a little Wedgwood bowl at home.”

  “Glad I don’t have to clean it all.”

  “I do,” responded Miss Cremond, thus dispelling any suspicions in anyone’s mind that she could possibly be other than hired help.

  There were clucks of sympathy all round at the enormity of the task, but soon they shuffled on. Like all such visitors they came, they saw, they fingered, they exclaimed, they went.

  It was almost exactly an hour after leaving it that the party arrived back in the great hall.

  The discomfort from her feet was vying in Mrs. Fisher’s mind with the constant fret about Michael—and with the interest of the bathroom. What she wanted more than anything else was a chair that didn’t have a red cord stretched from arm to arm. It seemed, though, that the tour was not yet at an end. Mr. Feathers wa
s speaking to them again.

  “Those of you who wish may now go down to the dungeons and armory at no extra charge.” He paused. “The twelfth Earl assembled one of the finest collections of medieval armor in the country. However, I must warn you that the stair is difficult.”

  This last would have settled it for Mrs. Fisher and her poor feet had Michael not been missing. Mr. Feathers had not seen him. He was quite certain about this, declaring that he would know Michael anywhere.

  “Like Maureen but a boy,” said Mrs. Fisher by way of describing him.

  Mr. Feathers said with perfect truth that he remembered Michael only too well and he was sure he hadn’t seen him since Mrs. Fisher’s party had left the great hall.

  “The armory,” he suggested. “Perhaps he went down there.”

  Mr. Feathers had been right to winnow out the party. This was no staircase for the aged and infirm. It was not wood but stone and it wound its way down inside a turret. A hanging rope did duty as a banister, but Mrs. Fisher did not trust it. Instead she pressed herself against the outer wall, invisibly helped by a force she did not recognize as centrifugal.

  “We know one thing about the chap who built this,” called out Mr. Feathers cheerfully from above. “He was left-handed. This staircase goes round the wrong way. That was so that his sword arm would be free.”

  Mrs. Fisher did not care.

  The descending stair seemed interminable. She had no idea how many times it wound round. She concentrated on following the person ahead and trying to keep out of the way of the person behind. At long last the steps came to an end and she was on a level floor again. It was very gloomy.

  “I don’t like it down here, Mum,” complained Maureen. “It’s too dark.”

  This was true: the only lighting came from two low-powered sconces on the wall.

  (“Don’t overdo the electricity down there, Purvis.”

  “Very well, my lord.”

  “Got to get the right atmosphere.”)

  As far as Mrs. Fisher was concerned they’d got it. She shivered and wished she was somewhere else. Just wait until she found Michael, that’s all, she wouldn’t half give him …

  “This way for the dungeons.” That was Bert Hackle, one of the undergardeners at Ornum House. He was custodian of the dungeons and tackled the job with relish. “This way, please.”