by Ashly Graham
When one of the lodge staff, ignoring the Do Not Disturb sign, knocked on the door of Huntenfisch’s bedroom late at night, nine hours behind Greenwich Mean Time, to give him the tragic news from Northumberland about the storm—there being no mobile phone reception at the lodge, the butler at home had called the land line—he received no reply; whereupon, presuming that his lordship was asleep, he entered with the intention of rousing him from his bed, on account of the butler having told him it was an emergency.
Finding Lord Huntenfisch instead already very aroused, and although not yet a-bed, about to be—as soon as he let go of the elk antler chandelier that he was swinging on, in order to gather momentum preparatory to making his own entrance into the owner–manager daughter’s not-so-secret boudoir [I did not wish to stem the flow of Aunt Jenny’s narrative by interrupting to ask her what this meant], the staff member covered his eyes and blurted out his message.
Aghast and incredulous that such a disaster could have occurred—for Dragonburgh, unlike the faithful Jessman, was irreplaceable—Huntenfisch let go of the antlers and trampolined off the daughter onto the floor.
His penile flaccidity restored [I let that one go too], his lordship dressed as hastily as he had removed his clothes, summoned his entourage of cronies, and informed them that they would be returning by float plane to Anchorage first thing in the morning, where the Gulfstream’s pilot would be waiting to fly them home via the Greenland route.
When Huntenfisch got back from Alaska, faster than he had arrived owing to the west-east Jet Stream air currents being in his favour—also of assistance was the absence of the one-tenth of a ton Jessman, who was being shipped separately for depositing at an Anchorage morgue to await the State Medical Examiner’s releasing his body with a verdict of death by misadventure, before being shipped home on a commercial flight—Huntenfisch had no choice but to attempt to ascend on foot the old winding path up the rock to the castle.
For not only was the helicopter pad on the roof terrace, which the storm had restored to its former role as a terrace surrounded by a balustrade, with stone furniture and urns and terracotta pots, no longer helicopter-friendly; but the cabin of the lift up the rock-face and its support structure, along with the engine and the electrical generators that had powered it, were now lying in a congeries of tortured metal and wire cable at the base of the cliff. The journey was made more arduous by the many fallen boulders that were blocking the way, and danger from further rockfalls.
But eventually Huntenfisch made it to the top. Despite the several bruised ribs and a sprained wrist that he had sustained, when he tripped and fell so close to the edge of the cliff that he nearly joined the remains of the lift, his lordship, despite the knowledge that the castle wasn’t insured, and that he was about to go bankrupt for a second time in quick succession, was distressed about nothing so much as the loss of his extensive and expensive collection of sporting equipment.
The disappearance of half a dozen Post-Impressionist paintings, and some acrylic daubs by the actor Tony Curtis in the style of Matisse, was of little concern; Huntenfisch’s decorator had acquired them to match the vibrant colours of the new upholstery fabrics and window treatments, and there was no longer anything to match.
When he saw what remained of the gun room, however, Huntenfisch was shaken to the core, for it had housed all his rifles and shotguns, and salmon and trout rods, and drawers of thousands of fishing flies. Every one of the glass and wooden cases and racks was shattered, leaving a useless debris of damaged stocks and bent steel and broken carbon fibre. The bamboo rods had been crushed into toothpicks for mice.
The whole would take years to reassemble, given the necessary funds, even if one were to forgo the silver engraving on the gunstocks, for which the waiting lists at James Purdey & Sons, gunsmiths and gun dealers in London—whose side by side game guns were built on the famous self-opening system patented by Frederick Beesley in 1880, whose over & under guns were matchless, and whose “Express Train” double rifles were to die for—were just as indelibly graven; and his lordship shed tears as he recalled Hardy Brothers’—the venerable and venerated fly-fishing company’s birthplace was Alnwick, Northumberland—report of the desperate shortage of the best split cane, due to some political argy-bargy with the Chinese.
The trout and salmon flies, which had been blown away maybe to land in river, lake, or sea, where they might already have been swallowed by any number of trophy fish, had been tied by a legendary old woman crofter who’d never held a rod, and was considered the best fly-tyer in the world; until, only the month before, her hook-gripping vice was loosened in death.
Swearing great oaths, and weeping into the tattered remnant of a pink-and-blue striped Harvie & Hudson shirt, Huntenfisch retired to the cellar beneath the wing of the castle that he occupied, to find his cases of vintage wines: his Champagne, Burgundy, and Bordeaux, and his rare bottles of port and brandy, smashed and useless for rendering him in a similar condition.
His lordship was flummoxed in trying to fathom how the storm could have penetrated to the depths of the castle, and liquidated the precious liquids. But the evidence spoke for itself, and all that remained was a tapped cask of Grande Champagne hors d’âge Cognac, which at Huntenfisch’s instruction had accidentally on purpose missed being included in the removal of the rest of the Earl of Northmarch’s cellar to Edinburgh.
Huntenfisch sat on the floor in front of the barrel drank himself into a stupor out of a silver tankard, which was so battered that the Huntenfisch heraldic insignia, which must have been lost from records at the College of Arms, of a stag couchant and a salmon rampant, could no longer be made out.
And in the cellar his lordship stayed for the rest of the day, nursing his tankard and dolour until he sank into unconsciousness.
Lady Eugénie, meanwhile, was seized by an idea, and went in search of the castle’s Clerk of Works.
Somewhere in the fortress, so the history went, as at Glamis Castle was an unaccounted-for room, or suite of rooms. From childhood onward, Jenny had been obsessed by the possibility that there was a hidden area that she did not know about; and if so, of finding it, discovering who might have occupied it, and for what purpose, and what might still be within it. Although she had conducted many exhaustive searches, because so far she had received no conclusive report from the Works department—which comprised no one other than the Clerk of Works himself—confirming that the castle’s ancient integrity of appearance, or lack of it, was miraculously restored, now was the perfect opportunity to look again in the hope that something might been laid bare or somehow revealed.
Ten years before, when she had just turned eleven [the exact same age as I was when my aunt told me this story] Jenny had explored every corner of Dragonburgh with her friend Sally Furness, the cook’s daughter. When they found nothing that previously had not been known about, Jenny approached the castle steward, Mr Jamieson, asking him if he might have the staff go into all the rooms and hang bath and hand and dish towels out of the windows, so that they might be viewed from the outside to ascertain whether any of the apertures were not accounted for.
After much wheedling and cajoling and fluttering of her eyelashes, Mr Jamieson acceded to Jenny’s request, despite complaints from the servants, that, as much as they loved the young lady of the castle, it was asking a lot of them to perform such frivolous tasks in addition to discharging their regular duties, especially when no doubt the towels would come back dirty and have to be washed.
When the towels ran out, Jenny sent child emissaries from amongst her other friends around the estate, with instructions to borrow a hundred more from the tenants, with the promise that there might be a bit of something extra for them at Christmas.
Following the influx of extra flannel, and when the job was complete, everybody—for now that it was done, there was no point in grumbling further, was there?...one might as well see for oneself what a waste of everybody’s time it had been—gathered outside to view the results.
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sp; To Jenny’s greatest thrill and the amazement of all, there was a row of three mullioned plain glass windows, ones so large, compared to the castle’s other lesser leaded diamond panes, as to make it seem odd that they had not before attracted attention, beneath a turret on the unused uppermost floor of a vacant wing, which were staring sightlessly back at them, and lacking the tongues of all sorts of towels, supplemented by bed linen, and tablecloths, small rugs, and rags…people did not squander as much water in those days, when much of it had to be drawn from a pump or well or in buckets from a spring, or from a rain barrel, and laundry was done in a vat or copper and rinsed in the stream, and six inches of water was all that was needed for a weekly bath…that hung from all of the other window frames.
Taking further advantage of the absence of her parents, who were in Monaco at the invitation of the ruling Grimaldi family, and the absence of the castle steward, Mr Jamieson, who had travelled to Edinburgh to visit his dying father, young Jenny, using her most authoritative and deepest voice, after making a number of telephone calls to the nearest town and speaking with an architect and a surveyor, requested them to present themselves at the castle at their earliest convenience, for a consultation and exploratory work, bringing with them as many carpenters, joiners, stone-masons, plasterers, and roofing contractors as they could muster at short notice.
When the professional men and crew arrived and were received by their youthful instructor, after informing them that her father would settle their accounts as soon as he returned from overseas, Jenny explained the situation and ordered them to conduct an exhaustive inspection of the area surrounding the mystery windows, from both within and without.
Many hours later, after every length and breadth and width and elevation and angle had been measured and calculated and assessed; after every inch of the walls and ceilings had been tapped and listened to, and drilled; and after floorboards and portions of stonework had been removed and replaced, every specialist on site pronounced it impossible that such a substantial space could exist, in between what was already accounted for and accessible. Each known room was either verifiably adjacent or adjoined to the next known room as they appeared in the floor plans, or verifiably connected to whatever common space it was supposed to give on to; and the floors, albeit sloping and uneven with age, were where one would expect them to be in relation to the roof and ceilings below.
There wasn’t even room for another priest’s hole.
Jenny, stymied, appealed to Dragonburgh’s resident ghosts, apparitions, spectres, phantoms, and wraiths—they all had different opinions as to their category, designation, or classification—for enlightenment. Some of them had become so well established over the generations, that one had to believe they must know the truth. Eliciting information from them was not easy, however: not only did they all have the shortest of attention spans, but they were so consumed with themselves and their own affairs as not to be interested in offering advice or assistance or cooperation. When pressed they either gave some flippant or irrelevant answer, or answered a question with a question, or wandered off while one was in the middle of a sentence.
So, despite the ability that these entities had to walk through walls, they were able to contribute nothing more helpful than the experts and trades people.
Notwithstanding their idiosyncrasies, the ghosts had always provided good entertainment value around the castle, especially considering that, although they did not pay rent, they were no burden upon the domestic arrangements.
Flouncing Phil was a transvestite dance instructor, who liked to attend the balls that were held in the Hall of Mirrors. If someone forgot to leave Phil an invitation on the piano in the music room for the next event or entertainment, he would show up anyway, as the players were striking up for the first reels, and run around tripping up the guests.
A number of the servants weren’t to be found in the wage-books, at least not those dating back several centuries, but had obligingly remained in active service. Mr Jamieson, the castle’s seneschal, reckoned that several thousand pounds a year were saved as a result of not having to take on extra help. Whisky-and-sodas would appear within seconds of ringing the bell in the blue drawing-room, courtesy of a butler named Butler who’d last seen corporeal service in 1653. Often the Earl of Northmarch’s valet, Spunge, was grateful to enter his lordship’s dressing-room to find that one of his energetic predecessors, Billings, had already pressed and laid out his master’s dinner attire. And the maids, under the housekeeper Mrs Scrubb, were voluble in thanking those who’d preceded them on their warming-pan rounds, replenishing bathrooms with fresh soap and towels, and emptying the commodes in the mornings.
Of course there were also the usual headless torsos and insubstantial figures who shimmied through obstacles, and passed by one on the stairs; these merited no more than a brief glance and greeting from those who were accustomed to seeing them.
Then there were the Odds and Ends.
The Odds and Ends, which were appreciated equally by residents, pre-Huntenfisch visitors, and domestic help, were such things as tea cups that refilled when they were drained; beds that made themselves; fires that were laid and lit by invisible hand; lights that switched themselves off to save one the trouble of crossing the room; candles that blew themselves out at the desired moment; and alarm clocks that set themselves when instructed to do so, and went off five minutes before a tray of orange juice, coffee, and hot buttered toast floated in the door, accompanied by that morning’s newspaper, which under normal circumstances arrived three days late.
A person who went to the library to look up a word in the dictionary, or consult an encyclopaedia, or remove a book—none of which happened often—might arrive to find the relevant volume of the Oxford English Dictionary or Encyclopaedia Britannica already on the lectern open at the relevant page, and the book on the table at the door, with a note written in an old-fashioned hand reminding one to bring it back in no more than three weeks; on penalty of a man’s shaving water arriving cold in the morning, or a lady finding holes in her stockings and moths in her dress.
The children had a seasonal favourite in the Green Giant, who at Christmas would let them chop off his head with a half-sized but effective axe; following which he would put his own nob back on his shoulders as if he were doing nothing more than putting on a hat, and give them each a shilling.
In the public areas of the house, for the most part impeccable manners were observed between domestics past and present, and argument rarely exceeded a debate between two butlers as to the difference between a Grande and Petite Champagne Cognac...as we already know, at present Lord Huntenfisch was agnostic on the subject, but sober he would have been of no help anyway because to him brandy was brandy.
In the kitchens, on the plus side it was true that Mrs Furness the cook’s shopping list kept itself without her having to remember to jot things down, and she was provided with another sheet containing recommended menus for the following week. This saved her no end of pencil-sucking, and juggling of her limited repertoire, which would otherwise have featured Brown Windsor soup at every meal.
But as is so often the case in households, the kitchen was a tinderbox of dissent. Generations of temperamental cooks had frequent and violent disagreements over recipes, preparation, measurements and proportions, consistencies, side dishes, seasoning, how hot an oven ought to be for a given dish, and which utensils were best for each task; over what was fashionable, desirable, and good or bad, in every sense except that of what was healthy to eat; over which supplier was better than another, whether the meat and fish and vegetables were hung long enough or as fresh as they ought to be, whether carp was superior in taste to perch, and how well done the Northmarches liked their beef.
Even the scullions, sewers, and kitchen maids had strong opinions, and did not hesitate to give them vehement expression. In the heat of open fires and tempers, not only was many a sharp word traded, but civil wars broke out, with each side hurling meat-cleavers, carv
ing knives, chopping knives, skewers, skillets, copper saucepans, earthenware pots and china, ladles and basters, mortars and pestles, even a roasting spit—anything that came to hand—from behind upturned tables that, at the conclusion of the battle, were porcupined with lethal instruments and surrounded by dented pans and shards of pottery.
On such nights the Northmarches were served oeufs en cocotte…baked or shirred eggs…and toast soldiers for supper.
There were lighter moods in the Dragonburgh kitchen, too, and servants past and present would play practical jokes on each other. When Mrs Furness wanted to come up with something new, for example, she felt a painful tweak, as a recipe for snapping turtle was attached to her nose with a clothes-pin; and after someone helpfully tied her full-length apron on for her, she found the dough for two loaves rising in her already well-filled frontage.
When things were going smoothly, menu-wise tradition reigned. Mediaeval fare that was no longer commonly thought of as edible, such as swan, peacock, heron, crane, and stork; or had become distasteful to the palate of latter generations of Englishmen, including those in the Scottish Borders, such as mutton and kid, and ox or neat’s tongue, and goose, woodcock and snipe; remained current…or they did until Lord Huntenfisch’s arrival.
In addition to beef, wild boar—at the Yuletide feast the boar’s head, with an apple in its mouth, would be borne in on a platter held high by four servants, and preceded by the mustard pot carried by a fifth—, pork, veal, goat, venison, hare or leveret, and coney, there were sheep’s heads and stomachs; trout and salmon, and every locally caught variety of salt-water fish and shellfish; duck, pheasant, red and black grouse, partridge, quail, cock or capon, turkey, chicken, pigeon; and such toothsome delicacies as stewed pike, eel pie, and hedgepig baked in mud with Bordelaise sauce.
Cats, too, were common at table: as in days of yore they had to be buried for a day and a night before they were needed, up to a dozen at a time depending on how scrawny they were; after which the brains were removed so that those partaking didn’t lose their own, as the superstition was. While the cats were being roasted, the scullion turning the spit had to beat them with a switch.