by Peter Straub
Someone in the house heard the sounds he made as he struggled toward the door. A light passed down the row of dark windows at the front of the house and moved toward the door. Standish wondered if a servant girl were rushing toward Esswood’s main entrance with a lighted candle, as would have happened centuries earlier. Would they still have servant girls, he wondered, and then began to wonder if he should be using the main entrance. There had to be an entrance at ground level, probably beside the staircase or off to the side of the house, where he had seen a trellised arbor. He grunted and hauled the two big suitcases up onto the terrace atop the steps. The massive, heavily ornamented door opened onto a blaze of light and color, and a woman in a well-cut gray pin-striped suit with a tight-fitting skirt stepped back, smiling to welcome him in. She appeared to be about his own age or slightly older, with long loosely bound hair and an intelligent hawk-like face with bright animated eyes.
Anxiety and surprise undid him. He said, “Is this the right door? Did I come to the right place?”
“Mr. Standish,” the woman said. Her voice was warm and soothing. “We’ve been wondering where you might be. Please come in.”
He fell another notch deeper into infatuation with Esswood.
“I’ve been wondering where I might be, too,” he said, and thought he saw a flash of approval in her lively eyes. Then he ruined it. “This where they all come in? This is the right door?” She nodded, smiling now at his fatuity instead of his wit, and he carried his heavy bags over the threshold. They seemed fatuous too. Everything inside the entrance seemed very bright—the woman’s smile, the gleam of mirrors and polished floorboards and brass and lustrous fabrics. “You’re not carrying a candle,” he said.
“Britain isn’t that old-fashioned, Mr. Standish. You needn’t have carried your bags by yourself, you know. The staff is here to make things easier for you. I’ll get someone to take your things to your rooms straightaway, and you may go up to relax a bit after your journey. Then we shall see you in the dining room. Mr. Wall has been waiting for this moment.” Now the beautiful smile was pure warmth again. “You must be famished, poor man.”
Standish wondered if there was even the slightest chance that this woman might marry him.
“I take it there’s nothing else in the car?”
She clearly expected him to say no. The light in her eyes informed him that he had brought too many clothes, and that she held out these two great straining bags to him as a joke she trusted him to share. He wished that the car and everything inside it would sink down into the drive and disappear.
“I guess I did bring a lot of stuff,” he said. “I had to leave some things in the car.”
“We’ll fetch them up for you. We don’t want you straining your back before you set to work.”
She smiled as if in forgiveness of his inexperienced packing and turned away to lead him toward his rooms. Standish paused after a few steps. She hesitated and looked back at him. He gestured toward his ridiculously heavy suitcases, which sat like intruders in the polished entryway. “They’ll be seen to,” she said. “Everything will be seen to. You’ll learn our ways, Mr. Standish.”
He set off after her down the entry hall, which he now saw to be a screened passage lined with vast tapestries. Between the long tapestries he looked into a hall the size of a ballroom in which brightly upholstered furniture had been arranged before a tall stone fireplace with Ionic columns. Big gloomy paintings of huntsmen, children, and horses hung on the paneled walls. The next time Standish came to one of the openings between the screens, he saw a gallery running above the far side of the room. Curved wooden beams and arches overhung the gallery.
“That’s the East Hall, the oldest part of the house,” the woman said, looking back at him. “Elizabethan, of course.”
“Oh, sure,” Standish said.
They reached the end of the screened passage and turned left toward a staircase that seemed nearly as wide as the stairs in front of the house. Portraits of eighteenth-century noblemen glowed dully on either side of the staircase, which divided into two smaller, curving staircases at its top. Standish’s guide began ascending the stairs, and he followed.
“I’m afraid there are more stairs, but you will be staying right above the library, in the Fountain Rooms. It’s where we always put our scholarly guests, and they’ve always seemed quite comfortable there.”
“Is there really a fountain?”
“In the courtyard, not in the room, Mr. Standish.” Turning into the left branch of the staircase, she smiled again at him over her shoulder. “You have an excellent view of the courtyard from your rooms.”
A question that had occurred to him in Zenith came to him now.
“Am I the only one? I man, aren’t there other people working in the library now?”
“No, of course not,” she said, giving him a rather severe, questioning look and at last pausing to allow him to catch up with her. “I assumed you would have known. Excuse me. I seem to have forgotten that you’ve never been here before. We never invite more than one guest to make use of the library at any time. Scholarship seems a very individual activity, I suppose, and I think we always wanted our guests to be able to make full use of Esswood. Didn’t want to have two people trying to use, the same set of papers—your sort of work is actually very intimate, isn’t it? Sharing it would be like sharing, oh, I don’t know, a toothbrush or a bath towel or—”
A bed, Standish thought.
“Well,” she said. Her eyes glowed. “At any rate, yes, you are the only one. You have three weeks in which all of Esswood, especially the papers in the library, is yours. In a manner of speaking.”
“Do you think I might be able to get an extension for another week if it turns out I need it?”
“I should think it possible. We are nearly there now.”
They were climbing the narrower side stairs together, and she smiled up at him.
“The Fountain Rooms are just ahead through the Inner Gallery. And the Inner Gallery is just beyond this—”
She opened a door at the top of the staircase and led him into a room or passageway that seemed as dark as a movie theater after the dazzle of his introduction to the house. About the size of the bedroom he shared with Jean back in Zenith, the dark room seemed crowded with furniture, uncomfortable and cramped. “Lighting’s wonky here. Must get it seen to. Study, this is, not used much now.” In the gloom Standish picked out heavy chairs with ottomans, books in dim dull ranks on the walls. Shadowy and indistinct, the woman moved like a blur before his eyes, almost melting into the room, and threw open another door at its far end. She slipped through into a rectangle of yellow light.
Standish felt as though he were pursuing her.
He burst out into the next, brighter room half-expecting to see her moving ahead of him down a corridor. But she stood facing him from a point about six feet into a long high-ceilinged space too wide to be a corridor and too long and narrow to be a room. One side of this museum-like space was decorated with large paintings of horses and dogs and boats at sea, beneath which were arranged low uncomfortable-looking benches. The other side, Standish’s left, was lined with a series of enormous windows that looked out onto the lighted windows of another vast house. Then Standish realized that the other house was another section of Esswood, and that he was looking out over the courtyard.
“Nearly there, Mr. Standish. This is the Inner Gallery, so called because there is another gallery, the West Gallery, on the second floor at the front of the house. The West Gallery was added in the seventeen thirties when Sir Walton Seneschal redid Esswood’s facade in the Palladian style.”
Palladian, Standish thought. That was the word he had not been able to remember. Then he remembered seeing the light, as of a flashlight or candle, passing behind the windows as he approached the house.
“The Gallery is on the second floor?” he asked.
“Both of them, yes.”
“And the second floor is where I entered, a
t the top of the stairs?”
She stopped. “Why, no—you entered on the first floor. The one below is the ground floor. Americans always take a little time to learn our system.” She began to move forward past the large dark windows.
Maybe he had been mistaken. “And you didn’t carry a candle, or something like a candle, past the front windows when you heard me coming?”
She stopped again and looked up at him in a way that seemed almost tense with worry. Then her face softened. “Are you teasing me?”
And there it was again, the note of a subdued flirtatiousness just beneath the surface of her manner.
“I don’t think I’d know how to tease you,” Standish said.
The flirtatiousness disappeared so quickly that Standish wondered if he had imagined it. “I mean, I thought I saw someone carrying a lamp past the first-floor windows.”
Her face smoothed out into a deliberate absence of expression. “I’m afraid that’s not possible, Mr. Standish.” She continued down the gallery a step ahead of him. .
“And now we have arrived,” she said, opening the door at the gallery’s end. “Everything’s been prepared for you. Your bags should be here in a moment. As soon as you’re ready, Mr. Wall will be waiting in the dining room, which you can reach by returning to the ground floor, turning to the right of the main staircase, and going straight through the West Hall. Or you might take the back staircase from your room to the library, go past the library, and keep turning left in the corridor until you come to the double doors—that’ll be the dining room.”
“Fine.”
She stepped back instead of leading him into the room, as he had hoped. To keep her from leaving, he said, “Are the Seneschals here now?”
She nodded. “They’re seldom elsewhere. Miss Seneschal is an invalid and rarely leaves the family wing. Of course they’re both quite old.”
“They have no children?”
Her extraordinary face flickered, as if this time he really had gone too far, and she gestured toward the half-opened door to the Fountain Rooms. “Remember not to keep poor Mr. Wall waiting long—he’ll be quite overcome with relief when he sees you. As overcome as you will be to see your dinner, I imagine.”
“I look forward to seeing both of them. And to seeing you again, too.” She shot what he took as a glance of humorous appreciation at him with her wide intelligent eyes, and she turned away.
Standish stepped through the door into the Fountain Rooms and turned to watch her walk away. He realized that she had never told him her name. He could not call out to her—he could not shout in Esswood. She opened the door at the far end of the gallery, and then she was gone.
His rooms were not what he had expected. The splendor of the rest of the house and the name, “Fountain Rooms,” had led Standish to anticipate extravagance: gold and velvet, decorative antiques, a canopied bed. The reality of the Fountain Rooms was as mundane as a room in a slightly run-down old hotel.
It was a suite of two small rooms. The living room was furnished with stiff high-back chairs and a couch covered in a floral chintz. A small table with ancient copies of Country Life and The Tatler stood before the couch. Standard lamps with big yellow shades shed mild light. A stuffed fox and a terrarium with dark green ferns stood on the mantel of the fireplace. Against a wall with rose-patterned paper there was a writing desk with a leather top and a green library lamp. A bookshelf beside the desk was crammed with novels by Warwick Deeping, Compton Mackenzie, John Buchan, and Agatha Christie. The books looked welded into place. On the pale walls with roses had been hung pictures of men in wigs and embroidered waistcoats playing cards in what looked like the East Hall downstairs, people in slightly more modern dress playing croquet on a terrace beneath the rear elevation of Esswood House, of a carriage drawn by prancing horses coming up the drive where Standish had left his car. A small spotted spaniel trotted alongside the carriage, his head raised. Through the windows on the left side of the room Standish saw the Seneschals’ windows glowing back at him from across the courtyard. The room contained no television, radio, or telephone.
Slightly smaller than the living room, the bedroom was fitted with a narrow single bed with a bedside table and carved wooden headboard, a comfortable-looking wing-backed chair, a sofa covered with the same dark blue floral material as the bedspread, a second small desk, and a large wooden press for hanging clothes. Beside the press was a tall wooden door that must have led to the back staircase. There was another chest-high bookshelf, this one filled with what appeared to be a complete set of the writings of Winston / Churchill. On the mantle of the bedroom fireplace was a pair of’ heavy ornate silver candlesticks, and above it hung a geometrical steel engraving that proved to be a plan of Esswood’s terraces, showing a long pond, what appeared to be a little forest with a circular clearing like a druidical site, and fields. The shutters of the bedroom windows had been closed, and the entire room looked hazy in the low golden light of the lamps.
Standish pulled at the handles of a pair of mirrored doors, expecting to find a closet, and looked into a tiled bathroom. He stepped inside, closed the door behind him, and used the toilet. Afterward, he washed his hands and inspected his face in the mirror.
The rims of his eyelids showed a faint pink like the eyes of a rabbit. Gray smears of dust lay across his cheeks. His receding hair, flat as seaweed, stuck to his head. Standish groaned. This was the face that the wonderful quick-witted woman had seen. What he had taken for flirtation had only been civilized pity. He had turned up hours late with an absurd amount of luggage, he had gaped like a tourist, he had undoubtedly leered. Yes, he had leered. Oh, God. Standish took off his jacket and unbuttoned his shirt. He filled the basin with hot water and washed his hands and face. Then he emptied and refilled the basin and quickly washed his hair.
He came out of the bathroom and saw his shirts, socks, and underwear laid out on the bed beside his bathroom kit. His four bags stood beside the bed. On the little desk was Crack, Whack, and Wheel. His suits and jackets and trousers had been hung in the press, his shoes arranged beneath them, his ties on a tie rack.
Standish put on a clean shirt, a new tie, and a blazer from the press. He changed his shoes for a pair of shiny loafers. The mirrored doors told him that he once again looked like a respectable young scholar. He felt light-headed with hunger, and decided that the back way to the dining room sounded faster than working his way through the gallery, the dark little study, and down the staircase. He marched up to the door beside the press and pulled it open.
FOUR
On the other side was a bare unpolished wooden landing. A narrow flight of stairs dropped past a window and then curved out of sight. Low-wattage bulbs set in old gas fixtures gave the stairs a dim but even illumination. Standish moved across the landing and began to descend the stairs.
After the third or fourth turning of the staircase he looked back up the way he had come and saw only the smooth skin of the walls and the steep dark risers of the steps. He wondered if he had somehow missed the exit onto the first floor and was descending into the scullery, or the dungeon, or whatever they had in the basement here. Then he remembered the height of the hall with the enormous stone fireplace, and kept going downward. After another series of turns he came to a place where the light bulbs had burned out, and he continued down slowly, touching the walls on both sides. When the stairs turned again Standish expected to emerge into the light, but the darkness continued. He felt his way down another nine or ten steps in the dark. At another turn of the staircase, light from below began to wash the outer wall, and after another few steps he saw that his hands and the sleeves of his blazer were gray with spiderwebs.
A little while later he saw the bottom of the staircase beneath him. A flagged corridor illuminated by the same altered gas fittings led to a tall narrow door identical to the one in his bedroom. This must have been the door to the library. Standish came down the final few steps and went down the corridor to stand in front of the door. Alm
ost guiltily he placed his hand on the brass doorknob. He looked sideways down the empty corridor. After all he had been through this day, no one would begrudge him a private treat. He had been invited to use the library: and Isobel had written a good deal of her verse on the other side of this door.
Standish turned the knob, so intent on seeing the library that when the door resisted him he turned it again and rattled it back and forth, as if he could force it open. Why was it locked? To keep the servants out? To keep him out? Standish remembered the dead lamps in the staircase, and wondered how long it had been since the last scholar had been invited to Esswood. Then he remembered what the publican in Huckstall had said about an American being murdered at Esswood, and quickly turned away from the door.
After about fifteen yards he came to a sharp left-hand turn in the corridor, marked by an Italianate marble statue of a small boy rising up on his toes, arms outstretched, as if for, a kiss. Standish went past the statue into the new wing of the corridor and moved on in silence for another thirty or forty feet. Again there was an abrupt left-hand turn, this time into a wider, but still flagged and dimly lit corridor. At the turn, another marble statue, of a woman cowering back with her hands over her face, stood on a round marble-topped table. Now Standish could hear low voices and soft noises coming from somewhere within the house. At last he stood before a wide set of double doors. He knocked softly and saw dingy wisps of spiderwebs adhering to his cuff. He hastily wiped them off. No one answered his knock. Standish turned the knob, and heard a satisfying thunk as the lock withdrew into its stile. He pushed, and the thick door opened before him.
A man with a square sturdy face and thick gray hair that fell over his forehead blinked at him, then smiled and stood up on the far side of a long table that took up the middle of the room. A single place setting had been laid opposite him on the smooth white cloth. The man was several inches taller than Standish. “Ah, at last,” he said. “Mr. Standish. How good it is to sec you. I am Robert Wall.”