Mrs. God (6 page)

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

O
n 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. Almost 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 see you. I am Robert Wall.”

As soon as Standish stepped forward he saw that the table was too wide for them to shake hands across it.

“Lost a bet with myself,” Wall said. “You stick there, and I'll make the trek round.”

Wall smiled at him with a touch of ruefulness and began to walk around the bottom of the table to greet him. He wore a beautifully cut gray tweed suit, a dark blue shirt, and a pink tie of raw silk. Wall was not quite what Standish had expected—he looked like a college president, not the administrator of an obscure literary foundation. His handsomeness struck Standish as an irrelevance, almost a hindrance. Wall marched up to him with his hand outstretched, and Standish realized how Jean would respond to the sight of this man.

“Allow me to welcome you properly,” Wall said. He gave Standish a dry brisk handshake. “You
have
had a day of it, haven't you? Care for a drink before we have the opportunity of feeding you? Splash of whiskey? Single malt? Something special, I promise you.”

Standish never drank whiskey, but heard himself agreeing. Up close, Robert Wall's face looked dusty with fatigue. Tiny wrinkles like razor cuts nicked the corners of his eyes and mouth. Wall grinned at Standish and turned away toward a pantry located behind a door at the bottom end of the table. Standish trailed after him. The size and splendor of the dining room both stimulated and oppressed him. Portraits of dead Seneschals frowned down from the walls, and wherever Standish looked he saw some unexpected ornamental detail: dental molding around the ceiling, the pattern of the parquet floor around the edges of the Oriental carpet, plaster rosettes around the light fixtures on the wall. The flatware set around his plate, and the plate itself as well as the rim of the wineglass beside it, were of gold. A golden plate! A golden fork, a golden spoon, a golden knife! The casualness of this opulence unsettled him, as if he had inadvertently stepped outside ordinary reality into the world of fairy tales.

Behind the glass-fronted cupboard doors in the pantry stood ranks of the golden plates, and in the cupboard at the far end was an array of bottles. A narrow staircase like the one Standish had taken from his room led downstairs, presumably to the kitchen. Robert Wall took a bottle from the shelf and two glasses from another cabinet.

“You said you lost a bet with yourself?”

“Yes, I did,” Wall said, smiling at him as he passed back into the dining room. His obvious exhaustion and the tiny cuts around his eyes and mouth utterly negated his good looks when you were this close to him—he looked as though he were still recovering from a skin graft.

Then for an instant Standish thought that Robert Wall did not look exhausted or ill but simply hungry, like a man who has never ceased to long for the great prizes that he has seen hovering, all his life, just out of reach; like a man who has never given up wanting more than he has decided to settle for.

Wall eased past him in the narrow space of the pantry, and as both men emerged back into the dining room, Standish realized that it was he, not Wall, who was hungry—he was famished, ravenous as a starving wolf.

Carrying the bottle and the short glasses, Wall went up one side of the table, Standish the other. Wall gestured toward the place that had been set, and Standish sat.

“The bet was that you'd have taken the main staircase back downstairs, and come in here from the West Hall. You're very intrepid, finding your way by the back stairs.”

Wall poured whiskey as he spoke. He leaned far over to pass Standish his glass, and then sank gracefully down into his own chair. For a moment filled with dismay, Standish found himself wondering if Wall were married to the woman who had shown him to his rooms.

Are you teasing me?
For a moment he saw the woman's hawk-like face looking up at him.

“A woman showed me to my room,” he said.

Wall nodded and raised his glass, giving Standish a look of vague disinterest. Standish took an experimental sip. The whiskey tasted like a rich smooth food. It was ambrosial. Wall was waiting for whatever he would say next. “The woman knew about the back staircase—that's how I knew about it. Who is she, by the way? She didn't tell me her name.”

“Couldn't say. You're settled in all right?”

“Dark hair, very long and sort of
loose
? Extremely good-looking? About my age?”

“Mystery woman,” Wall said. “You really are intrepid.” He looked at his watch. “Your dinner should be ready in a moment. Just a question of warming it up. Do you like the malt?”

“Wonderful.”

“Excellent—intrepid and blessed with good taste as well. It
is
rather special—seventy years old.”

“You mean you don't know who she is?”

“I tend not to have much to do with that sort of thing. You had a peaceful journey?”

Standish described getting lost on the roundabout and miraculously finding his way to Huckstall, and the scene in the pub there.

“I was thinking afterward that the whole thing was like an Isobel Standish poem—an Isobel Standish kind of
experience
, if you see what I mean.”

“A pity you should have chosen Huckstall for your first excursion into English life, but it can't be helped, can it?”

“Are they famous for waylaying visitors?”

“Not exactly. During dinner I'll spin you a tale.” He glanced at his watch. “Where
is
your dinner? They should have brought it up by now. I expect they're waiting for us to finish our whiskey even as we wait for them to bring your meal.” He stood up and went down the table and slipped through the pantry door. Standish heard him speaking to someone on the other side of the pantry door, then a low female laugh. Wall backed through the door with a tray in his hands. “Good job I didn't startle her into dropping this. They've given you a meal with a bit of a history. Loin of veal with morel sauce, some green beans too, I see. I'll open a nice bordeaux to go with that, shall I?”

Standish nodded. The smell of the food on the tray made him salivate. Wall set the plate down before him, and it fit perfectly into the larger golden plate. Wall carried the tray to the pantry, and reappeared instantly with a bottle of red wine and a corkscrew.

“I'll join you, if I may. We could continue our conversation until you want to go to bed. I must be off tomorrow afternoon, so I won't be here for a little time. Though I could have breakfast with you, if you like?”

“Please,” Standish said, happy not to be abandoned to the dining room. He tried a small section of the veal, and a variety of tastes so subtle and powerful spilled into his mouth that he groaned out loud. He had never tasted anything even faintly like it. The cork came out of the bottle with a solid pop, and Wall poured deep red wine into his gold-rimmed glass. Standish swallowed, and the food continued to ring and chime in his mouth.

“You know why you're given veal with morels, of course?” Wall sat down on the other side of the table.

Standish shook his head. He continued to eat as Wall spoke, now and then pausing to sip the wine, which was as extraordinary as the food.

“Isobel Standish's favorite meal.” Wall smiled at him. “When they heard that in the kitchen, there was no restraining them. We use fresh mushrooms, of course, and good veal can be had in the village. I'm happy you approve.” He paused, and the benign expression on his face altered. “So you knew nothing of Huckstall before you stopped there? Its fame has not crossed the Atlantic?”

Standish shook his head. A circle of warmth in the center of his being was spreading outward millimeter by millimeter, bringing peace and contentment to every cell it touched.

“Little bit of trouble there, earlier this summer,” Wall said. “Man killed his wife and her lover, then was killed himself. A publican.”

Standish saw the stony, immobile face of The Duelists' proprietor vividly before him, and the wonderful food congealed on his tongue.

“Not much of a scandal by American standards, of course,” Wall went on. “But it made quite a splash here. The woman was pregnant. The husband chained them up in the cellar of the pub and tortured them for several days. Finished up by decapitating both of them. The boyfriend was a prominent fellow locally, local poet, something of the sort. I didn't mean to spoil your meal, Mr. Standish.”

“No, it's fascinating,” Standish said. “It reminds me so much of the people I saw there.”

Wall looked pleasantly bemused.

“In that pub, The Duelists.”

“Ah.” Wall smiled indulgently. “See what you mean. Can't remember the name of this fellow's pub at the moment. Lord Somebody-Or-Other's, I think. Couldn't have been your place anyhow.”

“Why not?”

“Chap burned it down after he committed the murders, didn't he? Completely off his head, of course. Excuse the pun, if that's what that was. Anyhow, he put the heads in grips of some sort and tossed them onto a slag heap. Probably thought that no one would ever find them. Or didn't care. His own life was useless to him anyway, wasn't it? He jumped in front of a speeding car just outside the village. Have some more of that wine, won't you?”

Standish saw with astonishment that his glass was empty. He lifted the bottle and poured. Wall pushed his own glass forward and Standish stood up to pour for him too.

“The impact killed him, but nobody discovered the body until the next morning—all busy fighting the fire, do you see? The pub went up like tinder. Danger the entire street might go up with it. And then of course after they'd put out the blaze they found the bodies, which had escaped most of the effects of the fire. Being in the cellar, you know. Oh!” His eyes flashed at Standish.