The Stately Home Murder (2 page)

“Four, five, six … six girls,” Maureen called across to her mother.

“Don't shout,” said Mrs. Fisher automatically.

“Mum, there's six little girls on this grave thing. Aren't they sweet? And four little boys.”

“Them's their children,” said Mrs. Fisher. “Big families they had then.” Mrs. Fisher was one of nine herself. There was something very nice about big families. And as for the children in them—well, her own mother used to say children in big families were born with the corners rubbed off. Which was more than you could say for the twins.

Maureen wasn't listening. “I've found some more children round the side, Mum, only you can't tell whether they're boys or girls …”

Mrs. Fisher got to her feet. “Time we was going,” she said decisively.

“What are they round the side like that for, Mum?” Maureen Fisher was nothing if not persistent. “You can hardly see them.”

Mrs. Pearl Fisher—without benefit of ecclesiology, so to speak—could guess. The tapestry of life in Paradise Row was every bit as colorful and interwoven as that of the aristocracy—only the middle classes were dull. Aloud she said, “I couldn't say, I'm sure. Now, come along, do …”

They walked across from the church to the house.

Maureen sniffed. “Lilac blossom everywhere,” she said with deep contentment.

“Only on the lilac trees,” her twin corrected her.

Mrs. Fisher scolded them both with fine impartiality and they joined a small queue of people who were waiting to go inside the house. It was a queue that was turned into a party with one collective sweep of the guide's eyes.

That was Mr. Feathers.

He was a retired schoolmaster who lived in the neighboring village of Petering. There were several guides at Ornum House and their work was done on the principle of one guide per public room rather than one guide per party. This was the fruit of experience. One guide per room ensured the safety of the room and contents. There had been lost—not to say, black—sheep in the days when it had been one guide per party.

“Is that the Earl, Mum?” asked Maureen loudly.

“No,” said Mrs. Fisher, though for the life of her she couldn't have said why she was so sure. Perhaps it was because this man had glasses. Earls, she thought, didn't wear glasses.

Mr. Feathers, having assembled his flock, led them into the great hall.

“Early Tudor,” he said without preamble, trying to assess the group and measure their interest in such things as king posts and hammer beams. He positioned himself in the center of the floor. “When they first built this room they used to have the fire where I'm standing now …”

“What about the smoke?” asked someone.

“The smoke,” continued Mr. Feathers smoothly, “was left to find its own way out as best it could. As you can see”—here he pointed upwards, past a substantial chandelier, towards the roof—“it … er … kippered the beams very nicely.”

Thirty-five pairs of eyes obediently looked towards the roof. The thirty-sixth pair belonged to Michael Fisher, who was taking a potentially dangerous interest in the inner workings of a very fine clock by Thomas Tompion. Fortunately the thirty-seventh pair was watching Michael Fisher. Mr. Feathers had forty years' teaching experience behind him and was quite capable of pointing in one direction and looking in another. He also knew the vulnerable places in the great hall and bore down upon Michael at speed.

Michael's mother, who was usually the first person to stop Michael doing something, was perversely annoyed when Mr. Feathers did so.

She was hotly defensive at once.

“He never touched it,” she said, though in fact she had been looking at the kippered beams at the time. “Not a finger did that child …”

Mr. Feathers' voice carried easily and clearly across the great hall and above hers. “After about a hundred years they got tired of choking from the smoke and in 1609 they put in the chimney at the far end.”

Everyone—including Michael Fisher this time—looked at the chimney and fireplace. It was a truly magnificent affair, running for half the width of the far end of the room. Inside it was space enough for a dozen people. There was a huge andiron there on which rested several young tree trunks by way of winter fuel. Behind was a fireback carrying the same heraldic message as did that on the family pew.

“What does it mean, Mum?” hissed Maureen, sotto voce.

“Property of the Earl of Ornum,” said Mrs. Fisher smartly. “Same as on the corporation buses.”

Mr. Feathers cleared his throat and resumed his hortatory address. “The little cupboards on either side of the fire were for salt. That way it was always kept dry. Salt, you know, had quite some significance in olden days. It was by way of being a status symbol—”

“Below the salt,” put in a rather earnest-looking woman, who was clutching
A Guide to Calleshire
.

“Exactly.”

Mrs. Fisher changed her not inconsiderable weight from one foot to the other and wished she could sit down. The only status symbol recognized in Paradise Row was a wedding ring—which served to remind her of Mavis Palmer and her young man, Bernard. If she was any judge, Mavis would be needing one fairly soon.

Mr. Feathers turned back to the center of the hall and sketched a quick word picture for them. “You can imagine what it must have been like here in the old days. The Earl and his family sat on that dais over there—”

“Above the salt,” chimed in the earnest one irritatingly.

“And his servants and retainers below the salt in the main body of the hall. He would have had his own men-at-arms, you know, and one or two of them would always have been on guard.” Mr. Feathers gave a pedantic chuckle. “The floor wouldn't have been as clean then as it is just now …”

Pearl Fisher—Pearl Hipps, that was, before her marriage to Mr. Fisher—was with him at once. As a girl she had seen the film in which Charles Laughton had tossed his chicken leg over his shoulder with a fine abandon. Henry the Eighth, she thought, but Charles Laughton she was sure.

That had been in the days when she sat in the back row of the one and ninepennies at the flicks with Fred Carter. Actually they only paid ninepence and then used to creep backwards when the lights went out, but it came to the same thing. Mrs. Fisher came out of a reverie that included Fred Carter (he had been a lad, all right) and inflation (you couldn't get a cinema seat for ninepence these days) to see Mr. Feathers, his back to the fireplace now, pointing to the opposite end of the room above the dais.

A minstrels' gallery ran across the entire width of the great hall.

“The music came from up there,” said Mr. Feathers, “though it was music of a somewhat different variety from that which you would hear today. They would have had lutes, and probably a virginal …”

“Mum,” Maureen Fisher tugged at her mother's sleeve. “Mum, what's a virginal?”

Mrs. Fisher, having no ready answer to this, slapped her daughter instead.

“And,” continued Mr. Feathers, “they would have played up there, quite unseen, during the evening meal. Now, look up that way and a little to the left.… Do you see up there—in the corner at the back of the minstrels' gallery …”

“A little window,” contributed someone helpfully.

“A little window,” agreed Mr. Feathers. “Behind it there is a small room. From there the Earl would keep an eye on what everyone was getting up to.” He spoke at large—but he looked at Michael Fisher.

“And they couldn't see him,” said a voice in a group.

“No.” Mr. Feathers smiled a schoolmaster's smile. “They couldn't see him.”

Several necks craned upwards towards the peephole, but it was in shadow—as its Tudor creators had intended it should be. There was no light behind the window and it would be quite impossible to tell if there was anyone looking through it or not.

“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.”