Ann Pilling - The Empty Frame

Cousin M looked down at him. “I don’t know very much, dear. Her first husband was much older than she was and very ambitious, I suppose that’s why there’s this connection with royalty – I think they had a kind of mini-court here, in the summer.”

“But she looks ambitious,” Floss said.

“She does. But I think she mellowed in her old age. The husband was a bit of a tyrant and I think she probably went along with it all. They do say she did things she lived to regret.”

“What things?” demanded Magnus.

Cousin M blinked up at the portrait. “I really couldn’t say, dear, it’s all speculation, it all happened so long ago.”

“What happened?”

“I honestly don’t know what those two got up to.” She laughed. “I’m just the gardener round here.”

Nobody was fooled. Whatever Cousin M knew she was going to keep to herself.

Magnus’s eyes followed her as she went to switch off the strip light. “She has cruel hands,” he said, as the portrait disappeared into the shadow. “They’re like spikes.”

“It’s bed time,” she said. Her voice was soft but Magnus knew it meant business. And he didn’t mind at all. He felt safe with her. “Come on,” she chivvied gently, “we can talk about everything in the morning.”

In the entrance hall, they discovered that their pile of luggage had been removed. Cousin M looked embarrassed. “Cecil must have taken it upstairs for you, that’s good.” But she spoke as if she meant the very opposite, as if she minded that Cecil, this remote cousin of Mum’s, who owned the Abbey together with Cousin M, had not bothered to come and speak to them.

“He goes to bed early,” she explained. “He’s a very early riser. He has his swim at six o’clock.”

“Can we swim?” Sam asked.

“Oh, I should think so. I’ll have to talk to Cecil. He’s in charge of that side of things. Listen, dears, I’m sorry he’s gone to bed. He was annoyed with me, for getting so behind. He likes to stick to his routines. We were all up to schedule until Arthur disappeared.”

Floss suddenly remembered that this man Cecil’s surname was Stickley. He sounded like a Stickley, like a dried-up, withered old stick. She said, “Is Cecil our cousin as well?”

“I suppose he must be, about a million times removed,” said Cousin M, stopping at the end of a long passage way and turning left at the bottom of a staircase. On the wall, a neat modern sign said To Turret Dormitories.

“So Cecil’s a sort of cousin,” Magnus said slowly. He liked getting an absolutely clear picture of everything, in his mind. “So who’s Arthur?”

“My boyfriend,” Cousin M said. “You’ll see him in the morning.”

Now Magnus had seen the word “dormitories”, which suggested beds and therefore sleep, he seemed to have found a spare bit of energy and he began to climb the stairs. They were not ordinary stairs either, they were a stone spiral, enclosed within the fat tower they had seen at the corner of the Abbey buildings before the floodlights went off. He climbed quite enthusiastically, chatting a little to Cousin M. “There is Arthur here, and there is Cecil,” he said quaintly. “But who is that lady in the portrait?”

“Oh, don’t you worry your head about her,” said Cousin M. She still seemed reluctant to say any more.

“I’m not worrying,” Magnus said firmly. “I’d just like to know.”

“Well, her name was Alice, Lady Alice Neale. The Neale family lived here in the days of Elizabeth the First, and for quite a long time after that.”

“And what did you say she’s supposed to have done?”

“I didn’t say, dear, because I don’t know.” Cousin M had gone on ahead of him, rather quickly. Her excuse was that she needed to switch more lights on.

Magnus had now got the message. There was to be no more discussion of the lady in the portrait tonight. “Alice… it rhymes with malice…” he said, quietly, as they clumped up a third flight of twisty stairs. Then he added, but only very softly, “It’s like her hands. It’s like her horrible claws.”

Their bedroom was on the fourth floor of the fat tower, the top room of four which lay one beneath the next like the slices of a Swiss roll. Cousin M called it a dormitory and it was one of several that had housed the children who used to come to the Abbey for very expensive courses, to learn how to play professional tennis and to swim – to Olympic standard. The children did not come any more. Cousin M said that people no longer had the spare money to pay for such things.

Magnus only knew about dormitories from school stories and so he had imagined a huge long room with rows of iron bedsteads, and a few old-fashioned washstands down the middle where you washed in icy-cold water while prefects hit you with bunches of twigs. His own life had been so full of torments that he was always escaping into books, where he sometimes found more. But this dormitory was just a round, low-ceilinged room with four divan beds. Each had two pillows and a plump-looking duvet covered in a blue-grey fabric with birds on, and there were screens on casters which could be rolled round each bed, to make everything more private, “modesty screens” Cousin M called them. These were a relief to Floss. She’d not wanted to be put in a room on her own but she certainly did have her modesty.

The floor was covered in soft blue-grey carpet and the bird pattern was on the curtains too. By each bed was a white-painted locker on which stood a greyshaded lamp. “Sorry it’s a bit on the feminine side, you two,” Cousin M said robustly to Magnus and Sam. “We didn’t decorate it like this, the company who took over the Abbey for the sports centre project absolutely insisted.”

“We don’t mind, do we Mags?” said Sam. “I expect Floss minds more. Lady Macbeth wasn’t into prettypretty.” Floss kicked him.

“It’s called ‘Dove’. I think that’s why it’s these colours,” Magnus said sleepily.

They had noticed, as they’d climbed up and up, that each of the turret dormitories had the name of a bird – Eagle, Kestrel, Plover and Dove.

“There’s a beautiful dovecote here,” said Cousin M, switching on the bedside lamps and turning back the duvets. “It’s unique. There isn’t another like it in the whole of England.”

“Does it have a potence?” asked Magnus. He had chosen the bed by the fireplace and was pulling his screen into position, before putting his pyjamas on.

“A what ?” Sam shouted, over the top of it.

“A potence. It’s a ladder,” Magnus explained, rather pityingly, emerging a few minutes later in his night clothes. “It revolves, so that you can go round inside and collect the eggs.”

“My goodness,” said Cousin M, admiringly, “how on earth do you come to know a thing like that? I didn’t. Someone had to tell me.”

Magnus shrugged and went back behind his screen. “Oh, I just knew,” he muttered.

“His father was very, very clever,” Floss whispered, “and he educated Magnus himself. He knows the most amazing things.”

Magnus came out again wearing slippers and pushed his screen back against the wall. “There is a – a potence, Magnus,” said Cousin M. “I’ll show it to you in the morning. Or perhaps you can show it to me. It doesn’t work properly. You could try mending it. I think I’ll leave these windows open a bit, it really is very stuffy. You don’t expect it, somehow, coming up from that chilly old hall.”

“Is the hall always chilly?” asked Magnus. “It shouldn’t be, the ceiling’s quite low.” He was staring hard at Cousin M; he wanted information.

But she treated this as a casual enquiry. “Well, I often find it a bit chilly, dear. Why?”