“The third door on the left is the bathroom. Margot and I are round that corner and along at the end of the passage. This is a very confusing house until you get used to it. Do you know, there are seven staircases, though it is not at all a big house.”
“Seven staircases!”
Jacqueline’s wide smile flashed out.
“Terrible, isn’t it? Mr. Trent has had two of them shut up. He will want to show you the house tomorrow. It is very interesting. Oh, there is just one thing. Perhaps it would be better if you would lock your door. Margot has improved, but she still thinks practical joking a form of humour, so perhaps-” Ione turned the key in the lock with vigour. Her first impressions about Jacqueline were gone. She seemed a friendly person with a hard enough job on her hands. She found herself wondering if Margot was really quite normal.
She had a bath. The water boiling, a good deal to her surprise. She wondered if it was Geoffrey, or some previous tenant, whom she had to thank for that. It cost a pretty penny to provide new plumbing and an up-to-date heating system in a house which has started life somewhere back in the fourteenth century. Geoffrey had announced the date with pride at dinner. Now, as her hot bath began to run away, Ione wondered how much of his, and how much of Allegra’s money had also gone down the drain.
She told herself it wasn’t her business, and went back to her room. As she opened the door, a large wet bath sponge fell on her head. Since she was wearing a bath-cap and a towelling-robe, the chief damage was a horrid dark patch on the carpet. When she had rubbed it as dry as she could, it still looked rather too much like a bloodstain to be comfortable. You wouldn’t think of such a thing in any ordinary room of course, so why think of it now? And the carpet wasn’t even red, but a soft brownish pink. It was only where the water had darkened it that it looked as if the stain was blood.
Completely out of temper with these ridiculous fancies, with herself for having them, and with Margot Trent for having provoked them, Ione re-locked the door and got into bed. It was then, with the light turned off, that she became aware of the silence in the room. The country can be anything but quiet, but here in the Ladies’ House an extraordinary silence prevailed. The walls were so thick that each room contained its own sounds. You would not hear a step on any of those seven stairs. You would never know whether anyone moved above, or below, or even in the very next room. Each chamber as the sounds within it ceased would become its own deep well of silence in which thought and movement slowly petrified.
It didn’t really seem to matter if they did. The tides of sleep flowed in.
CHAPTER 7
Allegra did not appear at breakfast. It transpired that she never did. Remembering Cousin Eleanor’s spartan upbringing, Ione found this disquieting. When she suggested taking up Allegra’s tray she got a smiling shake of the head from Geoffrey.
“There is no need. We are quite civilized-daily maid from the village to eke out the Flaxmans. And Allegra doesn’t really care about talking until she is dressed. She won’t be long, and meanwhile I am going to show you the house. It’s well worth seeing.”
It was. And there was no mistaking Geoffrey’s pride and interest. He had to catch himself up once or twice.
“I expect I sound silly, talking as if it were a kind of ancestral possession, but do you know, that is the way I began to find myself thinking about it. I’ve always had a fancy for old houses, and absurd as it may sound, this place has got me. I feel as if I had roots in it, which is of course quite ridiculous.”
It was said in a very disarming way with a rueful sparkle of the blue eyes, a humorous twist of the handsome mouth, Ione had to smile too and agree that it was ridiculous, but that places did get hold of you like that.
Geoffrey laughed.
“Well, as long as you don’t mind my getting away on my hobby horse! You see, this is really the original Manor House, built by Robert the Falconer or his son Robert-there seems to be some doubt which. Of course there are modern additions. The drawing-room and Allegra’s bedroom over it are only seventeenth-century, but take those away, and you have a compact fourteenth-century manor house with no less than seven staircases-easy access between the floors for purposes of defence-cellars under the house with a well that never runs dry, and a useful dungeon or two. Of course the windows have all been changed and enlarged, and what the house-agents call modern conveniences have been contrived. As a matter of fact we have struck it very lucky indeed. Some wealthy Americans had a lease of the house in the thirties. They wanted to buy, but young Falconer wouldn’t sell, though I believe they offered a fabulous price. As a matter of fact, both he and the American were killed in the war, and the widow went back to the States. But before all that happened they had put in some absolutely first-class plumbing, so we’ve got central heating and a continuous supply of hot water, which is more than you can say about most old houses, and a good few modern ones.”
He went on talking about the house.
“The furniture isn’t all period, thank goodness. I should draw the line at fourteenth-century chairs, and besides, don’t you think that furnishing to a period is all wrong? No one wants to go back into the dark ages and stay there, but if a family has its beginnings there, and then has the luck to go on living in a place like this for hundreds of years, they would have their old things and go on adding to them and keeping the best of what they added until every period had left its mark.” He spoke with a quick boyish enthusiasm which was very attractive.
Up to now she had neither liked nor disliked Geoffrey Trent. She simply had not known him. He was a stranger whom Allegra had met at a house-party and married within three months of that first meeting. Ione could count on the fingers of one hand the times when he and she had met. There had been a round of visits, and then the rush and scramble of the wedding. Cousin Eleanor had been too ill to have them for more than a brief week-end, but they had gone the rounds of relations of Allegra’s-friends of Geoffrey’s! Aunt Marion and Aunt Hester, Uncle Henry, and old Cousin Oliver Wayne. But on Geoffrey’s side not a single solitary relation except Margot Trent. Masses of friends of course-but a sinfully good-looking bachelor with money would certainly not lack for friends. Parties for the races, for this, for that, for everything conceivable-they simply never stopped. Allegra had been completely worn out before the wedding day. But she oughtn’t to go on looking as if she had just used up the last drop of her strength.
Right in the middle of Geoffrey showing her one of the staircases he kept locked-and a horrid dark, precipitous affair it was-she found herself saying,
“What is the matter with Allegra?”
He stopped half way through a sentence, appeared to have some difficulty in deflecting his attention from the medieval stair, and repeated his wife’s name in a tone tinged with surprise.