Rain fell in torrents, torrents were followed by gales, tarpaulins blew off roofs, and water rose in cellars as it never had before. Every time I looked out of the window thinking that the rain could get no heavier, it redoubled its maniacal and mindless persistence. But there was one source of cheerful amusement for me in all this gloom. Charles had caught a very bad cold! I came in one morning to find him hunched over his desk, clutching a box of tissues.
‘For goodness’ sake, Charles,’ I said, ‘go home! You don’t have to stay here!’ I pointed to the wall chart. ‘You’ve got no meetings today or tomorrow and then it’s the weekend. Go home, have a bath, find a good book, and go to bed. I’ll man the main brace.’
He winced.
‘Can’t,’ he said. ‘Just had a call from the Trust. Felthorpe Hall. Main staircase. There’s a problem. I’ve just been looking up my last quinquennial survey report.’ He paused and pretended to run a critical eye over it. ‘It’s rather good, I think. Listen to this, Ellie, and mark the style.’ He began to read:
‘The condition of the main staircase has been mentioned in previous reports and its stability is now a matter of concern. A newel stair with four quarter-space landings, its strength is dependent on the support each flight derives from the flight below. Provided tenons are sound….’ He droned on and I switched off. ‘… is due to more than shrinking and old age.’
‘Well, what do you think?’
‘I’d say you’d covered yourself pretty well, there, Charles…all those provided-that’s and suspicions-ofs,’ I began to say, but he interrupted.
‘It is always my concern, Ellie, to have a care for the building as well as my own neck. I go on: I would suggest that where shrinkage gaps are to be seen, small hardwood wedges be lightly inserted, and if the distortion referred to increases, these wedges will fall. Should this happen, further structural investigation would appear imperative.’
‘Don’t tell me! Your wedges have fallen?’
‘They have. Luckily, the house is closed to the public for end-of-season cleaning, but they’ve got some sort of anniversary shindig coming up at Christmas. So they ring me. “Is this staircase safe?” they want to know. What can I say? “Leave it to me. I’ll come up and have a look.”‘ He blew his nose dolefully once more, pushed his spectacles up onto his forehead, and rubbed his reddened eyes.
His partner was on holiday. There was only one thing I could say. ‘Look, tell them you can’t come until next week, or if there’s a panic on, I’ll go for you. Why not? I don’t think you’ll make much sense in your present condition.’
Charles blinked and shivered theatrically for a moment, looked doubtful, and then said, as though my offer was all so unexpected, ‘Well, if you’re sure, Ellie, that would be a godsend…and it’s not as though you could do any real damage…I mean, I’ve laid on a carpenter – Johnny Bell will meet you there at half-past two. He’s very experienced and -’
‘Just give me the file, Charles! But – Felthorpe Hall? Where is it, incidentally?’
‘Er…north Norfolk,’ he had mumbled apologetically.
The house may not have welcomed me, but the carpenter, Johnny Bell, greeted me warmly enough in the hallway from which a fine newel stair climbed its way to a dim upper floor. I needn’t have come, really. Mr Bell was perfectly capable of taking up a few boards, dismantling a few stair treads, and, indeed, diagnosing the problem and solving it. The architect is very often the third wheel on the bicycle. This was one of those occasions. He knew it, and so did I. But with kindly East Anglian courtesy he explained the situation and even managed to make it appear he was hanging on my words.
‘Didn’t like to start until you got here, Miss Hardwick. Thought if we took up a couple of treads here and a floorboard on the landing and perhaps the riser off the step up into the pass door, we ought to see what we’re up to.’
I was about to say, ‘Nails must be cut and punched…’ but almost before I could speak he had slipped a hacksaw under the first stair tread and had started to cut the nails which held it in place, When he’d slipped the stair treads out of the strings, the risers followed with no more difficulty. We knelt together on the stairs and peered into the cavity we had created. I held the torch while Johnny Bell felt inside.
‘Carriage has gone,’ he said. ‘It’s supposed to be bird’s-mouthed under the trimmer and…’ feeling along the wall, ‘the wall string’s gone in the same place.’
I reached into the hole, broke off a section of timber, and brought it into the light.
‘Deathwatch beetle,’ I said.
‘How do you know?’ said a voice behind us.
I turned to confront a tall, stooping, birdlike figure peering over our shoulders. He reminded me of one of the bony herons I’d seen on arrival, hunched at the edge of the lake. This was Nicholas Wemyss, the curator, and introductions followed.
‘How do you know?’ he asked again.
‘If the exit holes are big enough to let you poke a match head into them, it’s deathwatch beetle. If they’re only big enough for a pin, it’s woodworm – furniture beetle, that is,’ I said, as I’d been taught.
‘Ah!’ said Nicholas, looking impressed. ‘Now I really appreciate a complicated technical explanation! But, Ellie, is this serious? Does it mean the stairs are unsafe?’
‘Well, it shouldn’t be left. Some of this bore dust,’ I held out a sample, ‘is quite fresh and, no, it probably isn’t quite safe.’ I looked at Johnny, who was nodding in agreement. ‘Let’s see if we can take up a board on the quarter landing. That’ll tell us more.’
Once more the hacksaw blade disappeared under the stair nosing, and one by one the ancient nails were snipped through. The first mighty board came loose. Loose for the first time since some ancient carpenter had tapped it into place over three hundred years before. Johnny waggled it to and fro, inserted the end of a nail bar, and prised it upwards. ‘Can’t move it!’ he said in surprise. ‘That’s stuck! There’s something under there!’
He poked around with the end of a two-foot rule. ‘Yes, bugger me – there’s something under there!’
We watched in puzzlement as he took up a second board. With that obstruction gone, the first board came out more easily. But it was unnaturally heavy. It was as much as the two of us could lift and, as it came from its ancient seating, ‘Corst blast!’ said Johnny. ‘There’s a little old box fastened up to the bottom of that!’
‘Little old box, nothing!’ said Nicholas. ‘No…that’s a little old coffin!’
There was no mistaking it. The profile of a coffin lid is in some way branded on the memory. The eternal symbol of death and dissolution, an object of reasonless fear buried in the country memories of us all. It was tiny; not above two foot long. A whiff of profound grief and misery briefly embraced us all as the darkness deepened, the thunderous rain began to fall again, and the damp chill of the day sharpened to an icy coldness.
The carpenter ran a knowledgeable hand over the small structure. Must have made hundreds of coffins in his time, I thought.
‘Oak boards. Nicely made,’ he said, absently caressing the joints with a craggy thumb. ‘That were tacked up from below.’ He slipped the point of a chisel under the rim of the coffin and pressed upwards against the covering board. ‘Lift it off, shall I?’
‘No! Wait!’ I heard my own voice call out. I didn’t want him to take off the lid. I didn’t want to see what the box held. ‘Perhaps we should call the police? Isn’t that what you do when you find a…er…come across a burial?’