‘It’s a murder hole,’ said Buttercup. ‘You hide up here with your bow and arrow and if the guests get past the doorman but they still look unappealing – peeyong! Dead.’
‘Handy,’ I said and walked into the Great Hall.
Great was the word. I could have driven my motor car into either of the two fireplaces and I was sure that two were needed since the room seemed so huge I could hardly believe the outside of the tower contained it. Perhaps though it was just the cold, our echoing footsteps and the fact that it was almost totally empty that made it appear so cavernous. For decoration there was only a display of swords laid out in a complicated pattern like a sunburst on one end wall and the furniture consisted of the kind of table, thirty feet long or so, in rough-hewn wood polished only by the greasy hands of centuries, that one imagines Henry VIII dining at and then sliding underneath. I wondered just how far Buttercup might be taking all of this, and how I should be able to face Grant after gnawing turkey legs and heaving flagons on to my shoulders in my new beaded chiffon.
‘The chairs aren’t here yet,’ said Buttercup, needlessly. ‘Nor the tapestries to help with the draughts. And then upstairs again…’ She plunged off towards the spiral staircase and we followed.
Upstairs again was a little better. A drawing room and a library, each with a window, no swords and some furniture, although still with stone floors and gargantuan fireplaces, and by the time we went up yet further to the bedrooms it was beginning to look almost cosy, at least one could imagine that a caveman would think it was the Ritz and I had given up planning to offer my excuses and leave.
‘There are only six bedrooms,’ said Buttercup, ‘but look how clever we’ve been. The walls are so thick and there are these little chambers simply all over the place, sleeping chambers I think, or private closets or whatever, but…’ She threw open a door in what was to be my bedroom to reveal a dressing room just big enough for a single bed and a tiny wardrobe. An arrow slit above the bed gave a wink of light. Just for a moment I wished Hugh were there so I could see his face.
‘And this one,’ said Buttercup, springing over to the far side of the room and flinging open another door, ‘is the dearest little bathroom.’ One could only imagine what an architectural historian would make of the gleaming chrome pipes and eau-de-nil bath shaped like a shell bolted on to the stone walls, but my spirits lifted no end. Of course Buttercup could not have spent fifteen years with American plumbing and then come back to dry closets and stone chutes to the garden. Perhaps I would be all right after all.
‘There’s just one last thing I have to show you,’ said Buttercup. ‘All the way to the bottom now.’ She sped off back down the staircase and Daisy and I descended gingerly after her, clutching the iron rail and feeling the way with our stockinged toes, our shoes in our hands.
‘The kitchen!’ Buttercup announced, entering a room right opposite the front door. It was a vaulted cavern as big as the hall above and fifteen feet high, with not a single window, not even an arrow slit, and a floor crisscrossed with channels in the stone. At the far end a blue and white enamel stove lit by electric lamps stood against the wall beside an ancient bread oven big enough for all three of us to have sat in. Opposite were a pair of gleaming white china sinks and at one of these a cook was working with her back to us, her shoulders eloquent with suppressed fury.
‘Don’t mind us, Mrs Murdoch,’ sang Buttercup, waving us over to the corner. ‘Now, what about this?’ We were looking through another grille in the floor to a stone-walled chamber, perfectly round and so deep we could barely make out the bottom.
‘An oubliette!’ Buttercup cried, eyes dancing. ‘Well, a prison pit, anyway. Can you imagine anything more romantic! Just think. They would throw the poor unfortunates down there and leave them to die. And the smells of the kitchen would waft down through the grille and torture them while they starved. Only we can’t think what to do with it, can we, Mrs Murdoch?’
The cook turned and gave her A Look but said nothing.
‘We had thought it would make a larder,’ Buttercup went on, ‘but we’d have to put in a ladder and Mrs Murdoch doesn’t fancy it. And anyway, there are so many other wall chambers for larders and suchlike we hardly need it.’
‘Well, no,’ I said. ‘And do you really think you’d want to keep your food there, darling? I mean, if people died in it.’
Mrs Murdoch turned on her way from the sink to the stove and keened towards me yearningly, but Buttercup only laughed.
‘Oh, we don’t worry about all that, Dandy darling. It was years ago. They’d be dead now, anyway.’
I suppose this made some kind of sense.
‘So I think we’ll just bash through from downstairs and use it as a cupboard,’ Buttercup said, sounding regretful.
‘Downstairs?’ said Daisy.
‘The dungeons,’ said Buttercup. Then: ‘Damn! The basement, I mean. We haven’t quite given up on the idea of persuading the servants to take up residence down there, but Cad reckons that calling it the dungeons doesn’t help.’
Mrs Murdoch threw a tray of scones into the stove and slammed the door with a clang.
‘Where are they now, then?’ said Daisy through a mouthful of warm scone, half an hour later. ‘The servants, I mean.’
‘They’re in the old house,’ said Buttercup. ‘I mean the new house. The house, you know. Where we were until the castle was ready.’
‘There’s a house?’ Daisy asked, piningly, and I had to bite my cheeks not to giggle, but Buttercup did not see me through the gloom.
‘Oh yes,’ said Buttercup. ‘A boring Georgian square. The de Cassilis family hadn’t lived in the castle for simply aeons until Cad came back. Aren’t people dull? And the servants are all still there. I keep telling them how much easier it would be for them to sleep here in the dun-… basement. We’ve fitted it up beautifully, you’ve no idea. But if they’re silly enough to want to tramp half a mile through the park every night and morning good luck to them. They’ll come around, I rather think, in the winter.’
‘But what makes you imagine they’ll stay?’ I said. ‘Servants these days just don’t stay unless you treat them like the gods of Egypt.’
‘Oh, I know,’ said Buttercup. ‘We’re on the second lot of maids already. Third, maybe. And I’m in a super-inflationary wages war with Mrs Murdoch. She’s up to three hundred at the last count.’
‘Well, she’s worth it,’ said Daisy. ‘These scones are divine. So I’d shut up about the larder if I were you.’
Buttercup chuckled, then cocked an ear.
‘Oh goody,’ she said. ‘Here’s Cad. Now drink him in and tell me what you think later.’
Cadwallader de Cassilis appeared in the doorway and strolled towards us. At once I had the fanciful notion that here was why Buttercup seemed not to notice the Stygian gloom of the castle, for he exuded light. From the top of his head, where his hair was polished and golden – real gold too, I rather thought, not April Sunrise – to the tips of his toes, in appalling patent co-respondent brogues, he shone. Part of it was the spanking new cricket jersey and cream bags – billowing acres of these – but some of it was the bursting, pulsing good health of his eyes and cheeks and teeth, the sheer Americanness of him altogether. Although one knew he was Scottish by ancestry, at least two generations’ worth of buffalo steaks, corncobs and milk must have gone to produce what stood before us now.
‘Sweetheart,’ he cried, pronouncing it swee-durrrt. ‘You should have called me. I was only up on the roof with Dudgeon. Welcome to Cassilis, girls. What do you think of the pile?’ He was fearfully American, every word sounding as though he were trying to speak whilst gurgling treacle, but so affable that I took to him at once.