The Stately Home Murder
UK title:
The Complete Steel
Catherine Aird
Chronicles of Calleshire 03
THE BUSY PEOPLE
Friday evening the genteel inhabitants of Ornum House were all busy. Cousin Gertrude cleaned the chandelier, the great-aunts played ombre, the black sheep of the family arrived in the village, his Lordship’s nephew and his wife came late for dinner, and one of them murdered poor Mr. Meredith.
To find the killer, Detective Inspector Sloan would have to sort through a household of suspects, an armory of weapons, and a muniments room holding a vital clue.
Murder at the Manor
On Sunday the public paid half a crown to view Ornum House’s three hundred rooms, its exceptional display of fine china, its authentic Holbein, its dank dungeon complete with suits of armor..and a dead body. With Burke’s Peerage tucked under one arm and a dictionary under the other, Detective Inspector CD. Sloan tiptoes through the halls of the aristocracy. His impeccable powers of observation might reveal who murdered the family archivist, but the family ghost walks through these same corridors. So someone else is going to die.
For Munro—or Ornum—with love
“What may this mean,
That thou, dead corpse, again in complete steel
Revisit’st thus the glimpses of the moon…”
Hamlet to Ghost
The Stately Home Murder
1
Ornum House was open to the public, which did not help the police one little bit.
On the contrary, in fact…
It was open every Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday from April to October, and to parties at other times by prior arrangement with the Steward and Comptroller.
It was also open—as all the guidebooks said—Bank Hols (Good Friday excepted). Henry Augustus Rudolfo Cremond Cremond, thirteenth Earl Ornum of Ornum in the County of Calleshire, drew the line at opening Ornum House on Good Friday.
“Religious holiday. Not a civil one. No beanfeasts in my house on Good Friday,” he had decreed, adding, as he always added when the subject came up, “Don’t know what m’father would have thought about having people in the house for money.”
There was usually someone on hand to make a sympathetic noise at this point.
“Guests, family, and servants,” his Lordship would go on plaintively. “That was all in his day. Now it’s half Calleshire.”
This understandable repugnance at having his family home tramped over did not, however, prevent him taking a close interest in the daily tally of visitors. At the end of every open day, Charles Purvis, his Steward, was summoned to give an account of the numbers—much as in Scotland on the days succeeding the Glorious Twelfth of August, the gamekeeper presented himself each evening with the game bag totals.
Ornum House, attractive as it undoubtedly was, did not really compete in the Stately Home League Tables—it was too far off the beaten tourist track for that. Nevertheless it did have a respectable number of visitors each year. It was sufficiently near to Berebury to constitute a “must” for people coming to that town, and sufficiently far from the industrial complex of Luston to be an “outing” for people living there.
The outing was usually extended to cover visits to the thirteenth-century church of St. Aidan or the twentieth-century roadhouse The Fiddler’s Delight—but seldom both.
On this particular Sunday in June the little church by the Big House offered its own attractions. It was both quiet and cold and it was possible to sit down in a pew in peace and surreptitiously slip off shoes grown too small on a hot afternoon. It had the edge—temporarily, at least—on The Fiddler’s Delight, which would not be open until six o’clock.
Mrs. Pearl Fisher was a member of the public who had come to see over Ornum House and her feet hurt.
She hadn’t even got as far as the house itself yet and they hurt already. This was partly because they were crammed into her best pair of shoes and partly because she had spent too long standing on them. In the ordinary way she spent her Sunday afternoons having a quiet nap, but this Sunday was different.
Just how different it was going to be had not yet become apparent to Mrs. Fisher when she and the twins and the rest of their party spilled out of the coach just before lunchthne.
The house and grounds were both fuller than usual. It had been wet for three weekends in a row, and now, suddenly, it was flaming June with a vengeance. There had been picknickers all over the Park since noon disporting themselves among the trees in a manner not envisaged by Capability Brown when invited to lay out the great park in the then modern manner. (That had been after one of the Earls of Ornum had clapped a Palladian front on the south side of the medieval house. And that had been after he had got back from his first Grand Tour.)
The public, though, seemed to have got the idea of Capability’s pleasances. They were positively full of people taking conscious pleasure from walking in them, enjoying their alternating sun and shade and the smooth grass underfoot, and, every now and then, exclaiming at an unexected vista carefully planned by that master craftsman for them to exclaim at.
At least two people had entered into the spirit of the Folly, which was set on a little rise some way from the House.
“No,” said Miss Mavis Palmer.
“Go on,” urged her ardent young man.
“No,” said Mavis, less firmly.
“Be a sport.”
Mavis giggled.
They had come to Ornum House for the day with a coach party from Luston, and there was no question but that they were enjoying themselves.
Mrs. Pearl Fisher, who had come on the same coach, wasn’t quite so sure she was. Apart from her feet, which were troubling her more than a little, there were the twins, Michael and Maureen, whom she had brought with her for the ample reason that Mr. Fisher would never have forgiven her for leaving them at home. His Sunday was sacrosanct to The King’s Arms and his own armchair.
Like Miss Mavis Palmer and her young man, Bernard, she came from Paradise Row, Luston. Any student of industrial philanthropy would immediately recognise this as a particularly grimy part of that particularly grimy town. By some Victorian quirk of self-righteousness the street names there varied in inverse proportion to their amenity.
The coach had been booked from door to door—which was one of the reasons why Mrs. Fisher had put her best shoes on. What she had not reckoned with was the distance within the doors. There was no distance to speak of inside the house in Paradise Row, Luston, but there was a great deal of it once through the portals of Ornum House.
It had been an old house by the time Capability Brown saw it, and now it was an architectural nightmare. It was true to no one period, representational of nothing but a series of improvements by a series of owners. Behind the Palladian south front were Tudor bricks and behind those the remains of a donjon—a reminder that before the house there had been a castle with a great central keep.
Lord Ornum himself never forgot this.
“Those were the days,” he would sigh. “Drawbridge, portcullis, and broadsword in that order and you were all right. Keep all your enemies at bay. But now”—here he would open his hands expressively—“now to keep out the enemy”—(he was referring to Her Majesty’s Commissioners of Inland Revenue)—“I have to lower the drawbridge and let everyone else in.”