“What does it mean, Mum?” hissed Maureen, sotto voce.
“Property of the Earl of Ornum,” said Mrs. Fisher smartly. “Same as on the Corporation buses.”
Mr. Feathers cleared his throat and resumed his hortatory address. “The little cupboards on either side of the fire were for salt. That way it was always kept dry. Salt, you know, had quite some significance in olden days. It was by way of being a status symbol—”
“Below the salt,” put in a rather earnest-looking woman, who was clutching A Guide to Calleshire.
“Exactly.”
Mrs. Fisher changed her not inconsiderable weight from one foot to the other and wished she could sit down. The only status symbol recognised in Paradise Row was a wedding ring—which served to remind her of Mavis Palmer and her young man, Bernard. If she was any judge, Mavis would be needing one fairly soon.
Mr. Feathers turned back to the centre of the hall and sketched a quick word picture for them. “You can imagine what it must have been like here in the old days. The Earl and his family sat on that dais over there—”
“Above the salt,” chimed in the earnest one irritatingly.
“And his servants and retainers below the salt in the main body of the hall. He would have had his own men-at-arms, you know, and one or two of them would always have been on guard.” Mr. Feathers gave a pedantic chuckle. “The floor wouldn’t have been as clean then as it is just now…”
Pearl Fisher—Pearl Hipps, that was, before her marriage to Mr. Fisher—was with him at once. As a girl she had seen the film in which Charles Laughton had tossed his chicken leg over his shoulder with a fine abandon. Henry the Eighth, she thought, but Charles Laughton she was sure.
That had been in the days when she sat in the back row of the one and ninepennies at the flicks with Fred Carter. Actually they only paid ninepence and then used to creep backwards when the lights went out, but it came to the same thing. Mrs. Fisher came out of a reverie that included Fred Carter (he had been a lad, all right) and inflation (you couldn’t get a cinema seat for ninepence these days) to see Mr. Feathers, his back to the fireplace now, pointing to the opposite end of the room above the dais.
A Minstrels’ Gallery ran across the entire width of the Great Hall.
“The music came from up there,” said Mr. Feathers, “though it was music of a somewhat different variety from that which you would hear today. They would have had lutes, and probably a virginal…”
“Mum,” Maureen Fisher tugged at her mother’s sleeve. “Mum, what’s a virginal?”
Mrs. Fisher, having no ready answer to this, slapped her daughter instead.
“And,” continued Mr. Feathers, “they would have played up there, quite unseen, during the evening meal. Now, look up that way and a little to the left… Do you see up there—in the corner at the back of the Minstrels’ Gallery…”
“A little window,” contributed someone helpfully.
“A little window,” agreed Mr. Feathers, “Behind it there is a small room. From there the Earl would keep an eye on what everyone was getting up to.” He spoke at large—but he looked at Michael Fisher.
“And they couldn’t see him,” said a voice in a group.
“No.” Mr. Feathers smiled a schoolmaster’s smile. “They couldn’t see him.”
Several necks craned upwards towards the peephole, but it was in shadow—as its Tudor creators had intended it should be. There was no light behind the window and it would be quite impossible to tell if there was anyone looking through it or not.
“For all we know,” said Mr. Feathers in a mock-sinister voice, “there may be someone there now, watching us.”
What the reaction of his listeners to this suggestion was, Mr. Feathers never knew. At that very moment there was a terrible screech. It rang through the Great Hall and must have come from somewhere not far away. It was eldritch, hideous.
And utterly inhuman.
It was almost as if the sound had been deliberately laid on as a Maskelyne-type distraction, because when it had died away Mrs. Fisher became aware that Michael had completely disappeared.
2
« ^ »
Whatever else was in short supply in Paradise Row, emotion and drama were never stinted.
“Whatever’s that?” gasped Mrs. Fisher, clutching her heart and looking round wildly. “And where’s my Michael?” She pointed. “Over there, that’s where it came from.”
“Outside anyway,” said a thin woman in sensible shoes, as if this absolved her from any further action.
“Sounds to me as if someone was being murdered,” insisted Mrs. Fisher.
Mr. Feathers shook his head. “Peacocks,” he explained briefly. “On the terrace.”
Mrs. Fisher was unconvinced. “Peacocks?”
Maureen Fisher had already gone off in the direction of the noise and was starting to climb on a chair the better to see out of the window.
This galvanised Mr. Feathers into near frenzy. “Get down, girl,” he shouted. “No one’s stood on that chair since Chippendale made it and you’re not going to be the first.”
Maureen backed down. “I only wanted to see…”
“Gave me quite a turn, it did,” declared Mrs. Fisher generally, looking round the party in a challenging fashion. Wherever she looked there was indubitably no sign of Michael.
The earnest woman—she who carried The Guide to Calleshire—and who had hardly done more than start at the noise, smiled distantly, and the whole group began to move towards one of the doors leading off the Great Hall. Mr. Feathers promised there would be another guide upstairs, made absolutely sure Michael Fisher wasn’t hiding anywhere, and then turned back to his next party.
Mrs. Fisher, thinking about her feet and her Michael, shuffled along in the group towards the staircase. In Paradise Row a bare wooden staircase meant you couldn’t afford a carpet. In Ornum House it obviously meant something quite different. For one fleeting moment it crossed Mrs. Fisher’s mind how wonderful it must have been to have swept down that staircase in a long dress—and then someone trod on her toe and instantly she was back in the present.
And there was still no sign of Michael.
There were pictures lining the staircase wall, small dark oil paintings in the Dutch style, which did not appeal to Mrs. Fisher though she liked the gold frames well enough, but there was a portrait on the landing at the head of the stairs which caught her eye.
Literally.
The sitter must have been looking at the artist because whichever way Mrs. Pearl Fisher looked at the portrait, the portrait looked back at Mrs. Pearl Fisher. It was of a woman, a woman in a deep red velvet dress, against which the pink of a perfect complexion stood out. But it was neither her clothes—which Mrs. Fisher thought of as costume—nor her skin which attracted Mrs. Fisher. It was her face.
It had a very lively look indeed.
And of one thing Mrs. Fisher was quite sure. Oil painting or not, the woman in the portrait had been no better than she ought to have been.
“This way, please,” called the next guide. “Now, this is the Long Gallery…”
Michael wasn’t there.
By comparison with the lady on the landing Mrs. Fisher found the portraits in the Long Gallery dull.
“Lely, Romney, Gainsborough,” chanted Miss Cleepe, a short-sighted maiden lady from Ornum village in charge of the Long Gallery, who recited her litany of fashionable portrait painters at half hourly intervals throughout the season. By June she had lost any animation she might have had in April. “That’s the eleventh Earl and Countess on either side of the fireplace in their Coronation robes for Edward the Seventh—”