Justice Hall - Laurie R. King [20]
I told the maid that I would keep my coat, thank you. She bobbed her response and went away with the garments of Alistair and Holmes over her arm. The butler admitted he would have to enquire as to His Grace’s whereabouts, and suggested that we follow him into the drawing room, but Alistair said we would wait in the Great Hall. Ogilby too slipped away, leaving Alistair to pick up a copy of Country Life from the top of an exquisite scagliola sideboard while Holmes and I craned our necks and gawked like a pair of museum patrons.
I had seen grander entrance halls—huge halls, halls whose every inch was encrusted with gilt and mirrors, halls dizzying with the sheer accumulation of beauty—but I had never known a room with a stronger sense of what I can only term personality. The room was a cube of marble and alabaster, the black-and-white tiles of its floor giving birth to a pale stairway slightly narrower at the top than the bottom. Near the foot of the stairway stood a larger-than-life statue of a Greek athlete, the outstretched right arm that had once held a javelin now empty; at first glance, he seemed to be preparing to stab any unwary passer-by. Fluted columns of a heavily veined alabaster tapered up to support first an upper gallery and then the side-lit dome above. The veins of chocolate and cream in the columns were peculiarly symmetrical, with a heavy streak in one leading the eye to a similar stain in the next column twelve feet away. As one studied them, the sensation grew that they had actually been cut from a single contiguous piece, the remnants of an original alabaster monolith left when the rest of the room was carved away, as if Justice Hall had been whittled from a huge block of living stone. The image was disorientating, and I tore my eyes from the fluted columns to look up.
It took a while for me to decide what the fresco on the dome depicted. Normally such paintings are either of battles—the ceiling at Blenheim, for example, created for the Duke of Marlborough to commemorate his victory at the battle of that name—or allegorical, with classical gods and illustrated stories. This one showed robed figures reclining at a feast, with dancers playing tambourines and musicians with harps and a variety of unlikely-looking woodwinds in the background. A cluster of remarkably serious greybeards stood to one side, looking for all the world like barristers discussing their briefs. Farther around the dome’s circle, a wood sprang up, with birds and wild animals decorating the dark and gnarled trees, and a single man, running from a tawny creature that I thought might represent a lion. The man was making for a small hut, looking back over his shoulder at the lion and thus not noticing the bear (this animal quite realistic) standing at the corner of the hut, nor the snake dangling from the eaves.
The combination of animals was unexpected in this setting, but as soon as I saw them I knew what the painter was illustrating—and indeed, in the remaining space of the dome’s bowl, in what I knew would be the eastern quarter, the sun was rising over an idealised English landscape of green fields and tidy hedgerows. Its rays illuminated the lower sides of a great and gathering darkness, crimson and black and awesome across the innocent land.
“Good Lord,” I said involuntarily.
Alistair glanced up from a Country Life article on improving one’s backhand in tennis. “Cheerful, is it not?”
“Do you see it, Holmes?” I asked. He shook his head, admitting ignorance. “From the Book of Amos. A description of Armageddon—the end of the world. ‘The Day of the Lord,’ the prophet calls it, which some desire as the time when the Lord comes to set human affairs straight, but which, Amos says, we ought to dread for just that reason.