Justice Hall - Laurie R. King [41]
“The stairs were bricked over, some time in the early nineteenth century. It wasn’t until about thirty years ago that Marsh’s father had the bricks down—some project Phillida’s mother had in mind for the stillroom near the kitchens. That tunnel was built by the second Duke in the 1750s. Seems he had a peculiar aversion to the continual passing of servants through the main rooms. This was his attempt to cut down the traffic. It comes out in the kitchens, or did, until it was blocked off. I remember when they had the bricks down; it was just before Marsh went off to Cambridge, so I must have been eleven or twelve at the time. I was here a lot, then, even though no-one much liked his stepmother. But they didn’t use the tunnel very long; after two house-maids fell on the stairs, the duke had the wine moved and locked it up again. It was probably the same reason that the end was bricked up in the first place, even though servants were cheap then.”
I could well believe those stairs would bring brisk-moving house-maids to grief. They were soldiers’ stairs, narrow and turning so as to be defensible by a single swordsman. Not that the original builders could have anticipated much swordplay, against enemies pouring into the house from the depths of the crypt.
With a last reluctant glance at the enticing fragments of Roman mosaic, I followed my guide up the steep stairway. At the top, Alistair shut down the lights and let me pass so he could lock the small door. As I reached for the latch on the door through which we had entered, I glanced at the smaller door’s twin and asked him where it went.
“Up,” he said, unnecessarily. “To the roof, eventually. Justice is riddled with nooks and crannies. When Marsh and I were children, we used to crawl all over the place—lock each other in obscure rooms, hold pitched battles in the tunnel, stage duels up on the roof leads. It’s a wonder we weren’t killed a hundred times. Once I was climbing these stairs and Marsh was waiting on the next level with a claymore in his hand. Another time he rigged a trap that would have shot me out over the battlements if I hadn’t seen it.”
“Good training exercises,” I commented. I ducked my head under the outer door frame to get back into the hallway at the end of the 1612 staircase; when I straightened, I found myself the target of two pair of pale and accusing eyes.
They belonged to a boy of perhaps eight and a girl a couple of years older; between their haughty expressions and the shape of their facial bones, there was no doubting their parentage: These were the Darling children. By the looks of them, no name could be less appropriate.
“What were you doing down there?” the girl demanded.
“Who are you?” the boy chimed in.
“You’re the friend of Uncle Marsh,” the girl said to me, and then to her brother, “She’s one of the friends of Uncle Marsh.”
“She doesn’t look like a friend of Uncle Marsh.”
“How would you know?” she retorted. “The only friend he’s ever invited here was that small man with the yellow hair who came when Mother and Father were in London.”
“He had a motor-cycle,” the boy informed me, sounding impressed.
Alistair had finally got the key to work and came out of the broom closet to rescue me. “What are you two doing here?” he grumbled. “Where is your nurse?”
“Miss Paul’s a governess, and she’s lying down with a head-ache.”
“I am not surprised. You go along back to the school-room and play.”
“Aren’t you going to introduce us?” The child even sounded like her mother.
Alistair glared at her, then gave in. Turning to me, he said, “Lenore and Walter Darling.” It sounded less an introduction than the identification of two possibly noxious varieties of local wildlife. “This is Miss Russell. Now be gone.”
Lenore Darling ignored him imperiously. “Are you of the—”
“The Bedfordshire Russells?” I finished