Justice Hall - Laurie R. King [42]
“Actually, no,” the girl admitted, and went on before Alistair could resume control. “I ought to warn you not to say anything about Peter Pan. My brother might kick you.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Peter Pan. The play by Mr Barrie?”
“I don’t know it, sorry.”
“Oh, that’s all right, then. It’s just that the family in the story is named Darling and my brother thinks Mr Barrie should have been stopped from using the name. Walter gets quite cross when someone makes a joke about Tinker Bell or the Lost Boys.”
Characters from a children’s play, I deduced, and wondered how we were to be rid of these two. Alistair’s flat commands fell on deaf ears. Perhaps he proposed to bind them to a newel post?
He turned down the corridor leading up the wing towards the front, and when the two children stepped off the stairs to follow, he whirled and went back to loom over them.
“I. Said. No.” It was like speaking to a pair of stubborn puppies. They dropped their eyes to study the toes of their shoes; Alistair took this as a sign of obedience, and gestured for me to continue. I thought, however, the meekness was an act, and indeed, as we went along our way we could occasionally hear a stealthy step, trailing a safe distance behind.
This evidence of insurrection annoyed Alistair, enough to distract him from his lectures on Justice Hall’s history and architectural styles. We moved rather rapidly through a drawing room done in pale, chilly blues, then a trophy room packed with the stuffed heads of large animals, the stuffed bodies of smaller creatures, and case after case of exterminated butterflies and beetles. This room opened onto an orangerie, with tiled floor and murals of picnicking black-haired aristocrats, and then a conservatory, inhabited by one enormous tropical vine with huge yellowed leaves pressing up to the glass, a dying palm tree, and not a lot else. We pushed our way through the dank, deserted glass house to the far end, where a door opened into the billiards room.
There Alistair prepared to lay in wait for our persistent tail, standing terrible and stern with arms folded, ready to explode when they crept through the door.
I touched his arm. “They’re doing us no harm. They must be restless for distraction here.”
“I do not like to be followed.”
Or disobeyed. “Of course not. But think about it: If you don’t allow children to practise following and watching, or to rig traps out over the battlements, where will your friend Joshua get his next generation of spies?”
He reared back, stared at me in astonishment, stared at the still-vacant doorway, then gave a loud bark of unexpected laughter and reached out to clout me hard on the shoulder.
“That is good, Mary,” he said, chuckling. “I do like the idea of two generations working for Joshua. Very well; we shall permit the brats to practise their skills on us. Just so you remember never to say a thing in this house that you do not want to find its way into nursery and servants’ hall before nightfall.”
Much cheered and able now to concentrate on his task, he led me through the public rooms on the ground floor, tossing out tit-bits about the various dukes, duchesses, and powers-that-be of their times. The Prince of Wales had descended on Marsh’s father for a few days of slaughtering birds, bringing with him half the court and despoiling the countryside of anything with feathers (to judge by the photographs commemorating the occasion). The current King had dropped in for tea on the terrace one sunny summer afternoon, which as obligatory social events go must have proved a bargain by comparison.
One long corridor, wrapping around the back of the dining room, chronicled a period of about ten years during which Justice Hall had stepped into the centre of the social whirl. Dozens of photographs, all eight inches by twelve and identically framed, recorded one week-end after another. The guests were assembled on croquet courts or picnic grounds, arranged up the great