Justice Hall - Laurie R. King [48]
“Trouble?” Marsh enquired.
“Nothing, no, just a friend—or not a friend, actually, a business acquaintance I—Yes, Ogilby?”
The butler had glided up with his silver tray, on which lay another telegram. Sidney stuffed the one he held into his pocket and snatched at the fresh one.
“Shall I go ahead?” Phillida asked her husband.
“Yes, my dear, I’ll be there in a moment. Is the car here, Ogilby?”
“Certainly, sir.”
“I’ll just . . .” Sidney tossed the shredded envelope in the direction of the silver tray and frowned down at the telegraphist’s words, which he had sheltered automatically from our view. He read it through twice, then shoved it unceremoniously into the pocket after the first one; without another word, he scurried out of the door, moving too fast for the attentive footman to get it fully open in front of him.
“Well,” Marsh said.
“What do you suppose that was about?” Alistair asked.
I turned to Ogilby for enlightenment. “Mr Darling seemed to think there was to be a march that might turn violent. I hope not in London?”
“I believe the news originated in Germany, madam.”
“The national socialists are about to stage a putsch,” Marsh explained. “General Ludendorff is one of the leaders, he and a young firebrand by the name of Hitler. Sidney is trying to decide if a change in the government would bode well or ill for British interests. He gave me some pamphlets to read; I found them dangerous nonsense.”
I let my gaze climb to the scene on the dome. Who would wish the Day of the Lord? And although Sidney might be depending on the Justice coffers to lay the foundations of an international manufacturing project, Marsh did not sound overeager to become involved in the country’s considerable problems.
With a last thoughtful look upwards at the man about to lay his hand on a serpent, I joined Marsh and Alistair, as we continued our tour.
Quitting the Hall for the western wing, we turned to the right, away from the decorated staircase at the back of the house. Marsh pushed open a door; I looked, then stepped in: the Armoury.
This would have been the banqueting hall of the original house, massive stone walls topped by a fourteenth-century timber roof and inset with ancient warped windows illustrating the family’s history. A sixteenth-century painted screen lay across one end of the hall, a huge fireplace dominated the other, and the arms of ages occupied the walls and corners. Four full suits of armour—one of which had been for a man standing nearly seven feet high, no doubt Long Tim—guarded the fireplace and the door opposite, pikes in their sheathed hands. A sunburst of broadswords and a wider one of pikestaffs faced each other across the southern end of the room. Plumed helmets, faded banners hanging free and behind glass, knives, longbows, and half the armament known to man. There was even a long row of matched blunderbusses, whose recoil would knock an unwary man down.
“A person could mount a small war out of this room,” I commented.
“When the eighth earl, who was to be the first Duke, built the new block beginning in 1710, he couldn’t quite bring himself to tear this out. It vexed his architect no end. But truly, it had to stay; it’s the heart of the place. Before the second earl got his hands on it and raised the roof a few yards, this was the abbey’s hall.”
The room had changed since brown-clad monks gathered here for soup and Scripture, but it took little imagination to conjure up a long feasting board filled with loud, heavily scarred fighting men, women carrying trenchers across a rush-strewn floor, huge pale dogs gnawing bones underfoot. Henry VIII, or either of his daughters, would have felt right at home in this room. It carried the history of this house as the Great Hall and the long gallery did not, and I circumnavigated its lumpy whitewashed walls with respect, taking in the window (Justitia fortitudo mea est, at the top of each branch of the tree with its names: Henry