Justice Hall - Laurie R. King [63]
We kept to the backs of the hedges and the far reaches of the formal garden, coming past stone gladiators and goddesses to the oldest part of the house. Iris led the way to a door, which she opened cautiously; deciding the voices were at a safe distance, we slipped inside. I thought we should be making a break for the carved stairway a third of the way down the corridor, but instead she turned immediately left, to dive into a sort of mud-room filled with old boots and waterproofs. Not the sort of place I might have chosen to inhabit until the coast was clear, I thought, but Iris pressed farther back, pawing aside coats that might have hung there since the fourth Duke’s day, if not the third. All I could see of my companion was the back of her herring-bone trousers, and I was beginning to wonder how on earth we would explain ourselves if one of the servants happened upon us when I heard a click, followed by a low exclamation of relief.
“In here,” she whispered.
I picked my way into the musty clothing, rendered half blind by the combined darkness and steaming-up of spectacles. Iris seized my outstretched hand and pulled me in; then to my consternation she shut the door, cutting off what light there had been and loosing the first tendrils of claustrophobia.
“Hold on,” she murmured. I could hear her shuffling about, her hand patting across some part of our tiny enclosure. I shifted away from the unexpected intimacy of her leg against mine, and then she spoke again: “Here we are.”
The rattle of a match-box warned me what to expect; on the third try, the head ignited and was held under the wick of a candle stub. There were several such, I saw, arranged on top of the doorsill, all of them furry with dust. She took a second one down, blew it clean, lit it from the one already going, then handed it to me.
I had thought the stairs down to the crypt were snug. This was more like a spiralling ladder. I had to take care not to set Iris’s coat-tails on fire, so nearly directly above me did she climb; my free hand rested on the steps in front of me for support, in the absence of anything resembling a rail.
We climbed a full circuit, then stopped at a narrow landing; the stairs continued their spiral up into the darkness. Iris’s candle illuminated a tiny door, its frame topped by another collection of candles and match-boxes. The latch seemed to be little more than a stiff wire jabbed into a tiny hole, but it gave Iris some difficulty. She poked and prodded away, experimenting with marginally different angles and degrees of force, until one finally worked. With a click like that of the first door, the wall gave. She pushed, leant out to survey the room beyond, hopped down, and turned to help me climb out.
It was a jib door, I saw when it was shut again, its seams rendered invisible by a square of wood trim, the same as any of those mounted decoratively atop the wall-paper all around the room.
We were in a bedroom—Marsh’s quarters before and now after his nephew’s time, bearing traces of an undergraduate’s personality. The room felt old, as the library and the billiards room below had not, all stone and rough-hewn black beams. One of the two Hughenforts had liked art deco, as testified the four lamps in the shapes of vines, leaves, and nymphs, although the wall-paper and Turkey carpet were probably half a century older. It was a shadowy chamber, in spite of the two windows: black wood, burgundy-coloured velvet drapes, and gloomy paintings.
Oddly like the interior of a Bedouin tent, in fact.
Iris swept the room with a disapproving gaze. “It was certainly more cheerful when Marsh was an undergraduate. And I can’t imagine Gabriel living with those paintings—Phillida must have moved them in here to get them out of the way. And those curtains! This was a sort of lumber-room when we were children. Marsh claimed it for his day-room as soon as he discovered the stairs,