The Book of Air and Shadows - Michael Gruber [177]
“Not. Plus, you practically accused him of trying to seduce your wife, in fact, you encouraged him to do so. Just before you wrecked the bar in your hotel and put the bartender in the hospital.”
“I did no such thing,” I said spontaneously.
“I know you think you didn’t, but you really did. Have you ever had blackouts like that before?”
“Oh, thank you! I’m sure you have an AA group in your church basement that I’d fit right into.”
“No, I don’t think you’re a drunk, or not yet, although three pints of strong English beer is a lot to drink in the middle of the day.”
“I’m a big guy,” I said, a little lamely, for it was all starting to come back, little fragments of horrid memory. I am not a drinker ordinarily.
The hell with this.
We got to Darden Hall about four, under sodden skies. The surprisingly short autumn day of these latitudes was nearly gone and our headlights illuminated dark drifts of leaves on the long drive up from the road. The place had recently come into the National Trust, on the demise of the final Baron Reith in 1999, and had not yet been renovated for public view. We had called ahead to arrange a conversation with the resident conservator, a Miss Randolph.
The place was the usual crumbling pile familiar to us all from horror films and Masterpiece Theatre anglophiliac fantasias, although the hour and the weather gave it the look more of the former’s sort of prop. It had a Jacobean core, a couple of Georgian wings, and some Victorian gewgaws despoiling the facade. We chance to meet a workman on a tiny tractor in front of the house and he directed us around to what was once the servants’ entrance. Our knock was answered by a solid fortyish woman of the English Rose type who wore half glasses, a tweed skirt, and two cardigans, wisely in the case of these last, for the room she showed us into was almost cold enough to show breath. A tiny electric fire hummed valiantly, but clearly to little avail. It was the old steward’s office, she explained, the only habitable room in the house, and her headquarters.
She asked what she could do for us and I said, “We’re here to see Count Dracula.” She grinned and replied in an appropriately Masterpiece Theatre-ish accent, “Yes, everyone says that, or else something about the peasants coming for Frankenstein. Too many Gothic novels and films, but I think there’s something in all that nonsense, you know. I think that even then, in the nineteenth century, when it seemed as if the life that produced these houses would go on forever, writers knew there was something wrong with them, that they rested ultimately on the most dreadful suffering, and it bubbled up in the Gothic tale.”
“What sort of suffering is this one built on?”
“Oh, take your pick. The original Lord Dunbarton stole it courtesy of Henry VIII from some Benedictine nuns who ran a charity hospital here. None of that for the baron, of course, and afterward the Dunbartons made their pile in sugar and slaves. That funded the Georgian buildings and afterward they had coal and gas and urban property in Nottingham and Coventry. None of them ever did an honest day’s work in their lives and they lived like emperors. But…”
“What?” Paul asked.
“It’s difficult to explain. Come with me, I’ll show you something.”
We followed her out of the office and down a dim corridor lit by wall sconces holding fifteen-watt bulbs. The chill in that room was coziness itself compared with the damp cold of the corridors, cold as the grave I recall thinking, slipping easily into Gothic mode. We went through a door and she pressed a light switch. I gasped.
“This was the Jacobean dining hall and later the breakfast room. It’s considered the finest example of linenfold walnut paneling in the Midlands, not to mention the carving on the sideboards and the inlaid parquet flooring. Look at the detail! This was done by English craftsmen for thugs who couldn’t tell a dado from sheep dip, so why did they put their souls into this walnut? Love is why, and I honor them for it, which is why I’m in the business of preserving it. Come, there’s more.