obviously determined to show them as little as possible of “his” Abbey. He’d made it clear at the beginning that he thought of it as his, even though Mum had told them that it was Cousin M’s money which had saved it from being sold. It was obvious that they were not to see a lot of the rooms.
“What’s in there?” they kept asking, as he hustled them past intriguing doors bristling with ancient nails and bolts, and very firmly shut. “Can we just have a peep?”
“Absolutely nothing of interest”, the Colonel would say or “just household rubbish”, or “the domestic offices”. And the faster he hurried them on the more they wanted to linger and to explore.
What they saw were the public or “show” rooms; those rooms which were on view to possible clients, for firms to use when they held conferences at the Abbey – a money-making scheme which, like the sports centre, had almost ground to a halt.
“Why don’t people come any more?” asked Magnus.
Floss glared at him and Sam tried to get near enough to give him a kick. “Don’t keep going on about it, Mags, it’s tactless,” he whispered, holding him back as Colonel Stickley unlocked a door labelled “Council Chamber”.
But Colonel Stickley had heard. “Ask away,” he said. “We’re in a recession, young man, everybody is tightening their belts. People don’t have the money for luxuries any more. Our charges are high, naturally, because we give a very high quality of service, but there isn’t the money to pay for it. QED,” he added.
“‘As has been demonstrated’,” said Magnus. “‘Quod erat demonstrandum’.”
“Stop showing off,” Floss hissed at him. “It’s getting on my nerves.” In the atmosphere of the Abbey Magnus definitely seemed to be coming out of his shell and to be more confident. He was talking more and asking most of the questions. She supposed this was better than sitting in silence all the time but she was finding it irritating, particularly when he paraded his knowledge in front of Colonel Stickley.
But the old man didn’t seem to have heard. “I don’t mind the place being empty for a few months,” he said. “I quite like it to myself, actually. All those tennis-playing brats were beginning to get me down.”
“Thanks a lot,” mouthed Sam to Floss, as they stepped inside a large panelled room on one wall of which was a small bay window with a cushioned seat and a view of the river. There was another huge fireplace with a coat of arms above it.
“This room was improved,” he told them, “for the young Elizabeth the First. She was a friend of Lady Alice Neale. It’s not very likely she held councils here, but that’s why they enlarged it, just in case.”
“What a waste,” said Sam. He disapproved of the Royal Family. “It’s like putting new lavatories into places when the Queen’s only going to be there for about five minutes.”
“But even royalty has to go to the lavatory,” Magnus observed solemnly.
Floss started to laugh but the Colonel didn’t seem to notice. “They raised the floor in this room,” he said. “It would have been much lower, originally. They really did do their best to get the Court to come here. They were obviously very ambitious, and it worked. The husband became a major diplomat. Anyhow, that’s about it, really. Pleasant room for a spot of reading or sewing, not to mention the royal comings and goings. Come along then, we’ll do the lower floor next.”
Floss and Sam set off in front of him. They were bored with these empty rooms. “Do you think we could slip away?” Sam suggested. “He’s obviously not going to show us much else. I’d rather come back when he’s out of the way, when he goes off to London or something.” The gardens and the river looked much more tempting than this series of empty rooms and, so far as he was concerned, the sooner the grand tour was over the better.
As the Colonel pulled the heavy door shut behind them, Magnus, hanging back for a final peek, was aware of a rush of cold air. It was not the general cold of an ancient, thick-walled dwelling, that retained its delicious coolness on a day of sun, it was a more precise, sharp cold; it was enclosed in time, like a phrase of music, or a sentence. And he distinctly saw, as the closing door filled the sunlit space beyond, the figure of a woman moving across the Council Chamber from right to left. Her Elizabethan dress was pure white and round her neck hung a broad, black priest-like stole. She was carrying white gloves and she continually twisted them in her hands, as if they were a handkerchief. He could hear a sobbing noise. He was unable to see the apparition’s feet. These were cut off from his view above the ankle, as if the rest of her was moving along at a lower level, about a foot below his eye.
Magnus cried out, then clapped his hand across his mouth. The Colonel looked down sharply. “You all right, young man? Got a pain? Shouldn’t bolt your food, you know.”
He said, “You’ve just locked somebody in. There’s somebody in there, a woman. Listen, she’s crying, can’t you hear her?”
Colonel Stickley stared at him, grimaced, pulled at his moustache then stood very still. The sound, though muffled through the thick oak door, was the same sound that had woken him in the night, the anguished sound of inconsolable weeping that Magnus had been unable to bear. And he could not bear it now. He clapped his hands to his ears and screamed, “Stop it! Stop it, can’t you!”
The Colonel dropped his bunch of keys and shook him vigorously. “Come on now, no hysterics, there’s no need for that.” But his voice was quite gentle. This was the foster child, the boy whose father had walked out, never to be heard of again, and whose mother had lost her mind, the child who’d never had a childhood. “Wait there,” he said, and he limped off after Floss and Sam. “I just have to oil a lock,” he called after them. “Make your way down to the buttery. We’ll be with you in a jiffy.”
Coming back to Magnus he picked up his keys, unlocked the door of the Council Chamber and steered him into the room. “See for yourself,” he said, “go on, investigate. Climb up the chimney and pull up the floor boards. It’s all been done before, you know.” His voice, no longer brisk and soldierly, was wavering, that of a tired old man. It was almost as if he wanted to cry now.
Magnus stared into the room though he knew perfectly well that he would not see the woman in white. She belonged to another time, to a time when the floor of the Council Chamber had been lower. She had been walking on that floor which was why she had seemed to him to have no feet. These were the simple mechanics of ghosts. Magnus knew all about them from old Father Robert, whose church had once been inhabited by an unhappy spirit which he had laid to rest with his prayers. The mechanics were not what scared him, they were just about two kinds of time getting muddled up. What was frightening was how he felt about the two women – the one who had cried in the night and the one he had just seen gliding across this room. Each spectre had brought the awful coldness with her, a cold that went into his very marrow and felt like death. And the coldness was part of her pain, of the grief which troubled her so. In a way he didn’t fully understand, it was as if her pain had joined itself to his. He was suffering as well, which was why he’d had to stop the noise of the crying.
Were there two women or were they one and the same person – the woman in the night, who he believed must have been Lady Alice, because her frame had stood empty, and now this other woman, all in white? Magnus could not begin to work out what was happening. He felt as if the top of his head was coming off, through too much thinking.
A hand descended on to his shoulder. “As you see,” Colonel Stickley informed him, “the room really is empty. There is nothing going on here and there
