A Fatal Winter (13 page)

Max had paused before the massive gates, calculating with reverence the man-hours required to construct them, then followed Milo into the small forecourt, where riders would once have entered, their horses stamping their hooves, and their servants rushing to unsaddle the mounts. One could easily imagine the castle lord followed by his retinue as he strode, cape swooping out behind him, into the hall.

He followed Milo through a heavy door that groaned on protesting wrought-iron hinges and into a small antechamber. They passed through a screen on the left and emerged into what could only be the Great Hall—a large shadowy space, almost Venetian in aspect, that made one think of whispered talk of treason by dark-robed men huddled in corners, of conspiracies and the muffled clink of bags of coins changing hands. It was a room of blackened oak beams with a timber arch-brace roof, its stone walls hung with paintings and tapestries depicting stag hunts and other tableaux that would put the sensitive viewer off his meal.

The lofty ceiling, like that of a cathedral, seemed designed to intimidate and impress the visitor. There were a very few, very high windows, so as not to compromise the solidity of the heavy stone walls. A small Chartres-y stained-glass window floated high up in one wall, throwing shards of colored light on the gray stone floor and the large dining table below. The one homey touch was an enormous hearth at one end of the room with sofas and chairs ranged before it.

His guide Milo swiveled suddenly to the left and disappeared, much as Lamorna had done. Scrambling to catch up, for Max again had dawdled to sightsee in the massive hall, he saw the concluding treads of a wide spiral staircase spilling into the room. The lighting was so poor Milo seemed to have been swallowed up by shadows.

Max followed the sound of footsteps up stairs worn slippy with age and smooth as butter, cupped in the middle by centuries of wear by hundreds of pairs of feet, stairs which grew progressively narrower as they ascended. At the top he found himself in a wood-paneled corridor, darkened by time and smoke. Other corridors led misleadingly away on either side—misleadingly because Max could see they quickly splintered off into little subcorridors and other steep flights of stairs. The whole layout was a mare’s nest, like something out of “Hansel and Gretel,” requiring bread crumbs to navigate one’s way around.

Having rejoined Milo, he followed him down one narrow passageway that seemed chosen at random, a hallway with doors spaced unevenly along both sides. It was inadequately lit and uneven, as had been the stairs. There were no lifts, of course: The whole idea of blasting through rock to create a vertical channel was a nonstarter, and like as not to end with the entire edifice tumbling into the sea.

Milo turned to Max to say, “Watch your step” just as Max caught his foot against an uneven bit of paving and went flying, just catching his balance in time.

By twists and turns, Milo reached a door, remarkably similar to every other door they had passed, and pushed it open. His back for the entire journey had remained ramrod straight. He might have been expressing disapproval. Or nervousness.

He went in, deposited Max’s bag, and proceeded to explain the location of the nearest bathroom and also the heating system, which Max gathered might require him to call on all the experts at Los Alamos to operate. Milo then gave him the time and place for dinner (unnecessarily, thought Max, for surely dinner could only be in that massive hall downstairs). But Max declined.

“I’m not really hungry, thank you. I’m meeting DCI Cotton in the morning so I think I’ll have an early night.”

“I’ll let you know when Inspector Cotton arrives, shall I, sir? If you change your mind, Doris—my wife—can bring a tray up to you. The bellpull is over there.”

Following some further instruction from Milo as to the ins and outs of the castle, Max thanked him and said, “I’m sure I’ll be most comfortable.”

Milo looked skeptical, so Max amended: “It should be a most interesting experience, staying in a castle,” blithely unaware that this would prove to be an understatement for the ages.

*   *   *

He stood at the door watching as the butler disappeared into a narrow service staircase near the main stairs. Back in the day it may have been a sort of bolt-hole or even a secret passageway between rooms, used for the occasional illicit rendezvous.

Max nearly hugged himself. It was all so delightfully gloomy and picturesque. An intimate castle, if there were such a thing. It bore traces of homey domesticity from the days before it became a fortified manor house, and vestiges of frippery from the days when defense of the realm was no longer the primary concern. Max felt as if he had wandered onto the set of an historical drama, or possibly a re-creation of the early life of Robin Hood. Turning back into his room, Max took a moment to assess his surroundings before unpacking (the days of the under-butler who would do this sort of thing for him being long gone). He decided to wait for morning before beginning anything like an investigation. It was late, the sun practically in free fall to the horizon.

The room had a casement window to which he was instantly drawn. His room overlooked a medieval-style knot garden with paths three feet wide, embraced by the castle’s high curtain wall. In summer this would be a lovely walk; now the intricate designs, like woven threads of Celtic knot work, resembled white-on-white embroidery. Ornamental bushes were plump with snow and topped with sparkly white hats. He could glimpse a pergola showing the frozen arteries of the climbing vines that would provide a lush canopy in summer. Someone, probably Lady Baynard, had had a go at incorporating an Italianate garden into the grounds, complete with evergreen art topiary.

By placing the top of his head against the glass and pivoting it to the right, Max had a glimpse of the sea—a narrow slice of sea, but there. What an estate agent would no doubt call a dazzling sea view. He could hear the waves far below pounding against the rocks, and also could hear coming from somewhere a faint rattle of tree branches, clicking like old bones.

Nice. Very nice indeed.

Max had never aspired to great wealth—to commute from a castle, like some rock star, by seaplane and helicopter, or to have a closetful of bespoke tailoring from Savile Row. Neither did he begrudge people who possessed these luxuries, unless they were gained by exploitation. Even before the world’s economies started falling like dominoes, he’d had a healthy suspicion of get-rich-quick schemes—of money earned in too vast a quantity, and too swiftly, or even at too young an age. Of rapid rises, which seemed always to be accompanied by faster, often drug-fueled, falls. He himself once had had a spacious flat along the river, not far from Thames House, and plenty of spare money if not plenty of time to spend it in. Since joining the Church, his income had slipped to precarious levels, but his needs were fewer, too. He could say he was happy to have left behind the heavy obligations of his former job, but of course his current job had more obligations. It was just that they no longer sat like a weight of metal on his soul.

Turning and peering through the somewhat murky space he saw that the room held a four-poster bed so large it must have been assembled on site, a wardrobe (likewise), and a large full-length mirror. One corner held a straight-backed chair with an embroidered footrest that seemed to depict a drowning, but Max felt on the whole that couldn’t be right. An historical event involving a body of water, certainly. And someone had placed an armchair, a small bookcase, and a side table by the fire, creating a cozy spot for reading. It was faced by a small love seat upholstered in worn velvet. His eyes ranged over the books on the shelves. There were several novels of the heaving-bosom variety—the room probably was let out to visitors in season, visitors who left behind the books from which they’d extracted all the needed wit and wisdom. A King James Bible, a le Carré or two. And then—ah, yes. The perfect Christmas read:

No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty.

One almost knew this was Dickens writing of Scrooge without needing to be told. Max read a few pages of
A Christmas Carol
and stopped to wonder how much like Scrooge Lord Footrustle might have been.

And had it led to his death—a death that came for Lord Footrustle before he had time, unlike Scrooge, to repent?

With a heaving sigh of his own, he decided to shower and turn in for the night.

CHAPTER 7

A Curse on This House

A frozen mist hung over the castle as the next day dawned: The view out the windows was of cotton wool. What Max could see from his window of the water, yesterday a deep blue velvet, was in the early morning light showing its true colors: turquoise suspended in gold and silver.

He decided before breakfasting to find Lamorna Whitehall, following Milo’s directions of the night before. Milo had agreed to alert her to Max’s plan to visit.

“But she is early riser,” Milo assured Father Max. “Reads Bible.” This last (“Reads Beeble”) was said with a careful, polite neutrality that seemed to be second nature to the man. Still, Max got the impression of a hidden message, even of a warning.

Cotton had said Lamorna was the one keen to see him, a “religious person,” so he felt in good conscience he should speak with her first, before making his presence known to the others. That, after all, was in theory the reason for his visit—to comfort her in her loss. To comfort all of them.

Her room was at the opposite end of his own long-and-winding corridor. He was later to learn it was close to the room Lady Baynard had occupied, and he suspected its location had to do with Lamorna’s role as unofficial provider of free labor.

She came to the door quickly in response to his knock and ushered him in. Then she stood about, nervously twirling the snarl of dark hair on her head. She wore the same gray sweater as the day before, but this time paired with a faded blue denim skirt. Hoping to put her at ease, he began to speak of that most neutral of topics—the weather—but she only nodded curtly in response to his theory that more snow might be on the way.

Sensing the problem—he was invading her space, after all—he asked if she’d prefer to speak with him downstairs. This nearly sent her into a panic.

“No.
No.
I wanted to speak with you in private.” Her eyes slid sideways to meet his, then as quickly looked away. “Apart from the others.”

So he settled into the worn armchair she indicated, and waited while she fussed with a paper handkerchief she’d drawn from one denim pocket, twisting it to shreds. The tissue did not appear to be an accessory of mourning: She was dry-eyed. He decided to skirt the topic of murder for now.

“You’ve been living here at the castle how long?” he asked tranquilly. “Obviously long enough to be an expert on its history.”

Ignoring the blatant flattery—quite right, too, thought Max—she said, “I was just six when my parents died. I’m thirty now. I came to live here with … Lady Baynard.”

“Your grandmother.”

“Lady Baynard. That’s right.”

He looked about him, hoping for clues to the nature of the woman in the décor. He reasoned that her room and her mode of dress might be the only ways she could impose her personality in a place she’d been made to feel was not her real home. There were several reproduction paintings on the wall, a haphazard assortment of poor quality that suggested the room was a dumping ground for whatever could not find a place in the rest of the castle. The religious statuary, however, was clearly hers alone, representing a brand of Christianity of the most mawkish sort. This was also true of the books on her bedside table and on a row of shelves by the fireplace, which in all cases appeared to be collections of hymns or abridged tales from the Bible. Max was reminded of the simple tomes aimed at children: short and punchy, easy to memorize, and of questionable theology—the Bible according to the Apostle Barney. Illustrations were tacked on the wall that appeared to have been torn from religious magazines. Most of these were curling at the corners, and hung crookedly, but Max could discern a trend involving the heavenly host of angels, free-floating and unnaturally backlit. In one, an angel smiled coyly as it embraced a human child, carrying it aloft. Max thought personally any child would be terrified witless on such an occasion, but she seemed delighted, torn from her mundane tasks, which for some reason involved pails of milk and a pitchfork, to be lifted bodily into heaven.

A maudlin Jesus gazed at him with blue-eyed concern from the front cover of one book, looking like a parody of every tent revivalist preacher who’d ever come along to distort for profit the original message of the testaments.

Max studied Lamorna as he waited for her to start unpacking whatever burden she was carrying. There were few angles to her face to give it definition or distinction. It was mainly her nose that spoiled her chance at conventional good looks, for she had a firm, round chin and eyes of a pretty color, even if they did protrude goldfish-like from behind her glasses.

But Max knew beauty came in all guises. Mother Teresa with her betel-nut face had been such an authentic personality she became more beautiful as she became more wizened with each passing year. It was difficult to predict such a transformation happening here.

Max thought Lamorna was like a character from a nineteenth-century novel—what at one time would have been called the poor relation, the spinster of the house, reliant on the largesse of wealthier relatives. She struck him as being a throwback to the days, not long past, when an unmarried woman’s choices of work outside the home—in this case, outside the castle—were limited. Someone belonging to the upper levels of society, however tangentially, might not recognize or take the few options available to her.

As if following his thoughts, she said, “Lady Baynard encouraged me to stay, you know. She would look at me out of those icy blue eyes of hers and say, ‘No one would hire you. You may as well stay on.’”