The Empty Frame. Ann Pilling

and Floss had woken up too. Through the barred window they could see a square of cloudless blue sky, sun shining on a sheet of water. The day suddenly felt good.

      “Don’t know if you’re interested, but there’s breakfast down below,” Cousin M said casually, tidying the bits of glass into a heap. “Mind you don’t cut yourselves on this. I’ll bring a dustpan.”

      “Did Arthur knock the flowers over?” asked Floss.

      “Probably. He doesn’t know his own strength, that animal.” But Magnus, who was observing her very carefully, didn’t believe a word of it. It was quite obvious to him that this kind of thing must have happened before and she’d got used to it. Her studied matter-of-factness did not fool him at all.

      “I’m very interested in breakfast,” announced Sam, suddenly smelling a faint bacon smell which he decided must be coming up the chimney flue. The sandwiches and buns of the night before now seemed a very long time ago.

      “Well, get ready and come down. We’ll be in the hall. When there are just the two of us we usually eat in the kitchen but you’re a good excuse to do things properly. I’m afraid the Colonel doesn’t like the way I slob around in my gardening things.”

      While they were cleaning their teeth, Floss said to Sam, “Do you think Mags is all right?”

      “Seems to be. Why?”

      “I’m sure he was crying again, in the night. It woke me up.”

      Sam shrugged, then made a great business of rinsing and spitting. He half-believed that a noise had woken him too, the voice of someone in distress. It hadn’t sounded at all like Magnus, it had sounded too adult. But he was a very sound sleeper and he had finally concluded that he was almost certainly dreaming. He’d snuggled down in the bed until he’d fallen asleep again.

      Floss had lain awake for some time too, but the sound she’d thought was Magnus had faded away in the end. The other thing she remembered was feeling very cold. “Do you think Cousin M has got any hot water bottles?” she said, as they climbed back up to Dove, to collect Magnus for breakfast. “My feet were like ice, last night.”

      “You could ask her,” said Sam. Then he added, “My feet were cold too. I put some socks on. It’s funny, how it suddenly went very cold. It was cold down in the Great Hall as well. And yet our dormitory’s a warm little room compared with the others, according to Cousin M. That’s why she’s put us up there. She said that Colonel Stickley was cross about it, apparently. He told her off. He said we should have been in one of the portakabins.”

      The long oak table by the fireplace was set for breakfast with a checked cloth and neatly folded napkins. As Cousin M seated them all Colonel Stickley came in with a loaded tray. He presented an interesting contrast with Cousin M who was wearing her grubby gardening clothes of the night before. He looked very formal and very smart in a tweed suit with a waistcoat and a watch chain across it, a silk handkerchief tucked into the top pocket and brown brogue shoes polished to a mirror gloss. “He’s a bit of a smoothie, isn’t he?” Sam whispered to Floss, as they sat down. “What is he doing frying breakfast for us lot? Don’t they have servants in a place like this? Where’s the cook?”

      Cousin M said, sticking spoons into pots of honey and marmalade and manhandling a very large teapot, “Let’s have a few introductions. Cecil, this is Sam, Floss and Magnus. This is Colonel Stickley, children.”

      Embarrassed, and unused to formal introductions, the three of them made vague mumbling noises and took refuge in their bowls of cornflakes. “Stick insect,” thought Sam, watching the colonel’s long legs arrange themselves neatly under the table. The old man did not smile, nor did he look in their direction. The business of the moment was breakfast and he was concentrating on that.

      Magnus, who was sitting with his back to the fireplace, thought he knew why Colonel Stickley was ignoring them all. It was because of the episode the night before. He’d been quite friendly in the end, in a stiff, grandfatherly way, helping him up to bed, but he was very different this morning. Magnus was determined to talk to him in private but he would have to find the right moment.

      He chewed his cornflakes and ran his eyes along the rows of portraits. The Lady Alice Neale, in her black dress, was back in her frame. There were the thin, unkind lips and the cruel hands, there was the little dog. He did not dare look from the portrait to Colonel Stickley. It was obviously better for now to go along with the pretence that the two of them had never met before.

      Instead he said, “Who is the big fat man?”

      Colonel Stickley glanced along the rows of painted faces and removed a sliver of food from between his teeth. “His nickname is Burst Belly,” he said. “He was a monk, head of this place, once. He was in charge of the Black Canons. Henry the Eighth got rid of them and he didn’t much like it. So he put a curse on the Abbey, or so people say.”

      Floss and Sam looked up at Burst Belly too. He was a huge and ugly man wearing the black and white robes of a priest. The white part of the costume was lacy and frilled like a Victorian night gown, incongruous under the flat silver cross which hung round his neck.

      “Good name for him, wasn’t it, Burst Belly,” Cousin M remarked, buttering her toast thickly and heaping on the marmalade. “He obviously ate too much, like me. I do love food, don’t you?”

      Floss said, “I don’t like his face. It doesn’t look exactly… well, holy, to me. It’s not the kind of expression you expect in a priest. Did he really curse the Abbey?”

      “That’s the story,” said Colonel Stickley. “But who knows? It’s certainly had a sad history. If you look at all the families that have lived here, you’ll see that nobody stayed around for very long. Things tended to happen to people.”

      “What sorts of things?” demanded Magnus, and his voice was unnaturally high and shrill. It was the voice he unconsciously seemed to develop when he was really concentrating on something. It irritated the other two.

      “Shh, Mags,” said Floss, and pressed his foot under the table.

      But Magnus seemed not to have heard. “That’s what you told us,” he informed Cousin M.

      Cousin M blinked at him. “Me, dear? What did I tell you? I’m afraid you’ll have to remind me.”

      “You said yesterday that Lady Alice did things she lived to regret; that’s exactly what you said, those were your exact words.”

      Floss was now pressing down on Magnus’s feet just as hard as she could because she knew it was a dangerous moment. If they didn’t somehow change course, he would start crying, possibly even screaming. It had happened just once or twice, and it was frightening. It seemed to be something to do with the stresses of the awful life he’d had, shut away in the unfamiliar house with his sick mother, wondering what had happened to his father.

      But Colonel Stickley, not knowing what was going on under the table, actually helped matters by glaring at Cousin M, rolling up his napkin and standing up. “End of subject,” he announced crisply. “Now then, I have a very busy morning, but if you’re prepared to come with me now I will show you a little of the Abbey, so you can get your bearings for the day.”

      Cousin M said in a nervous voice, “Why don’t you let them go round on their own, Cecil? You’ve so much else to do and I’m sure they’d be happier poking round independently.”

      Sam said, “We’ll be fine, sir, we won’t touch anything.” He was dying to get away from Colonel Stickley.

      “I shall take you round,” he said frostily. “‘Poking about’, as you call it, is precisely what I do not wish to encourage,” and he produced a bunch of keys from his pocket. “The public still use this place from time to time, Maude, in spite of our present circumstances. There are all kinds of hazards in an old building like this. I’d like them to see exactly what’s what.”

      “Very well, Cecil,” Maude said