The Empty Frame. Ann Pilling

Stickley, “and it’s… nine o’clock now.” He consulted a large gold pocket watch, tapped it and dropped it back into his waistcoat pocket. “I will meet you in the entrance hall in ten minutes, after you’ve rinsed off your breakfast crumbs. I shall go and do the same.”

      Floss and Sam exchanged disappointed looks, shrugged silently at each other, then set off obligingly for their turret room. But Magnus lingered. In between the pictures of Burst Belly and the Lady Alice Neale was a tiny portrait of a young boy. Magnus hadn’t noticed it the night before but now sunshine was filtering through small leaded panes and a square of barred light was shining on it. He was almost certain that it was a boy, though the child was very prettily dressed in a lacy ruff and had longish golden curls. Between two fingers he held a white, many-petalled flower.

      Magnus said, “Is that a peony?”

      The Colonel glanced up at the little painting. “I wouldn’t know. Flowers are Maude’s department. Why?” he demanded quite sharply. “I must say you ask rather a lot of questions.”

      Magnus was not put off. He was collecting information. “Well, she put some flowers like that in our room, and the cat knocked them over and broke the vase. Where is Arthur, by the way?”

      “I’m sure I don’t know. Cats aren’t my department, young man. Asleep somewhere, I suppose, it’s a nice life. I must get on, I’ve a great deal to do this morning. Rinsed your hands, have you?”

      Ignoring this Magnus said, “Who is that boy in the painting? Is it a boy?”

      “It is. And we don’t know. He might have been a son of the Lady Alice. She was married twice and she had several children. If it is a son of hers, then he wasn’t born here. He’s not in the parish records, and he’s not included in the family memorial, down in the church. Seen the church, have you? Rinsed your hands?” he repeated.

      “Just going to,” muttered Magnus, but he didn’t. His hands were perfectly clean. Instead he went into the entrance hall and stood by the tapestries, Balaam’s donkey and its meeting with the angel, Pontius Pilate washing away his guilt. That set him thinking about the woman in the night again, the woman who’d cried, and about the misty coldness, and how Arthur had fled in terror. Who was the pretty child with the flower between his fingers, and who had smashed Cousin M’s vase of green glass and torn her peonies to pieces? He had come to a conclusion about Cousin Maude and Colonel Stickley. They were both pretending. Both of them knew that all was not well in the Abbey but neither of them was prepared to say anything. This thought rather excited Magnus, but it also made him afraid. He’d quite like to talk to Floss and Sam about it, but would they laugh at him? He suspected that the best person to talk to would be Colonel Stickley, if he could get him on his own, and in a good mood – if the old man ever had such things.

      Colonel Stickley was 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