Death in the Castle Read online

  “That chandelier,” she said suddenly, “it isn’t just a chandelier. You’ll have to be careful about people standing under it. It makes me shiver to think of it.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “It’s dangerous,” she said in a half whisper. “It has a voice, Lady Mary says. ‘I’ll drop it—I’ll drop it.” She imitated a faint far-off voice with a Scottish accent.

  “Ah, don’t laugh,” she cried, when she saw him smile. “Lady Mary insists she’s heard it.”

  At this he laughed aloud, diverted. “What an attraction for the tourists! And have you heard this voice?”

  “No, but I’ve seen the chandelier shiver and shake until the crystals sing!”

  “You’re not serious!”

  “Perhaps I am—”

  “Come now—look into my eyes and tell me the truth!”

  He seized her by the shoulders, still laughing. She was half laughing, by now, but before she could reply they heard the strong steps of booted feet and Sir Richard stopped in the doorway and stared at them. John Blayne dropped his hands and Kate stepped back.

  “I’ve just put an idea to Mr. Blayne,” she said.

  “Indeed!” Sir Richard did not change his expression.

  It was not enough to placate him, she could see, and she hurried on. “I suggested that he consider again the idea we had at first—to make the museum here, you know, Sir Richard.”

  Sir Richard lifted his heavy eyebrows, came in and stood beside them. “And what did he say this time?”

  She glanced at John Blayne. “He refused again—not yet, anyway.”

  Before John Blayne could speak, Lady Mary entered. She had changed her tweed suit to a long gown of pale gray satin with a ruff of white lace and had touched her cheeks with rouge, a lovely, fading rose.

  “Wherever have you been, Richard?” she inquired in her sweet childlike voice. “I’ve been fearfully worried about you. And what are you doing here? And in your riding things at this late hour? It’s nearly time for dinner and Wells will be cross if we’re late. We’re dining in the small hall, Richard.”

  Sir Richard went to her and lifting her hand he kissed it gallantly. “I was about to look for you, my dear, to tell you I was home. Meanwhile, it seems, Kate has been bravely taking care of Mr. Blayne while you and I deserted the field. They’ve lighted all the candles because it’s grown so dark they couldn’t see each other. And Kate has made a proposal to him.”

  Lady Mary screamed delicately. “What? You’re mad, Richard!”

  Sir Richard put up his hand. “No, no—don’t jump to conclusions! She proposed merely that he accept our original idea and bring the paintings here. The castle would become the museum where it stands, as we understood from the first.”

  “A splendid idea,” Lady Mary said. “It always was. I can’t think why you gave it up, Mr. Blayne.”

  John Blayne looked from one to the other of these three. Fantasy, he thought, dream people living in another age! How to bring them into reality! He began to speak slowly and clearly.

  “Lady Mary, Sir Richard … and …” He looked at Kate and away again. “I wish I could agree that the idea is a good one, Lady Mary … it isn’t, I’m afraid. The castle is too out-of-the-way here. It’s not even on the tourist route from London.” He hesitated a trifle awkwardly. Kate had turned away but Sir Richard and Lady Mary were looking at him with painful intensity. He must not hurt them! He went on, haltingly.

  “Castles belong to a certain era, I suppose. They were necessary once, when a man had to build his own fortress. Today—well, fortresses don’t protect any longer. They’re rather like the Great Wall of China, where the people feared the enemy from the north. Now the enemy comes from the sky or the earth or the sea. We’re surrounded! So the castle becomes a museum piece in itself, wherever it stands, in the old world or the new. The new world needs it more, perhaps—lacking a history of its own. Anyway, in this curious compressed world today, history belongs to everyone, everywhere.”

  Sir Richard rejected all this with a wave of the hand. “Socialism! My castle belongs to me, Mr. Blayne. Let us stay by the facts, if you please.”

  John Blayne turned to face him. “Very well—you shall have the facts, Sir Richard. My lawyers have investigated. Even with the castle open to the public for a year, one day of every week, you have cleared two hundred dollars or thereabouts. Let’s see—that’s about eighty-seven pounds. How many people? A few hundreds—enough to support an inn, I suppose, but not a castle. I’ll be honest with all of you. It would be wrong, wouldn’t it, to bring great works of art here, at immense cost, where no one would come to see them? … It wouldn’t be fair—now would it?—to rob a new country like mine, whose people are hungry for art and beautiful things, by taking its treasures away and putting them where they couldn’t be enjoyed by everybody.”

  He gazed at their faces and saw only uncommunicating gravity.

  “Or am I wrong?” he inquired.

  Lady Mary replied brightly to this. “What’s wrong, pray, with an exclusive museum? It would be nice to have only people with clean boots. Put the idea to your father.”

  Sir Richard drew off his riding gloves. He was smiling now but vaguely, as though he were not listening, his eyes glazed and remote. He had withdrawn himself from them all. “Quite—quite,” he murmured. His eyes fell on Lady Mary. “I see you’re ready for dinner, my dear. You look very pretty. I expect Philip will soon be down. We’ll join you in a few minutes. … Mr. Blayne, it’s time to dress for dinner.”

  He left the room with dignity and after a moment John Blayne followed. He felt helpless. What could he do except leave them to their fate? And so he might have done, he realized, had it not been for Kate, so young and beautiful a creature whose fate and future were involved somehow with this ancient castle and the three dreamlike old creatures who inhabited it and would not leave it. As it was, what would become of her?

  “Sit down, Kate,” Lady Mary commanded when they were alone.

  She sat down as she spoke in the great carved oak chair beside the chimney piece and folded her hands in her lap. She felt lost and alone. She, the mistress of Starborough Castle, was not being told what was really going on. Where had Richard gone riding for hours? Why had Kate been talking alone with the American? Who was plotting what, and she not told anything? The afternoon had been torturously long while she sat crocheting and in unbearable, tedious anxiety. Wells had been too agitated and irritable to question because of a guest for dinner and at last she had dressed half an hour too early, on the pretext that this gown, which she had not worn since she had been unable to afford her own maid, was difficult to get into alone.

  “Now, Kate,” she began. “What have you been saying to this young man?”

  Kate sank on the hassock at Lady Mary’s side. “I really said nothing, my lady, except that I do wish he’d just have the museum here as we wanted from the first.”

  “Quite absurd to think of it, as I now see him,” Lady Mary said impatiently. “He’s not the sort of person who could be at all happy here.”

  “Why not, please?”

  “An American? Besides, Kate, I don’t think they would like it, you know—it would he so restricting to them to have an American about all the time, not to mention other Americans coming here, even in small numbers. They’d be quite put out. I shouldn’t like to answer for the consequences. After all, they’ve been here much longer than we have, and they can’t be ignored.”

  Kate reached for Lady Mary’s hand, a slender nervous hand, delicately veined, restlessly moving. “Dear,” she said, “are you quite sure you do hear them? It isn’t just—dreaming? I sometimes think you live too solitary a life here, shutting yourself away even from the tourists.”

  Lady Mary withdrew the hand. “Certainly I hear them! And it’s not only I, Kate. You remember what I told you about Richard’s mother. She came here as a bride and the very first night in the castle, although simply nobody had told her about them, whe
n she came downstairs to dinner she asked Richard’s father who the lovely lady was at the top of the stairs. And old Sir Richard answered quite calmly, ‘Ah, you’ve seen her! She was lady-in-waiting to a queen, and she was murdered by a groom who fell in love with her.’ Certainly I don’t dream, Kate, and it hurts me very much to have you doubt me.”

  “I don’t doubt you, my lady. It’s just that I myself can’t see them—or hear them.” She rose and stood beside Lady Mary.

  “That means you do doubt them,” Lady Mary retorted, “for if you believe in them you see them, or at least hear them. I do assure you, when I’m alone they make themselves known to me—put it that way.”

  “You don’t actually see them?”

  “I do see them, as clearly as those candles burn there on the table. Yet if you blow the candles out, quite possibly you might think they were never lighted, mightn’t you? Or couldn’t be lighted? They look dead until someone lights the flame. Well, that’s how it is. When I’m alone, I concentrate for a moment, sometimes for half an hour, and I think about them and they feel me thinking and then they come out of the shadows. They’re there all the time, but they must be felt before they can be seen or heard.”

  She looked down at Kate wistfully. “Does that seem impossible to you?”

  “Nothing seems impossible,” Kate said softly. “I believe you. Have you ever talked to Sir Richard about them?”

  “Of course,” Lady Mary said. “Many times.”

  “And does he believe in them?”

  “It’s not a matter of belief with him,” Lady Mary said. “It’s a matter of seeing.”

  “If he sees them, why doesn’t he speak of them as you do?” Kate asked.

  “Perhaps we don’t see the same ones,” Lady Mary leaned to whisper. “What if he sees only bad ones?”

  She looked over her shoulder and Kate saw a strange look of terror on her gentle face.

  “Lady Mary, what’s the matter, my dear?”

  She seized Lady Mary’s hands and held them in her own. They felt cold and limp and she chafed them. Lady Mary looked at her vaguely and answered, still whispering.

  “I told Richard only yesterday that I thought there was a king in the castle, because the voice in the chandelier sounds as if it might be dear King John’s voice. It’s said he had a very strange high voice. And Richard said, yes, there was a king in the castle, but he looked at me so… so … darkly, somehow, that it couldn’t have been the same king. … Perhaps he even saw one of the headless ones. I don’t know. … I’m glad I see only the good ones. They’re the ones that stay near me and want to help us.”

  “What did you say then, my lady?”

  “I said, ‘Richard, you do see them after all!’ And he said—and this was odd, Kate—very odd! He said, ‘How would you like to be a queen?’ ”

  “What did he mean?”

  “Just that be didn’t want to talk about it, I suppose. Whenever I want really to talk about them, he always talks about something else, to put me off. Oh dear—he can be very tiresome!”

  She freed her hands gently from Kate’s clasp and was silent for a moment before she began again. “Kate, I know that they can help us if they will.”

  “How?” Kate asked.

  She was troubled by the conversation. All her life she had known that Lady Mary believed in these others who had lived in the castle and until now she had accepted the possibility of the persistence of the dead beyond life. England was an old country, crowded with history, and the castle was a symbol of the past. The bridge across the moat had been drawn up in many a fierce battle against Dane and Norman, and kings had found refuge here, princes been murdered, and queens taken to bed by their secret lovers. The castle was a storehouse of passion and revenge and ambition, retreat and inspiration. Whatever men and women had needed, they had created in their time. Only now, when the world had somehow got mixed into one great bewildering confusion, had the castle ceased to have meaning except for the handful of people who lived in it, of whom she was one.

  And did she really live here? That telephone this afternoon from another world, that loud, commanding, arrogant voice of an American, how like the voice of an enemy it had seemed in the silent library, enclosed in book-lined walls—books that nobody read! Then was it the voice of life and today and a world from which she was hiding? No, not hiding! They needed her here in the castle, those two old dreamers whom she loved. Oh, if only she had been a man, she could have really helped them! Instead, being a woman, she did not know what she believed. Perhaps she had avoided knowing. She had neither seen nor heard the dead but then she was busy and young and strong. Lady Mary was often ill and spent hours alone or with Sir Richard, and he could alternate between calm good spirits, subdued and but a ghost of what in his youth must have been a charming gaiety, to moods of deep gloom, when he withdrew into himself or even disappeared for hours together. At such times Lady Mary was haunted with vague distress until he returned again. It had been a long time since there had been guests at the castle and it was true that when the public came, Lady Mary shut herself away from them in her private rooms to wait until they were gone.

  “There must he treasure in the castle,” Lady Mary was saying. “In all these centuries someone must have hidden jewels or silver and gold. Those kings and queens! They know where it is. They will guide us to it, if we only believe they will.”

  What could she say? She rose and stood looking at Lady Mary and smiled half sadly. Then she put out her hand. “Come, dear,” she said tenderly, “it must be nearly time for your dinner. The gentlemen will be waiting, and I must change my clothes. My grandfather does not like me to be late.”

  They walked arm in arm to the door. There Lady Mary paused and turned to look back. “Put out the candles, Kate. They cost two shillings apiece—those great wax candles!”

  She went on her way while Kate, obeying, took up the heavy silver snuffer and snuffed out the candles, one by one. The great hall sank into darkness and she stood lost in its shadows, listening, feeling. The wind had risen after sunset, the wind that had rain in it, and now it moaned as it circled the towers and swept through the keep. There was no sound of human voice or footstep. Believe, Lady Mary had said, believe and help will come. But how does one compel belief and if compelled, is it true? She bent her head and clasped her hands together tightly under her chin and stared into the darkness.

  “Help us,” she whispered. “Please, all of you, any of you, someone!”

  She waited a full minute and longer until she could not bear the sound of the lonely wind. There was no answer. Her hands dropped and she walked through the darkness toward the door that led upstairs to her room.

  … In the small dining hall the three then waited for Lady Mary. It was a pleasant room at night, the crimson curtains drawn, a fire in the chimney piece, and the table lit for dinner. A silver bowl of rose-red tulips stood between tall silver candlesticks, and the tablecloth of Irish damask gleamed. Wells was serving sherry, and the men sipped their wine as they stood about the fire.

  John Blayne held his glass to the light. “Liquid gold! How long have you had this, Sir Richard?”

  “I haven’t replenished the cellars since the war,” Sir Richard replied.

  “If the cellars are full of this sort of thing, you needn’t sell the castle,” Philip Webster said, and smacked his lips.

  “Ah, but they’re not full,” Sir Richard retorted. “They’re all but empty, like everything else.”

  “I suppose you haven’t thought of selling the other treasures,” Webster went on.

  “No,” Sir Richard said shortly. “I haven’t the right.”

  “Who but you has the right?” Webster countered.

  “There are other inhabitants,” Sir Richard replied.

  John Blayne lifted his handsome brows. “You mean—”

  “I mean the figures of history,” Sir Richard said.

  “Not ghosts?” Webster asked, half teasing.

  “The gr
eat dead,” Sir Richard said gravely.

  Lady Mary stood at the door, a graceful slender figure in her silver-gray gown. “Have I kept you waiting?”

  “No, my dear,” Sir Richard went forward and took her hand with old-fashioned grace. “We’re having a drop of sherry and making idle talk.”

  He pulled out her chair for her and took his own place at the head of the table.

  “You’re at Lady Mary’s right, Mr. Blayne—Philip at her left.”

  They sat down and Wells served the soup from a tureen on the buffet. John Blayne looked about the room.

  “Where’s Kate?”

  The silence was broken by Wells saying apologetically, “She will be here presently. Something made her late this evening. I am sorry, my lady.”

  Webster tasted the soup, then tucked his large linen napkin into his collar and said briskly, “Excellent soup, Lady Mary.”

  “Yes, Wells does nicely with his soups. I believe he uses bones,” Lady Mary said. She supped her soup daintily, barely touching the old silver spoon to her lips. In the glow of the candlelight her pale face was faintly pink and her eyes were mystic.

  John Blayne pursued the subject of Kate with dogged determination. “Kate is a sort of secretary, isn’t she?”

  “Quite indispensable whatever she is,” Lady Mary said gently.

  “Also quite beautiful,” John Blayne suggested.

  Wells turned to face the table. Without looking at any of them, as remotely as though he were introducing a stranger, he spoke.

  “My granddaughter is the maid, sir.” And with the announcement, he left the room.

  “I am glad you two gentlemen are to stay the night,” Sir Richard remarked as though he had not been listening. “I never like to discuss business after dinner. It will be much better in the morning—especially as the day has been somewhat exhausting.”

  “Always a pleasure,” Philip Webster said.

  “Thank you, Sir Richard,” John Blayne said. “You know, I haven’t had a look at the castle yet. I’d like to have a real tour—not for any business reasons but simply because it’s the most enchanting place I’ve ever seen—enchanting and enchanted, I’m sure that anything could happen here.”