The Empty Frame (2 page)

As they went in, under the pointed doorway, there was a click and the flood lights faded into darkness, pulling a curtain across the tantalizing theatre set of ancient glowing stone, of pillars and arches and stubby towers, of great silent trees. A huge door was pulled shut behind them and two massive bolts driven home.

“This is the original door, dears,” said the fat and friendly woman who had got to be Cousin M. “It must be eight hundred years old, if it's a day. Now then,
food.
”

But Magnus interrupted. He said, “I think I'd like to go straight to bed, please.”

The woman stopped, looked at the three of them, and considered. Only then, in the low, pillared entrance hall, did Magnus, Floss and Sam get their first proper look at Cousin M and she at them.

They saw a bulky, dishevelled woman of sixty wearing mud-spattered wellington boots, jeans and a baggy sweatshirt covered with meadow flowers, and the words “Worth Protecting”. Of course, Floss was thinking, she's a gardener. That's what she does here. Cousin M had a plain no-nonsense face, a firm jaw, a
straight, biggish nose and widely-spaced eyes of the most stunning dark blue. Floss envied these on the spot, and the hair too, which was still fair and extremely thick. It was gorgeous, heavy hair, the hair of an aspiring Lady Macbeth. But Cousin M obviously didn't care about it. It was tied back sensibly and caught up in an old scarf.

She saw a brother and a sister so alike they could have been two peas out of one pod – shortish and square, with the same coarse, dark hair and alert rosy faces with humour playing round the mouth. That came from their mother, her younger cousin Margaret, of whom she had always been very fond. It was great that her seaside flat had been free for their little holiday. Margaret would go picking up lame ducks though, and her latest thing was fostering this child. Cousin M wasn't at all sure about the wisdom of such an idea. Still, she liked children and these three would certainly liven the old place up.

Magnus, the foster son, was not big but he had long hands and feet which suggested he might grow tall if someone could get enough food inside him, enough sleep and enough fun… Enough
love
, love that wouldn't keep getting snatched away as he was moved from one household to the next, but poured down on him steadily, like the warmth of the sun. She knew all about what had happened to him.

“You can go to bed in two ticks, dear,” she told him, ushering them into a chilly, raftered hall hung with paintings. It was dimly lit and the pictures were not much more than dark rectangles. Light came from two standard lamps set at either end of a huge polished table which stood in front of a blazing fire laid in a grate so enormous and so elaborately carved it was like a room in its own right. A coat of arms hung above the fireplace and above that a curious black waisted clock, the shape of a legless person with a gigantic round head. It was just nine o'clock. Incongruous amid all this ancientness, was an electric food trolley on casters. Out of this Cousin M produced hot bacon sandwiches, chips and warm buns. Floss and Sam fell on the food but Magnus shook his head.

The woman studied him quietly for a minute, then she drew him gently towards her. Floss took in a sharp breath, waiting for Magnus to push the stranger away, but to her great surprise he sat beside Cousin M on the floor, meek and unprotesting, with his head against her knees. Normally, he shrank away from people, as if anyone who approached was bound to hurt him.

“Floss, Magnus and Sam… wonderful names,” Cousin M said unexpectedly, surveying them all.

Floss said shyly, “Is your name Emily… or Emma? Mum never told us what the M was for.”

“
Emma
? Heaven's no it's – promise you won't laugh?”

They promised, even Magnus. He wasn't asleep but, from his place of safety against Cousin M's knees, was peering up at the portraits. One was much larger than the rest, the picture of a woman with very white hands and a very white face.

“My name's Maude.”

In spite of himself, Sam snorted. This was catching and Floss found herself tittering.

Cousin Maude laughed too. “I know, it's hideous. I blame my mother, she really should have known better. She was a Maude too. She was friends with Gertrude Jekyll.”

“Jekyll and
Hyde…
” muttered Sam. It was one of the creepiest stories he had ever read, about a man who had two personalities, and whose wicked one eventually took over the good one.

“Oh no. Gertrude Jekyll was a very famous gardener. But Gertrude's a pretty hideous name too, don't you think?”

Floss said, “Well, my real name's Florence and I absolutely hate it.” She felt much reassured by Cousin Maude, they both had hideous names and they both had a weight problem. What she most liked about her was the way she was looking after Magnus, as if she understood all about his troubles and his shyness, without having to be told.

Suddenly, he came to life. “Who's that lady?” he said, pointing to the portraits.

At first Cousin M didn't answer. It was very quiet in the vast timbered hall, no sounds but the leap of flame round burning logs, the snap of the fire and a series of clicks as the electric trolley, now unplugged, cooled down. Sam couldn't understand why it felt so cold, the fire was huge but there was a definite chill all round them.

They waited and eventually Cousin M got up, walked across the floor and pressed a switch.

A strip light over one of the paintings flickered into life then steadied, and the three children stared. The picture was enormous, dwarfing all the others. A heavily-ornamented gilt frame, wreathed in leaves, flowers and berries, contained the full-length portrait of a young woman. She was dressed all in black except for a long white stole, like that of a priest, which was draped round her neck and fell on both sides to the hem of her dress, ending in gold fringes. She held black gloves, similarly fringed, and there was a little dog at her feet which, like her hands, looked impossibly thin and narrow.

“Is it Elizabeth the First?” said Floss. “She's got red hair and her face is – well, it looks awfully like her.”

“No. But they
were
friends,” Cousin M said. “The Queen stayed here, when she was young, in fact they made a special Council Chamber for her, she came so often. You can see it tomorrow. That's why there's a coat of arms over the fireplace.”

“That dog's cowering,” Sam said.

“I'm not surprised,” Floss muttered. “She has rather a cruel face. She looks—”

“Calculating?” Cousin Maude suggested.

“Yes. That's exactly it.”

“Tell me about her,” said Magnus. Cousin M had come back to her seat by the fire. He'd moved to a rug and was sitting on it, cross-legged, staring intently into her face. What he'd said sounded a bit like a royal command and he had a fixed staring look of total concentration on his face, which Floss and Sam had become familiar with.

Cousin M looked down at him. “I don't know very much, dear. Her first husband was much older than she was and very ambitious, I suppose that's why there's this connection with royalty – I think they had a kind of mini-court here, in the summer.”

“But
she
looks ambitious,” Floss said.

“She does. But I think she mellowed in her old age. The husband was a bit of a tyrant and I think she probably went along with it all. They do say she did things she lived to regret.”

“What things?” demanded Magnus.

Cousin M blinked up at the portrait. “I really couldn't say, dear, it's all speculation, it all happened so long ago.”

“What happened?”

“I honestly don't know what those two got up to.” She laughed. “I'm just the gardener round here.”

Nobody was fooled. Whatever Cousin M knew she was going to keep to herself.

Magnus's eyes followed her as she went to switch off the strip light. “She has cruel hands,” he said, as the portrait disappeared into the shadow. “They're like spikes.”

“It's bed time,” she said. Her voice was soft but Magnus knew it meant business. And he didn't mind at all. He felt safe with her. “Come on,” she chivvied gently, “we can talk about everything in the morning.”

In the entrance hall, they discovered that their pile of luggage had been removed. Cousin M looked embarrassed. “Cecil must have taken it upstairs for you, that's good.” But she spoke as if she meant the very opposite, as if she minded that Cecil, this remote cousin of Mum's, who owned the Abbey together with Cousin M, had not bothered to come and speak to them.

“He goes to bed early,” she explained. “He's a very early riser. He has his swim at six o'clock.”

“Can
we
swim?” Sam asked.

“Oh, I should think so. I'll have to talk to Cecil. He's in charge of that side of things. Listen, dears, I'm sorry he's gone to bed. He was annoyed with me, for getting
so behind. He likes to stick to his routines. We were all up to schedule until Arthur disappeared.”

Floss suddenly remembered that this man Cecil's surname was Stickley. He
sounded
like a Stickley, like a dried-up, withered old stick. She said, “Is Cecil our cousin as well?”

“I suppose he must be, about a million times removed,” said Cousin M, stopping at the end of a long passage way and turning left at the bottom of a staircase. On the wall, a neat modern sign said
To Turret Dormitories.

“So Cecil's a sort of cousin,” Magnus said slowly. He liked getting an absolutely clear picture of everything, in his mind. “So who's Arthur?”

“My boyfriend,” Cousin M said. “You'll see him in the morning.”

Now Magnus had seen the word “dormitories”, which suggested beds and therefore sleep, he seemed to have found a spare bit of energy and he began to climb the stairs. They were not ordinary stairs either, they were a stone spiral, enclosed within the fat tower they had seen at the corner of the Abbey buildings before the floodlights went off. He climbed quite enthusiastically, chatting a little to Cousin M. “There is Arthur here, and there is Cecil,” he said quaintly. “But who is that lady in the portrait?”

“Oh, don't you worry your head about her,” said Cousin M. She still seemed reluctant to say any more.

“I'm not worrying,” Magnus said firmly. “I'd just like to know.”

“Well, her name was Alice, Lady Alice Neale. The Neale family lived here in the days of Elizabeth the First, and for quite a long time after that.”

“And
what
did you say she's supposed to have done?”

“I didn't say, dear, because I don't know.” Cousin M had gone on ahead of him, rather quickly. Her excuse was that she needed to switch more lights on.

Magnus had now got the message. There was to be no more discussion of the lady in the portrait tonight. “Alice… it rhymes with malice…” he said, quietly, as they clumped up a third flight of twisty stairs. Then he added, but only very softly, “It's like her hands. It's like her horrible claws.”

Their bedroom was on the fourth floor of the fat tower, the top room of four which lay one beneath the next like the slices of a Swiss roll. Cousin M called it a dormitory and it was one of several that had housed the children who used to come to the Abbey for very expensive courses, to learn how to play professional tennis and to swim – to Olympic standard. The children did not come any more. Cousin M said that people no longer had the spare money to pay for such things.

Magnus only knew about dormitories from school stories and so he had imagined a huge long room with rows of iron bedsteads, and a few old-fashioned washstands down the middle where you washed in icy-cold water while prefects hit you with bunches of twigs. His own life had been so full of torments that he was always escaping into books, where he sometimes found more. But this dormitory was just a round, low-ceilinged room with four divan beds. Each had two pillows and a plump-looking duvet covered in a blue-grey fabric with birds on, and there were screens on casters which could be rolled round each bed, to make
everything more private, “modesty screens” Cousin M called them. These were a relief to Floss. She'd not wanted to be put in a room on her own but she certainly did have her modesty.

The floor was covered in soft blue-grey carpet and the bird pattern was on the curtains too. By each bed was a white-painted locker on which stood a greyshaded lamp. “Sorry it's a bit on the feminine side, you two,” Cousin M said robustly to Magnus and Sam. “We didn't decorate it like this, the company who took over the Abbey for the sports centre project absolutely insisted.”

“We don't mind, do we Mags?” said Sam. “I expect Floss minds more. Lady Macbeth wasn't into prettypretty.” Floss kicked him.

“It's called ‘Dove'. I think that's why it's these colours,” Magnus said sleepily.

They had noticed, as they'd climbed up and up, that each of the turret dormitories had the name of a bird – Eagle, Kestrel, Plover and Dove.

“There's a beautiful dovecote here,” said Cousin M, switching on the bedside lamps and turning back the duvets. “It's unique. There isn't another like it in the whole of England.”

“Does it have a potence?” asked Magnus. He had chosen the bed by the fireplace and was pulling his screen into position, before putting his pyjamas on.

“A
what
?” Sam shouted, over the top of it.

“A potence. It's a ladder,” Magnus explained, rather pityingly, emerging a few minutes later in his night clothes. “It revolves, so that you can go round inside and collect the eggs.”

“My goodness,” said Cousin M, admiringly, “how on earth do you come to know a thing like that? I didn't. Someone had to tell me.”

Magnus shrugged and went back behind his screen. “Oh, I just knew,” he muttered.

“His father was very, very clever,” Floss whispered, “and he educated Magnus himself. He knows the most amazing things.”

Magnus came out again wearing slippers and pushed his screen back against the wall. “There is a – a potence, Magnus,” said Cousin M. “I'll show it to you in the morning. Or perhaps you can show it to me. It doesn't work properly. You could try mending it. I think I'll leave these windows open a bit, it really is very stuffy. You don't expect it, somehow, coming up from that chilly old hall.”

“Is the hall always chilly?” asked Magnus. “It shouldn't be, the ceiling's quite low.” He was staring hard at Cousin M; he wanted information.

But she treated this as a casual enquiry. “Well, I often find it a bit chilly, dear. Why?”

“I just wondered.”

“Anyhow, you'll be toasty warm up here,” she went on. “Too hot, if anything. Now, I'm sorry about the bars, I know it makes it look a bit prison-like, but it's quite a long drop to the ground. I think this was a nursery in the old days and they usually barred the windows.”

“Actually, these bars are quite new,” Magnus said, examining them. “Look, they've got modern screws.”

Cousin M now looked exasperated, even a little cross. She took refuge in drifting about the dormitory, straightening the bedcovers and puffing up the pillows. “You can dump any extra things on this spare bed,” she called over from a corner. Then, “Well, now, what is
this
?”

The three of them gathered round her and looked on the fourth bed. There, neatly curled in the middle, with soft grey billows of duvet puffed up round him, was a little ginger cat. He seemed all tail and he had made a perfect circle. When he heard Cousin M, he lifted his head, blinked, yawned, mewed a little mew then buried his nose in his tail again.

“Should I take him away?” Cousin M said, stroking his ears very gently. “He's had a big day. Caught his first mouse, by the river. That's how he got lost. He's exhausted.”

“Let him stay,” Floss begged, delighted that the bed he'd chosen was next to hers.

“All right. But I'll leave the door open, and if he's a nuisance just chuck him out. He'll find his way down to the kitchen, only he just loves
people.
And now he's got three new ones to talk to.”

“What's his name, Cousin M?” Floss could already feel herself falling in love. The cat was mildly purring in its sleep.

“Arthur.”

“But that's… your boyfriend.”

“Exactly.”

Cousin M grinned. “Sleep tight, and God bless you all. No rush tomorrow. Get up when you like.”

“Isn't she great?” Floss whispered to the others as they lay in the dark. Arthur had already crossed over from his bed to hers, squeezed under her modesty screen and was burrowing under the duvet, settling into the special warm place in the crook of her knees. “She's put lovely flowers in the fireplace, and everything.”

“Yes.” It sounded as if Sam was nodding off. He could smell the light, frail scent of the flowers as he lay there peacefully, and the smell of the river across the grass, and a very faint smoky smell that must be coming from the chimney flue. “You OK, Mags?” he whispered, but there was no answer. Seconds later they both heard him snoring gently.

Somebody was crying, a sound with which Magnus was all too familiar. His mother had cried all the time after his father had walked out, and children had always cried in the Homes where he had been temporarily dumped when they first discovered how ill his mother was. Now, when babies cried in supermarkets and their mothers took no notice, he couldn't stand it; he had to run away. This terror of crying seemed to be connected to an invisible main cable that went right down through the middle of him. If it were activated he felt he might die. Magnus did not understand this part of himself; all he knew was that any kind of crying was painful for him. He only ever cried in secret.

The crying was that of a woman. She had a low voice, quite deep, and she was sobbing. There were no words. He sat up in bed and his hands met warm fur. Arthur was doing his rounds, first Floss, then Sam, now him.

Magnus could just see the shape of his little head. His ears were pricked up and his fat little tail was erect and quivering. His fur was a stiff bush and he was making a curious sound, not a mew and certainly not a purr, but a kind of throaty growl, the sound of a beast that is suspicious and uncertain, possibly afraid. The low sobbing went on, though fainter now and already fading away. But the cat did not stay with Magnus. It shot off the duvet, plunged through the open door and vanished into the darkness.

It was cold in the turret room now, cold and chilly like the Great Hall, and Magnus's duvet felt clammy and damp. It had been hot when they'd switched their lamps off and they'd all flung their bedding aside, to get cool. The cold he now felt was like mist, in fact he could see a sort of mist in the room, lit up by some faint light. The source of this light was a mystery to him because all was dark outside; perhaps the mist had its own light. He watched it. It was like a fine piece of gauze, or a wisp of cloud, wreathing round upon itself, unfolding and refolding until, like a square of silk in the hands of a magician, it vanished into thin air leaving a coldness that was even more intense than before.

He listened again for the crying noise. It was so faint now it was no more than a sad little whisper; it had almost become part of the dissolving misty cloud. But the woman had not gone away altogether. He could still hear her, though only very faintly, and she was still in distress. Magnus decided that he must try to find her. He had to stop that crying.

But first he felt under his pillow where he always kept two things: a green army torch and a heavy black clasp knife. These things were secret treasures and absolutely nobody knew about them but him and Father Godless, who had given them to him long ago, or so it felt to Magnus.

It was awful that “Uncle Robert”, which was what Magnus had called the kind old priest, should have had the surname “Godless” – though the old man had laughed about it. Magnus would have changed it, like people sometimes do when their name is Shufflebottom, or Smellie. He'd got to know the old man while staying with his first foster family, after they had taken him away from his mother. He was one of the priests in the church they went to. He lived in an old people's home, now, near London, but he sometimes wrote to Magnus, and occasionally sent him presents.

He'd given him the torch because he knew Magnus got scared in the dark and he'd given him a little Bible, too, with tiny print and a red silk marker. He'd called it “the sword of the spirit which is the word of God”. But he was a very practical old man so he'd also given him the knife. This knife, like the torch and the Bible, had accompanied him on dangerous missions in the war when he'd been a soldier.

Magnus got up and felt for his dressing gown. It lay ready on his bed because he sometimes got up in the night, to go to the lavatory and, in this turret block, the main bathroom was four floors down. He liked his dressing gown. Floss's mum and dad had given it to him. He liked its bold red and blue stripes and he liked its deep pockets. Into one of these he now slid his clasp knife and into the other the little
red Bible, because he was scared. The gold cross stamped deep into the front of it might give him some protection. You could wave crosses at vampires and it was supposed to shrivel them up.

He slipped through the door and made his way down the stone spiral of stairs. Each landing was lit by a small spotlight, but in between the floors there was a deep darkness. His heart bumped as he picked his way down the smooth cold treads, his ears strained for the sound of the weeping voice. He could still hear it, though it was very faint now, and it seemed to come and go as if the troubled woman was wandering about, all over this rambling place, coming near to him and then withdrawing when she did not find what she sought.

He knew where he was going and he made his way unerringly down the twisting stairs then out into the low arched entrance hall where Cousin M had greeted them. This was dimly lit by an occasional spotlight, and he could see now that there were lights in some of the flowerbeds. Through curious low windows, the shape of half-closed eyes, he could see lawns manicured with light-dark stripes where the mower had gone up and down, and the glint of shifting water and the great trees standing like silent sentinels.

The door to the Great Hall where Cousin M had fed them was ajar, but only a crack. Magnus pushed at it
and the vast slab of whorled timber, many centimetres thick and patterned with marvellous iron traceries, swung open silently. Then it gave a single, sharp creak, a sound not particularly loud but deafening in the vast room hung with its rows of gilded portraits. At the table, by the fire where they had eaten their sandwiches, a man sat in front of a chessboard. At the creak of the hinges he turned his head sharply and, seeing the small boy in the doorway, got abruptly to his feet, sending two of the chess pieces rolling across the floor. He touched a bank of switches by the fireplace and lights came on everywhere. Magnus was terrified but he stood his ground as the elderly man, who walked with a slight limp, strode purposefully towards him.

It was his first meeting with Colonel Stickley, the mysterious relative of Cousin M's who had gone off to bed without greeting them. Magnus never forgot that moment, the tall spindly figure limping across the cold chequered floor, the sudden harsh light after the reassuring darkness, and what that light revealed – row upon row of faces, priests and soldiers, men in university robes posed self-importantly over open books, women in wimples, children playing with cats and dogs and with curious toys, such as you only ever saw in museums. So many faces looking down upon the modern man and the modern boy, each from their own little corner in the greater sweep of history. But the face
he had come to see was not among them. The huge gold frame, containing cruel Lady Alice of the thin white hands, was empty. He found himself looking up at a blank black rectangle.

Did the Colonel see? Magnus could not decide because, instantly, the old man had interposed his own tall, stooping figure between the boy and the painting, had bent down and thrust his whiskery face at him. “Humph! What's this? Are you sleepwalking or something?”

Magnus, smelling pipe smoke and whisky, suddenly burst into tears. The crying of the woman which had brought him here had most definitely ceased now, and the painting was most definitely blank. These two things belonged together, of that he felt certain. But
how
they belonged he did not understand. She had looked so cruel, the Lady Alice Neale. It could surely not have been Lady Alice that wept. But where had she gone to, slipping out of her gilded frame and leaving the canvas empty? None of it made sense. He suddenly felt bewildered and lost, and he very much wanted to go back to bed.

The Colonel looked down at the snivelling boy, inspecting him through small round spectacles as, Magnus felt, one might scrutinise some botanical specimen under glass. Then, very awkwardly and stiffly, he stretched out his hand and laid it lightly on the boy's
shoulder. “Stay there young man,” he said, then he went round the hall switching off all the main lights. Magnus could hear him talking to himself, he seemed to be complaining about Maude. “Mad woman, my cousin. What did she want to put you up there for, four floors up? I told her not to but the woman wouldn't listen. It's not civilised. No wonder you lost your bearings. Come on, I'll have you in bed in two shakes of a donkey's tail. I'm going to see about this in the morning, get you moved. Are you up to walking up all those wretched stairs? Want a fireman's lift? My son always liked a fireman's lift, cheeky little beggar.”