The Empty Frame

“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.”

CHAPTER TWO

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.”

Magnus suspected that a fireman’s lift, one of the few terms with which he was not familiar, involved being carried back to his room over the old man’s shoulder. “I’m all right,” he said firmly. “I’d just like to go back to bed. Sorry if I frightened you.”

The Colonel gave a dry laugh. “You didn’t frighten me, young man, I often sit up late. Can’t sleep y’know, it’s my age. All right then, follow me, and mind where you put your feet, the lighting’s not good along these corridors.”

But as they left the hall something made Magnus look back. He said, “You’ve left one of the lights on.”

Colonel Stickley turned round. “So I have, and the Lady Alice won’t like that. Beautiful young woman but she had quite a temper, they say, quite an old paddy.” He clicked a switch and Magnus saw the tall woman in white and black with the thin little dog at her feet fade into the darkness.

As they went along the corridors towards the turret stairs, he saw two tapestries hanging on a wall, lit by a solitary lamp. One portrayed Pontius Pilate washing his hands in a bowl of water. A soldier stood by with a scarlet towel and Jesus, in a corner and already wearing his crown of thorns, was looking on, sadly. The other showed a scene from the Old Testament. Father Robert had told him the story, about Balaam’s donkey who was beaten because he disobeyed his master. Knowing that he was in the presence of an angel of God, the poor beast had lain down in the road and would not budge. Here, in ragged, faded threads, was that donkey, flattened, with its ears sticking out at right angles, as if something had run over it, and a great ball of shimmering light that was the angel. It was only a glimpse as the Colonel, puffing slightly, started to mount the spiral stairs, but it made Magnus think of Arthur, the little cat. Animals were sometimes more sensitive to the big, deep things than human beings were, and Arthur had been plainly terrified when the crying began. Like Balaam’s ass, the cat must have suddenly picked up a very strong presence, and he had fled from it. It was definitely not good, like the angel, but perhaps it was not totally bad either. All Magnus knew for certain was that it was very troubled. Its grief was great and it had wept human tears.

But how could it have anything to do with that hard-faced woman in the gold frame, the woman who had, he was sure, been out of it when he’d first come into the Great Hall and found the Colonel playing chess? And had Colonel Stickley known that the woman had gone from the frame and was that gruff, calm treatment of Magnus all a sham?

As the Colonel said goodnight to him and he snuggled down into his bed again, he once more felt afraid. He wanted some arms round him. Why hadn’t he gone to Majorca with Auntie Win and Uncle Donald? He felt round in the bed. Perhaps Arthur had crept back and was waiting for him, a warm purry presence, but the cat was not there. So he turned on his side, burrowing down as Colonel Stickley limped down the stairs, still muttering to himself. “Flowers in the fireplace,” Magnus heard. “Whatever next… for three children. Is this the Hilton Hotel? Humph, I’m not clearing the mess up. It’ll be that damned cat.”

But a cat as small as Arthur could not have achieved the complete wreckage that now lay in the grate, a wreckage Magnus had not seen as he’d climbed thankfully and hurriedly into his bed. Cousin M’s beautiful arrangement of wild peonies, set in the fireplace in their honour, lay in ruins. The simple green vase that had held them was smashed and it looked as if some of the smaller pieces of glass had been ground into powder. The flowers themselves had been torn from their stalks and dismembered, petal by petal, and they lay upon the dark polished floor of the tower room like big flakes of snow.

CHAPTER THREE

Cousin M, coming into the turret room next morning, saw the flowers scattered in the grate, knelt down and, without comment, began to pick them up.

“It wasn’t me, I didn’t knock them over,” Magnus said defensively, sitting up in bed. He’d become very used to people telling him off for things he hadn’t done.

Cousin M showed no reaction. “It’s all right dear. It’s a shame about the vase though, it was a pretty one. Perhaps the children’s mother could get me another. It came from the old glass factory near my flat in Majorca.”

Sam 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.”