Conrad’s Fate

“Seven minutes up,” Christopher said, folding back the frill at the wrist of his shirt to look at his watch. “No time to admire yourself, Grant.”

As we left the room, I remembered that I had left the port-wine cork in the pocket of my own trousers. Mayor Seuly had said to carry it with me at all times. I had to dive back to get it and stuff it into…Oh. The wretched breeches turned out not to have pockets. I crammed the cork into a narrow waistcoat pocket as I followed Christopher out. I was going to tell him it was a keepsake from home, if he asked, but he never seemed to notice.

Hugo had his watch out when we found him. “You’ll have to keep better time than this,” he said. “My father insists on it.” He put his watch away in order to tweak at my neckcloth, than at Christopher’s. Everyone at Stallery was always trying to rearrange our neckcloths, but we didn’t know that then and we both backed away in surprise. “Follow me,” Hugo said.

We didn’t go down in the lift. Hugo led us down narrow, creaking stairs to the next floor. Here the ceilings were higher and the corridors wider, with matting on them, but everywhere was rather dark. “This is the nursery floor,” he said. “At the moment, we use some of the rooms for the housekeepers and the sort of guests who don’t eat with the Family, valets, the accountant, and so on.”

On the way to the next flight of stairs, he opened a door to show us a long, dark, polished room with a rocking horse halfway down it, looking rather lonely. “Day nursery,” he said.

The next flight of stairs was wider and had matting for carpet. At the bottom, the ceilings were a bit higher still and there was carpet everywhere, new and pungent and dove grey. There were pictures on the walls. “Guest rooms?” Christopher guessed brightly.

“Overflow guest rooms,” Hugo corrected him. “My father has his quarters on this floor,” he added, taking us to the next flight of stairs. These stairs were quite broad and carpeted rather better than the best hotel in Stallchester.

Below this, it was suddenly opulent. Christopher pursed his mouth and whispered out a whistle as we stared along a wide passageway with a carpet like pale blue moss, running through a vista of gold and crimson archways, white statues, and golden ornaments on marble-topped tables with bent gold legs. There were vases of flowers everywhere here. The air felt thick and scented.

Hugo took us right along this passage. “You’ll need to know this floor,” he said, “in case you have to deliver anything to one of the Family’s rooms.” He pointed to each huge white double door as we came to it, saying, “Main guest room, red guest room, Count Robert’s rooms, blue guest room, painted guest room. The Countess has the rose rooms, through here. This one is the white guest room, and Lady Felice has the rooms on this corner. Round beyond there are the lilac room and the yellow room. We don’t use these so often, but you’d better know. Have you got all that?”

“Only vaguely,” Christopher admitted.

“There’s a plan in the undercroft,” Hugo said, and he led us on, down wide, shallow steps this time, blue and soft like the passage, to a floor more palatial yet. My head was spinning by this time, but I sort of aimed my face where Hugo pointed and tried to look intelligent. “Ballroom, banquet room, music room, Grand Saloon,” he said, and I saw vast spaces, enormous chandeliers, vistas of gold-rimmed sofas, and one room with about a hundred yards of table lined with flimsy gold chairs. “We don’t use these more than two or three times a year,” Hugo told us, “but they all have to be kept up, of course. There was going to be a grand ball here for Lady Felice’s coming-of-age, but it had to be cancelled when the Count died. Pity. But we’ll be using them again in a couple of weeks to celebrate Count Robert’s engagement. We had a spectacular ball here four years ago when the present Count was eighteen. Almost all the titles in Europe came. We used ten thousand candles and nearly two thousand bottles of champagne.”

“Quite a party,” Christopher remarked as we went past the main grand stairway. We craned, and saw it led down into a huge hall with a streaky black marble floor.

Hugo pointed a thumb down the stairway. “The rooms down there are used by the Family most of the time – drawing rooms, dining rooms, library and so on – but Staff are not allowed to use these stairs. Don’t forget.”

“Makes me want to slide down those banisters at once,” Christopher murmured, as Hugo took us to a much narrower flight of stairs instead, which came out into the hall behind the Family lift. He pointed to the various big black doors and told us which was which, but he said we couldn’t look inside the rooms because Family might be using any one of them. We nodded, and our feet skidded in our new shoes on the black, streaky floor.

Then we thudded through a door covered with green cloth and everywhere was suddenly grey stone and plain wood. Hugo pointed, “My father’s pantry, Family china scullery, silver room, flower room, Staff toilets. We go down here to the undercroft.”

He went galloping down a flight of steep stone steps. As we clattered down after him, I suddenly felt as if I was back at school. It had that smell, rather too warm and mixed with chalk and cooking, and like school there was that feeling of lots of people about, many voices in the distance and large numbers of feet shuffling and hurrying. A girl laughed, making echoes, and – again like school – a bell rang somewhere.

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