Page 21 of One More Christmas at the Castle
It was a dismissal for all of us and I noticed a slight pink tinge in Lucy’s cheeks, as if she resented it.
Henry and I had no objection to being treated as staff – why should we, when we were? – but Lucy’s position was clearly a little more ambiguous.
In some more casual households where we’d worked, the lines of interaction were blurred, but here, I was sure, Mrs Powys would like us to keep to our place and we’d do that … though Xan being an old friend of Henry’s might cause a few difficulties.
The tower was actually rectangular rather than square, as it had looked from the front, stretching back quite a long way. Lucy began her tour in the hall – called the Great Hall, naturally – where I noticed for the first time that what I’d taken to be statues on the plinths around the room, were actually antique diving helmets.
‘The mosaic in the middle of the floor is a perfect replica of the Roman one they found at the nearby fort,’ Lucy informed us as she skirted round the edge of it. ‘The original was moved to a folly in the garden in Victorian times. It depicts Mithras.’
‘Why is he wearing a pixie hat?’ I asked.
‘Mithras was usually shown emerging from a rock and wearing a Phrygian cap,’ Henry explained. ‘Mitras is another form of Mithras, so I expect that’s where the Castle got its name from.’
‘How clever of you to know that!’ Lucy said admiringly. ‘The furniture is all Victorian Gothic – such dark wood, I always think – and there’s a small downstairs cloakroom.’
She turned to me and said with emphasis, ‘Dark bluetowels in there, always.’
‘I’ll remember,’ I said gravely, though I was sure it would all be in those very detailed files in the kitchen.
A door at the back of the hall led to a billiard room and we went through it into a formal drawing room, all straw-coloured satin and gilded mirrors, but with a large-screen TV in one corner.
‘The double doors to the sitting room can be thrown open to make one large space for entertaining,’ she said, lowering her voice, before adding slightly acidly, ‘but we’ll go back through the billiard room, so we don’t disturb Mrs Powys’s important talk with Xan.’
The wide staircase rose from one side of the hall and as we climbed it she said, ‘There are three further floors, as you will see. Cousin Sabine has a suite on this first one so there’s only one further bedroom and a small bathroom.’
We were allowed the briefest glimpses inside the rooms, as if we wouldn’t soon be very well acquainted with them after bed making and bathroom tidying, though at least I now knewwhere to bring Mrs Powys’s breakfast in the morning – at 8 a.m. precisely!
The Castle had all been well modernized, with more bathrooms than you generally found in old houses of this kind, not to mention having linen and cleaning cupboards on every floor, too. All the bedroom doors had porcelain name plaques with a flower theme going on – the Bluebell Room, the Daffodil Room and so on. Mrs Powys’s was Rose.
When I mentioned this, Lucy said, ‘Cousin Sabine’s mother had them made. She was a keen gardener. I never knew her, of course, because she died when Sabine was a child, but she was the last of the Archbold family, the original owners of the Castle …’
She trailed off as we reached the top floor and she allowed us a peep into her own large bedroom, which also contained a sofa and TV.
‘Of course, I’ve helped Cousin Sabine in the house as much as I could since I came to live here – a little light dusting and arranging the flowers, that kind of thing – but my own health is really quite delicate, so it will be a relief for me to hand over those duties to you during the next few weeks.’
For that, I thought, read: ‘Now you’re here, I’m not going to lift a finger, if I can possibly help it.’
Henry and I exchanged glances: this was pretty much what we expected and, indeed, preferred.
‘My cousin will tell you which rooms to make ready for our guests later.’
Lucy indicated a small flight of wooden stairs, more like a ladder. ‘There’s no attic, of course, because of the flat roof. You can go up those steps and get out on to that in fine weather, but I dislike heights intensely so I never have.’
‘I’d like to see the view from there,’ Henry said. He’d probably like to try abseiling down the tower from it, too. I was only glad he hadn’t packed his climbing gear as well as the snowboard.
‘There’s just the old part of the house to show you now,’ she said. ‘We go back down to the first floor.’
We did, and through another of the pointed Gothic archways, this one opposite the door of Mrs Powys’s bedroom.
Lucy seemed to be flagging and merely gestured at the closed doors along the passage.
‘More bedrooms – and this one on the right was the old schoolroom, but apparently Xan always slept there when he visited the Castle as a child and has continued to prefer doing so.’
There were no porcelain plaques on the doors in this wing, but if there had been, a thistle would have been most suitable for Xan’s, since my conscience had been prickling ever since I’d seen him.
We’d now arrived at the top of the wide stairs down to the Garden Hall again, with the baize door blocking the passage ahead.
‘There,’ she said, ‘I expect you know where you are, now?’
