A Crowded Coffin(15)

‘Look.’ She drew him away from a dull, dark painting in a corner, that he was examining closely. ‘This is Dame Margery, the one who was a nun.’ She led him to a small portrait painted on a wooden panel and was about to speak when he gave a shocked gasp.

‘But I saw her,’ he said slowly. ‘I swear to God I saw this woman last night, on the landing upstairs, when I was going to bed.’

‘You – you couldn’t have,’ she exclaimed. ‘She’s….’ Edith stared at him in astonishment. ‘Was that what it was? When you kind-of squawked and looked gobstruck? Harriet and I both saw you jump out of your skin.’

Rory was staring at the head-and-shoulders portrait of a sixteenth-century woman. Not a young woman, he suspected; she wore a dark-green gown with a neat white ruff at the neck and her fair hair was just visible beneath a Tudor headdress with a jewel, perhaps some kind of reliquary, on a chain round her neck and an emerald ring visible on her slender hand. Her grey eyes held a thoughtful look as she stared out of the portrait towards them, while the firm lips quirked in just the suspicion of a smile.

Edith was surprised at the intensity of his gaze, then, as he let out a pent-up breath, he looked down at her – and jumped. ‘What?’ she demanded. ‘What’s the matter?’

He shook his head, looking bemused. ‘I just don’t know,’ he told her. ‘I could have sworn that this woman walked along the landing towards me last night and when I looked again, she’d disappeared. I thought I was going mad and I certainly don’t believe in ghosts. But now? You look a lot like her, did you know that? Maybe I just got mixed up. God knows I was tired enough and I’m still taking some heavy-duty medication; they warned me it could have some weird side effects.’

Medication? He certainly looked exhausted, Edith thought, taking note of the dark circles under his eyes, and there was that excessive thinness too. She bit back the questions on the tip of her tongue – his expression was forbidding so she smiled and shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t be quite so adamant about ghosts not existing,’ she said mildly. ‘Not when you’ve lived in this house a while longer. But never mind that, come over here and see this portrait by the window.

‘There,’ she said, pointing dramatically to a modern portrait, dating from the late 1970s. She watched with interest as Rory stared, mesmerized, at the painting of a young man with dark curly hair, startling blue eyes and the faintest promise of a dimple. Apart from the eyes, his own were hazel, it was the face Rory saw in the mirror every day when he shaved.

‘But who on earth?’ He turned to her, astonished, but seeing her eyes misted with tears, he understood. ‘Your father, of course. No wonder everyone jumps out of their skin when they meet me. What an amazing likeness.’

He hesitated then reached out an arm in a brief, consoling squeeze. ‘I heard about him in the village. You must have been very young. It’s hard, I know….’ He turned away, in embarrassment, perhaps, or to hide his own emotion as Edith, comforted, nodded her thanks, not wanting to trust her voice.

Rory stared at the picture of Richard Attlin for a few more minutes then set off on another ramble round the gallery, pausing now and then to examine a picture closely or to stand back and appraise another, with a thoughtful pursing of his lips. Much of the time, though, he spent staring round at the vaulted beams of the roof, the panelled walls and the wide, polished boards of the floor.

‘I just can’t believe it.’ He waved a hand round at the gallery. ‘How can something like this be completely unknown? It’s incredible inside, like a small version of that National Trust place in Cheshire, the black and white building. Is the house listed?’

‘No,’ she shrugged. ‘Not sure how it escaped but it did. The only reason we can think of is that nobody knows it’s here, apart from friends and family and as you spotted, it’s not visible from the road. Why? Do you really think it’s important?’

‘Important?’ He stared at her in disbelief. ‘Of course it’s important – it’s a national treasure! You need to get an expert up here as soon as you can. I bet there are all kinds of grants available for a house like this, even nowadays when funds are hard to find. It’s hidden from outside too, isn’t it? I wonder if they strengthened the building when they put the eighteenth-century front on the house. There’s not the slightest trace of a wobble in the walls or the floor, which you’d expect, I’d have thought, after all these centuries.’