The Empty Frame (6 page)

He cried out, “Speak to me.” But the apparition merely stared down at him, taking in, he thought, his
height and age, registering the fact that she was looking at a mere child who could be no use to her, she who had walked with a queen.

Then the figure opened its mouth but Magnus could hear nothing through the thick glass criss-crossed with its web of fine wires. In desperation he hammered on the window. “Come to me!” he cried, “Oh, come to me! Tell me why you are not at peace in this world,” strange words that did not feel like his own, words that had been given him to speak, by another being.

At once the figure vanished and the blue water surged up in a great wave and splashed over the edges of the swimming pool. Magnus felt weak, he had to clutch on to the edge of the window in the door to stop himself sagging down. He felt bitterly cold, great goose pimples stood out all over his arms and legs and his teeth were chattering. He took one last desperate look through the swimming pool door to see if the vision had really gone away, but found he could not see through because the glass in the windows was skinned with ice.

He walked very slowly after the others. He wouldn't tell them yet. He believed a very important pattern might be forming, a pattern that involved them all. But to understand what it all meant they would have to be patient, like bird-watchers sitting quietly in their hides or anglers waiting for the fish to
bite. The most significant thing about what had just happened was that for the first time when the ghostly woman had been present he hadn't felt afraid, and that she had communicated with him – or at least there had been the beginnings of a communication. His banging on the glass, which he regretted now, had frightened her away and that meant she was not locked in her own time, as he had understood from Father Godless was the usual way of ghosts. For a few minutes in the swimming pool building she had stepped from her time into his, perhaps because she needed the modern people in the Abbey. Or could it be that she just needed Magnus?

They found Wilf making sandwiches in the buttery. He knew all about the costs of the day-to-day running of the Abbey, and he was able to explain about the swimming pool.

“It costs a lot to run, a pool like that,” he said. “It's the maintenance. And with nobody coming on these courses any more there's no point in keeping it open, not all the time. But the Colonel goes in every day, briefly – swimming's good for his injury, stops him stiffening up. And your Aunt Maude insists—”

“
Cousin
Maude,” said Magnus.

“The lady insists on letting folk from the village come, now and again. The nearest public pool is in
High Wycombe and they don't all have transport. The Colonel's not keen of course, but he can only stay on here because of her money, so he's got to give way on some things.”

“Did he really not want us to come here, Wilf?” asked Magnus. “Doesn't he like children?” He felt very emotional. Sam and Floss's parents had given him a lot of love since he'd come to live with them and although he could not forget what had happened in his own family, and still dreamed terrible dreams about it, the way this new family treated him seemed to be healing something inside him, healing it with their love. Colonel Stickley had been quite kind to him, when they'd been on their own in the middle of the night, but most of the time he was grumpy and irritable. Magnus found it very hard to trust him and he very much wanted to.

Wilf, seeing tears in his eyes, patted him on the shoulder. “No, lad, he doesn't dislike young people, not at all. But he has this sadness to cope with, about his son.”

“The one who's missing? Cousin M told us,” Floss explained.

Sam said, “Do you think he's dead, Wilf?”

The little man paused, then let out a big sigh. “It seems pretty likely, to me.” He slapped big chunks of chicken between slices of bread, sprinkling on lemon
juice and a dash of curry powder, and feeding scraps to Arthur who was sitting hopefully under the table. “About this swimming lark,” he said. “Your only chance is the early morning.”

“What time?” asked Sam suspiciously. He liked lying-in during the holidays; he was hopeless at getting up early.

“Six-ish. Or you could go when the village people swim. I'll find out what's happening this week.”

“What about the multi-gym?” Sam asked next. He'd seen, again through locked glazed doors, glimpses of the most brilliant sports equipment, all laid out in a sports hall: tread-mills, cycling machines, rowing machines – thousands of pounds' worth of stuff all sitting there unused. And they had inspected the tennis courts too. They were marvellous, miles better than the ones they played on at school. Yet these also were firmly padlocked and notices everywhere said, “Temporarily Out of Use”.

Wilf said, “Listen, I'll tell you what I know, though it's not very much. And when I've told you, do you think you could let it drop and concentrate on your holiday? There's plenty to do here. You can go on the river and I'll try to get permission about the swimming, and there are some great walks round here – don't keep asking all these questions though; it doesn't help anybody.”

“But what
do
you know?” asked Magnus persistently. Grown-ups were so good at sliding off the point.

Wilf covered his plates of sandwiches carefully with plastic film, sat down and took Arthur on to his lap, almost like a bit of protection against these over-inquisitive children. He said, “The Colonel and I have been together since the war. We were very young men when it ended. We… a lot happened to us. He won medals. He's a brave man – and a
good
man,” he added quite fiercely. “Anyhow, I had no family much so I stuck with the Colonel. He got married but they didn't send me packing, and I helped, when his young wife was so ill, and then died. David, his son, was only little. We brought him up together.”

“So you must miss him too?” Magnus observed, his driving need to know everything getting the better of his tact.

Wilf pulled at Arthur's ears, drawing out of him big, rapturous purrs. “Yes, Magnus. I miss him. He'd have liked this cat. He always wanted to be a vet.

“The Colonel inherited the Abbey, eventually, from another branch of his family that had nobody else to leave it to. He was just a second cousin of a lady whose two sons had both been killed in the Second World War, killed in two separate battles. Hard to believe, isn't it? There was quite a bit of money too. So he thought he'd
turn it into a place where young people could come, to do sport really seriously, in beautiful surroundings. He felt it was a kind of memorial to those two dead boys. Of course, people had to pay, but a lot of them got grants, and he never turned people away. He started with tennis and had all the courts laid out, then later, he added the swimming pool and the multi-gym. The very best people came to coach the young folk and it became quite famous, this place; they were queueing up to get on the courses. And then—”

He stopped and his lean brown body seemed to go rigid, quite suddenly. Arthur jumped off his knee and went to sit under the table again where he engaged in vigorous washing.

“Then
what
?”

Wilf hesitated. “People started making complaints. It began with the adults, not the kids. First some of the top tennis coaches upped and left, just abandoned the young people in the middle of their training. Well, their parents had paid out a lot of money for them to come, some of the coaches were ex-Wimbledon. There was a lot of nasty business, about money. The Colonel had to go to court.”

“But that doesn't seem bad enough to close the place down,” Sam said. “Not that on its own.”

“It wasn't, not at first. But it's funny, word gets round. Places get bad reputations and people start to
avoid them, and go elsewhere – especially when children are involved. Anyhow, the Colonel weathered the court case and got new coaches. But then, the kids themselves started to complain.”

“What about?”

Wilf looked uneasy. “They just… didn't like staying here, particularly in the turret rooms, where most of the dormitories are. They kept asking to be moved. So the Colonel brought in some portakabins. You've seen them, I expect, they're down behind the tennis courts. Nothing spooky about a portakabin, for heaven's sake.”

“
What
was spooky?” said Magnus. They were at last getting to the point.

“Just let me finish, Magnus,” Wilf said patiently.

“The crunch came when a girl had an accident. She was found in the garden, very early one morning, at the foot of the turret block. She had two broken legs and she'd injured her back. She made a full recovery, as it happened, but she
could
have broken her neck. Her father was quite a well-known politician. There was an enormous fuss and the Colonel – typical of him, I must say – just closed down the whole operation, while they conducted an enquiry.”

“And what did the enquiry prove?” said Sam. He dimly remembered such a case, on the television news.

“Nothing really. They could have just been larking
about in the dormitories, or drinking. I don't know. But the Colonel was blamed and somehow, well, it broke his spirit. He never re-opened the Abbey as a sports centre. He's tried to get big companies to hold their conferences here, but people just don't book. And all because of that silly girl who was probably a bit drunk. I'm telling you, I could wring her neck!”

“But why do you think she jumped out of the window, Wilf?” Magnus wanted to know.

“I haven't a clue, and that's the truth. When it happened they were all asleep in bed. The coaches had gone the rounds and all was well. Any larking about was long since over for the night. Now I've told you what I know. The best thing you can do for the Colonel, and for Miss Maude, is to keep mum, enjoy the Abbey and not jump out of any windows. Got it?”

“We couldn't anyway,” Magnus explained solemnly. “We've got bars in our room.”

“That's right,” said Wilf. “They barred all the windows after the accident but it didn't make any difference. People still didn't sign up for the courses.”

“Why on earth did they put us in one of the turret rooms, Wilf?” Sam asked.

He grinned. “Well they nearly didn't, they had a real ding-dong about it, the Colonel and your cousin. He wanted you to have a portakabin but she said no, too damp and smelly and I must say I agree – not that I said
anything, mind you. She said the turret rooms were always warmer than anywhere else, which is true, and she wanted you to have the very nicest of all, which you've got, and if there was any larking about which of course she knew there wouldn't be, because she knew you were perfect children, every flipping window in the place more or less is barred now. Also, of course…” but here his voice died away. “Oh never mind. Here, Arthur, fancy a bit of bacon old chap?”

Magnus grabbed his arm feverishly. “Also
what
?” Why, oh why, did grown-ups have this infuriating habit of drying up at the most crucial moment?

“
Also
,” said Wilf, shaking Magnus off quite vigorously, “the two of them had a basic disagreement. In a nutshell, the Colonel has this notion that the Abbey is haunted at certain times by the ghost of Lady Alice Neale, the woman in the portrait, and your cousin thinks it's a load of poppycock. I reckon she wanted to show him just how much credence she placed in the things people say by putting you in the turret.
So… 
seen anything yet? Who are you putting your money on, the Colonel or your Cousin Maude?” And he grinned at them. It was pretty obvious whose side he was on.

Magnus answered for them all. He clearly did not want to divulge anything of his private “sightings” to Wilf, not at that moment. “We need to talk about it,”
he said crisply, “we all have… rather different views at the moment.”

“‘Curiouser and curiouser',” Floss muttered as they went outside and started walking towards the river. She was thinking, not of the Lady Neale, but of another, less formidable Alice.

“I'm not coming to see this old lady,” Sam said when they were back in the turret room. “It sounds a bit too like – well, I'm just not coming.” He spoke very firmly; his mind was obviously made up.

“But why not?” asked Magnus. “She knows all the history.”

Sam didn't reply, merely kicked open his suitcase to get a fresh T-shirt. He was dripping with sweat.

Floss led Magnus over to the window and whispered, letting her words float out over the gardens. “I think it's because of our Aunt Helen,” she explained, “well, our Great Aunt. Sam's her godson and she's had a stroke. He doesn't like going to visit her any more. It's too sad for him. OK?”

“OK,” Magnus said, unquestioningly. Then, to her surprise, he walked rather nervously up to Sam's divan and gave him a little pat. “They're horrible, strokes,” he said, in a very grown-up voice. “My friend Father Godless had one too. He dribbles now.”

Sam stared at him, not comprehending, then, suspiciously, at Floss. Then he turned his back, stripped
off his T-shirt and pulled on a fresh one. “I suppose the tennis whizz-kids were always changing their things,” he said, “like they do at Wimbledon. Do you think it was
this
window that stupid girl jumped out of?” And he examined the metal bars. “I can't tell how old these are, but they've been freshly painted.”

Magnus came and inspected the bars too. Then he stuck his head out of the window, manoeuvring his small neat ears past the metal struts, sideways, so he could see the ground. “It's an awfully long way down,” he said. “It's a miracle she wasn't killed.”

Floss said, peering out too, “But do you think she
did
jump? Might she have been pushed – like Humpty Dumpty? ‘Humpty Dumpty was pushed', that's what people are saying now. In other words, he didn't fall off the wall by accident.”

Sam and Magnus laughed, but not for very long. “Are you saying somebody tried to murder her?” Sam said.

“I don't know. But if she was a famous politician's daughter it could have been a government plot.”

“Perhaps your Miss Adeline will tell you more,” Sam muttered, foraging in his case for fresh socks. He'd decided his feet were smelly.

Floss said rather peevishly, “She's not ‘my' Miss Adeline. Sam, won't you change your mind, and come with us? She's OK, ‘sharp as a needle' Cousin M said.”

“No. I'm going to look round the village. Wilf's lending me his bike. There's a big memorial to the Neale family in the church. That's
real
history.”

“Have it your own way,” Floss said, and went off. But Magnus, who was privately getting more and more taken up with the history of the Abbey, seemed to approve of this division of labour. “We could report back here later this afternoon,” he said, “and we can pool our ideas.”

“Report on what, Mags?” Floss asked. “We're only taking an old lady a few home-made cakes.”

“You know it's more than that,” he said, quite frostily, “and I think it's rather serious. I'm wondering if we ought to move out of this room. They could put us in one of those portakabins.”

Floss stared at him. “What do you mean… that somebody might try to attack us, or something?”

“Well, why not? Somebody wrecked Maude's flowers while we were asleep.”

“It was the
cat
, Mags,” Sam said in exasperation. “Keep calm, can't you, and stop imagining things. I'm off. See you later.”

“OK. How about meeting in the walled garden at five o'clock?” suggested Floss. She giggled. “We could have – what does the Colonel call it – a ‘light repast'?”

Cousin M had put together a pretty basket of goodies
for Miss Adeline: a brown loaf, still warm, some scones, two fresh eggs laid by Eunice, an eccentric brown hen that followed her round the gardens, and a posy of flowers. “Tell her that I'll call in later, to boil her a tea-time egg, if she'd like,” she said, watching them crunch off along the gravelled drive towards the Lodge.

Before they were halfway there, Sam trundled past on an ancient black bicycle. “See you,” he said, then he called back cheekily, “I'm off to dig up some
proper
history.”

“Why is he like that?” Magnus asked Floss.

“Like what?”

“So… so against things, so… sceptical,” he added, pleased to have found the correct word.

“I think he's just nervous. Sam doesn't like things he can't understand. He's very practical.”

Soon they were standing in front of a dark green door and lifting a knocker of polished brass. The door was freshly painted and the knocker gleamed. There were tubs of sweet-smelling flowers on the doorstep, in spite of the chaos of the overgrown garden that surrounded the cottage. It all looked cared for. Floss wondered if Cousin M had put the tubs there, wanting the old lady to smell some flowers, even if she could not see them very well.

They lifted the knocker three times but nobody
came. Then they listened, their ears close to the door, in case the old woman should be shuffling along to open it, but they could hear nothing.

“She's out,” Magnus concluded, disappointed and finding his mouth was watering at the smell of the new loaf and the scones. “What do we do now?”

Then, “No, she's not out, she's just very slow,” said a clear, high voice, and the green door was pulled inwards. “It's Magnus, Florence and Samuel, isn't it?” she paused. “But there are only two of you.” She had stretched out her hands and was feeling towards them, touching, first their arms and shoulders, then their faces. She was tiny and her body was bent almost double, and she peered up at them through rheumy blue eyes. “I don't see too well, but there
are
only the two of you. I'm right, aren't I?”

“Yes,” said Floss. “Sam – Samuel, my brother, couldn't come today. Cousin Maude sent you these things.” And she held the basket out.

“Well, come along to my drawing room,” said the old lady, closing the door. Her voice was not exactly bossy, but it was firm. She seemed used to being obeyed and she hadn't said please. Nor had she said thank you for the basket of good things. Magnus and Floss followed behind her very slowly because she could only creep along, down a cool narrow hall tiled in black and white diamonds, a hall hung with paintings which they
were dying to inspect. They were smaller than the ones in the Abbey but they looked equally ancient and many were of people in Elizabethan dress.

“Drawing room” sounded extremely grand, but the room to which Miss Adeline led them was small and low-ceilinged, beamed with a great inglenook fireplace and crammed in every corner with delicate old furniture, all carefully polished. They could smell beeswax and lavender. On the floor were faded, beautiful rugs and the shelves and windowsills were crowded with pieces of painted porcelain, with gilded plates on special stands and fragile cups and saucers. There was a glass-fronted cabinet full of silver.

Looking at everything, at the dark cottage room stuffed full of valuable artefacts that seemed to belong to a rather grander life, at a little parlour which the old lady had called a “drawing room”, Floss remembered what Cousin Maude had told her about Miss Adeline, when she was packing the goody basket. She didn't live on the Abbey estate because the Colonel felt sorry for her or because her family had been servants. Her family had owned it all, once. But, like so many other branches of it, they had been obliged to let it pass out of their hands because there had been nobody left to inherit. In her case, it should have gone to a brother, but he had been killed in the First World War. It was exactly as Colonel Stickley had told them. No family
survived intact long enough to inherit and pass it on to their children, and to their children's children. The lovely things in the cottage must have been in the Abbey once. Floss felt sad when she looked at them.

“Sit down,” said Miss Adeline. “I thought we might take tea in about an hour.” A table by the fireplace was already set out, with four cups and saucers and four plates, brown bread and butter and a cake, and jam in a glass jar. “Would you remove Samuel's cup and saucer for me?” she said, “as he is not coming.” Floss decided that she was more disappointed than annoyed. He really should have come. Old people who lived alone set great store by visits and they didn't like changes of plan.

She said, settling herself in a wing chair with a high back, “Maude tells me you are interested in the history of the Abbey, and that you've been asking her a lot of questions she can't answer. Why, may I ask? Why all these questions? The young people usually come here to play tennis, or to swim.”

Floss and Magnus exchanged looks, then they both looked rather sheepishly at the old lady who had leaned forward intently to listen, her tiny claw hands bunched together in her lap. A narrow shaft of sunlight filtered through a window on to her fine white hair and her string of small seed pearls, and on the red-purple Paisley scarf knotted round her neck. She was rather
sharp-featured and very thin but Floss decided that she must once have been rather beautiful. She had a regal air, she was somebody obviously used to giving orders. She hadn't been a servant girl, washing floors up at the Big House, but a child of the family.

“Because,” Magnus began courageously, in a firm voice, “we think there is something wrong here.”

Miss Adeline did not react nor seem put out in any way. She merely said, “I take it you have seen the Lady Alice Neale?”

“Yes,” said Magnus. “Well, I've seen something. And the other two have heard her crying – that is, Floss has.”

“Samuel heard her as well,” Floss added.

The old lady leaned back against the worn green chair and closed her eyes. “So she is abroad again,” she murmured. “It's the usual pattern. The young come, and she walks. Only when the Abbey is thoroughly emptied of its young will she leave it in peace. Unless—”

“Unless
what
?” Magnus said urgently. “What needs to happen?”

Miss Adeline looked at him blankly. She seemed quite unaware that she had been speaking her thoughts aloud. “Has she come out of her frame?” she said. “Is that what you are telling me?”

“Yes, I am.” She was so very calm and matter-of-fact about it that Magnus was encouraged to be matter-of-fact too. “Last night something definitely woke me up,
a woman, sighing and weeping. I followed the sound and when I got to the Great Hall, where all the pictures are, I saw the frame, where the portrait should have been, and it was blank.”

“What else did you see?”

“Nothing. The Colonel took me back to bed. He was awfully cross.”

“Where is bed?” enquired Miss Adeline.

“In the turret. On the top floor.”

The old lady sucked in her lips. “Where that silly girl fell from the window.”

“They've put bars up now,” Floss explained.

“There were always bars, my dear, it was a night nursery. I slept in it myself, with my brother Maurice. Magnus, bring me the silver photograph frame from the walnut bookcase,” she said.

Magnus did so and laid it carefully between her stiff, waiting fingers. The old lady brought it close to her face, then, to their amazement, she gave it a gentle kiss. “My lovely brother,” she said. “He was killed in the Battle of the Somme. He was eighteen years old, cannon fodder. It was a war fought by children.”

Silence filled the room like something totally solid. Floss wanted to reach out and touch the old lady who sat clutching the photograph, as fragile, suddenly, as her delicate china cups. She said, “We are sorry, Miss Adeline.”

“Thank you, Florence. At my age, you live mainly with ghosts. There's nobody much else left.”

Then she said, in a firmer voice, “Has she visited you in the turret room?”

“Yes,” said Magnus, “and she seems angry. For example, Cousin Maude put some flowers in there for us, and they were wrecked.”

“What kind of flowers?”

“I'm not sure. Could they have been peonies? They looked a bit like roses, but they had no smell.”

“Go into the hall, Magnus,” she ordered. “On your left, by the grandfather clock, you'll see a small picture. Bring it to us, please.”

Magnus set off again to find the picture. It all felt so strange to Floss and yet, somehow, right, almost inevitable, Magnus taking these orders from the half-blind old lady, unquestioning, with the obvious feeling that all of it was meant to be. She did not mind at all sitting quietly by. And she was glad Sam had gone to the village. She felt there might be a purpose in that, too.

The picture Magnus unhooked carefully from the wall was identical to the one he had seen in the Great Hall in the Abbey – the head of a small pretty-looking boy with a white flower between his fingers. He said, placing it carefully in her lap, “It's the same one as in the Abbey, isn't it? I asked Colonel Stickley about it.”

“This is the
original
,” said Miss Adeline, moving her fingers across the surface of the painting, as if they could perform the act of seeing for her useless eyes. “The one in the Abbey is a copy. Now the fact that the painting was copied indicates to me that this young boy was important. But nobody knows who he was. What did the Colonel tell you, Magnus?”

“That he might have been a son of Lady Alice, but that nobody really knows. He's not in the parish records or anything.”

“Correct,” said Miss Adeline crisply, but she seemed to Floss to be definitely thawing, and very excited at having a story of her own to tell, and two eager children to tell it to. “The next thing you need to know – just to keep the facts straight – is that these white flowers are one of our clues. They are not peonies, by the way, peonies don't flower so early in the year, and they're bigger blooms. They're an old-fashioned English flower, quite rare. Oh, it's an impossible Latin name. I did know it once. Let me try and remember…” She screwed up her face in a great effort of concentration.