The Empty Frame (8 page)

“Miss Adeline, he's fainted! What should I
do
?” Floss could hear that her own voice was shrill with panic. Nobody had ever fainted on her before and Magnus had hit the floor with an almighty thump. What a good thing the drawing room floor was carpeted, not tiled, like the hall. He could have injured himself terribly if he'd hit his head on something hard. He could have died, like the little boy who couldn't spell.

“It's all right,” said the old lady from her chair. “Give me my bag. It's hanging on that chair. Thank you.” While she was opening it she gave Floss calm instructions. “Sit on the floor with him. Now pull him up towards you and let him lean against your knees. Make a seat. Have you done that?”

“Nearly. Just let me… that's it. Got him,” Floss said, puffing and blowing. Magnus was very light but he felt like an absolute dead weight in her arms.

“Now, push his head down between his knees, no,
right
down. You must bring the blood back to his head. And here, make him take a good sniff of these, they're smelling salts. They'll help. It's only a faint, Florence.
It's probably a bit too stuffy for him in here. I feel the cold dreadfully, I'm afraid, so I keep it rather warm. Ah good. He's coming round already.”

Magnus, sniffing at the small green flask which Floss was holding under his nose, was making little moaning noises. Then he gave a sudden sneeze and looked round. “Where… what happened?” he said. “Why am I on the floor?”

“Just a little faint, Magnus. No harm done. No, don't get up yet, sit down there with Florence until you've got your sea-legs back again.” Miss Adeline sounded vigorous and young, not like the little old woman she actually was, all but invisible in her deep fireside chair, but the lively girl who had gone round to the bedsides of wounded soldiers, plumping up their pillows and bathing their foreheads.

“I suddenly felt sick,” he said. “I think I need some fresh air.”

The electric kettle, long since forgotten in the adjoining kitchen, had filled the low room with steam, reminding Magnus of the tea which was to accompany the carefully arranged bread and butter. The very thought of it made his stomach heave and he brought his hand up to his mouth.

“I've got to get out of this room,” he whispered to Floss. “I'll throw up if I don't get outside.”

Miss Adeline, who had heard this, put the smelling
salts back in her bag and slowly zipped it shut. “Perhaps you had better go home my dears,” she said kindly. “I suspect we've talked enough for one day. But take your time, Magnus, don't rush. Let your body adjust. A faint is always a little warning to us. Have you been overdoing things, I wonder?”

He stared at her blankly, on his feet again now but rocking slightly, trying in his mind to reach back to what they had been talking about before the darkness had come up and washed him away. Now he remembered. She had been telling them about the little boy who'd been confined in a dark space and perhaps even beaten to death by his own mother and father. The fainting was not exactly a warning but he understood what she was saying, that he had reacted with his body to something which his mind felt was too painful to bear.

He was feeling distinctly odd and his mind was fuzzy. He tried hard to recall the exact details of what Miss Adeline had told him so that he could write them down the minute he got back to the turret room, but he found that his brain wasn't processing things properly. He simply couldn't assemble the facts in any order and now he was developing quite a nasty headache.

All he knew was that talking with Miss Adeline had filled in some vital missing pieces of the jigsaw of events that had centred on the ghostly walk of Lady Alice
Neale, and that what she had told them must be thought about again, and talked over. But it was as if one part of him didn't want to do this, because it meant going back into his own past, the most horrific part of it where the pain and suffering was. Nobody else in the world knew that – unless it was Lady Alice herself.

Slowly the sick feeling left him and after he had sat quietly for ten minutes, they said goodbye to Miss Adeline and left her sitting in her green wing chair, eating bread and butter and sipping the tea which Floss had made, from one of her beautiful old cups. She had insisted that Floss took Magnus home, to lie down. But they had promised to come back in the morning if he felt better. She said she had more to tell them, if they cared to hear.

And Magnus had said yes, oh, yes please, anything she could remember. Before the fainting, he had particularly wanted to ask about the key to the tunnel, but he'd thought it better to wait until she volunteered more information herself. If she really trusted them she would tell them about it in due course. He very much wanted to find the tunnel, but it seemed too much to hope that it wouldn't have been blocked up years ago.

Floss said, as they walked towards the Abbey, “I do think you should lie down, Mags. You've gone terribly pale. I'll come up with you. I can sit and read.” She thought she might have a look at the sleep-walking
scene in the play. How astonishing that the old lady should have quoted that. “A rooted sorrow” was what had caused Lady Macbeth to walk in her sleep, wringing her hands and trying to wash the blood away. The Lady Alice Neale seemed similarly tormented.

As they approached the Abbey buildings they saw that someone had unloaded a lot of building equipment at the base of the turret. There were neat stacks of heavy planks, and a concrete mixer and a huge pile of sand under the trees. There were serious-looking electrical machines, too, amongst them was a drill, the kind used for breaking up pavements.

Magnus, whose cheeks were still pale, looked at all the equipment very carefully as they walked past towards the front door. “I should think they're going to dig into the base of the turret,” he said. “They'd need a big drill for that.”

“Why, Mags? Isn't it unstable already, because of its foundations drying out after all the heat waves? Won't drilling make it worse?”

“That's exactly it. It
will
be unstable and one way of making sure it doesn't fall down is to dig round the base, make some holes, and fill them with concrete. I think it's called ‘underpinning'. The Colonel's been given a grant to pay for it, according to Wilf. But he can't have known they were going to start so soon. Surely he wouldn't have allowed us to sleep up there if he'd known.”

“How do you know about underpinning?” asked Floss. Magnus's amazing general knowledge continued to surprise her. But she wasn't going to say so. She didn't want him to clam up on her.

He said quite casually, “Father Godless, that old priest I used to know, had a church that was falling down, and that was very ancient too. They underpinned it, to give it new foundations. There had to be some excavating first.”

“I see. So do you think they'll put us in one of those portakabins?”

“I don't know. Wilf says they're very damp and that there's mould on the walls. I suppose we could always go in the flat, with the Colonel and Cousin M.”

“I don't think there's any room,” Floss said. “It's pretty small. If we want to watch TV, Cousin M said that the best place is in Wilf's kitchen. It's a bit odd, making us watch in a kitchen when she's got a television in her sitting room, don't you think? She's so friendly to us in every other way.”

Magnus said, as they toiled up the spiral staircase to the dormitory, “Don't you think it's because of Colonel Stickley? He really doesn't want us around, does he? He's trying to make sure that we stay out of the way.” But he was thinking hard about the Colonel's missing son. He'd decided that the old man couldn't bear to be reminded of him, not knowing whether he was alive or dead, and that this was the
main reason he was being so off-hand with the three of them.

“Do you really want to move out of this room, Mags?” Floss said, wandering round it and looking appreciatively at the pretty curtains and bedcovers, the view of the river through the deep windows, the curious curved walls. “Does it make you feel funny, when you think about that girl falling out of the window?”

Magnus considered this, as he closed his eyes and got comfortable on his bed. “No. I've changed my mind, actually. I'd rather stay now. Wouldn't you?”

Floss hesitated. Then she said, “Yes, I think I would. Though I was a bit scared when I heard the voice. But it's funny, I've got used to the idea of Lady Alice being around, now. I feel almost as if we ought
not
to move rooms.”

“I feel that,” Magnus replied. “It's as if there was a purpose behind it, us coming here, to the Abbey. I do think something might happen, even if it takes ages.” And he thought again about ghost-spotting being like bird-watching, and about sitting tight and waiting.

Waves of tiredness seemed to be lapping gently over him and he knew he was falling asleep. “You don't have to stay here,” he said to Floss. “Go and find Sam. I'll come down when I wake up.”

“I'm staying,” Floss said firmly. “I don't want you fainting again, up here on your own, without me.”

Magnus was pleased because this meant that Floss cared about him. He started to say, “Thanks, Floss,” but he fell asleep before he got the words out.

She crept past him and squatted in front of the big fireplace. The piece of sticking plaster he had fixed across the crack looked just the same. But now she had time to examine it, she could see that it was all rather alarming. Certainly she'd be worried if such a big crack appeared in one of their bedroom walls at home, worried in case a heavy lorry went past and sent the wall collapsing into the road below.

She rummaged in her suitcase until she found a wire coat-hanger. These were very useful objects in their house. Mum used them to unblock the sink, and once she'd seen her father get into his locked car with one. Burglars must find them very handy. Carefully, she untwisted the hanger until she had a straight sharp piece of wire. Then she stuck the end of it through the crack, just above Magnus's strip of sticking plaster. She was amazed at how far it went in, before meeting solid wall. Before she withdrew it she wiggled it about to try and get a feel for how much space there was, inside the crack, and there was obviously quite a lot. The walls of the turret, the very oldest part of the Abbey, were terrifically thick.

When she tried to pull the coat-hanger out again, she discovered it was stuck. She must have bent it
somehow. She tugged and tugged and bits of plaster fell off the wall, but she couldn't get it to come out. So she pushed it further in, to free it, and the whole thing suddenly disappeared into the crack. She actually heard it fall down into the darkness with a tinny clatter.

A wave of real fear hit her then, fear that clutched at her throat, and all because of a crack in an old wall. Something she'd once read in a fairy story came into her head, nagged at her, and wouldn't leave her alone. “The inside is bigger than the outside.” But what did it mean exactly?

She settled down on the floor next to the sleeping Magnus and opened a book, not
Macbeth
, that was too scary, but a favourite, reassuring school story she had read many times before. She wasn't going to admit it to anybody but she was frightened lest the crack in the fireplace might widen to admit into the room the Lady Alice Neale.

“Floss! Mags!”

Floss opened her eyes, feeling very stiff. She was still sitting on the floor with her back against Magnus's bed, her school story open at page one. She must have dozed off before the end of the first paragraph. No wonder, it was incredibly hot, even in this thick-walled turret room.

“That's Sam,” said Magnus, getting off his bed and crossing over to the window. “He's sitting by the river.”

“Grub up!” he was shouting, then, “Light repast! Come and get it!” Magnus could see him waving a jug.

They made their way down the spiral staircase along the cool passages and past Balaam's donkey, forever bowing low before the angel, past Pontius Pilate, then out across the baked lawns. Arthur emerged from under some bushes and streaked in front of them, his pale gingery fur hardly distinguishable against the browning grass. “You can really see where the first Abbey buildings were now,” Magnus observed. “Look, those lines show where the walls must have been. Cousin Maude said it sometimes happens, when the ground gets very dry.”

“It's stifling,” Floss said. “Do you think it's to do with the ozone layer?”

“I don't know. But the lack of rain's got to be the explanation for all those cracks in the turret. Do you see the builder's stuff, Sam?”

“Yes. Suppose that means they'll put us somewhere else.”

“Not necessarily. They'll only be digging outside. And nothing's going to fall down in a hurry.”

“I'm glad about that.” Sam was trying to prise the lid off a tin. “Want a flapjack?” The top of the tin was embellished with labrador puppies. “Honestly, these puppies are wearing
bows.
I bet it's Maude's tin. I bet she'd give Arthur a bow.” He offered Magnus the flapjack.

“I don't think I'll have any,” he said. “I still feel a bit queasy. I'll just have some of the lemonade.”

“He fainted at Miss Adeline's,” Floss explained.

“Really? What was it like?” Sam was envious. He'd never fainted himself. It seemed to him that it was always the sensitive, delicate people who passed out, not the cloddish ones like him.

“Not great,” Magnus said shortly. “How did you get on in the village?”

Sam leaned back against a massive cedar tree that was spreading long shadows over the scorched grass. “Not bad. I discovered quite a lot actually. You ought
to come and see the Neale memorial in the church, it's really hideous, like something out of
Madame Tussaud's.
The whole family's in it, all kneeling under a great big canopy and all looking terribly holy, and there are loads of dogs and things, and loads of children.”

“How many?” asked Magnus.

“Don't remember, but loads, all lolling around. It's quite funny. There's a baby all squashed up by Lady Neale's feet. I thought it was a dog at first. The canopy makes it look as if they're all in bed.”

“I suppose the idea is that they're waiting to be transported to heaven,” said Magnus. “Was one of the children called William by any chance?”

“I don't know. All the inscriptions were in Latin.”

Floss interrupted. “William's not included in the memorial, Mags. Miss Adeline told us that.”

“I know. But I thought they might have put a baby in as a kind of symbol, you know,
code.
”

“Who's William?” asked Sam, not understanding any of this.

“He was one of Lady Alice's sons, and they think she might have killed him, or that his parents killed him between them.”

“Why? What on earth for?”

“Because he was thick, because he couldn't spell, or blotted his books, that kind of thing,” said Floss casually.

“
Really
? He was bumped off because he was thick?”

“Yes, really. Though there's a lot more to it than that, according to Miss Adeline.” Floss was enjoying imparting this information to the astonished Sam. But Magnus stood up suddenly, scooped up Arthur and walked with him down to the river.

Sam's eyes followed him along the grass. “What's up with him? Has he taken the huff again?”

Floss could feel herself going red. “I don't know. Perhaps I've been tactless, just coming out with it like that. He was OK with Miss Adeline, in fact we were getting on really well with her. That is, until she told us the story of this dead boy, and the theories about him. Then, well he just passed out. I suppose it reminded him of when he was little, and the way he was treated. But she wasn't to know, she was sweet,” she added loyally.

“So are you saying that this Lady Alice person walks about wailing and moaning because she accidentally killed her son, for being stupid?”

“Well, it's one of the theories, apparently. I thought you didn't believe in ghosts?”

“I don't.” But then Sam decided he'd better come clean and tell her what he'd discovered. “The people round here obviously do, though, like mad. I found a guidebook in the church. It doesn't say much, it's mainly about the area, about the local walks and things, but it
does
say that the Abbey's ‘the most haunted building in England'.”

“If you believe in hauntings,” said Floss. “I wish you could see Lady Alice for yourself. You're like Doubting Thomas in the Bible.”

Magnus, still cuddling Arthur, was walking slowly back towards them.

“He says ghost-hunting's like bird-watching,” she whispered.

“What have birds got to do with it?”

“Just that you have to be patient.”

“There's a tunnel under the river,” Floss said very casually, staring down towards the water, “Miss Adeline told us about it.”

“There can't be,” said Sam.

“Why not? There's the Mersey Tunnel and there's the Blackwall Tunnel. They go under rivers and they're huge. And look at the Channel Tunnel. That goes under an entire
sea
,” she pointed out.

“Yes. But here? What on earth for?”

“Well, think about it,” said Magnus quietly. “Think of the days when people were being persecuted for their religion. They used to hide priests in holes and things. People were shut in them for weeks sometimes. So why not an actual tunnel? You had a chance of escaping to freedom then.”

“It just sounds a bit far-fetched to me, that's all,” Sam said, but less confidently now.

So Floss explained. “One of the theories about the
little boy who died is that his tutor might have tried to get him away from the Abbey altogether, down the tunnel. That's what Miss Adeline told us. She definitely believes in it, well, she actually said she used to play in it with her brother. So it's got to be true. She's absolutely in her right mind, Sam.”

“I'd quite like to come with you, next time you go,” Sam muttered. He felt embarrassed now. If there really
was
a tunnel he'd certainly like to explore it, and if she'd told them so much about the Abbey then this particular old lady must still have all her faculties, not like his Aunt Helen.

“We're going back in the morning,” said Magnus. “We promised.”

They watched television that night, in the flat shared by Cousin Maude and Colonel Stickley. He had obviously relented – or Cousin Maude had drawn the line at the three children watching Wilf's tiny black and white set, in the kitchen. Nothing was said about the builders. They had brought all their equipment and then gone away again. The three children had agreed not to raise the matter themselves. After all, they might have gone home before the men came back again.

Nobody was concentrating very hard on what was on television. It was too hot and they all kept dozing off, Cousin Maude over a piece of embroidery and the
Colonel over his chess game with Sam. He'd been terrified when the old man had offered him a game, but he'd found his elderly opponent very patient, even a little encouraging. Floss cuddled Arthur who watched the television intently, with appreciative bursts of purring.

Magnus's mind was busy somewhere else, systematically going through all they'd learned so far about the Abbey and all that had happened since they'd arrived. Pretending to watch an inane TV programme on a flickering screen was a good chance to escape into one's private thoughts.

He went to bed early and immediately fell into a very deep sleep. Sam and Floss were more wakeful, Sam because he was hot and Floss because she was nervous of that long dark crack in the fireplace, down which the coat-hanger had disappeared. Part of her felt brave, though, and wanted to see the Lady Alice Neale face to face, as Magnus claimed to have done.

But ghost-spotting was like bird-watching according to him and that night, although she watched very carefully, the birds never came.