The Private Life of Elder Things

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Richmond put his sherry glass down on the mantelpiece, having found it too difficult to juggle both that and the notepad. “You wish me to dispose of the harpy as well?”

  “Well, as you see fit. So long as the rooms are found, I can tolerate some vermin within the wainscoting.”

  Richmond nodded thoughtfully and chewed at his lower lip.

  “You feel you are up to the task, then?” Thale asked.

  There was barely a moment’s hesitation. “Yes, sir. You may put your entire trust in me. Of course … it would be of great assistance to me if your butler could supply a full list of the rooms, extant and missing, if such a thing exists. It would save me a lot of time to begin with.”

  “Certainly.” Thale waved a nonchalant hand. “Naotalba will bring you a list first thing in the morning. You won’t be starting tonight at any rate – it’s so much easier to find the doors by daylight.”

  “I will begin with the dawn,” Richmond assured him, “but it may take some time to complete the entire inventory.”

  “I understand. Naotalba will show you to your room. I believe you will be sleeping in the Red Bedchamber. Is that correct, Naotalba?”

  “Sir.”

  “Hmm. That room is not entirely reliable, I'm afraid – bit of a borderline case; you could have a disturbed night if you’re unlucky. But then, Richmond, if you’re not capable of dealing with that little eccentricity then you'll have very little chance of coping with the rest of the house. Fair’s fair, eh?”

  Richmond dipped a small, stiff bow. “I'm sure I shall be quite satisfied with the sleeping arrangements.”

  He was led out through the far door of the Drawing Room, through a pillared hall from which two great semi-circular flights of stairs swept up to the higher floors of the house, and beneath one of those cascades of steps toward a long corridor. As they passed through, a movement on the balcony above caught Richmond’s eye, and he looked up sharply. A woman was leaning over the balustrade, staring at him with an expression that was certainly not indifferent but was otherwise ambiguous. As far as he could make out in that brief glimpse, she was young and informally dressed, the white of her blouse contrasting with her intensely dark hair. That was all he was able to determine before Naotalba’s lamp passed under the stair and darkness engulfed the scene. Richmond was forced to hurry after him to keep up with the circle of light.

  They reached a door, one of many ranged along an oak-panelled stretch of corridor. “Fifth door on the left after the tapestry of Saturn and His Children, sir,” Naotalba said. “Usually.”

  The walls of the chamber were papered scarlet, the hangings of the old-fashioned bed made of blood-coloured velvet. A fire burned brightly in the grate, and laid out upon the counterpane was a silk nightshirt. Naotalba lit a taper and processed about the room, lighting candles in silver sconces. “I trust you will be comfortable here, sir. The bed has been thoroughly aired. There is a bathroom on the other side of the corridor, one or two doors to the right. If you require a bath tomorrow I shall be pleased to have hot water brought for you. Breakfast will be served at seven. Is everything to your satisfaction?”

  “Perfectly,” Richmond said, putting his case down on the bed. “Thank you.”

  “Then I shall wish you a good night, sir.” Noiseless as a ghost, Naotalba bowed and withdrew. Richmond strolled to the window, pushed open the curtain and wooden shutter, and looked briefly down into the garden. The rain must have ceased at some point since he had entered the house; now a strong wash of moonlight lay over the panorama. He judged he was at the back of the building because he could make out the stable-block and a lake. He drew the curtain once more. Then he turned back to the bed, opened his case and took out a pistol, a box of ammunition, a large gold fob watch and a cheap novel.

  He placed the first of these items under the bolster at his bed-head. After washing at the bowl and ewer on the side-table, he undressed, slipped into the nightshirt provided and climbed into bed. He sat up for some minutes reading, but was interrupted when the candles by his side went out, quite suddenly, without flickering or guttering. He looked about him sharply at that point. One by one the other candles in the room extinguished themselves, darkness swelling to fill the vacated space. Finally the fire itself dimmed, sank and went out.

  Richmond sat in the dark for a few moments, then shrugged, put aside his book and spectacles, and lay down for a night of dreamless slumber.

  *

  When Naotalba arrived the next morning, bearing breakfast on a tray, Richmond was already up and dressed and gazing out of the window at the lake in the garden below.

  “Did you sleep well, sir?”

  “Perfectly,” said Richmond. “There does seem to be a problem with the lighting, but it was only a minor inconvenience.”

  Naotalba’s white brows rose. “You were not … troubled … by the phenomenon then, sir?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “I'm very glad to hear it. Some of our past guests have found it quite distressing.”

  “Clearly I am possessed of a less sensitive nature,” Richmond said, sitting down and looking at the breakfast. “Do you have the list I requested?”

  “Certainly,” Naotalba said, lifting a folded document from the tray and tucking it under Richmond’s saucer. “Will there be anything else, sir?”

  Richmond speared a mustard-basted kidney with his fork. “Umm … I won’t be sitting down to luncheon. If you could provide me with some sandwiches that would be fine, thank you.”

  “Of course, sir. The master has requested that you join him for dinner tonight at seven.”

  “Hmm.” Richmond nodded over a mouthful of kidney. He unfolded the paper with the hand not wielding the fork and glanced down the list. “Do you have any information that would help me get started?”

  Naotalba inclined his head. “Only in the general sense, sir. The corridors are reliable, as is the great staircase. Other stairs, except the ones from the kitchen, are liable to get one lost. The second floor is considerably more intricate than the ground or the first. The attic rooms are largely servants’ quarters or empty, or at least that is the intended situation. If you wish to enter the cellars you will have to ask myself or Mrs Taylor, the housekeeper, to unlock the gates. The Picture Gallery, should you intend to investigate that avenue of approach, is on the first floor.”

  “Thank you.”

  “If that is all, sir, I shall go and see that your sandwiches are prepared. And if you will permit me the liberty, I should like to wish you the best of luck.”

  With a bow, he retired. Richmond, absorbed in the list of rooms, forgot to keep chewing and simply read.

  *

  After breakfast, he began to compile something which, while it could never be a map of the house, might be a guide. With sheaves of paper in his arm, he began a systematic search of every room, starting from his own. In each chamber he recorded the orientation, the features, the exits and any signs of occupancy. In each room, too, once he was satisfied of its position, he would pull from his waistcoat pocket that object that might be taken for a gold watch, and make a series of delicate adjustments to the mechanism. Complex cross-referenced diagrams became a necessity. He discovered that there were two interior light-wells in the centre of the house, complicating the ground-plan. Even if Lithly House had been entirely mundane and passive it would have been easy to lose one’s way between rooms.

  But of course, the house was not passive. Richmond stumbled across the first anomaly almost at once: whilst there was a connecting door between the bedroom with the bamboo wallpaper and the small chamber with the harpsichord, it was not possible to move back from the latter to the former once the sneck had clicked shut, for the same door only opened into a cupboard full of broken violins. Instead one had to take the roundabout route back into the corridor, past the bust of Pan, and into the Bamboo Room that way.

  Whilst a little unnerving, that particular manifestation of the house’s nature was harmless and,
it seemed, fairly stable. Richmond rapidly came across other, more extreme, examples. Walking up a narrow flight of stairs from the second floor, before the morning was even half over, he came out through the pantry door into the basement kitchen. The cook looked up, startled, from the meat she was chopping, while two scullery-maids idling by the fire glanced at each other and giggled. Richmond blinked, turned around and retreated down the stairs – only to emerge at once through a narrow door onto a balcony space right at the edge of the roof of the house, three storeys up, the cold wind whipping at his hair. At his back the door blew shut with a crash, and seemed to have wedged by the time he turned to open it. Richmond was forced to stumble fifty yards along the edge of the roof with his feet in the lead trough of the gutter, leaning on the bank of slates for fear of falling off to his death. He held on to his papers only through the utmost determination. Reaching a gabled attic window, he was unable to force the frame and resorted at last to smashing the glass and dropping through into the room below.

  That chamber turned out to be filled with swathes of yellow sand, draped and banked right up to the rough wooden walls. A few cacti were growing among the small dunes. Richmond floundered to his feet and watched a lizard dart away under a rafter. He pulled a handkerchief from an inside pocket, wiped his spectacles carefully upon it and made more notes on his papers. Then he scrambled over to the door of the room, which thankfully opened outward onto the corridor, and emerged in a small landslide onto the uncarpeted attic passageway.

  It took a certain amount of perseverance to regain the ground floor, and then more to retrace his route via kitchen and rooftop while doggedly working out easier lines of access to the rooms in question. This once done, he reset his watch in each room. The scullery maids sniggered and whispered at each of his reappearances. Having satisfied himself that there was no more need to make the journey along the guttering and through the broken window, Richmond decided to concentrate on the suite of rooms around the westernmost light-well, which seemed determined to resist mapping. It took him the rest of the morning to work out that the Linen Cupboard could be accessed from the Billiard Room, but only if that chamber was originally entered from the Chinese Parlour.

  When some distant bell tolled one, Richmond sat down and ate his ham sandwiches and a hard-boiled egg in the back row of the small Theatre at the extreme west end of the house. Although the auditorium, lit by gas mantles, was filled almost to capacity, his companions were not talkative. Each and every member of the audience – most of them on their feet in attitudes of extreme excitement and delight – was composed of fine Delian marble, intricately sculpted down to the last curl on the last periwig. Their appreciative attention was focused on the stage, whereon resided a black-lacquered Japanese box with brassbound doors. Richmond munched his sandwiches and stared thoughtfully at the box, but left the room without investigating its contents.

  His work went well during the afternoon, and by the time Naotalba came to find him, carrying an oil lamp against the gathering dusk, he had managed to tick off a third of the rooms on the butler’s list. He had glimpsed the Egyptian Bedchamber through a connecting door but had been unable to locate it subsequently. In the Trophy Chamber he had remarked upon the mounted heads of a number of mythical beasts. The Candle Room had turned out to be painted entirely black, and to indeed contain nothing but a softly burning candle of greyish tallow.

  Naotalba found him seated on a horsehair sofa, writing. The pages were covered in the young man’s tiny neat handwriting: cross-referenced, arrowed, asterisked and underlined.

  “Dinner will be served in an hour, sir,” the butler announced. “Your evening attire has been laid out, and I have drawn you a bath.”

  “Very well,” Richmond murmured, not raising his face. “What room is this?”

  “The Charlett Room, sir,” Naotalba replied, drawing the long curtains across the bay window. The heavy material, patterned like chestnut hair sprigged with blue ribbons, stirred in a draught. “Named after a friend of the family.”

  Richmond ticked off another line with an air of satisfaction. “Excellent.”

  In his own chamber he found the formal evening attire provided by his host. It fitted passably well. When the dinner gong rang he proceeded to the Dining Room – a well-trodden and therefore entirely mundane route – where Thale was already seated at a highly polished table. On his right-hand side sat a dark-eyed young woman, the one Richmond had seen last night leaning over the banister. Beyond her sat a slender man with a Mediterranean complexion.

  “Ha – no problem finding the dinner table then?” Thale joked. “Sit down, Richmond. May I introduce you to my daughter, Camilla? And this is Nikolaos Aldones, my personal secretary.”

  Richmond bowed shortly across the table to each in turn. Camilla met his eyes with a dark stare, but did not respond to his greeting and Richmond’s polite smile broke upon the walls of her reserve. She was a strikingly handsome woman, dressed very formally in pearl-grey silk, and she carried herself with a contemptuously proud air, but despite this her pallor and the black smudges under her eyes betrayed a lack of ease.

  “Very pleased to meet you,” Aldones said silkily, rising and shaking Richmond’s hand. His grasp was slightly too warm.

  “How goes your task?” Thale asked.

  “Quite well,” said Richmond as a heavy china bowl was placed in front of him by a servant. The soup was meaty and rather pungent. He unfurled his linen napkin. “I did find one locked door on the first floor that I wished to ask you about.”

  “The one at the top of the stairs? That is my own chamber,” Thale explained. “Behind that door lie the Master Bedroom and the Agamemnon Bathroom only, I can assure you.”

  “Thank-you,” said Richmond, making a mental note. “I should also report that I have found the Clock Room, which I believe had previously been mislaid.”

  “Oh really? Splendid! Where?”

  “Through the Silk Dragon Bedchamber. Perhaps you have noticed the large mirror on the door? If you press upon the mirror-frame instead of the door handle, it opens an entirely different egress from the room, and the Clock Room is down a short corridor.”

  Aldones raised one eyebrow and applauded archly: “Congratulations.”

  Camilla stared down at her untouched soup.

  “Goodness me! Well done, Richmond – that was smart work. The Clock Room has never been down that end of the house that I can remember. Hmm. Well, that must be noisy on the hour. We must make sure not to put guests in that bedroom if we can help it.”

  “It was the chiming that alerted me,” Richmond admitted.

  “Ha! Well, good show. Have you been up to the Picture Gallery yet?”

  “Not yet, sir. I had planned a reconnaissance trip after dinner.”

  “Well, don’t take too long about it,” said Thale. “Aldones here was hoping you'd match him in a game of billiards.”

  Richmond didn’t miss the smile on Aldones’ face, nor the sneer that curved Camilla’s full, purplish lips. He allowed himself a non-committal nod. The rest of the soup-course was finished in silence. Richmond just had time to take in the glazed picture on the bottom of his dish – a satyr of quite improbable proportions chasing a nymph – before it was cleared away and a plate of veal in a sour cherry sauce substituted before him.

  “Ah,” said Thale as the many side-dishes were arranged upon the tablecloth and Naotalba served all the diners with a rich Burgundy. “The gastronomic pleasures, the one appetite that one never outgrows, and the only delight left to me these sad days.”

  Aldones sniggered openly.

  “Hardly, father,” said Camilla. Richmond nearly dropped a spoonful of peas upon hearing her speak. She had a lush, deep voice like the purr of some jungle cat.

  “Indulge me, child,” Thale sighed. “If you cannot respect my advanced years, then pity the fate that has left me a cripple.”

  “Your own pity is quite sufficient,” Camilla replied. “And you brought your current state u
pon yourself.” She impaled a piece of veal with a kind of indifferent savagery.

  Aldones coughed and reminded her, “It was an accident,” but she didn’t bother to indulge him with so much as a glance. Her brooding gaze kept returning to Richmond’s face, which was putting him off his own meal.

  Thale laughed a thin-lipped laugh. “Of course you are right, my dear. I should not have gone out hunting. I should not have been tempted to desert my post.” He considered Richmond for a moment and then seemed to reach a decision to elucidate. “But I’ve been almost a recluse since the death of dear Mrs Beaumont – so heartbreaking, that was, and the London season has hardly been worthwhile without her parties – and it has been too long since I’ve felt the blood really stirring. I was probably a little reckless in taking the fences, and certainly am not as fit as I used to be. It turned out I had broken my leg…” Thale sighed and regarded the folds of tartan blanket laid over his lower body. “The limb would not mend, despite the best care. I was obliged to have it amputated, and chose to do so without ether. You might suppose that I would have been an enthusiast for that sort of thing, but although the experience was … intense … I do find that the inconvenience of mobility I am now labouring under rather outweighs the interest afforded by the extremity of sensation.”

  There was a long silence.

  “More wine, sir?” Naotalba asked, gliding up to Richmond’s elbow.

  “What? Ah— No, thank you.” Richmond became aware that all the other diners were watching him; Aldones with a crooked smile, Camilla with a glare sharper than a scalpel, and Thale purse-lipped, appraising, attentive. Each in their own way, Richmond realised, was savouring the moment. He put his fork down with an audible clink.

  “A very fine veal,” he said, “most delicious. My compliments to your cook.”

  Camilla began to laugh, her head thrown back so that it could bubble unimpeded from the long pale length of her throat. It was not a kindly sound. Then she folded her napkin and stood, smiling for the first time at Richmond. Without asking her father’s leave or bidding anyone farewell she strode from the dining room.