The Triple Goddess (155 page)

Starting at the top floor, the pair spent hour after hour examining walls and floors and ceilings, tapping wood panelling, testing cracks and anything else that showed signs of hollowness or looseness, and crawling into cupboards. They were soon both covered in dirt, and Jenny was hoarse from shouting instructions and encouragements to McJoist, who complained continually about his aching bones, the dust in his eyes, and the cruelty of Jenny’s demanding such work of an octogenarian.

When much later she decided that they would start again at the beginning, McJoist unbuckled his belt, dashed it on the floor, and swore that he would drop dead if so compelled, and a blessing it would be. Jenny was prepared for this, and produced, from a satchel of useful items she’d brought with her, a restorative bottle of malt whisky. She hadn’t wanted him to know she had it until necessary, but it was clear that moment had come.

Suggesting they sit down at the top of a staircase, Jenny watched as McJoist, mollified, pulled the cork out and set to refreshing himself with such enthusiasm that she had to wrest the bottle from him. She smacked the stopper home with the flat of her hand, to indicate that it would not be coming out again any time soon, and observed that a veined flush had replaced the pallor in the Clerk of Works’ cheeks, under the streaks of dirt and dust.

‘Please, Jock,’ she implored, ‘just a while longer. Trust me, I had a feeling back there, and I think we should go over it one more time. Then I promise we’ll stop, and you can have a drop more before we go down.’

The ploy was effective, and McJoist recovered the firmness of his limbs. As certain as he was that there was nothing to find, he reckoned that another half hour spent in proving it would be worth the pay-off; plus it would afford him the pleasure of being right. Then he could have some more of the excellent whisky, and probably get to keep the bottle for company for when he retired to the fireside in his own snug quarters that night. For this being a Sunday and Mrs Furness the cook’s night off, instead of eating his supper in the castle kitchen he would be dining at home on the mutton and onions, neaps and tatties, that were slow-cooking in the kettle.

Setting such thoughts aside for the time being, after Jenny had taken from her satchel and quickly eaten the second half of a sandwich she’d saved from earlier, and down half a pint of water from a bottle, and after he’d refused the biscuits that she tried to press upon him to mop up the whisky, the Clerk of Works got up and dragged the ladder back down the passage to go over the same area again.

When nearly all the ground had been covered again, they stopped at the foot of another staircase off a corridor, a narrow one, the shiny worn wooden banister rail of which surmounted a decorative wrought-iron baluster tracery of fleurs de lis.

McJoist propped the ladder against the wall at the foot of the stairs, wiped his forehead with a piece of cotton waste, grunted, and began to walk up. At the third step he stopped so abruptly that Jenny, who was hard behind him, bumped into him.

‘What the…move on, McJoist,’ she said with asperity, backing down two steps.

The old man looked upwards and scratched his head.

Jenny tutted. ‘Jock, why have you stopped?’

‘Hoots, cannae you see for yersel’, lassie?’ he said, twisting his head and frowning at her. Eleven or twenty-one years old, his manner of addressing her was the same.

‘See what? You’re not transparent. Keep going.’

‘I’m more’n one step ahead of you, it would seem. Pass the whusky.’

‘No. We agreed. Go on up, man.’

‘My point exactly. There is no up. I’ll tak just a drappie, lass.’

‘What do you mean, there’s no up? These are stairs, aren’t they? I knew I oughtn’t to have got the bottle out so soon. Heights aren’t the only thing you’ve lost your head for, Jock.’

‘What I’m saying,’ rejoined McJoist, ‘is that there’s niver been stairs here before, there’s nae call for them. My puir brains aren’t as befuddled frae my old stone jar or that wee dram I just had as a’ that, whatever you might think. There’s nae reason for these here steps, is my point.’

‘What? Why not?’

‘Why not, in consideration of there being nae floor above the one we’re on, as you should ken from your scampering about the premises as a bairn, missy. We’re on the top floor as it is. There’s nobbut over us but attics.’

‘
Mansards
,’ said Jenny.

‘An attic’s an attic in my book. Anyhoo, we’ve been doun this corridor a hundred times a’ready today, and up it a hundred more, and I’ll be hanged if there was a staircase here before, nor has there ever been to my knowledge, so happen there’s more to this than meets the e’e after a’. ’Orrible Ott...I mean, your husband cannae have had anything to do with it.’

‘Well, there’s only one way to find out.’ Jenny gave McJoist a shove.

It was a steep flight, and to Jenny’s amazement and Jock’s satisfaction, at the top there was nothing but a small landing against a blank whitewashed wall, a dead end. Jenny hammered on the wall with her fists, to what purpose she didn’t know. More sensibly, McJoist did the same with the wooden mallet that hung from a loop on his tool-belt, working his way methodically around, down, and across in search of a stud or hollowness. But all was solid stone.

Giving up, the pair sat on the landing side by side with their backs against the wall, and McJoist looked wistfully at Jenny’s satchel.

‘I’ll agree this doesn’t make any architectural sense,’ said Jenny, her head in her hands. ‘Why would someone build stairs to nowhere? Could it have been blocked off deliberately, d’you think, to hide something?’

‘Like I said, missy, there’s niver bin a staircase here, old or new, and that’s certifiable, like half your family. Going back a ways, that is,’ he added gruffly.

Jenny considered. ‘I suppose one of them may have been responsible. Great-great-grandfather “Potty” Plantagenet, for example. He drops in for dinner occasionally; slurps his soup, bangs mashed potato off his spoon handle at his portrait on the wall, eats off a jewelled poniard, and belches. He loves his food, does Potty. He used to live in the kitchen, with a bed next to the dogs, so that he could get his food quicker and while it was still hot.

‘Potty’s cousin, Barkynge Plantagenet, lived in a suit of armour, the vizard of which was forever dropping, so that he had to keep flipping it up like people flick their hair out of their eyes.’

McJoist said, ‘A man I hadn’t seen for a while strolled by the woodshed last week, while I was doing some chopping, and told me I wasn’t using the axe right. I told him I’d been doing it this way nigh on seventy year, but he was welcome to show me how and finish the job.

‘He laughed and said, if I recall correckly,

“When somethin’ needs doing, a Plantagenet

Prefers to just sit and imagine it;

As a breed we are lazy,

And some of us crazy,

So it’s best not to ask in effectin’ it.”

‘Then he lit a cigar and left.’

‘That was Useless Eustace. He talks in limericks.’

‘Useless or not, I’d say your bogle ancestors ought to rally round, seeing as you’re prepared to keep them in house and hame after they’re dead.’

Jenny nodded. ‘You’re right, Jock. As the poet said, “Death opens unknown doors”.’

‘A Plantagenet poet?’

‘There’s not a poetic bone in the family skeleton, Eustace’s limericks are as good as it gets. No, that’s Masefield, I think.’

Jenny got to her feet and exclaimed, ‘Come on, you Plantagenets, you heard the man—help us out here!’

A moment later, McJoist winced at a sudden discomfort in his back, where it was leaning against the wall, and turned. Then he scrambled to his feet with alacrity for one of his years, and Jenny, sensing that some alteration must have occurred to make him move so fast, did the same.

‘Well I’ll blethering be,’ breathed the Clerk of Works.

They stared. Where there had been nothing but plaster and paint was now a door: an oaken door studded with iron bolts and banded with scrolled hinges.

‘Thank you, Plantagenets,’ shouted Jenny.

Fearful that the door was about to disappear again, she grasped the ring handle, and was about to turn it when she changed her mind, and knocked instead; gently at first and then, after a pause, louder.

No sound came from within.

‘It’s probably just storage,’ said McJoist, hopefully, remembering his neaps and tatties and stone jar before the fire. Hunger was overcoming curiosity.

Apprehending excitement, Jenny said, ‘I very much doubt it, a storage room doesn’t have a serious door like this.’ And she knocked again.

As they waited, McJoist cleared his throat. ‘You could try opening it, lass, instead o’ chapping awa’. Doors often respond favourably to sich treatment.’

Jenny felt nervous for the first time. ‘You do it, Jock.’

He reached for the handle and twisted it. There was the click of a raised latch on the other side, but when he pushed the door it didn’t budge, nor did it respond to a heave from his shoulder.

The Clerk of Works took off his cap and scratched his head. ‘Locked, I reckon.’

‘The genius McJoist.’ Regretting her rudeness, Jenny raised an aggrieved voice and addressed the air a third time. ‘What reason can there be for a door to be first invisible and then locked against me in my own home?’

‘There’s no answer to tha’,’ said McJoist sourly; he was losing sympathy with his mistress’s mission, and the effect of the whisky had worn off.

Jenny pointed to the great bunch of keys, the symbol of the Clerk of Works’ office, at McJoist’s hip where it jostled against the tools in his belt. ‘The keys, Jock. Try the keys.’

The keys were so tightly clustered, in a ball, that they didn’t jangle as McJoist walked. Having carried them for so many years, for he never went anywhere without them, and being accustomed to lean to one side to compensate for the weight, for his tools were evenly distributed around his waist, meant that as soon as the Clerk of Works got home after work and unhooked the keys, he listed in the opposite direction. It was only later in the evening, when he had had his fill of whisky, that he returned to the vertical, as he marched ramrod straight to bed and toppled onto the mattress like a felled tree.

But sober, in theory there wasn’t anywhere in the castle that McJoist didn’t have access to, and now he removed the keys from his belt, and in practised sequence tried every one of the larger keys that might fit the lock.

But even the oldest of them, which looked as though it would have opened the entrance to a cathedral, didn’t fit.

‘Nae guid,’ he said; ‘and the wards are too heavy for picking.’

Jenny shook her fist at the recalcitrant portal, and again spoke loudly, ‘This is my castle by blood inheritance. There will be no secrets from me at Dragonburgh, and nobody can deny me passage. I, a Plantagenet, command this door to open!’

As they waited further, she sighed. ‘What a pain relatives can be.’

McJoist felt a twinge of sympathy. ‘I’ve nowt to say to that, lass. It’s all in a flower, as I understand it, that’s a’. Jist a flower.’

‘The Plantagenet name is derived from
plante genêt
, Jock, meaning the broom shrub.’

‘Och aye? I know veggies, not plants. But I’ll tak your wud for it.’

‘It is true that we have any amount of Scotch or common broom, botanical name
Cytisus scoparius
, growing around here. But there’s more to it than that. It came to be adopted as the family name and emblem when Gefroi, Duke of Anjou, who was the father of Henry the Second, wore a jaunty sprig of broom in his helmet on the field of battle, to atone for an evil deed. Though others have it that it was because Fulk the Younger, Gefroi’s father, was scourged with broom twigs before the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.’

‘Dinna fash yoursel’, but I know of one muckle glaikit man in this castle deserves a guid scourging.’

Jenny deflated. ‘Gosh, Jock, it would be too awful if we can’t get in. Let’s try something more practical. Could you take the door off its hinges?’

McJoist inspected the grain and fittings, and consulted the tools at his waist. He shook his head. ‘Not with what I’ve got wi’ me. From the inside only perhaps, but I hae ma doots, for it’s so ancient the hinges’ll have seized up more’n my own joints. Likely the wood’s warped into the frame too. No, nothing short of a battering ram is going to shift this braw chunk.’

The Clerk of Works reached for the steel-cased pocket watch in his frayed tartan waistcoat. ‘Crivvens, it’s much later than I thought. In fact, it’s about time for...’ And he gave the satchel a meaningful look.

This time Jenny did not object to producing the whisky, and McJoist took a mouthful, and then another, for fear that he would not see the bottle again. But even whisky strength was of no use when in frustration he barged at the door several times as a last resort.

‘Michty me!’ he gasped, panting and defeated; ‘I’m fair puggled.’ In need of liniment for his bruises, he took another pull from the bottle, there being no other liniment on hand.