are
hardly any outside doors. A morbid person could start to feel imprisoned in this house/*
Dipper stifled a yawn very artfully, but Julian was not deceived. "You’d best go to bed.”
"I don't mind sitting up, sir.”
“But I mind. You disturb my meditations. I keep wanting to look around suddenly, to see if I can catch you nodding off.” Dipper grinned. “When will you be getting up, sir?”
“Hugh Fontclair’s taking me to a horse fair in the morning, so you’d better wake me at some ungodly hour. Seven should be ungodly enough. If I won’t get up, bring a spear from that arsenal downstairs and prod me until I do.”
“Yes, sir. Good night, sir.” Dipper went out.
Julian explored his room more closely. It was a handsome apartment—the Fontclairs were justly proud of it. The walls were panelled from floor to ceiling in highly polished oak slabs, each panel divided lengthwise into three squares, and each square with a lozenge set inside it. Four marble maidens, the Seasons, held up the mantelpiece, while around them swarmed mermaids, satyrs, cupids, and mythical beasts. On the ceiling were vivid stucco reliefs of Elizabethan hunting scenes. The Fontclairs’ coat of arms, in painted and gilded wood, appeared at intervals along the cornice and even, to Julian’s amusement, on the door of the water closet.
Most of the furnishings were modern, but the massive bed, with its elephantine posts and crimson curtains, could only be Tudor. There were other Elizabethan touches: pewter candlesticks, a linenfold chest, and a portrait of a lady in a ramrod-straight bodice, with a ruff like a white platter round her neck. A pier looking glass hung near the door. The washstand, which had its own small mirror, was mahogany, with a white porcelain basin, a gilt soap dish, and two crystal glasses. There was a white towel draped over a rack at the side, and a gilt ewer on a shelf below.
The early June night was chilly, and the fire did not warm the room very much. None of Rumford’s improvements marred the quaint, hopelessly inefficient fireplace. The cold made Julian feel industrious, and he decided to write a letter. He sat down at a small
writing table in the window recess. In this little alcove, with the stained glass behind him, he felt like St. Augustine in some Renaissance painting.
He wrote for a while, but there was something disquieting about this night, this place. It was the silence, he realized—that awful silence of a country night that falls so hauntingly on a city-dweller’s ears. No carriage wheels on cobblestones, no clattering hoofbeats, no watchmen crying the hour, no revellers carousing in the streets. Of course, this room was bound to be especially quiet. As Philippa had pointed out, it was the only occupied room in this part of the house. Unless, of course, that ancestor who had taken part in the Babington Plot really did haunt the great chamber across the hall. Julian pictured him dancing there in some Elizabethan galliard, surrounded by ghostly companions in platter-shaped ruffs. Perhaps if he listened closely he would hear their minstrels playing—
What he heard was a rap on his own door. The sudden noise, more than the unexpected intrusion, made him start. He took an instant to collect his faculties, and called, "Come*in.”
5. The Family According to Guy
The figure who appeared in the doorway, with his long hair, knotted red neckerchief, and boots, might have passed for an Elizabethan privateer, come to join the spectral masque in the great chamber. But it was Guy Fontclair, his face flushed and his gait a little wobbly. Julian did not know Guy very well, but he was not sorry to have someone to pass the time with, even if it meant having to look at the red neckerchief.
“Hello, Kestrel! Survived your first evening here, I see?”
"Did you think I might not?”
“I’m always surprised when anyone gets through dinner at Belle-garde without visible wounds. Mind you, it didn’t used