The Empty Frame Read Free Page B

her. “Come on,” she chivvied gently, “we can talk about everything in the morning.”
    In the entrance hall, they discovered that their pile of luggage had been removed. Cousin M looked embarrassed. “Cecil must have taken it upstairs for you, that’s good.” But she spoke as if she meant the very opposite, as if she minded that Cecil, this remote cousin of Mum’s, who owned the Abbey together with Cousin M, had not bothered to come and speak to them.
    â€œHe goes to bed early,” she explained. “He’s a very early riser. He has his swim at six o’clock.”
    â€œCan we swim?” Sam asked.
    â€œOh, I should think so. I’ll have to talk to Cecil. He’s in charge of that side of things. Listen, dears, I’m sorry he’s gone to bed. He was annoyed with me, for gettingso behind. He likes to stick to his routines. We were all up to schedule until Arthur disappeared.”
    Floss suddenly remembered that this man Cecil’s surname was Stickley. He sounded like a Stickley, like a dried-up, withered old stick. She said, “Is Cecil our cousin as well?”
    â€œI suppose he must be, about a million times removed,” said Cousin M, stopping at the end of a long passage way and turning left at the bottom of a staircase. On the wall, a neat modern sign said To Turret Dormitories.
    â€œSo Cecil’s a sort of cousin,” Magnus said slowly. He liked getting an absolutely clear picture of everything, in his mind. “So who’s Arthur?”
    â€œMy boyfriend,” Cousin M said. “You’ll see him in the morning.”
    Now Magnus had seen the word “dormitories”, which suggested beds and therefore sleep, he seemed to have found a spare bit of energy and he began to climb the stairs. They were not ordinary stairs either, they were a stone spiral, enclosed within the fat tower they had seen at the corner of the Abbey buildings before the floodlights went off. He climbed quite enthusiastically, chatting a little to Cousin M. “There is Arthur here, and there is Cecil,” he said quaintly. “But who is that lady in the portrait?”
    â€œOh, don’t you worry your head about her,” said Cousin M. She still seemed reluctant to say any more.
    â€œI’m not worrying,” Magnus said firmly. “I’d just like to know.”
    â€œWell, her name was Alice, Lady Alice Neale. The Neale family lived here in the days of Elizabeth the First, and for quite a long time after that.”
    â€œAnd what did you say she’s supposed to have done?”
    â€œI didn’t say, dear, because I don’t know.” Cousin M had gone on ahead of him, rather quickly. Her excuse was that she needed to switch more lights on.
    Magnus had now got the message. There was to be no more discussion of the lady in the portrait tonight. “Alice… it rhymes with malice…” he said, quietly, as they clumped up a third flight of twisty stairs. Then he added, but only very softly, “It’s like her hands. It’s like her horrible claws.”

CHAPTER TWO
    Their bedroom was on the fourth floor of the fat tower, the top room of four which lay one beneath the next like the slices of a Swiss roll. Cousin M called it a dormitory and it was one of several that had housed the children who used to come to the Abbey for very expensive courses, to learn how to play professional tennis and to swim – to Olympic standard. The children did not come any more. Cousin M said that people no longer had the spare money to pay for such things.
    Magnus only knew about dormitories from school stories and so he had imagined a huge long room with rows of iron bedsteads, and a few old-fashioned washstands down the middle where you washed in icy-cold water while prefects hit you with bunches of twigs. His own life had been so full of torments that he was always escaping into books, where he sometimes found