Chapter One #4
‘Where you usually weekend,’ I said. ‘For I am but a poor, humble servant girl. I spend my days in thankless toil below stairs for a cruel and capricious mistress.’
‘Oh, do shut up, there’s a poppet.’
‘Righto. But “we” haven’t weekended anywhere for ages – we’ve been too busy.’
‘Ah, but when we did, we weekended at some of the finest homes in Britain. Some of the finest in Europe, indeed.’
‘We did, it’s true. And more than one of them was a castle. But this one, as our American pal Ellie Wilson might say, is “something else”.’
‘Something entirely else. It looks a tad forbidding from the outside – one wonders what his architect has done with the inside.’
I nodded towards where JB was shaking George Wilson warmly by the hand and exhorting him and the others to follow. ‘I don’t think we’ll have to wait long to find out. If McIntyre doesn’t show us all soon I think he’ll burst with excitement.’
We joined the group and followed our host up the stone steps cut into the side of the cliff.
They were broad, with a sturdy wooden balustrade, and at first seemed very easy to climb.
By the time we reached one of the landings about halfway up, though, Dotty Bridgewater’s face was a fetching shade of scarlet and she asked to stop.
Edgar Everett gave an impatient pfft and carried on leading Clarice towards the top, with Robert Sidwell-Plant still hovering at her back with his arms slightly wide, like a goalkeeper ready to save a penalty. Patience rolled her eyes and followed them.
But Lady Hardcastle and I stopped at the landing with Dotty, as did her husband, whose face had acquired a similar carmine hue.
‘I think stopping for a moment is a marvellous idea,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘No point in exhausting ourselves before the weekend has even begun.’
‘Quite right, too,’ panted Bridgewater. ‘Just get my breath back, then we can press on. Don’t want to miss the tour.’
‘That’s a good point, actually,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘I definitely want to find out more about this fort of JB’s.’
Just these few moments’ pause had improved Dotty’s colour no end. ‘Then let’s not hang about, darlings. Onwards and upwards, as they say.’
We set off once more.
JB and the others had waited for us at the top of the steps, and once we arrived they, too, set off again.
The island itself provided the raised platform on which the fort stood, and the ground rose from the grass and gorse like a miniature mountain. The top had been flattened off – either by nature or gunpowder – and a castle had been built above it.
The path was freshly gravelled and led up a gentle slope towards the fort. Now we were almost upon it, the fort – though tiny compared with a proper grown-up castle like Dover or Windsor – was surprisingly imposing.
From a distance it had looked a little more like a Tudor manor house than a fort, with its white-faced walls and tiled roofs.
But now we were closer it was a good deal more formidable.
The walls might be fitted with windows but they were sheer castle walls, and I was willing to wager they’d be thick enough to withstand a decent pounding from a ship’s guns.
I wondered about this incongruity – a fearsome fort looking like a family home – but then it occurred to me that the side we could see was the side facing the land.
Perhaps the local lord had objected to having an ugly fort just off his coastline and had insisted on one or two homely touches to the exterior to make it less of an eyesore.
We couldn’t see the side which faced the Channel and its potential invaders, but I was willing to bet it was a good deal more forbidding in appearance. It was fine keeping the lord and his tenants comfortable, but you wouldn’t want invaders to feel welcome.
‘They certainly knew how to build a fort in the olden days,’ I said. ‘I’d not fancy taking it by force.’
‘You’d be lucky to get close enough to try,’ said Lady Hardcastle with a nod. ‘A handful of well-manned guns up on those platforms would make matchwood of an approaching ship. You’d not be able to return fire – your guns would all be angled to shoot at other ships, not castles in the sky.’
Eventually, we reached a modestly sized but impressively sturdy, iron-bound front door.
‘Welcome to my fortress,’ said JB proudly as he opened the door for us. ‘Come on in.’
I hadn’t quite known what to expect, but the luxurious yet somehow also cosy hall on the other side of the formidable door still came as something of a surprise.
The walls were hung with modern tapestries while the flagstone floor was covered with some sort of rush matting. It was a fort . . . but not a fort.
There were appreciative oohs and ahhs from the rest of the group.
JB pointed. ‘We’re going to put a reception desk over there in the corner. That door there leads to a small bunch of unused rooms and we’re going to convert the whole thing to an office and an apartment for the hotel manager.’
This elicited another round of appreciative mutterings.
Apparently pleased with our reactions, JB led us round the rest of his weekend retreat like visitors to a historic castle on a guided tour.
On the ground floor we caught a glimpse of the well-equipped, modern kitchen from where JB’s cook-housekeeper, Mrs Crawford, gave us a cheery wave.
Beyond the kitchen, we were told, were the butler’s pantry and the Crawfords’ own comfortable flat – JB was at pains to emphasize the ‘comfortable’ part.
The rest of the ground floor was given over to a cosy sitting room and a substantial library, both of which had windows looking out to the English Channel.
I guessed that the next landfall would probably be Guernsey.
Or perhaps Jersey. I resolved to consult the atlas I noticed on the bookshelves to confirm my guess as soon as I had a moment.
As with the hall, the walls were hung with modern tapestries, but now the flagstone floors were covered by luxuriant rugs.
A narrow, curved staircase led to the first floor, where JB took us to a beautiful ‘long gallery’.
I was getting a tiny bit disorientated by this point and I wasn’t entirely certain how it sat in relation to the rest of the fort, but in my imagination it was directly above the library.
It was certainly a similar shape and now served a similar function: it was JB’s museum and housed his nautical collection.
‘I figured the guests would appreciate it,’ he said.
Maps and charts, mostly of the waters off the north-eastern coast of America and Canada, lined the walls.
Cabinets and display cases held knick-knacks and doo-dahs from an assortment of ships, ancient and modern, as well as ships’ logs, letters, photographs and medals.
There was a captain’s jacket with what looked like a bullet hole in the chest on a tailor’s dummy.
My attention was caught by a display of scrimshaw and I wondered at the skill and patience of sailors who could carve such beautiful and intricate work while being tossed about by the stormy waters of the North Atlantic.
Everything was precisely arranged and fastidiously labelled.
‘I can’t stand mess and disorder,’ said JB with a chuckle when Sidwell-Plant mentioned the neatness. ‘You know that. I have to straighten everything up, “sort it all out” as you fellas say.’
There was a cabinet devoted to firearms and it contained a number of pistols and revolvers of assorted vintages, as well as boxes of ammunition of various types, presumably for the weapons on display.
Next to it was another cabinet containing a selection of knives of all shapes and sizes; some were tools, while others were very obviously weapons. Bridgewater was intrigued but, like everyone else, his attention quickly turned elsewhere.
Because the thing that immediately captured everyone’s imagination was what looked like an ivory spear. It was about five feet long and was carved with a spiral pattern.
‘I say, JB,’ said Bridgewater, ‘where the devil did you get that? Could do a chap a lot of damage with a spear like that.’
JB smiled. ‘It’s not a spear – it’s a narwhal tusk. Actually, it’s a tooth, but we call it a tusk.’
‘And what’s a narwhal when it’s at home?’ asked Patience Sidwell-Plant.
‘It’s an Arctic whale,’ said JB. ‘And the males grow one of these extra-long teeth. Points straight out of the front of their face. Kinda like a swordfish, if you can imagine it.’
‘Whatever for?’
‘Same reason males do anything – to impress the ladies.’
There were smirks and chuckles from the group.
‘Seems dashed impractical to me,’ said Patience. ‘How do you kiss a chap with a five-foot tusk sticking out of his face?’
More chuckles.
‘Extremely carefully, one imagines,’ said Bridgewater.
JB frowned. ‘I’m not entirely sure narwhals kiss. But this tusk’s just a small one. They can get up to ten feet long. Those are the males the lady narwhals really go for.’
‘I still say it would make a good spear,’ said Sidwell-Plant. ‘You’re sure the people who live up there in the Frozen North don’t use them?’
JB was still baffled. I remembered from our previous meetings that he still wasn’t quite used to the English habit of making a joke of absolutely everything.
He was a funny man with a well-developed sense of humour, but in JB’s world there was a time for levity – and this, it seemed, was not that time.
I wondered if his other friends had noticed that, too, and were teasing him.
Bridgewater and Sidwell-Plant began to mime a fight between two men armed with five-foot ivory spears. George Wilson joined in, taking a fencer’s stance and miming, using the tusk as a sword. The three of them were giggling like schoolboys over their mock battle, but JB had already moved on.
A fair amount of the floor was given over to bedrooms, and I thought I counted six, served by three comfortable, surprisingly modern-looking bathrooms. We passed them quickly on our way to the other side of the building.
Next we were shown a luxuriously carpeted drawing room furnished with an improbable number of comfortable armchairs and a gleaming Blüthner piano. Despite its impressive size – the room was large enough to accommodate a billiards table at the far end – it was nevertheless warm and inviting.
My gaze lingered for a while on the piano, and I once more allowed myself to hope that it might be put to use to accompany Clarice later on. At the very least, Lady Hardcastle could bash out a couple of tunes.
Next door was the dining room with its long, oak table.
Something about the arrangement of the rooms was troubling my servant mind, but it was Sidwell-Plant who voiced the pertinent question.
‘Good place to have the dining room,’ he said. ‘I could look at that view of the Devonshire coast all day. But why put it upstairs? Shouldn’t it be nearer the kitchen? I don’t envy your man Crawford having to haul your supper up those stairs.’
JB gave a little chuckle. ‘Ah, but that’s because you’ve not seen my pride and joy. Look over here.’
He walked over to a pair of small doors on the wall next to one of the windows and opened them.
Inside was a reasonably sized, completely empty cupboard.
He pressed a button on the door frame and the interior of the cupboard began to move downwards, soon revealing a steel cable attached to the top of what we could now see was a box mounted inside a wood-lined shaft.
The whole thing moved silently but reasonably swiftly, and the box was soon out of sight.
‘It’s a dumb waiter,’ said JB. ‘We have them a lot in the States and I just couldn’t resist having one fitted here. They did a good job with it, don’t you think?’
‘It’s marvellous,’ said Sidwell-Plant. ‘But how does it work?’
‘It’s all electrical. We got ourselves a diesel-powered generator in a shed out back. Powers the whole place.’
‘Every modern convenience,’ said Bridgewater. ‘You should have seen the contracts we had to draw up to get all this stuff built. And the planning applications? Good lord – you wouldn’t believe it. My office has never been so busy.’
‘Still some work to do there,’ said JB. ‘We still need to get your General Post Office to approve running a telephone line out here, then we’ll be all set up.’
‘It seems you’re already rather well set up as it is, JB dear,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘As Sidwell-Plant says, this is all simply marvellous.’
JB beamed. ‘Why thank you, Emily. Now, friends, let’s get you settled downstairs in the sitting room and I’ll have Mrs Crawford bring us tea and cake while Crawford finishes taking your bags to your rooms. Then you can all rest awhile after your journeys and we can meet at six-thirty for drinks in the library. ’