Conrad’s Fate

“There’s a plan in the undercroft,” Hugo said, and he led us on, down wide, shallow steps this time, blue and soft like the passage, to a floor more palatial yet. My head was spinning by this time, but I sort of aimed my face where Hugo pointed and tried to look intelligent. “Ballroom, banquet room, music room, Grand Saloon,” he said, and I saw vast spaces, enormous chandeliers, vistas of gold-rimmed sofas, and one room with about a hundred yards of table lined with flimsy gold chairs. “We don’t use these more than two or three times a year,” Hugo told us, “but they all have to be kept up, of course. There was going to be a grand ball here for Lady Felice’s coming-of-age, but it had to be cancelled when the Count died. Pity. But we’ll be using them again in a couple of weeks to celebrate Count Robert’s engagement. We had a spectacular ball here four years ago when the present Count was eighteen. Almost all the titles in Europe came. We used ten thousand candles and nearly two thousand bottles of champagne.”

“Quite a party,” Christopher remarked as we went past the main grand stairway. We craned, and saw it led down into a huge hall with a streaky black marble floor.

Hugo pointed a thumb down the stairway. “The rooms down there are used by the Family most of the time – drawing rooms, dining rooms, library and so on – but Staff are not allowed to use these stairs. Don’t forget.”

“Makes me want to slide down those banisters at once,” Christopher murmured, as Hugo took us to a much narrower flight of stairs instead, which came out into the hall behind the Family lift. He pointed to the various big black doors and told us which was which, but he said we couldn’t look inside the rooms because Family might be using any one of them. We nodded, and our feet skidded in our new shoes on the black, streaky floor.

Then we thudded through a door covered with green cloth and everywhere was suddenly grey stone and plain wood. Hugo pointed, “My father’s pantry, Family china scullery, silver room, flower room, Staff toilets. We go down here to the undercroft.”

He went galloping down a flight of steep stone steps. As we clattered down after him, I suddenly felt as if I was back at school. It had that smell, rather too warm and mixed with chalk and cooking, and like school there was that feeling of lots of people about, many voices in the distance and large numbers of feet shuffling and hurrying. A girl laughed, making echoes, and – again like school – a bell rang somewhere.