Summer of Secrets by Cora Harrison

Author:Cora Harrison [Harrison, Cora]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Severn House
Published: 2020-09-07T23:00:00+00:00

NINE

We neither know nor judge ourselves; others may judge but cannot know us. God alone judges and knows us.

Wilkie Collins, Basil

The dust of centuries lay thick upon a motley collection of outmoded furniture and trunk-loads of centuries-old clothing and cushions stored in the attic spaces of Knebworth. I was tempted to rummage, but Dickens kept me firmly to our task. He had placed a covered oil lamp downstairs on the floor of the banqueting hall, next to the chalked mark that had been the place, appointed by Dickens, for the marquis to deliver his soliloquy and then to stretch himself out upon the floor. We had to see whether it would be possible for an assassin to put a bullet into his victim from this height.

The trouble was that the place was in excellent repair. The floors of the attics were boarded as well as though they had been rooms within the house. Not just that, but most of the space had been partitioned into small rooms used for storage: some used for storing of cleaning materials; some filled with furniture; some with trunk loads of clothing; and others with games paraphernalia: old tennis rackets, cricket bats, hockey sticks and masses of indoor occupations, chess sets, old packs of cards and stacks of well-worn books. We visited each section, each room. From time to time, we found small cracks in the floorboards – once, and once only there was a glimmer from the lantern downstairs, but no place from which a shot could accurately have been fired to hit a man in the chest.

Then we came back to the place where the young and active members of the cast who were mainly in the last act of the play had stood or sat during most of the play. Augustus Egg, John Leech and Charley Dickens had, I remembered, been smoking cigars, hidden from the audience and from the stern eye of Dickens, by sitting behind the railing of the minstrels’ gallery, some forty feet above the hall floor.

Hastily I climbed back down again, but my face betrayed me. Dickens said nothing but he, in his turn, climbed the steps. I saw him stop at the same place as where I had stood and I saw him stare down at the hall, as I had done, through the perforated wood of the minstrels’ gallery.

‘Some of the players in the third act stood there during the first act, didn’t they?’ he asked when he returned. His voice was meditative, and I made no reply. He knew as well as I did who they were: Augustus Egg, John Leech and Charley Dickens, enjoying a surreptitious cigar to alleviate the boredom of listening to the often-repeated lines. He had probably made a note to tell them not to do it again during the final performance.

‘Let’s go down to your room,’ I whispered in his ear and led the way back down the endless flights of stairs, along the red passage and to Dickens’ room, known as the Falkland Room.

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