Devil Take The Hindmost

Chapter Four

The door opened and my eyes swept across the oak panelled hallway beyond, trying to pierce the gloom of the unlit entrance hall. It took several heartbeats of confusion before I adjusted my eyeline downwards and saw the woman who stood at the door.

She barely touched five feet tall and had passed through plump and fat, definitely collecting two hundred pounds, prior to landing on spherical.

"Yes?" the woman said, peering up at me with rheumy eyes hidden behind a pair of glasses, the lenses of which were so thick I imagined them to be double-glazed. The single word uttered was less of a question and more of an accusation.

"Satchmo Turner," I said extending my right hand offered in a shake, adjusting the trajectory downward mid-manoeuvre so as not to jab the woman in the forehead. "I thought I was expected."

"Yes," the woman repeated with vigour enough that her hair, grey at the roots but an incongruous purple at the curling tips, shook with the force of the word.

The woman swung the door open wider and shuffled to the side to allow my entry.

The interior was not very homely. In fact, it didn't look like a home at all. The floor was tiled in a spectacular motif of right-angled triangles in black, white and grey laid out in such a way as to form a series of large eight-pointed stars. The tips of the outermost points of each shape touched the base of waist-high oak panelling on walls coloured a rich deep swirling russet, like a shot of arterial blood dropped into your morning café au lait.

The corridor itself was lined at oppressively regular intervals with oil painted portraits of sullen-faced and soberly dressed women, each of whom was well passed fifty at the time of their painting. Judging by the clothes worn in the pictures, they went back at least two hundred years and there were many more, further down the corridor, shrouded by the dark.

Perhaps these were the antecedents of Gloriana Wyntham - a long line of matriarchs memorialized in an unlit entrance hall where they could scowl with uniform expressions of disapproval at visitors, to wit, on this occasion, me.

"And you are?" I enquired of the woman as she lumbered past me, forcing me to step back to allow her passage.

"This way. They are in the drawing room," the woman continued, either ignoring or not hearing my question.

I followed the receding form of the woman as she waddled toward an open doorway from which a glow spilled. The orangish light of incandescent bulbs managing to squeeze past her hips only served to accentuate the depth of the shadow in which I trod.

The drawing room was in keeping with the hallway; stuffy, and last decorated over a hundred years ago. More oil paintings in heavy and ornate gilded frames dotted walls and alcoves, this time depicting scenes appearing to be historical, presumably telling bible stories I had forgotten or snippets from Saxon and medieval times.

An eclectic array of furniture was placed around the room, upholstered in crimson velvet and Art Nouveau designs eschewing the usual tightly interwoven floral patterns in favour of geometric shapes and symbols. Upon this collection of antique perches sat several women in different states of repose.

A trim, prim, silver-haired woman I judged to be in her sixties sat at a large writing desk peering at a handful of documents over the top of a pair of thin framed half-moon spectacles. She paused as I entered and addressed the woman who let me in.

"Thank you, Molly," the older woman said in a sharp voice with the merest hint of a local accent that a good education and the passage of time had sanded smooth.

The rotund Molly grunted in response as she made her way laboriously across a worn Persian style rug, then lowered herself inelegantly onto a love seat set into an alcove. There she picked up a leather-bound book from a small side table and began to read.