Intruding
I was startled by the bald man's abrupt appearance. I only glimpsed
his ashen face as he hurried away through the pergola but those
eyes stirred something deep in my memory. He made no sound (there
was no sound in the garden) but a mocking voice spoke within my
head.
Beyond the ragged yew hedge, the limes around Prinny's Folly towered
into a sky of battleship grey. I surveyed the garden, taking in
the dilapidated gazebo, the overgrown borders and weed-strewn paving.
Above the bench on which I sprawled, honeysuckle bushed from a massive
brick wall. The wall ran the full distance to the shuttered house:
Ladybower Hall. Stone steps led up to a terrace green with lichen.
Hard unyielding stone - the very sight of it panicked me ...
Why hadn't I noticed this neglect before? It was as if everything
had aged in seconds.
"Think man, think," I muttered. "Take it in stages.
Why are you here?"
To find Prinny's Folly, of course. In 1943, on my fifteenth birthday,
my uncle - who died serving with the Special Operations Executive
in Vichy France - gave me a book about Ladybower. It described the
folly's graffito. Legend had it that the Prince Regent himself cut
it during a last visit to his ill-starred mistress, Lady Amelia
Eaton. Twelve years later there I was: sitting beside the entwined
monograms wolfing corned beef sandwiches and ice cream soda - and
regretting that I'd forgotten my camera.
"Trespassers will be prosecuted," I read from a notice
- but they wouldn't catch me!
I hid my haversack, checked my torch and stuffed it with my notebook
into a trouser pocket. The next stage of my expedition involved
a difficult climb and a darkened house. Creeping towards the east
wing, I remember thinking that it must take an awful lot of work
to keep those sunlit hedges so neat.
Sunlit? Neat?
I frowned at the rickety archway through which the bald man had
crept; how could I have regarded this garden as anything but sadly
neglected - and what had happened to the sun? Why rest so soon after
starting out? Can ice cream soda poison the brain? There were so
many questions.
Shaking my head, I told myself to get a grip. I was here for a purpose.
My visit had been planned carefully. It all started with that pre-war
book which, with its coy stories of Prinny's generosity towards
Lady Amelia - and her suicide - led me to a pamphlet about Italianate
frescoes They included my target: The Heavenly Ceiling. The mid-Victorian
author claimed that Prince George had given 'Lady A' a fresco which
had been filched from Rome - a ceiling decorated by Michaelangelo
himself. And the 1936 guide book confirmed that, before the Victorian
orgy of renovation, the grand staircase had boasted an Italianate
ceiling. There was more evidence in the archive of the Eaton family:
unsigned letters to Lady Amelia. In one, her lover described how
he had been 'consumed with passion' during a ball; they had 'dallied
beneath a heavenly canopy worthy of the Sistine Chapel'. Ladybower's
ceiling became an obsession. As a would-be art historian, rediscovering
it was just what I needed to make myself known. But there was a
major problem: the house was strictly private. During the war, the
estate had been used as a secret
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