Chapter One

 

Of all the ghosts I had thought I might find haunting the galleries of Castlebridge Hall, that of my grandfather was the last one that I had expected to encounter. Maybe ghosts jump out at you when you're at your most vulnerable; haunt the cracks of your weakness and loneliness. That's what had happened in the past two days. When Stansbury had commissioned me to find a painting by somebody called Thomas Radcliff there had already been ghostly tendrils of recognition; a haunting feeling of having heard that name before somewhere. It had been the wee small hours of the night when I'd shot bolt upright in bed, in my dormitory of the servants' wing, and realised from where that name shadowed me.

It had been granddaddy's trial at the Old Bailey. The trial had been a sensation. Granddaddy had been one of the most prolific and successful art forgers of his day and, when his career had come to light, it had rocked the world of fine art to the foundations. The galleries and private collections of the world were riddled with granddaddy's masterpieces. So good were his forgeries that, even today, they are still not all uncovered and such was his notoriety that "genuine" Bertram Bradbury forgeries are valuable collectors' items in their own regard. There were even critics that lamented that granddaddy put his undoubted artistic talents to such illicit use for he could have been a great artist himself. In fact, that had rather been his downfall. Investigators identified some of his forgeries simply because they were superior in composition and execution than works by the artists they were purporting to be the product of.

The Old Bailey had been packed for granddaddy's trial and the media circus had been present in full force. It had dominated headlines for weeks. Granddaddy had become almost an anti-hero; holding court from the accused box with devastating charm and wit. There'd been something deliciously appealing about this elderly gentleman thumbing his nose at the rarefied elite of the artistic world and smearing egg all over the chins of pompous critics and gallery curators. The public had lapped it up. Even the jury had found it hilarious. Granddaddy had enjoyed himself immensely. Of course, he had known that he had only a few months to live, by then, so he had determined to go out with a last grand hurrah; waving his cap goodbye in jaunty mockery to the stuffed shirts of artistic academia he had so brilliantly humiliated.

Granddaddy had evaded detection for so long largely because of the artists he targeted. For the most part he had produced forgeries of lesser known artists; preferably fairly prolific ones whose entire portfolios were unknown. In this way he was able to slip any number of fakes into the market. If an unknown picture by Leonardo da Vinci suddenly appears from nowhere, everybody is going to regard it with extreme suspicion. When a picture emerges from some obscure English landscape artist, whose output was so large that it was entirely credible that there must be dozens of undiscovered works by him, hardly anybody blinks an eyelid. Thomas Radcliff had been just such an artist.

It was the name that had disturbed my slumber on that night; the name that had nibbled at the back of my consciousness ever since his foul Lordship Stansbury had mentioned it. I remembered then just when I had heard it before. The prosecutors at granddaddy's trial had even presented a pair of Radcliff forgeries as evidence in court. Forgeries or not, they'd been beautiful pictures and I think granddaddy had even been proud of them. I think he actually admired Thomas Radcliff as an artist. It was a bit of a vanity of his. He tended to forge the works of artists whose artistic talents he respected. It was a challenge to him to produce something so close in quality that it would fool most experts. In any case, when the name had finally registered on me, I had instantly realised that this could be one of his creations. A Thomas Radcliff, previously unknown, turning up among the possessions of some obscure collector was just too good to be true.

Granddaddy had had another vanity and one which was diagnostic. He had signed his forgeries. That might seem a little counterproductive but his signature was so obscure and cleverly camouflaged that only a person who knew exactly what it was and how to look for it would ever find it. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, only three people had ever known about the tiny little swirl he cunningly blended into the background of his pictures. One, of course, was granddaddy himself. Another was a person who I will be introducing you to later in this tale. The third person was me.

After granddaddy's ghost had reached out from the grave to touch me in the dead of night, I had set off on a quest to locate this painting; creeping through the dimly lit galleries of Castlebridge Hall in the small hours past midnight. It had been a night when it was easy to imagine the hallowed eaves of Castlebridge Hall to be infested with unquiet spirits but the real peril had originated from a figure from this side of the mortal coil. Making my way back to my dormitory, I had, as near as damn it, walked straight into Mr Greenwood, the Hall's majestic butler and feared disciplinarian, who had been stalking the corridors in the hope of catching one of my fellow maids who'd been abroad on mischief of her own. To my great good fortune, he had happened upon his target literally seconds before he would have inevitably seen me and, he being suitably distracted, I had evaded capture by the skin of my teeth. The other girl had enjoyed no such fortune, however. Her late night foray had cost her a sound caning in the library the following day.

That unpleasantness aside, I had located the picture in an annex of the library and archives and, sure enough, there had been granddaddy's signature mark woven almost indiscernibly into a piece of hedgerow in the landscape. I had been so taken by that discovery I had sat down on the floor and burst into tears. Such a weeping lamentation was generally uncharacteristic of me. Yes, it is true, I did tend to turn on the waterworks when having my rear quarters belaboured by a length of rattan cane and I had, between my piercing shrieks of anguish, blubbered like a baby when Greenwood had treated my bare backside to fifty good hard ones over the library caning stool on my first day at Castlebridge Hall. This cathartic, spiritual unburdening of my soul was not my usual form, however. In fact my propensity for shrugging off the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune with fatalistic stoicism had led some of my friends to conjecture whether I was emotionally retarded in some way. Perhaps I was just a late developer in this respect or perhaps just very good at bottling it all up. It had certainly been happening more often of late and those who knew me were having a hard time adjusting to a Michaela apparently more in tune with her inner feelings. I know that when I first came to pieces at school, prior to my relocation to Castlebridge Hall, it had shocked all my friends to the core and they had simply not known how to deal with me. The combination of events over the past few weeks were evidently taking a toll and reducing me to an unaccustomed vulnerability.

Before I go any further perhaps I had best summarise the story so far. I realise that this will probably elicit groans from those of you abreast of events to this juncture but I am conscious that there may be those just joining us who have spent the last few pages blinking in confusion and wondering what the devil I'm talking about. So, those of you who have been following the tale up to this point, just talk among yourselves for a few minutes while I bring the newbies up to speed.

I had arrived at Castlebridge Hall during the half term break at St Margaret's Catholic boarding school and my arrival at that most curious of English country seats had been as much a surprise to me as anybody else. The half term that had preceded this change of circumstances had been as rocky as a geology field trip. To cut a long story short, I had, in short order, been on the point of expulsion from school for pedalling adult sex toys, been press ganged into the school hockey team under duress, discovered that my parents had scattered to the far ends of the earth and washed their hands of me, fallen out with my closest friends, been shunned by my girlfriend, received the most memorable caning of my career to date and, to cap it all, fallen afoul of Cupid's arrow by way of falling in love with a beautiful exchange student from India, called Priya, who had turned out to be a princess and therefore about as far above my social station as it was possible to be without actually entering low earth orbit. From all this you might have gathered that the prognosis for a happy outcome was pretty poor.

In the event, it had not proved entirely disastrous although I will hesitate before declaring the outcome completely satisfactory. I had been "saved" (and I use the term reluctantly) by the intervention of the chairman of the school's board of governors, Lord Castlebridge himself. It was he who had intervened to prevent the nuns at school from forming a hollow square and drumming me out of the alma mater in disgrace. It was he too who had, in the absence of my parents, taken responsibility for me; paying my school fees and taking on the task of mentoring me. His Lordship, much to everybody else's bemusement, had professed to discern some potential merit in me and he had a long record of sponsoring worthy young women. It had been, as far as I was concerned, a mixed blessing; rather like being rescued from drowning by a hungry alligator. Now indentured to Castlebridge Hall, I had found myself, at half term, being shipped out to this vast blight on the countryside, for a work placement, where I was obliged to swap my school uniform for a maid's dress and join the small army of domestic servants, amongst whom I was to spend the next month in the disagreeable activity known as honest hard work.

Things had pretty much gone south the minute I had set foot in the Hall. I had barely had time to take my coat off before Lord Castlebridge, in a mood of reformatory zeal, had commissioned the Hall's butler to march me straight off to the library and introduce me to domestic service with a sound thrashing with the cane over the venerable and much renowned caning stool. It had been, in Lord Castlebridge's firm opinion, an excellent precedent; a good start in the manner one would wish to continue in regard to the future education of Michaela Francis. With that in mind, he had prescribed a regime of tight control and strict discipline for me. I had had all my none working clothes confiscated, been confined to the house and the senior staff members had been ordered to ensure that I was kept in line with at least one routine hiding a week.

This had been only the start of my troubles. Since then I had become embroiled in the complex and disreputable affair of the art collection of the late Colonel Withers; an old buddy of Lord Castlebridge's. This venerable old gentleman had passed away recently without apparently putting his affairs in order first with the result that his surviving relatives had been obliged to auction off his estate to cover its debts. There had seemed to have been no sort of proper evaluation of the estate and it had apparently escaped nearly everybody's notice that, among his personal art collection, there had been one or two very valuable paintings. The first of these that had come to notice was a truly appalling portrait of some frightful old ogre from the 18^th century. Eyesore or not, the painting was apparently the work of a renowned portrait artist by the name of Roland Bartholomew and, in spite of its less than aesthetic subject matter, had a potential value well into six figures.

Lord Castlebridge, seeing the chance to lay his hands on a bargain, had purchased the late Colonel's entire collection for the princely sum of ten thousand pounds. Most of the collection had been deemed worthless but the Bartholomew painting alone justified the investment. Since then the hideous picture had been sat on an easel in the library while Lord Castlebridge had gloated over the handsome profit he had expected to trouser over the business. Then it had all gone horribly wrong.

The painting, you see, had turned out to be a portrait of some foul and unlamented ancestor of the current Marquis of Stansbury, Lord Castlebridge's bitterest rival and as foul an example of lecherous human excrescence as ever blighted the ranks of English nobility. This deeply unpleasant man had leapt into the fray insisting that the painting had in fact originated in the portrait gallery of Stansbury Castle from where it had vanished, under suspicious circumstances, in the 1950s. He was adamant that the picture was the rightful property of his ancestral gaff and had decamped to Castlebridge Hall to lay his claim to it and was refusing to budge until the dispute was settled.

Stansbury's presence at Castlebridge Hall would have been bad enough but he had compounded his unwelcome arrival by turning up in the company of his girlfriend, the gruesome and fabulously rich widow, Priscilla Armstrong, whose fortune Stansbury was eager to lay his avaricious paws on by way of official robbery disguised as holy matrimony. She was a fitting companion to Lord Stansbury; as awful a female as ever wore Prada around a witch's cauldron on a moonlit night or saw off her late husband with a tincture of sea snake venom and scorpion entrails. This unholy duo was now firmly entrenched in a large guest suite at the Hall and making everybody's life a misery while Stansbury conspired to relieve Lord Castlebridge of a hundred grand or more's worth of dubious art.

To cap it all, Stansbury had also gotten wind of a second painting of apparently considerable value among the job lot that Lord Castlebridge had bought in the auction of his late friend's estate. This was apparently a late 18^th century landscape by Thomas Radcliff. Naturally Stansbury's nostrils were twitching over this picture. I'd researched the artist and discovered that fine examples of his work went at auction from anywhere between a hundred thousand and a quarter of a million. Lord Castlebridge was apparently entirely unaware that he possessed another painting of considerable value among his old friend's collection and Stansbury was busy trying to figure some way of winkling it out from under his nose.

It was at this stage that I had become entangled in the whole sorry affair. Priscilla Armstrong had been bitching from the moment of her arrival concerning her perceived lack of personal attention. The household had had no alternative but to assign a pair of maids specifically to exclusively attend upon her and her loathsome paramour for the duration of her stay. To my horror and dismay, one of the maids chosen for this onerous duty had been me. This had been as much as a surprise to me as anybody else. I was, after all, just about the most junior and inexperienced maid in the entire Hall and the last person you might have imagined to task with such an important responsibility. I had not known, of course, just what the devious scheming behind this appointment would turn out to be.

Stansbury, I had learned, had actually suggested me as one of the two maids appointed. He had had his own reasons for doing so. At first, the common suspicion had been that Stansbury, always on the look out for some pretty and naive young lass upon which to press his base attentions, had simply earmarked me as a suitable candidate for his lecherous ambitions. It had turned out to rather deeper than that, however. Stansbury had perceived that I was very new at the Hall and, since I had spent most of my nascent career there being thrashed for one thing or another, had concluded that I was no great fan of the establishment. I was, in other words, somebody whose loyalty to the Hall was extremely tenuous and therefore amenable to corruption. Since he required somebody on the inside of domestic service at the Hall in order to definitively locate the painting he was trying to ferret out, I seemed the perfect prospect, for a modest bribe, to aide him in his endeavours. It was his misfortune to read me entirely wrong.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to sound all virtuous and without sin. I'm as ready as the next girl to make a few quid on the side even if it involves illicit activity. Had it been anyone else I might well have been sympathetic to his schemes and all too ready to slip a few bob of filthy lucre in my apron pocket. But it wasn't anybody else. It was Lord Stansbury and as slimy a nasty little piece of work as you could hope to find. In the normal course of events, I wouldn't touch anything that had his dirty paws on it, with the proverbial barge pole. I had further reason to detest the man. The other maid assigned to this onerous service was Jessica Walker; one of the few people who had befriended me at Castlebridge Hall. In fact I was in somewhat of a complicated relationship with Jessica involving her, her girlfriend and a jealous dorm mate. I won't go into details here as I'm sure you'll pick up the gist as we go along. Complex or not, I was fond of Jessica and Jessica hated Stansbury with unbridled passion. She had, in fact, been in Stansbury's employ before coming to Castlebridge Hall and her girlfriend was still trapped at Stansbury Castle. She knew all about Stansbury and had every reason to despise the very ground he stood upon. Now say what you like about me but even my enemies would acknowledge that I am fiercely loyal to my friends. If Jessica hated Stansbury's guts then he would get short shrift from me.

If it had just been Stansbury's idea to press me into personal service to him and his repulsive fiancée then I should imagine that the notion would have withered on the vine. The authorities at the Hall would have derisively dismissed the thought that I was at all competent to serve in such a capacity and Stansbury's motives for suggesting so would have rightly come under sceptical scrutiny. Stansbury, however, had suggested my recruitment to the role to Lady Cynthia; the Machiavellian mistress of Castlebridge Hall. Doubtless he had hoped to pull one over Her Ladyship and to trump any notion she might have had of infiltrating one of her picked spies into his inner circle. If so, he had picked the wrong woman. Stansbury might have fancied himself as cunning and devious but he was out of his class against Lady Cynthia.

It was Lady Cynthia, in fact who had ensured my appointment in Stansbury's camp. It may seem odd. After all, as I've already pointed out, Castlebridge Hall had done little to earn my allegiance up until that point and you would hardly have thought that she could win enough trust and loyalty from me to ensure my cooperation in any scheme she had brewing. You would be underestimating Her Ladyship if you thought so, however. This brilliant and charismatic woman knew just how to do that; knew just what made me tick and how to get inside my skin. It was hardly a new trick for her. Lady Cynthia commanded a devotion bordering on worship among the maids of Castlebridge Hall. She had virtually every last one of them in the palm of her hand. She could have told the lot of them to go jump in the lake on a cold February night and expected to have her commands followed to the letter. Perhaps I have made her sound wicked and manipulative. There's a good reason for that. She was wicked and manipulative. She was sly, devious and completely ruthless in her manipulations. She had more angles than an Archimedean rhombicosidodecahedron. (I'm not just making that word up. There really is such a thing. Go Google it.) She was a thoroughly bad woman who would cause any pious priest to tut sadly about the wickedness of the world. She'd forgotten more about underhand, covert conspiracy and intrigue than Stansbury had ever known. She'd have made the Borgias look like rank amateurs in comparison.

Reading between the lines of the above you may detect a certain amount of admiration for this diabolical vixen on my part. Well you'd be right and therein lay the fundamental difference between her and Stansbury. Both, on the face of it, would appear to be thoroughly disreputable people but there was a vast discrepancy between the rotten to the core evil of Stansbury and what passed for bad in Lady Cynthia. How others perceived them is telling. Stansbury was universally despised as a loathsome snake. Lady Cynthia was adored by nearly every decent person who knew her and those who had reason to hate her were just the kind of slime balls you would expect. She was that rarest of people; a villain with a heart of gold; someone who was bad in the name of good, if that makes sense to you.

So yes, if it came to a choice of taking sides between Stansbury and Lady Cynthia, it was a no-brainer. She was one of the few older people I ever really looked up to. I thought she was just brilliant and I had a considerable crush on her. She had an easy job in bending me to her will. Not only was I already fan-girling all over her but she had one irresistible ace in her hand; she thought well of me. That, as you might imagine, was pretty unusual. Most people in authority normally regarded me with abject horror. The nuns at school generally considered me unsalvageable, inherently bad and pretty much on a one way journey to doom and damnation. The number of figures in authority that considered me of any worth or held out any hope for my future could be counted on the fingers of a hand that was missing a couple of digits. It was a unique experience for me to have people actually consider that I had potential and to expect great things of me yet that, much to my surprise, was what I found at Castlebridge Hall.

Lord Castlebridge, in his own way, had high expectations of me. That was implicit in the fact that he was prepared to pay my school fees and be willing to act as my mentor. I was just the latest in a long line of young women His Lordship had sponsored and nurtured towards careers in his own multi-national business emporium. His interest in me was to be expected, therefore, although he was cognisant enough of my failings and he certainly was of the opinion that I required regular thrashing to realise my full potential.

Lady Cynthia's interest in me was more surprising, however. At first I had taken her interest to be simply a trick of her own charisma. There are people that just have this ability to make you feel special; to make you feel that their talking to you is the best thing that's happened to them all day. Yes, Lady Cynthia did possess that quality. It was part of what made her so popular at the Hall. I came to realise, however, that her interest in me went further than her own innate charm. I think she was genuinely fascinated by me. All the girls at Castlebridge Hall interested Lady Cynthia of course but there were some who interested her more than others. The ones who most piqued her interest were bad girls. I don't mean the truly nasty, cruel or self-serving narcissistic girls but rather those who, while full of mischief and trouble, were fundamentally decent; hell raising little madams of intelligence and resourcefulness who might be frequent visitors to the caning stool but yet possessed of a certain degree of honour. They were, I suppose, the ones in whom she saw some reflection of herself.

She had not always been Lady Cynthia of course. She had started her career at Castlebridge Hall just as I or any other girl there had; dressed in a maid's uniform, working hard, raising hell and, if the evidence of the disciplinary ledgers was anything to go by, getting into trouble and having the error of her ways pointed out to her over the caning stool in the library. I think it was because she too had once worn the livery of a Castlebridge Hall maid that made her so loved by the Hall's maids. She was one of them as it were. She'd also had to drop her knickers for the cane after being caught sneaking back into the Hall after curfew just as everybody else had. She'd also been over the caning stool for pinching booze from the butler's pantry or been strapped by the Head of Housekeeping for canoodling with another girl in a linen closet when she was supposed to be on duty. She was, in many respects, the ultimate Castlebridge Hall girl; a fully paid up member of a sorority that held that you weren't really a Castlebridge Hall girl until you'd had your first thrashing in the library.

Well I had paid my dues in that respect within an hour of setting foot in the Hall. It was already achieving the status of a legend that I had been sent to the library to be caned even before I had been issued my uniform. That would have immediately brought me to Her Ladyship's notice. Curiously enough, the only other person, currently at the Hall, who had managed the feat of being caned on arrival, as it were, was a girl called Victoria Partridge and Victoria was now one of Lady Cynthia's personal maids. Those were Lady Cynthia's kind of girls; the particular gems she most enjoyed finding. I was bemused and bewildered by Her Ladyship's apparently genuine excitement at discovering me among the newcomers in the Castlebridge Hall stable of girls. It was only later that I came to understand it more fully.

To cut to the point, however, Her Ladyship had easily seduced me into her service and I was now acting as her eyes and ears in the Stansbury camp. Having discovered the "Radcliff" landscape I had taken immediate steps to arrange a conference with her through the medium of her Maria, the most senior of her personal maids. That was what led me to Her Ladyship's wintergarden and the interview in which I had revealed Stansbury's interest in the Radcliff painting I had uncovered and also my conviction that said painting was a forgery of my grandfather's. This bombshell had gone down a treat and you could almost hear the cogs whirring in Lady Cynthia's brain as she tried to think how best to exploit this latest gem of information. One thing was for sure. Life was going to become even more interesting in Castlebridge Hall.