Free The Mist in the Mirror by Susan Hill Page A

to stand there for long enough, I felt I would have guessed it, been given an answer and understood it. But then therewas a scraping sound and the metal grille was lifted. Behind it, I saw the outline of a face, and a muffled light.
    I spoke my name and heard the bolts being drawn back, and the veil fell forward again, the secret was secret still.
    The porter who admitted me was a ruddy-faced man wearing a bowler hat and greatcoat. He took my bag and, after locking and bolting the wooden door again, led me out from under the shadow of the buildings. As we passed by his lodge, I glanced in and saw a cosy, frowsty room, with an armchair pulled up close to a grate in which a small fire was burning, and, beside it, a black cat, curled asleep.
    We came out into a great, rectangular cobbled yard, surrounded on four sides by dark buildings, several of which he pointed out as we passed. ‘Chapel’, and ‘Scholars’ House’, and ‘Muniments’, though without any explanation, and then stopped before a statue on a plinth in the centre.
    ‘King Henry,’ he said curtly.
    The King stood, grave and venerable, with snow on his leaden shoulders. Ahead was a clock tower. ‘The King’s Tower.’ I paused and looked back. Snow covered the cobbles and the stone window-ledges, giving off a pale sheen, and a pool of light bobbed ahead from the porter’s lantern. Everything else was hidden deep in shadow, and now we passed under an archway into an inner cloister, and here the shadows lay deeper still. A passage ran round the parameters of the snow-covered central square, with arches at regular intervals. We walked around three sides, our footsteps echoing hollow on the stone floor, and the echoes were taken up and continued to sound all around us, so that I had the urge to whisper aloud and hear the answering echo.
    It was cold as iron here but, at last, we ascended a flight of stone steps, went through a baize door, and into a wood-panelled corridor. Several closed doors stood on one side,and, on the other, windows in stone embrasures looked down into the court. The walls were lined with portraits, whose eyes seemed to follow me, staring down, and I had an uneasy sense that all around us and behind doors, hidden in corners, standing back in the shadows, faces watched, saw us pass, took note. But, when I looked, there was no one.
    We stopped in front of a door, and the porter set down my bag. ‘Here is your set, sir. Everything you should require. Dr Dancer is away until tomorrow, sir, but I am to conduct you to the library after breakfast, which I will bring. And so, sir, I bid you goodnight.’ He leaned forward, through the doorway, and switched on a light. ‘At the top of the two flights. There is a bell, sir, connecting to the lodge, should you require anything.’
    ‘Thank you.’ I picked up my bag. ‘Thank you very much.’
    But he was already off down the corridor; the baize door sighed shut and I was left alone in the silence that seethed like dust, settling around me.
    A steep flight of stairs led ahead, twisted sharply round and narrowed even more for a second, shorter flight, at the top of which was another baize door. My footsteps trod heavily on bare boards and I was half-expecting to come out into some dingy attic furnished with spartan iron bedstead in the style of a school dormitory, without comforts of any kind. It was still bitterly cold and a draught came through cracks on every side. I reflected that, since my arrival in England, I had spent much time climbing stairs up to strange rooms, wondering what lay ahead, and I was becoming, after so many odd, unnerving events, more and more wary and apprehensive. I need not have been.
    On pushing open the door, I found myself at once in a most pleasing and comfortable sitting room. The lamps were lit, a fire burned brightly in the grate, with a brass hod full of coal beside it and logs neatly stacked on either side.There was a desk and a fine mahogany table, deep