Free Most Secret by John Dickson Carr

small windows of stained glass, but richly carved and painted—a noble oak staircase rose up from the black-and-white flags of the floor.
    A throng of people, gaudy in their plumage, had begun to drift down these stairs. Certain doubts assailed my grandfather. He had promised Mr. Stainley he would not mingle too freely with …
    “Under favour, Mr. Abraham,” says he, “but who’s here and what’s here? Where, in precision, are we bound?”
    “Abovestairs; where else? Past the Guard Chamber, and through … Great body o’ Pilate, lad!” The other man broke off. “You’re familiar with the palace, to be sure?”
    “To speak a truth, and between ourselves: not over-familiar, I fear.”
    “Well! Well!” Bygones Abraham relished this jest. “But you are new; you are unfledged; this is none so surprising. This morning’s levees are all but finished, you’ll observe. If you would learn, hearken well. I am the man to guide you; I will be your sisserony. Hey?”
    Bustling, almost at a strut, lowering his voice to a confidential growl, he continued to speak volubly as they mounted the staircase; and he pointed out every detail.
    It is all dust, now. Near to three decades after my grandfather first saw it, a huge fire destroyed all of Whitehall Palace save only the Banqueting House. In these halls, in the maze of galleries surrounding them, there had been an end of revelry long before the fire. The fiddle strings were all snapped, the candles blown out, on a grey February morning when Charles the Second died.
    But it would be fifteen years until that evil winter. Here at the top of the stairs rose spacious windows, and arches of wood so polished that they threw out gleams of red. Here were the doors to the Guard Chamber, a lofty room with a gilt ceiling. Beyond this, an inner room, lay the Presence Chamber of the king, where those allowed entry must preserve the strictest behaviour.
    The doors to the Guard Chamber were closed as Bygones Abraham and my grandfather went by, the king’s levee being over. But they had actually to pass the queen’s Presence Chamber, and the old soldier bade Kinsmere glance in.
    Half a dozen maids of honour, in taffeta gowns, were playing at cards round little tables. Over the back of one chair lounged a handsome stripling who Bygones Abraham said was the young Duke of Monmouth, the king’s natural son by an old affair with a brown-faced Englishwoman in Holland. But Queen Catherine herself sat facing the windows, near a hanging cage of canaries, and they could not see her face.
    However, as they passed the door, a dark-haired woman with a train of handmaidens came sweeping and rustling out of the room. Bygones Abraham, looking stunned, made a deep obeisance which she ignored. She was not (as you will see her in the portrait by Sir Peter Lely) pensive and languishing, head against one shoulder, looking up with deep, heavy-lidded brown eyes. She carried her head high, the face as haughty and dusky as a Spaniard’s. Round her mouth there were lines of anger as faint as though drawn with a needle. Dark and plump, all a flash and fire of eyes half shut up, she whirled past in her gown of yellow satin. Her hair was set in the short wired ringlets called heartbreakers, and trembled against her cheeks.
    “Eh! Now it’s a very odd day,” said Bygones Abraham, at a kind of musing rumble, “it’s a very odd day when my Lady Castlemaine pays her devwar to the queen. Ecod, lad, there walks a fine woman!”
    “My Lady Castlemaine?” says Kinsmere. Even in Somerset they had heard much of this charmer, who for a full decade—in part, at least—had captivated the king’s fancy. “The Countess of Castlemaine, was it? Why, damme, though, sir: she’s fat .”
    He said that because he refused to admit how much he had been struck. For she had an allure, all fleshly and lewd-suggesting, which spread round her as she walked.
    “I would not asperse her,” says he, “and such words are plaguey ill