Justice Hall by Laurie R. King Page A

Pelicans, I saw, and nearly laughed aloud at the unlikely frieze of beaks and outstretched wings that intertwined and emitted jets of water into the bronze sea-cliffs at their base. I did not think I had ever seen such an ornate fountain incorporating such whimsy. Certainly it did not have much in common with the immense dignity of the house itself.
    A throat cleared, and I tore my eyes away from the Baroque splendour to join Holmes. We made our scrupulously escorted way up the seven wide steps of a brief but psychologically distancing terrace. A vestigial portico sheltered us; an ornate door swung wide of its carven stone surrounds; Justice Hall permitted us entrance.
    Just inside the door, some surprisingly indulgent past master had built a small vestibule for the guardian of the door. The butler even had some heat source, the brush of warmth on my face informed me, and I could see a chair and foot-stool accompanying the more usual front-door implements of waiting umbrellas, a house telephone, and the all-essential silver salver for accepting the cards of callers. Once past this private oasis of comfort, the interior hall was freezing cold, but as unremittingly impressive as any duke could have asked—or many kings, for that matter. A hundred visitors might collect beneath that frescoed dome, under those arched colonnades, among those acres of echoing marble both real and faux; the grandeur would still dwarf them all. Three guests, a butler, and the house-maid receiving our outer garments made for a human element that was insignificant indeed.
    I told the maid that I would keep my coat, thank you. She bobbed her response and went away with the garments of Alistair and Holmes over her arm. The butler admitted he would have to enquire as to His Grace’s whereabouts, and suggested that we follow him into the drawing room, but Alistair said we would wait in the Great Hall. Ogilby too slipped away, leaving Alistair to pick up a copy of
Country Life
from the top of an exquisite scagliola sideboard while Holmes and I craned our necks and gawked like a pair of museum patrons.
    I had seen grander entrance halls—huge halls, halls whose every inch was encrusted with gilt and mirrors, halls dizzying with the sheer accumulation of beauty—but I had never known a room with a stronger sense of what I can only term
personality
. The room was a cube of marble and alabaster, the black-and-white tiles of its floor giving birth to a pale stairway slightly narrower at the top than the bottom. Near the foot of the stairway stood a larger-than-life statue of a Greek athlete, the outstretched right arm that had once held a javelin now empty; at first glance, he seemed to be preparing to stab any unwary passer-by. Fluted columns of a heavily veined alabaster tapered up to support first an upper gallery and then the side-lit dome above. The veins of chocolate and cream in the columns were peculiarly symmetrical, with a heavy streak in one leading the eye to a similar stain in the next column twelve feet away. As one studied them, the sensation grew that they had actually been cut from a single contiguous piece, the remnants of an original alabaster monolith left when the rest of the room was carved away, as if Justice Hall had been whittled from a huge block of living stone. The image was disorientating, and I tore my eyes from the fluted columns to look up.
    It took a while for me to decide what the fresco on the dome depicted. Normally such paintings are either of battles—the ceiling at Blenheim, for example, created for the Duke of Marlborough to commemorate his victory at the battle of that name—or allegorical, with classical gods and illustrated stories. This one showed robed figures reclining at a feast, with dancers playing tambourines and musicians with harps and a variety of unlikely-looking woodwinds in the background. A cluster of remarkably serious greybeards stood to one side, looking for all the world like barristers discussing