Gibbous House 49

To my relief, the windows of the library revealed only the extraordinary room in which I had enjoyed a tincture with the wandering Professor. It was only when I noted that the candles had been snuffed, that I realised that someone had been but recently in the hidden room. Why else had it been illuminated? Who had been stealthily bearing tapers and doubters to all parts of the house? Maccabi had not mentioned any staff other than the insubstantial Mrs Gonderthwaite. My determination to have more than several matters out with Maccabi grew still more forceful with every hour.

I turned left at the end of the west wing. The french windows at the library's end opened onto a generously proportioned terrace. A long sward of grass swept downward, flanked by oaks of some antiquity. I could see a tiny coal red light in the distance, moving rhythmically but slowly as though someone was smoking a briar pipe. Surely someone tended the numerous sheep I had seen on my arrival at the house? The terrain dropped away as the flags of the terrace marked the edge of the library wall. To my left I could see a wall adjoining the main body of the west wing approximately where the library ended, and where the secret room began. This long extension to the rear of the house obscured the wall supporting the dome. I had seen no entry to this part of the building, although almost anything could have been concealed by the disorder in the atrium. Of course, it was likely that access to this part of the building was in the mysteriously hidden withdrawing room; but I had discerned no such portal when I peered through the sash windows, and, as I have said, the room was unaccountably well lit.

The long wall could well have been a mole - had it been at Seahouses, instead of land-locked in Northumbrian hills. It was uncommon long; a furlong perhaps, with not a window to it, although it plainly was the wall of a building. It was possessed of a mansard roof. At the top of the wall itself was a ludicrous arrangement of deep embrasures and high merlons: the house was scarce a hundred years old, as Maccabi had informed me during one of our interminable journeys in the phaeton. I doubted that the most irrational fear of the Jacobites could have justified the fortification.

Again, at the termination of this long spur, the terrain swept down a steep gradient. A charming lake, little more than a pond perhaps, lay at the foot of the hill. I resolved to walk down to it. It lay no more than several chains away. As I approached I could hear the waterfowl competing with a cacophony of frogs to claim precedence over the water. At the water's edge I turned to look back at Gibbous House. The ridiculous dome had taken a large bite out of the night's full moon and I learned a further reason for Fitzgibbon House's soubriquet.