Pilgrim’s Rest by Patricia Wentworth Page A

Columba.
    For once it really was not necessary for her to speak at all.
    Of the wooden pigeonholes which had once covered the walls only some charred pieces remained, but the walls, of the same stone as the passage, stood firm. The floor had been swept, the furniture removed. The place stood empty except for the smell of fire.
    Miss Silver permitted herself to say, “Dear me!” After which Miss Columba locked the door and turned back.
    A cross passage ran off in the direction of the kitchen premises. Just beyond it she opened another door and said,
    “The lift room.”
    It was square and quite unfurnished-bare stone walls and a bare stone floor, except where an old-fashioned handworked lift bulged out from the left-hand side. There was no window.
    Miss Columba explained.
    “This is the oldest part of the house. There was a spiral staircase going up to the next floor and down to the cellars. My father had it removed and the lift put in after he broke his hip in the hunting-field. It comes up just beyond the bedroom you are in, and he had it made to go right down to the cellars because he had some very fine wine, and he liked to be able to go down and look at it.”
    “You have extensive cellars?”
    “Oh, yes. That’s what keeps the house so dry. They are very old.”
    “This is not the only entrance, I suppose?”
    “No-there is a stair in the kitchen wing.”
    They proceeded there, returning by way of the dining-room to the hall, and leaving it again by yet another long stone passage.
    The kitchen premises were as large and inconvenient as is usual in old houses. There were innumerable rooms, many of them not in use, or devoted to mere collections of lumber. The kitchen itself spoke of the time when hospitality meant endless courses. Ghosts of the enormous meals of other days presented themselves to the imagination-dinner-parties where two kinds of soup were followed by a practically endless procession of fish, entrée, roast, birds, two kinds of sweets, a savoury, an ice, and finally dessert. After more than four years of war the ghosts had a somewhat shamefaced air. Miss Silver gazed at the range, and thought how large and inconvenient it was, and what a lot of work all these stone floors must make.
    They came out of the kitchen and branched into another passage. Miss Columba opened a door and switched on the light.
    “This is the way to the cellars. Do you wish to see them?”
    If she hoped that Miss Silver would say no, she was disappointed. With a slight deepening of gloom she led the way down what was evidently a very old stair, the treads worn down and hollowed by generations of Pilgrims and their butlers visiting and tending that centre of hospitality, the wine-cellar.
    “My grandfather was said to have some of the finest Madeira in England,” said Miss Columba. “All these cellars on the left were full in his day, but now there is only the one with any stock in it. I believe there is still a bottle or two of the Napoleon brandy. Roger should really go through the cellar-book with Robbins-it has not been checked up since his father died. But I can’t get him to take an interest. He likes a whisky and soda, but he always says he doesn’t know one kind of wine from another. I am a teetotaller, but my father had a very fine palate.”
    As this was by far the longest speech she had heard Miss Columba make, Miss Silver was able to assess the importance of the wine-cellar as established by family tradition.
    She was presently shown where the lift came down, and the hand-trolley was pointed out by means of which the wine could be transported without being handled or disturbed.
    “It can be wheeled into the lift. You see, old wine must never be shaken. My father had these rubber-tyred wheels substituted for the old hard ones.”
    The cellars were certainly very extensive. They branched off right and left from a central hall, the roof supported by pillars. Before the days of electric light it must have been