Dandy Gilver and a Spot of Toil and Trouble

by Catriona McPherson

  Mrs Ellen scrambled her clogs back on and got to her feet, grabbing the kettles and making good speed out of the room with a brief curtsey. It is a skill I used to admire in my mother; that way of hounding servants into briskness without ever issuing an instruction worth the name. I was not aware of its awakening in me but, sometime in the long years, awaken it had and I was now a master.

  Grant allowed herself a soft snort of laughter once the woman’s footsteps had faded.

  ‘What I don’t understand,’ I said, as I clambered out of the bath and wrapped myself in towels to keep warm while she got to work on my hair, ‘is what makes any of them think it’s still here. It’s a large house and far from Spartan but they’ve had decades to search and have never turned it up. What makes them think it’ll suddenly fall out of a cupboard into the hands of an actor by this time tomorrow?’

  ‘It’s not so much that they think it’s likely, madam,’ Grant said. ‘It’s more that they fear it, unlikely as it may be.’

  ‘Because of …?’

  Grant nodded. ‘The curse. I happened to dress Mrs Bewer’s hair for her.’ Of course she did. I knew she was going to. ‘And she mentioned it. She wouldn’t tell me what the curse is, though. She didn’t seem to believe I was an assistant detective. Quite annoying. I’d be glad of it if you’d put her right, madam. You could visit her before dinner if you’re quick.’

  ‘I daresay you plunging in and setting about her with your curling irons didn’t strike her as part of an investigation, Grant,’ I said. ‘You can’t be all things to all men. Assistant detective or lady’s maid. Take your pick.’

  She thought about it for a long moment while working up the pump on her bottle of setting spray then, as she doused me in a noxious cloud like a gardener killing blackfly, she made her pronouncement. ‘Lady’s maid. It’s a shorter step from there to dresser and I do so very much want to get in about the costumes. So I’ll leave the detecting to you and Mr Osborne this time, madam.’

  I said nothing but gave her a dry look and stood to let her help me into my frock.

  Her successes as assistant detective are admittedly several, but Grant is a wonderful lady’s maid. Despite its being June, she had correctly anticipated the temperature and humidity of a lowland castle and had packed a velvet evening dress with a high neck and long sleeves. My white fox fur lent a faint air of the music hall against the dark velvet and clashed a little with the cream lace in my headdress, but my mother was dead and could not be shocked, and I was almost cosy as I followed Grant, to be shown Mrs Bewer’s bedroom door.

  ‘There aren’t any bells,’ she said as we parted, ‘but just wait. I’ll hear from Pugh when you come back up and I won’t be long. That’s it over there, madam. And mind your head when you go in. There’s a flying buttress lying in wait for you.’

  I took word of the flying buttress in my stride. The passageways we had traversed between my room in the Bower Lodging and Mrs Bewer’s above the drawbridge gate, in what Grant informed me was called the High Keep, had taken us up and down myriad little steps, often for no reason at all that I could see, and past ghosts of earlier walls or little wisps of long-vanished doorways. At least some of the curved ceilings had to be decorative rather than structural too, for the passageway was a mere four feet across and Hugh has droned me into a state of reluctant expertise on the question of barrel vaults and their best diameter.

  I knocked, entered and ducked the buttress – actually the underbelly of an old staircase with no beginning or end. Mrs Bewer was sitting in another armchair, with another footstool, drawn close to another fireplace, but had been transformed from the bundle of shawls I had met downstairs into a grand old lady in satins and pearls. Her white hair would not have disgraced the court of the Sun King, for Grant had teased it into an enormous ball and studded it with jewelled pins like an orange stuck with cloves.

  ‘Your girl’s a lively one,’ she said, peering at me again through her lorgnette. ‘I haven’t had this frock out of its bag for ten years but she talked me into it.’

  I rather thought Grant had talked Mrs Bewer into some rouge and lipstick too. She would be blacking the old lady’s lashes and sticking on patches by the end of the week.

  ‘You look lovely,’ I bellowed.

  ‘I’m not deaf,’ she snapped back at me. Then, seeing my look, she said it again with even more fervour. ‘I’m not deaf. I pretend, so that I hear things. It’s very useful and I recommend it to you for your own dotage if you end up living with your children.’

  ‘But why have you just admitted it to me?’ I said. ‘If even your own son doesn’t know.’

  ‘I pay the bills,’ said Mrs Bewer. ‘Including the detective’s bills, and so you are bound to me by confidentiality. I am your employer and you must tell me what you learn from Minnie and Bluey as well as everything else you might stumble on.’

  Divorce work would have been less murky.

  ‘Tell me about the ruby,’ I said. ‘The necklace.’

  ‘See for yourself,’ she answered, and waved at the far wall, beyond her bed with its brocade hangings. I stood and lifted one of the candlesticks from above the chimneypiece to take a closer look.

  ‘Mind your footing,’ Mrs Bewer said. ‘The floor slopes sharply for a bit in the middle there.’

  I had already found the spot, a ridge almost deep enough to call a step, treacherously masked by the blots of colour in a Turkey carpet. I padded on and raised the candle to study the portrait in its gilded frame.

  She had been beautiful. Her hair was fair, her skin white and her dress the barest pink, like the last blowsy day of the apple blossom before it falls. And then there was the jewel at her throat, fiercely red and glittering. I leaned closer and peered at it.

  ‘It’s quite something, isn’t it?’ Mrs Bewer said from behind me. ‘You know its nickname, I suppose? The Cut Throat.’

  ‘Nasty,’ I said. ‘But apt.’ It gave me the shudders to look at the picture and think of the name, for it was impossible, once it had been suggested, not to see those red gleams as drops of blood and that great red eye as a pool of it settled in the white hollows. ‘And it was given to you as a wedding present?’ I asked, remembering what Mrs Ellen had told me. ‘Wait. No.’ Mrs Ellen had claimed the gift’s original owner had died.

  ‘My mother-in-law, Beulah,’ Mrs Bewer said. ‘She got it as a wedding present. From a neighbour.’

  ‘Gosh,’ I said. ‘Rather lavish, wasn’t it?’

  ‘The neighbour was the Marchioness of Annandale,’ Mrs Bewer explained. ‘From Mespring, you know.’ That made it a little less odd; the Annandales had been fabulously wealthy in their day, even if they were reduced to day-trippers now. ‘But it wasn’t a kindness. Bluey’s grandfather had been promised to one of the Mespring girls, you see.’

  ‘That would have been a—’ I stopped myself before the words ‘splendid match’ escaped my lips. It was not diplomatic to remind a woman who had married into the Bewers that they were something of a comedown.

  ‘Splendid match,’ said Mrs Bewer, with a twinkle. She might be ninety and frail but she was still a pretty sharp twig. ‘On paper, perhaps. But the particular Mespring girl selected for Harold Bewer was not likely to be found beating off an army of suitors. She was … Well, one doesn’t like to be cruel.’ She left a pause for me to fill silently. ‘And so the gift of the ruby necklace was by way of a “dig”. Suit yourself and God rot you, kind of thing. It made the bride squirm with shame, as you can imagine.’

  I nodded. Of all the indignities associated with a wedding, the show of presents was ever the worst. The ranking of items by hard cash value, the suckings-up and snubs delivered in code by way of solid-silver soup-tureens and Sheffield-plated cake-forks, and then all the dowagers trooping through, nodding and smirking as they found out what everyone thought of the poor girl.

  ‘Forgive me, Mrs Bewer,’ I said, ‘but someone mentioned, to my maid, the question of a … well, it sounds silly, but a—’

&n
bsp; ‘The curse?’ said the old lady. ‘Good grief, you can’t be as squeamish as that, girl. Yes, of course, the curse. I’m getting to it, if you’d let me.’ She craned her head round the wing of her chair to take a look at the portrait, then sat back with a huff that was almost a groan.

  ‘The card on the wedding present said something along the usual lines: to grace every party at Castle Bewer throughout your long and happy union. Or some such. You know what the Victorians were. Romantic tommy-rot came spilling out if you so much as nudged them. And, well now, you see it so happened that my mother-in-law did not go out in society much for a year or so after the wedding. Must I say any more or do you understand me?’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. I understood her perfectly. It was a variation of the ‘invalid resting’ story Minnie had mentioned. A fruitful honeymoon had resulted in a sickly six months’ child which was coddled until it was bonny. Or rather, the baby arrived already bonny and too promptly by far, and the dates needed a little shading.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Bewer. ‘That baby grew up to be my husband, Richard. Well anyway, what with one thing and another, it was two Christmases after Richard’s birth before the first time his mother packed her trunks and went off to a house party. Boxing Day shoot after a Christmas ball. And she took the beautiful ruby with her. She wore it to the ball – this was somewhere off in the depths of the Highlands. Rosshire.’

  ‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘Do you mind if I shove a couple of bits of coal on the fire, by the way?’

  ‘Yes, it still makes me shiver too,’ Mrs Bewer said. ‘By all means, my dear.’ She took a deep mustering breath and went on with her tale. ‘My mother-in-law dazzled at the party, so legend has it. She was wearing white satin and no other jewels at all. The next morning, she went out for a ride and tried to jump a narrow gate with briar roses on either side. She was whipped off her horse by a branch all caught up in ropes of ivy that snatched at her neck and practically garrotted her.’ Her voice, I noticed, had turned into a singsong, as though this were a fairy tale.

  ‘Her husband, Richard’s father, saw her lying in the ditch, her white stock undone and her white neck laid bare and all the blood. Thirteen drops of blood, the story goes. And the note on the card came back to him. He said he heard it as if a witch were whispering in his ear. “To grace every party at Castle Bewer throughout your long and happy union.”’

  ‘Ah,’ I said. ‘It was never to leave the castle?’

  ‘Exactly,’ Mrs Bewer said. ‘Harold brought it back the next day along with his young wife’s body and it never crossed the drawbridge again.’

  ‘And,’ I began gently, ‘forgive me, but what do you make of it all, Mrs Bewer?’

  ‘Oh, do call me Otto,’ she said. ‘There is much I dislike about modern life but it’s certainly chummier than it was in my day. And you don’t need to step so carefully: I don’t believe a word of it. I wouldn’t have sat for that portrait with the thing around my neck if I thought it had killed my late mother-in-law. Would you? But my husband believed it. Oh yes, Richard mourned his mother until it became a kind of mania with him. And when I tried to show him it was all silliness and sentiment – I didn’t say it quite like that, I should add – he became quite peculiar. So I gave up and went along with it. The Cut Throat stayed in its velvet box in the salt-cupboard in the gatehouse keep, with a stout padlock keeping it safe and the story of the curse keeping it even safer, as far as the servants were concerned anyway. But,’ she went on, ‘then came dearest Minnie.’

  I had never been so agog since a nurse enthralled my sister, my brother and me with tales of headless horsemen in our night nursery and gave us all such horrid dreams that she was sacked and sent away.

  ‘What did Minnie do?’ I breathed.

  ‘She lit up our lives,’ said Ottoline. ‘She’s a darling. And, while I didn’t care for the Cut Throat myself, it bothered me that she wasn’t going to get to wear our treasure. It was Christmas time when Bluey first brought her and I could think of nothing prettier than the Cut Throat for her wedding day.’

  ‘Hm,’ I said. I like to think I am not a superstitious woman, but I tried to imagine a cursed ruby and a dead mother-in-law and Donald or Teddy’s bride and I wondered if perhaps I might not have suggested a string of pearls instead.

  ‘So I told Richard I would prove that the curse was nonsense,’ Ottoline said. ‘I would wear the Cut Throat to a party – Mespring House, no less, which struck me as poetic justice – and then, when no harm came to me, we could give it to Minnie as a wedding present and she could take it on honeymoon with her and enjoy it as I had never been allowed to do.’

  ‘But he wasn’t to be persuaded?’ I guessed.

  ‘He snatched it off my neck,’ said Ottoline, confirming what Grant had told me. ‘I was dressed and ready to go, waiting for the carriage, and he grabbed it and snatched it right off my neck. In the morning I shall show you the scar. It’s just about still visible amongst my wrinkles in a strong light.’

  ‘Poor thing,’ I said. ‘That must have been dreadful for you.’

  ‘Oh, he’d been getting more and more strange,’ said Ottoline. ‘The wedding was bothering him. And the memory of his mother dying. Except of course, it wasn’t a memory at all, because he was a babe in arms. It was his father’s endless maundering on about it. Such silliness. Anyway, I’m afraid I wasn’t very clever. I screeched at him that I would go for a walk round the field in it one morning, or I’d go for a carriage-ride into town with it hidden under a scarf. I really rattled him.’

  She was rather rattling me so I could hardly scoff.

  ‘That was our last contretemps,’ she went on. ‘Shortly afterwards he left me. Fled in terror of what I might do. I hushed it up. Of course, I couldn’t keep it quiet from Minnie but that was a love-match.’ I smiled, remembering. ‘And she has never said a cross word on the matter. Nor has she ever complained that the crowning jewel of her portion – that fabulous necklace – had been lost all the years she’s been here. Now I am a very old woman and I am past rubies. And Minnie is getting past them too. But while I’m alive I want to see Penelope at a ball in the Cut Throat. I want to see her wear the thing on her wedding day.’

  ‘You really, really don’t think it’s cursed then?’ I said.

  Ottoline had been gazing at me gently, but at that she unbent the handle of her lorgnette, held it to her face and fixed me with a piercing look.

  ‘Do you?’ she said. ‘Curses? I thought young people were too modern and scientific for that.’

  ‘I don’t believe it exactly,’ I said. ‘But something puzzles me about what you say your husband did. Running off like that.’ She leaned forward and regarded me closely until I went on. ‘Wouldn’t it have been you the curse came down on? If he – I know you said I needn’t pussy-foot, but stop me, won’t you? – if Richard wanted to be free of his wife, wouldn’t he have just let you go out in the necklace and then waited to be widowed?’

  She stared at me, as still as a stone, and I guessed I had gone quite some way too far.

  ‘Forgive me,’ I begged her. The years of rolling theories around with Alec had evidently blunted my sensibilities.

  ‘Not at all,’ she said. ‘You didn’t offend me. You impressed me by cottoning on so quickly. Because of course the same idea occurred to Richard, once he was away. When he was no longer here in this gloomy place where his mother is buried and where his father dripped such misery into his young ear, he saw sense. He must have kicked himself that he left behind such lovely “portable property” as Mr Dickens called it. And so as well as some rather nasty letters to me, listing my faults and threatening to ruin me with scandal, he also sent henchmen – five in all, over a couple of years – to try to find the necklace and steal it away.’

  ‘But you had hidden it?’ I asked.

  ‘Not I,’ said Otto. ‘And not Richard, before he left. Or he would have known where to look and one of his burglars would have found it.’

  ‘What makes you t
hink one didn’t?’

  ‘Because the last one was run off at the gate after being pressed to admit what he was and who had sent him.’

  ‘Then who did hide it?’ I asked.

  ‘That,’ she said, ‘is certainly something of a mystery. But not the great mystery. You see what the great mystery is, don’t you, my dear?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ I agreed. ‘Where is it?’

  Before she could answer, a gong sounded deep in the bowels of the castle.

  ‘Dinner,’ she said. ‘On you go ahead, you young thing. Gilly will come to help me.’

  I left her and made my way, with only a few wrong turnings, back to the head of the staircase in the Bower Lodging. There was a dull ringing from overhead as male footsteps descended. They were slow and deliberate and I waited to see if it was the elderly Pugh or if perhaps a footman was carrying away heavy pails of bathwater, two at a time. When legs, then a body, and finally a head appeared, though, I saw Alec, walking as if stunned.

  He stared at me. Even in the gloom I could see the whites of his eyes quite clearly.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked him.

  ‘Valet,’ Alec said. ‘Told me the whole tale. At least I think it’s the whole tale. I certainly hope so.’

  ‘The Cut Throat was a wedding gift that killed a bride with a briar rose and is hidden in the castle where the curse lives on?’

  ‘Masterful summary, Dandy,’ said Alec. ‘All this and Shakespeare too.’

  5

  Dinner was served in something called the sheriff’s apartment, which was a long slog from our bedrooms and equally far from the cosy drawing room. I surmised that it was close to the kitchen and made life easier for servants charged with the delivery of hot food, for it had little else to recommend it, being so small and square that the long thin dining board had to be jammed in slantways to fit. The places set at either end were practically in the fireplace and out the door.