It was at that moment that Grant, trying to be servant-like but made bold by her pride, marched into the room with a pair of gossamer wings held aloft.
‘Behold!’ she said. ‘Silk-net with a silver thread through it. It’s left over from that frock with the panels, madam, do you remember? I put the half-bolt I’d saved in my case on the off-chance. It’s perfect, isn’t it, and the wire frame is so light it can be held on with a couple of pretty ribbons.’
Never had one of her notions met with such unwelcoming blankness. She gave a quick dart of a look at the fairy wings and, unable to account for it, muttered a soft ‘excuse my interruption,’ then, crestfallen, left the room.
‘So, Macbeth,’ I said. ‘It’s very gripping. And I think it’s shorter.’
With that, I sealed my fate as the resident Philistine. Bess, Leonard and Penny each gave me a withering look and never really took me seriously again.
6
Neither Minnie nor Bluey were fierce as a rule but they each had views on the current pickle and they aired them. Alec and I withdrew, fixed smiles upon our faces, and went in search of the library.
A housemaid was sweeping out the fireplace in the large hall we traversed. Although she was properly dressed in black with a canvas apron, there was something about her shining curls and the way her stockings clung about her neat little ankles without sagging.
‘Are you Gilly?’ I asked her. She jumped up, bobbed and blushed. She was indeed the girl we had seen the evening before.
‘Madam,’ she said. ‘Sir.’
‘Two questions, Gilly,’ I said. ‘We shan’t keep you from your work. Where is the library? And do you know how long each of the staff has been in service here?’
Gilly pointed straight up at the arched ceiling high above our heads. ‘The master’s book room is right over this,’ she said. ‘It’s not really a library but it’s the closest thing we’ve got. Take any staircase and just keep walking till the red gate is right opposite out the back windows.’
She was, I decided, a sensible girl: these were excellent directions for two strangers in such a jumble of a house.
‘And as for seniority,’ she said. ‘Pugh’s been here thirty years. Mrs Ellen the same. And the cook. I’m ten years coming in the autumn. There’s a gardener was here when I came.’
‘Anyone here longer than the cook?’ said Alec.
Gilly shook her head. ‘There was a big change for Mrs Minnie coming,’ she said. ‘New butler, new housekeeper, new kitchen staff. Mr Bewer’s nanny was still here, they say, and she was thinking of hanging on till she was needed, which would have been Miss Penny, but Mrs Bewer put her out to a cottage in the village there and she never came back.’
‘Wonderful,’ I said. ‘I like to hear of servants retiring comfortably.’
Gilly was too well trained to say whatever it was she was thinking, but she was clearly thinking something. She gave me a small and sickly smile and then glanced back at her fireplace and its bucket.
‘We shan’t keep you,’ I offered dutifully.
When we were a little way off, I said: ‘A clean sweep of staff for the new bride.’
‘That strikes me as very interesting,’ said Alec.
‘On two counts,’ I agreed. ‘Did they offload the old staff because they suspected one of theft?’
‘Or?’ said Alec. To be fair, he thinks less about housekeeping than do I and could not be expected to have landed on this theory.
‘Or,’ I said, ‘while garnishing the castle to welcome Minnie, did one of the old staff happen upon the hidey-hole and therefore welcome the offered retirement. Imagine if Bluey’s old nanny has been living in a free cottage for thirty years while spending the proceeds of selling the family treasure. Or perhaps there’s a butler or cook who’s now set up in a nice little business with no history of inheritance or nest-egg to explain it away.’
‘Well, if it’s so, the servants will know,’ Alec said. ‘Barrow knows the life history of a laundry woman who was long gone even before Mrs Lowie arrived. The legends seem to hang around the servants’ hall for lifetimes.’
‘No different with us,’ I reminded him. ‘We all know the gossip of our grandparents’ youths, don’t we? That’s what makes it so very odd that the story of the Cut Throat and the curse is news.’
‘Let’s keep the library for now, and try to find the kitchen,’ Alec said. He nudged me and pointed along the latest stretch of passageway, which was just about to change from having paintings on the walls and carpet on the floor to being stone all around with plain tallow candles already replaced and waiting for later. At its end, a door was propped open with a lead stop and the unmistakable scent of boiling bones rolled out and came to meet us.
Our first glimpse of the cook was unfortunate. She was not a beauty, nor even a faded beauty grown into handsomeness. She was immensely tall and stooped and had a nose and chin striving to meet one another over a grim mouth. Still, had she not been stirring an elephantine stockpot with a wooden spoon roughly the size of a cricket bat and muttering, or had we not just been discussing the Scottish play, perhaps she would have made less of an impression. As it was, I stopped dead in the doorway and half thought of fleeing.
‘Gosh,’ said Alec softly at my side.
The cook’s words, when we caught the gist of her mutters, did not improve matters.
‘So much toil and trouble and for what?’ she was saying.
I cleared my throat and she straightened as far as her spine would ever let her and looked over. ‘Are you actors?’ she said. ‘Or carpenters? Carpenters I’ll give a cup of tea to and a slice off the new loaf, for it’s hard work. If you’re actors, luncheon is at one and there’s a bun shop in Annanbridge High Street’ll take your penny.’
‘We’re neither,’ Alec said. ‘Mrs …?’
‘Porteous,’ she said.
‘We, Mrs Porteous, are the detectives,’ Alec told her. ‘We’re here to find the Cut Throat at last.’
‘Before the old master’s hundredth birthday,’ she said, nodding. ‘Last day of October he was born, in eighteen thirty-four.’
‘You are very well informed,’ I said. Then, regretting how clipped I sounded, I tried to turn it into a compliment. ‘It’s marvellous when a household endures without change down the years.’
‘The family’s dates are written in the Bible for all to see,’ said Mrs Porteous, loftily. As though a cook reading her master’s Bible was any less peculiar. ‘And Mrs Bewer has always been a nice, warm, chatty lady,’ she added. She did not say ‘unlike you, madam’, but I heard it faintly.
‘Speaking of the family Bible,’ said Alec, ‘we are bound for the library this very morning to search out floor plans and make our task methodical.’
‘But we shall also need to interview everyone, at some point,’ I said. ‘It’s astonishing what people sometimes know and yet don’t think is worth repeating. You might have seen something that could lead us right to the hiding place.’
She gave me a long steady look across the steam coiling up from her pot. Then, as the liquid in it belched threateningly, she reapplied her spoon and withdrew her gaze. ‘I wasn’t here when the ruby vanished,’ she said.
‘So Gilly has just been telling us,’ said Alec. ‘There was a changing of the guard. Retirements all round and new blood for a new mistress.’
I thought the same look that had flitted over Gilly’s face now crossed this woman’s, leaving a shadow.
‘Were the old staff really all of an age?’ I said. ‘That’s quite remarkable. I remember my childhood being an endless upheaval of servants leaving and arriving. My mother always blamed the remote location of our house. But that corner of Northamptonshire is Piccadilly Circus compared with Castle Bewer.’
‘Nanny retired,’ the cook said, fixing on this one just as Gilly had. She set a lid at a jaunty angle across the top of her pot, wrapped her hands in cloths and heaved it to the back of the range, where its bubbling slowed to occasional dull s
plats. She stowed the two cloths in her belt and turned to face us.
‘And the others?’ I asked her.
‘They weren’t of an age for retiring,’ she said. ‘They were sacked. Butler to boot boy, they were sacked. Well, they were given good characters but it was a clean sweep.’
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘They were no loss,’ she said crisply. ‘The castle was in uproar. Master ill, mistress beside herself and that lazy lot had let the place go to rack and ruin. I’ve never seen a kitchen the like and if you ask Mrs Ellen about the state of the linen cupboards …’
‘And yet Mrs Bewer gave them good references?’ Alec said.
‘Glowing, they were. One even went along the road. A fine step up.’
‘Along the road?’ I said. ‘To Mespring?’ If so it certainly was a step up.
‘He’d been the master’s valet here,’ said Mrs Porteous, ‘and went to be a footman for the Annandales.’
‘Is he still there, do you know?’ Alec asked, but Mrs Porteous only shrugged. I supposed the frosty relations between the two houses accounted for that.
‘And what of the others who left?’ I said. ‘Did any of them keep in touch?’
This second shrug had a shake in it too. ‘It led to a bad taste,’ she said. ‘All of them out to let us in. And it got in the way of the usual overlap, if you see what I mean.’
Alec nodded. It was what he had just been speaking of. The servants’ hall letters, letters by which youngsters come to know strangers long gone before, had never been shared around the supper table at Castle Bewer. The clearing of the ranks had made a sharp, effective breach between old and new.
‘And why was such a swingeing clear-out put into action?’ I said.
‘It was part of Mrs Bewer’s plan to put an end to tales of the curse and let Mrs Bluey have a normal, happy life,’ said Mrs Porteous.
‘It doesn’t seem to have worked particularly,’ I pointed out. ‘Everyone knows about the curse anyway. Butler to boot boy, as you said.’
‘Well, as I said too, Mrs Bewer is a friendly sort of a mistress. And besides, when the master leaves as suddenly as all that you can’t expect a staff not to notice something’s wrong. And then, of course, the burglaries began when we’d been here but a year. So, you’re right about us all knowing the tale.’
‘And yet you all stayed?’ said Alec. ‘Despite burglaries?’ I joined him in his astonishment.
‘Some of the youngsters took off,’ said the cook. ‘But the way I saw it, it wasn’t the mistress’s fault her husband was such a queer one. It wasn’t her fault he abandoned her either. And as long as the Cut Throat is safely hidden here there’s no harm coming to anyone.’
‘So you believe in the curse then?’ I said, trying to speak levelly.
‘I think you can’t be too careful with such things,’ she said stoutly.
‘And so what do you make of us?’ I asked her. ‘Coming to unearth it after all these years?’
‘And put it safe where none will find it,’ Mrs Porteous said, not quite asking but not exactly stating either. ‘That’s what you’re at, is it not? Making sure none of the guests find it and takes it away before you can find it and put it safe forever.’
‘Put it safe?’ said Alec.
‘Under a floor or bricked up in a wall,’ said Mrs Porteous.
‘Who told you that?’ I asked her.
‘No one told me,’ she said, ‘but what else would you do? When the master’s hundred comes round and there’s death duties to pay, the family might be asked to sell it if it’s anywhere to be found. So they must hide it safely. And you’re here to help them.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Alec as we left by a side door a few minutes later, stepping out into the new-washed sunshine and the cheerful shouts of carpenters busy moving long planks of white wood into place at the far end of the courtyard. ‘Oh dear, oh dear.’
‘Indeed,’ I said. ‘The staff think the ruby’s sought only to be better hidden from the taxman. Ottoline thinks the ruby’s sought to be given to Penny as a trinket. And all the time Minnie and Bluey are trying to find the thing and sell it on the quiet before Halloween.’
‘Halloween?’ Alec said.
‘Richard Bewer’s hundredth birthday. Mrs Porteous just said so.’
‘Good grief,’ said Alec. ‘This case didn’t need any extra dramatic shading really. Are there any more horrors to be unveiled? Macbeth instead of the Dream, a family divided by secrets and lies, and a cook who boils bones and calls it stock. I shall be pushing away my soup at dinner tonight, shan’t you Dandy?’
‘We still have occupation and diversion before us,’ I reminded him. ‘The castle plans await. Imagine if we find it!’
‘Mrs Porteous will be thinking up new curses for us.’
‘But after a couple of years,’ I reminded him, ‘when everyone is fine and the curse has been shown to be nonsense. When the society pages show the Cut Throat on the neck of some financier’s wife at the Lord Mayor’s ball and she’s as healthy as a horse. They’ll thank us then, won’t they?’
‘To the book room in the meantime,’ Alec said.
We soon found a stairway; we could hardly help it, for Castle Bewer had more of them, twisted tight like sticks of barley sugar, than any house I had ever known. At the head of this one was the first really bright apartment we had come across yet, an airy gallery, much encrusted with the kind of plasterwork that kept tradesmen busy throughout the Regency. As usual, it was thoroughly picked-out in various colours, changing whenever a ridge or dip or corner gave the slightest excuse to switch brushes, every bump and bulge daubed with gold.
The portraits hanging over the panelling were as dour as those of any other Scottish family, a parade of mirthless patriarchs, mulish brides and sulky children, but at least, since the tall windows were unshuttered, the sunlight poured in and bounced off the glass, hiding most of them.
‘Behold the red gate,’ said Alec, pointing out of a window when we were halfway down the gallery’s length. ‘So this must be the book room. I hope it’s orderly. Or has a catalogue. I suppose a librarian’s too much to hope for.’
Since sacking the librarian seemed an easier saving than dispensing with one’s privacy and filling the house with strangers, I expected any Bewer archivist was long gone – if he had ever existed at all – and so I entered the book room without knocking and without any attempt to appear guest-like. I simply strode in, unfolding my reading spectacles and settling them upon my face as I advanced, disturbing Bluey Bewer, who was standing by the window, leafing through an elderly volume. ‘I was just having a look at my Shakespeare,’ he said. ‘Reminding myself of the plays and checking if perhaps the cast of one would fit the other. But it’s quite hopeless. And, by golly, Macbeth is torture. I’m very cross with Penny and simply aching for poor Minnie after all her hard work. We shall have to pay back all the people who don’t want to sit through murder and misery instead of love and laughter and we’ll be worse off than before.’
He had wandered over to a writing desk and now sank into the chair behind it, running his hands through his thin hair until it was quite disarranged and stuck out all around his head like thistledown.
‘Well, now, I’m not so sure,’ Alec said. ‘The Dream could be a bit of a washout if the weather does its usual midsummer trick on us. But Macbeth is about as proof against inclement weather as an oilcloth coat, isn’t it?’
‘And people will eat more if they’re cold,’ I said.
‘And I’ll bet Americans would rather watch a play about a Scottish castle, in a Scottish castle, than sit in a Scottish castle and try to imagine Venetian glades. It might turn out to be a blessing.’
‘And you could always do the Dream next year.’
Bluey shook off that last attempt at comfort, but he did at least smooth down his hair again. ‘We shall be gone by next year,’ he said. ‘Haven’t the ladies told you? We shall be gone by Christmas, if the lawyers get cracking bright and early on
All Souls’ Day.’
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Yes, your father’s century. And the death duties. Yes, Minnie did bring us up to date with it all, as a matter of fact.’
‘Rotten luck,’ Alec said. I did not know whether he meant the death duties alone, or if his rather bluff comfort was to cover the missing father and the curse as well as the coming penury.
‘Still,’ I added. ‘We haven’t even started yet. It’s far too early to give up. And that’s what brings us here this morning, actually. I’m glad we happened to find you. We’re after house plans, to organise the great search!’
‘You are too kind,’ Bluey said. ‘It’s marvellous of you to say you’ll do it.’
‘You give us too much credit,’ said Alec. ‘We’re champing at the bit, aren’t we Dandy? I feel like a small boy at a birthday party.’
Bluey regarded us both quizzically for a moment before he spoke. ‘I fail to see what’s fun about it,’ he said. ‘One dull meeting with what will undoubtedly be a rather dull man. It’s a good idea to acquaint yourselves with the house, though, I must say. You could even mark the plans with a soft pencil, if you like, to convince him you’ve actually gone poking around.’
‘Convince whom?’ I said.
‘The taxman,’ said Bluey. ‘You’ll vouch that we’re church mice, with no treasure to our name, won’t you? You’ll swear that we haven’t got the thing squirreled away?’
‘But we’ll poke around too,’ said Alec.
‘Oh my dear chap,’ said Bluey. ‘And dearest Dandy. There’s no point grubbing about getting dusty. The Cut Throat is gone – long, long, gone – and all we need from you is your word under oath that it’s not in the castle. I have already made applications to all the London jewellers – Paris too – hoping to hear that it passed through reputable hands, but that looks a little like playing to the gallery.’
‘You think it’s gone?’ I said, rather stupidly, even for me.
‘I do,’ Bluey said. ‘And so in all conscience we can’t really dupe people into hoping it’s not.’
‘What people?’ I said.
Dandy Gilver and a Spot of Toil and Trouble Page 6