Dandy Gilver and a Spot of Toil and Trouble

by Catriona McPherson

  But Nanny’s Picture Show looked well thumbed. I had my opening. I would try to get her to talk about being given this cottage with no say in its position.

  As she returned with a tea tray, balanced miraculously on her knuckles since she was still gripping the sticks, I smiled brightly and began.

  ‘It’s a pretty spot this, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘But rather far from town.’

  ‘We have two butchers with vans and a fishmonger with a cold cart,’ she said. ‘And the baker delivers to me because I trained his mother and she brought him up well.’

  ‘Oh gosh, well of course, for a pillar of the community it makes no odds,’ I said, retreating. ‘I was thinking about the visitors to Mespring and Castle Bewer, really. Wishing the Annandales and Miss Penny success with their ventures, you know.’

  Nanny nodded. ‘She’s always been the same,’ she said. ‘Of course, I wasn’t her nanny, but she always included me in her capers. Many and many’s the time I went along to her nursery to sit and clap at the latest of her shows. I was sorry she was an only one for it would have been ever so much more fun for her with sisters and brothers to direct. As it stood, she was everything but the wardrobe mistress and a cast of one puts a stop on what you can bring off, be it in the West End or in the night nursery with a painted sheet behind you.’

  ‘Indeed,’ I said. ‘I met this Cousin Leonard today. Have you come across him?’

  It was the very outer edge of what a loyal family retainer could stand, but so tempting that with a vague look on her face, as if to say: I am not aware of what is passing; I am not responsible, she replied: ‘I daresay Miss Penny will bring him along for me to inspect. In time.’

  ‘How lovely. Even though, as you said, you were never her nanny. You surely retired very young.’

  She was not to be flattered. ‘I retired at sixty,’ she said. ‘I’m ninety on my next birthday and I don’t care who knows it.’

  ‘Had you had enough of babies and tiny children?’ I said, hoping that this time she would let me lead her where I wanted to go. ‘I can understand that.’

  Nanny’s kettle was beginning to chirp on the gas ring out in the scullery and she lumbered off to deal with it. I felt my shoulders slump. How was I ever to bring her round to the question of her retirement and the reason for it and any possible contact she had with Richard after the changing of the guard?

  Thankfully, she used the time away from me to make a decision as well as a pot of tea. When she came back, on one stick and with a heavy brown china teapot wavering in her grasp, she had a determined set to her face. She banged the pot down and dropped back into her chair. ‘You can pour,’ she said. ‘But mind and not drip. Not yet, girl! It’ll hardly have started mashing.’

  I withdrew my hand and braced myself for a cup of teak-coloured tar whenever Nanny decreed the pot was ready.

  ‘I would have happily tended to Mr Bluey’s little ones,’ she said. ‘We didn’t know it would be Miss Penny alone away back then. But I retired instead. I retired very happily. It was the right thing. A clean sweep.’ They were the same words Mrs Porteous had used too. ‘The castle was no place for a bride and a staff can get set in its ways.’ I waited in silence, hoping she would continue to enlighten me. ‘We’d all have been too gloomy and sad for a honeymoon pair, missing our master and wondering what had become of him. It was better to have all the nasty old things swept right away and start afresh.’

  ‘Nasty old …?’ I said, wondering what on earth she meant.

  ‘Mercy, I don’t mean the servants,’ she said, clapping a hand to her mouth and then dragging it round to cup her cheek in an expression of horror. ‘I meant the castle itself. It was a dreich place. Dark and dingy. Displays of swords and muskets on the walls of the great hall, suits of armour hanging about like murderers waiting to snatch at you. Those tapestries were like a zoological garden, seething with slaters and clipshears. And then there was Old Mr Bewer’s specimens. They were none too lovely by the time Mr Bluey was grown. So Mrs Bewer turned the whole lot out and had the place as pretty as pretty for Miss Minnie. And a new staff too who wouldn’t be harking back and making her droop.’

  I cast my mind over the castle I had just left. Fresh and pretty were not the first words to spring to mind, but I could see that thirty years ago the cream distemper and printed curtains might have been charming and it was true that there were no mouldering tapestries or rusting muskets around.

  ‘Healthier too,’ Nanny was saying when I started paying attention again. ‘Mr Richard was so terribly ill before he left to take his cure and you can’t tell me those hangings were wholesome. Traps for germs of all sorts. No, she was right. It was better.’

  ‘It must have been a shock to you that he left,’ I said. I was pouring the tea. She had not instructed me that it was ready but she did not stop me. ‘I hope he kept in touch with you from his stations abroad,’ I added, as I handed her her cup and proffered the milk jug.

  ‘He did not,’ Nanny said. ‘I was sadly taken in by Mr Richard, or so I came to see. He was a lovely daddy to my sunny little boy Bluey. He changed. Well, we all change; life changes us, but most stay the same at the core, I always say. Not Mr Richard. He changed at his heart. And he did it without me ever seeing it happen. So you see when it all came out it was like something had been stolen from me. All the long happy years of my life, stolen away from me.’ She took a sip of her tea, drawing it over pursed lips in a rasping gurgle to cool it as it passed.

  ‘How awful,’ I murmured.

  ‘Ocht, Mrs Bewer was trying to do right by him,’ she said. She selected a biscuit from the plateful on the tray, hard little quoits of biscuits beloved of nannies everywhere, who do not believe that treats should be too delicious lest they spoil us. But she dipped it into her tea to soften it for her old gums. ‘I think …’ she drifted into silence and then gave me a sharp look. ‘You’ll be keeping all of this to yourself,’ she told me. I nodded. ‘I think the illness was nothing to do with his lungs and the mouldy curtains at all, for taking himself off to Aleppo wouldn’t help clear that up, would it?’

  ‘Aleppo?’

  ‘I had never heard of it in my life. Have you?’

  I shrugged, which seemed to satisfy her. ‘No,’ she said, sucking her teeth, ‘I think it was up here.’ She tapped her temple with a crooked finger. ‘Because all of that about the Curse that was supposed to have come to him from his father after his mother died? Supposed to have been festering in him all through his boyhood and came to a head at last?’ I nodded again. ‘Never!’ she declared. ‘Of course old Mr Bewer put the thing away when he had no wife to wear it. But he didn’t turn his son against it with wild stories. I’m sorry to have to say it of a man I knew when he was young and strong and healthy, but that came out of Mr Richard’s own fancy, did that. A curse! That was his own weak head. I could scarcely credit it when I heard it. And it took time, mind you! Mrs Richard stayed loyal as long as she could.’

  ‘And then told you because you knew him best?’ I asked.

  Nanny, to give her credit, blushed a little, which told me that she had got the gossip at second hand. She changed the subject with a sniff. ‘If he had had more occupation,’ she said. ‘If he had taken a proper interest in the farm or even gone in for beetles or butterflies like his father before him. Or more children. A nice family round him. Stop him brooding.’

  I smiled at her and there was real affection in the smile. She might have been my very own Nanny Palmer come to life again, opining that no ailment of mind or body could withstand outdoor occupations and settled healthy habits.

  ‘So he never wrote to you?’ I said. ‘You have no letters that might help us trace him.’ She shook her head as she let her eyes pass along the collection of photographs upon her mantel, pausing as she got to the telegram and reading it with her lips moving. She sighed. ‘And one last question, Nanny,’ I went on. ‘Do you have any idea – any suspicion at all – where the Cut Throat might be?’

  �
�Cut Throat?’ she said. ‘Who’s this?’ I simply gazed at her. ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘You mean the ruby necklace, don’t you? Yes, the cook told me about that silly name he gave it. See, this is what I’m saying. He was not himself. His father never called it that. And Mrs Bewer never called it that or she wouldn’t have posed for her pretty picture in it, now would she? Would you? It was the Judas Jewel in my day.’

  That, I thought to myself, was not much of an improvement when it came to putting the thing round one’s neck, but I said nothing.

  ‘And you’re asking me where I think it is?’ she went on. She had finished her biscuit and now took a huge draught of her cooling tea. ‘Well, I think he took it with him. Oh, it would have been so much easier if poor Mrs Bewer hadn’t been trying to save face. Saying he was ill and then he was away for his health. And so she said he left the jewel behind too, did she? She thinks it’s in the castle?’

  ‘They all do,’ I said. ‘At least partly. And Minnie and Bluey have engaged me to find it.’

  ‘Engaged you?’ Nanny echoed.

  ‘I’m a detective,’ I said.

  She put her cup down so smartly it rattled in its saucer. ‘Here’s me thought you were a lady!’

  ‘I am a lady,’ I assured her. ‘Lady enough to know that nannies have all the best hidey-holes. From playing hunt the thimble and stashing Easter eggs. Is there anywhere in Castle Bewer that Mr Richard might know about but everyone else would overlook?’

  ‘All these years?’ she said. ‘And while the place was turned out and done over and everything?’ She shook her head as though the very question was folly. ‘And we rolled our eggs down the hill like Christians. We didn’t hide them.’

  ‘Well, but is there anywhere even worth checking?’ I asked. ‘My own childhood home had a mouse house in the nursery staircase. A little door in one of the risers and behind it a mouse’s parlour with doll’s house furniture and a family of stuffed mice sitting down to their tea. My brother forgot about it and when I visited and told his children I became their favourite aunt forever. Nothing like that at the castle that you can remember?’

  She shook her head even more decidedly. ‘There was a little box with a hinged lid under the saddle of Master Bluey’s rocking horse. He hid a broken inkwell there to stay out of trouble but the ink stained through and he had to take the slipper for clumsiness and for sneaking too. But I can’t think on any hidey-holes in the castle itself. In the … how would you say it?’

  ‘The fabric of it?’ I suggested.

  ‘The fabric of it, just so. It’s a lump of a place. Everything stone and slab. Nowhere hollow. Now if it was Mespring House! Have you seen Mespring?’

  ‘Not yet,’ I admitted.

  ‘I’ll be along there with my shilling when they throw open the doors,’ Nanny said. ‘I can get my neighbour’s niece to push me in a chair. I’ll not miss it.’

  ‘And shall you come to the play at Castle Bewer?’ I asked, but her look spoke volumes.

  ‘Sit in that draughty courtyard and watch that nasty play full of evil deeds and foul language?’ she said. ‘Not I. I’ll leave that to them as have a taste for it.’

  I was interested to reflect, as I made my farewell and headed back to the castle, that she knew already it was Macbeth and not the Dream that was afoot and I wondered if someone who lived in this row still worked for the Bewers, or if it was the usual tale of the housemaid’s brother stepping out with the baker’s sister. It really had been silly of Ottoline to believe that she could keep quiet a juicy tale like the Cut Throat curse simply by sacking a few servants and saying her husband was ill.

  The bustle had become a frenzy by the time I returned. The carpenters were hammering in the very last nails in the transformed courtyard and one of them waved cheerfully at me, inviting me to climb the steps that formed the central aisle of the auditorium and try out one of the benches in the back row. I sat gingerly for there was nothing but my own vigilance to stop me from toppling backwards and, although the rake was shallow and there were only ten rows, still the plummet from the tenth could easily end in broken bones and an abrupt halt to my detecting.

  ‘Aye, we’ll pit oan a backrest,’ the carpenter called up, seeing my discomfiture, ‘but we’ll have to sand it right well, case it rips the nice frocks and best coats.’

  Penny was on the stage, anticipating one of the later scenes of the play by shoving around enormous pots full of greenery. I put a hand up to shade my brow and guessed at azaleas, which were certainly decorative but hard to work into one’s usual picture of Macbeth. When she heard the carpenter she stood up and hailed him.

  ‘Will it be extra?’ she said. ‘We’ve budgeted for this load of wood and no more.’

  ‘Doctor’s bill for folk falling off’ll be steeper,’ the carpenter called back.

  ‘How about a rope?’ said Penny. ‘Bang some posts in and string a stout rope between them.’

  The carpenter, just like a salesgirl in the dress department of a grand London store, curled his lip at the thought of his customer’s budget being finite, but Penny’s attention had been hooked away anyway. Leonard was striding down the aisle. He was still in the ancient flannels but his cotton square had been discarded and instead around his neck he now wore a long piece of silk chiffon, which fluttered behind him as he thundered forward.

  ‘No!’ he cried. ‘No, no, no! What the hell is that, Penny?’

  I felt a sudden need for the rough plank or the stout rope. As I reeled backwards in shock at his words I could easily have toppled.

  Penny did not blush, flounce off or burst into tears at being sworn at by her fiancé in front of half a dozen workmen and others. She put her hands on her hips and stared down at him. ‘Now, don’t be unreasonable,’ she said. ‘We got these to decorate the wings for the Dream and it’s too late to change them now.’

  ‘Flower bushes?’ said Leonard. He leapt up onto the stage with a show of vigour that at last gave some clue as to what Penny might conceivably see in him. He was a healthy specimen, if nothing else. ‘Pink fl— Oh, they’re paper.’

  ‘Of course they’re paper,’ Penny said. ‘Good grief, Leonard, have you any idea how much enormous great shrubs like this would have cost if they were real? We don’t have a gardener toiling away in a hothouse, you know. We would have had to go to a nursery and buy them!’

  ‘Well, at least take the pink bits off,’ said Leonard, descending on the nearest pot and snatching at the ‘blooms’ until the bush was ragged and the stage floor littered.

  ‘Stop!’ said Penny. ‘Stop it! Oh, what a mess!’

  But help was at hand. Grant, like all three apparitions rolled into one, suddenly materialised and laid a hand on Penny’s arm.

  ‘I can make cobwebs,’ she said. ‘Draped in gauzy cobwebs, these won’t even look like shrubs. They’ll just be nameless humps. Perfect for the heath and fine for the castle.’

  ‘Won’t it take a lot of … whatever it is you need?’ said Penny, unconvinced.

  ‘Wool,’ said Grant. ‘I brought a load of old shawls to unravel. I meant to wind it round the trees to make dawn mist in the Dream, but it’ll do cobwebs just as well.’

  ‘She’s a marvel, isn’t she?’ said Alec, who had joined me while all my attention was onstage.

  ‘And she knows it,’ I said. ‘She’s talking far too loud for just Penny and Leonard. She means it for me and will want praise later.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Alec said. He was still so thrilled at the thought of his acting debut that he would not hear a word against Grant, even spoken in the mildest jest. ‘She’s projecting. She gave me a lesson in it. You speak from your kneecaps and deafen everyone. Why are you scowling, Dandy? Is it envy? I daresay Leonard would let you walk on if you ask nicely.’

  ‘I can’t say I care for our friend Leonard,’ I said. ‘He was just absolutely foul to Penny and given her lack of surprise I gather that’s his usual way with her. I wonder if Minnie and Bluey know what a churl he is.’

&nbs
p; ‘Dandy, you can’t cause ripples,’ Alec said. ‘Two days before the first curtain goes up is no time to insist on tea-party manners. Actors are not held to the same niceties as others.’

  ‘They are by me,’ I said grimly. ‘And he hasn’t shown a moment’s interest or an ounce of courtesy to Ottoline either. The matriarch of his own family after all.’

  ‘Not really,’ Alec said. ‘She married into quite another branch of the family tree, didn’t she?’

  I turned the conversation to safer ground. ‘How did you get on in the billets? Find anything?’

  ‘Most definitely no,’ said Alec. ‘Which is a satisfactory end to a morning’s work in its way.’

  ‘Agreed, but why so very definite?’

  ‘Simply this. The castle as a whole was given a great turnout for Minnie and Bluey’s nuptials, as we know, but the cadets’ quarters that I’ve been pawing over this morning didn’t see so much as a lick of the paint. They’ve been as they are today since before Ottoline and Richard married. No floorboards have been lifted, no plaster pulled away and patched and there’s not a single suspiciously light or dark line of grout in any of the stone walls. I would swear on a stack of Bibles that nothing is hidden anywhere.’ He had been rummaging in his coat pocket and now drew out a sheaf of his floor plans. ‘Pencil, Dandy!’ he said, and proceeded to score Xs over all the rooms in the West Lodging before folding the plans in three and replacing them.