How silly of me to think I could catch Grant out. She tutted briskly and enlightened me.
‘No, indeed, madam, because only a few years later the double safety clasp was invented and no one in his right mind would risk a nice string of pearls on one of these after that. You had to keep checking that they were still round your neck. Don’t you remember? You had a jet and emerald collar from Mr Gilver’s grandmother that gave you no end of trouble till we had it updated.’
I did remember and it still had the power to make me blush decades later. It was rather a dashing object, more of a bib than a necklace and it filled up a décolletage nicely when necklines were so very low. But the catch had unhooked itself one night at a dull dinner and, when I stood up with the ladies to withdraw, the thing slithered free and plummeted down inside my dress. It would have been mildly embarrassing if it had stopped somewhere in the middle and somewhat more embarrassing if it had dropped straight through and hit the floor. What happened was worse than both: it went halfway and then the hook end of the fastening caught on part of my underclothes so that the necklace could clearly be seen dangling below my daring hemline. Of course, everyone pretended not to notice but, as I stalked awkwardly away to the stairs to take refuge in my bedroom and unhook the dratted thing, a great helpless gale of laughter broke out from the gaggle of wives I left behind me.
‘Eighteen-thirty-seven-ish then,’ Alec said. ‘So these must have belonged to Richard’s mother. Only that makes no sense because she had no granddaughters. Just Bluey.’
‘And she died before he was born,’ I reminded him. ‘On Boxing Day, when Richard was a baby.’
‘What do you mean about granddaughters?’ said Grant and was duly shown the note, which she scrutinised very closely. ‘She might have written this to future baby girls,’ she said.
‘But only if she had reason to believe she would not live to see them,’ I pointed out.
‘A premonition of her death?’ said Grant, saucer-eyed. ‘Is that what you mean?’ She had picked up the rings and was turning them in her hands. She frowned and looked down. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘No, these didn’t belong to Beulah.’
‘How on earth can you tell?’ Alec said.
‘Because she died very young when she was practically a bride,’ said Grant. ‘And these rings were worn for years. Look at them.’
She was right. The band on the diamond cluster was worn thin at the back and the hoop of garnets had been mended with coarser gold at some point over its lifetime.
‘Well, that’s a puzzle,’ I said. ‘Luckily, it’s one the Bewers will no doubt be able to help solve. I would have preferred to go to them with answers rather than questions, but no matter.’
‘Meantime,’ Alec said, taking out his watch and glancing at it. ‘Shall we search a few rooms before tea?’
Grant cleared her throat.
‘I shall,’ I said. ‘You have a costume fitting. Just point me in the right direction and leave me to it.’
In the end though we all went, many hands making light work and Grant being reluctant to miss out on the fun.
The Bower Lodging comprised four further apartments, besides my ‘plague chamber’ and Alec’s ‘dead man’s drop’. I daresay if one had a romantic bent they were quite delightful, filled as they were with the kind of furniture our grandmothers threw onto middens or chopped up for firewood and which was just now being put in the windows of London antique shops and even reproduced to adorn what I believe are known as ‘Tudorbethan villas’ in Surrey. It was dreadful stuff: as black as treacle, roughly hewn as though wrought by lumberjacks rather than cabinet makers, and bristling with knobs and bumps that would catch one’s clothes and ruin them. But the chairs had been covered in light cotton slips, and floral-printed cushions abounded. Besides, there is always something appealing about a very high, very mounded, snowy-white bed. There were, as well, jars of the very wildflowers I had admired that morning, standing in the open windows so that the breeze sent their sweetness through the air. I dared to hope that the American guests would not mind too much the washstands with jugs and basins and the long trip to the nearest actual bathroom. They might take it as part and parcel of the quaintness and might even – with Shakespeare in their minds – be grateful that the castle was not even more primitive. They might think of Macbeth and then look around and see only modernity and convenience.
The searches themselves did not take too long for it was true what Alec had said. Looking around these rooms one could not think for a single moment that anyone had hacked a hole in a wall or floor and then patched it up again. The broad black boards had impeccable patina, the wax and wear of decades upon them with not a single raw edge or new nail to be found. And the plastered walls were a perfect smoky ochre, the result of new distemper for Minnie and Bluey’s wedding and then thirty years of wood fires and candles since. The furniture too was hardly a challenge. The beds were made of slatted boards, the mattresses visible in strips if one lay down and squinted, and the chairs under their cotton coats were simple wood. There were no chests of any kind, only cupboards set into the thickness of the walls and they did not seem to have any nooks and crannies about them anywhere. We even lifted the lining paper from the shelves and peered underneath it.
I stood in the centre of my second room once the search was over and looked up at the ceiling. It too looked solid, unblemished, unbroken and impossible. Gilverton would have taken a crack team weeks on end to search, for its panelling and its fussiness could conceal any number of secret compartments, but life in the fourteenth century when the Bewers built their stronghold was so very much simpler. I consoled myself that we were at least meeting Bluey’s expectations, if not Minnie’s or Ottoline’s, and was turning to go at last when I heard a blood-curdling scream from the room next door.
I raced out into the passageway and swung round to see Pugh standing in the corridor with two suitcases dangling from his hands, apparently rooting him to the spot. The scream had come from the bedroom he was just about to enter. I dashed in just as a tremendously solid woman dashed out and we made what is called in cricket matches a good contact. I was bounced back into the passageway where I made a second contact, not so good but much more unwelcome, with Pugh’s frontage.
I came to a standstill just as Alec appeared at the solid woman’s back and Grant popped up around Pugh’s far side.
‘My dear lady,’ Alec said. ‘I cannot begin to apologise to you.’
‘What happened?’ I said.
‘I went into my room!’ the woman said. She had the refined quack of a Bostonite. ‘I opened a door and found a strange man in my room!’
‘Ah,’ I said.
‘I’ve only got two hands,’ said Pugh. ‘I can’t be carrying bags and opening doors both.’
‘What is going on?’ said the woman. Her outrage did not seem to be lessening any. Her black brows were drawn down in a deep frown and this, added to a pursed mouth and a rather definite kind of nose, made her look quite a bit like an eagle. The white hair, which contrasted sharply with her blackened brows, finished the effect to a T. She could not have been any other nationality on earth except American. A rich American lady from the north-east – just the prize trout Minnie was baiting her hook to land – and I recognised this as the disaster it was.
‘Mrs Rynsburger,’ said Grant, and how she knew the woman’s name was anyone’s guess, ‘Mr Osborne here is a member of the household and the company and he was just leaving.’
‘He’s moving out as I’m moving in?’ Mrs Rynsburger said.
‘No, no,’ said Alec. ‘I was just …’
‘Yes, we were just …’ I said. But nothing even slightly sensible sprang to mind.
‘But you were in my closet!’ said Mrs Rynsburger.
‘Most unfortunate,’ said Alec.
‘With the door closed?’ I asked.
‘I suddenly remembered reading something once about a secret passageway that only opened up once the cupboard door was closed,’
Alec said. ‘You’d never see it if you simply opened the door and glanced in. It was done with pulleys, you see. You had to go right into the cupboard and close the door on yourself and then the floor fell away and revealed a staircase. I thought it was worth checking.’
I had been shaking my head as discreetly as I could while he got through all of this, imagining Mrs Rynsburger taking off to the nearest commercial hotel in Annan and telegraphing her friends to warn them, but to my amazement she dropped the hand she had pressed to her bosom and smiled for the first time.
‘A secret passageway?’ she said.
‘We’re doing a survey of the castle for the Bewers,’ I put in. ‘And we did hope to have these rooms ticked off our list before you arrived. I’m terribly sorry we overlapped and startled you.’
But Mrs Rynsburger was quite recovered now. She jostled Alec aside and hurried back into her bedroom gazing around herself.
‘A secret passageway?’ she said again, turning around in the middle of the floor and drinking in what she saw.
‘Indeed,’ came Minnie’s voice from the stair head. She swept past us into the room and took Mrs Rynsburger by the hand. ‘One of the many secrets of Castle Bewer. Do forgive me for not welcoming you in person. I was talking to the cook about dinner and I didn’t expect you quite yet.’
‘I’m early,’ the lady said with a wave of her hand. ‘I was sick of that ramshackle train and I got off a few stops before Carlisle and shifted to a taxicab. So did you find it?’ She swung back to Alec.
‘Not yet,’ he replied, taking his cue from Minnie.
‘And what kind of secrets?’ said Mrs Rynsburger.
‘Oh, the usual,’ said Minnie. ‘There’s a legend about lost treasure and somewhere in the castle is the entrance to the place it’s hidden.’
‘Really?’
‘I’m afraid no one who comes to stay can ever quite resist the temptation to have a go,’ Minnie said. ‘You are naughty, Alec. Mrs Rynsburger, I shall make sure he doesn’t come back and disturb you.’
‘Oh, pish,’ said Mrs Rynsburger. She had quite recovered her sangfroid and had plunged straight into her own search. She was over at the mantel, pressing and twisting all the protruding pieces of carving she found there and casting her eye around greedily when she was done. ‘And is this room really where the passageway begins?’
‘We have no idea,’ Minnie said. ‘The plans are lost.’ I would have to ask Bluey to lock his map cabinet to bolster this lie, I thought to myself. ‘But this room has always been known as the Gateway Chamber, so it seems quite likely.’
‘The Gateway Chamber,’ said Mrs Rynsburger. ‘Now isn’t that enchanting? We have a lovely home, even if I say it myself. It’s comfortable and filled with beautiful things and in such a genteel neighbourhood of the city. But none of our rooms have names and we certainly have no lost plans and secrets. Oh, I think I’m going to be very happy here.’ With that she drew an enormous pin from amongst the lavender netting that adorned her hat, took it off and fluffed her white hair. Clearly she was beguiled and meant to stay. Almost as clearly we now had someone helping to unearth the long-kept secrets of Castle Bewer.
10
Since Mrs Rynsburger needed to rest before tea, the taxi having been not that much more plush than the train compared with what she was used to in Boston, I took the opportunity to draw Minnie away, show her our find and ask for her thoughts regarding this mysterious grandmother.
‘I don’t know whether I’m more impressed or bewildered,’ she said, turning the rings over in her hands. ‘These are hideous. Hardly worth resetting.’ She picked up the pearls and let them run through her fingers. ‘But this is lovely. Smack back in fashion too. I can’t wait to show Penny.’ Then her face clouded. ‘So long as Leonard doesn’t make her sell them to help pay for his everlasting theatre. Oh, Dandy, why could you not have married out of your season like the rest of us? Donald and Teddy would be just right for Penny now and so much more suitable.’
‘We really meant you to see if you recognised the handwriting,’ Alec said, driving Minnie away from maternal daydreams and back to the point.
‘I hadn’t met Hugh by then,’ I said. ‘So any children I’d had wouldn’t be Donald and Teddy. They might even have been girls, competing with Penny for the same beaus.’
Minnie gave me a startled look. She had known me as a deb, conventional and feather-headed, and was not inured to the way I now considered competing hypothetical states of affairs as easily as potential luncheon menus. Alec looked no less astonished, for I did not generally edge quite as close to the biological underpinnings of marriage and family as I had just done. I had even surprised myself, and rather unpleasantly. Had I married at twenty, I realised, my daughter would now be a suitable match for Alec. That truth was most unwelcome.
So it was that all three of us bent closely over the note and gave it our full attention. At last I began to see what it meant.
‘The slight warning only makes sense to someone who knows the story of the Cut Throat,’ I said. ‘Wouldn’t you agree? Decorate your life but not change it – for good or ill? Rather an ominous tone unless the curse is in the background.’
‘So, it was Ottoline,’ Alec said. ‘She has a granddaughter, after all.’
‘Do you mean she stashed the jewels and wrote the note and … forgot?’ I said. ‘That doesn’t seem very likely. On the other hand, she was flabbergasted to be reminded of the rocking horse, wasn’t she?’
‘It’s not her handwriting,’ Minnie said.
‘And why wouldn’t she have mentioned all of this when reminded?’ Alec added. ‘Minnie, would you ask her? It might be kinder coming from you. Less of an interrogation.’
Minnie was nodding doubtfully and I took the chance of her doubt to sweep in, for Ottoline was a witness, present in the castle before and after Richard’s departure, and anything that an unexpected questioning would shake out of her was something Alec and I needed to know.
‘Leave her to me,’ I said, hoping I sounded helpful, not bossy. Minnie smiled her thanks and left us, hurrying away along the passage with a distracted air.
Outside in the courtyard, of which Alec’s tower room had a bird’s-eye view, two rattly motor cabs had rumbled through the gatehouse arch and squeezed themselves into what small spaces were left by the Bewers’ motor, the vans and carts of the company, the trunks and boxes and endless bundles that seemed to grow like toadstools wherever the stage hands passed, and of course the arc of seats.
‘It’s turning into a bit of a circus,’ Alec said, coming to stand beside me.
‘And I’m beginning to think we’re part of the show,’ I said. ‘After Ottoline, why don’t we take ourselves off to Mespring and see how many rings are under the big top there?’
‘The challenge being to dream up an excuse to go bothering them,’ Alec said.
But Ottoline was just about to take care of that for us, and in the most unexpected way.
She was resting, as might fairly be expected of any ninety-year-old woman whose house is in uproar and whose life is under scrutiny, but she welcomed me cheerfully enough and took the idea of Alec joining me in good spirit, only going so far as to sigh with some gentle regret that a young man in her bedroom was unproblematic for her and un-noteworthy for him.
‘Ah me,’ she said, as she sent me off to fetch him. ‘Of all the reasons I have to be bitter at Richard the one that troubles me most is this, Dandy. Everyone currently in my life met me when I was already past my prime. Minnie knows me as Bluey’s mother, the entire household thinks of me as Old Mrs Bewer. Only Richard, were he here, might look at me and see a girl still. I should have liked to grow old with someone whose eyes grew kind as my face changed.’ She heaved another sigh and turned her head away.
‘You are welcome to join us,’ I told Alec, pausing just outside her door. ‘But try to be gallant. She’s feeling old. And that’s troubling her.’
Alec looked just about as keen on this brief as any man
would be, but he set his jaw and accompanied me back into Ottoline’s boudoir.
‘Thank you for giving us an audience, Mrs Bewer,’ he said. ‘It’s rather an unconventional moment, but we needed to catch you “between engagements”. I believe there’s a cocktail party for your new guests this evening and then dinner?’
‘Minnie’s guests, not mine,’ said Ottoline, but she did not completely reject the compliment. She raised herself up a little and tucked a strand into her cap, ready to hold court.
‘And I had to visit this room some time,’ Alec added. ‘Might I go over and inspect the portrait, please?’
Ottoline waved him on. The light on the Cut Throat painting was a great deal better during the day and I joined him, marvelling even more now at the indisputable quality of the thing. The winking rubies were not the half of it: the dewy skin of the bride, pink on her cheeks and cream on her shoulders, a delicate bluish tint in the fragile angles of her neck and jaw, made one want to reach out and touch her. As well, the satin gown of the young Ottoline gleamed on its planes and spangled in its folds, making me remember my own presentation and my days as a bride when pale satin became me. How I fretted that it would crease if I sat down and that the men would think me a sloven and decline to dance with me. How little I understood men. Now I knew it was the ranks of mamas in front of whom we were actually parading and it was our mamas in turn, and our maids and nannies, who were being judged on the strength of wrinkled gloves, drooping curls, and those creases in our satin.
‘Where did you sit for your portrait, Mrs Bewer?’ Alec asked, making me consider the background of the painting for the first time. It was definitely a castle and one would have assumed it was this castle except that through the window behind Ottoline’s head was a view of turrets and snapping pennants and a hill rising up like a great black pyramid.
‘Oh, the landscape is the work of the painter’s imagining,’ Ottoline said. ‘Richard always said it was meant as a snub but if so, it was too subtle a snub to hurt my feelings. But that’s why it’s always hung in here instead of down where guests might titter.’
Dandy Gilver and a Spot of Toil and Trouble Page 11