Dandy Gilver and a Spot of Toil and Trouble

by Catriona McPherson

  I stepped closer and tried to see more clearly. The hill, so dark and so very conical, was cruder than the rest of the painting at a distance but when one peered from six inches away as I was now, one could see a great deal of unexpected detail: glints and flecks of reflected light and darts of shadow as though the hill was actually made of tiny lumps of …

  ‘Coal?’ I said.

  ‘Indeed,’ said Ottoline. ‘A reference to how my father made his money.’ She had given up claiming that the nature of the snub was beyond her.

  ‘And actually,’ Alec added softly, fishing in his pocket for the sheaf of castle plans, ‘I think the painter has included the parts of the house that were gone by then, hasn’t he? What a cheek! No doubt he was paid his due for his work and yet he makes a sly dig at the state of the castle and sneers at “new money”. I wish I could make out the signature so I could properly despise him, don’t you?’

  He turned away and went to sit at Ottoline’s bedside. ‘Very illuminating,’ he said. ‘But I can’t believe the picture did you justice, Mrs Bewer. It barely does you justice now that you have added wisdom to your beauty.’

  ‘Good grief,’ Ottoline rasped at him. ‘If you’re going to flirt like that, young man, you had better call me Otto.’

  ‘Well then, Otto,’ Alec said, ‘we have something to show you and something to ask. We found the rocking horse, you see, and in it we found this.’

  Ottoline leaned forward as Alec fished in his pipe pocket. Her wrap fell open a little and revealed the top edge of her camisole but she did not seem to notice and I did not alert her. Her eyes, so wide open they were slightly protuberant, were fixed on the velvet box.

  She gasped and the slight flush that Alec’s gallantry had put in her cheeks drained away, leaving her waxen. ‘You … You found it?’ she whispered. ‘I don’t … How … You found it?’

  ‘It’s not the ruby,’ I said.

  ‘Well, no!’ she retorted, sitting back as a flush much ruddier than the first suffused her. ‘How could it be? In Bluey’s rocking horse. So what is it?’

  Alec opened the box and showed it to her. She turned her head a little to one side and then to the other, looking like a jackdaw, and said: ‘I sacked a maid for stealing that. She swore on her Bible she hadn’t and I showed her the door.’

  ‘So they were yours,’ I said. ‘We thought they must be.’

  ‘Not mine!’ said Otto. ‘They were family pieces. There’s a portrait of Richard’s aunt wearing the pearls, if not the rings.’

  ‘His aunt?’ I said. ‘Would you recognise her handwriting, by any chance?’ I had been guardian of the note and I now drew it out of my bag where it had been pressed between the pages of my little notebook. ‘Did her granddaughter – that would be Bluey’s third cousin, or is it cousin twice-removed; I never know – but did her granddaughter play here as a child? Share Bluey’s nursery, perhaps?’

  ‘Her granddaughter?’ said Ottoline. ‘Dorothy was Richard’s maiden aunt. She had no children of her own. She lived quietly here, did good works in the village, was a boon to our neighbours. And took herself off not long after I arrived.’

  ‘So I don’t suppose you corresponded enough to know her hand,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t think we corresponded at all,’ said Ottoline. ‘A note on my engagement perhaps, but nothing more.’

  ‘So, if not Aunt Dorothy,’ said Alec, taking the paper to show to Ottoline, ‘who wrote this? Do you know? Minnie didn’t when we showed her.’

  Ottoline unfolded her lorgnette, raised it to her eyes and made a lengthy show of looking at the letter, but I was watching her very closely and I saw the flash of recognition, instant and sure, at her first glance. There was a flickering at her throat and her hand shook, so that the paper fluttered like the wing of a hovering bird.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘Oh dear me. I fear no good will come of this.’

  We waited a polite interval and then Alec glared at me and tipped his head towards the old lady. I cleared my throat and spoke very gently.

  ‘Would you say a little more? It’s all such a long time ago, surely?’

  She sharpened a bit at that, almost to bristling. ‘How do you know how long ago it was?’ she demanded. ‘It’s my lifetime, not ancient history.’ Then she sat back.

  ‘So …’ I said, trying furiously to decipher her words, ‘the granddaughter is Penny and the woman who wrote these words was … surely not Minnie’s mother? How could Minnie’s mother gain access to a rocking horse in the attics of Castle Bewer?’

  Ottoline’s chest was rising and falling rapidly, making the lace edge to her wrap flutter as fast as the little piece of yellowed writing paper. ‘There was no granddaughter,’ she blurted out. ‘Good heavens, the way you two build castles in the air! You’d have us all hanged on a fairy tale.’ She gave a stern look at Alec and then at me and when she spoke again she sounded more her own mistress again. ‘The direction on the note made an assumption about a baby yet to be born,’ she said. ‘Sometimes people can be very sure they know what’s coming. It’s a little too like witchcraft for my taste and in this case it was wrong. Because the baby – when it came – was Bluey.’

  ‘But Bluey’s grandmother was long dead,’ I said. ‘Killed on Boxing Day by a briar rose when Richard was a baby.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Ottoline said, ‘but … Oh, it’s all so very tawdry.’ Alec sat back sharply at the word. I am ashamed to say I edged forward. I have no taste for salaciousness but what is tawdry is exactly what people will work hard to keep quiet and so is often exactly what we are listening for.

  ‘I said, just now,’ Otto went on, ‘that Aunt Dorothy had been a good neighbour. Do you remember?’ Alec and I nodded. ‘And it was poor Anne Annandale she was a good neighbour to.’

  ‘Anne Annandale?’ I said. ‘That’s a thoughtless burden to hand to a child.’

  ‘I daresay,’ said Otto, ‘they didn’t think she’d have it long. She was to be Anne Bewer as soon as she turned eighteen, you see.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Alec. ‘This was the rejected match for Richard’s father, was it?’

  ‘And Dorothy’s great chum,’ said Otto. ‘Dorothy’s bosom pal. Her very dear friend. I do hope you catch my drift for I am not willing to say more.’

  ‘Gosh,’ I said.

  ‘Quite,’ said Ottoline. ‘She was a very strange woman, even besides that. And she grew more peculiar as the years rolled by. Eventually, her peculiarities began to tell on poor Dorothy. She got a quite ludicrous notion in her head towards the end. It wasn’t the jilting, not even the Cut Throat, that finally quashed the friendship between our two houses.’

  This time when we waited we were rewarded. With a look of some distaste on her face, Otto resumed speaking.

  ‘After Beulah – Richard’s mother – died, Anne started a sort of campaign to replace her. To become the second wife and thereby Richard’s stepmother.’

  ‘But I didn’t think she was the marrying kind,’ said Alec.

  ‘Well no,’ Otto said. ‘That’s the point. She really wanted to come here to live with Dorothy. And she thought since there was a son already and Richard’s father didn’t need any more there was no reason she couldn’t do just that.’

  ‘Hardly enticing,’ Alec said. ‘Although Richard’s father didn’t marry again, did he?’

  ‘And after she saw that was a bust,’ Otto went on, ignoring him, ‘then she got really strange. She said Richard should have been hers. If his father hadn’t jilted her, he would have been hers. She actually for a while nagged to have the little boy go and live with her at Mespring instead of here with his father and aunt.’

  ‘How odd,’ I said. ‘One doesn’t think of confirmed spinsters as being maternal.’

  ‘She was odd,’ said Otto. ‘Just once, when I was expecting Bluey any minute, she came to visit. Dorothy brought her.’

  ‘Dorothy?’ I said. ‘I thought Dorothy died just after your wedding.’

  ‘No,’ said Ottoline,
frowning. ‘She didn’t die. I never said that. As I was saying, she brought Anne. And the woman rambled on and on about her imagined connection to the family and how much she looked forward to her granddaughter’s birth. It was excruciating. I was furious with Dorothy. I told her to make her choice: the Annandales or me. Her mad friend or her nephew and his wife. She chose the friend. She took herself off to Mespring the next day and never came back. They lived out their days there two dotty old ladies together. The Annandales sulked at being landed with Dorothy, of course, and we’ve not been so much as nodding acquaintances since. It seems rather silly now.’

  I agreed, but then a question occurred to me. ‘How do you know so much about what happened when Richard was a child?’ I asked. ‘Anne’s campaign to be the second Mrs Bewer, I mean.’

  ‘Hm?’ said Ottoline. ‘Oh! Richard told me.’

  ‘Who told him?’ said Alec.

  ‘Dorothy herself,’ Ottoline said. ‘They were very close and she was … well, as I said … rather unconventional. She regaled him with the whole story: the curse, the Cut Throat, the accident that dreadful Boxing Day, how Anne wanted to take his mother’s place.’

  ‘That ties up quite neatly,’ I said. ‘You didn’t mention, the first time we spoke, who it was who poured it all in Richard’s ear and I rather assumed it was his father. Mourning widower, you know.’

  ‘Didn’t I?’ said Ottoline vaguely. ‘Well, one would have liked to keep some of the family skeletons locked in their cupboards, you know.’ Her airy voice dried up rather in the course of this speech and by the end of it she looked rather ghastly.

  ‘Very understandable,’ Alec said. ‘But much to be resisted, Otto, if you can manage it. It’s considerably easier for us to work out what’s what if we have all the facts and can shuffle them like a deck of cards, put all four suits in order. We’re only interested in a very few of them and, hard as it might be to believe, the others simply pass us by. We have forgotten more scandals than you’d find in a Sunday paper. Haven’t we, Dandy?’

  ‘Pretty much unshockable now,’ I agreed. ‘My husband laments it. He thinks I’m getting coarse and worries about my influence on our sons.’

  In such a way we managed to lighten the atmosphere again and soon she was smiling, laughing along with us as we shared some of the more ludicrous highlights of our shared detecting past: the time we had to jump into the cold plunging pool of a Turkish bath as a fire raged in the rafters; the time we joined a village wedding as worst maid and man in tramp’s clothes and odd boots; the memory – hazy for me but regrettably sharp for Alec – of my only and inadvertent brush with opium one night that I am glad I cannot quite remember. We entertained her until we saw her start to flag and then we withdrew to let her nap before dressing.

  ‘One last thing,’ I said from the door, ‘where in the house is the portrait of Aunt Dorothy in the pearls?’

  ‘It’s not in the house,’ Otto said, her voice low and thick with advancing sleep. ‘It’s at Mespring. A picture of Anne and her in the garden as girls. When they thought they’d be sisters one day.’

  ‘Hmph,’ I said as we walked away with the door shut behind us. ‘It just goes to show you the dangers of social niceties. If we hadn’t kept digging, we’d never have heard any of that. By the way, darling, what are you planning to do with the pearls and rings? The letter we can certainly keep in evidence but …?’

  ‘Oh quite,’ said Alec. ‘I shall hand over the actual loot to Minnie and lock the letter in my writing case. But as to social niceties; I should have welcomed some. I was blushing to my boot soles in there. Nothing was left unsaid.’

  ‘Yes, but when Otto first mentioned the jilted Annandale girl she didn’t say anything about her being uninterested in marriage and I jumped to the conclusion that she was plain or perhaps stupid. That it was Richard’s father who baulked.’

  ‘You think too highly of men if you think stupidity would be a bar,’ said Alec. ‘Some of my old chums, I wonder how they bear the mindless prattle of the women they’ve married, but they’ve only themselves to blame.’

  I knew I would regret it but I could not resist; he had so very nearly raised the subject. ‘I imagine it’s getting easier to find a clever wife with something to say,’ I murmured. ‘Now that girls are being educated.’ Alec did not answer, so I said a little more. ‘Look at Penny.’

  ‘Huh!’ said Alec. ‘Look at Penny indeed. Much good educating girls does if they throw themselves away on fools like Leonard.’ He became utterly silent after this outburst – for I think it could fairly be described as an outburst – but I felt a spring in my step as we made our way back to the Bower Lodging and our own rooms.

  Grant was in ebullient spirits. ‘I think this play’s going to be quite something,’ she said. ‘They were rehearsing – just the principals, without the lords and attendants – and they’re grand actors, all of them. Mr Dunstane has a presence I’ve not seen since my own father was in his prime and Miss Byrne – you’ll excuse me speaking freely, madam – but twenty years dropped off her when she was up on the stage. I had thought she would make a sight of herself as Lady M, but they dropped away. She’ll be fine. And as for the man himself!’

  ‘Macbeth?’ I said.

  ‘Ssh,’ said Grant. ‘Don’t tempt the fates, madam. When the stage is out in an open courtyard, who knows what counts as the theatre. Don’t tempt them.’

  I changed the subject, for I have little patience with superstition and there were far fewer things in heaven and earth than Grant included in her personal philosophy. ‘When do the full rehearsals start?’ I said. ‘With all the lords and attendants, as you say?’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ said Grant. ‘So if I can leave you to shift for yourself tonight, madam, I’d be very grateful. I’ve got some sewing I want to do. I think I’ve got enough of that iridescent gauze to make beautiful costumes for the apparitions. There are only three after all.’

  ‘But one of them’s Roger,’ I pointed out. Grant pursed her lips. Her loyalties were no longer mine. She was a member of the company of players and they could do no wrong.

  In the great hall, the only room in the castle that would not have been turned into a crush by the assembled number, Grant’s ebullience met its match amongst the newly arrived paying guests and the yet further swollen band of players. Mrs Rynsburger, having beat the other guests by a mere half day, was nevertheless lording it over them shamelessly, calling Pugh and Gilly by name as they passed with trays and making sure the newcomers were aware of the age of the castle and that this chamber was in its oldest surviving wing.

  The newcomers, as might fairly be imagined, were disgusted to have such a notable new experience as a Scotch castle on the far side of the Atlantic presented to them as something already picked over and chewed into palatable titbits for them by an advance party. They deserted Mrs Rynsburger the way a flock of skittish sheep will desert an ill-trained collie, rushing in a solid block to the other end of the paddock – in this case to the far end of the hall – and sticking there glowering. I bore down on them, partly because Pugh was up that end with cocktails so cold the glasses were beaded with condensation, but also, partly, early training. This was a party and Minnie was a pal. If guests were glowering it was my job to make them smile again.

  ‘Mrs Gilver,’ I said, offering the nearest lady the hand that was not firmly wrapped around the stem of an icy-cold glass of something pink-coloured and fragrant.

  ‘Are you an actress?’ she said, predictably. She was quite as old as Mrs Rynsburger but put together along very different lines, with a cloud of yellow curls and a sweet dimpled face.

  ‘Surely not, Trixie,’ said another of the group, a tiny woman with a tight cap of white frizz on top of a face either suntanned or weather-beaten but certainly vastly different from ‘Trixie’s’ pampered peaches and cream. ‘She would be Miss if she were an actress.’

  ‘Well,’ said a third, this one very glamorous, although not actually pretty, ‘there’s Mrs Patr
ick Campbell.’

  ‘I am not an actress,’ I said. ‘I’m a fellow guest. A friend of Minnie’s. But I can introduce you to some of them.’ I was aware that they were all looking beyond me now, to Moray Dunstane, Miss Byrne and a new arrival so dashing one almost believed he had a spotlight trained on him even in the murk of this gloomy chamber.

  ‘Minnie is Mrs Bewer, isn’t that right?’ said the glamorous woman. ‘Such extraordinary names these Brits go in for. I’m Mrs Jonathan Cornelius, Mrs Gilver. Clotilde Cornelius, of New York.’

  ‘Trixie Westhousen,’ said the dimpling woman with a shy dip of her head. ‘Mrs Linus Westhousen. New York.’

  ‘And I’m Mrs Schichtler,’ said the tiny woman. ‘But I answer to Shichter, Shicker, Shiltzer, Schinkler … Call me Jesamond. It’s easier.’

  ‘Well, let me take you over and …’ I stopped dead. I was carefully brought up and beautifully finished off. I could introduce an under-ambassador to the widower of an earl’s daughter without blinking, but I had no idea – given a band of travelling troubadours, there because the balcony dropped out of their theatre, and a gaggle of what were in essence, lodgers – who I should be presenting to whom.

  Minnie was evidently in the same quandary but had solved it in the most remarkable way. Pugh padded to the middle of the floor with a little glockenspiel, such as one sees in opera house bars at the interval, which I thought was a nice touch on someone’s part, and banged upon it until the chatter died to be replaced by an expectant hush.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Bluey said, ‘distinguished guests, acclaimed thespians, and gentlemen of the press, welcome to Castle Bewer.’

  Alec caught my eye at his words and we both frowned. Right enough, though, there were a couple of slightly louche individuals skulking around the drinks table whom I had taken to be stagehands but who might well be newspapermen.

  ‘Although this little party,’ Bluey went on, ‘is merely intended to show how thrilled Minnie and I are to have you here, we thought we might steal a march and make our introductions. Penny? If you’re ready.’