Dandy Gilver and a Spot of Toil and Trouble

by Catriona McPherson

  I have never attended a Brownie Guide meeting, although I got close early in my marriage, when the village still believed I might be that kind of woman. On one occasion I only outwitted the local Brown Owl by hiding in a stable until she had given up and gone home. Nevertheless I imagined a gathering of the troupe would be something like this: everyone standing around in a ring while someone tried, in hearty tones, to make all believe that they were having tremendous fun.

  Penny gave it her very best. She noted earlier triumphs for every one of the actors, even if some of them were the lowliest triumphs imaginable: our third witch had once played Miss Prism at Pitlochry, a man by the rather marvellous name of Paddy Ramekin, currently Banquo, Caithness and Seyton, had once reached the heights of Falstaff in Aberdeen; and both Max Moore, the dazzling individual who was Macbeth himself, and a girl who looked far too young and sweet to be Hecate, had appeared in the West End, plays and parts unnamed. It worked too; this flurry of accolades. I never did quite learn who everyone was and the honours just floated around the company in general, adding a little sparkle to all.

  When every last thane had been awarded his polite round of applause, Minnie took over and gave the American ladies a tremendous fanfare, making New York sound like the seat of a cultural empire, with Boston not far behind, and conveying the distinct impression that Rynsburgers, Corneliuses, Westhousens and even Schichtlers – she managed the name without quite sounding as though she had swallowed a fly while bicycling – were responsible for most of the delights to be found there.

  ‘And finally,’ she rounded off, ‘my dearest Penny, and my dearest Bluey will be your lecturers for the morning programmes, starting off tomorrow with “Castle Bewer and the Family Bewer through the Ages”.’ The visitors twittered with delight. Perhaps New York and Boston really are a great deal more cultured than London and Edinburgh, for I am sure none of my set could have greeted that announcement with anything but a long groan and a hasty excuse for absence.

  ‘And we have one final introduction to make,’ Minnie said. She had a fixed look upon her face and a slight heightening of her usual bonny colour across her cheeks. ‘We are delighted to have with us Mrs Gilver and Mr Osborne, of Gilver and Osborne Investigations.’ All four of the ladies swung round and stared at us, just as we swung and stared at Minnie. ‘Mrs Gilver and Mr Osborne are here to oversee a very special treat we have laid on for you all.’ Sweet Mrs Westhousen clapped her hands with a childlike glee, already thrilled, even before she knew what the treat was. My mind went briefly back to Alec’s words about rich men and silly women, for Mrs Westhousen was a goose but the rings that twinkled on her hands as she clapped them spoke volumes about the absent Linus Westhousen of New York.

  Minnie now strode over to a dark corner beyond the enormous fireplace where I had not noticed a cloth draped over an easel. ‘Castle Bewer, like so many houses that have stood for centuries and seen their fortunes rise and fall, has its share of secrets,’ she said. There was a strained quality to her voice.

  ‘She’s going to do it,’ I murmured to Alec. ‘Whatever it is they’ve been hemming and hawing about, they’ve hemmed their last haw. Here it comes.’

  ‘And the greatest of these is …’ Minnie paused and grabbed a handful of the cloth in one hand ‘… the Briar Rose!’ With a sharp tug, the cloth fell away to reveal a portrait. It was not Ottoline, but it was certainly the Cut Throat or Judas Jewel, now evidently rechristened yet again. The four ladies gathered in front of it, the overbearing Mrs Rynsburger forgiven and quite one of the flock again. The five ladies gathered, I should properly say, for I jostled right in beside them, craning for a look.

  It was, at a guess, Richard’s mother, sometime between her hasty marriage, ill-timed child, and untimely death. She sat in a chair so ornate I would have thought it a throne if I had seen this picture in some European musée. Her gown was of bottle-green velvet with a deep froth of creamy lace at the shoulders and it was the perfect foil for that lustrous cascade of blood red jewels. One of the newspapermen rushed over to the corner of the room where he had left his Box Brownie and then fairly cantered to stand in front of the picture and begin snapping.

  ‘Who was she? Briar Rose,’ said Mrs Cornelius, her voice throaty as she drank in the beauty before her eyes.

  ‘She was the doyenne of Castle Bewer,’ Minnie said. ‘My grandmother-in-law, although I never met her. Her name was Beulah and she was, as you can all see, a great beauty. She was also – and I think you can almost see this if you look very closely – quite, quite mad. Our very own Lady Macbeth, if you will.’

  ‘Does she rest in peace?’ said Mrs Rynsburger. I had to hand it to her; not many people could have heaped any more Gothic atmosphere on top of what Minnie was shovelling, but Mrs Rynsburger had managed it. Mrs Westhousen, her dimples quite gone, edged a little closer to her friends.

  ‘She looks down on us all and laughs,’ Minnie said. ‘Because the secret of Castle Bewer, my dear ladies, is that naughty Beulah Bewer hid the Briar Rose and no one has ever found it.’

  The actors, perhaps inured to dramatic effect, had been paying only the most desultory attention to Minnie’s pronouncements so far but, at these words, all of them seemed to grow still and were suddenly as attentive as a litter of kittens watching a piece of string.

  ‘We have searched over the years, of course,’ Minnie said. ‘We have knocked on walls and tapped on floors, we have pushed and pressed every bump and notch in the castle’s carvings and now, this year, to celebrate the opening of our first summer of Shakespeare … we give up and declare open season.’

  There was a stunned silence throughout the room. The company – guests and actors – stood frozen. The only things that moved were their eyes, but their eyes moved like a shoal of sardines scattering under a shark’s shadow; darting and flashing into every corner, flitting back to the portrait and then whisking off again as each individual in the room took in the news. There was a fabulous treasure and its finder was its keeper.

  ‘It’s an unorthodox move,’ said Bluey, with considerable understatement even for a Scottish gentleman, ‘but to be frank we shan’t be any worse off once some lucky treasure seeker has found it and borne it away.’

  The other newspaperman was scribbling furiously in his shorthand notebook, a shine on his brow that was surely not only caused by the cocktails. He had come along to the castle to cover a very dull little affair and take no more exciting a snap than that of four middle-aged American ladies. He was going back to his office with a story he could send down the wire to Glasgow, Edinburgh, London and beyond.

  ‘Mr Bewer,’ said Mrs Cornelius. ‘Do you really mean to tell us that you are opening a treasure hunt for this ruby necklace and whoever finds it is its new owner?’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Bluey. ‘I couldn’t have put it better myself. Anyone who buys a ticket to see the play is free to search.’

  ‘Free to search anywhere?’ said Mrs Westhousen. ‘What about our bedrooms?’

  ‘Your rooms have been searched already,’ Bluey said. ‘And will be under lock and key. Lock, key and patrol by the reputable firm of Gilver and Osborne. You have no need to worry.’

  ‘It’s true, Trixie,’ said Mrs Rynsburger. ‘That nice young man was in the closet when I arrived. I nearly jumped out of my skin and his explanation seemed unconvincing but it all makes sense now.’

  ‘And you’re happy to give up your inheritance?’ said Mrs Cornelius, turning to Penny.

  ‘I’ve never seen it,’ Penny said. ‘It’s been lost since before I was born so I’m not giving up that much really.’

  ‘Another round of cocktails, Pugh,’ Minnie said. ‘Please, everyone, carry on and enjoy the party.’ The newspapermen sped off as soon as the words had left her lips, jamming into the doorway together in a dead heat, but everyone else was delighted to accept another of the pink-coloured drinks and flutter about like budgerigars, twittering and chattering, as though some director had given them moves and lines and reh
earsed them for weeks on end to perform the perfect successful cocktail party. I had seen nothing like it for at least ten years.

  While it fizzed and buzzed all around I bore down on Minnie, meeting Alec, who was arriving at her other side.

  ‘Well?’ she said. ‘Is it our masterstroke or evidence that we have lost our senses?’

  ‘Both,’ Alec said. ‘It’s mad and you’ll be overrun.’

  Minnie gave a great gusting sigh as the fretting of weeks and months finally left her. ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘We did hope so. We just didn’t quite dare to believe so. But look at them all, They’re enchanted. We’ll be a smash hit. Even with gloomy Macbeth instead of magical Midsummer. We’ll be turning them away at the gate.’

  ‘And what does Ottoline think?’ I said, the cold spoon in the soufflé.

  Minnie’s smile dimmed a little. ‘Yes, Ottoline,’ she said. ‘But we can’t just sit by and do nothing while it all falls apart, can we? I’m afraid the cost of living so long is that one sees the world change around one. I hope to get to her age and be undone by the dreadful things Penny gets up to. What else can any of us hope for, really?’

  ‘Where is Otto, anyway?’ I said. ‘I thought she was coming down for the party.’

  ‘Oh, she’s here somewhere,’ Minnie said, waving a vague hand. ‘But it’s one of the boons of her deafness. She can be in the room and one never has to be worried about what one says.’

  Alec and I shared a stricken look and, at that moment, as a clutch of young actresses – witches I rather thought, from Penny’s introductions – moved out of the way, we all saw Ottoline, sitting in a chair against the wall, the very chair, or its twin, that had been rendered in oils in Beulah’s wedding portrait. Her head was resting against the high back and could not be comfortable with all that carving. Her mouth had dropped open. I hoped she was sleeping but I feared, hurrying forwards, that she had fainted. I prayed, as I drew close to her, that she had not died.

  11

  She had not died. Nor had she fainted or fallen asleep. She had simply closed her eyes in disbelief and let her reeling head fall back for a moment until it stilled again. She stood up as soon as I reached her side and bade me in a hissed whisper to take her to her room and tell Minnie she would dine off a tray there.

  ‘Unspeakable!’ she spat out as we stalked away through the passages back to her quarters. The stalking of a ninety-year-old woman is no less furious for being rather slow-paced and so she was leaning heavily upon me. ‘Unspeakable!’ she repeated. ‘What is Minnie thinking?’

  ‘I’d say it’s a bit of a brainwave,’ I told her. ‘Especially if the Cut-Jud-Bri- … if the necklace is long gone. No one will find it and spoil the fun.’

  ‘But you didn’t hear them!’ Otto insisted. ‘Not the American visitors. They are wealthy and bejewelled enough already. Besides being stout and unwilling to besmirch themselves with castle dust. But those girls – penniless actresses all – they mean to make a job of it! They’ll pull the place down around our ears. I heard one of them talk of hollow pockets in the joints of the roof timbers. And another said that chimney bricks as old as ours are never mortared. They’ll burn the place down if they start knocking out chimney bricks. Or they’ll bring it tumbling down like Jericho. Oh, what is she thinking?’

  ‘Now, Ottoline please,’ I said, stroking her arm and finding a soothing voice from who knows where for, in all honesty, I agreed with her. ‘Of course the actresses are excited and a-twitter. But they will be far too busy to go dismantling roofs and draining the moat. They’ll be preoccupied with the play. It’ll be a ten-minute wonder with them. Just you wait and see. As soon as the second or third batch of day-trippers is in here the players will want to be above it all – drawling about what a bore it all is and how gullible the paying public are. I promise you. Just wait and see.’

  If anything, though, my words produced an even greater state of alarm than she had reached already. Perhaps she had not considered that wave upon wave of treasure seekers would be bearing down. She looked at me with trembling lips and stark eyes and said in a tiny voice: ‘You won’t help them, will you? You won’t actually make suggestions and pass on tips?’

  ‘Heavens no,’ I assured her. ‘One wouldn’t want to make later arrivals feel the lake had been fished out. In fact, I think I shall say to Minnie that the hunters should be sworn to secrecy.’

  ‘Will you keep searching as well?’ said Ottoline. ‘Or will you leave it to the … what did you call them? Treasure seekers.’

  I considered it for a minute as we arrived at her door and she toddled over to her customary chair and footstool, dropping into it with a great groan of relief. ‘I need to examine my conflicting sets of orders,’ I said at last, ‘but I rather think I shall carry on. I need to be able to say hand on heart to His Majesty’s exchequer that I’ve looked and, apart from anything else … imagine if I found it!’

  ‘It would spoil Minnie’s plan,’ Otto said, rather sourly.

  ‘But if Minnie and Bluey had that fabulous jewel to sell they could afford a few trinkets to stash here and there just to keep the seekers keen. In fact, I think I’ll suggest that anyway. A little silver locket with something mysterious and ancient inside. It doesn’t have to be precious. A scrap of cloth from an old … I say, you don’t still have trunks of clothes in the attic from the times these portraits were painted, do you? Beulah’s and your own. A scrap of the pink satin or the green velvet in a silver locket would make a nice find.’

  Otto’s look had soured even more until she seemed, sitting there, like the very last of a bad batch of prunes. ‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘Those frocks were turned and turned again, re-trimmed and handed on, then they went for petticoats and bed jackets when they were done. I thought you were brought up well enough to know that.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, deflated but unchastened. ‘Of course I was. I can’t say I mourn those days, but you’re right about them.’

  I had loathed those days; walking into a dance in a gown ‘turned and turned again and re-trimmed’ and knowing that everyone knew. My mother had always claimed otherwise but by the time I was eighteen I could tell a new gown from an old faithful and so could every other girl in the room. Grant was the only one I knew who mourned the practice; for it was a great test of a maid’s ingenuity and it was responsible for quite a chunk of a lady’s maid’s high wage, back in the old days. I smiled to think of her delight at turning the planned fairy wings into apparitions’ weeds overnight in time for the dress rehearsal tomorrow.

  ‘What are you grinning about?’ said Ottoline. ‘What are you plotting now and smirking so slyly about?’

  I simply helped her off with her high-heeled shoes and put her stockinged feet up on their hassock. She was not really being disagreeable to me, I knew. She was merely tired and old and had had a new fright on top of a few days of too many surprises.

  ‘I’ll send Mrs Ellen up, shall I?’ I said.

  ‘Gilly!’ said Ottoline. ‘Send the girl.’

  I supposed Mrs Ellen with her gloomy voice and her love of gossip would not be as soothing even if she was a family retainer of long years. I closed the door softly and went to fetch ‘the girl’.

  Dinner should have been entertaining, with all the excitement of the treasure hunt still at work in the company, but I had the great misfortune to be seated between two of the lesser actors. The American guests were given the plums, of course: Bluey, grand old Moray Dunstane and dashing Max Moore. I was left with George Bull and Robert Roberts who were exactly as thrilling as their names suggested. They spoke at length about their parts in the play, which were Lennox and Ross. These were two characters regarding whom I could not have dredged up a single word if my life depended upon it, but Mr Bull and Mr Roberts waxed on as though they had taken to the stage purely in hopes that one day they would get to sink their teeth into those very roles. Oh, the exquisite challenge of bringing these vital men to life! The length of Lennox’s longest speech, upon whic
h the play – it seemed – was to pivot! The mystery of Ross’s scene with the Old Man upon which the play – it seemed – was to pivot again! The very precise challenge to an actor’s diction of delivering such lines as ‘Thence I go thither’ and ‘Hence I come hither’ effectively.

  ‘Without making anyone lau—?’ I said, before I managed to stop myself. ‘Or do you mean they’re a tongue twister? But surely Macbeth’s “with his surcease success” is the worst trap waiting for anyone in any play ever? She sells seashells, practically.’

  Roberts and Bull treated me to a pair of withering looks and I gathered that when one is conversing with lowly lords and messengers one is expected to pretend the Macbeths and the rest do not exist, or only to provide a setting.

  With my brick dropped, the two men proceeded to talk across me, showing off their superior knowledge of ‘the play’, ‘the bard’, ‘the folio’ and making chortling references to ‘notorious’ scholarly questions I had never heard of and did not care to.

  It was utter tedium to my ears and only when Leonard shouted down half the length of the table and across the centrepiece too did I pay a scrap of attention to it.

  ‘We are not changing the words of the greatest dramatist who ever lived!’ he thundered. ‘And poet,’ he added, taking away quite a bit of the force of his words and, in my opinion, proving that he was neither. ‘He is a man for all time and his words will be spoken as he wrote them this summer in Scotland as they were during the first season in London in 1606!’ He tossed his hair back and stared down his nose at the two men, his eyes cold and glassy.

  ‘But that’s the whole point,’ said George Bull, doggedly. ‘They’re not. They weren’t. They can’t be. The words we use were written after his death and not until 1623. We should go back to his own true words if he’s the greatest—’

  ‘What’s this about?’ I asked Miss Tavelock, leaning around Mr Robert’s back, since he was leaning so far forward to shout up to Leonard. Manners had been suspended, clearly.