‘Oh,’ she said, flapping a weary hand at me. ‘Don’t get me started. Leonard is mad for his precious first folio. The first collected works,’ she added, at my blank look. ‘And George is quite right about it. It’s pretty good on most of the plays but Macbeth is a mess. It’s got songs added that hadn’t even been written when Shakespeare dreamed up this play and I think they dropped the pages and bundled them back together in haste. Lady Macduff is straightforward enough, thank heavens, but some of the men’s lines are … Oh, Lord it’s too dull for words but someone talks about something before it’s happened and no one can ever work out if the battle’s been or is still to come.’
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Well, yes, it does seem rather silly not to tidy things up if they’re in a muddle.’
Miss Tavelock smirked. ‘I think so. But don’t ask me to agree with you if Leonard’s listening. Penny will back me up.’ She leaned across and hailed her. ‘Penny? Isn’t Leonard peculiar about his “texts”?’
Penny gave her mouth a rueful twist. ‘Men can be fierce about such silly things sometimes. But what harm does it do?’
I wiggled my eyebrows at her in what I hoped was a diplomatic but unmistakable reply and, once again, I wondered to myself how firmly stuck on Leonard she really was. She spoke of him with the exasperation of a wife not the adoration of a fiancée. And she spoke with just that practical, sensible air Alec always claims he is looking for in a woman. I turned to see if he was, by any chance, watching her – for she was very pretty in the candlelight and although we had not changed and her shoulders were hidden, her hair unornamented and her face shining with soap instead of gleaming with clever swipes of subtle colour the way girls’ faces are at dinner now – she was still rather beguiling.
Alec, however, was sitting quite still and straight, looking neither to right nor to left; not even entertaining his neighbours, who were talking round him. He was certainly not craning up the table to drink in the sight of Miss Bewer.
‘What was wrong with you at dinner?’ I said, once the gentlemen had joined the ladies in the drawing room again. They had come swiftly, Bluey perhaps fearing for his cellars if the company of players spent too long over the port. ‘You looked as though you’d seen a ghost. Or bitten down on a piece of shot.’
‘Yes,’ said Alec. ‘I was chasing a wisp.’
I took in a sharp breath. ‘Did you catch it?’
‘Does one ever?’ he said, and I groaned. There is much of the detective life that I enjoy, such as righting wrongs, and much that I abhor, such as fielding untruths and batting them back to their tellers who are invariably belligerent at being caught. There is just one aspect of our trade that I find infuriating and that is when one knows – knows without doubt – that one has missed something. I do my very best to avoid the sensation by feverishly writing down every word spoken, every look thrown, every move made and unmade, every smile and frown and scowl that flits like a cloud across every face. I record all in my little notebook and am roundly scoffed at for my troubles. Yet still I manage to miss things and so am condemned to the limbo state that Alec found himself in now: knowing that somewhere there is a loose thread and that I have smoothed it instead of tugging.
Alec screwed his face up in a grimace. ‘It was something someone did, or words someone spoke perhaps, that seemed like nothing, until someone else said something else and it struck me as a kind of echo.’
‘Let it go and it will pop into your head unbidden,’ I advised. Alec stood and went to fetch himself another drink from Pugh, who was presiding over the decanters and glowering at the actors and actresses as if with every drop of whisky they were taking food from the mouth of a starving babe. He managed to clear the drawing room by ten o’clock and I am sure I saw Bluey shoot him a grateful look as the last of them trailed away.
‘I’m just going to look in on Mama,’ Minnie said, standing. ‘I felt a sweep for tiring her with that party, but I hope dinner in her room has left her feeling a little better.’
‘She was quite a bit brighter already when I stopped in on the way down,’ Bluey said. ‘But she did say quite firmly that she wasn’t to be disturbed again. So I would leave it, Min. Pop in before breakfast instead, eh?’
Penny, to my astonishment, was tidying the drawing room, gathering glasses and tipping ashtrays into the dying fire, before stacking them near the door.
‘If my mother could see you, Penny darling,’ Minnie said, ‘she’d have twenty fits. Dandy, do your boys … what’s equivalent for boys of my daughter acting like a nippy at the end of her shift?’
‘Oh, Mother,’ Penny said. ‘Gilly and Mrs Ellen have enough to do.’
‘Absolutely,’ I said. ‘I saw Donald in the stable yard busy filling up the petrol tank of his motorcar with a can and a funnel just the other day. And Teddy can iron a shirt. He’s been on the wrong side of his scout so many times over parties and what have you that he’s had to learn or go around crumpled. Mind you, it’s an electric iron and I try not to think about it for I’m sure he might just as easily burn down the college as not.’
‘Ironing!’ said Minnie. ‘What next?’
‘I can iron,’ Penny said. ‘I can iron a Tudor ruff made of nasty artificial wool and starch it stiff enough for five acts of Henry VIII.’
‘And one notable day,’ I said, butting in before Minnie started nagging Penny again, ‘he ironed the frock of one of his chums’ sisters who was up on a visit without her maid.’ I frowned, remembering. ‘Rather a worrying lot of postcards went back and forth after that as I remember, but then she met a guardsman and ironing went out the window.’
Alec was staring at me slack-jawed. I would have liked to believe he was chasing another wisp, but I suspected he was marvelling at my inanity.
I raised my stock a little by letting him overhear me telling Minnie my brainwave about the silver lockets and scraps of stuff inside them. She leapt on it and immediately improved it, which pleased Alec even more. Really, our rivalry outdoes even that of my sons when they were little; and, once, they competed in the matter of who could consume more hard-boiled eggs on a picnic, which ended the picnic abruptly as I recall.
‘Oh, yes, Dandy!’ Minnie said. ‘But instead of scraps of satin and velvet – for that’s almost misleading, wouldn’t you say? – what about dried wildflowers? A little cornflower or a single rosebud in a locket would appeal to the romantic in us all.’
‘Can you dry some in time?’ I asked.
Minnie gave me a sheepish grin. ‘I have drawers full from when Penny was little,’ she told me. ‘She was a great drier and presser of flowers and never tired of presenting them to me. We can rummage out some of the less mouldy ones, can’t we Penny darling?’
With that they were chums again and I took myself off to bed, unable to face another chapter in the day’s events, should the chumminess prove unlasting.
Grant, as she had forewarned me, was not in evidence and so I bumbled around on my own, tangling my bracelets and scraping my scalp, once quite badly, as I tried to affix my pins for the night. Soon enough though I was tucked up with the curtains open to the moonlight and applied myself to missing Bunty for a minute or two before I felt sleep steal over me.
My dreams were disordered, as always when a case starts to knit itself around me. I dreamed of Leonard marching about a stage with a sheaf of letters in his hands, bellowing at the actors to stop reordering the words of the great man. Minnie was there, cutting little squares of canvas out of Beulah’s portrait and poking them into lockets which creaked open and snapped shut like the visors of armoured knights. I was hauling myself around in that dreadful treacly attempt at rushing, where the world has turned to quicksand and one cannot get where one is trying to go. ‘No!’ I cried out. ‘Stop it!’ quite without knowing what it was they were doing that had to be stopped. When the screaming started it was a relief to waken.
I knew at once who it was, not only from the direction of the noise but also because only one person in the whole of
the Bower Lodging had the stature to produce such a resonant and lusty bellow. Mrs Rynsburger, out of her corsets and able, therefore, to fill her deep chest to its pit, was screaming holy murder and seemed disinclined to stop. I leapt out of bed and, snatching at my wrap, thundered barefoot along the passageway to her bedroom.
She was sitting up in bed, the bedclothes clutched at her chin and one finger pointing wildly into a dark corner.
‘A ghost, a ghost, a ghost!’ she sang out at the top of her lungs. It was operatic in tone and in the rising pitch of each repetition, but it sounded quite sincere.
I rounded to face the corner but saw nothing. There was a door, locked up tight although no key or bolt could be seen on this side, and not so much as a billowing curtain or patch of reflected moonlight to explain her fright.
‘It’s gone now, Mrs Rynsburger,’ I said. ‘Can I fetch you a glass of water?’
She looked almost as aghast at my inadequate response as she had been at her vision, but thankfully at that moment the other three arrived: little Mrs Schichtler in just a white nightgown and bed cap, looking like Clara in Act I of The Nutcracker, dashing Mrs Cornelius in a black satin dressing gown with a dragon on the back, and sweet Mrs Westhousen in quilted pink with matching slippers and, surprisingly, a poker in her hands. She was holding it like a baseball bat, which is to say much like a cricket bat but with greater determination.
‘What happened, Hetty?’ demanded Mrs Cornelius. ‘You look terrible!’
‘I saw a ghost,’ said Mrs Rynsburger. ‘In that corner over there.’ Again she pointed. The three women huddled a little closer to her bedside, a little further away from the shadowy corner.
‘Oh Hetty,’ said Mrs Schichtler. ‘Come away with us in case it comes back.’
I suddenly felt I might swoon. The three women, gathered together, and Mrs Rynsburger regaling them suddenly brought the play to mind. Hecate and her visions. Her three weird sisters beckoning her to come away, come away. A shudder strong enough to make me take a balancing step passed through me.
‘What did it look like, Mrs Rynsburger, and what did it do?’ I asked. If she had said it looked ‘vaporous’ or that it hung in the air and then vanished I think I might have fainted dead away. She did not.
‘It looked like a ghost,’ she said. ‘A shining ghost, lurching about like Frankenstein’s monster.’
‘Shining?’ I said, a dreadful notion beginning to creep up on me.
‘Shining as bright as the moon,’ said Mrs Rynsburger. ‘And lurching.’
I rattled the door again and felt high and low for a bolt. Then a soft cough came from just outside the room in the passageway.
‘Do I have your permission to enter, Mrs Rynsburger?’ Alec said.
‘The more the merrier,’ the lady cried. She had recovered her good spirits now, surrounded by her friends and being the centre of attention. Alec’s arrival was a delight to her. He sidled in, rather hilariously gave a small bow to the four ladies – as though very stiff manners could offset the dressing gowns – and then joined me.
‘What’s on the other side of this door?’ I asked him. ‘Can you remember, from your sketch plans?’
‘A staircase that leads from the kitchen corridor up to the far end of the book room,’ Alec said. ‘Don’t you remember? There’s a door set into the wall halfway up a flight.’
‘And where’s the key? Presumably not on the other side? Perhaps Pugh keeps it.’
‘Key?’ said Mrs Rynsburger. ‘It was a ghost, I tell you. It had no need of keys.’
‘It had no need of doors, come to that,’ Alec pointed out.
‘But if the person lived here in his life he would always have used that door and be in the habit,’ she countered.
‘Do you think he was showing you the way to the treasure?’ said Mrs Cornelius, and now she too came to give the door a good shove and a rattle of its handle.
‘Was it definitely a man?’ I asked. Mrs Rynsburger frowned with her eyes closed for a moment and then nodded.
‘Most definitely,’ she said. ‘A shining, lurching man.’
Her companions shuddered at the words and to be fair she did give them a sepulchral swoop as she spoke them but I had made my mind up and was feeling grim. ‘Where shall you spend the rest of the night, Mrs Rynsburger?’ I said. ‘Do you want to swap with me?’
‘You can’t—’ she began, but Mrs Westhousen interrupted her.
‘You stay put, Hetty,’ she said, ‘but let me join you.’ She twirled the poker and her sweet face was even grimmer than mine. ‘I didn’t always live in New York City,’ she said. ‘And I married very well.’
She looked so determined that I felt safe to leave Mrs Rynsburger in her hands and, as Alec and I made our way out, the others were fussing over both of them, offering to fetch flasks ‘for the shock’ and plumping pillows.
‘What I’d like to know is where the devil are the Bewers?’ Alec said. ‘Or can’t they hear what goes on in this wing from theirs?’
‘And what I’d like to know is whether Penny colluded with whoever it was and, if not, how he got the key.’
‘What?’ Alec said.
‘If I find out Grant’s in on it, I shall send her home and dock her wages,’ I said. ‘Unforgivable.’
‘Dandy, what are you talking about?’
‘Oh this place!’ I cried out. ‘What’s the quickest way down to the kitchen from here?’ Alec put a hand under my elbow and ushered me through a series of anterooms and across one corner of the great hall to a short straight staircase that led down to the passageway we had entered on our first day. ‘What I’m talking about is Grant’s iridescent gauze for the apparitions’ costumes. She was working on it tonight and I gather she’s had a fitting. When Mrs Rynsburger said she saw a ghost, she was speaking the truth, you see.’
There was a bright light showing around the edges of the kitchen door and I sprang forward and threw it open, striding into the room and crying out, ‘Aha! Red-handed.’
12
My entrance revealed a gaggle of players lounging up and down both sides of the long kitchen table, which bore many stone bottles of beer and several stout brown pots of tea as well as a good new loaf, badly hacked into rough slices, and a pot of jam with the breadknife sticking up out of it. None of the principal actors was there, but Leonard sat at the head of the long board, in what I took to be Pugh’s Windsor chair, with Penny on his lap. Despite that, my eyes were all for the tableau on the hearthrug: Grant on her knees with a mouthful of pins and Roger, boots off and trousers rolled to the knees, swathed in gauze. Hardly ghostly but certainly shining.
‘Where are the other two apparitions?’ I said. ‘I take it you’ve finished with them, Grant, have you?’
‘Miles and Tansy?’ said Leonard.
‘I don’t know their names,’ I snapped.
‘Is something amiss, madam?’ said Grant, infuriatingly. I ignored her.
‘And Penny, do you know where the keys are to the unused doors in the castle? Are they all kept together?’
‘What’s happened, Mrs Gilver?’ Penny said, sliding from her perch.
‘Mischief,’ I said. ‘I assume you don’t know about it? Weren’t part of the planning of it?’
Penny gave me a look of wide-eyed innocence, but I did not forget that she had theatrical training.
‘Someone entered the bedroom of one of the paying guests and pretended to haunt her,’ I said. Leonard chuckled but I was pleased to see a frown on Penny’s face.
‘One of the Americans?’ she said. ‘Is she kicking up a ruckus? Do the others know? Oh Lord, is she leaving?’
‘She kicked up a terrific ruckus and yes the others know,’ I said crisply, ‘but thankfully no. She is not leaving. She has decided she believes in it and thinks it came to show her where the treasure was hidden. Now, the keys?’
There was a board in Pugh’s pantry, Penny told me, and a set of spares locked away in her father’s book room. Beyond that, Pugh had what he
needed by way of cellar, silver store and jewellery safe; Mrs Ellen kept her own selection handy for the store rooms; and Mrs Porteous was in charge of the larders and icehouse.
As Alec went off to check on the whereabouts of the Second Apparition and Penny to see if the Third Apparition had gone straight to bed after her fitting as she had announced, I was pantry bound.
Thankfully, Pugh was still up, sitting looking fairly orderly except for his feet being eased out of his shoes and his collar being unbuttoned with his tie pulled a little way down.
‘Pugh,’ I said, ‘I think someone might be scampering about where they shouldn’t be.’
He turned down his mouth at the corners, as though his face needed any more lugubriousness, and shrugged. ‘House parties for you,’ he said.
‘Good grief,’ I said, ‘I don’t mean— No, but I think one of the actors was in the guest wing. The Bower Lodging.’
Again, Pugh shrugged. ‘They’re all guests,’ he said. ‘If they want to go a-wandering I can hardly stop them.’
I tried a third time. ‘I rather think,’ I said, ‘that someone has pilfered one of your master keys.’
That did the trick. Pugh rose up like a whale breaking the waters and, shoving his feet back into his shoes and yanking his tie back up his neck, he bustled over to his locked key board. It took less than the blink of an eye before he fell back again – actually fell back – and leaned against the wall with relief.
‘All present and correct,’ he said. ‘Going worrying me like that!’
‘Are you sure?’ I said. ‘Do you know the keys off by heart then? Which one fits the door between the staircase and the Gateway Chamber? You know the door I mean; halfway round one of the spiral flights where one would have to take a hop, skip and jump to get through it.’
Pugh was frowning at me. ‘That door’s never used,’ he said.
‘And the key?’ I asked him, hiding my exasperation.
Dandy Gilver and a Spot of Toil and Trouble Page 14