‘I rather think not,’ Bluey said. ‘We’ve decided we don’t believe in this burglar, you see.’
‘But your mother’s evening bag is definitely missing,’ I said.
‘Hmm, well, I’ll ask Gilly to search for it tomorrow,’ said Minnie. ‘I daresay it’ll turn up.’
‘She seemed very definite, didn’t she Alec?’ I said.
‘And the windows were wide open?’ Bluey said. ‘Oh poor Mama. She really is beginning to get quite childlike in some ways.’
‘I don’t understand your meaning,’ I said.
‘We think she dropped it,’ Minnie said. ‘Either by accident, if she wrestled with the window catch while she still had it hooked over her arm …’
‘Why not pick it up?’ I said.
‘When I say she dropped it,’ Minnie went on, ‘I mean in the moat.’
‘That doesn’t seem likely.’
‘Well, there was that time she got into her bath,’ said Penny. ‘Poor Granny. She was in a hotel in Glasgow and she had rather a lot of banknotes in her purse so she was hanging onto her good brown leather handbag like a limpet. She took it to the bathroom with her instead of leaving it in her room and then she actually—’ She sat back and giggled. ‘Oh poor Granny. She was terribly flustered. She had to dry out the money between two bath towels, and then ask the hotel maids to iron it. So if she was trying to keep it quiet that she had all that lolly with her it was a bit of a bust.’
Minnie and Bluey were giggling too now. But Bluey sobered rather abruptly and shook his head fondly. ‘Or,’ he said, ‘there’s just a chance that she … oh, it’s terrible to tell tales out of school on one’s own mother but she does have rather a habit of dropping things in the moat, doesn’t she, Min?’
‘What sort of things?’ Alec said.
‘Coins,’ said Bluey. ‘For luck. And sometimes pebbles. Well, quite big stones. She likes the plunking sound they make, she says. But there was a time recently, she was terribly anxious – about money, of course, as usual, as we all are and … Well, I’m afraid we caught her making a sort of sacrifice, I suppose you’d say. She dropped a—’
‘Bluey, please,’ Minnie said, flashing a look at Penny who was staring open-mouthed.
‘A sacrifice?’ she said. ‘Granny? You make her sound absolutely gaga.’
‘Old age comes to us all and earns us the right to be a little odd sometimes,’ Minnie said, but it did not seem to placate Penny much.
‘Dropped a “what” anyway?’ she said. ‘A goat? Chicken’s entrails? Good grief! Don’t let Leonard hear about it or he’ll add it to the scene on the blasted heath.’
‘Leonard will only hear of it if you tell him,’ Minnie said. ‘So there’s no need to worry.’
‘And we’ll search for the bag in the morning,’ I added. ‘We particularly want to find it, Minnie, because it had in it some letters from Richard that Ottoline was going to show us. The letters from years ago, just after he left.’
‘What do you want with them?’ said Bluey.
‘Just in the name of completeness,’ Alec said. ‘To see if there are any hints in any of them that might help us track your father’s movements and find his place of … Well, wherever he ended up.’
‘Very thorough,’ said Bluey, vaguely. ‘Very commendable. Not sure what it would get us, mind you.’
I opened my mouth to tell him, then closed it again. I was not sure what the point of the letters was either, now I came to think of it. In fact, I was less sure all the time what the point of any of it was, not sure what Gilver and Osborne were doing here at all.
That is why, when I sat down at the little table in my bedroom to write to Hugh, it was not the billet-doux Otto’s tears had suggested to me – just as well, for Hugh would have been perplexed to receive such a thing and would have taken months to forgive me – nor the humdrum little reminder that Teddy would be home in two days and the maids were planning to take down the drawing-room curtains to remove the winter linings. Instead it was the most honest communication I had ever written to my husband in all the years of our marriage. I knew he would barely skim it but the writing of it helped me, nevertheless.
Minnie and Bluey got us here under false pretences,’ I scribbled. ‘Minnie didn’t want us forewarned of our brief in case she changed her mind about it or in case we demurred. But in any case, we are not really to find the necklace, or not primarily. We are to oversee a great public treasure hunt, which you will have read about in the Scotsman before this letter reaches you, I daresay. Beulah and the ruby and the Boxing Day mishap. Old Mrs Bewer is horrified by the whole thing and is getting quite dotty from all the upset, beginning to jettison her possessions into the moat (we are told this is a favourite habit of hers when she is terribly anxious about something). A secondary task, tertiary perhaps now I think of it, because Bluey wants us to act as character witnesses in the face of the taxman, assuring His Majesty’s exchequer that the Bewers don’t have the thing stashed away. Where was I? Our tertiary task is to try to establish the movements and fate of Richard Bewer, Bluey’s father, probably long deceased but about to be incontrovertibly deceased in the eyes of the law upon his hundredth birthday. If we could find some evidence that he took the thing with him all those years ago and sold it in Aleppo, then His Majesty would have to lump it regarding the death duties. So, dearest Hugh, I don’t suppose you, in any of your extensive correspondence, ever heard that a Richard Bewer left his wife and travelled the globe. No one met him in the British Bar in Cairo and told the story? Ask George at the club if you run into him, would you? George knows everything and will always tell it. A side-note, while I think of it, is: can you believe they hushed it up? Can you credit that a chap left his wife and grown-up child thirty years ago and, with a quiet wedding for the child, a change of staff in the house, and a vague tale of some distressing illness, they got away with it? But then the stories from the generation before would make your hair curl. I know you didn’t read The Well of Loneliness, Hugh, but you’ll have heard of it. Yes, well, besides the unfortunate Beulah, there was also a dotty aunt who spent a happy spinster life with her dear friend at Mespring. This dear friend was supposed to be delivered to Harold Bewer as his bride, until Beulah scooped him in the time-honoured way, walking down the aisle with a large bouquet held very close. This spurned friend got quite peculiar after Beulah died and I am Mespring-bound tomorrow to see if any of the peculiarity is pertinent to our concerns. But fear not. I shall not be dropping bricks in the drawing room and disgracing you. It’s really a servant I want to grill: there is a servant there who used to be here. Used, in fact, to be Richard’s valet. He might be able to shed some light on Richard’s last days in the castle, don’t you think?
I signed my name, added a postscript instructing him to scratch Bunty’s ears for me, then blotted the paper and sat back.
There was no way to know whether Hugh would be more horrified by my grammar, my indiscretion, my reference to ‘that novel’ or my plan to sit, yet again, in a servants’ hall. It was probably a dead heat.
So, since the chances of Hugh or even George knowing anything about Richard Bewer seemed quite remote, I tore up the letter and tossed the scraps of paper in the fire, stirring it with the poker until it was quite gone.
Then ignoring that damned wisp, which Alec had passed to me, or its cousin which I had just somehow spun for myself perhaps, I took myself to bed and dreamless sleep.
13
By eight the next morning, when I came downstairs, Castle Bewer was a perfect hive of anticipatory coming and going. I hung out of a landing window to watch it, in a manner that would have seen Nanny Palmer take the vapours. The actors were up and already out on the stage engaged upon vocal exercises or mysterious silent trampings about and squintings, looking for the best spots to stand upon during the play I supposed. Leonard was shouting and waving his arms like a windmill, presumably determined that they would stand where he told them and like it. The American guests, too excited by the
treasure hunt to stay in their seats until breakfast was done, were actually drinking cups of coffee as they stood in the courtyard pointing up at windows and arguing. Alec, I thought, could have sold them copies of his sketch plans at a pound apiece to help them organise their searching. The carpenters were back and, aided by Bess, the still mysterious ‘ASM’, were now knocking together crude trees and battlements. Minnie and Bluey had won that skirmish apparently. There was to be scenery, to please the conventional tastes of the locals.
Busiest of all, as I saw when at last I drew in my head and carried on to the ground floor, the family and servants were flying around with armfuls of unearthed crockery and even Bluey was tramping hither and yon with spare tablecloths.
‘For the teas!’ Minnie shouted over her shoulder. ‘You should see The Scotsman, Dandy. Top of page five. We’re going to be inundated. Mrs Porteous is on her fourth batch of scones and she says we’re going to need more jam too. Such a terrible time of year for fruit! Would you be a dear and pop into the greengrocers in the village and—’
‘You can’t serve grocers’ jam!’ I said.
‘Greengrocers,’ Minnie repeated, ‘and pick up as much as you can lay hands on – gooseberries, I expect.’
‘Doesn’t he deliver?’ I said.
‘Ah, but we don’t want spies,’ Minnie said. ‘Castle Bewer is a stronghold fast again. Just for today to help excitement build.’
‘Very well,’ I agreed. ‘I was going out anyway.’ Then I bit my lip for I did not want her to ask where I was headed. Luckily, she was far too busy and simply smiled her thanks and dashed off in pursuit of Bluey, shouting after him. ‘They don’t need to be pressed, dearest. Mrs Ellen doesn’t have time and Gilly is sulking. We’ll sprinkle drops and put lots of plates on them and they’ll be flat by tomorrow.’
Gilly was indeed sulking. She was standing mulishly at Alec’s elbow in the breakfast room, willing him silently to hurry up and let her clear. She did not know the strength of her opponent. I have never seen Alec either hurry a meal or stop eating a moment before he was stuffed to the gunnels. His few hints have led me to blame the trenches and the many days and nights of gnawing hunger he spent in extremis there and so I cannot scorn him or even call him greedy. Thankfully, he is blessed with a constitution that seems to absorb the enormous meals without it showing, although it does occur to me now and then that such constitutions do not last but rather turn on one and take the upper hand when one’s youth is gone. I hoped he would finally settle on a wife before he was transformed into Henry VIII as he surely would be if this morning’s work was anything to go by: a porridge plate, smeared with cream, and another bearing the unmistakable remains of kedgeree and five – five! – bacon rinds sat at his elbow, while he was engaged upon what looked – from the emptiness of rack, butter dish and marmalade pot – to be his seventh or eighth slice of rather thick toast.
‘How is Mrs Bewer this morning?’ I asked Gilly, pointedly.
I was rewarded with an impressive scowl. ‘She’s fine,’ Gilly said. ‘If she’d leave it be and ring for me, she’d always be fine. I’ve never known such a meddler. Why employ a maid at all, if you’re going to live like a … like a … frontierswoman in a cabin on the prairie!’
With that, her patience deserted her, and she flounced off, no more than a ‘ring the bell if you ever stop eating!’ thrown over her shoulder.
‘Golly, she’s impertinent,’ I said. ‘Even for nowadays. I hope Grant doesn’t study at her elbow – I’m not sure I’d put up with that.’
‘Hm?’ said Alec. ‘Try the kedge, Dan. It’s bliss.’
It was harder than I would have expected to drag myself away from the castle an hour later, after the kedgeree had been finished, coffee drunk, first cigarettes smoked and the results of our night’s musings shared. The stage, even in plain daylight, was beginning to be transformed and to exert its particular magic. The setting was, as all the Bewers had proclaimed, quite intoxicating and my scepticism was done away, chased off by a little dance in my innards. It was the same dance as used to be danced there when I was taken to ballet matinees as a child and the first few times I had sat myself down in a darkened picture house too. When Sarah Byrne walked onstage in a long red velvet dress with trailing sleeves and her bright hair flowing loose down her back, I actually caught my breath.
‘She’s going to be marvellous, isn’t she?’ I said to Alec who was standing at my side.
‘I don’t know whether to be glad I shan’t be upstaged by her or sorry I shan’t get the chance to act with her,’ Alec said.
‘Are you busy rehearsing all day? Or can you come with me to Mespring.’
‘Not a chance,’ Alec said. ‘Two roles, Dandy. Murderer and king. I’ll be running lines even when not actually rehearsing.’
‘Do the kings have li—?’ I began but swallowed it out of kindness and instead asked the question that had been troubling me since I first heard of Leonard’s thrifty casting. ‘Won’t everyone recognise you? All this doubling up: doctors, kings, murderers and what have you?’
Alec stared at me a good long time before he answered. ‘No,’ he said coldly at last. ‘The performance of a lord or a gentlewoman is quite distinct from the performance of a murderer or witch, Dandy. And we have hats.’
I nodded solemnly and managed not to let out a single giggle or even allow my lips to twitch until I was alone in my little motorcar, trundling over the rickety bridge and across the field to the gate, taking wide swerves around Pugh and a lad I did not recognise but took to be the hall boy, who were pounding pennants on stout sticks into the ground, presumably preparing for the ‘traffic jam’.
Mespring House was not quite three miles away but it occupied a very different world. The rough hedges bordering on the lane gave way first to trimmer hedges and then to high stone walls with iron fleurs-de-lis atop them then finally, at a curve in the wall, to angel-crowned gateposts. Behind these, a pair of storybook lodge cottages, with low eaves, latticed windows and ornamentally crooked chimneys, announced the entrance to the park. And what a park it was: not for the Annandales the straggle of fading rhododendrons and a monkey puzzle tree brought back by an errant uncle and plonked on a lawn to kill the grass and concuss garden boys. Here the drive was lined with yew, clipped every so often into the fantastical shapes of dragons, lions and serpents and, in between, clipped no less skilfully – and rather more impressively to my mind for its very understatement – into an endless undulation like a rough sea or like what one is told about clouds viewed from above by adventurous friends who have taken to the skies in aeroplanes. Beyond this hedge, if it were not a calumny to call it by the same name as the thickets of hawthorn and bramble around the castle, there was an expanse of soft green velvet studded with those conspicuously interesting trees, which have bright or shining or papery, peeling bark, enormous girth or height or etiolation, lime green leaves or flowers upon bare branches. Everywhere – as I could see quite clearly because they had been recently polished – there were little brass plaques stuck in the ground, no doubt telling the trees’ Latin names. I remembered Pugh and the hall boy banging in pennants to organise the motorcars and my heart bled for the Bewers and hardened against these Annandales before I had clapped eyes upon any of them.
Were I the jealous type, my heart would have hardened even further – or soured anyway – when, after a long drive through this horticultural vulgarity, I rounded a little hill and gazed across a valley at Mespring. Of course, I knew what it looked like; pictures of it were reproduced in every book on Scottish architectural history ever written and Hugh likes nothing more than reading books on Scottish architecture unless it is to foist them upon me. Besides, I was sure I had been to a party here once or twice in my girlhood. I should not have paid any attention to it then, of course, for there was no young man to whom the house was an accompanying element in the decision we girls were ever encouraged to be making, and I was particularly prone to being dragged along wherever my mother sent
me and Nanny took me, paying no attention and barely knowing in which of the kingdoms the train had stopped. I assumed back then that I would spend my life in soft Northamptonshire or another of its neighbouring counties and that the great houses of the Scottish Lowlands would be no more to me than Venetian palazzos or the ruins of Rome.
Now, though, seeing the house anew after decades in Perthshire and a couple of nights in the higgledy-piggle of Minnie and Bluey’s domain, it took my breath away. Some of that was trickery, for it stood just beyond an artificial lake and its Palladian front was reflected and therefore doubled. Even without the mirrored Mespring in the still water though, the place was quite something. There were three banks of three windows in three storeys and the depth of the shadows to either side told me that this was the narrow end.
At least Pugh’s pennants would have helped me decide where to leave the motorcar. As I drew closer to the great house I found myself unaccountably dithering about whether to carry on round and try to find the kitchen door to beard the valet, late of Castle Bewer, or to sweep up to the front steps and ascend, reminding the family of our acquaintance and forcing a cup of coffee out of them in a morning room. I could, I supposed, find a middle ground; ringing a bell, presenting my Gilver and Osborne card and hoping against hope that no one remembered me.
The decision was taken out of my hands by the fact of a lowly door opening under the mobile steps as my wheels crunched on the gravel. A young man came pattering out, waving his hands. He was dressed in shirtsleeves and braces but was clearly not a footman caught without his livery, for everything about him, from his floppy hair to his cigarette holder to the cut of his ludicrously high-waisted trousers, which, if they had been taken in, could have made a sail for a decent-sized dinghy, screamed that this was a sprig of the family tree. I sent up a prayer that Teddy was not, this moment, wearing such bags and sucking on such a cigarette holder, making some other woman my age want to groan.
Dandy Gilver and a Spot of Toil and Trouble Page 16