Dandy Gilver and a Spot of Toil and Trouble

by Catriona McPherson

  ‘Next week! Next week!’ shouted the sprig, in a friendly but firm way, still advancing and still shaking his hands. ‘Sorry and all that. Hope you haven’t made a long trip.’ He stopped in front of the Cowley and put his hands on his hips.

  ‘Oh,’ I said, stepping down. ‘No, I’m not a visitor. Gosh, I wish I were. It’s tremendously grand, isn’t it? No, I’m from Castle Bewer.’

  He asked, just before I realised that of course he was going to: ‘Are you an actress?’

  ‘Friend of the family,’ I said and then, judging his instant reaction, which was a downward droop of boredom in the haughty eyes, I added: ‘although currently employed by them as a detective.’ The eyelids lifted again, taking the arched brows with them.

  ‘Detective?’ he said. ‘Are they in some kind of trouble? Nothing trivial, I hope.’

  I could not help laughing. ‘Dandy Gilver,’ I said. ‘Gilverton, Perthshire as the family friend and Gilver and Osborne with my detective’s hat on.’

  ‘Ah,’ said the sprig, shifting the cigarette holder to the side of his mouth like a pipe – I noted in passing that it was made of jade with a gold tip. ‘Hugh Gilver? Friend of Silas Esslemont? And Gilver and Osborne? Well, yes, indeed. Quite. Golly. Can you tell me about the trouble or is it hush-hush?’

  ‘There’s no trouble,’ I said, ‘or it would be completely hush-hush, because we guarantee discretion.’ I spoke as archly as he was, the annoying habit of the young these days being to say everything with a veneer of insincerity. I have even heard wedding vows exchanged that way and it made me want to smack bride and groom. ‘Just an enterprise in need of an overseer. Perhaps you haven’t—’

  ‘Heard?’ said the sprig. ‘Haven’t heard? It’s all over The Times and since it’s all over the Record too, our maids are like a flock of budgies with it, just when we need them concentrating. I am livid. And Mummy is absolutely beside herself. Of course, we knew about the Dream and we were pig sick enough about not having had the idea ourselves, but the ruby! A treasure hunt? Pchah!’ He tore his cigarette out of its holder, threw it down and ground it to shreds under his elegant leather heel. Then, with an even greater cry of frustration, he crouched down and picked it all up again. ‘We’ve got to keep the place pristine,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t believe what we’re charging them to shuffle round and gawp at a few Holbeins, a bloody awful Titian from before he learned to paint and a deeply disputed Rembrandt we keep in a dark corner or it would fool no one. Billy Annandale, by the way,’ he said, straightening. He tipped the crumbled tobacco and paper into his left hand, wiped his right thoroughly on his trousers and shook mine.

  ‘Well now,’ I said. ‘Funny you should mention pictures, because one of my reasons for popping along this morning is that I very much wanted to see the painting of Anne Annandale and Dorothy Bewer.’

  ‘Oh Lord, not Aunt Nancy!’ said Billy Annandale. ‘Mespring’s great scandal of 1834. Have you heard?’

  ‘I’ve heard murmurs,’ I said, quietly hoping for better.

  ‘Come and see her if you really want to,’ he said, stepping back into the shadow of the stairs.

  ‘Oh I do!’ This was rot, of course. The only reason I had come was to mention the ruby and see if I could tell – from guilty looks and blushes – whether they really had pinched it back again.

  ‘And you can be a guinea pig too,’ he went on. ‘We’re all sick of the sight of every last sketch and footstool but if you could ooh and aah a bit we might get our spirits back up in the face of the betrayal. It is a bit of a cheek, isn’t it? Those Bewers on our coat-tails?’

  He ushered me into a low passageway. It was not quite sumptuous but not quite plain, dating from the days before the fashion for showing off turned great houses into the burdensome white elephants they have become; that same fashion that had started the journey towards this day, when palaces and castles were opening to day-trippers, laying on teas and putting up plays.

  ‘You could out-do them,’ I said, feeling disloyal to Minnie but unable to help myself. ‘Stage an opera on your terrace and knock them into a cocked hat.’

  ‘Opera?’ said Billy. ‘I thought they were pushing it with Shakespeare, if I’m honest.’

  ‘Oscar Wilde then,’ I said, teasing now.

  ‘My mother would drop,’ Billy said. ‘Do you know her?’

  We traced acquaintance in a desultory fashion as we made our way up a set of back stairs to the entrance hall. When we emerged through a door in the panelling I stopped speaking from sheer awe.

  Mespring was, quite simply, staggering. A game of rugby football could have taken place in this hall and still left room for the household to have tea undisturbed by the fire. It was enormous, like a cathedral, and stuffed to its waistline with marble in every conceivable shade. The floor was mustard with green veins, the fireplace ginger with pink, and the pillars were the nasty brown of chocolate ice-cream. The statues were good plain white but they were dwarfed by what was above them. Surely, I thought, this hallway had been raised at some time in its long life. Surely no architect had planned all of this at once. For on top of the green, brown and pink marble excesses was another room entirely, as though its floor had fallen through and they had simply left it hovering there. The upper room was a riot of painted frescos, crawling over walls and ceiling. Literally crawling in most instances, I noted, since the tableaux – as such tableaux tend to – suggested that people do not walk around or sit down but that instead they drape themselves on couches if mortal or clouds if not, so that a crowd of them painted on a grand scale is simply a tangle of arms and legs and the odd bit of floating drapery. Gods, cherubs, graces, nymphs and putti rolled about from the top of the hideous marble on one wall all the way across to the top of the hideous marble on the other, eyes beseeching, limbs waving and clothes mostly falling off.

  ‘It’s—’ I said.

  Billy Annandale guffawed. ‘It certainly is. Let’s keep walking. I’m afraid there’s a lot more of it before we get to the long gallery.’ He cleared his throat modestly, an impeccable imitation of a very correct footman, or perhaps a clerk in a rather staid bank. ‘This, as you see, is the great hall and if we ascend the great stairs’ – he waved to both sides, pointing out the disputed Rembrandt on the way – ‘we arrive at the great drawing room.’ Here, in a chamber forty feet long if it was an inch, as well as marble and tapestries and a fresco of the birth of Venus with a great many more flailing arms and legs and even less clothing, there was also a quantity of veneered wood in that very intricate parquetry that I am afraid makes me think of dartboards. Add the fact that the carpet was Victorian and so had not yet begun to fade the way that older carpets do – so kind to their surroundings – and the fact that the curtains were set about with tassels and tucks and looked like the costumes of a battalion of pantomime dames, and the drawing room was worse than the hall.

  ‘And now the great dining room,’ Billy said, flinging open one of a pair of doors.

  ‘What on earth is that?’ I asked, stepping through into an even longer room, which seemed to have been afflicted with some kind of fungus.

  ‘It’s leather wallpaper,’ Billy said. ‘Stamped, silvered and gilded. Do you like it?’

  ‘Uh,’ I said. ‘It’s ingenious.’

  Again Billy only laughed and said, ‘If you’re wondering how much better it would look with more gilding covering the leather … Behold the great music room.’

  ‘Oof,’ I said, for here the gilt was dazzling and the marble border above it – quite ten feet deep – had even more naked nymphs, all managing to play violins, pipes and lutes while rolling on their backs.

  ‘We did think of redoing the chairs,’ said Billy, waving at the rows of those uncomfortable little gilt and velvet affairs one sits on during music recitals. They are wonderful at keeping one awake even after a solid dinner, but most unfortunately in this case they had been covered in what I can only call orange. It was not the gold of the leather walls nor even the cream of the dama
sk curtains. It was an unrepentant orange. ‘But really,’ Billy went on, ‘what’s the use? If we actually started to look at any of it with the eye of taste we would curl up in little balls and weep, wouldn’t we? Anyway, finally the ordeal is over and we have arrived at … the great gallery.’

  We passed through another tall door and it was a testament to the garish nature of the rooms behind us that this – a sixty-foot gallery with red walls, red carpet and gargantuan portraits in those gold encrusted frames that look as though they have been overrun by barnacles – seemed almost soothing.

  ‘God knows what the trippers will make of it all,’ Billy said.

  ‘I think,’ I told him, quite honestly, ‘they will be overawed and delighted but, because not everything is exactly in accordance with modern tastes, they won’t be quite so covetous and dissatisfied with their own little villas and flats as they might be otherwise.’

  Billy stared at me. ‘What a nice woman you are,’ he said. ‘They’ll be happy to have paid their sixpence to see this ugly barn of a place and they’ll go home to cream paint and plain rugs quite content?’

  ‘Exactly. Tell me though, are you really going to call everything “great” as you lead people around?’

  ‘I’m not leading people around,’ he said. ‘Good God, no. But yes the guides are thus instructed. It’s inarguable for one thing. They are great rooms even if hideous, and besides that, if people ask about the ordinary rooms – the dining rooms and drawing rooms that are actually habitable – we have an answer.’

  ‘They can see them for a modest extra fee?’ I guessed and was rewarded with a smirk and a waggled eyebrow.

  ‘We’ll go through for coffee after this and I’ll show you. But first …’ I looked with interest up and down the walls of portraits and then hurried over to where he was pointing.

  14

  ‘John Watson Gordon,’ I said, as I approached. John Watson Gordon was responsible for a fair few of the gloomiest portraits of Hugh’s ancestors. I spent every evening at home facing a picture of his grandfather glaring down at me and despising me for sins unknown and, as a result, I would recognise the painter’s work anywhere. Even when painting girls and therefore deprived of mutton-chop sideburns and round spectacles, there were still clothes so dark as to be invisible and that same background of sepia landscape that did for everyone. He was only any good at faces really. ‘It’s rather unusual for him to paint a pair of young ladies, isn’t it?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ Billy said. ‘Provosts of far-flung burghs and elderly ministers are more his thing. But as you see, Nancy and Dot didn’t go in for frills.’

  I looked again. The portrait was clearly from the 1830s, when gigot sleeves reached their zenith, rather as Billy’s trouser legs had today, and necklines were at their very lowest and widest too. The girls’ snowy shoulders, bedecked with pearls, rose out of what looked rather like a molehill of cloth. And that molehill was grey and black in the case of one sitter and brown and black in the case of the other. Their hair too was in the unfortunate style of the day. For this the blame was to be laid at the tiny feet of the new young queen, who had been very badly advised by her lady’s maid into believing that pouched cheeks and a needle nose would be set off by lank loops of hair echoing the pouches on either side of a sharp parting. At least, Anne Annandale and Dorothy Bewer had better bones and the loops and molehills did not make them look quite as comical as the same fashions had rendered Victoria in her youth.

  ‘The Bewers said they were … very close friends,’ I murmured.

  Billy nodded. ‘Devoted to one another,’ he said. I glanced at the pearls, wondering if an expert would be able to tell if they really were a depiction of the strand I had just found. I should have said they were a little shorter but that might have been because the dress’s neckline left such an expanse below them. Next I studied the rings, noticing that the girls wore one each on their intertwined fingers. Mostly, however, I was mesmerised, as one often is, by the frank gaze of these painted strangers who died so long ago. Anne’s light, sparkling eyes held mine and the slight purse to her decided mouth made me wish I could hear what she was thinking. Dorothy was the milder of the pair and, although she too looked out of the picture at me, the tilt of her head suggested that either she had just turned from gazing at the other girl or was just about to.

  ‘Anne was very much the boss of the outfit then,’ I said.

  ‘Now how clever of you to see that,’ said Billy. ‘It’s true, from what the stories have told us anyway. She was rather wild and headstrong, and in latter years even more than headstrong. Quite peculiar. Dorothy was the peacemaker, the good listener, the patient one. But, how did you know which was which?’

  I blinked in surprise for the question had caught me out. Then I laughed. ‘Simply that Penny Bewer is her Great-Aunt Dorothy’s double,’ I said.

  Billy subjected the portrait to a moment’s close study. ‘Well, as far as I know I’ve never met Miss Bewer,’ he said. ‘Because of the feud, you know. It was set in stone before I was born. But even if I had, I daresay I’d take your word for it. Women are always finding family resemblance. From the day a child is born, a howling pink monkey of a thing, women are always telling the doting parents that it looks like one or the other granny or someone. I would take it as an insult but no one else ever seems to.’

  I found it rather rude the way this young man was pronouncing on the habits of ‘women’ as he called them, and I wondered if his coarse manners meant that I could simply plunge in with both feet and ask about the nasty wedding gift. Before I had made my mind up, though, he took the matter out of my hands.

  ‘I suppose you’ve heard that this marvellous necklace the Bewers have been advertising actually used to be ours,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve heard so many different things about the necklace that I can’t keep them straight,’ I said. ‘I can’t keep up with what it’s called from day to day for a start.’

  ‘Yes, Briar Rose is a bit more enticing than Judas Jewel, isn’t it?’ said Billy.

  ‘Or Cut Throat,’ I added.

  ‘That’s a new one,’ he said. ‘Where did that come from, I wonder.’

  His ignorance was rather puzzling but then, from the breezy way he spoke of its being ‘women’ who cooed over babies, I supposed he was also above remembering the gossip of his grandmother’s day. Except that he had rather delighted in the ‘great scandal of 1834’.

  ‘Come and ask Mother if she can enlighten you,’ he said. ‘Tell her what you told me about the ugliness of this place being a boon and she’ll adore you. She should just about be sitting down for her coffee about now.’

  He swept me away through another of the panelled doors but this time we emerged into a long plain passageway with a fine carpet runner, polished edges to the floor, pale blue walls and some soothing landscapes. There was no furniture except for the odd half-moon table here and there and upon them some bowls of roses.

  ‘I’m glad to see you really don’t live against those backdrops we’ve just seen,’ I said. ‘I should have worried for your sanity.’

  Billy laughed and ushered me into a sitting room where the current Lady Annandale was just being served with a laden silver tray of coffee and plain biscuits by a maid in black serge and white apron. The settled domesticity of the scene was delightful and Lady Annandale herself, coolly dressed in angora the same shade as her corridor walls and with a sleek little greyhound or some such leaning calmly against her still-shapely legs, was quite a contrast with poor Minnie, harassed and frazzled and running about with armloads of tablecloths the day before the opening of her home. Lady Annandale was so far from frazzled that, when her son burst into her morning room with a stranger in tow, she did not even blink but just murmured to the maid to bring another cup and beckoned me to sit.

  ‘This is Mrs Gilver, Mother,’ Billy said. ‘Hugh Gilver’s wife.’

  ‘Dandy,’ said Lady Annandale. ‘Of course. How kind of you to drop in while you wer
e in the area.’

  I was horrified. I could not have produced this woman’s name if I were dangling from a rope over an abyss and it was the password to secure my release. But I summoned the spirit of Nanny Palmer, Mlle Toulemonde and the entire staff of my finishing school and dug deep down into my memory.

  So, I had definitely been here before then. Perhaps I stopped off on my way north, on the very trip during which I met Hugh. I kept digging. If so, I was here with Daisy and her mother and they were here because Daisy’s mother had been on a crossing to New York with the new wife of Lord Annandale who, oddly enough, had honeymooned on an island off the Massachusetts coastline, even though the wife was not an aluminium heiress or anything of that nature. She was a perfectly ordinary English girl and her name was …

  ‘Winifred,’ I said. ‘Of course. I should have telephoned to you but the line seemed always to be engaged so I popped along on the off-chance.’

  ‘I should have been hurt if you hadn’t,’ Lady Annandale said. ‘When I read that you were here I was a little hurt I hadn’t seen you already.’

  She was pouting and my memories of her were solidifying nicely. She was just as big a ninny now as she had been thirty years ago. Back then she had a kitten with a bow on its head instead of the whippet or Italian greyhound or whatever it was and she had made a terrific fuss about it scratching her when she tickled it. She had wrapped her finger in a handkerchief and gone to the nursery to have it bathed and smeared with ointment. Remembering this, I had to concentrate to keep smiling. So it took me a moment until her words went in.

  ‘You’ve read about me?’ I said. ‘In the newspaper?’

  ‘Quite a long write-up,’ she said, as if that would please me. ‘The real-life Lady Macbeth, they called you.’

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘Why?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ said Lady Annandale. ‘The notion of a gentlewoman plotting and planning, perhaps?’