Dandy Gilver and a Spot of Toil and Trouble

by Catriona McPherson

  ‘I minded,’ Alec said with a shudder. ‘And it makes more sense to divide and conquer. I shall meet you in the book room, to start proving that Richard wrote that note.’

  ‘Proving it?’ I said. ‘How?’

  ‘If you haven’t worked out how by the time you get there, I’ll tell you,’ said Alec infuriatingly and, turning again, left me.

  Ottoline was still abed, and I was happy to see that someone had brought her a cup of tea. It did not seem to be doing her much good, though. She appeared more shrunken even since the night before when she was none too bonny.

  ‘Ottoline,’ I said, bending to kiss her forehead. I had become fond of her in the few days of our acquaintance and I felt sorry for her to have all this upheaval in her house. She had not had a happy nor an easy life and she deserved more peace than this at its close. ‘Might I sit and talk a while?’

  ‘Certainly,’ she said. ‘What would you like to talk about? My thoughts run to my granddaughter this morning. That man is no match for her but I’d rather see her married than spurned.’

  I was delighted to find the conversation turning so easily to where I needed it. ‘Speaking of granddaughters,’ I began. ‘And I agree about Leonard, by the way. He’s not worthy of her. But speaking of granddaughters, we’ve worked out who wrote the note in the rocking horse.’ Her eyelids fluttered and came to rest with her eyes closed. I lifted the teacup, almost empty, out of her hands. ‘It was Richard, wasn’t it?’ I said gently.

  ‘Everything I told you about Dorothy and Anne was true,’ she said, rather querulously.

  ‘Oh, I know,’ I said. ‘I heard enough to confirm it, along at Mespring.’ Her eyes fluttered open again. ‘I’m afraid there’s a lot of snooping and checking in what Mr Osborne and I do. But back to the “Granddaughter” note: I’m afraid I shall have to press you. Richard wrote it before he left, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ottoline said. ‘I’ve been thinking of it – as you can imagine – since you brought it to me. And I think it shows that he was beginning to see sense. I think he had to go away to clear his head but he was certainly beginning to come out from under the spell of the curse even before he left. Do you see what I mean?’

  I cast my mind back to the words and nodded. ‘He knew he had been gripped by some kind of mania,’ I said. ‘And he wanted to make sure no one else in the family ever became so obsessed with baubles. Yes, that would have been cause for hope if you had seen it at the time.’

  ‘But he died somewhere out there in one of those hot, unwholesome places, didn’t he?’ said Ottoline. ‘And quite soon. The letters stopped within the year. Poor Richard.’

  I had half-decided not to tell her what I suspected about those letters, but looking down at her wan face, her brows drawn up with anguish and her lower lip not quite steady, I thought I should bestow what comfort I could, for it was precious little.

  ‘Ottoline,’ I said, very softly. ‘I don’t think Richard sent those letters to you.’ She stiffened, but said nothing. ‘I think Bluey – dear old Bluey – wanted you to feel some hope or at least no regret. Perhaps he was searching for his father, unbeknownst to you, and he wanted to … Well, keep the home fires burning, I suppose you’d say. So he forged them and then he pretended they’d come from overseas. But he did it to comfort you, not to trick you. Or only incidentally anyway.’

  ‘Bluey?’ said Ottoline. ‘You think Bluey wrote those letters from his father to me?’

  Her tone had me wondering what precisely was in them and reflecting how shocking it would be to write letters to one’s mother that one might properly only write to one’s wife. Her next words assured me.

  ‘Bluey never had any talent for that kind of thing,’ she said.

  ‘He didn’t do it all on his own,’ I said. ‘Gunn, his father’s valet, helped him.’

  Ottoline was now absolutely rigid in her bed. ‘Gunn? The servant who went to Mespring?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, does it?’ I said. ‘It’s all a long time ago now.’ Too late, I remembered that when I had said similar words before she had berated me for treating her lifetime as though it were a great sweep of history. This time, she did not even seem to notice, or perhaps she had come to agree, for all she said was: ‘I have lived too long.’

  I tried to shush her but she waved my words away. ‘I have lived too long and now all I want is to die at home in peace. I wonder if I shall be permitted to.’

  It was the sort of remark for which there is no adequate answer. I tried a kind of boisterous good cheer instead.

  ‘Well, there won’t be much peace today, certainly. Are you keeping to your room?’

  Ottoline met my tone with a matching effort. ‘I might toddle down later and see what sort of fist Penny makes of her lecture,’ she said. ‘Although if she sees me in the audience she’ll bellow to make sure I hear and I don’t suppose that would be very comfortable for the rest of them.’

  ‘Why did you ever decide to play deaf?’ I said. ‘It must be extraordinarily inconvenient for you.’

  ‘There was a moment when it seemed the best thing,’ said Ottoline. ‘All a long time ago now, of course.’ Her eyelids were beginning to flutter again and so, with one last stroke of her cool brow – smooth in sleep – I left her.

  20

  Of course, Alec was delighted when I arrived in the book room looking just as mystified as ever. He did not know, though, that it was the moment when deafness seemed useful that was mystifying me, not his riddle.

  ‘Do you give in?’ he said, grinning like an imp.

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘Oh! No. Although, of course you’re right and you’re very clever for seeing it before me. There must be more of Richard’s writing somewhere amongst all these family books and papers, mustn’t there? He lived here for seventy years, after all. Have you found any that looks like the granddaughter note yet?’

  Alec tried to hide how miffed he felt with a long droning explanation of how he had divided the areas to be searched: estate ledgers, from when the Bewers owned more than the field in which the castle sat; albums and scrapbooks from foreign travel and special occasions – just the sort of thing letters were pasted into when Otto and Richard were young; and Bluey’s desk.

  ‘Bluey’s desk?’ I repeated, aghast. ‘Have you asked him? You can’t go poking around in someone’s private papers?’

  ‘You don’t think employing us as detectives to search a castle for a hidden item pretty much buys us free entry to every receptacle in that castle?’

  ‘No I do not,’ I said. ‘And nor do you, if you’re honest. Of course we can feel around the backs of drawers for secret compartments and false bottoms but we can’t open the drawers and read the documents inside them.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Alec. ‘I shall take care of the desk on my own and you – cloaked in honour from head to toe – can tackle “Our Indian Journey” and the rest of the scrap books.’

  It was supposed to chasten me, but Alec underestimated my appetite – the appetite of all females, I daresay – for looking at photographs of people, even strangers, even strangers long dead. I settled to my task quite happily.

  ‘Our Indian Journey’ had been pasted onto the board pages of a leather album by Ottoline, it soon became clear. ‘Richard and I on elephants!’ exclaimed one label. ‘Richard and I with the Maharaja!’ another, and the same hand was evident throughout. I checked the hand against the ‘granddaughter note’ as we seemed to be calling it, which Alec had placed handily between our two stations. They could hardly have been more different if one was Chinese. With reluctance, I closed the elephants and maharajas, and turned to the other, much thicker, record of the more humdrum days at home in Castle Bewer.

  I began at the back, for it seemed sensible to start with people I knew and work my way down into the history of unfamiliar strangers. The last page was devoted to Penny’s coming-out from five years previously. There she was in her pretty white dress with her long white gloves and those three ridiculous fe
athers, looking stiff and scared in a panelled anteroom. There was another of her at her own dance, standing between her parents at the head of a flight of stairs. How well I remembered that dreadful moment, standing at the top of the steps waiting to receive the guests at one’s coming-out ball, hoping the room would fill, and becoming more and more sickeningly sure that no one at all would come and that one would be muttered about and shot kind looks for the rest of the season. I could still hear the sound of the first carriage wheels slowing and stopping outside the door and I could still feel the drop of my mother and father’s shoulders on either side of me, for we were huddled together like orphaned lambs there. It was one of my first intimations that grown-ups felt just the same swoops and soars of emotion as did I and the disappointment was considerable. Up until that moment I had looked forward to the day when I should be beyond them.

  There were pages on end of Penny. I was sure that my mother had not saved menus and dance cards from my own ball and invitations to other grander ones, nor the bread-and-butter letter from the debutante to her parents telling them how marvellous they were for putting on such a beautiful party. I was not sure I had ever thought to write that letter and I told myself it was peculiar, to avoid feeling churlish. At any rate, it was another hand to check against our note and discount.

  ‘Penny didn’t write it,’ I said to Alec and got a withering look in reply. ‘It’s best to be thorough.’

  The christening was just one double page. There was an invitation to it, an order of service for it and a photograph commemorating it: Minnie in a dining chair with Penny in a froth of lace and ribbon on her lap and Bluey, his hand on the chair back, bending over slightly and beaming at the baby. Ottoline, darker-haired and somewhat plumper but otherwise the same, was in another dining chair alongside and behind them were a handful of what I assumed to be godparents, all slightly dead-eyed in the usual way of those days, when photographs took so very long. A young slim nanny in a pale dress and a dark hat with a badge spoke of the family’s correctness and prosperity.

  The photograph just before that one spoke of it even more loudly still. It was Minnie and Bluey arriving at Castle Bewer after their honeymoon, as I surmised from the style of Minnie’s travelling costume – those droopy crêpe coats that were crushed to rags as soon as one sat in them – and the high necks and fancy caps of the servants who had all gathered on the bridge, new and bright-looking, to welcome them. There was Pugh with a shock of hair instead of the plastered strands he sported today. There was Mrs Porteous who looked entirely unchanged. I supposed it was one of the few benefits of true ugliness that one had no looks to lose. Mrs Ellen was there, stouter and more buoyant-looking than the heavy-legged woman who hauled herself around the castle, sighing and panting, these days. And there were a bevy of maids and boys, five in all, smiling shyly at Minnie, who was their contemporary but in every other way must have seemed a creature from another world. One of the maids was a mere child, looking far too young to be anywhere except at her mother’s side. Just for a moment I felt a flash of that revolutionary spirit Hugh always suspects my detecting career will ignite in me and which I always stoutly deny. Minnie and I might lament the loss of the world we were born to and trained for, but I could not help thinking that little girls being at school instead of curtseying to the new mistress was not anything to sigh over.

  Minnie’s wedding, if one ignored the sagging frocks anyway, was beautiful. There was just one photograph pasted into the album: Minnie, her bridesmaids, and all the ladies in their finery. She smiled out of the picture as radiant as any bride I have ever seen. I was sure she was smiling at Bluey, banished along with the other gentlemen from this composition of lace, silk and covered buttons. I remembered how much they adored one another – that jolly Minerva Roll and young Bewer – the trouble they had got into for sitting so close together too, making chaperones frown even as they made the rest of us girls pine for someone to sit so close to us. Perhaps that whiff of scandal accounted for the look upon Ottoline’s face in the wedding group, which was one of pure relief, more usually the expression of the bride’s mother. I scanned the faces in the three rows of guests to see if I could spot such a person. But quite a few of the gathered relations were cut off at the nose by the hat feathers of a lady in front. Hats were dreadful that year, as they are most years to anyone who is honest enough to say so.

  ‘That’s interesting,’ I said, recognising a face at the edge of the second row. ‘Things were friendly enough between Mespring and the Bewers for Anne Annandale to be at Minnie and Bluey’s wedding, at least.’

  ‘What?’ said Alec.

  ‘It’s quite a testament to a portraitist’s art if you can recognise a person from a painting, don’t you think?’

  ‘What does that have to do with Richard’s handwriting?’ said Alec.

  ‘Although I can’t pick Aunt Dorothy out from the crowd,’ I added. ‘So perhaps Anne just had one of those faces that’s easy to capture. I’m forming a complete view of the case and the characters involved in it,’ I added loftily as Alec gathered himself again to tell me I was wasting time.

  I picked up a bit of speed anyway, eschewing the reading of the wedding breakfast menu and only glancing at the invitation which was pasted in beside it. Another page further back, though, were pictures impossible to resist: pictures of the castle interiors from the days of Bluey’s childhood here. I gathered that his father had procured his first camera around about the time Bluey went off to Eton for, as well as a picture of the boy beaming in his tails before the fire in the morning room, there were a myriad more snaps of the castle’s rooms, including two capturing each end of the very book room we were sitting in this morning. I could not help looking up and down and up and down, tracing the few changes and noting the many ways the room was just the same, for Bluey’s retreat had escaped the wholesale overhaul of the castle I had been hearing about from everyone, when Ottoline – for Minnie – threw out the dark furniture and the memorials to the castle’s past as a fort, painted every wall in pastel shades and covered every seat with roses. Gone were the suits of armour that used to guard either side of the entry to the great hall, gone were the displays of swords from claymore to dagger that had once adorned the walls as well as the current black iron sconces. Gone was some quite dreadful Tudor furniture almost as black as iron itself: those chairs it is torture to sit upon, beset with carving as they are; and those endless chests on little legs in which travellers used to haul their plate and coin around when roads were the workplace of highwaymen.

  It occurred to me also, as I looked at a photograph of a long passageway, that the Castle Bewer of today had not a single stuffed and mounted head anywhere inside it. It was the first moment of my feeling anything but pity and sympathetic anger for Otto regarding her husband’s flight. She had the worry and shame, to be sure, but she had been able to toss a bewildering array of stag, doe, bear and tiger heads onto the bonfire when Richard departed, as well as the zebra-skin rug Bluey stood on in his new finery and an elephant’s foot umbrella stand that had once been filled with fishing rods by the gatehouse-passage door.

  There was a photograph of the party responsible for one of the stags: seven men with pipes in their mouths and guns broken over their arms, standing in a chilly dawn, two of them with feet up on the flank of the great beast, all grinning.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ said Alec. I had not been aware of sighing. I certainly had not realised that I was getting sentimental about stag in my advancing years.

  ‘I wonder if Leonard knows there are cannons stashed away somewhere,’ I said, to throw him off the scent. ‘He’d surely want them for the stage, don’t you think?’

  ‘Cannon,’ said Alec. ‘The plural of cannon is—’ but he stopped himself before he finished and had the grace to give me a sheepish look. ‘Finding anything?’

  I did not want to admit to barely thinking about the task in hand at all and so I concentrated hard and managed to make a point with a bit of stretchi
ng.

  ‘If the Cut Throat is hidden in the castle,’ I said, ‘I bet it’s in this room. This is the only room that wasn’t gutted and painted over after Richard left.’

  Alec sighed now. ‘It seems a long time since we really believed the Cut Throat was hidden in the castle though, doesn’t it?’ I nodded and bent to my work once more.

  Those Homes and Gardens pictures of the castle were the last of the photographs altogether. There was an invitation and an order of service for Bluey’s christening, the same again for Richard and Otto’s wedding, a terribly yellowed set of menus and invitations for Harold and Beulah’s wedding and their engagement party, and every page before that was filled with watercolour sketches of the castle, faded invitations to yet more parties, and I had wasted twenty minutes and achieved absolutely nothing.

  ‘Hmph,’ said Alec.

  ‘Hmph what?’

  ‘Typical,’ he added, unhelpfully. I waited. ‘Penny inherits everything if they can keep hold of it,’ he said at last.

  ‘I don’t know whether to be more shocked that you’re reading Bluey’s will or that he’s got it there in his desk instead of safely with his solicitor.’

  ‘Of course I’m not,’ said Alec. ‘It’s a clerk’s copy of the entailment on the estate.’

  ‘Oh well then!’ I offered, hoping he would catch the sarcasm. I wondered how he would feel if someone was poking around the entailments on his own estate and I did not see how its being a clerk’s copy made any difference.

  He flipped a page. ‘Huh!’ he said.

  ‘Huh what?’

  ‘Typical.’ Again I waited. ‘It used to be eldest legitimate male. When there were farms and forests and a moor to shoot over, it was male heir to male heir all the way. They changed it to general “legitimate issue” once it had gone down to this white elephant of a place and a row of pensioners’ cottages. Penny only gets it because it’s no longer worth getting.’