Bright Young Dead

by Jessica Fellowes

  Only, tonight the show was cancelled. Alice clapped her hands once, laughing when Louisa and Mary jumped. She turned to Bertha. ‘I think this policewoman is nervous but she shouldn’t be, should she?’

  Bertha growled. She actually growled, like a dog straining at a leash.

  ‘No,’ said Alice, ‘we’re very nice. There’s nothing here for the police to worry about.’ She turned back to Louisa. ‘I’d ask you to stay for a drink,’ she continued, ‘but I don’t think you’ll accept, will you?’

  Neither of them responded, not knowing at all how to read this.

  Her voice lowered. ‘Now would be a good time for you to go.’

  Louisa slowly started to turn, looking over her shoulder the entire time but nobody else in the pub moved an inch as she opened the heavy door and Mary shot out. Louisa was about to run too, when Alice grabbed her by the arm and whispered into her ear. ‘On the other hand, Dulcie Long ought to be nervous. Ours boys followed you. You and her son. All the way to that sister’s house. Now there’s two traitors in that family and I don’t like that. I don’t like that at all.’

  She let go with a shove and Louisa ran out of the door and onto the street not knowing where she was going, so long as it was far away from the Elephant and Castle and all who drank there.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  Somehow Louisa ran back the way they had come and hit the road where the bus stop was. Only when she was sure that nobody was behind her did she bend over, hands on her knees, and try to get her breath back. Her chest hurt and her eyes ached. After a few moments she stood up straight but immediately felt sick; unable to prevent it, she vomited over somebody’s garden wall and prayed it had gone into a flower bed. Slowly, with trembling legs, she walked back to where they’d agreed to meet Guy, and saw him standing there, his arms around Mary, her head leaning against his chest. It wasn’t what she wanted to see but she couldn’t blame her. If she’d got to Guy first, she’d have done that too.

  Louisa went nearer and when Mary saw her she broke away from Guy. She’d been crying. ‘I’m so sorry, Louisa,’ she said. ‘I was useless but I was so frightened…’ A fresh bout of tears overcame her.

  Guy looked like a balloon that had lost all its air. ‘I should have come with you.’

  ‘No,’ said Louisa, ‘it would have made it worse. Only now I’m worried about Marie. We have to warn her.’

  Mary blew her nose and started to recover herself. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Alice whispered something to me as we were leaving, about Dulcie betraying her. Someone followed me from Mrs Brewster’s. And I said Billy Masters’s name, which made one of them angry. Because of us, Alice thinks that Dulcie has talked to the police about him and the rest of them. And now they are going to want their revenge.’

  ‘This means there is a connection between Dulcie and the Forty, and this man, Billy Masters. He’s the key. Do you think he’s the one that met her at Asthall Manor?’ Guy, who had had a horrible half an hour waiting for Louisa and Mary to come back, wanted badly to redeem himself by solving this.

  ‘There’s a connection,’ said Louisa, ‘but we don’t know any more than that, do we?’

  ‘There’s no hard evidence,’ said Mary.

  ‘No,’ sighed Guy.

  It was late now, and a chill had seeped into their bones. Louisa was overcome with tiredness and hunger but she hadn’t arranged anywhere to sleep that night. She’d had a vague idea that she’d be able to get the last train back to Shipton but that would have departed some time ago.

  ‘You can stay with me,’ said Mary. ‘My room’s only small but I can make up some cushions with a blanket on the floor.’

  So they said goodbye to Guy and caught two buses to Mary’s room in a women-only block for nurses and the few female police officers working in London. Her quarters were cramped with barely space around the bed, sink and chest of drawers, though she kept it proudly neat with a jam jar in which she had stuck sprigs of holly and berries. Louisa hardly noticed the details as it was after one o’clock by the time they got there and even the marrow of her bones was crying with exhaustion. They crept about as quietly as possible – the walls were very thin, said Mary – though she insisted on making Louisa’s bed comfortable and even offered to make her a hot chocolate on the camping gas stove she kept in her room. Only Louisa had fallen asleep with her boots still on before Mary had even finished the sentence.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  When Louisa let herself in through the back door at Asthall the next morning, Mrs Stobie was halfway through her preparations for lunch. She raised an eyebrow at the bedraggled nursery maid.

  ‘You’re a sight for sore eyes,’ she said sternly. ‘Nanny Blor’s not given you away but I think you’d better make it up to her quick.’

  Louisa could barely nod to this, exhausted as she was from her restless sleep and early train ride without breakfast, topped by a long walk in the cold and drizzle back to the house. She trudged up the stairs to the nursery, hoping to slip into the bathroom for at least a reviving strip wash with a flannel and hot water before announcing her return. Tom, Diana, Nancy and Pamela should all be in the library, if not out walking. Debo, Unity and Decca might be in the schoolroom with colouring books and pencils. It had become Nanny Blor and Louisa’s most regular form of entertainment in the Christmas holidays on days that were too miserable and damp to take them outside between breakfast and luncheon, though the afternoon walk was never missed, even if it was raining cats and dogs.

  Louisa found the nursery quiet when she reached it and was able to slip into her room and change after a brief wash and splash of ice-cold water on her face. Nanny was in the corner of the schoolroom, occupying herself by sharpening the pencils with a pocketknife. Debo rushed over to Louisa when she came in and gave her a big squeeze around her knees, and Unity and Decca looked up to wave hello but quickly resumed their colouring. It was as if her being away had made no difference at all.

  Yet back in London, her being away had made all the difference, hadn’t it? She was terrified for Marie and Daniel. They needed to be warned that Alice Diamond knew Dulcie’s boy was with them but how to tell them without revealing that she was the one who had been so stupid as to lead them there? Those men must have seen her leaving Mrs Brewster’s. What made it even more awful was that the Forty also believed that Dulcie had given Louisa – and a policewoman – Billy Masters’s name. He would be more important to them than Dulcie. If any of them saw either her or Mary, their lives would be in peril. At Asthall Manor she was safe but these thoughts would cycle endlessly in her mind giving her nightmares.

  ‘I take it the emergency is over?’ said Nanny.

  Louisa nodded, doing her best to look nonchalant. ‘It turned out not to be as bad as was first thought,’ she said, hoping she hadn’t given herself away. Nancy always said that Nanny was the only one who could make her feel shame for something naughty, and Louisa knew exactly how she felt. At least she had only missed a day and she would find a way to make it up. Louisa knew that Nanny Blor was used to having her around but she couldn’t help feeling that now Debo was no longer a baby and the others were getting older, there was less and less need for her to be there. Of course, there was always tidying to be done and chores such as ironing the children’s clothes and mending the nursery linens. But, truthfully, none of it was onerous and with the governess around most of the time, there was even less for her to do. Perhaps that was why she had allowed herself to be so distracted by everything going on in London.

  Where the routine of the children’s daily life had given her comfort before with the regular-as-clockwork timetable of meals, walks, laundry and baths, now it felt suffocating. Debo was a placid and easy child but Unity and Decca were withdrawing into a secret world of their own, talking in a language that nobody else could understand. Yet they were not at all alike, so while they were wrapped up in their own plans, spending hours in their shared room or in a corner of the library, their giggles
would be suddenly interrupted by arguments and soon there would be shouting and the stamping of small feet.

  Tom was home for the holidays but, at sixteen, he considered himself a young man and preferred to seek his father out, accompanying him on long walks and shoots, rather than be the source of entertainment for his sisters, who plied him with endless questions about school and the food he was allowed to eat there. Diana, fifteen years old and womanly in looks and behaviour, resented her confinement to the nursery and was frequently frustrated in her desire to accompany either Nancy or Pamela in whatever outing or task they embarked on. Alone, she would read in the library, a sulky expression on her face that had started to take on the perfectly carved outlines of a marble bust. In company, she had a tendency to prickliness, which exasperated her mother.

  Yet, Louisa knew none of them were any worse than they had ever been and she was still very fond of all of them. She hoped her misgivings were no more than her mind always roaming elsewhere. Even if she hadn’t been afraid for Marie and Daniel, she didn’t want to be outside London any more. Perhaps what Nancy had was catching: Louisa was beginning to feel oppressed by the beauty and wide-open spaces of the countryside and longed instead for the freedom that came with the tightly packed men and women on the dance floor of a seedy club in Gerrard Street.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  It was Ada who told Louisa the surprising news that Charlotte Curtis was due to arrive at the house later that day.

  ‘She’s coming in the run-up to Christmas apparently,’ said Ada, as they cleared away the lunch plates from the nursery. ‘Bit rum, if you ask me.’

  Louisa was surprised that neither Nancy nor Pamela had mentioned it to her but she thought she had probably put their noses out of joint by staying behind in London.

  Charlotte arrived at four o’clock, collected from the station by Nancy, with Hooper driving the car. There was a week until Christmas Day but with her mother recuperating in a nursing home in the south of France, Charlotte had asked if she might spend that week with the Mitfords at Asthall. Everyone thought the request odd, and it had been discussed in the kitchen by Mrs Stobie and Ada, as well as in the drawing room by Lord and Lady Redesdale. Why would she want to spend Christmas at the house where her brother had been killed? Louisa heard various theories suggested: that she wished to investigate further the circumstances of the murder; that she had been looked after in the days immediately afterwards by Lady Redesdale and wanted more of the same comfort for her grief; that she had nowhere else to go, not having stayed at the family homes of her other friends. Nancy thought it was simpler than that: Asthall Manor was reasonably close to Oxford and she would want to see Adrian’s friends.

  When she arrived it was certainly clear that Charlotte was still in deep mourning. Each layer of her clothes was richly and sumptuously textured, pigmented a black so intense they were almost purple. Louisa thought everything she wore was brand new, with every cuff, collar and hem bearing the crisp look of the not-yet laundered. Her hair fell in thick, chestnut waves to just below her chin and her eyes were made larger and sadder with kohl pencil, a daring style of make-up outside London. She moved slowly but with grace and waved delicately at her luggage in the hall as if it were a metaphysical burden someone else must carry. All the same, she did this with the sure confidence of a woman who had never been asked to lift anything heavier or less glorious than a diamond ring.

  Lady Redesdale had arranged for everyone to gather in the library, where she felt the atmosphere would be less formal and more suitable to this young woman they hardly knew staying with them. She had frankly confided in Mrs Windsor – who told Mrs Stobie, who told Ada, who told Louisa – that she was concerned that the youngest children may feel their Christmas joys would be muted by Miss Curtis’s presence but equally knew that she was glad of an opportunity to mitigate the guilt she felt at the death having happened at Asthall. If they could give her a happy time there perhaps Miss Curtis would remember things differently. Lord Redesdale was far more disturbed by the idea of a flapper spending so much time in his house and unduly influencing the more malleable minds of his daughters but it was always possible the servants had misinterpreted the distant shouting and repeated slamming of his study door.

  At any rate, there they all were, gathered together in the library where the advent calendar leaned on the mantelpiece, the seventeenth window opened that morning by Decca to reveal a cheerful robin redbreast. Louisa brought down Debo, Unity and Decca from the nursery, each girl tidied up from their afternoon’s blowy walk, with hair rebrushed and tied up in a velvet ribbon, in clean dresses with white socks and buckled shoes. Tom came in from his walk with Farve, along with Pamela who had been in the stables, while Diana had remained in the library all afternoon reading a book on Elizabeth I as she lay on the sofa. At least, that was what she told her mother. The governess had been dismissed until January and the children had been vocal in their belief that there was no need to do anything ‘improving’ until she returned.

  Ada brought in a tray of hot buttered crumpets, which the children fell upon after Charlotte declined one, asking only for a cup of China tea with no milk and a sliver of lemon. Louisa stole furtive glances at her and was more certain than ever that she could see a likeness to Daniel in her; more than the dark curls of their hair, it was the sulky mouth and soft chin she shared with her brother. Even when happy, the Curtis bloodline would always look resentful in a minor fashion – one ice cube too many in their drink, say, or a hem that came undone halfway through a party.

  The tea passed in a fairly desultory manner, with the children the only ones to offer lively chatter, asking Charlotte what present she most hoped for at Christmas and whether she liked robins or Jesus better (‘on Christmas cards, Muv!’ they exclaimed when their mother protested). Perhaps it was the flatness of this atmosphere that prompted Nancy to announce suddenly that she was planning a dinner party for the following night.

  ‘What?’ said Lady Redesdale but she had been wrong-footed. Nancy knew she would not want to tick her off in front of Charlotte.

  ‘Sebastian and Ted are in Oxford, it would be easy for them to come down,’ said Nancy with insouciance.

  Charlotte’s face visibly lit up at this news.

  Nancy carried on, taking advantage of her mother’s tongue-tied response. ‘I spoke to Clara on the telephone this morning and she said she’d like to join us. Perhaps we could ask Phoebe, too.’

  There was a guttural sound from Lady Redesdale’s throat but Nancy cut her off. ‘I’ve already spoken to Mrs Stobie and she said that so long as she can do us a simple supper of roast chicken then she’s got enough food in. We’ll set up the table in here and then you and Farve needn’t be disturbed by us.’

  Iris Mitford, who had been observing the scene with her usual quiet elegance, laughed at her niece’s nonchalance, although not disapprovingly. Lady Redesdale’s high forehead crinkled but she spoke in a resigned tone. ‘I suppose if you’re not going back to London before Christmas, it would be nice for you, Charlotte?’

  ‘It would mean a lot to be able to see everybody,’ said Charlotte, and Louisa saw from the flush on her neck that this was, indeed, the real reason she had wanted to come to Asthall Manor. Charlotte turned to Nancy. ‘Perhaps not Dolly. I expect she’s got to run the club in any case.’

  Nancy laughed. ‘Fine, not Dolly. Come with me, let’s go and telephone the others.’

  What, Louisa wondered, was Nancy’s game?

  She didn’t have to wait long to find out.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  Louisa was in the linen cupboard the following morning, having decided to rearrange the shelves for no reason other than that it gave her an excuse to stay in there for an hour or two. It was more of a small room than a cupboard, with three walls lined with deep shelves and a high window. The smell of freshly laundered cotton made her nostalgic for her mother and she had learned that the powerful emotion gave her a peculiar combination of comfort and heartache
. When she needed her other senses overwhelmed, this would do the trick. At this point, Louisa was trying not to think about Dulcie because she had done little else in the small hours of the night, her thoughts whirling around like a dervish and producing not one single resolution. She could not write to warn Dulcie of Alice Diamond because all letters were read by a prison officer, nor could she find an excuse to get back down to London again so soon without risking her job. And anyway, even if she did warn Dulcie it wouldn’t do any good: it would just leave the wretched girl fretting in a prison, unable to tell her family.

  As Louisa was deciding whether the single bedsheets should go on a lower shelf so that they could be more easily reached by a helpful child, Pamela came in. Louisa knew that Pamela sometimes liked to hide in here too, usually to read a book when she was in retreat from her sisters. The linen cupboard guaranteed warmth with its hot water pipes running along the back wall, even when Lord Redesdale’s strict instructions about the fires being lit meant the rest of the house was ice cold. No book was in Pamela’s hand this time.

  ‘Lou,’ she said, ‘I need your help.’

  Louisa tried to look as neutral as possible before committing herself to a promise. A Mitford daughter might ask for help with reviving a dying mouse or rescuing a rabbit caught in one of the hated gamekeeper’s snares as easily as other children wanted their shoelaces tied.

  Pamela closed the door behind her and the two of them were almost pressed together. ‘Nancy wants to do a seance,’ she said.

  ‘A what?’ Louisa couldn’t work out what Nancy would want to do this for.