‘Where is it?’ said Jeanne Beauclerc, looking past me.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Didn’t you bring my luggage? Is Fleur bringing it? Are you coming too?’
‘If I could just come in,’ I said again and she drew back against the passage wall to let me enter. At the end of the passage, facing the sea view, was a sitting room of comfortable armchairs, reading lamps and low tables and from the walking guides, touring maps and picture magazines fanned out upon these tables I quickly surmised that this was the residents’ lounge for Low Merrick’s paying guests.
‘So,’ I said, perching on the arm of a chair, ‘when you left St Columba’s last week you came here?’
‘And Fleur was supposed to pack a few things for me,’ said Miss Beauclerc. ‘If she could get away. But here I am with one change of linen and my toothbrush waiting and waiting and you haven’t brought so much as a spare nightgown. And I can’t stay here much longer.’
‘Why not?’ I said, puzzled by her air of grievance. Surely she did not mean to suggest that she was above the simple comforts of this pleasant farmhouse. ‘Paying guests are quite the norm here, aren’t they?’
She frowned and shook her hair back. She wore it in long loose curls, like a child.
‘Mrs Paterson tells me she needs my room at the end of the week, for Parents’ Day at the school. And they do not like keeping it secret that I am here. I shall not be sorry to go.’
‘Why did you come here?’ I said.
‘We chose this place because it was right on the other side of the town from Miss Shanks but near enough to walk to, and very quiet. Hah! Quiet! First came the police and then a very strange young man – but I got rid of him.’
‘I heard,’ I said drily. ‘Where are the dogs today?’
She ignored the question and the reprimand, although she had the good grace to blush a little.
‘And now you!’ she cried. ‘What is happening?’
‘Might one ask why you and Fleur were running away?’ I said. ‘In the middle of term, like two schoolgirls instead of two mistresses?’
‘Hasn’t Fleur told you?’ said Miss Beauclerc, warily.
‘Fleur, I’m afraid to relate, is gone,’ I said. ‘She left on Saturday.’
Miss Beauclerc was silent for a full minute, the blood draining from her face and her eyes widening and widening until I could see the whites all around. When she spoke again her voice was ragged.
‘She left without me? She took her things and sailed away? Without me?’
‘Sailed?’ I echoed.
‘Oui,’ said Miss Beauclerc. ‘This was our plan. We were to hire a little boat on Saturday, smuggle our things into it overnight – pretend to be ill and miss church if we needed more time – and set sail tonight on the tide. We even thought we might throw some of our clothes over the side to wash up and maybe people would think we had drowned and never look for us.’
‘A boat,’ I said. ‘Of course.’ The police had asked about trains and ferries and taxis, had even asked fishermen if they had had a passenger. They had dragged their minds into the twentieth century enough to ask at the garage if a young lady had hired a motorcar but it had never occurred to them to think that Fleur might have hoisted the mainsail of a little boat and taken herself away across the sea.
The worst of it was that, while one could forgive them – the police force of a small and traditional town where such modernity was unknown – I did not know how I was ever to forgive myself. I, who knew all too well of Fleur’s love of boats and the sea, who had watched her playing at sailing ships in the lake and had read in Pearl’s letters through the years that followed all about how marvellous Fleur had been crewing for this or that friend in some race or other. Even that summer when she was a baby of seven she had sat imperiously on her sandcastle that day at Watchet, a chicken leg in one hand and a spyglass in the other, watching the yachts out in the bay and regaling us all in her precocious way with where each crew had got its trim wrong and how differently she would have managed things if she were the skipper.
‘I’d have shaved a good few minutes off that blue one’s time, I can tell you,’ she had said, taking her glass away from her eye and trying to spit out the mouthful of hair that had blown in before she took another bite of chicken. ‘They don’t have the first idea what she can do.’ She tore a strip of chicken meat away from the bone with her teeth and put the glass back to her eye. ‘A waste of a good wind, if you ask me.’
For the rest of the day, Aurora and Pearl took to calling her ‘Cap’n Bligh’ until Fleur pointed out with great dignity that Captain Bligh was a naval officer who would not have known a tiller from a teapot, and if they had to call her something of the like she thought Francis Drake was more of a sailor any day.
‘Why did she go without me?’ said Miss Beauclerc, bringing me out of my memories. ‘And what am I to do now?’
‘Well, if we’re picking things over,’ I said, ‘why did you leave early and come to the Patersons’? If you were all set for today why did you bolt a week early?’
‘I couldn’t stay,’ said Miss Beauclerc, not helpfully. She had bowed her head and muttered the words as though ashamed of them.
‘Were you sacked?’
‘No, I was not,’ she said. ‘I could not stay another minute in that place.’
‘Yes, but why?’ I said.
‘How much do you know?’ she asked. ‘You said you are an old friend of Fleur’s?’
‘I know nothing about your business,’ I told her. ‘I don’t know why Fleur left. I don’t even know why Fleur came.’
‘She came, as did I, because Miss Fielding was a wonderful, kind, compassionate and understanding person. Sadly deceived, too innocent and trusting to see what sort of woman she had fallen in with.’
‘Miss Shanks,’ I said.
‘And so we decided to leave, Fleur and me,’ said Miss Beauclerc.
‘Just like Miss Blair and Miss Taylor and Miss Bell before you,’ I said.
‘Not the same thing at all. They were sacked. They were the lucky ones. We had to rip ourselves away and we knew that life would never be the same again. We did not care, we each had one true friend . . . Or I thought I did. I do not understand why she abandoned me.’
‘Nor do I,’ I said. ‘I don’t suppose I can strike a bargain with you, Miss Beauclerc. You tell me what Ivy Shanks did to you and Fleur and I’ll fetch your things and arrange some mode of transport to take you away. What do you say to that?’
‘I say no thank you,’ said Miss Beauclerc. ‘And I ask what sort of woman would bargain with me instead of just helping me.’ I flushed then, for to hear it put that way was pretty shaming.
‘The thing is, mademoiselle, that a woman’s body washed up—’
‘I know, I know,’ she said. ‘The policeman told Mrs Paterson, when he came. And Mrs Paterson said the man I saw off with the dogs had been talking about her to all the neighbours too.’
‘And so I need to be sure that you know nothing about how she died before I could possibly think of helping you get away.’
‘I?’ said Miss Beauclerc. ‘Why should I know anything about some poor drowned woman? I can tell you how it feels to seek that way out of life’s cares, because I came close to it myself. Had it not been for Fleur I should have washed up somewhere with my face all nibbled and seaweed in my hair.’
‘Did the police tell you that?’ I said, sharply.
‘They told Mrs Paterson, and she took great delight in telling me. But that is all I know and I can’t understand why you would suspect me.’
‘Just seems odd, that’s all,’ I said, rather lamely. ‘You’ve run away to here and the police think that the body might have gone in from here.’
‘And who is this woman I have killed for no reason?’ she said. ‘The wicked creature of depravity that I am.’ She was getting very angry and yet, and yet, as I looked at her, her cheeks flushed and her eyes flashing,
it was not offended innocence that I saw but something else entirely. And it occurred to me that no one running away in the night and shoving her belongings overboard in hopes of being thought drowned could be all that innocent anyway. She had maligned Miss Shanks but offered no details and although I too found the woman odd it could not be disputed that she was steering a very successful girls’ school through a stormy passage with sackings, deaths and resignations threatening to capsize the vessel at every turn.
‘No one knows who the body is,’ I said. ‘Fleur went to see and Miss Barclay did too and neither of them knew the woman.’
‘And so why would you think she is anything to do with me?’ said Miss Beauclerc.
‘No reason at all,’ I answered. ‘Just that rather a lot has happened since I arrived, leaving no time to sort it all out and think it through.’
‘Since you arrived where?’ she asked me. ‘Who are you, anyway?’
‘I’m the new English mistress at St Columba’s,’ I said. ‘Now that Fleur is gone.’
‘And did Miss Shanks appoint you?’
‘Sort of. Pretty much,’ I said.
‘Then you should be very careful,’ she said. ‘It must look like a lifeline to you just now. It isn’t, believe me.’
‘I’m going to ask you one last time, Mademoiselle Beauclerc,’ I said. ‘And then of course I shall fetch your things and bring them here to you whether you answer me or not. I’m not a monster. Now, once and for all, why did you leave St Columba’s?’
‘Because it is a place of great wickedness and it would have corrupted me to stay.’ She must have known this was worse than useless to me, heavy on drama (and delivered most flamboyantly too, I must say) but lacking any actual content. Her voice softened a little as she went on. ‘Fleur was happy here for five years and asked me to join her. I had one wonderful year with her and with Miss Fielding and the Misses Taylor and Bell too. But afterwards . . . We could not leave in the usual way – Miss Shanks’s contracts are very binding – so we decided to leave in an unusual way.’
‘But you bolted,’ I said. ‘And then Fleur bolted. And Fleur left you stranded.’
‘And then you came and now you will help me.’
‘And where will you go?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Miss Beauclerc. She did not wring her hands exactly but she clasped them together so hard that her fingers whitened. ‘We were supposed to go away to Fleur’s home.’
Of course, I thought. Pereford. Where else would she go? There had been times in my own life when I had dreamed of going back to Pereford for succour, and I had never really lived there.
‘But I can’t go there without her, can I?’ Miss Beauclerc was saying. ‘I have no money left and no family who will own me. I – I – I . . .’
I would love to report that what I said next sprang from pity for her, so far from home, friendless and without a change of clothes, sitting there hunched in her chair and staring at an impossible future of lonely destitution. Honesty forces me to admit, however, that I wanted her safely stashed where I could easily find her again. It was out of my mouth before I could catch it and swallow.
‘If I bring your things this evening can you catch a late train?’ She started to interrupt me. ‘And you can go to Perthshire. To my home. And stay there until things here . . .’
‘Be a guest?’ she said. ‘In your home?’
Belatedly, my common sense began to rumble into gear as I imagined what Hugh would make of me sending strangers – nay, foreigners – to live in his house while I was out of it.
‘Can you sew?’ I said. ‘Or anything? You could help my maid, Grant. She’d love to quiz an honest-to-goodness Frenchwoman on the subject of clothes.’
Miss Beauclerc drew herself up a little and her voice shook as she answered me.
‘You think of me as a servant?’ she said. ‘Or worse, possibly a servant, if I can tell you that I am able to sew?’
‘You’re a working woman,’ I protested. ‘I don’t see why you should take it that way.’
‘My family,’ said Miss Beauclerc, ‘is of the most ancient and exalted line. The Beauclercs have been in the Dauphiné since—’
‘But they, my dear mademoiselle, have disowned you,’ I said. ‘And you were a schoolteacher, which is not so different from a governess, who is almost a servant. I’m sorry my suggestion offended you and I withdraw it.’
‘I am a scholar,’ she said. ‘I have a degree, from Grenoble. I wrote an article published in the—’
‘I am offering refuge, Miss Beauclerc,’ I said. ‘If you cannot sew then my maid and my husband will both wonder what you are doing there. I’ve done it myself before now, you know. Pretended to be a servant to earn my place in a household where I needed to be.’
She stared at me and breathed rather hard while she thought it through.
‘I can sew,’ she said at last. ‘And I can embroider too and even make lace, if I have to. Thank you.’
One did not wear much in the way of embroidery any more, thankfully, but if that was her handiwork pegged out in the farmhouse garden then her place in Grant’s heart was assured, for my maid deplored modern, factory-sewn underclothes above all things and her distress at my thrift in banning the beautiful garments I used to order by the dozen before the war had been piercing. They had been made by silent nuns somewhere in the Alps, and if my geography were not deserting me Grenoble was near enough the Alps to put a smile on Grant’s face that might last until Christmas.
‘I shall return after nightfall with your luggage,’ I said, ‘if you’ll tell me where you think it might be.’
On my way back to St Columba’s again I stopped at the harbour and shook my head in shame to see the little hut with its painted sign: Fishing & touring boats for hire. By the hour & by the day. Enquire within.
Knocking on the door, I roused an ancient mariner with a leathery purple complexion and a demeanour which made the driver of the railway station dog-cart appear like the doorman at the Savoy.
‘Aye?’ he barked at me from around his pipe, glaring out of small, red, swimming eyes. ‘What do ye want? I’m in no mood for women today.’
‘A question for you,’ I said, taking a step back away from the combined exhalation of tobacco and whisky. ‘Did you rent a boat to a young lady on Saturday past?’
‘Aye!’ he bellowed, bridging the distance between my nose and the fumes. ‘And if you’ve come wi’ a pack o’ excuses fae the besom, ye’ll can get straight back and tell ’er fae me that she’s a wee b—’
‘Before you say something you might come to regret,’ I said, ‘let me assure you I have no idea where the lady went to and I had no advance notice that she was going to steal your boat.’ My plain speaking mollified him somewhat, and his next speech was grunted rather than boomed.
‘One pound ten shillings and sixpence she paid me,’ he said. ‘And she owes me another fifteen guineas b’now.’
‘That seems a little steep for a week’s boat rental,’ I said.
‘That’s a fine, no’ the rent,’ he said.
‘Have you reported the matter to the police?’ I asked. ‘Or the coastguard?’
‘Aye well,’ he said. ‘Well, no’ just yet, like.’ Which I took to mean that he feared a report would lead to a return and the mounting fine would then stop accruing. He preferred, I surmised, to fester and whinge and think of the total growing greater every day.
‘I take it you had a proper contract?’ I said. He nodded. ‘Might I see it?’ He nodded again and, reaching behind him into the hut, he unhooked a board from a nail beside the door and showed it to me.
There on the yellow form, as large as life, was her signature: F.D. Lipscott. While I stared at it, a crabbed and yellowed finger threaded in under my arm and tapped the form, the thick black nail – hideous to behold – like a scarab.
‘Late fees,’ he said. ‘All set oot there and she’s got a copy o’ it.’
‘Nevertheless I think you should tell the coast
guard,’ I said. ‘And the local bobbies too.’ I thrilled to think of Sergeant Turner’s blush when he realised as I had that Fleur had got clean away from under our noses and that all the jostling boats in the harbour, their chugging engines, the snap of the dinghies’ sails and the clink of the painters had not jogged our brains at all in two long days.
8
‘You are a brick, Miss Gilver,’ said a guileless child by the name of Jessie or Tessie or possibly Bessie, over dinner. ‘I’ve had the most enormous crush on Rob Roy Macgregor since I was a tiny child.’
‘How can you have a crush on someone in a book?’ said another. There were general snorts of derision from all around her and one dainty little miss went as far as to roll up a piece of bread into a missile and throw it at her.
‘Petra lives for chemistry,’ one of them explained to me. ‘She’d only have a pash for—’
‘Mendel,’ said a child at the end of the table, provoking gales of laughter. Petra was unperturbed.
‘Gregor Mendel was a biologist,’ she said. ‘You mean Mendeleev. Now, the fascinating thing about Mendeleev—’
‘Oh, shut up!’ said Bessie or Nessie, as Petra underwent another hail of bread pellets.
‘Girls, really,’ I said, a little too mildly and a little too late. I was watching out of the corner of my eye in case one of the real mistresses were about to storm over and effect a coup.
I had decided I could not justify more time spent on the sixth formers, who had told me all they were ever going to, and I had swapped places with Miss Christopher. These little ones, however, were so much more boisterous at table than they had been in the classroom and so very much more boisterous than Stella and her crew, unfettered as they were by any desire to be thought languid, that I was beginning to feel overwhelmed. And we were only at the soup.
‘I like David Copperfield,’ said another.
‘Or George IV,’ said the first bread thrower. ‘From that history book The Maid used to use. He always seemed like great fun.’
Dandy Gilver and a Bothersome Number of Corpses Page 19