Dandy Gilver and a Bothersome Number of Corpses

by Catriona McPherson

  ‘Ugh! Angela, you’re horrid even to say it as a joke. George IV with all that clay in his hair and never bathing. You’d be sick.’

  ‘Girls, really, please,’ I said. ‘No more talk of pashes and crushes.’ Was I ever this frivolous, I wondered? Certainly not in front of grown-ups.

  ‘Oh, Miss Gilver, don’t get like Juliet!’ said Petra. ‘All that great sweep of literature and she wouldn’t let us read a word that would give her broken heart a pang.’

  ‘Silly little girls,’ I said. I drank some soup and while I did their words caught up with me. ‘What broken heart?’

  ‘Oh Romeo, Romeo!’ said a pair of them in chorus. ‘Of course she had a broken heart. She displayed all the symptoms – solitary walks, pale cheeks, endless trips to church even when there wasn’t a service. We think he must have died, don’t we, girls? She was too woebegone for someone who’d been jilted.’

  ‘Stop it, you dreadful children,’ I said. Of course, the exasperation was all an act; I could not wait for dinner to be over and for Alec’s expected telephone call to ask him what he thought of the theory. Slowly, I became aware that the girls were giggling in that stifled way which only produces more giggling than if they had let their laughter go. Clearly they could tell that I was thinking over their words in a most undignified way.

  ‘You think we’re right, don’t you, Miss Gilver?’ said one.

  ‘Enough!’ I said. ‘On pain of Silas Marner, you are not to talk in that disrespectful way of Miss Lipscott any more.’

  ‘In your hearing, Miss Gilver?’ said Petra. ‘Or at all?’

  ‘At all, you little monkey,’ I said. ‘I’m putting you on your honour.’ And it was wonderful to see how this subdued them. How long would it last that their untarnished honour was as a line drawn, uncrossable, in the sand? I hoped for some of them it would endure their whole lives through.

  There was time before Alec’s scheduled call for a short trip to the little flower room downstairs where Jeanne Beauclerc had told me the mistresses kept their luggage. I had my own suitcase as my excuse for wandering, but it did not take long for me to realise there was no way I could manhandle it down the stairs on my own. (A new-found respect was born in me for Grant, far from hefty, who threw the thing around like a beach ball, and for all the station boys and elderly porters who had shouldered cases and trunks in and out of boots and guards’ vans, full of clothes, in my travelling years.) I dragged it back to my room and set off with a hatbox and my overnight case instead, worrying a little about how I would manage Miss Beauclerc’s suitcase if it were as large as my own.

  Unfortunately I was only ten paces from my door when I was waylaid.

  ‘Miss Gilver?’ It was one of the maids. She bobbed and then stared at my bags.

  ‘I was just looking for somewhere to put these where they won’t be in my way,’ I said.

  ‘The mistresses don’t put their bags in the attic, Miss Gilver,’ she said, and before I could stop her she took the bags out of my hands. ‘You wouldn’t believe the pandemonium at the end of term and a nice leather case like that would get scuffed away to bits in the scrum, for sure.’ She was retreating and I sped after her. She had reached the head of a small casement staircase and shot down it with the light steps of youth and daily practice. I shot down after her, tense with the knowledge of my greater years, greater weight and lack of acquaintance with what characterful traits this stairway might have to its name.

  ‘The mistresses keep their cases in the wee luggage room by the side door that used to be the flower room,’ she called over her shoulder, as she descended. ‘Nicer for them not to be jostled in with the girls.’

  ‘Ah, I see,’ I said. The stair spat us out in a corridor of the ground floor I had not encountered before, somewhere in the kitchen wing at my best guess, and the little maid barrelled along it at the most amazing speed. If she had been up since six scrubbing and sweeping, her energy at seven in the evening was a thing of wonder.

  ‘You don’t need to come, Miss Gilver,’ she said, showing a concern for the elders of St Columba’s that I had not seen before.

  ‘Well, yes, but just in case I need to lay hands on it,’ I replied. ‘Best if I know where things are. That hatbox still has the hat inside, for instance – nowhere better to keep it, don’t you know, but I might need it for Parents’ Day.’

  ‘Oh, uh-huh?’ said the maid. I could not be sure if she were being politely interested in my remarks or if they had raised suspicions in her.

  ‘It’s rather swish, if I say it myself,’ I said. ‘And I don’t know the form, you know? Wouldn’t like to upstage the mothers or the headmistress or anything.’

  She gave a longing look at the hatbox in her hand, perhaps taken with the idea of a swish hat (for while maids seldom have the means of acquiring much finery nor the occasions which call for it, that does not mean they feel any less the desire, as witness Grant’s frustrated attempts to indulge it vicariously through endlessly disappointing me).

  ‘Here we are,’ said the girl, turning into a room at a bend in the passageway. ‘It’s not locked, since everything’s empty that’s stored in here.’

  There were many trunks around the walls, and several hatboxes and small cases on the slatted wooden shelves where once flower bulbs might have been set to dry over winter. In fact, I could not immediately see where on the shelves I could squeeze my bags in.

  ‘I’ll just stack them up a wee bit and make some space,’ said the maid. ‘There’s no need for this lot to be all set out in a row . . . That’s funny.’ She was tugging at a small case on a low shelf. ‘It’s kind of heavy.’ I bent to see.

  There were two stout cases side by side, strapped shut, and two small bags wrapped in mackintoshed cloth as though to withstand more weather than their manufacturer had had in mind. Weather, I thought, or possibly sea spray. Did all four belong to Miss Beauclerc? It was possible, and yet there was a symmetry and neat modesty about the two large cases and the two small bags which put me in mind of lockers and bunks and sailors’ duffel bags, and of the smallness of Hugh’s army kit when he went away to war.

  If there were any further doubt in my mind the maid removed it.

  ‘Thon’s Miss Lipscott’s bag,’ she said, pointing to one of the two larger cases. ‘And this other one’s Mam-wazell B’s. She’s a proper lady like yourself, miss, and she’s got the most beautiful things. I’d know her bags anywhere.’ She put her hands up to the sides of her face and turned to me.

  ‘Miss?’ she said. ‘They said that poor soul that fell in the sea was a stranger.’

  ‘She was,’ I said.

  ‘But there’s their traps. Both o’ them. Where have they gone with none of their things, miss?’

  ‘The body,’ I said, ‘can’t have been Miss Lipscott, for I was there when she went to look at it. The body was dead by Wednesday at the very latest. And Miss Lipscott was here until Saturday morning.’

  ‘But Mam-wazell!’ said the girl. She kept looking back at the cases and her teeth were beginning to chatter.

  ‘It wasn’t Mademoiselle Beauclerc,’ I said, firmly, wishing I could tell her (but knowing I dared not) whence the firmness sprang. ‘That poor dead woman was nothing to do with St Columba’s at all.’ The girl looked at me with a great deal of troubled doubt in her young eyes. ‘Trust me,’ I said, hoping that I was to be trusted. For even though No. 5 predated Fleur’s departure, I had seen Jeanne Beauclerc with my own eyes and Miss Blair was apparently bringing cricket to the schoolgirls of North Yorkshire, there were still two mistresses unaccounted for. And if it were too much of a stretch to imagine that Miss Taylor or Miss Bell had revisited her old stamping ground and been drowned there, there was still a world of other ways the body could have something to do with the school. In fact, it offended all reason to think it did not have something to do with the school. For starters, as my sons were wont to say, there were women who dressed plainly in dark garments and went about their lives unprotected by husbands an
d here was a woman’s body dressed plainly in dark garments which seemed not to have any abandoned husband searching for it. Besides that, the headmistress (of a school I had heard called evil and corrupting) had immediately thought when she heard of the body that it was one of her girls or one of her staff. Not to mention the fact that a mistress had taken one look at the thing and promptly fled, leaving her plans, her friend and her very luggage behind her. There had to be a connection somewhere, even if I was without the merest hint of what it might be.

  ‘No,’ I said again. ‘Nothing to do with St Columba’s. Now, what’s your name, my girl?’

  ‘Maureen,’ said the maid.

  ‘Well, Maureen, you run along and don’t give these bags another thought. I’ll take care of getting them sent on after Miss Lipscott and Miss Beauclerc. And Maureen? Best not mention them to anyone, eh? It is a bit odd and we don’t want to cause a lot of worry.’

  There was no way of knowing whether she would heed my words or scurry back to her bedroom to regale the rest of the maids with the news. She bobbed silently, still looking anxious, and was gone, leaving my hatbox and case in the doorway and leaving me the problem of just how this ‘taking care’ was to be effected.

  What I wanted to do was wrest open Fleur’s bags with a chisel to see if they yielded any clues as to where she had gone but, thinking calmly, I could see that if her plans had changed to the extent that her bags had been abandoned in the flower room this way her destination might well have changed too. What I should do, of course, what honour bound me to do, was take Miss Beauclerc’s bags to her as I had promised.

  The sound of a door opening somewhere close by in the house jogged me at last into action. What I could not do was stand here staring at the luggage, waiting for someone to find me. I shoved my own bags onto a low shelf and grabbed those I judged to be Jeanne Beauclerc’s – they were indeed of very buttery pigskin and had her initials, rather an impressive string of them, tooled in gilt (somewhat vulgar, but then perhaps they did things differently in the Dauphiné). Taking them with me, I shut the door on Fleur’s. They had sat there undisturbed for two days and two nights and there was no reason not to think they would sit there a little longer. I would take these to Low Merrick Farm, return for the other two, smuggle them to safety and ransack them at my leisure.

  I made it almost all the way to my room to fetch my outdoor things before my plan started to unravel. The corridors were quiet, all the girls at rest, I supposed, and all the mistresses hard at work in their studies as usual, and in the echoing silence it was impossible not to hear the cry when it began.

  ‘Miss Gilver! Miss Giiiiilverrrrr . . .’

  It sounded like Ivy Shanks, that peculiar playful way the words were sung out that made me think of the big bad wolf and his sing-song call of ‘Come out, come out, wherever you are!’ I looked desperately around for some curtained niche or blanket chest where I could shove the bags, and seeing nothing I stepped lightly up the nearest stairway.

  ‘Miiissss Giiil-verrrrr!’ sang Miss Shanks’s voice again.

  Making no effort to be quiet this time I turned around and came back down the stairs.

  ‘Miss Shanks?’ I said, stopping a few steps from the landing and peering down. ‘Did you need me?’

  ‘Ah, there you are!’ said Miss Shanks, tripping along to the bottom of the steps to meet me. ‘What are you doing up there?’

  ‘I was taking these to the attics,’ I answered, indicating the bags and trying not to look like a liar. ‘I won’t be a tick.’

  To my immense relief, Miss Shanks gave my burden barely a glance, but just wound her arm round and round as though reeling me in on it and started walking back the way she had come.

  ‘Leave them just now, Miss Gilver, you’re wanted on the telephone.’

  ‘I see,’ I said, hurrying after her. ‘I’ll just . . .’ I opened my door on the way past and practically threw the bags inside. ‘Thank you for coming to fetch me, Headmistress. Is it . . . Did the caller say . . .?’ A sudden enormous worry had bloomed in me like ink dropped into water that if Miss Shanks herself had run to find me, perhaps it was a telephone call of grave import. Perhaps it was Hugh. Perhaps one of the boys was in trouble. I did not quite like to mention my husband and sons out of the blue to a woman so deep in the fiction of my spinsterhood that she seemed to have forgotten it was not true.

  ‘It’s that nice young man of yours,’ said Miss Shanks with a twinkling look over her shoulder. ‘Can’t take himself off to his bed without the sound of your voice.’ She grabbed the handle and threw her office door wide.

  ‘There ye are, make yourself at home and I’ll wait in the staffroom.’ She beamed at me, shooed me inside and closed the door again.

  ‘Alec?’ I said, sitting down in the chair at the desk. It was an oak and leather affair, one leg and four little castored feet, and it was set very low to the floor for Miss Shanks’s short stature. I twirled it round and around a few times to make myself comfortable and by the time I had undone the ensuing tangle with the telephone cord, Alec had roused himself and was talking.

  ‘Dandy!’ he said. ‘What a day I’ve had. I hope that woman isn’t angry I rang you.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘She doesn’t seem the least bit put out. She’s shown me into her own office and gone to camp out in the staffroom until I’m done. Now, listen, Alec.’

  ‘I found Blair,’ Alec said.

  ‘I found Beauclerc,’ I said, unable to resist it. There was a short silence.

  ‘We’ll get to you in a minute,’ Alec said, eventually. ‘I also found out something very interesting about Elf. His life, I mean. Not his death, exactly.’

  ‘He was Fleur’s lover?’ I said. ‘I thought as much.’

  ‘Well, aren’t you clever?’ said Alec, bitterly. ‘Fine. Tell me about Mademoiselle Beauclerc then.’

  As succinctly as I could, for I instantly regretted taking the wind out of his sails that way, I related the discovery of Jeanne Beauclerc in the Patersons’ farmhouse, the tale of her and Fleur’s planned escape, the evidence of the rented boat never returned and the two sets of waterproofed luggage sitting in the flower room.

  ‘My word,’ said Alec, with the understatement he always affects when he is more impressed than he cares to admit. ‘At Low Merrick, eh? And you interviewed her.’

  ‘And found out precisely nothing,’ I reminded him. ‘She gave no hint about why she and Fleur were taking off, nor why she suddenly bolted almost a week early. She’s in a bit of a fix now, of course, but still admirably – well, lamentably – close-lipped about the whole thing. So, tell me, Alec, what do you think of this idea?’ Quickly I described my arrangement that she should travel to Gilverton and lie low there.

  ‘It would certainly be nice to have her safely stored until we can give her our full attention,’ he said.

  ‘My thoughts exactly,’ I said. ‘So that’s my miraculously reappearing mistress. How about yours?’

  ‘No, no,’ said Alec. ‘You carry on and tell me the rest. How did you guess about Elf?’ I could hear the rustle and click of pipery going on and knew that he was determined to cap me one way or another.

  ‘Well, I didn’t really until you hinted,’ I said. ‘I was just being a pest. Only the girls at supper did a lot of silly giggling about the idea that Fleur had a lost love – a dead lost love. Goodness knows how they cottoned on to it but they seemed pretty sure. That’s why they called her Juliet, apparently.’

  ‘Not a happy precedent,’ Alec said. ‘Right then, to me. I got to The Bridge House in time for tea – not that I was offered any, mind you. They viewed me as rather a fox in the hen coop, quite unlike St Columba’s. But Miss Blair came out to speak to me and we tramped around the playing fields in the freezing cold and driving rain for a while.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And she was pretty forthcoming about life in Portpatrick, eventually,’ he said. ‘Oh, at first she tried to make out she had resigned, only she wouldn’t say over w
hat, or why she had left in the middle of term or what possessed her to give up the fresh sea breezes for this moor and the hacking cough she has had since she got here. Eventually, though, as I say, she broke down – a chest infection is wonderfully weakening to the spirit – and vouchsafed to me that she had been sacked. Her eyes watered as she told me and I don’t think it was just from coughing.’

  ‘You are a meanie, Alec,’ I said. ‘You might have taken the poor woman to a tea shop if they wouldn’t let you inside the school.’

  ‘Tea shop?’ he cried. ‘Dandy, I don’t think you quite appreciate the scope of this moor. You might as well say I should have taken her to a bull fight or a cancan show. The North York Moor makes Perthshire look like Biarritz!’

  ‘All right, all right,’ I said. ‘She was sacked. Why?’

  ‘I’m still shivering a little,’ Alec said, then at last he resumed the tale. ‘She didn’t know why. And I have to say I believe her. She was still very hurt and completely bewildered. She said she had known Miss Fielding from some place they had both worked at before and that Miss Fielding had written to ask her to join the staff of St Columba’s while it was still at the planning stage. All was well for five years or so and then Miss Fielding died. Before she was cold in her grave, Miss Blair said, Old Hammy Shanks had sacked her. Just told her her services were no longer required and could she push her key through the letter box as she was leaving. Along with a Miss Spittal who taught riding on a monthly contract, Miss Mount the swimming instructress who used to travel in from Stranraer in the summer term and a pair of sisters from Portpatrick village who took the little ones for ballet and taught the big ones a spot of waltz and rumba.’

  ‘And Miss Taylor and Miss Bell?’ I said.

  ‘They were still in post when she left,’ said Alec. ‘And since – quite understandably – she didn’t keep up a correspondence with a place which had used her so ill, she doesn’t know what became of them afterwards.’

  ‘And you think she’s being quite honest, you said?’