‘Is there someone missing?’ I said, looking around and counting them off surreptitiously on my fingers. The butler, the cook and me made three, the four menservants – handsome John, plain Harry, round little Stanley and sweet Mattie – made seven and Clara, Phyllis, Millie and Eldry, the four maids, made eleven in all. Lollie had definitely told me there were twelve. Stanley and Mr Faulds glanced at one another, but it was Harry who spoke up, his voice as rough and awkward as his complexion.
‘Maggie,’ he said. ‘Kitchenmaid. Done a flit on Saturday night.’
‘Really?’ I said.
‘Silly wench,’ said Mr Faulds. ‘Didn’t know when she was well off.’ I saw Clara shift in her seat, her long face solemn and her small eyes beady, and Phyllis put her embroidery down and leaned over to squeeze the other girl’s arm. ‘Took off after a promotion, Miss Rossiter, down by Berwick in a big house with a chef and a lot of girls to boss about. Kept it to herself and didn’t work a day of her notice. Mistress would have let her off with a week and given her a reference, but there’s no talking to these youngsters.’
Privately, I agreed. To have left a post with no reference was a reckless move for any servant and if the Berwick job fell through, good luck to Maggie finding another.
‘Mind you, Mr Faulds,’ said Stanley, looking up from the newspaper spread over his place setting, ‘if she’d stayed her week she’d never have got there. It says here there’s no trains on tomorrow with this general strike.’
‘It’s not a general strike,’ said Harry, sitting forward suddenly so that his chair legs banged against the floor. ‘It’s a selective co-ordinated industrial action.’
‘Harry is our resident Red, Miss Rossiter,’ said Mr Faulds.
‘It’s a menace is what it is,’ said Stanley, folding up his newspaper in brusque angry movements. It is always pointless – either annoying or amusing – for the under-thirties to attempt pomposity and Stanley failed to do anything but make Phyllis giggle again.
‘And you’re the . . . valet?’ I said to Harry. I was still trying to get them straight in my head after the whirlwind of introductions.
‘He is indeed,’ said John, grinning. ‘It’s all part of the plan.’ Then he ducked as Harry aimed a punch at the side of his head.
‘Now, now, lads,’ said Mr Faulds, as Stanley looked on with his mouth pulled down in a cod-like pout of disapproval. The butler heaved himself up to his feet. ‘There’s a bottle of burgundy needs using up,’ he said to himself, ‘but sausage and onion pie wants beer, really.’ Picking over a large bunch of keys, he left the kitchen and I heard the hobnails on his heels ring out against the stone steps as he descended to the sub-basement where, I guessed, the beer cellar must be.
‘All part of what plan?’ I asked the lads once he was gone. John grinned again and Harry gave me a long appraising look.
‘Don’t encourage them,’ said Phyllis, who had taken up her sewing again.
‘All the valets are Trots,’ said John. ‘Just waiting for the word and then ccrrrkkk!’ He drew a finger across his throat. ‘The lords and masters struck down while they get their morning shave and the revolution begins. Easiest way, really.’
‘Disgraceful!’ said Stanley.
‘You should recruit Miss Rossiter, Harry,’ said John. ‘Get the lady’s maids as well as the valets and you’re laughing.’
‘Eldry would have plenty to say if she caught you sweet-talking Miss Rossiter,’ said Phyllis to John. I looked at her, startled. Poor plain Eldry and this rather arrogant young man? Surely not. But I thought, from John’s shout of laughter and Phyllis’s look of mischief, that this was a tease more than an indiscretion.
‘You wouldn’t dare go on like this if Mr Faulds could hear you,’ said Stanley.
‘Aye, we would,’ said John. Stanley flushed.
‘Well, you wouldn’t dare if we had a butler like the butlers that trained me,’ he said. ‘Like the butler I’ll be one day.’
‘Oh Stan,’ said Clara, stretching out a long leg and poking the footman with her toe. ‘Don’t let him rile you, he disnae mean anything by it.’ But Stanley was not to be soothed.
‘I’ll go and help Mr Faulds,’ he said, rising and patting at imaginary specks on his waistcoat. ‘Heaven knows, he needs it.’
‘That’s my boy,’ said Harry. ‘We’re all workers together. We shall surely overcome, united in toil.’
So Stanley’s exit was marred by yet more giggling and his slightly pendulous cheeks were aflame as he passed me, his pop eyes shining.
‘They were saying on the train that Baldwin and Pugh are meeting tonight,’ I said, hoping to sound knowledgeable, wondering what Miss Rossiter would, and therefore what I should, make of the affair.
‘Uncle Arthur’ll never give in,’ said Harry.
‘Fingers crossed,’ said a small voice. I started. It was the first time since I had come into the room that Mattie the hall boy had spoken. With his white-blond hair and his pale skin, he appeared not only childlike but positively elfin and anything less like a troublemaker could scarcely be imagined.
‘They’ll be awright, Matt,’ said Phyllis, and she and Clara swooped down on him from each side and kissed a cheek each. ‘Mattie’s worried about his family, Miss Rossiter. With the lock-out, you know.’
‘Mrs Hepburn’ll give you such a basket to take to them on your day off, you’ll not be able to carry it,’ said Clara, trying to make him smile. ‘You’ll have to eat the lot to keep your strength up and then you’ll have an empty basket and your ma’ll leather you and call Mrs H. all sorts and you’ll wish the strike was all you had to trouble you.’ Mattie did, indeed, give a small chuckle at that.
‘Who’s this and what are they calling me?’ said Mrs Hepburn, coming back in with an enormous tray, steam rising from six deep plates of soup. Eldry followed with another tray and Millie brought up the rear with a breadboard and butter dish. ‘Where’s Mr Faulds and his shadow got to now, then? This soup needs supped before the pies get over-browned. Come on, come on – get your legs under. You too, Fanny. Grub’s up.’
The journey from the servants’ hall after dinner was a long one. Of course, any upward journey is hindered by the recent ingestion of pea soup, sausage pie and treacle pudding – I was blowing like a whale by the second landing – but it was more than that. Across the linoleum, past the scuttles, up the worn stone steps, across the glittering tiles on the ground floor, past the hall table with its salvers, up the marble stairs with the gilded banisters, across the gleaming parquet of the drawing-room floor, up the carpeted stairs with the ebony banisters, all the way to where Lollie waited, peeping around her door, looking out for me, and when I arrived it took a moment for the idea to fall away that I was simply going to help her into an evening frock, stud her hair with a few ornaments and take her stockings away to rinse out for the morning. Miss Rossiter had possessed me body and soul.
‘In here, Dandy,’ she hissed. She drew me into the room beside her and closed and locked the door. ‘How was it?’ she said, looking searchingly at me, ‘I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you down there. Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘I like your Mrs Hepburn, Lollie dear. She calls me Fanny and plies me with drink. And the girls and boys are all very lively. I slightly let Miss Rossiter’s accent fall by the wayside, but they’ve decided en masse to treat it as a sort of joke, so there’s nothing to worry about on that score.’
‘Splendid,’ said Lollie. She crossed the room and sat at her dressing table where an overflowing ashtray spoke of her nervous afternoon. ‘It’s just a couple of Pip’s friends for dinner tonight – nothing too fancy. But let’s talk while I change.’ I thought of Mrs Hepburn’s spun toffee nests and the coconut ice she had been finishing off to fill them with when I had left her, and I wondered what ‘fancy’ would have looked like.
‘Very well, then,’ I said, taking out my little notebook and sitting down on the end of her bed. ‘First of all: do you have
any suspicions about who it is that’s following you when you go out?’
‘None,’ said Lollie, stopping with her shirt halfway off over her head and staring at me.
‘Male or female, even?’
‘Why?’
‘I was trying to think who it might be myself,’ I told her. ‘Some of them are absolutely impossible: Millie and Mattie, for instance. Their innocence shines out of them.’ I nodded to myself. Of course, it was terrible detective work to discount a person on that score but, more pertinently, a scullerymaid is always under the eye of the cook and a hall and boot boy hardly less so; harried and chivvied and nagged and kept up to the mark with endless little jobs all day. I could not imagine that young Mattie could easily slip away.
So perhaps the only candidates were Mrs Hepburn or Mr Faulds, with no one above them to check their movements and demand accounts of missing time? But as soon as I had thought it I could see how hopeless it was, for a butler is always there, upstairs and down, drawing room and servants’ hall, always at the other end of a rung bell, opening doors, bearing trays, bowing over salvers. If Pallister, at home at Gilverton, were to take up secret missions the very walls would crumble by teatime. And if a butler is the walls and floors and door bells of a house then a cook is the foundation stone, square and solid and always down there, in the kitchens, toiling away. I am not often in the kitchens at Gilverton, it is true, but I had certainly never been there when Mrs Tilling was not, could scarcely imagine such a thing.
No, if anyone were slipping out and following Lollie it was to the middle ranks I should be looking. Not perhaps the footman, for footmen are as visible as butlers all day long, and not the tweenie who, even though she spent half her time above stairs and half below, had a daily round not of her own devising. Besides, poor shy Eldry, biting her lip and blushing, did not seem the girl to dash out and then cover her tracks upon her return. The two upper maids, languorous Clara and pert little Phyllis, were a livelier pair of prospects; I should have thought either of them quite equal to a bit of spying. But then I thought again of Clara’s flouncing huff over Miss Rossiter’s Christian name. Surely that sprang from some quite solid sense of fair play? And then think of Phyllis giggling and stitching her embroidery and comforting poor Mattie with cuddles. A snooper? It did not seem likely.
Which left those two boys: John and Harry. John, being the chauffeur, could certainly – easily – be sent off on errands by his master without the other servants missing him. And I knew from my own experience how much time Grant spends mysteriously employed away from the house, even with only a dressmaker in the village to absorb her attentions. If we lived in a town she would never be out of the shops, buying up yards of ribbon and stockings by the score, and I imagined the same was true of a valet, if not even more so, what with shaving soap and tobacco and hair brilliantine. Again though, apart from the free time at their disposal, neither of them seemed all that likely: John had the easy, open manners which come from good looks and early advancement and Harry the brusque insolence of plain features and too much politics, but of watchful cunning and furtiveness I had seen not a whisker.
Lollie’s thoughts must have been running along the same lines as my own.
‘It never occurred to me it was one of the servants,’ she said, rousing me from them. She had got herself out of her shirt and skirt and had wrapped herself up in a dressing gown to sit at her table.
‘Who else?’ I asked her. ‘It was the first thing that occurred to me.’
‘I suppose a private detective?’ said Lollie. ‘Someone could easily wait across the road for me to come out.’
I stepped over to the windows and looked out. Her bedroom was at the front, on the sunny side, and had an excellent view over Queen Street Gardens where a private detective might indeed pass endless unseen hours behind a tree watching her, so long as he had a key. These gardens were not open to the hoi polloi, naturally, but kept scrupulously for the use of the residents, even nannies with perambulators being frowned on in some of the grander squares and crescents in the town. I turned back to the room.
‘I’m not even sure it’s the same person every time,’ said Lollie, who had started brushing her hair.
‘Here, let me do that.’ I came back from the window, took her hairbrush out of her hands and set to work with it.
‘And doesn’t that suggest a firm of detectives, rather than a servant?’ she asked.
I did not answer; her fine, silky hair had responded to my brushing by flying up in a cloud like a dandelion head all around her parting. I dabbed the brush at it trying to make it flatten down again and caught her eye in the mirror.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Do you have a rose-water spray? I’m almost sure I could make some little waves if we dampen it.’
We went together to look and see what there might be in her bathroom, Lollie saying it was a good idea for me to get the lie of the land.
‘And don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Pip won’t be up for half an hour.’
It had once been the dressing room and – although windowless in the middle of the building and surely rather stuffy as a result – made a very comfortable bathroom now. I looked with interest at the little hooded alcove on one end of the bath, something between a sedan chair cover and a grotto.
‘Gosh,’ I said. ‘A stand-up shower-bath! How lovely.’
‘Yes, we had them in our suite in Turkey on our honeymoon,’ said Lollie, ‘and Pip put one in for me. It’s rather delicious, except when the hot water suddenly runs out. I don’t think I’ll chance it while our coal’s being rationed. Now come and see my boudoir.’
She cannot have needed it, what with four rooms downstairs and the ground-floor parlour too, but there it was: a little oasis of satin- and tulip-wood, with Louis XIV salon chairs and floral plaques stuck on to any cabinet, cupboard front or sewing table which presented a flat space for the sticking.
Across the landing to the back, Pip had the larger of the two bedrooms, north-facing like Miss Rossiter’s room four floors beneath it, but with a view down over the Forth to the hills of Fife. I stepped close to the glass and peered downwards, seeing my little cherry tree and patch of grass far below. Then I turned around and studied the room closely. One could surely learn a great deal about a person from his bedroom.
What I learned of Pip Balfour was that he took rather less interest in his own surroundings than in those of his wife. Lollie’s bedroom, no less carefully fitted up than her boudoir, had walls freshly covered in pale lavender silk, with white and lavender chintz at the windows and bed and sumptuous Aubusson carpets scattered about wherever her feet might be imagined to rest for more than a moment, but in here the walls were papered in stripes, the curtains were lined velvet and the floor was covered in a warm but far from beautiful Turkey rug. The furniture was mahogany in both rooms, it was true, but Lollie’s was Georgian mahogany with legs like toothpicks while Pip’s bedroom contained great hulking boulders of the blackest, most bulbous excesses the Victorian age can ever have mustered, from a very strong field.
‘It’s fearsome, isn’t it?’ Lollie said. ‘He’s had it since he was a boy. He told me he once managed to shut himself in the bottom drawer of the chest and slept the night there.’
I nodded but said nothing, still busy studying the room. There were books on the bedside table – Walter Scott, which suggested that Pip read to help with bouts of sleeplessness – and photographs on the chimneypiece – Lollie in various forms and a few of the right vintage and composition to be parents and siblings – but there were no toilet articles anywhere, I was disappointed to note. (Nanny Palmer had dinned it into me that the state of one’s hairbrush and toothbrush was a window on one’s soul – or moral character anyway – and I suppose I thought I might find evidence of Pip Balfour’s villainy near his washstand.)
One thing I did notice was the great number of keys on view. There was one in each of the two doors in the room and one in every drawer and cupboard too, and they had given me a
n idea.
‘Why don’t you simply lock your door at night?’ I said, thinking that if this were a house in which keys stayed where they were put, there was sure to be a key for Lollie’s room as well as this one. I have always admired such houses; Gilverton is of the other sort, where every lock is empty and there are jars and drawers and boxes full of miscellaneous keys all over the place and no one ever has the time or the patience to put the sundered pairs back together again. Hugh once got a locksmith in to redo the locks on the gun room, wine cellar and silver cupboard, but within weeks the keys had wandered off again and gone to join their chums in odd vases on distant windowsills.
Lollie was shaking her head at me; not just her head either – she was trembling.
‘I couldn’t bear it,’ she said. ‘I’ve never been able to sleep in a locked room – not even in hotels – not since I was a child and my nursemaid slipped out one night to meet her young man and left me locked in my nursery. There was a thunderstorm and I couldn’t get out of my room to find my mother.’ She grinned at me. ‘Pip always says we are Jack Spratt and his wife. I used to hate knowing that Pip locked his door at night, until we came to a compromise.’ She led me back out onto the landing.
Nothing, she told me, could persuade her husband not to turn the key in his bedroom door at night, following a lifelong habit, but there was another door just outside at the top of the stairs which led into a small back hall, thence into Pip’s bathroom – another former dressing room – and from there back into his bedroom again, and Lollie explained that he had consented to a night latch on the outer door, rather than a lock proper, with the little key kept on top of the lintel in case of emergencies.
‘I should be far more wary of that arrangement,’ I said. I did not trust these new-fangled cylinder latches with their flat little keys all looking exactly the same and always thought one could get into much more of a pickle from doors slamming shut with the key on the wrong side or from leaving the little knob up when it should be down or putting it down when it should be up.
Dandy Gilver and the Proper Treatment of Bloodstains Page 5