‘Oh, can I have it, Mr Faulds?’ said Phyllis. ‘It’s not fair having a rotten old Tuesday for my free afternoon. Let me swap it, and I’ll do Great Aunt Goitre and not complain – promise.’
‘You’re doing her anyway,’ said Clara. ‘It’s your turn.’
‘I’ve decided that Miss Rossiter should step into Maggie’s free days,’ said Mr Faulds. ‘Sorry, Phyllis. Fanny, if that’s all right with you.’
I could not have been more delighted, for Alec would be here by the following day and a free afternoon was more than I could have hoped for to spend with him. We had not arranged how to meet but later that evening, with the greatest imaginable fuss and uproar, Mrs Lambert-Leslie finally arrived. Mr Faulds went out to meet the lady, Stanley helping to ferry a great many bags and boxes up the front steps, Clara – caught on the hop – rushed upstairs with the water jug and hot bottle for her bedroom, Lollie rang down to ask if that was Great Aunt Gertrude arriving, Phyllis sped to her side to say that it was and her passenger got out of the motorcar, let himself in at the area steps and pushed a note for Miss Rossiter through the letter box. Miss Rossiter was in the servants’ hall at the time and saw the three sets of legs come down with the note and go up again: one pair of legs in grey flannel bags and town brogues, four liver and white legs with soft fringes, and another four, long, smooth, beloved, spotted legs which brought a lump to my throat as I glimpsed them.
‘Damned fellow brought his dogs,’ Great Aunt Gertrude was saying, as I stepped into Lollie’s boudoir with a tea tray, ‘all the way from Perthshire with two tails whipping in my face. Pretty little spaniel and a Dalmatian bitch with even less sense than most. Tea?’ she enquired, seeing me. I nodded and bobbed. ‘Oh well, why not,’ she said, ‘as long as there’s a drink on its way soon. And I smelled ham when I came in. Run down and get Mrs Hepburn to cut me a sandwich, would you, girl? And one for my niece. I don’t like this peaky look of hers.’
No one, I thought, could describe Mrs Lambert-Leslie as having a peaky look. She was a large pink person, with plain features gathered all together in the middle of her face and a great deal of cheek and jowl and forehead around them. Her hair was white and fluffed up into a fan-shape at the front, leaving a sparse little bun, very neglected, at the back, just above her collar. It was not an attempt at a fashionable hairstyle which had gone woefully wrong, nor even a relic of some earlier arrangement which had survived and mutated as one often sees in ladies of a certain age. It was inexplicable and could only have been carried off by a woman of titanic self-confidence. Great Aunt Gertrude, needless to say, managed.
‘Who was it who gave you the lift anyway?’ said Lollie, and I was interested to hear that her voice was calm and sounded neither flat nor suspiciously animated. The doctor must have mixed up a magic potion out of his bag which had dulled her down and picked her up and left her in the middle. ‘You didn’t just stand by the side of the road and wave your stick, did you?’
‘Wouldn’t be the first time,’ said Great Aunt Gertrude with a shout of laughter, ‘but no. He’s Millicent Osborne’s sister Daphne’s grandson. Dorset. Good family. Although there was something about him . . . I forget what now . . . came into an estate somehow that wasn’t quite the thing. But it’s a neat enough place. Of course, I only saw the drive and the hall, but you can tell a lot from gravel, I always say. And he’s not married. So I’ve invited him for dinner. You were too young last time of course, but you can’t hang about now. Here – girl! What are you standing there for? Sandwich, sandwich. And you can take the smaller of the two bags with the straps on downstairs with you. All that’s for washing.’
I glanced at Lollie again as I left to see how well she was standing up to this extraordinary person and her outlandish suggestion, but either the doctor’s powders were potent ones or she was too used to her aunt to be shocked by anything, for she gave me a mild smile to send me on my way and turned back to listen to the report of the journey which was just beginning.
I half expected a timorous knock or two on my door that night or the following morning, as one or other of the junior staff wrestled with their consciences and decided to give up their secrets. I even made sure that I was busy in the little laundry room so that I might not miss the knock when it came, and listened intently whenever I heard a pair of feet descend to the sub-basement. There was a great deal of traffic up and down for, as well as the usual commerce of the house and the extra burden of our exacting guest, Mr Hardy had indeed returned and all the servants trooped up to be grilled by him once more.
All I got for my pains, in the end, was a pile of rather limp underclothes – Lollie’s (I drew the line at ‘the smaller of’ Great Aunt Gertrude’s strapped bags which was not much smaller and was stuffed to bursting) – as well as a crick in my neck and very sore knuckles from scrubbing wet cloth between them. There was presumably some knack to this which Grant had neglected to pass on to me, but I consoled myself that dishpan hands, as they call them in the cold cream advertisements, were an authentic touch for Miss Rossiter and I should take them out on my free afternoon with pride.
After luncheon – haddock and egg pie, fried potatoes and pickled beetroot followed by steamed ginger sponge and custard – I tidied my hair, put on a cameo brooch and a pair of fine stockings, jammed my copious notes into Miss Rossiter’s best bag and left by the area door, to meet Alec – as his letter had suggested and as was most fitting for a lady’s maid on her free afternoon – under the Scott Monument in Princes Street Gardens.
I set off with head high and heart stout, but by the time I had crossed George Street – the spine of the New Town – and was descending again, my footsteps had started to falter as I imagined what I might see when I emerged onto Princes Street, with who knew what gangs gathered there and what scuffles brewing.
There were indeed a dozen or so men standing arm in arm at the top of the steps which led down to Waverley station, with perhaps a dozen more marching up and down in front of them carrying signs on sticks. Three policemen stood in the road, very still, simply watching, but they had their whistles between their teeth: even at this distance I could see the glint of the chains which fastened them to their breast pockets.
And how could three policemen stand still in the carriageway on Edinburgh’s busiest thoroughfare on a Friday afternoon? Quite simply because aside from the little tableau they made with the pickets and the sign wavers, Princes Street was empty. Oh, the shops were lighted and open and there were customers going in and out, but very few, and they walked quickly with their heads down and their voices low and, besides, the pavement with its window displays and awnings and tempting doorways, which would draw the eye on any other shopping street but this one, is always – even on ordinary days – belittled by the great broad flat road and, on its other side, the green sweep of gardens falling away and then rising up to the jagged skyline of the Old Town and the hulk of the Castle Rock. Today, with the road deserted, tramlines still, bus stops unpeopled, rabble of motor lorries and taxicabs and horse carts gone like ghosts when the lamp snaps on, a handful of shoppers scurrying in and out with their parcels were like sandhoppers on the tideline against the expanse of emptiness behind them, and so the emptiness was all one could see and all one could hear was the silence.
I felt a fluttering in my throat as my pulse quickened. I had laughed at Hugh, even at Harry, but this was no Edinburgh I had ever known, this was no country of mine, and just for a moment, I feared for us all.
Then I heard a shout from the other side of the street and, looking over, saw Alec silhouetted under the arches of the monument waving wildly at me. I looked to both sides for traffic – for one cannot suppress these instincts – and crossed the deserted street towards him, towards the whining, circling bundle of pent-up ecstasy on the end of the lead.
‘My darling!’ I sank onto my knees and let Bunty yelp and sniff and lick my hat and trample her paws all over the front of my coat and skirt and wipe quantities of her stiff white hairs ont
o me and wheel away to gallop off some of her joy and then come back to do it all again. Eventually she dropped down, rolled onto her back and wriggled this way and that with her eyes half-closed and her tongue lolling out of one side of her mouth and I stood, brushed myself and resecured my hatpin.
‘Well, I can’t compete with that for a welcome,’ said Alec, ‘but it is good to see you, Dandy.’
‘And you,’ I said, returning his quick hug. ‘Hello, Millie.’ Alec’s spaniel, sitting primly at his side, waggled her bottom briefly.
‘Shall we go down out of the breeze? I said, for it was rather gusty.
‘If we can get past the doormen,’ said Alec, pointing to the top of the steps where two policemen were standing shoulder to shoulder, their mouths set and their eyes grim.
Of course, both policemen stepped aside and one touched his hat as we passed them, and we descended to the lower level and claimed an empty bench, one looking down over the railway lines which emerge from the glass roof of the station and briefly bisect a portion of the gardens before disappearing into a tunnel which runs under the rest of them. Princes Street Gardens, I thought as I looked around, are at their best in May, crowded with tulips and pansies and wearing fresh new cloaks of green on the ground and in the air. (Later in the summer the green grass would turn yellow if it were dry or wear through to the earth from the tramp of feet if it were rainy, the green leaves of the trees would darken with smuts from the trains, the growers of the bedding plants would have outdone themselves for double and treble and quadruple begonias all of monstrous size and unlikely colour, and the benches would be dusty and sticky so that even if one were not actually sitting amongst picnic litter with spilled lemonade under one’s feet, it always felt that way.)
‘Very odd with no trains, isn’t it?’ said Alec. ‘You get used to there always being a few chuffing away at the platforms. It’s like being in a summer meadow today.’
‘Apart from the shouting,’ I said. From the station I could hear voices and what sounded like a drum being beaten in slow threatening time. I jumped as a particularly lusty yell reached our ears.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Alec. ‘There are so many special constables in the station there’s hardly room on the tracks for the strikers and they were sharing out cigarettes and playing cards together when I looked in on them.’
‘You went down there!’
Alec grinned at me. ‘I told the bobbies I was a volunteer.’
‘Are you going to volunteer?’ I said. ‘Do be careful.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Alec. ‘I just put a ten-shilling note in the strikers’ collecting tin at Platform 3, so it would be rather inconsistent. Oh, don’t look at me like that! The Prince of Wales sent them a tenner. Now, Dandy – fill me in.’
I heaved in a huge breath, planning to expend it on the start of my tale, but long before I had decided where to begin I had to let it go all in a rush, for fear of bursting. The same thing happened with the second breath. Bunty, who had come to rest her muzzle in my lap, looked up at me with wrinkled brows and blinked at the draught.
‘A hippo in a mudhole,’ said Alec. ‘Top marks.’
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Very well, I shall try and you must make of it what you can. You knew already what sort of husband Pip Balfour was, but what I’ve discovered is that it wasn’t just Lollie. Everyone hated him, with very good reason too, except . . .’
‘Except?’
‘Except . . . I don’t know. I can’t put my finger on it. Look, he forced his beastly attentions on several of the maids. Clara, the parlourmaid, a high-spirited colt of a girl, long legs, long nose – prettier than I’m making her sound, though – got the worst of it, since she, as she put it, “fell”.’ I saw Alec’s puzzled frown and translated. ‘Was made with-child, darling, which – at Pip’s insistence, I should add – she successfully concealed with tightened corsets and bigger aprons.’
‘Really? Is that possible?’
‘You’d be surprised,’ I told him.
‘And what happened to . . . it?’
‘It was stillborn. She crept off on her own to the attics, Alec, and never told a soul.’
‘Dear God.’
‘He also pounced on Eldry, the tweenie,’ I continued. ‘Rather an unfortunate girl. Pitifully plain, all bones and teeth. Edith Sitwell, except that she arranges her hair like a character from Beatrix Potter and so only draws attention to herself. Also Millie, the scullerymaid, truly a character from Beatrix Potter – round and pink and guileless, and by the way absolutely besotted by the most unattractive young man – Stanley, the footman.’
‘What’s wrong with him?’
‘Fastidious,’ I said. ‘Faints at the sight of blood or the mention of it.’
‘He can’t help that,’ said Alec.
‘Also pompous, boastful, ostentatiously servile, insinuating and sanctimonious. I’d love to be able to suspect him, but no one who pales at a drop of blood on a pricked finger could have wielded that mutton knife, you know. And no one who wasn’t innocent would dare to drone on so about what he knows and could tell.’
‘What does he know?’ said Alec. ‘What could he tell?’
‘Nothing, he’s just one of those annoying hinters. He had good reason to revile Pip, all the same. Pip refused him leave to visit his father when everyone thought he was just about to peg out from TB. And threatened him with the sack if he went AWOL. And he’d do it too, because Phyllis, the housemaid – she of the pawnshop visit – was on warning for cheek and would have been out on her ear if Pip hadn’t died. That was Phyllis’s particular complaint. She can’t even say, with any certainty, what it was she did, so one suspects she did nothing.’
‘He just wanted rid of her? What’s she like?’
‘Delightful,’ I said. ‘Little impish, freckly thing with those very round blue eyes. Irish, perhaps.’
‘Doesn’t sound like the kind of girl one would cast easily aside,’ said Alec, with rather unguarded honesty it seemed to me. ‘Do you really believe she can’t think what she did? Clumsiness? Breaking the Meissen? Pilfering? Corrupting the grocer’s boy?’
‘Well, pilfering is a possibility,’ I said. ‘I never did manage to work out where she got that seventeen pounds, after all.’
‘That’s not pilfering,’ said Alec. ‘That’s theft. Fingers as sticky as all that would have got her much more than a warning.’
‘Yes, but I wondered if perhaps she was in the habit of a little very minor pinching – the pawnbroker thought the rug and nightie – and then after Pip’s death she swooped in and pocketed the seventeen pounds she knew was lying around.’
‘But that would be senseless,’ Alec said. ‘To do something to draw suspicion towards one when one knew there would be policemen sniffing about.’
It did sound unlikely when he put it that way.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘perhaps she did it to get the rug and nightie back, in case there was a search and they were missed. And then found. In the pawnbroker’s.’
This sounded even less convincing and Alec was kind enough to pass on without commenting.
‘So that’s the young girls,’ he said. ‘And Stanley.’
‘So let’s have the rest of the men. Mr Faulds is more discreet about Pip’s deeds than the rest but he didn’t hide his feelings for a minute. Good news about the death, let’s all stand together and what’s next, was the order of the day.’
‘Who’s Mr Faulds?’ said Alec.
‘Oh! The butler,’ I said. ‘Faulds. Ernest. He’s a dear. He lays down the law to the youngsters when he remembers but his heart isn’t in it. Mostly he hands out drinks and instigates sing-songs. He has a music-hall background, you know, and is teaching young Mattie to play the piano. Now, Mattie is the hall boy, also a dear. White-blond hair, deep dimples and a stammer when he’s nervous. He comes from a family of miners but had to give it up after an accident. Can you imagine, Alec, being trapped down a mine for hours? It’s left him with a crippling fe
ar of being alone in the dark and yet Balfour – blister that he was – insisted on Mattie waiting up in the dark hall to let his master in on late nights out. Similarly, John the chauffeur was left to sleep in the car countless times when Balfour might easily have organised for him to have a bed wherever. And he’s the usual strapping type that people employ as chauffeurs too – not built for curling up on the back seat. And as for Harry, Balfour’s valet – well, there the tricks begin to get so silly they seem quite mad. Balfour stole the poor chap’s clothes and gave them back with the pockets cut out.’
‘Eh?’ said Alec.
‘I know. It’s like something from a fairy tale. But actually, it makes some kind of sense when one considers that Harry is the resident communist.’
‘Does it?’
‘Well, you know, can’t really make a fuss about his possessions since he thinks no one should have any.’
‘A communist valet,’ said Alec, as wonderingly as I had. ‘Rather an odd choice of occupation, isn’t it? Odd enough to be suspicious, do you think?’
‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘I’ve forgotten someone. Faulds, Harry, John, Stanley, Mattie. Clara, Phyllis, Eldry, Millie and . . . Oh! Mrs Hepburn. Of course. Kitty Hepburn, the cook.’
‘Interfered with like the rest of the girls?’ said Alec.
‘Not by Balfour,’ I said. ‘But she and Faulds have a bit of an understanding. In fact, they were together on the night in question and provided one another with alibis.’
‘So does she have some other reason to have loathed Balfour?’
With a shudder I told him about the dead mouse in the goose and the other insults to her cooking.
‘Hm,’ said Alec. ‘It’s nasty – especially the mouse, which you might easily have kept to yourself, Dandy; I may never eat roast goose again – but it’s better than what happened to all the young ones.’
Dandy Gilver and the Proper Treatment of Bloodstains Page 20