‘I’m sure it’s nothing,’ I said, ‘but I’ve got a bee in my bonnet for some reason.’
‘Who are you?’ the voice said.
I was only steps away from him now and yet still, as I gazed up at his face, I could not make sense of it. Not until I looked downwards and saw the cardigan jersey, the bagged corduroys and the carpet slippers, did I realise my blunder.
‘Lord Buckie?’
‘Who are you?’ he said again, and I could hear a very faint echo of his brother’s voice as his surprise gave way to a natural amusement.
‘I— Oh my goodness, I do apologise. Yes. My name is Gilver – Dandy … lion. I dropped in to see Robin and I just … I haven’t come for the silver. Don’t worry.’
‘Well, I’m afraid he has gone out,’ he said. ‘Might I relay a message from you?’
‘Not really,’ I said, feathers of panic begin to tickle at me. I did not want to have to tell this man about Anastasia’s death. ‘I could leave a note, perhaps. Will he be gone long?’ Not having heard a motor car, I suppose I imagined that he had taken a dog for a walk or something.
‘He could be.’ Lord Buckie – it was a struggle not to think of him as ‘the old man’ and yet I knew he was barely fifty – treated me to a considering look, deciding whether to go on. ‘I expect he has gone visiting. Of course, you are very welcome to wait.’ He bowed slightly and ushered me towards the open door behind him. I made a slight bow in return and trooped wordlessly to where he was pointing. It was only after I got there that I regretted it.
It was his library, and quite clearly his bolthole, one comfortable chair drawn up by the fire and a table littered with books, pipes and spectacle cases. There were not, as far as I could see, any of the expected accoutrements of serious illness, no bath chair or chaise, not even any medicine bottles or so much as a blanket, nothing but the thinness of his legs under their corduroy trousers and the bony chest above the cardigan buttons to speak of his frailty. His skin too, I saw as I came into the light, was stretched pale and papery over his cheekbones. Only in silhouette could he ever be mistaken for his brother, one of them as lithe as a green willow-wand and the other as dry and hollow as a reed. He settled back down into his chair and waved me into a seat on a hard sofa against the wall.
‘Now then,’ he said. ‘Are you sure there’s nothing I can do to help?’
‘Quite sure,’ I said.
‘Then might I offer a little advice?’ he went on.
I nodded, rather puzzled.
‘I am very fond of my brother,’ he said, ‘but I have no illusions about him. If I were you, Miss Gilver, I should count myself lucky that he was not here today and I should give it up now. I mean no disrespect to you in saying so, my dear, quite the reverse and I hope I haven’t shocked you.’
He had, of course, horrified me and at the same time had flattered me more than I had ever been flattered in my life.
‘Lord Buckie, we seem to be at cross-purposes. I’m Mrs Gilver. From Gilverton.’
‘Hugh Gilver’s wife?’ said Lord Buckie. ‘Hugh Gilver’s wife, here to see Robin?’ Now I was in even greater danger of collapsing into giggles; of course, he must have some experience of the odd Mrs coming mooning around after Robin as well as the hopeful Misses, tails wagging and hearts about to break.
‘I’m on my way to Cairnbulg,’ I said, and I had never been more grateful to know the stainless Brodies, all but pasteurised in their rectitude. ‘I just dropped in in passing, truly, and am in no need of your protection.’
At last, the earnest look fell away from him and he sat back and gave a short laugh.
‘But why did you drop in to see Robin alone and not me too?’ he said. ‘I’m always happy to have some company. Really, you can hardly blame me for thinking it a tryst.’
‘I had heard you were ill,’ I said. ‘I had got the idea that you were …’
‘At death’s door?’ said Lord Buckie, baldly. ‘Or halfway up the drive? Unfortunately not.’
‘Hardly unfortunately,’ I said, very uncomfortable. ‘Thankfully, mercifully.’ I should have kept quiet, for the discomfort only grew.
‘Oh no, you mustn’t say that, my dear,’ he said. ‘Whatever fleeting moment of sorrow you would feel to read over breakfast one morning that Old Buckie had popped off at last, it cannot count against my claims.’ I frowned and shook my head slightly, not following him. ‘My life has long been a burden to me,’ he explained. ‘Its loss would be a release.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, cursing myself for being drawn into this. No wonder he did not get many visitors if this was how he entertained them.
‘Please don’t be,’ he replied, and went on: ‘Eternal rest and an end to cares. What reason is there to be sorry?’ Well, I thought, I was sorry I had come and sat down in this library for a start. With dismay, I realised that the question was not a rhetorical one; he was looking at me, expecting an answer.
‘You said you were fond of your brother,’ I blurted out. ‘And from hearing him speak I know how much he cares for you too. That’s something worth living for.’
‘I have lost more than a brother can ever make up for,’ he answered. ‘I wish I could believe that I shall see them all again – my housekeeper never tires of trying to convince me – but at least I shall stop missing them. I could give up twenty brothers – even twenty Robins – to stop missing them.’ At the close of this speech, quite the most doleful I think I had ever heard in the whole course of my life, he finally took pity on me and rallied a little. ‘But how cheering to hear that Robin speaks kindly of me in my absence. I never imagine the parties he attends to be places where relatives are asked after.’
‘It was not a typical gathering,’ I admitted. ‘But he did seem – and it was remarkable to me too – to be a very family-minded young man.’ It was with some surprise that I realised this was true: all of the poison regarding Robin’s cold-hearted desire for his inheritance had come from the gossip of others and the only words I had heard from the horse’s mouth spoke of warm feelings and a heart which could grieve with the best of them. ‘He does hide his finest qualities very skilfully, doesn’t he?’
‘Good God, no!’ said Lord Buckie, near laughter again. ‘That’s exactly how he does it, my dear. He doesn’t hide his tender heart. Not at all! He offers tantalising glimpses of it in between the roguery and every woman between twenty and fifty decides that she can save him.’
Not every woman, I thought to myself. Ina Wilson, for one, was having none of it.
‘But I love him dearly,’ Lord Buckie went on. ‘He has such claims on my heart that I forgive him anything.’
‘I have a brother myself,’ I said, ‘and a sister, and you make me ashamed, Lord Buckie, for I am not sure I would ever describe my own family feeling in quite that way.’
‘It’s more than family feeling,’ he replied. Then he gave me a shrewd look. ‘Forgive me, I can see how uncomfortable I’m making you.’ He paused while I mumbled a pointless denial. ‘But I rarely get the chance to speak of them …’ A pause and a sigh. ‘When my dear wife died’ – I could not help a sinking feeling, seeing that our excursion away from doom was over – ‘all but one of my children were already gone. And that one, my oldest, wasn’t even sick. She didn’t have it.’
‘I know,’ I said gently.
‘She drowned.’ He looked up at me. ‘And Robin almost drowned trying to save her. Did you know that?’ I shook my head. ‘I have never forgiven myself.’
‘For what?’ I asked him.
‘When her mother died, I meant to rouse her, to stop her sinking into the kind of grief I feared she was too young to bear, but instead I only added to it and …’
‘I am sure you could not have done that, Lord Buckie,’ I said.
‘I told her she was more than enough for me, that we would be everything to one another now. It must have seemed that I was asking her for strength she did not possess, that I was asking her not to mourn. So she went to the cliffs and
threw herself into the sea.’
I gasped.
‘I – I – thought it was an accident,’ I said.
‘We managed to keep it very quiet,’ he said. ‘Or rather Robin managed. Out of kindness to me. And so I could forgive him pretty well anything. Even his afternoons of visiting.’
‘Ah,’ I said, ‘visiting! A young widow? I hope not the wife or daughter of one of your men.’ I was trying desperately to lighten the mood. ‘Very bad for the estate, that kind of thing.’
‘A retired piano teacher,’ said Lord Buckie, himself making a brave effort to sound cheerful. ‘But between you and me, my dear, she still sees one pupil. Robin is always to be found there whenever he’s feeling ruffled. She lives in the head groom’s cottage as was and pays her rent on time.’
‘A retired piano teacher?’ I was trying and failing to picture Robin Laurie drinking tea in a cottage with my first piano teacher, Miss Cribb – moon-faced Miss Cribb with her slightly crossed eyes and her bun so tightly scraped back. I always wondered that it had not managed to uncross them.
‘Well, my housekeeper maintains that she might well know how to dance on a piano but nothing more.’ He was almost animated as he spoke, and I considered, quietly to myself, the growing puzzle of Robin Laurie. A scamp? A blister? Could any man who lit his ailing brother’s final hours this way be all that bad? Could anyone who jumped into the sea to save his niece be a cad at heart? Could anyone who kept up something as cosy as this afternoon arrangement with the piano teacher really be the kind of wrecker who deserved all of Ina Wilson’s disdain?
In fact, I told myself later as I drove away, Ina Wilson’s view of Laurie was getting curiouser all the time. For it seemed to me that the shared influenza nurse must have seen Robin the brother and Robin the uncle at his most impressive and endearing and could only have praised him to the heavens to her next patient. Well, perhaps the nurse was pretty and Robin had seduced her or perhaps – this was much more likely – Ina, knowing that he was a poppet underneath, found his veneer all the more tiresome and did not trouble to hide it. Perhaps she was one of the many who had tried to save him, got stung and retired, smarting.
13
Determined to show Hugh that his capacity to do without me was more than matched by my utter indifference as to whether he were a feature of my day, I went straight back to the winter ground from Cairnbulg on Tuesday morning and arrived to find the circus in a state of some uproar. There were raised voices in the stable tent, sounds of childish weeping from the Prebrezhenskys’ living wagon and the unexpected sight of Bill Wolf stamping up and down in front of the performing tent, his brows thunderous and his boots making the very earth shake beneath them. Mrs Wolf could just be seen watching from behind the lace in her wagon window, a pained expression upon her broad face, and Tommy and Little Sal were sitting on the steps gazing at their father with a mixture of curiosity, trepidation and awe.
Ma Cooke popped her head out at the sound of my motor car and came over to meet me, moving at a trot, wiping her hands dry on her skirt as though upon an apron which her evident agitation had made her forget she was not wearing.
‘So, here you are back again and where were you when we needed you so?’ she scolded me as she arrived at my side.
‘What’s happened?’ I said.
‘The police have gone. Accident, they said. Only to be expected, they said. What were we doing wasting their time a-calling it anything else?’
‘But you didn’t want them to stay,’ I said. ‘So what’s wrong?’
Ma’s eyes flashed to Bill Wolf before she said anything. He had ceased his stamping up and down and was now stamping over towards us.
‘Fie, fi, fo, fum,’ I said under my breath. ‘What on earth’s up with Bill?’
‘The good Lord knows and He won’t tell the likes of me,’ said Ma. ‘I don’t know what we’re at, my beauty. I’ve known that man there fifty years and more and been in the wagon with thon forty-five and this is the first time either of them’s puzzled me in all my days.’
‘“Thon” would be Pa?’ I hazarded.
‘He’s gone too far now,’ said Bill as he drew close to us. It was a considerable effort not at least to take a step back from him. With his shoulders thrust forward, his fists bunched and his voice an angry rumble he made one think of those thrilling gods from Norse Stories Retold; thrilling, that is, when presented in the form of a little woodcut showing how Thor got his hammer, but rather terrifying when standing right before one, larger than life, clearly fuming. ‘What’s he playing at, eh? He’s overstepped the mark and no mistake about it.’
‘Isn’t that what I’m telling Mrs Gilver? I don’t know what he’s at. I can’t work it out for my life. And there’s Inya, Alya and Ilya breaking their little hearts.’ Ma sounded almost ready to join the Prebrezhensky girls with some weeping of her own.
‘But what’s happening?’ I insisted, hoping that I did not sound as shrill as I felt inside.
‘He’s lost his senses,’ said Ma. ‘Lost his circus sense anyways. He’s said he’s going to shoot the pony and won’t hear a word against it. As soon as the police told him what they’d made of it, he decided. I tried to change his mind and Charlie tried, then we both tried together and he just got madder and madder and he won’t listen to anyone.’
‘But I won’t stand for it,’ said Bill, his temper rising again on the swell of his booming voice. ‘I won’t be made a fool.’
‘Shoot Harlequin?’ I said. ‘Kill him?’
Ma nodded miserably.
‘But … but what about Princess Zanzi?’
‘Who?’ said Bill.
‘Tigress what bit my pa when I wurr a little maid,’ Ma told him.
This was very troubling news. The hasty shooting of hapless little ponies was common enough in my world, of course, where fond fathers of suddenly crippled daughters were wont to reach for their guns, but Pa Cooke killing off a highly trained and surely valuable rosy-back prad, at a time when Cooke’s Circus was far from thriving, and when the lost girl had been such a thorn in the collective Cookes’ side? The only explanation I could see for that was not one I welcomed: the police had chalked up Ana’s death as an accident and happily wiped the chalk dust from their hands and Pa was falling over himself to boost the official version. Surely, he would only do that if …
‘Oh no,’ said Ma. ‘No, no, no, don’t be thinking that there. Pa would never.’
‘You give me goose pimples sometimes, Ma,’ I said. ‘How did you know what I was thinking?’
‘Twas wrote on your face like love and hate,’ said Ma, and for once I should rather have thought her psychic, since to have his every thought ‘wrote on his face’ is as unhelpful to a detective as to a card player.
‘And you, Bill,’ I said, mustering my courage and turning to look up at him. ‘What think you? And why are you so angry?’
‘I think no harm of Tam Cooke,’ said Bill, rather unconvincingly to my mind. ‘And don’t you go twisting up my words on me. I just want what’s best for us all. All I ever did. And killing Harlequin is just burning pound notes, to my mind. I won’t stand for it.’
‘I’m not sure I shall either,’ I said. ‘Where is he, Ma?’
Pa Cooke, as Ma indicated with a jerk of her head, was in the performing tent so squaring my shoulders I strode off to have it out with him. He was standing in the middle of the ring in what I had come to think of as his rehearsal dress, long boots and flashing whip but coatless and with his sleeves rolled to the elbow, shirt buttons open piratically low upon his chest, giving an effect close to pantomime. Certainly his audience seemed not far from booing and hissing. Topsy, arms folded very tightly across her chest, was looking stonily ahead without a trace of her usual twinkles. Zoya and Kolya, just behind her, were slumped forward, elbows on knees, staring coldly at Pa and muttering now and then to one another in their guttural Russian, a language so suited to gloomy muttering that one does wonder how Russians do anything else, such as tellin
g jokes or wooing maidens, and surely a Russian wedding with the vows repeated in those doleful lumps of sound could not be festive.
Pa saw me enter, but only cracked his whip and turned his back. I slipped into Alec’s row of seats and shuffled along until I was sitting beside him.
‘You’re back,’ he said. ‘Have you heard what’s happening?’
‘Ma just told me. Do you have any idea why?’
Alec gave a short laugh ‘I’m up to my eyebrows in artistic temperament and haven’t the faintest of clues about anyone. Even Miles is beginning to seem a bit odd, frankly.’
‘Quiet,’ barked Pa, from the middle of the ring. ‘Quiet when we’re working.’
‘News to me,’ said Topsy and Pa treated her to a glare. Then he whistled earsplittingly shrilly through his teeth and Tiny and Andrew came bowling into the ring on two unicycles, with Charlie Cooke trotting after them pushing a wheelbarrow. Jinx, in the barrow, looked his usual irrepressible self but Charlie’s face was mutinous and a moment’s viewing told me why.
‘This is instead of Ana and Harlequin,’ Alec whispered, as Tiny and Andrew sped around the edge of the ring, juggling coloured balls, while Charlie and Jinx chased after them, never catching them up.
‘Charlie won’t think much of being the chump,’ I said. ‘I take it he can’t ride a unicycle himself, then?’
‘I suppose not,’ said Alec. ‘But look at Bill Wolf: packed up his medicine balls and crossbows and took to the accordion with never a grumble.’
‘He’s grumbling plenty today,’ I pointed out. ‘Stalking up and down like a thundercloud out there.’
‘That’s because Pa chucked him out of the tent. For lip.’
‘Can he do that?’ I was amazed. I had grown used to the idea that the circus folk were as civilised as Alec and me, only sprinkled with a little strangeness, as a kind of garnish.
‘Apparently,’ said Alec. ‘Because he only had to say it once and off Bill went. It seems the boss can do whatever he likes.’
‘Even as far as killing ponies,’ I agreed. Most unfortunately, there had happened to be a moment’s silence just then while Tiny and Andrew balanced, arm in arm and wheels still, and so my words reached Pa Cooke’s ears.
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