‘Wicked man,’ I said, and Tiny gave a very convincing diabolical laugh and hugged himself.
‘What can I do for you?’ he asked presently.
‘Confirm what is becoming very clear,’ I replied. ‘Anastasia was not a chum of Ina Wilson’s, was she?’
Tiny shook his head as I had expected.
‘No, but her man’s laying on the funeral anyway,’ he said. ‘Did you know that? Should have been Cooke’s that paid for it, like, but we’re not in a way to insist. Coming to something, in’t it, missus, when her nearest and dearest can’t give her a proper goodbye. That’s the least we should do.’
‘You are very kind,’ I said. ‘But surely you – you, personally, I mean – are not scratching around for “the least you should do”?’
‘Am I not?’ he said, his face falling, deep lines forming on either side of his mouth. ‘You’re being too kind to me,’ he said. ‘Dazzled by my mesmerising looks and my charisma. But there I go again, see? I wasn’t kind to that poor girl. Not at all. She needed to be took serious, to be cared for gentle, and I just joked and teased and used her lightly same as I do everyone. I’d have been better just to keep right out of her way, like the Russians did, and there was no love lost there. At least t’rest can make theirselves feel better by carrying her coffin tomorrow, but I’m not cut out for a pall-bearer, me.’
Zoya was alone in her wagon with Akilina, her youngest child. The little girl was sitting very still while her mother snipped with scissors at her wetted fringe.
‘Forgive me stay busy,’ said Zoya.
‘While you work,’ I said, settling myself down in the other chair, ‘might I ask a few questions?’
‘Of course,’ Zoya said.
‘I shan’t say anything that might upset the little one,’ I assured her, but she shrugged off my concern.
‘Ilya has got not much of English,’ she said. ‘Kolya is so sure we will go home and our girls need to be Russian girls for then.’
‘Very well,’ I said. I was sorry that her mind was tending towards her ‘beloved Mother Russia’ given what I was planning to ask her, but I smiled encouragingly and pitched in.
‘It’s about Ana,’ I began. Zoya interrupted me.
‘I am patient woman,’ she said. ‘Everyone circus must be very patient, very steady, or never learn anything, see?’ I nodded. ‘But that one, “Anastasia”, she make my blood to boil like black sugar spilled over.’ It was a horribly apt phrase, even coming from this calm, pale woman bending over with her face so close to that of her daughter.
‘I can see that she must have annoyed you.’ I said. Zoya looked up at the inadequate word. ‘Incensed you, I mean.’ She looked down again and smiled at Akilina. ‘What I need to ask is this. I’m just about sure of what the answer will be, but tell me: did you ever see any sign that Mrs Wilson was a friend of Anastasia?’
‘Mrs Wilson? The lady from the castle? You think she killed Ana?’
‘No, no,’ I said. ‘I just want to know if you ever saw them together. Or if Ana ever mentioned her.’
‘Anastasia never spoke to me of anything,’ said Zoya. ‘She had too much pride and too much fear to speak to me.’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘You could have been her undoing in an instant.’
‘Until very soon ago,’ Zoya said, sitting back and thinking about it. ‘Some weeks, a month. Before we come here. Then she said to me one day: “I will reign over you, Madame Prebrezhensky. You shall see. You shall be sorry you ever to laughed at me, when I reign over you.” That is what she said.’
‘You must have been very angry,’ I said.
‘What, you think maybe I kill her?’ said Zoya. ‘You think all Russian just go kill everyone, hey?’
I began to clamour, shouting her down, but she was smiling at me.
‘How?’ she cried. ‘How? Magic? Send a spell?’ She closed her eyes and chanted a strange incantation in her sepulchral voice then opened her eyes wide and threw her arms up in the air like a falconer letting his hawk go. Akilina giggled.
‘Of course not,’ I said, thinking to myself that there was never a set of people in the world less prone to taking offence than these circus folk. Who else could one rather doggedly accuse of murder day after day only to have it brushed off with smiles.
Outside, I was looking around the ring of wagons wondering where to turn next, when I became aware that Akilina Prebrezhensky was standing at my side, looking up at me intently, her gaze all the more piercing given the severity of her mother’s trimming. She licked her lips and spoke in a tiny, peeping voice.
‘Missus,’ she said. Her hand curled into mine as small and soft as a rabbit’s paw and she pulled me backwards, pulled me outside the ring of wagons altogether, into the shadows where we would not be seen.
‘Missus,’ she said again. ‘Me seed.’
‘You seed?’ I echoed. I did not want to be discouraging, but I could make nothing of that. Akilina pointed back over her shoulder towards her wagon and mimed to me, making heads of her hands and snapping her fingers and thumbs together rapidly like talking mouths. She pointed at me and made the mime again. It began to make sense.
‘You understood what we were saying?’ I said. ‘In there?’ She nodded hard.
‘Me seed,’ she said again. With the kind of prickling sensation one sometimes gets from large gulps of overly fizzy champagne, I felt illumination spread through me.
‘You saw?’ I whispered. She nodded again. She pointed at her own living wagon and mimed crouching at the window, her hands up under her chin as though grasping the windowsill over which she was peeping.
‘What did you see, Akilina my darling?’ I asked her. ‘What did you see?’ Akilina licked her lips again and took a couple of deep breaths, scraping for the words to tell me.
‘Missus Lady … tchah!’ she said, then she pointed frantically over her shoulder. I turned round.
‘What? The stream? The water?’ I was miming too now.
Akilina shook her head, stood high on her tiptoes and heaved her pointing hand over her head as though trying to throw a heavy object a long way. I thought about what was beyond the stream and the trees.
‘The castle!’ I said. ‘You mean the lady from the castle? Mrs Wilson.’
Akilina clapped her hands and nodded, jumping up and down. She pointed to the performing tent and then walked her fingers away from it. And it was then that I realised, with a thump of excitement, that Alec, checking off his list of witnesses from the night of the show, had missed someone out after all.
‘Yes, yes, you’re quite right. Oh, you clever little girl. She left the tent.’
Then Akilina pointed at Ana’s wagon and shook her head hard, her mouth pushed out in a pout and her brows low and angry.
‘No!’ she said. ‘Not Ana! Lady no!’
That could hardly be clearer.
‘She didn’t hurt Ana?’ I said, just to check. Akilina shook her head so hard that the rats’ tails of her still-wet fringe banged against her head. Then her expression changed. She put her arms out and circled them as though embracing someone, closed her eyes and made loud kissing noises, swaying dreamily like Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. She was an accomplished little actress and it should have been squirm-inducing to watch, but just then I did not care.
‘Who?’ I asked. ‘Who was she kissing?’
But Akilina was lost in her performance now and could not be halted. She mimed writing, sealing the letter with a kiss and blowing it into the air, where it became a bird and fluttered away, coming to earth a long way off, piercing the lover in the heart and making him swoon.
‘All right,’ I said, ‘not just kissing, eh? Love?’
‘Love,’ she said and then began a new bout of really rather excellent silent acting. She breathed out hard four times, moving her head a little between breaths, and then she polished the four spots she had breathed upon. She swept the ground with a broom, shook out and laid a cloth upon a table, lovingly smoothing
it, and set down upon it a lamp, also burnished in passing, which she then lit. Her meaning was clear.
‘Love and marriage,’ I concluded. ‘I see. But who is it, darling? Who is it she loves? Who?’
Here, maddeningly, she stopped miming, stopped even pointing and spoke a stream of Russian, higher-pitched than one would have imagined Russian could be and at breakneck speed.
‘What? Who? Slow down,’ I said. ‘In fact, no. Point. Where is he? What does he look like?’ With my hands, I sketched a beard and a fat middle, spectacles and a long nose. Akilina gave me a pitying look – clearly unimpressed – and then set to herself. She held her hand up high above her head, as high as she could reach, then she smoothed back imaginary hair, plucked at a bow tie, twirled a walking stick and sauntered back and forth in front of me like Burlington Bertie from Bow.
‘The tall gentleman in the beautiful suiting,’ I said. ‘Robin. Of course.’
My head was popping like fireworks with new ideas, zapping with every new connection like low branches touching a tram wire in a thunderstorm, but one thing was very clear. I squatted down, ignoring the sound of my skirt seam straining and splitting, and looked hard into Akilina’s grey eyes. I needed all my tiny store of miming talent now for, if Ina Wilson were out of the picture, there was no other possibility except that one of the circus folk was guilty after all. And that meant that this little girl, with what she knew, might be in danger.
I pointed at my chest and at Akilina’s, put my finger to my lips and let out a long, very quiet, Sssssh!
Akilina turned a key in the middle of her mouth, took the key out and handed it to me. I put it in my pocket. We nodded again, and sealed the bargain by shaking hands. Then she stole away round the outside of the wagons to her own and I sidled off in the opposite direction feeling like a spy.
I found Alec without delay, but it was a considerable challenge to keep from blurting until we were right away from the tents and from all the wagons. I took him up to the pool at the foot of the waterfall where our voices would be drowned by the crashing of the water and where we could easily see anyone approaching.
‘Earth-shattering news, darling,’ I said, ‘and yet, and yet, you’re going to kick yourself when you hear it, because in the five minutes that I’ve known all kinds of odd puzzles have been fitting together.’
‘Shall I go and get a snare drum from Mr Wolf?’ said Alec and, although I had been all ready simply to tell him, his disdain in the face of my excitement turned me mulish and made me want to give him, as Nanny Palmer always used to say, ‘a spoonful of porridge from yesterday’s pan’. Unfortunately, Alec saw this plan forming and treated me to a withering look. ‘Oh, all right then,’ I said, ‘and don’t ever tell me I’m not an angel, because I’m far more of one than you deserve, frankly.’
‘Get on with it, Dandy. It’s freezing.’
‘If Ina Wilson,’ I began, ‘is indeed looking forward to an imminent change in her life, the way you thought she was, I know what it is. She is, I should imagine, hoping to leave Albert to join her lover as soon as his circumstances resolve themselves.’ I paused to allow the excitement to mount even further. ‘I should imagine that she hopes to become, after her divorce and remarriage, and the death of her brother-in-law-to-be, the Marchioness of Buckie.’
Alec, who really is quite good value sometimes, gave a long low whistle with his eyebrows lost somewhere in his hair.
‘How did you find out?’ he said.
‘They were seen. By Akilina Prebrezhensky, kneeling up in her bed looking out of her window at the stars on the night of the show.’
‘Peeping through the banisters,’ said Alec. ‘A thing that all children do and all adults forget they do. Is she sure?’
‘Absolutely, and she’s a remarkably stout-hearted little person – I have not a shadow of a doubt on the matter. Ina and Robin crept out to a short tryst in the moonlight while no one was looking. And that was the reason he was so utterly pole-axed by me going and telling him I turned around and asking him about Ina leaving and what he saw!’
‘He must have thought you were threatening him with exposure,’ said Alec, beginning to smile about it.
‘And that’s why he was so unsure of what to tell me and why he suddenly turned on the charm – unable to believe his luck that I didn’t know and trying to stop me thinking about it any more.’
‘They were taking a bit of a risk, weren’t they? Albert was right there in the tent. What if he had turned around?’
‘Well, maybe it wasn’t a tryst exactly,’ I said. ‘Maybe Ina dragged Robin out to scold him about turning up there. It was her only chance to get him on his own. And she was furious with him, livid.’
‘Which all of a sudden begins to make sense, doesn’t it?’ said Alec, nodding. ‘We never could get to the bottom of why she loathed him – the hints about the sickroom gossip never convinced me – but, of course, she was angry!’
‘Besides, she does have a heart,’ I said. ‘She does care for Albert a little and even if she’s leaving him she wasn’t happy to see him be made such a fool of.’
‘Not that he knew.’
‘Yes, but he will, afterwards. He’ll know then and he’ll spend the rest of his life wincing about it.’
‘He only has himself to blame,’ said Alec, sounding rather heartless. ‘He was never going to make her happy and as for all this nonsense since the ’flu – he’s had a longer run with her than he deserved to, if you ask me.’
‘I suppose so,’ I said. ‘And I suppose one can understand the attraction of Robin – when one has Albert Wilson to set him against, I mean.’
‘I wonder how they met,’ said Alec. ‘And when.’
I gasped.
‘I’ve just realised something,’ I said. ‘Hugh told me that Robin Laurie was engaged once to what Hugh described as “a very ordinary Miss” – I remember the phrase he used most particularly because I thought it was beyond vulgar – and that he broke it off hoping for better things. But perhaps it wasn’t that.’
‘You mean perhaps he broke it off in case his brother disinherited him on account of Ina’s inferiority?’
‘Exactly. Were the shades of Cullen to be thus polluted and all that.’
‘Could he disinherit him?’
‘Very possibly,’ I said. ‘I don’t go as far as to say I listen when Hugh regales me with thrilling tales of Scotch succession but some of it has seeped in over the years. You wouldn’t believe the shenanigans, if I told you.’
‘And so the lovers parted to wait for the old boy to die.’
‘Only Ina was offended and married Albert Wilson just to anger Robin. Or because she knew he would be running fast and loose with every chorus girl he could lay his hands on and this was the only way she could pay him back for it.’
‘Hang on, though,’ said Alec. ‘The Buckie wife and children died of influenza and Ina was already married by then.’
‘A divorcee!’ I cried. ‘Even better.’
‘And so Ina Wilson is crossed off our list of suspects once and for all,’ Alec said. He sounded exceedingly gloomy about it. ‘And it’s back to the circus folk.’ He sighed. ‘Are we still thinking it was a booby trap set by someone who was in the ring when she fell? Or do we think it was someone backstage and someone else is lying for him?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘but they are tremendously loyal to one another and surely would lie. And as for getting her off her horse or setting a trap and then spiriting it away … when one thinks about what that would need, doesn’t it come down to things like split-second timing, sleight-of-hand, physical strength …’
‘Misdirection of the eye,’ added Alec miserably. ‘Tiny and Andrew have promised to teach me some of the basic stuff if I’ll stay on after tea. They’ve been delighting to show me what they can do in plain view without being seen, just by making everyone look elsewhere. Oh, Dandy, don’t you just hate this sometimes?’
15
There was rather a di
fficult telephone call to be made when I got home, and however I rehearsed it while ringing up and waiting for the butler to fetch his mistress, I could not make it sound any less of a humiliation.
‘Ina?’ I said, when at last she came on. ‘It’s Dandy. Darling, I’m sorry, but I must beg a favour of you. Could you send someone down to the circus and see if Alec Osborne is still there and if he is could he please bring Bunty home? I’ve left her. Yes, I know. I know. I can’t imagine, except that I was terribly distracted.’
I was desperate to ring off, not only so that she could dispatch the message, but out of embarrassment to be talking to her, knowing what I knew and knowing, moreover, what I had so recently suspected, but Ina was in a chattering mood and short of blatant rudeness I could not get rid of her.
‘You’ve heard about tomorrow night, I suppose?’ she said. ‘The show?’
‘I did,’ I said. ‘Can’t you persuade Albert that it’s too cruel to put them through it?’
‘Albert? He would happily never go near the place again. It was Pa’s idea – meant to rally them all after their loss. We’re not invited to the funeral – circus only, apparently, and I don’t count after only this much time and not actually living there. So the least we can do is go along and cheer them afterwards. You must come. I won’t accept a refusal.’
I was not sure how to respond to this new, strikingly different Ina, unable as I was to forget its source, but I think she had a moment’s clarity of her own just then and gave a small self-deprecating laugh.
‘You must be wondering what’s going on with me, Dandy,’ she said.
‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘It’s good to hear you in such … fettle.’
‘Fettle!’ crowed Ina. ‘Well, I haven’t lost my mind in case you’re worried. I’ve found it. I’ve … the truth is … and you mustn’t tell a soul, just yet …’
The Winter Ground Page 26