The Winter Ground

by Catriona McPherson

  ‘We’ve all done things we’re not proud to own,’ said Pa.

  ‘What about the flour and the balloons?’ Andrew asked.

  ‘That was me too,’ Charlie said. ‘I thought if tricks were played on Ana no one would suspect it was her behind them.’

  ‘But how can you have wanted to marry a girl you thought would do such things?’ Topsy said. ‘She can’t have been right circus, Charlie. How could you?’

  ‘I thought once she was in her place, in charge, she would be happy and she would stop all the games.’

  ‘And anyway,’ said Ma. ‘It wun’t her at all. It wurr that Laurie. See, Charlie? You don’t need to think bad of your girl what’s not here to clear her name. She was circus through and through.’

  I had been thinking hard in the waiting time between Boxing Day and Hogmanay and there was something troubling me: I knew that Topsy’s swing was gone before Robin Laurie ever appeared. I remembered Ma telling me it was missing the first day I had come to the circus, the day that Robin first came to tea. But if there was a choice between blaming him and blaming a poor dead girl who could do no more harm to anyone now, I was with Ma. I said nothing.

  ‘What a mess,’ said Bill Wolf. ‘What a state we’ve got ourselves in, eh?’

  ‘If people would just talk to each other,’ said Topsy. ‘If everyone would just say what they’re thinking.’

  How like the young, I thought, who have not yet learned that as many hurts can come from secrets shared as from secrets hidden.

  ‘You’re right,’ said Tiny. ‘I’ll start. You’re my girl, Topsy. The only one for me and I shouldn’t have tried to hide it and make you jealous.’

  ‘But how could you not see how I felt about you?’ she said.

  ‘You were friendly to everyone,’ Tiny said. ‘I needed to make sure.’

  ‘So you flirted with Ana,’ said Charlie. ‘I could have laid you out for that. Making up to her for all to see when I was having to play it so close to my chest, save Tam finding out.’

  ‘There’s worse things than a bit of flirting,’ Andrew said. ‘Look at me: jumped in up to my neck with the first thing in skirts ever to come near me.’

  Tiny, his arm at full stretch around Topsy’s waist, grinned at him until one thought his face would split.

  ‘God in heaven, boy,’ he said. ‘If I’m not proof that there’s someone for everyone, I dunno who is. Yours’ll come. She’s coming.’

  ‘Poor Ana,’ said Ma, quietly to me. ‘Bill wanted a ring partner, Charlie wanted to be the boss man, Tam wanted obedience, Tiny only wanted to mend his pride. Nobody really wanted her. I wonder who she wurr, eh? Wonder if she wurr this Lady Amber? She must have been – she recognised him there, didn’t she?’

  I shook my head and Pa, who had joined us, gave me a sharp look.

  ‘I don’t know why Ana left the ring,’ I said, ‘but it wasn’t because she recognised Robin Laurie.’ I nodded at the photograph which I still held in my hand. ‘This is Bisou, isn’t it? The pony Ana brought with her? Well, I’ve been in Amber Buckie’s house and I’ve seen a picture of her and her beloved pony. He was black. So whoever Anastasia was, she wasn’t Ambrosine.’

  ‘You sure, my beauty?’ said Ma. ‘Certain sure? Don’t seem right, one maid disappearing into thin air and another popping up out of nowhere and them not one and the same. You got a buddy with no past and a buddy with no future, you want to tie them together nice and tidy.’

  I could not help smiling at the troubled look on Ma’s face and I should have laid a hefty wager that in the retelling, in the years to come, Ambrosine and Anastasia would indeed be tied tidily together. I had thought from the first that Ma’s stories had had the benefit of an editorial hand.

  ‘I’m sure,’ I said. ‘And I’m afraid that “no future” is probably the plain truth about Amber. Perhaps her note was cryptic and perhaps her body was never found but one can hardly suppose she really has been in hiding all these years. A girl that age running off can usually be relied upon to be home again by morning. No, I think she must have died, by her own hand or by misadventure somehow. It was only Robin Laurie’s desperate hopes that she wasn’t alive that ever made him believe she was. With less at stake he’d have been happy to dismiss the news of “Anastasia” without a care.’

  ‘So,’ said Ma slowly, thinking it through, ‘if it wun’t her uncle she saw, what wurr it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said again. ‘I have no idea why she went off like that when she did.’

  ‘I’ll tell you why,’ said Pa. He had been listening in silence with his chin sunk down on to his chest. ‘If we can keep it between the three of us, mind.’ He paused and looked into the middle distance as though at something no one else could see.

  ‘She had a fine talent, it’s true,’ he began, ‘but she was trying to take over – take over the spec, get her spots moved to the big finish – and I couldn’t stand to see it. Now I know why. Now I know where she was getting all her pride but then I only knew she was talking very high and speaking to me like she was the boss-lady and I was a ring boy. So, first thing I did, to show her who was in charge? I sold her golden pony, just to show her I could and she couldn’t stop me. Just to keep her down.’

  ‘That’s madness, Pa,’ said Ma. ‘Spoiling a fine act like that.’

  ‘I was mad,’ said Pa. ‘I was out of my mind. I thought …’

  ‘What?’ his wife demanded.

  ‘He thought what all husbands always think, Ma,’ I said. ‘He thought that he had lost you. To Charlie.’

  Ma, who I had thought might never smile again, broke into a grin as wide as a painted clown’s.

  ‘Me and Charlie? Me? And your brother? I’m sixty years old, Tam, and I’ve been in the wagon with you since I wurr fifteen.’

  ‘But why else would you be with him against me all the time?’ Pa said. ‘What else would I think?’

  ‘I miss my boys,’ said Ma. ‘I want to go over there and be with my boys. I’m your wife but I’m their mammy too. And I’m a circus woman. I’m tired of knocking myself out here where it’s finished. I was happy to leave it all to Charlie, see what he could make of it with a new young wife to help him. I just want my man happy again and I want to be where the future is and I want my boys. All three.’

  Pa nodded slowly, as if defeated. ‘Listen to the rest of my tale,’ he said. Once again he stopped and looked into the empty air before speaking. ‘I sold her golden pony but that’s not all. I trained her rosy-back to listen to me. They boys of yours was half right, missus. She got a fright and she gave them the nod to lift the box, but Harlequin didn’t take a turn on her. I did it. I whistled him to leave the ring. I wanted to show her who was boss. Harlequin was carrying her, but he was trained to me.’

  ‘That’s why you wanted rid of him?’ said Ma. Her voice had sunk to a whisper.

  ‘Aye, it was me.’ He sounded bleak with misery. ‘If I hadn’t sent that pony off early she’d not have been caught by yon devil and she’d be here today. I just couldn’t bear to look at him, knowing what I’d done.’

  ‘No, Pa,’ I said. ‘You hadn’t done anything. She would have been off in two minutes anyway. It would have made no difference.’

  But Ma was not to be swayed. She gazed at her husband in horror.

  ‘You trained her own prad out from under her, Tam Cooke?’ she said. ‘What’s happened to you? Where’s the man I married? Where have you gone?’

  Pa’s black eyes filled with tears then and he blundered away, leaving the two of us gazing after him.

  ‘I don’t really see why you’re so very upset about that,’ I said. ‘Amongst all the rest of it.’

  Ma shushed me. ‘You wouldn’t, my beauty,’ she said. ‘Flatty like you. But that what Tam done there, it’s not circus. Just not our way.’

  Postscript

  I had stopped reading the letter halfway through and was staring out of the breakfast-room window at the faint haze of green softening the tracery against the
eastern sky. The beech trees were beginning to grow their haloes again at last; the winter was over; the spring was here.

  ‘Good Lord!’ said Hugh, and The Times shook as he took a firmer hold.

  I brought my gaze back from the view outside and waited to see if there would be more. Hugh had been Good Lording with regularity since the scandal of Robin Laurie hit the news-stands. Indeed, breakfasts during the trial had become so animated that I had given up trying to read my letters completely and the morning after he was acquitted we were still there over cold coffee and bacon rinds when the parlour maid came to clear.

  Yes, Inspector Hutchinson’s gloom and Lord Robin’s optimism had each been borne out and the fifteen good men of Perth had dismissed the charges in less than an hour. After all, the jury foreman seemed to say, one only had to consider the accused, standing there in his dark suit, a loving brother, a gentleman and a good soldier to boot, and then look at the witnesses for the Crown – just look at them! Tiny, Bill, Andrew and the Cookes did not stand a chance. Even the police had called it an accident and no one saw it and the girl herself had been a nobody – no name, no family, no papers, nothing at all.

  I had gone to Cullen and had slowly, very gently, explained everything to Lord Buckie, who immediately engaged me to find her, to search for ever and stop at nothing, money no object, no expense to be spared. But it was all the publicity of the trial which brought her story to light in the end, no doing of mine. In January, a letter had come from the free hospital in Carlisle. She had made it that far before the influenza got her: a young girl who gave her name as Amber Laurie and was already dying like so many others. The nurses had no time to spare and no one connected her to Lady Ambrosine from the north who was missing, not then. It was her though, no doubt about it, for the letter had said that she died calling someone’s name, calling out for someone who never came to her. The nurses, it said in the letter, thought it might have been her nanny, or her maid, maybe even a pet name for a lover: Blackie. Where she had left him when she finally dragged herself to the hospital and what happened to him we never knew.

  ‘Well, I never,’ said Hugh, folding the newspaper down to look at me, and so I asked him to tell me – for Well I Nevers were usually points of titillated interest where Good Lords could be anything at all.

  ‘Buckie,’ he said, with some relish, ‘is married.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I have a letter from him right here.’

  ‘In town,’ said Hugh. ‘To Gisella Cunningham.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Bobby and Arlene Cunningham’s girl,’ said Hugh. ‘Lucky if she’s thirty.’

  ‘Twenty-eight,’ I said. ‘And a very good thing, because he needs an heir.’

  ‘Mind you,’ said Hugh, ‘they’re lucky to get her off at all, never mind to a title, and … I don’t mean to be crude but … at least he’s sure of the heir because she’s already proved she has no trouble in that department.’

  ‘I should hate to hear you when you do mean to be crude then.’

  Hugh frowned. ‘Why’s he writing to tell you?’

  ‘He’s not. He mentioned it in passing in the covering letter he sent with my fee.’ I picked up the banker’s cheque and waved it tantalisingly in front of Hugh. He tried to look as though he were uninterested in reading the figures written upon it. ‘I feel rather guilty accepting it, but he won’t brook a refusal, he assures me. I shall send your congratulations, shall I, when I write to say thanks? Perhaps we can stop in on our way to the Brodies at Easter?’

  ‘We certainly will not,’ said Hugh. ‘I’d like a line drawn under the whole affair if you don’t mind, Dandy. And I haven’t decided about Easter at Cairnbulg yet.’

  ‘The boys will be pleased to hear that,’ I said. ‘It’s a boring house for children and we’ll need to pull out quite a few stops to live up to their last trip home.’ This was enough to put Hugh back behind his newspaper again. I opened another letter and began to read.

  ‘Hah!’ said Hugh, after a while. ‘Benachally is up for sale. Hah!’

  ‘Really? They’ve really gone?’

  ‘Fella like that trying to run an estate!’ said Hugh. ‘With his draper’s daughter playing lady of the manor. I’m not surprised he didn’t stick it out.’

  ‘Her father was a don, not a draper,’ I said.

  ‘Perhaps that’s where his daughter got all the advanced ideas from,’ said Hugh. ‘She turned out to be a bad egg in the end, didn’t she, your friend?’

  Poor Ina. Poor silly, spoiled Ina. It made me shiver whenever I thought of her now.

  ‘Well, let’s just hope for someone decent next time,’ said Hugh. ‘Miles of common boundary, you know, and it’s most inconvenient when the owner is a man one cannot meet on any terms. I do not have your taste for unusual company.’ He looked quite sickened as he said this. ‘People like ourselves are perfectly sufficient for me.’

  I nodded in agreement and waved the letter I was reading, which was from a person just like ourselves. Hugh gave me an approving look, almost a smile. He would not have done if he had known any more.

  ‘Ma and Pa left for Chicago a week ago,’ Andrew Merryman had written. ‘But they left us the liberty horses and Lally Wolf is doing a grand job with them and has got little Tommy up on Harlequin too. (Thank you for sending him home in such good heart, Dandy. He was so bonny I wonder if all our horses should have a holiday every so often. If you decide to take up off-season livery in any organised way, do let me know!) Zoya and Kolya finally decided that they would stay, for which we are all very thankful, and Charlie, to my great surprise, has made enormous concessions to soothe their wounded pride. I know it must seem odd that we are all banded together under Charlie’s leadership after what happened and even he would say it was not his finest hour, but Cooke’s Circus has been Cooke’s Circus since 1750 and so it’s only fitting that there should be a Tam Cooke at the helm. (He’s Thos on the posters, but he’ll always be Charlie at home.) Tiny and I have worked up some good stuff now that we’re a double act and not a trio any more and Charlie is very happy just to manage the animals. Yes – animals! It’s a considerable financial gamble, but we shall see. The tigers arrived on Tuesday and are magnificent, but Zoya and Lally are in constant hysterics trying to keep the children away from them. I can’t see it myself, but Tiny reckons Akilina might have a feeling for them. Until she is big enough to see over their backs, however, we pick up a cat man – one of the Codonas and a distant relation, of course – in Glasgow on our way south to start the season. The elephants are coming into Glasgow too, up the Clyde by boat, and Charlie thinks we shall gather some good “press” when we go to collect them (perhaps even be filmed for the newsreel). Tiny and Topsy’s wedding is to be in Glasgow too. They did not want to wait, but neither did they want to be married anywhere near the place where we have all been so very far from happy. It would have been an ill omen for the start of their life together. Besides, boatloads of Turvys are coming over the sea from Dublin to be there. (Tiny has reminded me several times now that Topsy has four sisters. Again, we shall see. I am determined to move at a more stately pace if anything of that nature ever befalls me again.) It is to be a quiet wedding, Turvys excepted, but you would be welcomed with open arms if you were to come. I feel I should give you fair warning that you are unlikely to meet any of us again if you wait for us at home, for no one at Cooke’s Circus wants ever to get within a hundred miles of that winter ground again. You might feel the same, but if you could face it we should all like to think of there being flowers on her grave. The mason has finished the stone and erected it so you will have no trouble finding the spot. He was not best pleased with the inscription – a very conventional man – but she had no other name that we could ever discover and besides, I think it’s the truth about her. It’s who she was. We all have to decide in the end. So the stone reads “Anastasia, of the circus”. If you can bring yourself to visit her we will all be very grateful to you. Yours sincerely, Andrew Merryman
(of the circus).’

  Poor Benachally, I thought. How everyone hates it. And none of what happened there was the fault of the castle or the park and hills.

  ‘Why don’t we buy it?’ I said. Hugh looked up. His lip curled in preparation for a long rant about our penury, the government and the state of the nation, empire and world, but my expression stopped him. His eyes flicked to the cheque, lying by my bread plate, and then back to my face again. I gave him a beatific smile.

  ‘Buy it and add it on?’ he said.

  ‘Buy it and keep it separate,’ I corrected. ‘For Teddy. Two brothers with only one inheritance is rather brutal on both in the end.’

  ‘And how would we explain being able to?’ he said. ‘People will wonder. Even the boys will wonder.’

  ‘Tell the truth,’ I answered. ‘I am a detective, Hugh, quite a successful one.’

  ‘You,’ said Hugh in a voice I had never heard before, ‘are a wife and mother.’

  I took time considering my reply to this.

  ‘I am,’ I agreed at last. ‘I am Mrs Hugh Gilver and I never forget it. But I am Dandy Gilver, Detective, too.’

  Hugh took even longer than I had to answer.

  ‘It could be worse, I suppose,’ he said in the end.

  ‘But it’s not worse,’ I told him. ‘Wife, mother and detective, nothing more. Nothing more.’ I meant it as I spoke, Andrew Merryman’s words still clear in my mind. In the end, we all have to decide who we are.

  An Invitation to Gilverton

  If you have enjoyed spending this time at the winter ground, why not visit Dandy at home at www.dandygilver.co.uk?

  There you will find much more of her world than can be fitted into the books: illustrations and descriptions of the real places and people behind some of the make-believe; floor plans and estate maps of Gilverton; biographies of the characters; postcards from old friends and details of past cases.