A Step So Grave

by Catriona McPherson

  ‘You’re not tempted to take part in the snowball fight?’ said Tibball. ‘The children are planning a battle royal, so Biddy tells me.’

  ‘Where?’ said Lord Ross. ‘Not in the apple crosses, I hope.’

  ‘Oh, Daddy,’ said Cherry, who was just coming in at the door. ‘It was once and it wasn’t a snowball.’ She gave a comically exasperated sigh and turned to me. ‘Once upon a time, Dandy, back in the primeval mists, Mallory and I broke a graft on one of the apple crosses larking about in the snow and we’ve never been forgiven, even though the tree recovered and Mummy couldn’t find the scar now if she had a week and a magnifying glass. I ask you!’

  ‘Your mother likes to see the virgin snow in the knot,’ said Lord Ross. ‘You can scuffle around out the front, building snowmen and throwing missiles. But if you break a window it comes out of your dress allowance.’

  ‘My dress allowance?’ said Cherry, looking down at the pair of balding corduroy riding britches and Fair Isle jersey she was wearing. ‘I think I’m in funds, Daddy. I could probably spot you some in a pinch.’ She had finished buttering a slice of toast. Now she wrapped it in a napkin and, dropping a kiss on her father’s head, she made to leave the room again.

  ‘But Cherry, now I think about it,’ her father said, ‘you shouldn’t be in a snowball fight at all! Good gracious, no!’

  ‘Oh Daddy, really!’ Cherry said, wheeling back and giving him a look of wounded innocence. ‘What have you heard? Who told you?’

  ‘Mummy, of course. Who else?’ said Lord Ross. ‘And I’m going to insist. No snowball fighting for you.’ The words ‘in your condition’ were unspoken but they hung in the air anyway. Dickie Tibball looked on with interest, but in ignorance. Clearly his wife had kept the news to herself.

  ‘Very well then,’ said Cherry. ‘I shall sit on the sidelines and catch my death of cold instead.’

  ‘Or there are the flowers,’ said Dickie Tibball. ‘For the party. They’re all ready and waiting.’

  I had no room to speak because my maid Grant is so far above herself I have despaired of ever getting her back in her place. Still, it seemed very odd to me that this man, whether one thought of him as Lord Ross’s nurse or as Mitten Tibball’s father, should be telling Cherry how to prepare for her mother’s birthday.

  ‘I shall do them once I’ve cheered the snowball fight,’ she said. This time she really did leave the room.

  ‘You should sit and eat a proper breakfast,’ Lord Ross called after her.

  She did not answer but Mallory appeared in her place and grinned. ‘No time, Daddy,’ she said. ‘Are there boiled eggs? Oh good – very portable and very apposite for a snowball fight too. We’ve just got time for one almighty set-to and then we’re going to start decorating. Mrs McReadie has promised to try to winkle some orchids out of the old grump. And I’m going to ski up to the blasted oak and cut some ivy with my little machete. We can twine it round the staircase and put some ribbon through it if McReadie won’t give up any carnations. I know there are some in flower in those hothouses somewhere because the smell just about knocked me over when I took Donald to show him the melons.’

  Hugh had entered during her speech. ‘Pinks?’ he said. ‘Sweet williams? Or true carnations? I’d love to see what he’s got them growing in to have them in flower for St Valentine’s Day.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Mallory, putting a hand against her chest in an astonishingly unconvincing gesture of surprise. ‘Is it Valentine’s Day? I had quite forgotten.’ She gave a giggle and trotted out, juggling three boiled eggs expertly as she went.

  ‘I don’t blame Spencer for taking off out of it,’ said Dickie Tibball.

  ‘Has he left then?’ I said. It struck me as odd that he would journey all this way and leave before the party.

  ‘Not left,’ Lord Ross said. ‘Just off somewhere on the early market boat. Mysterious tasks related to Lady Love’s birthday, no doubt.’

  ‘He’ll be back before the fun begins,’ Dickie added. ‘Wise man, skipping the preparatory nonsense.’

  ‘Yes, all the womenfolk are going to be skittish today,’ said Lord Ross. ‘Do pardon them, Mrs Gilver.’

  I smiled tightly, rather offended not to be included amongst the womenfolk. On the other hand, gushing and skittishness were not in my repertoire and I was glad to be excused joining in with it.

  Biddy Tibball had the gushing well in hand anyway. I caught sight of her in the drawing room as I was leaving to return to my own room and write Lady Love’s birthday card. Hugh had been instructed to join me and sign his name to the thing. He did not dare to argue in front of Ross and Tibball, although I knew he found such behaviour sentimental.

  ‘I’m not dusting, Dandy!’ Biddy sang out. She was standing by the piano with a duster in her hand and a great sliding heap of silver-framed photographs piled up one on top of the other on the closed lid. ‘Or rather, yes of course I am dusting, but only incidentally. I’m setting out fifty years of our darling Lady Love. These are usually kept in the top attic, except for this one day.’ She caught her lip and seemed to consider saying more, but in the end she merely pointed to a few of the topmost photographs, which showed Lady Love and a spaniel on a gusty hilltop, Lady Love and McReadie standing in a village hall with a beribboned cup held between them and Lady Love and Lord Ross sitting in an open-topped motorcar of ancient pedigree, both of them with darker hair and smoother faces.

  ‘Look at this one,’ said Biddy, selecting a small frame with a tinted picture of an enormously fat baby in frills and flounces. ‘Wasn’t she a poppet? And then there’s the first one of her and me together.’ Lady Love was still as plump as a peach, sitting on a tired-looking pony with a slim and sleek Biddy on another pony at her side.

  I tried to select a remark that touched on how much prettier Biddy had been than her chubby friend but everything seemed to carry with it an unspoken coda regarding how things had changed now that Lady Love was the centre of this adoring household and Biddy Tibball was no longer slim and sleek, but instead dishevelled and scrawny. I failed of course. There was no such remark – and besides, there were more important matters to be spoken of.

  ‘Do you know Dickie’s plans for the day?’ I said. ‘Is he to be swept up in the preparations for the party or will he be by Lord Ross’s side?’

  ‘I can fetch him for you now if you need him,’ Biddy said. ‘I think he’s still at breakfast.’

  ‘No, no, it’s not that,’ I assured her. ‘It’s just that I promised Mallory I would make certain her father was carefully watched. For a day or two. After yesterday.’

  ‘Mallory?’ Biddy said, in a voice so surprised the word came out like a squawk. ‘Don’t tell me she’s starting up with all that too? I mean to say, we adore Cherry. Of course we do. She’s a darling. But she’s never heard a fairy tale in her life she didn’t believe. Besides all this Garden-of-Eden frivolity.’

  I frowned. I had never thought of the story of the Garden of Eden as being one of rampant frivolity. A certain misguidedness, perhaps; a lack of forethought …

  ‘I see you’ve escaped hearing about it,’ Biddy said. ‘Enjoy it while it lasts. You’ll be lucky to get through another day without a lecture from one of them.’

  ‘One of them,’ I repeated. ‘Cherry or …?’

  ‘Mitten,’ she said and sighed. ‘Oh, that boy!’

  ‘But not to harp on it or anything,’ I went on. ‘If you would just drop a word in your husband’s ear about sticking close to Lord Ross for a bit, until the memories fade. It would soothe Mallory’s troubled breast, which would soothe Donald’s, which would in turn soothe mine. And his father’s.’ I gave a smile into which I tried to inject as much soupy maternal devotion as I could muster.

  ‘It was odd. That dog. Wasn’t it?’ Biddy said.

  ‘Poor thing,’ I said stoutly.

  ‘And the crow,’ she added. ‘Arriving like that. Has anyone checked to see if it’s still there, I wonder. It’s when it flies off that it takes s
ouls with it, in the old legends.’

  I said nothing and kept my face as blank as a skating pond. But perhaps my thoughts showed there anyway, for she gave me a sheepish look.

  ‘Highlanders we are for good or ill,’ she said. ‘In fact, there should be a picture of Lady Love and Lachlan’s wedding day here somewhere.’ She clacked through a few silver frames and then drew one out with little cry of triumph. ‘Here we are! Now look at that and tell me what you see.’

  I saw a young-looking Lavinia in a frock with a bustle and a silly little hat practically falling over one eye, and Lord Ross tall and handsome in full regalia. A youthful Biddy, with hair just as frizzed and a smile just as wide, stood at Lady Love’s side as she did today. There was only one remarkable figure in the group.

  ‘Is that a washerwoman?’ I said, peering at the plump figure in a shawl, with a linen bundle under one arm.

  ‘Yes, that’s the cailleach,’ said Biddy. ‘The bent knee.’ She took pity and said it very slowly. ‘Bean-nighe. For luck.’

  ‘I thought the … I thought she was a bringer of death,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Biddy. ‘But better to invite her and keep her happy, than scorn her and risk her wrath, you see?’

  ‘I think so,’ I said. ‘One’s friends close but one’s enemies closer?’

  I wondered if I imagined the little twitch of a frown that plucked at Biddy’s brows for a second before she smiled again.

  ‘Are you all right?’ said Hugh, arriving in my bedroom minutes later. ‘You look a bit fed up.’

  ‘Just reflecting on life and its disappointments,’ I said, not the most diplomatic thing to say to one’s husband, I admit. Thankfully, Hugh – as ever – was not really listening.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Can you believe Ross wants me to go outside the wall and struggle round through the snowdrifts to get to the hothouses instead of walking on the paths. The garden, if you please, is not to be sullied by my footprints.’

  ‘Not your footprints,’ I said. ‘Not specifically yours, and I think I might agree, actually. Let’s go for a look from the landing window. I bet it’s lovely.’

  We went together up the next bend in the stairs and stood at a tall window that looked down over what the Dunnochs appeared to call the apple crosses garden. It was exquisite. The snow had landed on every filigree of twig and turned the criss-cross of the pergolas into something magical. The paths underneath were as perfectly blanketed with snow as the knot garden itself had been blanketed with ticking by McReadie the day before. The dovecote had a cap of snow on its roof and the arms of the weathervane were dusted with a few flakes too, like sugar on a little cake.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘It’s beautiful. You see, Hugh? She’s right, isn’t she?’

  Hugh hates to be corrected. He grunted into his collar and then brightened when he saw something he could point out to me that I had missed. ‘McReadie’s going to be in trouble!’ he said. ‘Look at that. The man’s left his spade sticking out of the ground right in the middle of the garden. Ha! If no one’s allowed to walk on the precious snow, we’re going to be looking at that shovel handle until it melts, aren’t we?’

  ‘It’s not exactly an eyesore,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t have noticed it if you hadn’t drawn my attention to it. And I think it’s a broom. It doesn’t have the handle of a shovel.’

  Hugh, corrected again, harrumphed even harder and I was glad to hear someone approaching who would break up our tête-à-tête.

  Mrs McReadie was coming downstairs with a laden breakfast tray in her hands.

  ‘Hasn’t eaten a bite nor drunk a sip!’ she said. ‘“Breakfast in bed, please, my good Mrs McReadie.” My good Mrs McReadie! As if her and me weren’t bairns together. Then she eats not a bite of it. As if I haven’t got better things to do than tramping up and down all these stairs on a day like today!’

  ‘It’s very kind of you,’ I said. ‘Couldn’t a maid do it?’

  ‘No maids at Applecross,’ said Mrs McReadie. ‘Just the footmen.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said, as if I understood. In truth, it struck me as beyond odd to hang on to footmen and let the maids go. ‘Do you have daily girls?’

  ‘Women,’ said Mrs McReadie. ‘No maids in this house, like I just told you.’ Then she stumped off down the next half-flight, still tutting over the wasted effort of the breakfast tray.

  I turned my gaze back out of the window towards the restful scene laid out below us, but there was movement there now, catching my eye. One of the pop-holes in the little dovecote had darkened as the crow, startlingly black this morning, hopped out. It took two more hops to the edge of the platform, looked down, looked up and then spread its wings – they looked five feet wide from up here although they could not be, really – and flapped away, setting the weathervane gently spinning and sending a flurry of snowflakes down to settle on the mounds and drifts of the knot garden.

  I shivered, standing so close to such a large window on such a cold day.

  8

  I need not have spoken to Biddy Tibball of my fictitious concerns after all, as matters transpired, for Hugh elected to spend the day with Lord Ross. He had legitimate business with the man, of course: thrashing out a settlement for Mallory. He also had a deep desire to keep out of the way of the party preparations.

  The girls and boys came in flushed and boisterous about eleven o’clock. Teddy was crowing about a decisive victory over the others, since he had been unencumbered by a maiden to protect and defend. Cherry had, it seemed, ignored her father’s admonitions and all thought of delicacy and had plunged into the fray with the rest of them.

  ‘We’ve made a snowman too,’ she said. ‘I tried to make it look like Mummy, with one of her old hats and a trug, but it looks more like Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, if I’m honest. Have a peep at it out of the window, Dandy, and tell me honestly if you think I should knock it down before the Miss McIntoshes and the Rev. all get here.’

  I wandered through to the dining room, which had the best view, and looked out at the snowman squatting in the middle of the lawn.

  ‘It doesn’t scream Lady Love,’ I said. It was completely round with a completely round head, as is the way of snowmen, and since the snow was falling again, the hat and trug were beginning to blur. What it looked like, more than anything, was another version of that washerwoman from the wedding picture, the trug full of snow in place of the linen bundle and the snow on the hat rendering it indistinguishable from a white cotton cap. ‘Why not ask your mother?’ I said. ‘But don’t knock it down if she disapproves. Just put a bowler on top and pipe in front and turn it back into an archetype.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t want to bother Mummy,’ said Cherry. ‘She always keeps strictly to herself whenever we’re planning a treat for her. She’s such a rewarding person to lay things on for. Now, if McReadie really has agreed to furnish us with some of our own flowers, as Daddy said, I shall begin on the dining table. Are you a flower arranger par excellence, by any chance, Dandy?’

  ‘I can just about put daisies in a milk bottle the right way up.’

  ‘Splendid. Mallory and Donald are too busy nuzzling and whispering sweet nothings to be any use, but you and I shall manage.’ She put an arm through mine. ‘If we spin it out a bit we might miss the first couple of hours of the Miss McIntoshes. They always come miles early for anything. They see it as a wasted journey unless they get two meals out of us on any visit. But then they taught Mummy piano and they’re not to be snubbed.’

  ‘I’m happy to help,’ I assured her.

  But when we went along a side passage and arrived in a little stone-floored flower room with a sink and a shelf of vases, I quailed at the task ahead of me. Here, plunged into deep buckets, lying in towering heaps with wet paper over their stem ends, and filling two wheelbarrows besides, was a profusion of hothouse flowers the like of which I had never seen. Their perfume was enough to render one dizzy and the colour was an assault on the eye.

  ‘I’m thunderstruck,’ said Cherry. �
�McReadie never forks over this much loot. Not for Armistice Day, not for Daddy’s first Christmas back at home. Hmph! Not for my wedding.’

  ‘Everyone keeps saying how much he adores your mother,’ I said. ‘Here is the proof.’

  Cherry was unbuttoning her cuffs and rolling up her sleeves. ‘Righty-ho,’ she said. ‘We need something massive for the middle of the dinner table and we could have two fairly biggish lots on either end of the sideboard too. Then how about a garland for Mummy’s chair in the drawing room, for when she’s opening presents? We’ve got these very natty little vials around here somewhere. They’re for fancy buttonholes really. You put the stem in a sort of test-tube …’ She had gone over to the dresser and was rootling around the shelves, ‘… then fill it with water, and a thingumajig like a hairgrip keeps it in place. There should be a box of them.’

  But all I could see on the shelves were a great many bound volumes, each stamped with a date in gold upon its spine. These, I assumed, were Lady Love’s garden journals. ‘Perhaps in here,’ Cherry said, wrenching on a drawer handle. ‘Now then, let’s see.’ The drawer had sprung open at last, despite how the damp of this room had warped and swollen its wood over the years. She stood staring down into it.

  ‘Is something the matter?’

  Cherry turned to me and swallowed. ‘No,’ she said. Her hands were behind her as if she was steadying herself on the lip of the open drawer. ‘At least, I think it might be the smell of all these flowers. I feel a bit sick all of a sudden.’

  ‘It’s to be expected,’ I said gently. ‘A cup of tea usually helps.’

  ‘Rotten luck for it to start today of all days,’ she said. ‘I’ve been fine up till now.’ She wiped her forehead and smiled. ‘I think I’ll take your advice and ask Mrs McReadie for a “nice cuppa”.’ She sidled past me and swept out.

  It was subtle but not quite subtle enough. Cherry Tibball had just seen something unexpected in that drawer. She had palmed it quite adroitly. But she had not been able to hide the fact that it had shocked her.