‘We could ask Mrs McReadie,’ said Alec. ‘At the moment her position is secure: her husband avenged Lady Love’s death and the Rosses owe her gratitude. If the real story is that her husband killed Lady Love and killed again to get away … she might help us, if we promise not to point the finger at her husband.’
‘I don’t think we can promise that,’ I said. ‘But she has a lot to lose, as you say, and she might just blurt something useful if we sniff around.’
‘Not her,’ said Alec. ‘Not after the way she kept her nerve on the night of the ball and the morning after.’
‘Or perhaps we don’t actually need to know the scheme. Perhaps it’s irrelevant.’
‘Perhaps,’ Alec said, somewhat reluctantly. ‘Although, I do hope not. We’ve got Spencer scuppering a secret scheme and the mystery of McReadie’s motive. It would be nice if the two were connected.’ He puffed at his pipe again, but I knew from the whistling sound it made and the look of chagrin he gave it that the thing had gone out again. ‘I don’t suppose you’re edging towards a brainwave?’
I had all but given up on brainwaves and told him as much with a sigh. It is one of the perennial frustrations of a complicated case. Somewhere, in the midst of the cascade of tales we had been told at Easter-time – each of them suspecting another, no one suspecting the true culprit – someone had said something that shone a thin beam of light into a corner so dark I had not even fully apprehended that there was a corner there at all. I could not remember who said it and I could not remember to whom it was said. It might even have been the dream about the glass paths in the labyrinth, still hanging about me as the most unsettling dreams sometimes do.
Who knows how long we would have carried on picking it over and worrying at it like ratters with a catch. As it was, we turned, when a horn tooted, to see Hugh’s Daimler coming over the brow of the hill with Donald and Teddy each hanging out of a side window.
‘Engine trouble?’ Hugh called hopefully, or so it seemed to me.
‘Just having a breather,’ Alec said. ‘All’s well.’
‘You looked rather blank,’ Donald said, with a wary look. ‘Nothing wrong, is there?’
‘Just puzzling, as usual,’ I said.
‘Now Mother,’ said Donald. ‘You promised you’d put all of that out of your head and simply enjoy the wedding.’
‘Did I?’ I had no such memory.
‘You could promise now anyway,’ Donald said. ‘I’d be most awfully grateful.’
I beamed at him. It was a non-committal beam and, besides, the most fervent beam ever hoisted onto a face is not a binding contract. Donald, however, is not the most intellectually supple child, and he beamed back, satisfied, as Hugh drove away.
As we descended the hill, past the graveyard, past the first of the crofters’ cottages and into the woods, I became aware of a great clamouring filling the air. It sounded, from a distance, like a revolutionary horde, but as we drew closer to sea level, the shouts and shrieks were revealed in fact to be baas and bleats. And as we came to the walled paddocks nearest the parkland, the unmistakable scent of a great many warm sheep began to fill the air.
‘They’re shearing,’ Alec said, as we rounded a bend and came upon a little huddle of sheep crossing the road in front of us. They were newly shorn down to their milky-white skin and had looks of enormous affront upon their naked faces. Alec stamped on the brakes and managed to avoid ploughing into them. The shepherd was herding them from behind by clacking his crook against the ground and shouting – unintelligibly to our ears, although the sheep were paying close attention.
Alec leaned over the steering wheel and peered in at the field gate. Then he opened his eyes very wide. ‘Good grief, Dandy,’ he said. ‘Can you see that?’
I could see nothing except the high stone wall and so I stepped down from the motorcar and wandered over. The scene in the shearing field was straight out of Bruegel the Elder: men, women and children swathed in long aprons with cloths upon their heads, sheep of every age and size, from proud rams with curling horns, to anxious ewes, to struggling hoggets new to the experience, to lambs who were not to be shorn for a year yet and who stood forlorn, crying their mothers’ names. The men grabbed the beasts and wrestled them to the shearers’ stations, the women picked over the fleeces and rolled them tight, the children chased about after stray wisps, filling little sacks. In the middle of it all was a strange sort of gibbet, taller than a man, and hanging from it a long sturdy sack, half full of fleeces already and filling all the time as new ones were flung up to a woman straddling one of the top beams and deftly flicking them in.
‘Cherry!’
She looked down, squinting against the sun, and then waved madly.
‘Dandy!’ she said. ‘I thought I heard a motor but I was concentrating. Welcome back! Welcome back, Mr Osborne! Oh, happy day.’
‘Cherry, what are you doing up there?’ I said. The beam was hefty and she had her ankles wound round it but I could tell from the ground that she was as plump as a dumpling, her round stomach resting on her lap.
‘I’m the best at flicking the fleeces in,’ she said. ‘Years of tennis. I’m quite safe. There’s a ladder to get me down again.’
‘Well, I can’t watch you,’ I said, turning my back and hurrying away.
I was more glad than ever for Mallory when we drew up the drive of Applecross House minutes later. She came out onto the step, holding Donald’s hand, dressed in a pretty frock of pink crêpe and with her hair in shining curls. Grant had been here for half a week and already it was showing.
‘Do you know what your sister is doing?’ I said, as I kissed her on both cheeks.
‘Shearing,’ said Mallory.
‘She actually shears?’ I said, astonished. ‘She bends double with a sheep held between her knees and …?’
‘Not this year, thankfully,’ Mallory said.
Inside Applecross House, a subtle change had taken place. I could not put my finger on it at first. The hall was furnished as before and, despite this being Midsummer Day, there was a fire burning in the grate. There were perhaps a few more newspapers on chair-backs and there were certainly fewer flowers around. Only one bowl of roses sat in the middle of the big table and some petals had fallen. Mallory picked them up absent-mindedly and threw them onto the fire.
‘You must excuse the state of the bedrooms when you go up,’ she said. ‘We haven’t done very well with our forced blooms, having no McReadie and no Mummy. They were the experts. And so we’re saving most of the best stuff for tomorrow. In fact, it should all be in the flower room now, plunged in cold buckets, to let the earwigs scramble out. I hope you’ll forgive us bedside bud vases instead of the extravaganza Mummy used to do.’
‘The bedrooms are so very pretty anyway,’ I said. ‘Even without extra flowers added, I can’t imagine they’ll be drab.’
Mallory laughed and tucked my arm in hers just as I had when she arrived at Gilverton. ‘Yes, if it was me taking over this place, I might try to do something about the floral nature of the upstairs decor, but Cherry and Mitten really don’t care. As long as the stable yard is swept every morning and the hay is made and dried before the rains come, I think the inside of the house could be given over to mice and cobwebs.’
‘Cherry and Mitten are definitely taking over then?’ I said. ‘What about your father?’
‘He’s along in the manse.’
‘Alone?’
‘Oh no, not at all,’ said Mallory. ‘He doesn’t need Dickie any more, of course, but Biddy’s such a good housekeeper and so at home in the kitchen that we don’t need Mrs McReadie here. So she’s looking after him. And they seem to do very well.’
‘Biddy and Dickie are living here in the house, are they?’
‘Yes, it’s all worked out neatly enough,’ Mallory said. ‘The cottage they used to have has been given to a family who needed it and Cherry’s so hopeless at anything domestic, she’s delighted to have Biddy take the reins.’
Her voice grew rather strained towards the end of this speech and I glanced at her from the corner of my eye. Something about this latest upheaval was troubling Mallory. I assumed it was not the same thing that was troubling me: namely, that Lachlan was now living alone with the wife of a fellow who had killed and killed again. Mallory might think he did not need Dickie Tibball’s nursing but I would have been happier if some protection for the old man was guaranteed.
I would also have been happier if Mrs McReadie was still in the kitchens of the main house. It was a great deal harder to think up a reason to enter the servants’ quarters along at the manse and strike up conversation with her there. I decided, therefore, to start with Lairdie and Mackie, the footmen.
I swept into the servants’ hall the next morning at an unconscionably early hour, hoping to catch them unawares. I was alone since Alec had told me he was not going to risk a meal to go fishing for an unknown catch. ‘Weddings do terrible things to a household economy, Dandy,’ he said. ‘Lunch is bound to be a crust of bread and a rind of cheese. I am not willing to miss my porridge and kippers too.’
‘Mrs Gilver,’ Lairdie said, leaping to his feet. He was in shirtsleeves and his braces hung at his hips. ‘Did you ring?’
‘I want a chinwag,’ I said. ‘How’s your tooth?’
‘Gone back to Kyle for the dentist’s collection,’ he said. ‘But my gum’s fine. Thanks for asking.’
‘A chinwag?’ Mackie said. He was polishing medals. I took it that Lord Ross was going to walk Mallory down the aisle in full regalia.
‘It’s about the trouble in the spring,’ I said. ‘Winter and spring. Mr Osborne and I have a few questions outstanding, you see.’
I did not acknowledge the look that passed between them but neither did I miss it.
‘Fire away,’ Lairdie said and, seized by a deep desire to sort this out before my son joined the benighted Dunnoch family in seven hours, I fired.
‘What plan did David Spencer spoil by coming up here in the winter to talk to Lady Love?’ I began.
I had no reason to think the two boys were related, except by the sort of inevitable cousinhood that tends to arise in places like Applecross, but they looked very similar at that moment, with their eyes growing round and their faces turning pale.
‘I- I- I don’t know,’ said Lairdie. ‘We never heard anything about it.’
‘About what?’ I said.
‘What?’
‘You never heard anything about what?’
Lairdie flushed, realising his mistake, and began to speak very fast, almost babbling. ‘Ocht, her ladyship always had some scheme or another,’ he said. ‘The pier was the latest, after the road, and then the move to the manse. That was her idea. And a new school. She was all for another schoolhouse so the bairns could stay home with their mammies instead of taking off on the boat to Plockton all week. I don’t know what she was planning, the poor lady. Before she was taken.’
‘How could David Spencer do anything to interfere with plans such as those?’ I said. ‘He wasn’t a speculator, was he? He hadn’t persuaded Lady Love to invest in something?’
‘No, indeed,’ said Mackie. ‘He was a soldier turned poet, was Mr Spencer.’
‘A poet?’ I said, startled. ‘Right enough, he did always seem well-read.’
‘Yes, writing poetry and teaching a wee bitty and editing for the … what was it called. The University Press.’
‘Gosh,’ I said. That sounded like much more than writing “moon” and “June” on the back of an envelope. ‘Which university?’
‘Cambridge?’ Lairdie said uncertainly. ‘I was valeting for him and I saw some of his papers. But I’m blessed if I can remember.’
‘No,’ I said, clicking my fingers as the truth rose in me, ‘it’s Oxford. Chaucer wouldn’t call Cambridge the Midlands, would he?’ I only became aware that I was staring at them when Mackie cleared his throat and looked down at his polishing cloth. ‘Oxford University Press,’ I repeated.
‘Handy for his work,’ Lairdie said.
‘I had only heard “down near London”,’ I added.
‘And so it is near London,’ said Lairdie. ‘What with the trains and roads. No waiting for spring or the coal boat down that way.’
I nodded absently. Oxford. Where Roddy McReadie was studying. The boy whose life Lachlan saved, thereby ruining his own. David Spencer lived there. David Spencer rushed up to Applecross unexpectedly and scuppered a plan. And the McReadies were neck-deep in his death.
Alec was wiping his mouth with a napkin when I found him in the breakfast room. ‘We need to get to the manse and lean very hard on Mrs McReadie,’ I said. ‘Something in this infuriating tangle is at last beginning to loosen.’
I regaled him with my news as he, I and Bunty walked – fairly marched – along the shore road to the manse. I prayed that he would not pooh-pooh my discovery and squash my excitement back down.
Far from it, he whistled and sped up even more so that I was obliged to trot to keep up with him. We skirted the garden wall of the manse and came up on it from behind, entering the kitchen after a sharp rap on the door but not waiting for an invitation.
Mrs McReadie was there and, even better, was alone. She had, I thought, made a great deal of effort for Mallory’s wedding day. Her hair was no longer in its scraped-up bun, but had been cut short and was shining. And although she was wearing an apron to protect her clothes while she dusted trays of little cakes with icing sugar, the clothes she was protecting were a smart lilac skirt and a crisp cream-coloured shirt.
‘Busy day, Mrs McReadie,’ I said. ‘But still we wanted to stop in and ask how you’ve been.’
Mrs McReadie cocked her head to one side and regarded me.
‘It’s a hard road, Mrs Gilver,’ she said. ‘I hope you never have to walk it. But then if you go first there’s Mr Gilver will have to walk it instead. And you’re not married yourself, sir?’
Alec was startled, and shrugged while his cheeks coloured a little.
‘But you speak as if McReadie is dead,’ I said. ‘Have you heard that he’s dead?’
Now it was her turn to colour. She turned to face the range in an attempt to hide it, but there was nothing there that had to do with sugaring cakes and she soon turned back again.
‘Gone is gone,’ she said. ‘I suppose I’m trying to make myself face that I’ll never see the bodach again. If that’s strikes you as cold, then I’m cold.’
‘The bodach?’ I said and shivered. ‘Is it like the cailleach? It’s unnerving how the same word is used for one’s nearest and dearest and for … well, witches and ghouls too.’
Mrs McReadie merely stared at me. ‘We have our own ways,’ she said at last.
‘You do indeed,’ I said. ‘Like those little models of Lachlan and Lady Love that used to be in drawers in the flower room?’
She stared even longer this time before she selected a suitable remark. ‘Why would you think I made them?’
‘Because they were wool and it was you who made the necklets,’ I replied.
‘That was just for luck.’
‘Good or bad?’ I asked and her eyes flared.
‘Depends which was on the left and which the right, doesn’t it?’ said Alec. Months late he had provided just the expertise on Scots folklore for which I rang him up that fateful day.
‘But let’s not dwell on it, this happy morn,’ I said, seeing that the swift change of topic had unsettled her as I meant it to. I gave her a bright smile. ‘Has your son come up for the wedding?’
Mrs McReadie shook a thick blot of sugar over the edge of the tray as her hand jerked. Even Bunty could sense the woman’s discomfiture. She pricked her ears up and wrinkled her brow. ‘My son? Why would he be here?’
‘Hasn’t he known Mallory all his life?’ I asked. ‘And given his history with Lord Ross too.’
‘He’s got his exams,’ said Mrs McReadie.
‘As late as this?’ said Alec. ‘I’d have thought finals wou
ld be long past by now.’
‘He’s had to resit one,’ she said. Finally she raised her eyes to ours again. ‘I’m that ashamed of him. I don’t want his lordship to know. I’d be grateful if you wouldn’t mention it.’
‘I can sympathise,’ I said. ‘My younger son did nothing but drink cocktails and study form for about a year. I wanted to go down there and box his ears more than once.’
Mrs McReadie swallowed. ‘What year is he in?’ she said. ‘I wonder if they know each other?’
‘Oh, he’s finished,’ I said. ‘He scraped a lower second in the end.’
Mrs McReadie’s shoulders dropped a good inch and a half.
‘Your lad must be a good bit older than most of the undergraduates,’ Alec said. ‘One would hate to think he was lonely. But then there are other soldiers who’ve gone back to studying. Of course, he won’t have Mr Spencer any more. He did know Mr Spencer, didn’t he?’
‘What makes you think that?’ said Mrs McReadie. ‘I never heard that they met.’
‘Really?’ Alec said. ‘I just assumed that what with Spencer being such a friend of the family and being right there, they’d have been sure to run into each other.’
She shook her head and when she stopped I noticed that her jaw did not quite stop trembling. Bunty was keening in Mrs McReadie’s direction; she is always ready with comfort for the troubled.
‘Well then, we’ll leave you to it,’ I said. ‘I’m sure you’ve got a lot on your mind. On your docket, I should say.’
Mrs McReadie nodded bleakly and we departed by the back door.
The garden along here at the manse was not quite as glorious as the labyrinth at Applecross but it knocked anything the Gilverton gardeners had ever achieved into a cocked hat. The roses were leggy adolescents still but they had put on a good show for midsummer, each of their trained stems hanging heavy with blooms. The paths between them were not as smooth as the paths at Applecross, having the marks of barrow wheels running through. I got a twinge that might have been the memory of the deep scores through the gravel on the night of the engagement party or might have been the last lingering shivers from my nightmare. The new knot garden itself was looking rather better than the original had been last time we saw it, with profusions of flowers blooming. Just as a troubled thought rose through the layers of confusion to the top of my brain, Alec voiced it for me.
A Step So Grave Page 27