Dandy Gilver and the Proper Treatment of Bloodstains (21 page)

‘Yesterday?’ she said, and then she nodded, remembering.

‘Yesterday,’ I said, guiding her to the chair. She perched on its edge.

‘It’s what I said about “souvenirs”,’ she said. ‘I – I fell, Miss Rossiter. A while back now.’

‘You had a baby?’ I said. ‘To master?’

‘No,’ Clara said. ‘I mean to say, I was going to and I never told anyone. I just laced my stays tighter and let out my dress seams, like he told me to, and Phyllis never noticed and then, when it was getting nearly time, it came and it was already gone and then that was that.’

‘Your baby died?’ I said gently.

‘It never even . . . cos you’re no’ supposed to keep yourself tight-laced, are you, miss? Or maybe it wasn’t as close to the right time as I thought. But it was labour, Miss Rossiter, that’s for sure. I’ve seen my mammy labouring and there’s no mistaking it. Except . . . it seems like a dream now when I think back. It’s hard to believe it happened.’

‘Where were you, Clara?’ I asked, wondering how on earth a girl could have gone through such a thing all alone, in this houseful of people, without someone hearing.

‘Up in the nurseries,’ she said. ‘Right up top there.’

‘And what did you do with . . . I mean, what did you do afterwards?’

Clara frowned then and shook her head as though trying to clear it.

‘Sometimes I think I came down to the furnace,’ she said. ‘But other times I remember wrapping up a bundle. I don’t know, to be sure. Maybe . . .’ She lifted her head and stared up at the low ceiling of my room. ‘Maybe it’s still up there.’

It might have seemed fantastical that she did not know, but I had heard of such things before; there was even a long and ugly name for it which I had, thankfully, forgotten.

‘And so tonight?’ I asked her softly. ‘Were you all the way upstairs on the nursery floor just now, Clara? Searching?’

She lowered her head and blinked at me, then she smiled faintly.

‘No, miss. I was in the kitchen.’ She screwed up her nose, looking the very picture of discomfort. ‘Mrs Hepburn made that chocolate thing for mistress’s dinner and she hardly touched it and I asked Millie to set it aside in the scullery for me. I just can’t say no to chocolate, miss, and by the time I’ve paid into my post office book and given something to my ma and got all my doings I’ve never got a penny spare to buy myself some.’

Of course, I should have scolded her, but who would have had the heart? I opened the door for her to leave, only managing to say:

‘You should have torn yourself away from the sing-song and eaten it up earlier. You shouldn’t be scampering about at night. Or eating chocolate for that matter. It’ll give you nightmares.’

It was I, however, who had the wretched night, reeling at top speed through an endless succession of short, senseless dreams: in one I was in the wings of a music-hall stage listening to the compère announcing Mr Faulds and me, but I did not know what the act was that we were presenting and I could not speak to ask anyone; in another I was searching through the laundry rooms of the convalescent home in Perth, undoing bundles of soiled linen looking for something I did not want to find and shushing an unknown someone who was whimpering somewhere close by, telling this unknown someone that we had to be quiet, that no one must ever know; in yet another I was sitting in the flower room at Gilverton, which was as close as I could get to dreaming of Miss Rossiter’s bedroom, I think (one cannot introduce new settings to one’s dream world with swift abandon), and there were men in miners’ helmets with their lanterns lit and smoking, and they were trying the door, rattling the handle and then peering in at me through the window mouthing at me to open up for them. Great Aunt Gertrude was somewhere, I knew she was, although I could not hear her. ‘Ssh!’ I said to Mattie who was banging on a long row of boots and shoes with a drumstick as though playing a glockenspiel. ‘Ssh!’ I hissed. ‘She’ll hear you!’

I woke in the cool light of six o’clock and lay gasping, looking around at my room as though at an oasis after forty nights in the wilderness. And here came Mr Faulds to open us up for business once more, the nails in his boots striking hard against the stone floor of the passageway. He pulled back the bolts, giving slightly less than full measure, I thought; certainly it did not ring out in that bone-shaking way it had the evening before. Or perhaps it was just that sounds carried further at night; one often reads that they do. I heard him put the key in the lock, turn it and throw the door wide. This he did with as much brio as he could, sending it bouncing on its hinges.

‘Lovely day, Etheldreda,’ he called upwards and I could hear Eldry’s faint answer.

‘Tell Mrs Hepburn two eggs for me this morning,’ he said. ‘And I wouldn’t mind a taste of that ham just to see if it’s fit for company.’ Whistling, he turned, passed along to the stairs again and skipped up them, making a little tune with his shoes like a tap-dancer.

One of the benefits of Miss Rossiter’s life, I thought to myself as I dressed for the visit to the solicitor’s office, was the release from all concerns of wardrobe. Had I been appearing as Mrs Gilver, I should have been lucky to get away without several changes before the competing demands of sobriety and decoration were satisfied, for while one would not wish to look jaunty upon such an errand, neither would one want one’s black cape and veil to outdo the widow’s. Nothing, unless it be wearing white to a wedding, is poorer form than that. As it was, Miss Rossiter got her grey serge, lisle stockings, black shoes, felt hat and armband on in four minutes flat. I was even becoming used to the look of my scraped-back hair and shining, soap-and-water face and wondered whether I were not looking rather better than usual – more youthful, fresher somehow – a possibility I put down to the settled routines and clean living of a servant’s life until I realised that between the endless note-making, the rushing about the streets, the nightmares and the way that strong drink punctuated the hours, my two days spent below stairs in Heriot Row had been the least settled of recent memory. Probably it was only the dim light and the elderly looking-glass which gave the effect and if I glanced into Lollie’s dressing-table glass upstairs in the sunshine I should be disabused.

‘Are you sure you wouldn’t rather wait until Great Aunt Gertrude gets here?’ I asked Lollie, when I got to her. She simply gazed back at me. The skin around her eyes was yellow and her hands trembled as she lifted her hat onto her head. ‘Here, let me,’ I said. I secured her hat none too firmly, for they are fearsome things to stick into someone else’s hair if one is not accustomed to it, or perhaps just if one has finer feelings than Grant, who wields a hatpin like Captain Ahab with his last harpoon.

Lollie shook her head.

‘Mr Hardy wants to know if there’s anything of note in it,’ she said. Her voice was gravelly as though with exhaustion, very worrying in one known to have slept away the bulk of the last two days, and I determined to get her doctor to her when we returned from our outing. ‘Besides, there might be something in it about a funeral – instructions, I mean, or requests, or something. It’s best to get it over and done with.’

‘Didn’t you ever talk about funerals?’ I asked her. ‘Don’t you know what he would have wanted, if you c—’

‘If I care?’ Lollie said. ‘I shouldn’t care, should I? And yet, it’s hard not to. And no, we never spoke of such things. Pip was twenty-six, why would we?’ I had not been imagining long, morbid discussions on their own account, of course, but rather thinking of Hugh and how he always spent the return trip from any funeral in high dudgeon about the mawkish unsuitability of the chosen hymns and the scandalous impropriety of anything – from florists’ wreaths to panelled coffins – that his father and father’s father and
his
father had ‘managed perfectly well to die without, Dandy’. What he would do when this much-vaunted new prayer book finally came out, I could not imagine; I had never seen anyone walk out of a funeral in protest before but I would not put it past him.

‘We only ever spoke of it once,’ Lollie went on. She was looking at herself in the glass as though she were some sort of puzzling find brought home from a nature walk; she pulled at her eyelids and stretched the skin on her cheeks this way and that. It was disconcerting to watch and I caught hold of her hands, as though to inspect her nails, really just to stop that dreadful, inquisitive mauling.

‘When was that, dear?’ I said.

‘When he went to Paris without me. It was the only night we spent apart after we were married. He made a joke of it; saying that if I were proved right, if the aeroplane went down – that’s why I didn’t go with him, you see – I would have carried the point and should feel free to bring his body back by boat.’ She smiled, remembering, and her skin looked tight and dry as she did so. ‘I shouldn’t think there are instructions, in the will,’ she said. ‘Pip was never one to make demands about things. Not at home anyway, or at his tailor’s or at his bank. He was the most easy-going man, really, Dandy. Everyone said so.’

I thought it best to remain silent.

‘He could get rather impassioned about his model boats,’ Lollie went on, ‘but even when one of those was broken through a servant’s carelessness he just shrugged it off. He was—’ She broke off. ‘Except he wasn’t,’ she said, with a harder note in her voice. ‘I keep slipping into the most fearful maudlin daydreams, Dandy. As if I’m under some kind of spell. I know very well what he was and so do you.’

‘Let’s go,’ I said, thinking that this robust mood would carry her out of the house and into her motorcar better than any other. ‘And don’t worry about the funeral. Two horses and “Lead, kindly light”. These things practically organise themselves.’

Faulds, sombre of face and – for once – silent of foot, let us out of the front door. John was waiting at the kerb. It was the first time I had seen him in his full livery: a high-collared tunic to match his breeches and a grey cap with a gleaming black peak, his face as impassive as a guardsman’s under its shadow. He opened the back door of a very new Rolls-Royce Phantom and between us we helped Lollie up into the seat. John leaned in and put a rug over her knees, then offered a hand to me to help me into the front. I thanked him, finding my voice a little shy, for it was an odd business to be handed into a car by a young man one has seen singing music-hall songs in his shirtsleeves, and an unaccustomed experience to sit beside him, no glass to close between the two of us.

Lollie, behind me, was looking out of the window at the quiet streets. There were nannies, off to Princes Street Gardens with their charges for an hour before luncheon, pairs of girls – the well-turned-out daughters of the New Town – making their way arm in arm to the jewellers’ and dress shops of George Street, pairs of matrons – their mothers – on their way to Marshall & Aitken, and upright old men marching to the New Club for the day. What there were not, though, were delivery boys on their bicycles, nor coalmen on their carts, sweeps with their barrows, not even the late postman on the parcel round.

‘How quiet it is today,’ Lollie said, with a wondering note in her voice, as we came around Charlotte Square. ‘The whole world seems to have stopped. Not only me.’

At the west end, a policeman mounted on a horse was standing backed into the doorway of Mather’s public house.

‘Trying to stop them gathering today,’ said John.

‘The publican won’t be very pleased,’ I said, ‘to have a great hulking police horse driving away his custom.’

‘There’ll not be much beer left now anyway, Miss Rossiter,’ John told me. ‘There’s been three nights since the last delivery and there was parties all over the night it begun.’

‘I heard them,’ I said, remembering the cheers and shouting drifting in the bedroom window in the small hours of Tuesday morning.

‘Any excuse for a booze-up,’ said John. ‘Best night out since Hogmanay.’ He winked at me. ‘Or so I heard, anyway.’ Here he dropped his voice even further in case Lollie could hear him. ‘Till the funeral, eh?’ He jerked his head towards his mistress. ‘Talk about having something to celebrate.’

‘Poor master,’ I said. ‘There are limits, John.’

‘He didnae think so,’ John retorted. ‘And I should know. I spent more time with him than anyone else, except Harry maybe.’

‘True,’ I said. ‘One could hardly drive him around and not get the measure of the man.’

‘Aye, I got his measure,’ he said. ‘And I wasn’t feart for him, like some I could name. He was your typical mummy’s boy. Sleekit wee bully-boy. Nice as ninepence when anyone was watching and then a right so-and-so when he got the chance.’

‘Was he a right so-and-so to you personally?’ I asked. John nodded.

‘He used to make me sleep in the car,’ he said. ‘Wasn’t so bad in the summertime but once in the winter I near about froze to death.’

‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘How did he stop you going inside and sleeping in your bed? How could he?’

‘No, not at home,’ said John. ‘This was if he was away out somewhere and he would say to me to just wait in the car, then he just never came back and the night would go on and then in the end I’d realise that he wasnae
gonny
come back and he’d done it to me again, so I’d just have to doss down until the morning.’

‘Where was this?’ I said, wondering what these solitary outings of Pip’s might be.

‘Eh?’ said John. ‘Oh, you know, here and there. Nowhere special. I can’t remember where it was we were the last time it happened.’

His vagueness set a faint alarm bell ringing in me, but at that moment we drew up outside the offices of Murray and Ettrick in Coates Crescent and I had to concentrate on assisting Lollie. We were met at the door by Mr Ettrick himself, as I should have expected given the size of the estate; if Mr Murray had been there brushing flies from our path with banana leaves it would not have been
too
surprising.

‘All alone, Mrs Balfour?’ he said, his eyes passing over me without stopping and peering at the inside of the motorcar behind me. ‘I expected Mrs Lambert-Leslie to be with you.’