Dandy Gilver and the Proper Treatment of Bloodstains (6 page)

‘Next to him,’ said Mrs Hepburn, ‘is Harry, master’s valet.’ Harry took his nearly finished cigarette out of his mouth and saluted me with it, touching his fingertips to his temple in such a way that the insolence was as hard to define as it was to ignore. I smiled at him regardless and he looked away. He was as young as John and as tall, but nature had been less kind, giving him a weaker chin, a larger nose, a rather red and angry-looking complexion.

Beside Harry was the man who had vacated my armchair. He was clearly a butler-in-waiting, natty in dress, stout in outline, dressed in the same striped trousers, yellow-edged waistcoat and butterfly collar as Mr Faulds.

‘Stanley,’ he said to me, half rising to bow. ‘I’m the footman.’ He tweaked at his trousers as he sat back down and I noticed that Millie’s eyes, soft behind her spectacles, were fastened upon him with something approaching rapture. I had to purse my lips not to smile. For if the scullerymaid was a china doll fashioned by Mabel Lucie Attwell, then Stanley the footman was made to match her with his large blue slightly pop eyes, his pink cheeks and his egg-like figure. They put one in mind of the carved couples who trundle out one on each side of a cuckoo clock to mark the halves and quarters with a bang of a mallet.

‘And then there’s Phyllis, the housemaid,’ said Mr Faulds, gesturing with a broad smile.

‘Nice to meet you, Miss Rossiter,’ said Phyllis. She was a taking little thing, perched at the end of the table with her feet up on the spar of her chair and a small embroidery frame held up close in the dimness as she sewed. She had that very pretty Celtic colouring of dark hair, pale skin, light eyes and sparse pale brows, with curling lips which looked as though they had been rouged but were really just naturally pink, and a shiny little spade of a chin. I could not help glancing at John and Harry to see if there were any more rapturous glances to be intercepted, but I found none.

‘And finally,’ said Mrs Hepburn, ‘Eldry, the tweenie.’ Eldry, the tweenie, when she looked up and nodded a greeting – for she was sewing too – was revealed to be a plain girl with a bony nose and teeth which, at rest, were always visible against her bottom lip. She should have scraped her hair back, painted her lips red and pointed that sharp nose to the sky, I thought – I had seen girls who had managed to make themselves striking that way if they had enough confidence to pull it off – but Eldry had taken the much more common route of pressing her hair into little curls around her face, lowering her head to hide the nose and pursing her mouth to hide the teeth, after which of course there is no helping it.

‘That’s a very unusual name you have,’ I said to her. Phyllis – I guessed that she was the giggler amongst the girls; there always is one – tittered again.

‘Etheldreda,’ said Eldry. ‘Only my ma’s Ethel and my grandma’s Dreda so there was only the middle bit left for me.’ She sounded so plaintive as she said it that the laughter spread around the room, even as Eldry blinked at us all wondering what the joke was.

‘Eh, dear,’ said Mrs Hepburn. ‘Ah well, if you can’t laugh, eh? Right then, girlies! It’s sausage and onion pie and treacle pud, Fanny. Drop of pea and ham soup to start with. I knew you’d be wanting a good dinner after your long day.’

Eldry and Millie jumped up and Mrs Hepburn, one hand on each knee, hauled herself to her feet too. Clara, who had come to drape her long frame on the arm of the chair during the introductions, now slid into its seat and stretched her feet out towards the blaze.

‘Is there someone missing?’ I said, looking around and counting them off surreptitiously on my fingers. The butler, the cook and me made three, the four menservants – handsome John, plain Harry, round little Stanley and sweet Mattie – made seven and Clara, Phyllis, Millie and Eldry, the four maids, made eleven in all. Lollie had definitely told me there were twelve. Stanley and Mr Faulds glanced at one another, but it was Harry who spoke up, his voice as rough and awkward as his complexion.

‘Maggie,’ he said. ‘Kitchenmaid. Done a flit on Saturday night.’

‘Really?’ I said.

‘Silly wench,’ said Mr Faulds. ‘Didn’t know when she was well off.’ I saw Clara shift in her seat, her long face solemn and her small eyes beady, and Phyllis put her embroidery down and leaned over to squeeze the other girl’s arm. ‘Took off after a promotion, Miss Rossiter, down by Berwick in a big house with a chef and a lot of girls to boss about. Kept it to herself and didn’t work a day of her notice. Mistress would have let her off with a week and given her a reference, but there’s no talking to these youngsters.’

Privately, I agreed. To have left a post with no reference was a reckless move for any servant and if the Berwick job fell through, good luck to Maggie finding another.

‘Mind you, Mr Faulds,’ said Stanley, looking up from the newspaper spread over his place setting, ‘if she’d stayed her week she’d never have got there. It says here there’s no trains on tomorrow with this general strike.’

‘It’s not a general strike,’ said Harry, sitting forward suddenly so that his chair legs banged against the floor. ‘It’s a selective co-ordinated industrial action.’

‘Harry is our resident Red, Miss Rossiter,’ said Mr Faulds.

‘It’s a menace is what it is,’ said Stanley, folding up his newspaper in brusque angry movements. It is always pointless – either annoying or amusing – for the under-thirties to attempt pomposity and Stanley failed to do anything but make Phyllis giggle again.

‘And you’re the . . . valet?’ I said to Harry. I was still trying to get them straight in my head after the whirlwind of introductions.

‘He is indeed,’ said John, grinning. ‘It’s all part of the plan.’ Then he ducked as Harry aimed a punch at the side of his head.

‘Now, now, lads,’ said Mr Faulds, as Stanley looked on with his mouth pulled down in a cod-like pout of disapproval. The butler heaved himself up to his feet. ‘There’s a bottle of burgundy needs using up,’ he said to himself, ‘but sausage and onion pie wants beer, really.’ Picking over a large bunch of keys, he left the kitchen and I heard the hobnails on his heels ring out against the stone steps as he descended to the sub-basement where, I guessed, the beer cellar must be.

‘All part of what plan?’ I asked the lads once he was gone. John grinned again and Harry gave me a long appraising look.

‘Don’t encourage them,’ said Phyllis, who had taken up her sewing again.

‘All the valets are Trots,’ said John. ‘Just waiting for the word and then ccrrrkkk!’ He drew a finger across his throat. ‘The lords and masters struck down while they get their morning shave and the revolution begins. Easiest way, really.’

‘Disgraceful!’ said Stanley.

‘You should recruit Miss Rossiter, Harry,’ said John. ‘Get the lady’s maids as well as the valets and you’re laughing.’

‘Eldry would have plenty to say if she caught you sweet-talking Miss Rossiter,’ said Phyllis to John. I looked at her, startled. Poor plain Eldry and this rather arrogant young man? Surely not. But I thought, from John’s shout of laughter and Phyllis’s look of mischief, that this was a tease more than an indiscretion.

‘You wouldn’t dare go on like this if Mr Faulds could hear you,’ said Stanley.

‘Aye, we would,’ said John. Stanley flushed.

‘Well, you wouldn’t dare if we had a butler like the butlers that trained me,’ he said. ‘Like the butler I’ll
be
one day.’

‘Oh Stan,’ said Clara, stretching out a long leg and poking the footman with her toe. ‘Don’t let him rile you, he disnae mean anything by it.’ But Stanley was not to be soothed.

‘I’ll go and help Mr Faulds,’ he said, rising and patting at imaginary specks on his waistcoat. ‘Heaven knows, he needs it.’

‘That’s my boy,’ said Harry. ‘We’re all workers together. We shall surely overcome, united in toil.’

So Stanley’s exit was marred by yet more giggling and his slightly pendulous cheeks were aflame as he passed me, his pop eyes shining.

‘They were saying on the train that Baldwin and Pugh are meeting tonight,’ I said, hoping to sound knowledgeable, wondering what Miss Rossiter would, and therefore what I should, make of the affair.

‘Uncle Arthur’ll never give in,’ said Harry.

‘Fingers crossed,’ said a small voice. I started. It was the first time since I had come into the room that Mattie the hall boy had spoken. With his white-blond hair and his pale skin, he appeared not only childlike but positively elfin and anything less like a troublemaker could scarcely be imagined.

‘They’ll be awright, Matt,’ said Phyllis, and she and Clara swooped down on him from each side and kissed a cheek each. ‘Mattie’s worried about his family, Miss Rossiter. With the lock-out, you know.’

‘Mrs Hepburn’ll give you such a basket to take to them on your day off, you’ll not be able to carry it,’ said Clara, trying to make him smile. ‘You’ll have to eat the lot to keep your strength up and then you’ll have an empty basket and your ma’ll leather you and call Mrs H. all sorts and you’ll wish the strike was all you had to trouble you.’ Mattie did, indeed, give a small chuckle at that.

‘Who’s this and what are they calling me?’ said Mrs Hepburn, coming back in with an enormous tray, steam rising from six deep plates of soup. Eldry followed with another tray and Millie brought up the rear with a breadboard and butter dish. ‘Where’s Mr Faulds and his shadow got to now, then? This soup needs supped before the pies get over-browned. Come on, come on – get your legs under. You too, Fanny. Grub’s up.’

The journey from the servants’ hall after dinner was a long one. Of course, any upward journey is hindered by the recent ingestion of pea soup, sausage pie and treacle pudding – I was blowing like a whale by the second landing – but it was more than that. Across the linoleum, past the scuttles, up the worn stone steps, across the glittering tiles on the ground floor, past the hall table with its salvers, up the marble stairs with the gilded banisters, across the gleaming parquet of the drawing-room floor, up the carpeted stairs with the ebony banisters, all the way to where Lollie waited, peeping around her door, looking out for me, and when I arrived it took a moment for the idea to fall away that I was simply going to help her into an evening frock, stud her hair with a few ornaments and take her stockings away to rinse out for the morning. Miss Rossiter had possessed me body and soul.

‘In here, Dandy,’ she hissed. She drew me into the room beside her and closed and locked the door. ‘How was it?’ she said, looking searchingly at me, ‘I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you down there. Are you all right?’

‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘I like your Mrs Hepburn, Lollie dear. She calls me Fanny and plies me with drink. And the girls and boys are all very lively. I slightly let Miss Rossiter’s accent fall by the wayside, but they’ve decided en masse to treat it as a sort of joke, so there’s nothing to worry about on that score.’

‘Splendid,’ said Lollie. She crossed the room and sat at her dressing table where an overflowing ashtray spoke of her nervous afternoon. ‘It’s just a couple of Pip’s friends for dinner tonight – nothing too fancy. But let’s talk while I change.’ I thought of Mrs Hepburn’s spun toffee nests and the coconut ice she had been finishing off to fill them with when I had left her, and I wondered what ‘fancy’ would have looked like.

‘Very well, then,’ I said, taking out my little notebook and sitting down on the end of her bed. ‘First of all: do you have any suspicions about who it is that’s following you when you go out?’

‘None,’ said Lollie, stopping with her shirt halfway off over her head and staring at me.

‘Male or female, even?’

‘Why?’

‘I was trying to think who it might be myself,’ I told her. ‘Some of them are absolutely impossible: Millie and Mattie, for instance. Their innocence shines out of them.’ I nodded to myself. Of course, it was terrible detective work to discount a person on that score but, more pertinently, a scullerymaid is always under the eye of the cook and a hall and boot boy hardly less so; harried and chivvied and nagged and kept up to the mark with endless little jobs all day. I could not imagine that young Mattie could easily slip away.

So perhaps the only candidates were Mrs Hepburn or Mr Faulds, with no one above them to check their movements and demand accounts of missing time? But as soon as I had thought it I could see how hopeless it was, for a butler is always there, upstairs and down, drawing room and servants’ hall, always at the other end of a rung bell, opening doors, bearing trays, bowing over salvers. If Pallister, at home at Gilverton, were to take up secret missions the very walls would crumble by teatime. And if a butler is the walls and floors and door bells of a house then a cook is the foundation stone, square and solid and always down there, in the kitchens, toiling away. I am not often in the kitchens at Gilverton, it is true, but I had certainly never been there when Mrs Tilling was not, could scarcely imagine such a thing.

No, if anyone were slipping out and following Lollie it was to the middle ranks I should be looking. Not perhaps the footman, for footmen are as visible as butlers all day long, and not the tweenie who, even though she spent half her time above stairs and half below, had a daily round not of her own devising. Besides, poor shy Eldry, biting her lip and blushing, did not seem the girl to dash out and then cover her tracks upon her return. The two upper maids, languorous Clara and pert little Phyllis, were a livelier pair of prospects; I should have thought either of them quite equal to a bit of spying. But then I thought again of Clara’s flouncing huff over Miss Rossiter’s Christian name. Surely that sprang from some quite solid sense of fair play? And then think of Phyllis giggling and stitching her embroidery and comforting poor Mattie with cuddles. A snooper? It did not seem likely.

Which left those two boys: John and Harry. John, being the chauffeur, could certainly – easily – be sent off on errands by his master without the other servants missing him. And I knew from my own experience how much time Grant spends mysteriously employed away from the house, even with only a dressmaker in the village to absorb her attentions. If we lived in a town she would never be out of the shops, buying up yards of ribbon and stockings by the score, and I imagined the same was true of a valet, if not even more so, what with shaving soap and tobacco and hair brilliantine. Again though, apart from the free time at their disposal, neither of them seemed all that likely: John had the easy, open manners which come from good looks and early advancement and Harry the brusque insolence of plain features and too much politics, but of watchful cunning and furtiveness I had seen not a whisker.