The Vintage Girl (21 page)

I watched as Catriona snaked her hand round Robert’s, slipping it into his pocket.

This wasn’t like one of the reels where partners changed merrily from one step to another. This was set long in advance. And there was a lot more depending on it. People’s feelings, people’s lives. It really wasn’t up to me to start whisking it all up, then vanishing while the champagne corks were still being swept away.

A gloomy sense of missing the boat settled on my shoulders. I was here at the wrong time, in the wrong place, yet again. I was used to that—feeling melancholy that I would never wear buttoned boots or live in Victorian Mayfair—but this was a very modern ache, and it hurt.

“I should … be getting on,” I said. “I’m supposed to be giving your dad my rough report this evening.”

“And I need to get on with my team,” said Catriona. “That’s the trouble with being a perfectionist, I guess! Still, it’s good practice for future events, eh, Robbie?” She beamed at me. “Weddings. Don’t you think this would make the most marvelous venue for weddings?”

I glanced between them. She looked serene, converting the kitchens and building into holiday lets already, but Robert’s eyes were hooded and thoughtful. Somewhere else.

“I’ll leave you to it,” I said, and did.

I spent the rest of the afternoon shuttling happily from one ball-related task to another, feeling more Christmas Eve-y as the daylight faded and the lamps went on. I tied gold ribbons, twisted linen napkins into holly-and-ivy rings, and listened to endless stories about proposals. Everyone seemed to have met their husbands at the Kettlesheer ball. It was like a matrimonial eBay.

All this bustling, though, wasn’t keeping the castle chill out of my bones. Now that I knew about the oil bill, I could hardly moan about Ingrid keeping the heating turned down, so I excused myself and went back upstairs in search of my last clean cardigan.

But Mhairi had been up and had tidied my clothes again, and not into the same drawers as last time. I looked at the endless chests and cupboards: the room wasn’t short of mahogany-based storage space. Ranald must have had a lot of clothes, I thought, starting with the tallboy by the window. How long had Violet kept his shirts and tweeds just as they were, smelling of him, in these drawers?

Maybe Max’s television contact was a
good
thing, I reasoned as I rhythmically opened and closed drawers, finding nothing but mothballs and old drawer liners. Maybe they could include dramatizations of Violet’s incredible transatlantic love story, from fortuitous bicycle crash to her brave fight for survival, interspersed with documentary stuff about the Chippendale table.

Ooh, yes! My imagination caught fire. And Robert could probably do some kind of deal. They could open a tearoom. Hold weddings in the ballroom! Let it out to other BBC film units to film period dramas … yes!

No sign of my own cashmere. I turned to the next likely chest, a long bowfront commode with a pitcher and ewer on top.

And maybe Robert would find some business deal in the romance that could—

I stopped. My eagle eye had spotted a key taped to the side of the top drawer, with a label reading
Bathroom
in faded script. I peeled it off. It was too small to lock the door. What was there in the bathroom that had a lock? A cupboard? A medicine chest?

Positively vibrating with Miss Marple–ness, I hurried into the big bathroom, which had taken on a whole new feel to me now that I knew Violet and Ranald had shared it. The double-ended bath, and the twin cupboards, and the looping brass towel-warmers …

No time now for romantic bath speculation. I frowned into the speckled mirror. Nothing. I ran my hands over the dark panels, tapping, feeling for a loose bit of wood. I lifted up the watercolors of Highland scenes on the walls, in case there was a concealed safe. Nothing.

I sank against the rolltop bath, frustrated. Maybe it wasn’t
this
bathroom. How many bathrooms were there in Kettlesheer? The enormity of the challenge crushed me, and then I spotted something odd about the medicine cabinet. Slowly I went over to it, and moved aside an old bottle of Listerine and spare coal-tar soap.

In the back was a keyhole.

My hands shook as I pulled out the shelves, then slipped the key into the lock. I had to jiggle it around, but then the whole cabinet swiveled open to reveal a little safe, built into the oak panels. I frowned at the dial, then turned it to 1-9-0-2, the year of Violet’s marriage. It swung open.

“I knew it,” I breathed. “Ha, Robert. Who’s laughing at my panel tapping now?”

I had to admit to a little flutter of anticlimax when I reached in and pulled out not a soft leather pouch of diamonds but another notebook.

It looked familiar. Very familiar. I patted around in the space, just in case there was a diamond or two, but that was it. Nothing else in there.

The light was better in the bedroom, so I went back in and sat on the bed to examine the book properly. Why would you lock up a notebook? Maybe it was a journal! I was desperate to find Violet’s proper diary, not just menu lists.

Hungrily, I opened it, and was instantly disappointed. It seemed to be some kind of scrapbook, filled with yellowed cuttings and notes in Violet’s madly curling hand. She’d clipped wedding announcements and society details from newspapers and magazines.
Née Maybelle Asquith!
she’d written against one.
In motorcar engines!
against another.
Now in Baltimore!

I felt a shard of sympathy for Violet as the scent of money and distant glamour rose from the lines. Even if she loved the place, it must have been hard for her after Ranald died, reading about the girlfriends she’d done her London season with making their second and third marriages in New York and London, while she was on her own with five children, difficult tenants, and huge bills that had to be paid with something. Every year that passed, she must have felt more and more left behind with her memories.

I turned a page and came across a draft letter, dated February 17, 1934, and covered in crossings-out.

I lifted the letter nearer the lamp to make out the words better. She was an enthusiastic rather than neat writer. I could actually see her mind working under the scribbles and scratches.

There was some scribbled indecision about pleasantries—Violet obviously hadn’t decided which tone to take—but then beneath that were some figures in a more definite hand and a rusty pin.

I turned the page to see what the pin was holding: a wedding announcement between one Beatrice deVille and an Ashton Davis Adams, and beneath that a note to herself.

Angus: for one occasional table: £5.
Table delivered 9/20/35; collected 10/14/35; shipped 10/18/35.
Personal check received from Bettina Whitelaw Ward 12/20/35.
See notebook A for provenance details, supplied.

What?
I stared at the paper, wondering if I’d misread it.

I turned the letter over and read it again:
Angus: for one occasional table: £5.
And there was his receipt, and some sketches.

Book A? That was why the book seemed familiar; it was the same as the furniture record. I hurried over to the desk and brought it back. When I flicked through it now, I could see little numbers penciled against the details of the furniture listed, some crosses and some ticks.

I’d thought on first reading that Violet had given the table to Beatrice; but no, Violet had
sold
the table to Mrs. Whitelaw Ward.
She’d
been the one giving the present; Violet had been the very upmarket dealer in the transaction. And whose table was it? There was no note of any money paid back to the lady mentioned in the letter, just a payment to “Angus” for making an occasional table.

So which had been sent to Beatrice deVille? The copy or the original?

Horror swamped me. There was no way of knowing, not without consulting a proper expert—and a proper expert might just decide to go public.

I looked through the notebook to see if there were any more letters.

There were quite a few more. Violet had kept her drafts as copies, and each of them was tagged with details of the piece sold, the price paid to Angus for a copy, shipping dates, and any other details that might affect the price she was asking.

I sank back in the pillows and tried to make sense of it all. Had Violet really been selling off the family furniture almost like a small business? There were transactions covering many years, different items, different letters, but the same breezy tone, treating each transaction as the most marvelous thing, cleverly covering the squalid tang of common or garden retail with skillful charm.

My mind raced. It wasn’t exactly unheard-of for families in trouble to hawk the silver. Max had once told me about a grande old dame he’d cultivated for years, taking her out for tea in Chelsea while she dropped wistful hints about the Edwardian tiara she was saving “for a rainy day.” Normally he took things like that with a pinch of salt, but in this case her provenance was unimpeachable—she was the daughter of a minor aristo—and he’d had a quick peek at the item in question when she wasn’t looking and been sufficiently convinced to hang in there.

Sadly for Max, when the rainy day came and he rocked up at the daughter’s house ready to offer his tiara-liquidating services, all he got was the unpleasant job of informing the bereaved family that they’d just inherited a pile of very convincing glass, and that their mother must have cashed it in for ten years of dutiful attention from her Polish companion. To add insult to injury, as he was leaving, two of his competitors were just pulling up in their best black-leather sympathy coats.

I gripped my hair. Was that what Violet had done? Had she even told Carlisle, her son? Was that why she’d impressed on them the importance of saving the house—because if anyone looked round, they’d realize it was all fake? My imagination sketched in the blanks: the furniture shifted upstairs for each ball, a little less coming back down each time. Some pieces reappearing, but not displayed quite so prominently as before.

A cold hand—and for once it had nothing to do with any ghosts, real or imaginary—gripped my throat as the ramifications of what I’d discovered sank in. First of all, I was about to look like a complete idiot in front of Max. What was I supposed to do? Ring him up and tell him to ignore any photographs of furniture, and just focus on the porcelain and silver?

Hastily, I scrabbled back through the notebook. Had Angus copied Sèvres vases too? No. Good. So that at least was safe.

I looked resentfully at the pointless lists I’d made for Duncan. I couldn’t show them to him now. Five days of crawling around under tables getting dust up my nose and splinters in my fingers, five days of cricking my neck photographing dovetail joints, five days of listening to Max pronouncing
Chippendale
with a horrible kissy-kissy—

Oh
no
.

The table! The prize table, the Chippendale cherry on the cake that I’d more or less promised Ingrid would solve all Duncan’s money worries. If it was a copy, a two-hundred-year-old copy, it was still worth something. If it had been copied in an outbuilding in Berwick within living memory, it wasn’t.

Maybe she’d kept it. You couldn’t just knock together a table like that. I flicked through the notebooks and papers and letters, my eyes desperately searching for the word
Chippendale
, and right at the back, in the records from 1937, I found it: a transaction with Maribel Edwards Schuster of Long Island.

My heart sank. I’d never realized how true that description was until now: I actually felt my heart fall like a glass paperweight into the pit of my stomach.

And then it stopped.

The handwriting had got tighter as the lines went on, as if Violet was having trouble forming the words. At the bottom she’d noted
MES’s fiancé’s family in munitions; renegotiate price?
But the usual flurry of exclamation marks was missing. There was no joy in this one, no playful tweaking of the pleasantries. This had been a hard letter for her to write.

She’d pinned some notes from a discussion with Angus: types of wood needed, times, prices. Quite a commission for a little workshop, like building the
Titanic
in a garden shed.

I looked at the dates. December 1937. Not long before the war—Violet would have been in her fifties, handsome now rather than beautiful. Would her three adult sons have been signing up? Would the Schaffenacker Bentleys have been begging her to get on a boat and come home to safety in New York? Were they still penniless? Was there even a home to go to?

Tears filled my eyes. I didn’t
want
to think of Violet selling the McAndrews’ remaining treasure: the scene of her lavish wedding breakfast, of her ball dinner parties, a link to Ranald’s family and his sons’ birthright. It must have been such a last resort. The Violet I’d conjured up wouldn’t have done that.

But it would explain why I couldn’t feel anything on it: no parties, no celebration, no history. How could I, if it had been made just seventy years ago?

Being proved right had never felt so disappointing.

What was I supposed to do? I didn’t know who was going to be more devastated to find out it was fake: Duncan or Max. At least Duncan hadn’t already mentally spent the money, unlike Max, who was probably lining up imaginary fleets of really rare Dinky model cars and Cuban cigars right now. Not to mention crowing down the Builders Arms to his cronies about finally getting his big TV break.

A crack of hope appeared in my mind. But what if it
wasn’t
? What if Violet had done a bait-and-switch, and kept the real thing? But that would make her a crook. Was that better?

I had to tell someone. But who first? I guessed etiquette demanded that Duncan should get the bad news first, but my insides shriveled at the thought of how exactly I was going to do it. Casually informing someone their revered granny was a con artist on a large scale? Hours before dining off the family-heirloom-no-longer? What sort of social clanger was
that
?

I didn’t much fancy telling Max either, although there was the chance he could give me three handy tips for confirming the validity of Chippendale tables one way or another. But there was the risk that he might insist on coming up himself, and I shrank at the lurid pictures that summoned up.

I closed my eyes, and Violet herself appeared in my mind’s eye. Young and privileged, beautiful and laughing on her way to the ballroom she’d decorated with eagles and violets. I didn’t want to see her as a trickster, shilling the family heirlooms to keep the roof from leaking, but it was spirited of her. It showed how determined she was to stay with Ranald’s memory once she’d lost him, how enterprising …