Tyringham Park (45 page)

After everything the family, especially Mrs Sinclair, had done for her, Jim continued, telling him where the money was hidden was the least she could do. She must have had an aberration. It
could happen to anyone handling all that cash, being tempted, giving in during a weak moment, afraid to own up, not knowing how to undo it. He understood. It wasn’t too late to make it
right.

An image of Charlotte Blackshaw keeping a stubborn silence came to mind. She would do the same. He couldn’t trip her up if she didn’t say anything. Look at what Charlotte had got
away with.

He waited, but she held her nerve, looking downwards so she wouldn’t be influenced by his expectant expression.

“We all thought the world of you, Elizabeth,” he said, dropping his arms. “Just shows you how wrong you can be. I’ll find the money, believe me, even if it means lifting
up floorboards and tearing the place apart, and putting the hard word on every bank manager in Sydney.”

Apologising for having to check her handbag, he took it to examine the contents and found amongst her personal things a wad of high-denomination notes fitted into an empty cigarette packet. The
money was for her Beth Hall account. She had intended to deposit it later on in the day after she’d done the hotel banking, but she couldn’t very well tell him that.

“The mother of your fiancé?” he asked, reading Lady Blackshaw’s address on the unstamped envelope of the letter she had written. “I would offer to post it for you,
but I have a better idea. You’ll hear about it in a minute.”

He replaced everything in her handbag, including the money. “You’ll need that where you’re going to tide you over,” he said. “It’s the big stuff I’m
after, not this piddling amount. I can’t have you ending up on the streets. It’s not that I don’t appreciate what you did for the Waratah, but you have to admit you were well
paid.” His voice sounded more sad than angry. “There was no need for you to put your sticky fingers in the till.”

From the top of her wardrobe he retrieved her suitcase, opened it, and felt around the linings and pockets where he found the necklace, rings and bracelet she had stolen from Lady Blackshaw.
“Mrs Sinclair mentioned these. From your fiancé, she said.”

Dixon made a grab for them.

“I’ll keep them,” he said, putting them in his pocket as he sidestepped her. “Compensation. Go on. Pack. I’m not taking my eyes off you until we leave.”

It was Peter Molloy, the new manager, who had noticed something wrong, Jim said. “Get a professional to look over the books,” Peter had advised after he’d been there for six
months. “Something isn’t adding up.”

The young pup had never liked her. He must have thought all his Christmases had come at once when the auditor found deficits going back twenty years.

The mistake she’d made was increasing her percentage after Peter, a hotelier with little experience, had been appointed manager over her when she knew the position was rightly hers. Passed
over because she was a woman and a spinster. She knew there was no malice in what Jim did – he often acknowledged how she and Mrs Sinclair had done wonders wooing customers and how she had
held on to them after her patron had left. He thought being manager, even of a respectable establishment like the Waratah, was no job for a woman, and he would have considered it the gentlemanly
thing to do to protect her with a male superior.

He was going to deport her at ten o’clock precisely. It was either that or inform the police, and he’d made the executive decision to send her back to England, from where she could
cross over the Irish Sea and deliver her letter to Lady Blackshaw by hand and save on the postage. He would personally escort her to her cabin and wait at the gangplank until it was raised and the
ship pulled away to make sure she didn’t disembark at the last minute.

“You’ll have the status of a stowaway,” he said, “except the captain knows you’re there. This no-speaking lark will come in handy for the trip.”

He couldn’t bring himself to involve Norma while the investigation was going on, he continued, and didn’t look forward to telling her before the next first Sunday of the month to
explain Dixon’s absence. As for Mrs Sinclair, she would go to her grave without knowing her protégé had disgraced herself.

Jim didn’t allow Dixon to enter her office, speak to the night porter, or leave any written notes or phone messages before she left the hotel.

A young sailor was expecting them at the quay and led them to a cabin the size of a cupboard with ‘
Quarantine
’ fixed to the door.

“I gave your name as ‘Jane Brown’, not that anyone will be talking to you. Remember to stay out of everyone’s way – I don’t want my old mate cursing the day
he did me a favour. You won’t be seeing him. He has more important things on his mind than social chitchat, like trying not to be sunk by a German U-boat, for instance.” He placed her
case on the bunk. “You’re a cold fish, aren’t you? Did we ever know you?”

He put his hand in his pocket, retrieved her pieces of jewellery and, taking Dixon’s hand, folded her fingers over them. “Keep them,” he said. “I can’t dishonour
the memory of your fiancé who wasn’t as lucky as I was coming home from the Great War in one piece. Just make sure you never show your face around here again. If you do I’ll
personally break your bloody neck.”

With that, he left.

Dublin 1943

Edwina placed the music box on the low table beside her chair and hoped that Charlotte would choose to pay a duty call during the day. With things so strained between them she
couldn’t make a specific request to see her.

Around midday she heard the familiar footsteps and her heart quickened. Charlotte came in with her usual sour face, pulled along by Mary Anne, who was all set to explore the familiar things in
the room. Her favourite item was the piano which Charlotte would not allow her to bang on, holding down the lid and saying, “Don’t annoy your grandmother” – a phrase she
used constantly. Edwina always wanted to say ‘Leave her. I like to see her enjoying herself,’ but the words refused to form in her throat when she imagined the disbelieving scorn on
Charlotte’s face if she said them.

During a visit three days earlier, while Charlotte was distracted reading the paper, Mary Anne, all trust and affection, had climbed on to Edwina’s lap and begun to play with her necklace.
Edwina found herself affected by the touch of the little fingers as they lifted the brightly coloured beads in turn. When Charlotte looked up and saw the interaction she gave a cry of dismay and
ran to scoop up the child, saying, “Don’t annoy your grandmother,” before carrying her to the far side of the room.

Edwina, feeling hurt, said, “My arms still function, you know. I wouldn’t let her fall,” wanting to add, ‘Let her stay. She’s no trouble. I like having her
here,’ but was once again unable to say the words.

Edwina admired Mary Anne’s slender limbs, pretty face and dark, soft curls – no trace of Waldron or Charlotte there – but most of all she admired her spirit: she was not afraid
of an old woman, ugly and immobile.

The maid had been sent out to buy something that would definitely appeal to a child approaching two years of age. Anything with moving parts that made a noise was irresistible, the shopkeeper
had assured her. If this worked, Edwina would buy more and would even engage a toymaker to design novelty items that would tempt Mary Anne to visit more often and stay longer. A magnificent rocking
horse had already been commissioned from a master carver to be ready for Christmas, and even though lap dogs were anathema to her, Edwina had ordered a Yorkshire terrier puppy as the ultimate
enticement. In a year’s time she would buy a few acres outside Dublin and keep some ponies there so that Mary Anne could begin her training to ride better than a man, thereby compensating
Edwina for not quite reaching that standard before her accident. Manus, for old time’s sake, could be inveigled up to oversee the initiation. How could he turn down a request from her after
all they had shared in the past? To top all that, she would invite over Sir Dirk Armstrong, by now the most famous and most expensive artist in the British Isles, to paint Mary Anne’s
portrait. Her letter to him would not be hectoring like Waldron’s had been, inviting rebuttal, but persuasive, recalling past intimacies that he was now too old to be threatened by, and she
wouldn’t even hint at the possibility of a discount.

Edwina reached down to open the lid of the music box. Mary Anne heard the tinkling of ‘Greensleeves’ and followed the sound to the table beside her grandmother. The child stood
staring at the twirling figure in a white tutu, reflected in mirrors angled in a semicircle around it. When the music and figure slowed and finally halted, Mary Anne pointed at the box and looked
up at Edwina.

“How interested she is,” said Edwina. “What advanced concentration she has!”

Charlotte hovered suspiciously. Edwina lifted up the box, rewound it, placed it back on the table, and opened the lid again to release the twirling figure. Mary Anne, laughing and jigging, could
not restrain her excitement.

“I’ve never seen that before,” said Charlotte. “Where did it come from?”

“I bought it,” said Edwina.

“You
bought
it?” Charlotte lifted up the box and examined it, noting the price written on the base.

Mary Anne made gestures signalling she wanted to hear the music again. Charlotte put the box back on the table and sat down to watch the interaction. For five minutes Edwina continued to wind up
the box, and Mary Anne didn’t tire of it. At one stage she put her finger gently on the figure of the ballerina, pulled back at the feel of it, and then repeated the move. Charlotte noted the
pleasure on her mother’s face. She picked up Mary Anne, saying, “I’ll take her down to the garden before she gets bored and restless,” and left.

That night Verity reiterated Charlotte’s faults, the main ones being her over-familiarity with servants, spending too much time with her sister-in-law drooling over babies, and worst of
all, nursing – she couldn’t bring herself to use the more descriptive term – a practice abhorred by Queen Victoria who forbade her daughters-in-law to do it, and if the dear Queen
didn’t know what was right and proper, who did?

“I blame that one-armed, Communist, French-speaking artist Delaney for the way she turned out. If she’d had a refined female tutor instead of that mad Irishman, she wouldn’t
have ended up spurning her class and its military traditions,” she concluded.

Usually Edwina countered with, “I blame Waldron. He should have forced her to go to that school and there wouldn’t have been any need for any kind of a tutor,” but she had lost
the heart for this conversation in its entirety and remained silent. She even had an urge to speak up in Charlotte’s defence, and not just to annoy Verity.

For Edwina had fallen in love with her granddaughter. She couldn’t understand how it had happened, and with things the way they were between herself and Charlotte, couldn’t admit to
it. One thing she did know was she would have to disarm the mother to get access to the daughter. How she would go about it would require a lot of clever planning and she didn’t want Verity
clacking away in the background while she was trying to think.

Dublin
1943

Before travelling to County Cork, Elizabeth Dixon opened two accounts in two different names in two separate banks in Dublin and signed the forms to have both her accounts in
Sydney transferred, marvelling at herself while she was doing it that she was able to do it. How far she had come! Influential and all as Jim Rossiter was, as his father had been before him,
courted by all the bank managers in Sydney vying for his business, Dixon was convinced he wouldn’t find her money.

But he did.

Who would connect Elizabeth Dixon and her pin-money account in one bank with Beth Hall and her sizeable amount in another, when no one from the Waratah Hotel knew she was a customer at the
second bank, and no one from the second bank knew her real name?

He did.

When she returned to the banks to see if her money had come through, the teller in each establishment had looked at her oddly and told her that her account in Sydney had been frozen.

“Frozen?”

Both of them?

If she had any enquiries about the matter, she could make an appointment to see the manager, said both tellers.

Dixon said that wouldn’t be necessary. She would sort it out herself.

It wasn’t fair. All her legitimate savings as well as her stolen hoard had been hunted down by Jim Rossiter, leaving her penniless. There would be no sorting out. Where was her hope now of
buying a house of her own and having enough money to support herself into her old age? Or, if the worst came to the worst, finding a respectable position?

Who would want her at her age and who would employ her when she had no way of producing a recent reference?

Charlotte laid out what she considered to be her forty-two best oil paintings – completed before her marriage – ready for David Slane to assess. He had undertaken
to oversee the framing and hanging of her first solo show, booked to take place in three months’ time. Cormac Delaney promised to travel from Paris to attend the opening night.

On the last occasion David Slane had contacted her, he was so excited he had to slow down and repeat himself before Charlotte could make sense of what he was trying to say. Sir Dirk Armstrong,
the most famous artist in the United Kingdom, would be in Ireland at the time and, although he had at first declined to open the show, citing an overcrowded schedule, had changed his mind when he
heard the artist’s name was Blackshaw.

To prevent a repetition of Edwina’s earlier unwelcome antagonism, David suggested that Lady Blackshaw should not be told about the show until an hour before the
opening.

Later on the same day, Charlotte drew up her last will and testament with Mr Dunwoody, the family solicitor, in which she stated that her mother would never have any hand, act
or part in Mary Anne’s rearing. The outward fondness the old woman was showing the child didn’t fool her and the amount of money she was spending to win the child’s favour was
beginning to appear sinister and cynical.