After the Armistice Ball (21 page)

‘No, ma’am,’ he said. ‘Mrs Duffy said she’d drop me a note when she was getting low and she paid me when I delivered.’

‘But of course you would know not to deliver it now,’ I said, making doubly, trebly sure. E. McNally looked at me as though I were an imbecile.

‘There wasna any order outstanding, ma’am,’ he said. ‘But I’ll venture if there was I’d have known to ignore it.’ I nodded, gave him a little something anyway for his trouble and got back into the car. So, Mrs Duffy was to have dropped a line when the coal got low, and there was the coal hole at Reiver’s Rest scraped clean for all to see with no order outstanding. I wondered if this detail had escaped her planning or if she had decided not to advertise in advance the fact that she had used all that fuel in case the news of the fire should jog an uneasy thought and start the coalman’s tongue wagging.

Drysdale turned the car again and I knew he took the chance while checking over his shoulder to fire a look at me, searching for some clue as to why I should leap from the car and accost a coalman in the street. His look was matched by that on the face of Mr McNally as he watched me pull away.

Thus after a single day, with my work in Galloway complete, and one or two more of the world’s populace now believing me to be an idiot, I headed for home again. I was ready to tell Hugh that the puppies were all earmarked for friends of the family and that I had changed my mind anyway after both Bunty and I had been snapped at by the mother with her teeth like little icicles and been told by her doting owner that this was something for which the breed was known.

We arrived back at Gilverton just as lamps were being lit, and while Grant took herself off in high dudgeon to unpack the case of clothes for a week’s visit she had packed only two days before, I sought out Hugh to tell the tale of woe. I could hear voices from his library and smelled pipe smoke alongside the usual reek of Hugh’s cigar so arranging a smile of wifely and hostessly serenity upon my face I threw open the door and strode in. (When visitors are there I do not knock and keep my feet on the hall carpet.)

‘Dandy my dear,’ said Hugh. (When visitors are there he reacts with delight to any glimpse of me.) ‘Just in time. What will you have to drink?’

‘Welcome home, Dandy,’ said Alec Osborne. ‘This is an unexpected bonus, I must say. I feared I might miss you.’

But for some reason the sight of the two of them on either side of the fire like that, a heap of dozing dogs between their feet, presented a domestic and social challenge to which I felt unequal after the long drive and the excitements of the day before. I excused myself hastily, promising that a half-hour’s rest should render me fit for the dinner table.

Up in my room, Grant was slamming around with her mouth still set in a grim line but with a tell-tale loosening of her shoulders which told me that she was happiest really to be home again with her own irons and well-drilled laundry maids waiting below. I sat at my dressing table and began to remove hatpins until I caught her eye in the glass. She looked significantly at me and then at my bed where, miracle upon miracle, there against the pillows sat a familiar black leather album tied with a ribbon. I threw off my coat, kicked off my shoes and climbed up on to the counterpane, drawing the album towards me like a lover, sure that inside it cast-iron, rock-solid, gilt-edged answers were soon to be found.

Chapter Eleven

I saw it immediately this time, of course. Added to the fact of Mrs Duffy’s redecoration, it was so obvious that I felt some shame for not seeing it before. Because really, how could these dowdy stripes and sprigged muslins have been freely chosen by the same woman who had turned her drawing room at Drummond Place into an ice-cube?

I resolved to subject the idea to my harshest criticism while dressing, and see if it was still standing up by the time I was done. I was late already, but since Grant was in far too foul a temper to be let loose on my hair, I saved myself a good twenty minutes by pulling on a silk turban instead. Thank heavens for turbans in the evening. I hoped they would stay in fashion for ever, or at least until I was old enough to go on wearing them whether they were in or out. I pulled a couple of curls out at the front and tried to make them rest against my forehead, but this was wasting time. I still could not see any flaw in my discovery and could wait no longer to tell it to Alec, nor to quiz him on how he had wrested the album away from Clemence.

When I joined him and Hugh, moreover, I could see from his dancing eyes that he was bursting to tell me. Hugh, though, was well away on the relative merits of dry-stone walls and hedges and I had to wait until we were sitting down to dinner before I got in.

‘Tell me, Alec,’ I said, ‘to what do we owe this pleasure?’ For I could not imagine on what pretext he had insinuated himself into my household at less than a day’s notice. Hugh is not antisocial but he needs to be led up quite gently to the idea of a single visitor; they require so much more attention than does a crowd of twenty.

‘Came to see a horse,’ he said.

‘Uncommonly decent of you to take the time too,’ said Hugh. I, with a wife’s keenly attuned sensitivity, understood this to mean that Hugh had mentioned something in passing at Croys and meant nothing by it, so was now more than a little surprised to have it followed through. However, from his tone I also divined that he found Alec Osborne agreeable company and did not therefore mind too much.

‘I find myself with time to fill,’ said Alec. ‘I was expecting this week to be the run-up to a wedding, you know.’ Hugh gulped and turned to me beseechingly.

‘Have you seen any of the family since we left Gatehouse?’ I asked, knowing he had and wanting to know more.

‘Yes, indeed,’ said Alec. ‘Lena is still away of course, but I spent the day with Clemence yesterday. She’s bearing up terribly well, and I took three good friends of Cara to visit which I’m sure helped. She seemed very much soothed by them.’

That explained it, I thought. Clemence could not withstand the combined efforts of Koo, Booty and Sha-sha (who could?), hence the presence on my bedside table of the leather volume. I could bet, though, that Clemence would be anything but soothed to reflect on having let it out of her clutches, and if she knew it was here with me she would be having absolute kittens.

‘Dreadful, dreadful thing,’ said Hugh, and we fell silent. Just as well, perhaps, since we were having mutton and if one does not shut up and eat it while it is hot, especially in a chilly place like our dining room, it can congeal quite horribly before one is halfway done.

I fetched the album down to the drawing room when I left the dinner table, and was sitting staring at the picture of Cara on the landing when the door opened. Hugh and I rarely sat together after dinner and I had expected Alec and him to return to the library. Indeed I was beginning to despair of getting a chance to talk to Alec at all, knowing that he should be out at the stables the next day, but here was a piece of good luck: Alec entered the drawing room alone.

‘Hugh asks you to excuse him, but he has work that must be done tonight. Something about a contractor? And asks me to excuse him, and asks me to ask you to excuse him to me, and generally wants us to spend the evening apologizing to each other on his behalf. Are there contractors?’

‘There are certainly drains,’ I said. ‘I rather thought it was clearing, which would suggest plumbers, but it may have been building, so contractors might be indicated.’

‘Or perhaps he just can’t face it,’ said Alec. ‘I’ve noticed people simply not knowing what to say to me.’

I poured him some coffee and decided to indulge in a little straight talking.

‘People
don’t
know, Alec dear. That is, they don’t know – and I didn’t myself if it comes to that – how you are taking the whole thing. You don’t seem perturbed. And it’s not –’ I said, holding up my hand to stop him interrupting, ‘it’s not because you know she’s not dead, before you say that. Because it was exactly the same when you thought she was. Bluntly, no one wants to extend the hand of sympathy for a sorrow you don’t appear to be suffering.’

Alec came and sat on the other end of the sofa; I think so that he might speak without having to look at me.

‘It wasn’t a great romance, if you must know.’ He spoke with a quiet, hard deliberation as though pushing the words out of himself as one forces notes from a brass horn. ‘But I liked her. Well, you know Cara, Dandy – she’s impossible not to like. And she seemed to like me, although I admit she seems to like everyone, so I can’t feel too flattered.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘She’s that rare thing: an absolute darling who doesn’t make one sick. Less so recently, perhaps. More troubled. But generally, one would rather wonder why she wasn’t engaged long ago than marvel at her being so now.’

‘Quite,’ said Alec. ‘So I daresay I should think myself lucky she didn’t want a great romance any more than I did. We should have been happy, though, I’m sure. For one thing we had known each other all our lives, or known of each other at least, and that’s a start.’

‘Yes, you’re a distant relation, aren’t you?’ I said, only now remembering that someone had told me this. ‘And so were you always meant for Cara? From the cradle? Very touching.’

‘What a Victorian you are,’ said Alec, laughing. ‘From the cradle, indeed! Cara was just a cousin in Canada as far as I was concerned.’

But there was a shifty defiance about the way he spoke despite the laughter, and I knew he was rattled, embarrassed by more than just my teasing, and I remembered something he had mentioned lightly just in passing.

‘The mystery you hinted at, to do with Cara’s settlement? Have you any idea what it was?’

I was lucky again; Alec laughed so hard and so long this time that I could not help but join in.

‘You should have seven daughters, Dandy, instead of your sons. Talk about Lady Bracknell! But to answer the question . . . I always imagined that Gregory was to settle everything he could on Clemence and felt he couldn’t tell me this outright.’

‘Why on earth would you think that?’ I said. ‘Cara is by far his favourite, so much so that I feel sorry for Clemence sometimes.’

Alec turned to face me, to enjoy the look he was about to put on my face.

‘I rather thought he would settle what he could on Clemence because Dunelgar, Culreoch and the London house are coming to me. I’m Gregory’s heir.’

I choked on my coffee.

‘How too Mr Collins for words,’ I said at last, and luckily Alec gave another bark of laughter instead of slamming out of the room as I should have deserved.

‘What an idea! What things you do say, Dandy! No, I didn’t quite resolve to “make my choice from among his daughters” – although you’ve no idea what the girls in Dorset would have thought of moving to the Highlands; they shrank away at parties when they found out. Broke into a run, some of them. Anyway, as it turned out, my elder brother . . . And so I might have stayed in Dorset after all.’ He laughed again, but this time absolutely mirthlessly, and went on in a loud, blustering voice with a small tremble at the back of it that made me want to take him on to my lap like one of my sons. ‘Since I was getting Gregory’s pile, I convinced my father to settle on my younger brother after Edward was killed. Now what do you bet Gregory changes his mind and I end my days in a home for old soldiers?’

‘But could he change his mind?’ I said. ‘Isn’t it an entail?’

‘Liferent,’ said Alec. ‘I don’t think you get entails up here, do you?’ I shrugged. ‘Meaning he can’t sell them but must pass them on along the male line. So, more or less an entail really, except that it needn’t be me.’

‘But you’re an Osborne,’ I said. ‘Not a Duffy. How can you be male line? I’ve never understood how Mr Collins can be Mr Bennet’s male heir, come to that.’

‘My grandfather, Gregory’s father’s brother, married a Miss Osborne,’ said Alec. ‘She was an only child and so, much to the delight of her family although to the disgust of his own . . .’

‘He changed his name?’ I was laughing again.

‘It’s not so unusual really,’ said Alec. ‘Much commoner than you’d think.’ He was looking away from me again and seemed defiant.

‘No!’ I said. ‘Darling, tell me you weren’t going to!’

Alec had the grace to look sheepish.

‘As I say, when there’s land or loot hanging on it, it’s not as unusual as you’d think. And in my case I’d be changing back anyway, to what I should have been if my grandfather hadn’t been swayed by the Osbornes.’

‘I suppose so,’ I said. I thought about all of this for a moment, wondering if it had any bearing on the case. ‘It’s all very dynastic,’ I concluded.

‘To tell the truth,’ said Alec, ‘I hardly thought about it until after the war. When I went off to the front, Lena and Gregory might easily have had a son of their own and I might easily have not come back.’

‘Yes,’ I said, sobered. ‘In 1914, Lena can barely have been forty and the girls were still children. I suppose because they had the two of them so quickly and so close together and then no more, one doesn’t think of it. But look at Queen Victoria.’

‘Exactly,’ said Alec. ‘So it was only when I came to visit a year or two ago that I really began to believe in it.’

‘And you met Cara again, and your eyes locked over the estate accounts and –’

‘Oh, shut up!’

‘What if Cara never comes back?’ I said. ‘And the only way to keep the estate together – your bit and Clemence’s bit – is for you to –’

‘Will you shut up!’ said Alec louder, but still laughing. ‘I am not quite such a Mr Collins as to run through the family, even if there is no Mary waiting at the bottom of the barrel.’

‘What about the diamonds?’ I said. ‘Are they part of the “boys only” bit? I must say it’s very unfair if they are.’

‘Don’t know,’ said Alec, shortly.

He didn’t know? This was strange. Diamonds as precious as the rest of the estate put together and he didn’t know whether they were to be his? Or his wife’s, if she ever came back. It spoke volumes to his credit to be so unconcerned about their fate, I thought. But did he know they weren’t insured? Had I told him that? Or was he perhaps this careless only because he assumed that a huge insurance cheque would be his instead?