Dandy Gilver and a Bothersome Number of Corpses (3 page)

‘Now really, Floribunda,’ Pearl said. ‘Play prettily with the other children or Nanny will take you home.’

‘But honestly, Oysie,’ Fleur was saying (this nickname had stuck, as one of the many), ‘what a place. It’s like a barracks. Not right for a party at all.’

‘It’s a tower house,’ I said. Fleur turned dreamily towards me, blinking as though the movement of her head had made her dizzy. ‘A fort, rather than a barracks, actually.’

‘Although,’ she said, ‘come to think of it, I’ve been to some marvellous parties in barracks and at least tonight I won’t have to depart over the wall.’

Mrs Forrester was a woman mixed together from a bloodline reaching back to the time of the Danish kings along with a good shovelful of the Yorkshire soil where the family had always been planted, which mixture had produced a character of pure flint. She froze with a card halfway to the table.

‘She’s teasing, Fenella,’ Aurora said calmly and wagged her finger at Fleur. ‘Straight to bed with no supper unless you stop being naughty.’

‘I don’t want any supper,’ said Fleur. ‘Have you seen it? Great slices of ham as though we were ploughmen! I’m going to dance again.’ She dropped a kiss on all four of our heads and ran on light tiptoes out of the card room with the floating chiffon panels of her party frock streaming out behind her.

‘Doesn’t she look adorable?’ Pearl said, gazing after her.

‘Truly like a little flower,’ said Aurora. ‘That frock makes her look as though she’s dressed in petals.’

‘Three spades,’ said Mrs Forrester, but they were too busy gazing.

‘Mamma-dearest and the Major must have seen her whole pretty life ahead of her the day she was born to have given her that name,’ said Pearl.

‘And yours, Pearl darling,’ said Aurora. ‘You are the pearl of us all.’

‘And you were the dawn of us all, my angel,’ said Pearl. ‘What does Fenella mean, Fenella?’

‘It means my grandmother’s name was Fenella and she had her own fortune to leave as she chose,’ said Mrs Forrester, making me laugh even though I am not sure she meant to be funny.

I laughed again now, remembering.

‘Dandy?’ said Pearl down the line.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Do go on. I was just thinking about Mrs Forrester on Armistice night.’

‘I must have forgotten,’ said Pearl. ‘So, dearest darlingest Dandiest, will you help?’

‘I will,’ I said, interrupting the endearments firmly. ‘Of course I will. But you’ll have to tell me a lot more about what’s wrong. Love or money? It’s usually one of the two.’

‘Not this time,’ said Pearl. ‘It’s remorse. Black engulfing guilt. I thought Fleur had put it quite out of her mind but, as I say, from her letters I think it’s taken hold of her again.’

‘Guilt over what?’

‘Nothing!’ said Pearl. ‘How could little Floramundi have anything to be guilty of? And besides, she’s done everything she can to live a different life, a glorious, selfless, saintly life.’

‘You make it sound as though she’d taken the veil,’ I said. Pearl said nothing. ‘She hasn’t, has she?’ I was not entirely joking now. ‘She’s not in a convent? Pearl?’

‘Not quite,’ said Pearl. ‘She’s in a school.’

‘What do you mean? Studying to
join
a convent?’

‘No, I mean, she’s teaching in a girls’ school. A boarding school. In Portpatrick, in Scotland.’ Now,
I
was speechless. Sweet little Fleur, pretty and rich, had become a schoolmistress? ‘St Columba’s College for Young Ladies,’ said Pearl miserably. ‘And it’s worse than it sounds. It’s run according to a nasty German theory of education – the Foible Method, or something – and the girls all go on to universities and oh . . . poor little Fleur.’

‘It does sound pretty ghastly,’ I agreed. ‘And so you want me to winkle her out of there? Persuade her to resign? I’m not sure I could—’

‘No!’ said Pearl. ‘She’s been there eight years and for all that time she’s been almost happy. I want you to find out what’s gone wrong with her
now
. I want you to stop her running away even from St Columba’s. If we lose her completely again we’ll all die of grief. Mamma-dearest, Sunny and me.’

‘There, there,’ I said. ‘Pearl, please. Of course I will, darling. Only why don’t you and Aurora hop on a train and—’

‘Banished,’ said Pearl. ‘Forbidden the house. Kept at the gates. “Miss Lipscott is not at home to callers.”’

‘Miss Lipscott,’ I echoed. Of course I should have realised that a schoolmistress could not be a married woman, but to think of that faerie-child, that glittering chiffoned girl, still Miss Lipscott at thirty gave me a pang. Add the fact of her fortune, I thought to myself, and the news would
kill
Hugh.

Of course, Alec Osborne was furious.

‘A school?’ he said. ‘A
girls
’ school? I thought we had decided, Dandy.’ He spiked his fork into his beefsteak and attacked it with his knife as though he were sawing through a plank. (And since the beef from the Mains is excellent, the butcher at Dunkeld a stickler for hanging and Mrs Tilling, my cook, a fiend with a tenderiser, he got clean through it in a second and the blade made a painful screeching sound against the porcelain below.)

‘How could we decide such a thing?’ I asked him. ‘We agreed that it would be fun for you if a case came in that was a little more . . . rugged, but we didn’t entertain the idea of turning business away. I didn’t anyway.’

‘What next?’ Alec cried. ‘A lying-in hospital? An harem?’

‘Trouble?’ asked Hugh. He had retired into his own thoughts while I was speaking, naturally, but Alec’s distress had roused him.

‘The curse strikes again,’ Alec said. ‘Gilver and Osborne are engaged to infiltrate a dormitory full of schoolgirls. Or in other words, Dandy is in business and I am to stand and hold her coat.’

‘No one mentioned dorms, darling,’ I murmured.

‘Ah,’ said Hugh, but his interest had already waned. As far as my husband is concerned any man who mixes himself up with such nonsense as detecting has only himself to blame if his path leads to boudoirs, servants’ halls, dress departments or even boarding schools for young ladies.

‘Dear Alec,’ I said, ‘if I could order you up a murder aboard a merchant sea-vessel with a crew of forty bearded sailors in ganseys, I wouldn’t hesitate to do so.’ Alec regarded me coldly. ‘A stolen medicine ball from a boxing gymnasium?’ His lips twitched. ‘Death and dismemberment in a troop of morris dancers?’ Now he really did smile.

‘I’m coming to the town with you,’ he said. ‘Even if I can only press my face against the railings and pine. Where is it, exactly?’

‘Miles away,’ I said. ‘Practically Ireland, and we don’t have any friends anywhere about so it’s the village inn for you. And me too unless I can wangle an invitation to the staffroom sofa.’ Neither of us looked at Hugh. Alec practically strained his neck not doing so.

My husband’s opinion of my new life had been through several shades: blissful ignorance, suspicion of something at once both worse than the truth in its betrayal but miles less troubling by virtue of its being so unexceptional (this when all he knew was that Alec and I were spending more time together than he could properly account for), relief on that score swiftly followed by a bewildered huff about why I should do such an unearthly thing, delight in the money, another bewildered huff lest he was being duped in some twisty double-crossing way by Alec and me, wheels within wheels, treachery inside innocence wrapped in treachery, until we had finally arrived at this uneasy three-legged balancing act. Dinner together discussing a case was fine but one arch comment at a party and Hugh was wont to grow mulish again. I tended just to look the other way and whistle since, while nothing is a greater bore than Hugh in a fully fledged sulk, the thought of losing Gilver and Osborne (especially of losing Osborne, if I am honest) was not to be borne.

‘And it’s not death and dismemberment, is it?’ Alec said. ‘
What
is it?

‘Her sisters—’

‘Whose sisters?’

‘The schoolmistress. Her sisters fear she’s going to bolt but they don’t know why and they’re not allowed to visit her. She’s obviously in some kind of trouble and they want us – well, me – to find out what kind, fix it and resettle her.’

‘Sounds thrilling,’ said Alec.

‘And I want to find out what she’s doing there in the first place,’ I said. ‘This girl, Alec, was an absolute darling – pretty, lively, clever, adored and indulged, free to live any life she chose . . . that’s the puzzle I want to solve: how on earth she ended up an old maid teaching in a girls’ school.’

‘I take it back then,’ said Alec. ‘Sounds a bit
too
exciting when you put it that way.’

‘No, but really,’ I said. ‘Hugh, you remember Fleur Lipscott, don’t you?’ I had been looking forward, rather meanly, to regaling him.

Hugh considered the name and then shook his head. ‘Never heard of her. Lipscott?’

I suppressed a sigh. ‘There were three sisters: Fleur, Pearl and Aurora. They were at our wedding. You danced with Pearl at a ball at the Esslemonts’.’ Hugh was shaking his head as slowly and steadily as the pendulum in a long-case clock. ‘The two elder married rather late on.’ More shaking and at last I relented. ‘They’re all very rich. Left well off by their father, Maj—’

‘Johnny Lipscott’s girls?’ said Hugh. ‘Why didn’t you just say that? Yes, of course I remember them. One of the Forrester boys got one and some magnate no one knows nabbed another. I don’t know who snapped up number three.’

‘No one did,’ I told him patiently. ‘She never married and she’s working as a schoolmistress in Wigtownshire.’

‘Really?’ said Hugh. ‘Now, that
is
interesting. Is she merely employed there or has she invested in the place? These single women are notorious for sinking funds into tea shops and dress shops.’

‘Hugh, you can’t be serious,’ I said. ‘She’s thirty and she’s got some dark and dreadful secret in her past, probably a child or an elopement or something.’

‘I’m lost,’ Alec said.

‘It could be anything,’ Hugh retorted.

‘A spell in burlesque, gambling debts, opium . . .’

‘What are you talking about?’ said Alec looking between the two of us.

‘Hugh – it’s too revolting – thinks she might do for Donald, don’t you, darling?’ I said, expecting to shrivel him. He was unrepentant.

‘He’s eighteen,’ he said.

‘Yes, but we’re not living in eighteen hundred and eighteen.’

‘Osborne?’ said Hugh, fixing Alec with a stare. Even a man as lost to silliness as this one, it was to be understood, would side with him when it came to the hard matter of a dowry.

‘I wouldn’t have thanked my father for a thirty-year-old bride when I was eighteen,’ Alec said. ‘But of course, I’m thirty-seven now. If she’s really so very rich and so very pretty, maybe I can steal her away to Dunelgar. Her sisters can always come and visit her there.’

Hugh cannot tell when Alec is joking and got a look upon his face reminiscent of mild toothache at the thought that he had shown his hand and alerted another to the prize. He fell silent, we arranged to set off on what passed for a fast train the following morning and Alec left early to supervise his packing (Barrow, his valet, is a man of decided opinion and forceful nature, but Alec always tries to have some say) and pow-wow with his estate manager about the many jobs which May inevitably brings. I spent a rueful moment reflecting on how deeply entrenched Alec had become in his pasture and crops and his timber holdings since he arrived at Dunelgar five years before. He sometimes seemed as happy discussing barley or pheasant chicks with Hugh as discussing suspects and alibis with me, and it often made me wonder which was the real Alec Osborne, if either.

I was sitting on my bed describing the little I knew about the case to Grant, my maid, to allow her to choose my wardrobe for me (I, unlike Alec, gave up all thoughts of influence over my outfits long ago) when a knock came at the door.

Grant and I stared at one another and ran through all possibilities swiftly. My sons were at school; we had no guests staying in the house; none of the other maids would dare risk Grant’s wrath by attempting to breach the sanctum and if Alec had forgotten to tell me something he would have rung at the front doorbell and sent a message to me. He makes quite free with the downstairs of Gilverton in the hours of daylight but he would never come a-knocking at my bedroom door at night.

‘Come in?’ I said and Grant nodded, approving my handling of this unheard-of development in our lives.

The door opened, revealing Hugh.

‘Ah, good,’ he said. ‘You’re still up, Dandy. Well, I just wanted to say this: Donald is coming down at the end of this term – in a few short weeks, actually. He has no interest whatsoever in university, thank goodness since he has no aptitude for it either, and unless he comes home and takes over Benachally he’s only going to racket about and ruin us. Living at Benachally alone would be rather dull and so why not? I wouldn’t have ordered her off a menu with that size of an age difference, but you yourself said you like the girl and so . . . a word to the wise. Don’t let Osborne have it all his own way.’

I was speechless, and so said nothing.

‘Different if it were Teddy,’ Hugh said, ‘but Donald has had a ribbon in his pocket since he was ten.’

‘They don’t carry ribbons in their pockets any more, Hugh,’ I said. ‘Even you didn’t carry rib—’

‘Just a figure of speech,’ said Hugh. ‘Don’t quibble. He has had a caravan of village girls following him around since he was old enough to wink at them and if we don’t get him married off in short order I can quite imagine that someday it will be a caravan of village fathers, with shotguns. Which would you rather?’

Grant was rolling stockings in a kind of paroxysm of embarrassment of which Hugh was sublimely unaware.

‘He is too young,’ I said. ‘And she is too old. If you’re worried about shotguns’ – I glanced at Grant but Hugh did not so much as follow my eyes – ‘then threaten him with your own. Oh, how I wish he would just join the army and get rid of his high jinks with his brother officers where he can do no harm.’

‘He’s not joining the army,’ said Hugh, rather shortly. ‘Not now. Not soon and I fervently hope not ever.’