The Winter Ground (17 page)

‘You’ll do what you’re bid,’ he shouted to her retreating back. ‘The spec’s about all of us, not just you.’

What he said about Topsy was true enough. She was a little hesitant about the state of her hands, but of fearfulness there was not a whisper.

‘We’ve checked everything thoroughly now,’ said Andrew Merryman, when I asked if he could account for it. ‘And no one has been here to make any more mischief. We’ve all been keeping an eye out for “unsavoury characters hanging around”.’ There was a faint laugh in his voice. ‘Makes a ch-change,’ he explained, ‘from shopkeepers and village bobbies keeping an eye on us.’

‘Do they really?’ I said. My short sojourn with the circus folk had already rendered them ordinary in my eyes and I could not imagine it, could barely remember that first impression: the smoking child, the giant and the bear.

‘You’ve no idea,’ he said. ‘I can sometimes face them down with my best Old Harrovian’ – as he spoke, the circus fell away from his voice and a haughty, icy drawl replaced it – ‘but I get t-t-t—’ He flashed his eyes furiously and pointed to his mouth.

‘Tongue-tied?’

‘Thank you,’ he said, letting all of his breath go in a rush. I could not decide whether, like Tiny, he was teasing me. He had not seemed sufficiently at ease with himself to do such a thing but perhaps he was
perfectly
at ease with himself and now getting that way with me too. I gave him the same stern, governess-ish look that I used on his friend and returned to business.

‘And are you keeping your things under lock and key?’ I asked. ‘Are you keeping all your ropes and poles and whatnot close by you?’

‘No need,’ said Andrew. ‘No one in the circus would ever tamper with another man’s props.’

There it was again, the wilful, blinkered and infuriating refusal to look at the plain facts and call them by their name. I heard the same thing from Topsy and Ma. No one circus would do such a thing; no one circus would even dream of it.

‘But it happened, Mrs Cooke,’ I said when I could not listen to it in silence any longer. ‘The rope, the swing, the flour, the balloons and the whip. You told me Ana did it.’

‘I said I was wrong there, didn’t I?’ she replied. ‘She’d never have swapped that rope like that. She couldn’t have. So then the whip wun’t her neither.’

‘Well, if no one in the circus can possibly be up to anything, then all these strange happenings have been the work of elves and pixies and I am wasting my time,’ I said, not even trying to hide my exasperation.

‘Oh, somebody’s up to
some
thing,’ she said. ‘I can feel it in my … well, in my water there, pardon me for mentioning it in your presence. It’s worrying our Ana half to death, the poor maid, and I’m vexed as a hen she won’t talk to you, my beauty, no more than she’ll talk to me. But all them tricks wurr a flatty what come round making trouble. Must have been.’

‘Somebody’s up to something, but not the very things that have happened?’

‘Never, not no way,’ she said.

‘And the rope switch was hardly a trick,’ I said. ‘I’d have called that attempted murder.’

‘That’s what I’m saying,’ said Mrs Cooke. ‘That proves it. ‘Nobody cir—’

I held up my hand; if I heard it again I should scream.

‘You know your business, my beauty, but I know mine,’ said Mrs Cooke and she sat back in her chair, folded her arms under her considerable bosom and began nodding, very slowly, as though she would never stop.

I gave a sigh and left her. All I could say was that I was glad
I
was not dangling from the rafters, or galloping around on a bare-back pony jumping through hoops. I was glad that Donald and Teddy were signed up for no greater a commission than to lift a section of ring fence up and slot it back into place again, and even at that I told them to stay well back when the horses were passing and not to stand under anything tied to a beam.

Dinner with the Wilsons before the show was every bit as excruciating as might be expected. Hugh declined to attend and not even the clamour of the boys as they told him in shrill and outraged detail what he was missing could sway him, but Alec was there looking almost as stony as Hugh might have as the rest of the assemblage was introduced to him.

Gathered in the hall of the castle, where two sumptuous fires of apple wood crackled and flickered in the grates and the shadows of holly branches danced on the plaster walls, were every raffish younger son, every disgraced wife and discarded husband, every overly merry widow which Perthshire and points north could muster. The hall, usually as calm as a chapel, rang with laughter and glittered with jewels – they had all opted for a fair amount of finery this evening, even to go and sit on wooden benches in a tent – and the smell was an ever thickening fug of French scent, hair oil and that new top note at all the parties just then: the smell, unidentifiable at first whiff but unmistakable ever after, of feathers and metal threads warming as the women in the fringed dresses grew hot and raucous, cocktails in hand.

In the middle of it all sat Robin Laurie, lolling on a sofa like a leopard in a tree, his own cocktail barely tasted and pushed away from him and his hip flask unstoppered and constantly at his lips.

Margot Stirling had even had the nerve to bring along the boy, a chauffeur to my recollection or a gardener perhaps, for whose sake she had given up her name and her reputation and with whom she was now ensconced in a tiny cottage on her brother’s estate. I was very glad that Hugh was not here to see her, and even more glad that he was not here to see the way she glanced at Alec and then winked at me. The boy himself looked perfectly at his ease in his surroundings, gulping his drink and affecting an insolent sneer, and the others for the most part ignored him – Margot was a chum and therefore a given, but there were limits – and shrieked across the room at one another.

‘But darling, that’s what I told you. I don’t think I ever did go to one when I was tiny. I think this is my very first time.’

‘Such a thrill! I’m much too excited to eat any boring old dinner first.’

‘But I don’t want to sit near the front under the thundering hooves, for I shall scream.’

Albert Wilson bustled and scurried, nagging the sweet butler about drinks and practically bouncing on the balls of his feet with glee to be hosting such a party. At least, I noted, the guests were not laughing at him or teasing him into greater vulgarities than he might naturally display, although their wholesale disregard was just as rude in its own way. They acted as though he were another butler, and one with no tray and therefore nothing to offer them that they could possibly want.

When Ina arrived in the hall, Albert made extra efforts to gain their attention and actually managed to get through about a third of his prepared talk about her health and the guarding of it before the shrieking began again and his audience was lost to him.

‘Now, really, I must just tell you,’ he said, his voice rising. The chattering voices only rose still higher and drowned him. ‘And please, ladies, no cigarettes, I implore you.’

‘Don’t trouble yourself, Albert dear,’ said Ina, ‘I shall go into the dining room and take my seat. Please, dear, please.’

Robin Laurie, hearing this exchange, making quite sure that he did hear it, I thought, from the way he leaned forward and stared at Ina as she was talking, spoke up at once.

‘Splendid idea, Mrs Wilson,’ he said, his eyes dancing, ‘let’s go to the dining room and wait for dinner there.’

The shriekers turned to face him as one and there was a moment of quiet, before the first of them answered.

‘What a naughty Robin,’ she said. ‘Why on earth?’

‘We can’t let our hostess sit all alone,’ said Laurie, ‘and you have spread yourselves all over the place in here and left her nowhere safe to perch. I told you all about Mrs Wilson, didn’t I?’

‘Such fun,’ said another of the women, this one a rather raddled forty-year-old got up like a girl in pink frills and white satin shoes. ‘I haven’t gone in to wait since nursery tea. Do let’s.’

So, to Albert Wilson’s bewilderment and his wife’s silent fury, the shrieking women and drawling men put down their cocktail glasses and trooped along after Ina into the dining room, where obeying the name cards set out at each place they sat around the table in a horseshoe all staring at her alone on the fourth side.

After a long and rather hollow silence, someone giggled, and one of the parlour maids poked her head in at the door, her eyes round with surprise to see us all there.

‘Perhaps we could have a glass of wine while we wait?’ said Laurie. Albert Wilson leapt to his feet.

‘Oh yes, splendid, an excellent idea. I believe there was going to be sherry with the soup so maybe we could have that now and then if I can just …’ He drew the butler off into a corner of the room, but still his hissed questions about the sherry and the temperature of those bottles of good Sauternes were clearly audible. The giggles began to grow.

‘What the bloody hell is he playing at?’ said Alec to me under his breath.

‘He’s just a wrecker,’ I said, not caring that Laurie must guess we were discussing him, for we were both staring right at him as we murmured to one another. ‘Just a silly little wrecker. And the rest of them!’ I glanced around at the faces, some still sparkling with the enjoyment of the moment, some bored again already. ‘My God,’ I said, ‘it’s like the fall of Rome in here.’

At that, even Alec giggled a little and I almost joined him, although I was quite serious really in my way and I did not dare look at Ina. Fortunately the kitchen staff came up trumps; perhaps they had been well beforehand as my own dear Mrs Tilling always prefers to be, or perhaps there was a gas ring which could be pressed into service to speed things up. One way or another, the soup began to arrive before the vexed question of the sherry could be settled and while it was handed and drunk things became slightly more normal again.

Alec, bless him for it, dug deep within himself, all the way to prep school tea with the housemaster’s wife and after-church chats with ladies from the village, and kept the table afloat through soup, fish, venison and spiced steamed pudding, valiantly quizzing Albert on the broad sweep and the nitty-gritty of the common house brick far beyond anything I could have imagined possible. Of course, the topic rendered the rest of the company helpless with silent amusement and one or two of Wilson’s earnest answers even brought gales of quite loud laughter. Meanwhile, I did what I could with Ina, reminding myself more than a little of a governess taking a child for a long walk in a high wind, one part exhortation and three parts dragging. By the time the meal was over I was exhausted.

Thankfully, there was no time for coffee in the drawing room and port around the table, just some hot cocoa to help the spiced pudding do its work and then we were off to bundle ourselves into furs and make our way through the icy night to the circus.

And what a very different prospect it presented, with the great white stable tent glowing like a full moon come to earth and the performing tent starry with lanterns. There were no tickets to be sold but there Ma Cooke was in the little ticket wagon anyway, with her black hair piled on top of her head and festooned with gold-coloured beads as bright as the rings in her ears.

‘Roll up, roll up, roll up there, my fine ladies and gents,’ she said. ‘Madame Polina welcomes you to Cooke’s Family Circus, the oldest circus as ever was in all this scepter’d isle and still the finest.’ Of course there were giggles at that, but they seemed less harsh than they had before, less braying, with a little real pleasure at the magic, even the tawdry magic, of it all.

At the door of the tent, where the canvas flaps were covered with sleeves of red tonight and looped back with gold braid ropes, stood Donald and Teddy. They looked rather splendid in their blue satin coats and pillbox hats (all well-doused with Keating’s powder) and with red ribbon hastily tacked down the sides of their old school trousers by Nanny that afternoon – proper circus, as Ma Cooke would say – and none of the guests gave them a second glance, except Alec who pressed ten-shilling notes into their hands as he passed, with a wink. They winked back, but scrupulously ignored me.

Inside, Albert Wilson ushered Ina into a seat in the back row to the left of the door and stood guard on the end to stop anyone joining her there, before taking his place a couple of rows in front. He need not have worried. In the manner of the bright young things they were hoping to be taken for (and might, in fact, be) all of the ladies raced to the front and packed themselves in like children on a school treat, jostling and giggling, and pleading with the men to sit in the row behind to protect them. The men, for the most part, filed into the row with good grace, only Robin Laurie himself standing aloof and amused in the doorway, finishing his cigarette, before sidling into the back row across the aisle from Ina, where he leaned against a pole and stretched his long legs out in front of him. Ina, looking straight ahead, nevertheless scowled and shifted slightly in her seat until she was turned far enough away from him that even his shoes must be out of sight to her.

I sighed and led Alec to a seat midway between the pack of giggling idiots at the front and whatever nonsense was passing between Laurie and Ina at the back.

‘And remember,’ I said to him in a low voice, ‘we’re not here to amuse ourselves. We’re here to watch. Watch their faces, watch for hints of dark passion, watch for glares of hatred, watch for … anything really.’

But there was nothing to see; there was no hint at all of what would happen until the very moment it did.

Sallie Wolf, who was huddled beside the gramophone close against the ring fence behind one of the king poles, now grasped the handle in both hands and cranked it furiously, looking like Buster Keaton on one of those frantic handcart journeys along desolate railway tracks (a journey which he takes inexplicably often to my mind; I have never known anyone in real life who did so). When the contraption was well wound, the child set the arm down with a slight screech and the tent began to fill with a rather reedy oompah-oompah, which Sallie augmented with a little drum of her own, and soon there was enough noise to make one feel a thrill of anticipation.