Dandy Gilver and the Proper Treatment of Bloodstains Read online

  I had been wondering how to lead her towards the topic of interest to me, but now I thought that surely such a featherhead as this, one who puddled her way through life cushioned against its cares by her own innocence of them, must often find that questions loomed up at her out of nowhere.

  ‘What did you think of Mr Balfour, Millie?’ I said. ‘Did you see much of him?’

  Millie disappeared into the scullery and when she returned she was carrying a cleaver in her hand and looking as stern as her pink and white face and round cheeks would allow.

  ‘Too much, miss,’ she said. ‘He was a bad man and he did silly things that he shouldn’t have.’ My stomach turned inside me. Not Millie too! She was a child and had not half the guile of some children one has encountered.

  ‘To you, Millie?’ I said, hoping that perhaps she was merely repeating gossip.

  ‘Auntie Kitty said to me not to say,’ she said. ‘Because what you don’t know can’t hurt you and if Stanl— I mean, if a nice boy one day asked you anything, then he wouldn’t want to know the nasty things that you had done.’

  With a sinking certainty, I knew that Millie’s hopes regarding Stanley were doomed; he was a young man of great ambition and even greater self-satisfaction and his plans, whatever they were, would not include taking the hand of a simple scullerymaid and making her dreams come true. As I watched Millie centre one of the trimmed trotters on the table and take aim, I wondered suddenly how long she would be able to hang on to that simplicity, where there were good men and bad men and simple right and wrong and what one did not know could not harm one. She raised the cleaver to her shoulder and brought it down so fast that the blade whistled before it split the bone apart with a crack like a gunshot. The two halves dropped away and the cleaver was left sticking up out of the table. Millie bit her lip and gasped.

  ‘I’ll get one of the boys to wrench it out for . . .’ I began, but Millie had splayed one hand on the table, gripped the handle hard with the other and, after one mighty tug, pulled the cleaver out again. I could not take my eyes away from her hand – spread out broad and strong on the table-top – and could not help hearing again in my mind what she had said about making sure a nice boy never knew the nasty things one might have done. Did Stanley have a reason to hate Pip Balfour, as had so many of the others? Would Millie, blind with love, have gone as far as avenging her beloved footman?

  ‘Now you really must get a board, Molly-moo,’ I said. ‘Or that table will be kindling by the time you’re done.’ Millie giggled and wiped her cheek, leaving a smear of blood there, then went to the scullery to fetch one.

  9

  Lollie was in brighter spirits by the evening. The police had given permission for the funeral arrangements to proceed on the understanding that cremation was out of the question; the will was to be read the next day, allowing Lollie thereafter to begin to make plans for her widowhood; and as for her state of lonely isolation, Great Aunt Gertrude was on her way. How exactly the old lady expected to get from Inverness to Edinburgh, when the nation was at a standstill and strike officials were stopping motorcars left and right to check that they were not carrying blackleg goods, was unclear. It seemed she had left home without maid or chauffeur, but with a full tank of petrol, two cans in the dicky and an unshakeable belief that her long lifetime of getting exactly what she wanted when she wanted it would hold good, whatever pickets, blockades and rioting gangs might be doing to disrupt the lives of lesser mortals than she.

  Downstairs, Mr Faulds was safely back in the bosom of the household after Mrs Hepburn’s selfless dash to the police station to gather him home, and the amazing news of their tryst (which, to give the two principals their due, they did not attempt to rise above but instead acknowledged with throat-clearings and jaw-scratchings on the butler’s side and with blushing smiles from his beloved) gave a larky air to the servants’ hall which an uninformed guest would have found quite appalling.

  Miss Rossiter’s position as a newcomer was most welcome, as it conferred upon her the opportunity to sit rather quietly in the midst of the party (and a party it almost was) watching faces, chasing down glances and listening to anything which was not quite being said. The rest of the servants were gathered around the piano, beer glasses in hand, singing an endless selection of popular melodies from the music halls, and rather saltier ones than Mr Faulds had hinted were in their repertoire too: even as far as something apparently called ‘Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-De-Ay’ in which each verse was worse than the last.

  ‘You certainly have been practising, Mattie,’ said Mr Faulds when the hall boy had got through a complicated run of trills in the lead-in to a love song.

  ‘Aye, I have,’ said Mattie, ‘but it’s more fun to play out loud and no’ fret that I’m gonny disturb anybody.’ He pressed down the loud pedal and fairly banged the notes out of the thing, and Clara and Phyllis pressed their hands together under their hearts, fluttered their eyelids and began singing.

  ‘Oh Cupid, your harp had

  me fooled at the start as

  it told me his love was for keeps,

  but he’s scarpered . . .’

  ‘Take the man’s part, Mr Faulds,’ said Mrs Hepburn when the girls had got through the first verse and the others had joined them for the chorus (Oh, pluck my heart out now, why don’t you, for everything else you could pluck is away), but Mr Faulds shook his head and held his hands up, protesting.

  ‘I’m no singer,’ he said, ‘and John knows this one.’ John straightened up and cleared his throat.

  ‘Forgive me, my maiden,

  you are most mistaken,

  if you’re telling me

  that you languish forsaken,’

  he sang in a fair approximation of the most affected music-hall swain. All he needed was a straw boater on the back of his head and a cane to twirl.

  ‘Oh, pierce me through the heart, why don’t you?

  For everything else is torn in two,’

  sang the company. I wondered if Millie, carolling away merrily, understood the import of this lyric, if anyone did, and I found myself sharing a little sympathy with the only member of our number who was not lifting his voice in song; Harry, hunched over his latest strike bulletin, scowling at the din.

  ‘I’m worried that mistress will hear them,’ I said to him, going to sit on the next seat to his at the long table. ‘It doesn’t seem right.’

  ‘She won’t,’ said Harry, ‘she’ll either be in her boudoir or in that wee parlour at the back. As long as they pipe down before she goes to her bedroom,’ he pointed straight up with his thumb, ‘we’ll be all right. And anyway, do her some good for a change to see the world getting on without a care when she’s miserable.’

  This was remarkably callous, I thought, and I could not let it pass unchallenged.

  ‘What has she done to deserve such scorn?’ I said.

  He had the grace to look uncomfortable as he answered.

  ‘Not her in particular, miss,’ he said. ‘Just her sort. People like her in general, I mean.’

  ‘Oh Harry,’ I said, ‘there is no such thing as people in general. Everyone is someone very particular.’

  He argued on – his sort will always argue on – but I had stopped listening because a thought which had been nudging gently against me all day now struck me square. Everyone had agreed that no one could open a locked and bolted door without being heard by those in the rooms nearby. Miss Rossiter, however, was not where she should have been that night, close by the sub-basement door. And Mrs Hepburn and Mr Faulds – who ought to have been asleep, one beside each of the other doors – had been cavorting together. Now, had Mrs Hepburn said where they were? I concentrated hard to bring the memory of the conversation back to mind, and I was almost certain that she had used the phrase ‘I was with him’. Yes, she had said, ‘I was with him,’ definitely not ‘He was with me,’ which meant that her room, above mine, was empty. I sat back.

  Of course that still left Phyllis and Clara who would hea
r the back door, but then Phyllis had come into that seventeen pounds somehow, and perhaps Clara was an unusually deep sleeper and Phyllis knew it – had not Phyllis complained of how Clara snored? – but how could Phyllis know that Mrs Hepburn was at the front of the house, tucked in with Mr Faulds under the red chenille bedspread, and that I was four flights up on Lollie’s chaise?

  ‘Are you all right, Miss Rossiter?’ said Harry, who had stopped talking quite some time ago.

  ‘Fine, Harry,’ I said. ‘I think, though, that I shall say goodnight.’ I needed at least notes if not diagrams for this.

  Despite the lusty singing and the glasses of beer which were going strong when I left the room, I had not been in bed long when I heard the party dispersing. Indeed, Harry, Stanley, John and Mattie leaving by the kitchen door sounded like an army on manoeuvres. Mr Faulds locked up after them and shot the bolts with his usual gusto and then I heard Mrs Hepburn enter her room above my head. Mr Faulds and the girls descending the stairs on the other side of the wall was enough to make the water tremble in my bedside glass and, when he secured the sub-basement door, once again the bolts going home rang out all around and above like a hammer on an anvil. I shook my head. No one could possibly have breached this citadel without someone knowing.

  Mr Faulds strode away and there was silence, except for the sound of Mrs Hepburn moving around in her stockinged feet, then I heard someone scamper down towards me from the kitchen level. I sprang out of bed and opened my door a crack. Clara was rounding the corner of the passage with her shoes in one hand and a candle in the other, unguarded and guttering.

  ‘Oh! Miss Rossiter,’ she said. ‘You nearly made me jump out my skin.’

  ‘Everything all right?’ I asked her.

  ‘Fine,’ she said, her little eyes as wide as she could make them. ‘I just had to – you know – go a place before I turned in.’

  I frowned at her.

  ‘But Mr Faulds has locked up,’ I said. ‘If you went to the lavatory, Clara dear, how did you get back in?’

  She flushed slightly, I could just see it in the light of the candle.

  ‘Oh well, you know,’ she said and started sidling towards her door.

  ‘Didn’t he lock up?’ I persisted. ‘I was sure I heard him. Perhaps I should go up and check.’

  ‘No!’ said Clara, taking a step towards me. ‘Don’t . . . I mean . . . I’m sorry, Miss Rossiter, but that was a wee fib there.’

  ‘A fib?’

  ‘Not a bad one,’ she said. ‘Nothing to do with . . . what’s been happening, I mean.’

  I wondered if I could carry off the command that had sprung to my mind. I decided to try it.

  ‘Tell the truth, Clara,’ I said. ‘And shame the devil.’

  She stared helplessly at me for a moment and then, as though giving up some internal struggle, she lifted her hands and let them fall again.

  ‘Come in, dear,’ I said, stepping aside and opening the door wider. ‘Sit down and tell me what you wouldn’t yesterday.’

  ‘Yesterday?’ she said, and then she nodded, remembering.

  ‘Yesterday,’ I said, guiding her to the chair. She perched on its edge.

  ‘It’s what I said about “souvenirs”,’ she said. ‘I – I fell, Miss Rossiter. A while back now.’

  ‘You had a baby?’ I said. ‘To master?’

  ‘No,’ Clara said. ‘I mean to say, I was going to and I never told anyone. I just laced my stays tighter and let out my dress seams, like he told me to, and Phyllis never noticed and then, when it was getting nearly time, it came and it was already gone and then that was that.’

  ‘Your baby died?’ I said gently.

  ‘It never even . . . cos you’re no’ supposed to keep yourself tight-laced, are you, miss? Or maybe it wasn’t as close to the right time as I thought. But it was labour, Miss Rossiter, that’s for sure. I’ve seen my mammy labouring and there’s no mistaking it. Except . . . it seems like a dream now when I think back. It’s hard to believe it happened.’

  ‘Where were you, Clara?’ I asked, wondering how on earth a girl could have gone through such a thing all alone, in this houseful of people, without someone hearing.

  ‘Up in the nurseries,’ she said. ‘Right up top there.’

  ‘And what did you do with . . . I mean, what did you do afterwards?’

  Clara frowned then and shook her head as though trying to clear it.

  ‘Sometimes I think I came down to the furnace,’ she said. ‘But other times I remember wrapping up a bundle. I don’t know, to be sure. Maybe . . .’ She lifted her head and stared up at the low ceiling of my room. ‘Maybe it’s still up there.’

  It might have seemed fantastical that she did not know, but I had heard of such things before; there was even a long and ugly name for it which I had, thankfully, forgotten.

  ‘And so tonight?’ I asked her softly. ‘Were you all the way upstairs on the nursery floor just now, Clara? Searching?’

  She lowered her head and blinked at me, then she smiled faintly.

  ‘No, miss. I was in the kitchen.’ She screwed up her nose, looking the very picture of discomfort. ‘Mrs Hepburn made that chocolate thing for mistress’s dinner and she hardly touched it and I asked Millie to set it aside in the scullery for me. I just can’t say no to chocolate, miss, and by the time I’ve paid into my post office book and given something to my ma and got all my doings I’ve never got a penny spare to buy myself some.’

  Of course, I should have scolded her, but who would have had the heart? I opened the door for her to leave, only managing to say:

  ‘You should have torn yourself away from the sing-song and eaten it up earlier. You shouldn’t be scampering about at night. Or eating chocolate for that matter. It’ll give you nightmares.’

  It was I, however, who had the wretched night, reeling at top speed through an endless succession of short, senseless dreams: in one I was in the wings of a music-hall stage listening to the compère announcing Mr Faulds and me, but I did not know what the act was that we were presenting and I could not speak to ask anyone; in another I was searching through the laundry rooms of the convalescent home in Perth, undoing bundles of soiled linen looking for something I did not want to find and shushing an unknown someone who was whimpering somewhere close by, telling this unknown someone that we had to be quiet, that no one must ever know; in yet another I was sitting in the flower room at Gilverton, which was as close as I could get to dreaming of Miss Rossiter’s bedroom, I think (one cannot introduce new settings to one’s dream world with swift abandon), and there were men in miners’ helmets with their lanterns lit and smoking, and they were trying the door, rattling the handle and then peering in at me through the window mouthing at me to open up for them. Great Aunt Gertrude was somewhere, I knew she was, although I could not hear her. ‘Ssh!’ I said to Mattie who was banging on a long row of boots and shoes with a drumstick as though playing a glockenspiel. ‘Ssh!’ I hissed. ‘She’ll hear you!’

  I woke in the cool light of six o’clock and lay gasping, looking around at my room as though at an oasis after forty nights in the wilderness. And here came Mr Faulds to open us up for business once more, the nails in his boots striking hard against the stone floor of the passageway. He pulled back the bolts, giving slightly less than full measure, I thought; certainly it did not ring out in that bone-shaking way it had the evening before. Or perhaps it was just that sounds carried further at night; one often reads that they do. I heard him put the key in the lock, turn it and throw the door wide. This he did with as much brio as he could, sending it bouncing on its hinges.

  ‘Lovely day, Etheldreda,’ he called upwards and I could hear Eldry’s faint answer.

  ‘Tell Mrs Hepburn two eggs for me this morning,’ he said. ‘And I wouldn’t mind a taste of that ham just to see if it’s fit for company.’ Whistling, he turned, passed along to the stairs again and skipped up them, making a little tune with his shoes like a tap-dancer.

  One of the bene
fits of Miss Rossiter’s life, I thought to myself as I dressed for the visit to the solicitor’s office, was the release from all concerns of wardrobe. Had I been appearing as Mrs Gilver, I should have been lucky to get away without several changes before the competing demands of sobriety and decoration were satisfied, for while one would not wish to look jaunty upon such an errand, neither would one want one’s black cape and veil to outdo the widow’s. Nothing, unless it be wearing white to a wedding, is poorer form than that. As it was, Miss Rossiter got her grey serge, lisle stockings, black shoes, felt hat and armband on in four minutes flat. I was even becoming used to the look of my scraped-back hair and shining, soap-and-water face and wondered whether I were not looking rather better than usual – more youthful, fresher somehow – a possibility I put down to the settled routines and clean living of a servant’s life until I realised that between the endless note-making, the rushing about the streets, the nightmares and the way that strong drink punctuated the hours, my two days spent below stairs in Heriot Row had been the least settled of recent memory. Probably it was only the dim light and the elderly looking-glass which gave the effect and if I glanced into Lollie’s dressing-table glass upstairs in the sunshine I should be disabused.

  ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t rather wait until Great Aunt Gertrude gets here?’ I asked Lollie, when I got to her. She simply gazed back at me. The skin around her eyes was yellow and her hands trembled as she lifted her hat onto her head. ‘Here, let me,’ I said. I secured her hat none too firmly, for they are fearsome things to stick into someone else’s hair if one is not accustomed to it, or perhaps just if one has finer feelings than Grant, who wields a hatpin like Captain Ahab with his last harpoon.

  Lollie shook her head.

  ‘Mr Hardy wants to know if there’s anything of note in it,’ she said. Her voice was gravelly as though with exhaustion, very worrying in one known to have slept away the bulk of the last two days, and I determined to get her doctor to her when we returned from our outing. ‘Besides, there might be something in it about a funeral – instructions, I mean, or requests, or something. It’s best to get it over and done with.’