Dandy Gilver and a Spot of Toil and Trouble

by Catriona McPherson

  ‘It can be done,’ said Alec, ‘if Mrs Cornelius, Mrs Westhousen, Mrs Schichtler and Mrs Rynsburger don’t mind not getting to sit in the front row and enjoy the show. But instead …’

  Which way would they jump, I wondered, turning to where the four of them were sitting. It is so hard to tell with American ladies: in some ways so prim and in some ways such hoydens.

  ‘… instead be in the play?’ said Mrs Rynsburger.

  ‘Now, hold on!’ said little Mrs Schichtler.

  ‘Playing what?’ said Mrs Cornelius.

  Alec glanced down at his notes. ‘A servant, an attendant, an apparition, and a king.’

  ‘We’ve cast the only “king” that’s a queen,’ said Grant hastily.

  ‘Yes, and that’s another thing I need to talk to you about,’ said Leonard. ‘That costume is completely wrong. A white robe like the others and plain gold coronet by tomorrow or you’re out.’

  Grant waved him away like a gnat and persisted, ‘Who’s the other queen?’

  Alec shifted a little and gave a sickly smile to the statuesque Mrs Rynsburger. ‘It’s a lot to ask,’ he said, ‘and if you think it would be undignified, I shall understand completely …’, and at last I caught his meaning. Mrs Rynsburger was not only tall, she was also broad of shoulder and narrow of hip and her features were strong and definite.

  ‘It won’t be the first time,’ she said with a good-natured sigh. ‘I spent my girlhood in just the same way. Who am I?’

  ‘James the Sixth and First,’ Alec said. ‘He wasn’t a great hairy beast of a man by all accounts, if that’s any comfort.’

  ‘And who am I? Who am I?’ said Mrs Westhousen, actually bouncing in her chair and clapping her hands.

  ‘Take your pick,’ Alec said. ‘Although you’re rather too bonny to make much of an apparition so a servant or an attendant, dear lady, as you will.’

  ‘This servant’s not the porter?’ said Mrs Cornelius, provoking a general titter and a few sharp looks my way that flooded my cheeks again.

  ‘Attendant!’ said Mrs Westhousen. ‘It doesn’t sound quite so lowly. Is my dress pretty?’

  ‘Your costume will be the male servant’s costume with some kind of …’ He waved a hand and cast a look of supplication towards Grant.

  ‘Headdress,’ she said. ‘I’ll make it and an overskirt too.’

  ‘But don’t go mad,’ said Leonard again, pointing at the silk-slashed sleeves, the satin petticoats and brocade overdress, the pearl embroidery and velvet trim she had donned to walk over the back of the dark stage for half a minute.

  ‘Which makes me the apparition, does it?’ said Mrs Cornelius. ‘Well, my mother always said this face would be good for something.’ We all murmured politely but she was right.

  ‘And you’re the servant, Jesamond,’ said Mrs Westhousen to Mrs Schichtler. ‘Oh what fun! How much more fun to be part of it all. One big happy band!’ They looked so delighted, even the actors beginning to relax again, grinning and giving one another pointed looks as if to say it would be such a bore to be nannying amateurs on opening night. So soon after vowing I would never set foot on a stage again as long as I lived I actually felt a little left-out, a little crestfallen and wistful even. It had been fun, lavatorial lines aside.

  ‘No,’ said Mrs Schichtler.

  ‘Oh Jesamond!’ Mrs Rynsburger cried. ‘You can’t be a stick-in-the-mud when dear Alec has been so clever and saved the play. You can’t be so mean, surely!’

  ‘I can’t do it,’ said Mrs Schichtler. ‘I tried as a schoolgirl and I disgraced myself. From nerves. I physically … disgraced myself. In front of everyone.’

  ‘Oh, but you’re older and wiser now,’ said Mrs Westhousen. ‘You speak in public all the time at the museum luncheons.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t be so hasty …’ said Leonard. ‘If you mean you might actually …’

  ‘To be honest, Mrs Schichtler,’ said Alec. ‘The servant’s costume wouldn’t fit you anyway. And I’m not sure Miss Grant has time to be taking in hose as well as everything else she needs to do by curtain up tomorrow.’

  ‘Although,’ said Leonard with another darted glance at the queenly Tudor gown, ‘she is obviously a quick worker.’

  ‘So can one of us three do two of the new roles?’ said Mrs Westhousen.

  ‘Or can I?’ said Grant, not keen to relinquish higher billing without a fight.

  ‘Or,’ said Alec, with a grin spreading upon his face, ‘we could give the little part to the only one who’s out in the cold, couldn’t we? We’ve seen what she can do with the part of a lowly servant after all, haven’t we?’ They were laughing again and I smiled politely until I realised that they were laughing at me and that Alec was grinning at me. I shot back like an arrow to my stout ambition never to tread the boards again, but it was no good. All the arguments that had fitted Mrs Schichtler fitted me too, as did the costume apparently, and that was that.

  Leonard and Penny jotted down the dramatis personae to make up errata for the programmes and the rest of the company dispersed.

  ‘You’ve got the plum of the new parts, Dan,’ said Alec under his breath to me. ‘Two lines and you share the stage with Sarah Byrne. Enter together and exit alone.’

  ‘You are Machiavellian,’ I said. ‘I’d rather be an apparition, for I am sure I could go on without make-up. I’ll be pure-white from nerves.’

  ‘You’re far too pretty to be an apparition,’ he said casually as he surged ahead of me to catch George and Robert for a quick word. If he had not just used almost the same gallantry to Mrs Westhousen I would have hugged it to me. I hugged it a little anyway, until Minnie touched my arm and drew my attention.

  ‘He’s such a splendid young man,’ she said.

  ‘He’s a good sort,’ I agreed.

  ‘Just a pal, though?’ she said mildly.

  ‘Of mine?’ I said, feeling my cheeks, for the third time that evening, flush like dawn in the tropics. ‘Good heavens, Minnie. I don’t move in those circles. Gosh, who could be fagged with it, apart from anything?’

  Minnie laughed. ‘Excellent news,’ she said. Then her face grew grim and her voice too. ‘Penny cannot marry that blister. We must stop it somehow. I wouldn’t put it past Bluey actually to throw him out a window if we can’t persuade her to ditch him. He’s awful.’

  ‘He really is,’ I said. ‘And if he’s this insufferable as a young man in courtship, just imagine what kind of husband he’ll be as the long years begin to roll by.’

  It was a depressing indictment of the differences between Minnie’s life and mine that she seemed not to know what I meant. Thankfully, my agreement on the subject of the unsatisfactory Leonard was all she cared about. She squeezed my elbow and we went up to bed arm-in-arm, like girls again.

  19

  At six o’clock the next morning, as the blush of a midsummer daybreak faded and the pure-blue morning to come began to breathe warmth and birdsong in at my open window, I was sitting up in bed, stiff with terror. A knock came at my door and Alec sidled in.

  ‘Ah good,’ he said. ‘You’re awake. Is Banquo gone from court?’

  I gave him a grateful smile and said: ‘Aye, madam, but returns again tonight.’

  ‘Say to the King I would attend his leisure for a few words,’ said Alec.

  ‘Madam, I will.’

  ‘And then you go off, stage left, and you’re done,’ Alec said. ‘You’re going to be fine, Dandy.’

  ‘But without any rehearsal at all!’ I said. ‘Surely one of the girls could do it. Penny or Tansy. Surely Bess could walk on for a minute and walk off again.’

  ‘And risk upsetting Leonard afresh?’

  ‘But no one is who they were this time yesterday anyway,’ I said. ‘What difference would one more tiny adjustment make now?’

  ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream is where nothing is as it seems,’ Alec said. ‘Not Macbeth. This is all very straightforward, though rather ugly.’ I stared at him. ‘What?’ he said, coming and
sitting on the edge of my bed and taking one of my hands. ‘What is it? Have I just started a hare running, saying that? Do you think someone truly isn’t what he seems? Dandy? Say something.’

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘No, no hares. I’m just sick with stage fright. I mightn’t even be able to get myself on tonight. Sitting here, I feel as though my legs are paralysed and I’ve still got thirteen hours to go. I must try to think of something else or I’ll go mad. And I must try to do something more than just read those two lines over and over again all day.’

  ‘Forget the play,’ Alec said. ‘The case is the thing. We need to start with what we know and work out the rest. We can do it, Dandy.’

  ‘What do we know?’

  ‘Plenty! First, Richard didn’t write the letters. They were fakes,’ Alec said.

  ‘Fakes,’ I repeated dully. ‘Oh, I wish Grant would come with my cup of tea. I can’t think clever thoughts about fake letters without it.’

  ‘I’ve just seen Grant already hard at work on the overskirts,’ said Alec. ‘Your best bet is to get up and go down.’

  I heaved a sigh of self-pity for it really did seem a bit thick. ‘Very well, then. I shall meet you in the breakfast room in half an hour to hear all about it.’

  Since he did not offer to bring me a tea tray instead that is what I did, dry-mouthed and maid-less, and by the time I got downstairs my interest in the case was flagging, compared with my interest in coffee – I was far beyond tea – and breakfast. The others had been and gone, I surmised, and the sideboard was rather picked-over, but Alec looked so eager, perched on the edge of a chair with his first pipe, that I contented myself with the last of the scrambled eggs scraped from the bottom of the dish, two slices of barely warm toast and a cup of opaque coffee, got by upending the pot completely, and settled to listen.

  ‘What makes you so sure—’ I began. Then at his frown I amended it to, ‘How did you deduce that the letters were fake?’

  Alec settled back and, as I ate enough of the unsatisfactory breakfast to see me through to luncheon, he regaled me.

  ‘Because, as we said, the itinerary makes no sense. One wouldn’t go to Lisbon en route to any of the other places mentioned, either on the way there or on the way back. And also because Minnie and Bluey were so cavalier about Ottoline’s ghost cum burglar. This explains it. One of them crept into Ottoline’s room and took the bag containing the letters because they had heard us say we were going to read them. The story of her tipping things into the water never struck me as all that likely. Did it you?’

  ‘She’s never appeared gaga that I could see,’ I agreed. ‘How did Minnie and Bluey know the letters were fake, though?’

  ‘Because they wrote them,’ said Alec. ‘Bluey wrote letters supposedly from his father and gave them to pals to post back from foreign lands, to make his mother believe … Well, whatever the letters said. That he was sorry, that he still loved her, that he was coming home.’

  ‘But Otto said the letters were nasty. Filled with loathsomeness.’

  ‘Well, then Bluey wrote them to make her feel less sad over her abandonment.’

  ‘But in either case if the letters fooled Ottoline why would Bluey and Minnie think they wouldn’t fool us? And why does the question of Ottoline recognising Richard’s writing ring such an alarm in me?’

  ‘Hm,’ said Alec. ‘I don’t know. And I don’t know.’

  ‘And what’s it got to do with Gunn along at Mespring?’

  Alec took a while to knock out and refill his pipe. I had given up on the rubbery eggs and chewy toast and had lit a cigarette of my own before he spoke again.

  ‘Ha!’ he said. ‘I’ve got it. They were fake through and through. They weren’t only forged by Bluey imitating his father’s hand, they weren’t even sent from Aleppo and the rest of it. The stamps were left over from someone’s grand tour – Bluey’s own, I expect – and the postmarks were fudged and smudged. Gunn helped them appear to arrive through the post so that Ottoline would believe the story.’

  ‘That actually does make sense,’ I said. ‘And the burglars?’

  ‘Again, Gunn and Bluey colluding to make his mother believe …’

  ‘Yes, but in this case, believe what?’

  ‘Believe …’ Alec said slowly, ‘… that the jewel was still in the house.’

  ‘When, in fact …?’

  ‘Richard took it with him, of course. To fund his trip.’

  ‘And why would it matter if Ottoline knew that? If her husband had left her, would the fact that he’d absconded with a necklace really make it so much worse? She doesn’t believe in the curse, remember. She wanted the necklace to be a wedding present for Minnie.’

  Alec puffed steadily for a minute and then took the pipe out of his mouth and said: ‘The hypocrisy might hurt. If Richard trotted out the curse to keep it off Otto’s neck all those years and then conveniently disregarded the curse when he needed a quick sale for cash.’

  ‘So …’ I said, thinking furiously, ‘Minnie and Bluey know very well that the Cut Throat is long gone, do they? And all of this treasure hunt is just flim-flam. And Ottoline thinks perhaps it really is still here.’

  ‘Why didn’t Minnie and Bluey just tell us the truth, though?’ said Alec. ‘I mean about the letters, even if they had to fib about the Cut Throat so we would collude in the treasure hunt with a straight face? I don’t see what the problem would have been in their saying, “Oh, ignore the letters. We wrote them to spare Mother’s hurt.”’

  ‘Let’s ask,’ I said, but to my surprise Alec frowned and shook his head.

  ‘There’s too much going on today,’ he said. ‘And it strikes me that it’s probably not Minnie and Bluey at all, but Bluey alone. After all, Minnie was a new bride when this happened. It’s not likely that she’d join in with an elaborate plot to stop her new mother-in-law mourning the loss of her scoundrel husband. I can’t see Bluey being quite so blasé as to rope her in. Can you?’

  ‘But I’m sure Otto recognised Richard’s writing,’ I said. ‘Her eyes flared with it in that unmistakable way.’

  Alec nodded slowly and sucked on his pipe. Then suddenly he coughed. ‘Hold on,’ he said. ‘We didn’t see Otto with Richard’s letters.’

  ‘Oh! What an idiot,’ I said. ‘No, of course we didn’t. We saw her with the note to the granddaughter that she said was written by the very peculiar Anne Annandale. But Ottoline shouldn’t have recognised that writing at all, should she?’

  ‘No, of course she shouldn’t,’ Alec said. ‘Are you sure she did?’

  ‘Absolutely certain,’ I said. ‘And that story struck me as most unlikely anyway. Even if the dotty Miss Annandale came to visit while Bluey was expected but not yet arrived, how would she lay her hands on the rocking horse to stuff Dorothy’s pearls and rings in it? If two maiden ladies come for tea in your house you don’t let them patter around in the attics.’

  ‘Well,’ said Alec, ‘one of them had lived in the house for most of her life so she wasn’t exactly a visitor. And perhaps since, as you say so coarsely – you are getting to be an absolute crone, Dandy; you shock me sometimes – but if, as you say, Bluey was soon expected, perhaps the rocking horse was down in the nursery and easily accessible. Perhaps Ottoline took the ladies to show them the cradle and all the rest of it. Isn’t that the kind of cooing ladies like to do?’

  I wanted to stick my tongue out at him, but since I had already been called coarse I refrained.

  ‘We can ask her,’ I said. ‘Ottoline is not doing any of the preparation for tonight and there’s no reason she couldn’t bear up under a couple of questions.’ Then I felt the breath leave my body as the thought struck me anew. ‘Oh, God,’ I said. ‘Tonight.’

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ Alec said. ‘It might even be fun.’

  ‘Not what you were saying yesterday,’ I reminded him. ‘I could throttle Francis Mowatt for taking a fit of the willies and leaving us all in the lurch. How he thinks he’ll ever get another job in theatre if thi
s comes out! And I can’t imagine Leonard keeping it quiet out of friendly feelings, can you?’

  ‘It’s for the best,’ Alec said. ‘The three other ladies couldn’t be more thrilled.’

  ‘I suppose I should try to be more sympathetic,’ I said. ‘He must have been truly rattled simply to leave a quick note and then take off into the night.’

  ‘Truly,’ Alec agreed. ‘Right then. You for Otto and I for … Well, I promised Grant I would intervene on her behalf with Leonard and Bess regarding the make-up, but after last night’s Queen Mary costume I’m not sure there’s any point. She’s getting worse instead of better, Dan.’

  We left the breakfast room – it had not escaped my notice that Gilly had come to the door twice and sighed gustily to see us still in there – and went our separate ways. I do not know if my words echoed in Alec’s head at precisely the same moment they echoed in mine, but I do know that, once I had gasped, clapped my hands and turned on my heel, we met back at the breakfast-room door.

  ‘He left a hasty note and took off into the night!’ Alec said.

  ‘It was Richard who stashed the pearls and rings in the rocking horse for the granddaughter, as yet unborn, that he knew he’d never meet!’ I said back.

  Thankfully Gilly had finished her clearing and gone, for we made no attempt to moderate our voices and anyone nearby might easily have overheard.

  ‘Otto recognised his writing!’ said Alec.

  ‘And Bluey knew the fake letters wouldn’t pass muster if the two specimens were considered side by side!’

  ‘Not by nasty, nosy suspicious detectives like us anyway.’ We had finally managed to stop exclaiming at one another.

  ‘So,’ I said, ‘he took the key and broke into his mother’s room and stole them away, evening bag and all.’

  ‘And I’ll bet Bluey suggested to the youngsters that they should flit about the corridors in their diaphanous costumes. As decoys.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Well, then. I shall go and see Ottoline and charge her with it. And then where shall I meet you afterwards to tell you what happened? Unless you want to come with me. She didn’t seem to mind you being in her bedroom that other time.’