Dandy Gilver and a Spot of Toil and Trouble

by Catriona McPherson

‘Aye, madam but returns again tonight,’ I said to my reflection. ‘Madam, I will.’

  I was just beginning to wonder what to do to my face to turn it into that of Lady Macbeth’s servant when Grant seized me by the shoulders and spun me round.

  ‘Fine,’ she said to Penny. ‘Be like that, then. Far be it from me.’ And, with a few brusque strokes around my eyes and some blows upon my cheeks with a round sponge, she used my face to tell Penny Bewer exactly what she thought of Leonard before flouncing off.

  I turned back and jumped so badly the legs of my little milking stool screeched against the stone floor. I had been transformed into something from a Punch and Judy show: my brows black darts, my eyes larger by half than any eyes should be and my face a shade of orange unknown to nature.

  ‘Lipstick?’ I said faintly.

  ‘Of course not,’ said Penny. ‘You’re done. Do you need help with your headdress?’

  I glanced at the coat hanger on the peg beside my table. I saw a dress, brown and baggy, and an apron too, but nothing like a hat. Penny sighed, twitched down a square of cloth I had not noticed and wound it into a turban, finishing it off at my nape.

  ‘Good enough,’ she said, looking at my reflection.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, meekly, trying not to stare at Lady MacDuff’s cone and veil – or at least not to covet it when I did so. ‘When should I dress, to be ready for Act III?’

  ‘Now!’ said Penny. ‘Now, of course. Act III? What are you—? Good God!’

  Without questioning her outrage, I took down the baggy brown dress and wriggled into it. A pair of soft leather boots, more like stout socks really, and I was complete. For the first time in the case I wished Hugh were here. He is not given to fits of merriment; sometimes months go by without him actually laughing, beyond a gruff ‘ha!’ when some item of dire news he predicted is announced in The Times, but if he could see me now he would be helpless and weeping.

  ‘Is it all right to stand in the wings until it’s time to go on?’ I asked Tansy Bell who was on my other side. ‘Or should I keep out of the way in case someone trips over me.’

  ‘You’d better be standing in the wings where Bess can see you,’ said Tansy. ‘If she has to come looking, she’ll flay you alive. You’re carrying on a plate of food in Act I.’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘Act I, scene 7,’ Tansy said. ‘Diverse servants.’

  ‘But-But …’ I said, thoroughly rattled. ‘No one told me. What plate? Where do I get it? Where shall I put it?’

  ‘I’m telling you now,’ said Tansy. ‘Bess shoves it into your hands and you put it on the table. Where else?’

  ‘And then I leave?’ I said.

  ‘No!’ said Lady MacDuff, letting her concentration drop and becoming Miss Tavelock again. It was the first time she had acknowledged my presence. ‘Good God, do you want your head cut off? If you go scampering about the stage during Moray’s “if it were done when ’tis done” he’ll come after all of us. You trot on, put the tray on the table and stand still till the exeunt.’

  I nodded then looked back at myself in the mirror. I could carry a tray of food, so long as I did not have to speak at the same time. ‘Aye, madam, but returns again tonight,’ I said. It was becoming a sort of prayer. ‘Madam, I will.’

  ‘And you’re on and off in a blink the second time,’ said Penny.

  ‘The second time?’ I could feel my face blanch, even if my orange cheeks hid every trace of it.

  ‘You come on with the murderers in Act III, scene 1,’ said Penny, ‘and then they say to go to the door till they call you back and you go. On and off, quick as a flash.’

  ‘And do they call?’ I said. ‘Do they call me back?’

  ‘No, that’s it,’ said Lady Macduff. ‘Until you’re back on with Lady M in scene 2.’

  ‘Aye, madam, but returns again tonight. Madam, I will?’

  ‘Word perfect,’ said Tansy. Lady MacDuff smiled at me too, for encouragement, and all three of us pretended not to hear how badly my voice was shaking.

  For a moment I considered going the way of Francis Mowatt and just walking out of the castle to catch a bus for town. It would have to be a bus, for my little Morris Cowley was trapped at the far end of Pugh’s field by a charabanc that had brought a party of Rotarians up from Carlisle and the yellow sports car of some bright young things who had fetched up from heaven only knew where to have fun of the wrong kind, in Leonard’s sour opinion.

  But how could I escape to the bus stop? There was only one egress from the castle – through the gatehouse passage and across the bridge – and between me and it in one direction was a long corridor thronged with excited playgoers taking their seats. I could hear them. In the other direction were Leonard and Bess breathing fire in the wings. I was as completely trapped as if the ingenious drawbridge still pivoted on its hinge and had been brought smartly up to seal us all off from the world.

  Besides, there was no more time. Even as I had the thought, Bess was making her way along the dressing rooms, rapping on doors and calling ‘Act I beginners, please! Witches, Malcolm, Duncan, Captain, Lennox, Ross! Act I beginners, please!’ She stuck her head into the ladies’ dressing room. Her hair now had the wild look one associates with Bedlam inmates – just like the dreadful etching of Bertha in an illustrated Jane Eyre I had owned as a girl – and her eyes were stark and huge in her face, stretched wide with first-night panic. I would not have crossed her with a knife under my ribs.

  ‘Act I beginners,’ she bellowed at us, before she withdrew.

  Lady Macduff threw a cloak over her shoulders and brought it up over her head, transforming herself into First Witch. She and the other two proceeded out, leaving the American ladies and me in awe of their calm expressions and steady gait. Mrs Westhousen, in contrast looked rather sick, and Mrs Rynsburger had a high colour in her cheeks and on her neck that no amount of patting with more of the orange panstick could disguise.

  I decided I would rather be in the wings watching the professionals prove it was possible to walk onstage without dropping dead from fright than sit here letting my fellow amateurs wind me up into a blue funk.

  I missed the witches’ first scene and the reports of battle and arrived just in time to hear the prophecies.

  ‘Thou shall get kings,’ said the third witch, almost yelling the word that had got her into such trouble with Leonard.

  Bess, on the book, snorted. ‘It’s going to be that sort of first night then, is it?’ said Sarah Byrne suddenly at my elbow. ‘Terribly unprofessional.’ She glanced at me and started. ‘Mrs Gilver? Are you going on?’

  ‘Didn’t Leonard tell you?’ I said. ‘There’s been quite an upheaval since yesterday.’

  ‘You’re not the porter, are you?’ said Sarah and her lips twitched.

  ‘Servant,’ I said, my mouth drying again at the thought of it. ‘Your servant. Aye, madam, but returns tonight. I’m petrified.’

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

  ‘Madam, I will,’ I said gratefully.

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ said Sarah. ‘But might I ask why the upheaval?’

  ‘Francis Mowatt left,’ I said. ‘He’s gone.’

  ‘Angus?’ she said, and swung round to look onstage. ‘Why yes, I see Julian on there instead. But I don’t believe Francis has really gone. Has one of those scamps not locked him in a broom cupboard for a joke? It’s the sort of thing Roger would do. Poor Francis is probably beating on the door and wearing out his voice shouting for help.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘He’s really gone. He fell in the moat.’

  Sarah shot out an arm and clutched me. ‘You mean “gone”?’ she said. ‘Gone to his rest?’

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘No. Gosh, no. He caught cold and had a fright and has gone … home, I suppose, to recuperate.’

  ‘He’ll never work again,’ said Sarah. ‘A cold? A cold? I went on as the Duchess of Malfi with a broken ankle when I was young. I didn�
�t even limp. The only excuse for not going on and giving your all in a part is if you’re actually dead. Quite dead and stiff.’

  ‘And even then there’s Yorrick,’ came another voice. Moray Dunstane had arrived, dressed as King Duncan again and even grander somehow than he had been the day before at the dress rehearsal. Bess and Sarah tittered and I took it that this little exchange was a well-known routine.

  ‘Snap an ankle, dearest,’ said Sarah, as Moray gathered himself to enter.

  ‘Shatter a kneecap, my love,’ replied Moray over his shoulder. He swaggered onstage with his wife blowing kisses behind him and I considered how much nicer Sarah and Moray were when they were actually acting. All the grandeur and hauteur quite gone. Sarah was chatting again now, chummy as anything.

  ‘—Duncan’s not a great part, but combined with the Old Man it at least gives an evening’s work. And of course he’ll be in Duncan’s crown again for the curtain and that always gets a cheer. I still remember the first time I saw the play. I was quite a young girl and very sheltered. I didn’t believe he was dead. I sat waiting for him to come back and wreak revenge right up until the end. I wept with relief at the curtain.’

  Her words made me think of Richard, long gone and surely dead by now, but everyone always wondering.

  ‘I had been seeing so much of Oscar’s oeuvre,’ she went on. I could not help catching Bess’s eye. Oscar Wilde was not writing plays when Sarah Byrne was a girl. We smirked but said nothing. ‘And of course no one who is missing is actually dead in those plays. No one is ever even missing. They are all right there disguised as governesses and cousins. Does anyone actually die onstage in Wilde?’

  ‘I haven’t seen them al—’ I said.

  ‘There’s something more honest about dying right there onstage where everyone can see it,’ she said, talking over me. ‘I wonder why Mr Shakespeare didn’t let King Duncan have his death scene.’ She tutted, then strode forward, taking a scrap of paper from her pocket as she went. I was so surprised that I almost reached out to grab at her, to warn her that she was walking onto the stage. But of course she knew that. Duncan and Macbeth had exited at the far side; this was a different scene; and Sarah Byrne, with barely a breath between, had left off chatting to me and was now acting. There was something marvellous about that to my mind, I decided. I was thoroughly glad I had spoken to her. I nodded. Thoroughly glad. Although, if I were honest, something she had said was, for some reason I could not fathom, troubling me.

  I could see Duncan and Banquo in the wings on the far side waiting to come back on. And all around me other ‘diverse servants’ were beginning to gather. Tansy bent low over Bess’s shoulder following the lines and then at the end of a speech she slid into the chair that Bess slid out of and bent still further.

  ‘Plates,’ said Bess. ‘You, take the beef and put it in the middle.’ She gave an oval of painted card with a lump on it to one of the men. ‘You, maidservant, take the soup.’ She nodded to me and I picked up a deep covered dish with a ladle. ‘Put it on the far end of the board and stay o/p upstage of Moray.’

  ‘What is o/p?’ I asked.

  ‘Opposite prompt,’ she said. ‘Other side of the stage. But that doesn’t really matter. Upstage of Moray does. Do you know what that means?’

  ‘Don’t get between him and—’

  ‘Right,’ said Bess. ‘Now go.’ And with another of the little shoves that had sent me flying onto the stage the night before I was on again.

  22

  It was darker tonight, the low clouds Minnie had lamented helping the courtyard feel more like a theatre than I would have imagined possible. It did not help me. Out beyond the footlights, I knew they were all there, hordes of them. I could hear them breathing.

  Except I could not possibly hear them breathing, I told myself because I was a servant in Macbeth’s castle. I looked around at the tall boards where Sarah and Bess had nailed swords to make a murderous display. A suit of armour stood in the shadows at the back of the stage and I saw, as I glanced towards the footlights, that they had found the cannon. Two of them sat at angles one to the other in the corners, like the arrangements of flowers that used to adorn every variety show.

  But I should not be gawping at the fittings of this castle where I worked hard in the kitchens. I marched over to the far end of the table with my soup tureen held aloft the way I had seen Pallister hold aloft soup tureens down the years. I set it down, with a bit of a thump, for it was lighter than it should be and the table top was hollow despite its sturdy look, but apart from a glower from Moray at the thump interrupting his lines no one seemed to notice. I withdrew myself to the dark, back portion of the stage and stood listening to Macbeth lose heart and Lady Macbeth scoff at his cowardice and scorn him.

  What a peculiar play it would be if Duncan really were hiding in a blanket box after his last exit, ready to jump out at any moment. But Sarah’s point was well made as far as Richard was concerned. If he were dead, as surely he must be, what a disastrous twist of fate it was for him to die somewhere no one knew him and without any papers upon him, so that word never reached home.

  I had stopped listening to the actors altogether now. It was not just a disastrous twist; it was preposterous. He wasn’t a desert tribesman dropping from thirst between watering holes, or a tramp expiring under a hedge on a country road, nor even a king in the days when life was brutish and deeds dark. He was a gentleman travelling with a trunk and writing case, not to mention a passport.

  ‘If we should fail?’ Macbeth was saying.

  ‘We fail?’ said Lady Macbeth, with a snort and a look of disdain.

  It was a simple plan if one had the stomach for it: to kill the old king and then get rid of the guards and call the job done. What had happened at Castle Bewer all those years ago was considerably more devilish. A curse, a ruby, a feud. Burglars, letters, a note in a rocking horse. Pearls and diamonds, servants sacked and new ones—

  There! There it was at last. There it was. It was not the name of the gem that had been troubling me at all, when I spoke to Nanny in her cottage. Oh, if only I had gone back and interviewed her properly! I should not be having these revelations when I was stuck onstage with a hundred strangers watching.

  It was the timing. Richard’s illness and disappearance and when one followed the other. That was what had been worrying away at me like one of those beetles that fell mighty trees with years of gnawing. Had Ottoline pasted a picture of ladies only into the scrapbook of her son’s wedding because her husband was ill and spoiled the look of the group? Or was there no photograph of Richard because he was already gone?

  When did his illness turn into his absence? The new servants had said the master was ill and left to go to the mountains for his lungs, and what a thing it was for him to leave before Minnie even arrived. But the old servants, Nanny and Gunn, said the master was ill and left to go to the mountains for his lungs and what a thing it was for him to go when Minnie had just arrived. So which was it? Whether he had left before Ottoline sacked the servants or after, whether he left before Minnie arrived or soon after she came, some of the servants – new or old – should have seen him go.

  ‘What can you and I not perform on th’unguarded Duncan?’ said Lady Macbeth.

  And not a single one of them had seen him! But one of them claimed to. Gunn. Suddenly, I knew everything. Richard had not been ill at all, neither in his mind nor his body, and he had never left the castle. At least not on his own legs. Someone had killed him. Someone had killed him and sent fake letters back from distant ports and that same someone had found the ruby in the rocking horse and put some unwanted old baubles in there instead, so that when they were found, everyone would believe Richard knew he was leaving.

  I was as sure as I had ever been of anything that Ottoline knew nothing about the rocking horse. Which left Bluey. With or without Minnie.

  ‘… we shall make our griefs and clamour roar upon his death,’ said Lady Macbeth.

  Minnie had been fil
led with sorrow at the misfortune of never meeting her father-in-law. Could she have sounded so sincere if she had taken a hand in his killing? I remembered Sarah joking and gossiping with me and then striding forward and acting her relief about Macbeth’s battle triumphs.

  ‘False face must hide what the false heart doth know,’ said Macbeth and the stage emptied around me as everyone swept away.

  I did not even realise what had happened until Banquo and Fleance came on from opposite sides of the stage and huddled in the middle.

  ‘How goes the night, boy?’

  ‘The moon is down; I have not heard the clock.’

  It was another scene. It was another room in the castle. It was the middle of the night after the setting of the moon and yet still I stood there. I took a step to the left just as Max Moore came striding back on, then halted. If I ‘scampered about the stage’ while Macbeth himself was speaking I shuddered to think what might befall me. As Banquo started up again I sidled back.

  ‘The King’s abed,’ Paddy said and my knees turned to liquid. It was the very moment, solemn and dreadful, when Duncan was being murdered, and there I was, shuffling back and forth and distracting everyone. I was sure I could hear a few whispers from the wooden benches. I would have given anything to have been playing the porter again, giving those toe-curling speeches with my cheeks flaming. Anything but this. I looked around wildly and, at last, I saw an answer.

  The suit of armour Bess had finally dragged down from the attics stood just to my right in the darkest upstage reaches. Slowly, I took three steps back until I stood beside it as though at the other edge of a door. I clamped my hands to my sides and, thanking Penny at last for the cloth that bound my head, I raised my chin and froze.

  This time there was definitely a whisper, and a rush of smothered laughter, from out in the audience. I thought I heard a scuffle in the wings too, but I stared straight ahead. I could almost convince myself I was doing the production a great favour. For suits of armour, like cannon, come in pairs. A single suit of armour plonked on the stage just made Macbeth’s castle look silly.