Lady Emmeline and the Swansong Caper

by Anna Reader

  “I would imagine it’s in the attic, with the rest of your toys,” Lady Alverstock said, by now never particularly surprised by her daughter’s unusual requests. “Why? Are you thinking of going exploring? I’m not sure it would be terribly hygienic to start clambering about in London, darling…”

  Purdie laughed, and accepted the cup and saucer being offered to her. “No, Ma,” she reassured her, “I have no intention of going in search of fossils - if I wanted to do that, I’d go and spend an afternoon in the Travellers Club. I was just curious, that’s all.”

  They sat together in companionable silence, each lost in her own thoughts. It was a large, attractive room, high-ceilinged in the Regency way and decorated in Lady Alverstock’s impeccable style. Oriental rugs covered the polished wooden floor, the walls were lined with oak bookshelves, and the surfaces of the antique furniture were dotted with silver cigar boxes, crystal decanters, and vases full of flowers. It was, in short, a quintessentially English room, immune to fashion and time.

  “Inspector Dashwood seems like a very nice young man,” Lady Alverstock said at last, glancing across at her daughter. “Terribly handsome.”

  “I hadn’t noticed,” Purdie replied, lying through her teeth. “I suppose I might think he were a nice enough sort of a chap, if he hadn’t bowled in here accusing me of hiding that bally cufflink.”

  “I really don’t know what all this talk of cufflinks is about,” Lady Alverstock said, “but he doesn’t actually seem to have accused you of anything, darling.”

  “You wouldn’t have said that if you’d seen him trawling through the contents of my purse this morning,” Purdie replied, rather primly. “It was all most intrusive.”

  They lapsed into silence once more, as Purdie thrust the image of the Inspector’s face from her mind’s eye and tried to focus on her plan to wend her way up to the attic as soon as he’d made his way home - which, she noted grimly, should have been hours ago. She really couldn’t understand why her father was keeping him here; they were certainly taking their time over their port. In fact, Purdie thought to herself, given the way her father had welcomed the Inspector into their home with such open arms, she wouldn’t have been at all surprised to discover that he had cracked open a 1910 bottle.

  Just as she was muttering something darkly about pearls and swine under her breath, the drawing room door opened and the two men walked in; laughing, smoking cigars, and clearly on the best of terms.

  “Hallo, darling,” Lady Alverstock said, smiling fondly up at her husband. “Coffee?”

  “Yes please, darling,” Lord Alverstock replied, beaming, as he invited his new friend to take a chair. “Peter?”

  “Thank you, Lady Alverstock, no,” Inspector Dashwood replied, staying on his feet. “It’s been a wonderful evening, but I really must be getting home.”

  “Nonsense, Peter, at least stay for a whisky,” Lord Alverstock cried. “It’s not even twelve!”

  “Now, Father,” Purdie remonstrated, “we’ve already kept Inspector Dashwood here far longer than he intended. We mustn’t delay him any longer. Let me show you to the door,” she added, leaping to her feet and fixing her new nemesis with an inscrutable smile.

  Lord Alverstock decided not to protest any further, and instead moved forwards to shake the young man by the hand. “A pleasure to have met you, Peter,” he said with great enthusiasm. “Hope to repeat the experience very soon.”

  “Thank you both for a truly enjoyable evening,” Inspector Dashwood replied. “Good night.” And with that he followed Purdie out into the hall.

  “If I’ve offended you in any way, I am sorry,” he said suddenly, as she reached for the latch on the front door. “I hope you understand I’m just doing my job.”

  Purdie glanced up at the young Inspector, and felt her heart leap into her mouth. He was looking down at her from his considerable height, real warmth in those green eyes. They were standing so close now that their arms were practically touching, and Purdie was almost able to forget the circumstances in which they had met. She felt simultaneously both at ease and terribly alert – taken aback by the flash of intimacy, and the sudden sensation of complete trust. It was entirely new to her - and also highly inconvenient.

  “Oh, I’m not offended,” she said at last, clearing her throat slightly and opening the door. For a moment she almost felt guilty, knowing that he was completely justified in his suspicions and that she was concealing the truth from him. That soon passed, though, as she remembered what her reasons were. She might like the young man standing next to her, but in the current circumstances it was impossible for them to be friends. “Good night.”

  Inspector Dashwood stepped out into the lamp-lit street and glanced back at Purdie. Their eyes met and it almost looked as though she was about to speak…but then the door closed, and he was alone in the dark. He looked up at the stars dancing in the midnight sky above him, shook his head and laughed.

  SIX

  It was a bright, cloudless spring morning, and Purdie found her father alone in the library once again. She crept up behind him as he read his paper, wrapped her arms around his neck and tenderly planted a kiss on top of his head.

  “I have an idea,” she announced, arranging herself in the chair next to his desk and resting her feet on a stool.

  “Morning, sprog,” Lord Alverstock replied, pouring her a coffee from the pot at his elbow. “What kind of an idea?”

  “To do with breaking Sir Reginald out of the Gallery,” she announced. “I think I have it.”

  “Emmeline,” her father replied, “have you really? Well, don’t for heaven’s sake be shy – speak up!”

  And so, slowly and with great care, Purdie unfolded her scheme, like a promising sergeant presenting a manoeuvre to her general. She had spent half the night refining the details, and could now see the plan so clearly in her mind’s eye that it was rather like relating the plot of a moving picture. It was jolly good, she knew – as has father’s fast-growing interest made clear. Drawing to a close, Purdie reached for one of her father’s cigarettes and leaned back in her chair, lighting it with a match and beaming with satisfaction.

  After a moment’s thought, Lord Alverstock gave vent to a great crack of laughter. “My word, Em,” he cried, slapping the arm of his chair in delight, “it’s so bold, I think it might actually work. You say this came to you last night?”

  “When we were having coffee in the drawing room,” she confirmed, grinning broadly. “I remembered I had the harness from playing Puck in that awful production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in fifth form – do you remember? Titania was so nervous that she fainted, and Hermia tripped over a wire and broke her front tooth.”

  “How could I forget?” Lord Alverstock replied, enjoying the recollection. “What a shambles. You were wonderful though, darling.”

  “Thank you, Pa. My first, and last, experience of treading the boards. Or flying above them, as it happened.”

  “I must say, I’m terribly pleased that you’re taking all of this so well, Emmie,” Lord Alverstock said, serious for a moment. “I wondered whether our evening with Inspector Dashwood might have dissuaded you from our flirtation with a life of crime, as it were.”

  “Not at all,” Purdie replied briskly. “He must have realised that he’s not going to get that cufflink from me by now. I doubt we’ll see him again.”

  Lord Alverstock looked intently at his daughter. “That would be a shame,” he said at last. “I confess, I rather liked him.”

  “He was perfectly pleasant,” she agreed noncommittally, focusing her eyes on the embers of her cigarette. “And if we’d met under different circumstances, I’m sure I would have liked him, too. Anyway, enough of Inspector Dashwood,” she said, leaping from her chair. “I need to see Pongo. Will you make the arrangements for a private viewing with the Gallery? Remember – it has to be a first floor room.”

  “Righto,” Lord Alverstock confirmed, galvanised into action by his daughter’s vim. “We
’ll have to think how to get the tripod in place, too.”

  “Yes,” Purdie said slowly. “I can wear the harness under my clothes, but that is a point. Ideally, we’d have everything set up beforehand…perhaps we ought to do a spot o’ reconnaissance.”

  “Can you put Pongo off for a couple of hours?” Lord Alverstock replied. “I can run us into town now, if so.”

  “I’ll give her a bell,” Purdie announced, moving to the door. “Meet you outside in ten minutes.”

  Lord Alverstock’s racing green Blériot-Whippet zipped through the streets of West London, bearing the two criminal masterminds towards the Royal Portrait Gallery at speed.

  “I say,” Purdie cried out to her father, keeping one hand on her maroon cloche hat as they bowled through Mayfair with the roof down, “what are you going to do with the thing once we’ve seized it?”

  “Thought I’d hang it in my dressing room,” Lord Alverstock shouted out over the roar of the engine. “Hide it in plain sight, as it were. Besides, I’d like to make the most of having it.”

  Purdie’s laugh rang out and she looked across at her father with adoration in her eyes. “Ma’s going to work out what’s going on, you know,” she replied, at full volume. “She always sensed the precise moment one of us tried to sneak into the pantry without her knowing. She has almost supernatural antennae for the misdemeanours of her progeny.”

  Lord Alverstock grinned. “Your mother, Emmeline, is an angel. Now, come along.”

  Displaying the kind of expert steering one would expect from an officer of the Royal Horse Guards, Lord Alverstock drew the Blériot-Whippet to a smart stop outside the Gallery and killed the engine. The pair abandoned the vehicle and, arm in arm, walked towards the beckoning entrance.

  “Good afternoon, sir,” said a young man sitting behind the ticket desk. “That’ll be a shilling.”

  “Ned Kelly’s alive and well, I see,” Lord Alverstock replied with a snort. “Hardly your fault, dear boy, but for what do we pay our taxes if not to share in our collective cultural wealth? Astonishing way to manage a public institution.”

  Before the beleaguered young man could muster a reply, however, Lord Alverstock had fished a couple of coins from his pocket and set them on the counter. “I should be very grateful if you could tell the manager that I should like to see him. My name is Lord Alverstock, and I shall be on the first floor. Good day to you.”

  The young man was thoroughly bemused by this: people occasionally took exception to being asked for payment, but they rarely asked to speak to the management - and certainly never in such a grand way if they did. Still, Lord Alverstock had a natural air of command and the ticket-seller – himself a former army man – found himself compelled to obey. He therefore took the unprecedented step of abandoning his post and going in search of Mr Tilbury, incumbent manager of the Gallery.

  Lord Alverstock and Purdie, meanwhile, made their way up to the first floor to continue their reconnaissance. Ignoring the walls of masterpieces in oil, charcoal and watercolour, father and daughter strode the length of the building in search of a likely spot with a window leading out to the street below.

  “Bingo!” Purdie cried, as they made their way into the so-called Purcell Room – currently home to a stirring exhibition on key figures from the English Civil War – and found themselves confronted by a wide bay window. “What a topping view, Pa.”

  “There’s my chariot,” Lord Alverstock remarked, spotting the handsome Blériot-Whippet parked in the road below them. “Isn’t she a beauty?”

  A particularly officious looking patron of the Gallery – the only other person in the room, as a matter of fact – tutted loudly at the Purdew pair and shook his head in disgust, unleashing a jellied ripple in his numerous chins as he did so. It was quite beyond him why anyone would visit one of the jewels in the nation’s cultural crown simply to look out of the window at an automobile. “Heathens,” he muttered.

  Happily, the manager chose this precise moment to enter stage left, nipping any skirmish in the bud. “Lord Alverstock?” A small man exuding oleaginous efficiency scuttled across the room towards the pair, ready to ingratiate himself for the good of the Gallery.

  “Ah, you must be the fellow in charge,” Lord Alverstock said, offering his hand to the plump, precise looking man standing before him. “I commend your alacrity.”

  “Mr Tilbury at your service, my Lord,” the manager said, taking his Lordship’s hand and shaking it with just the right amount of vigour. “I understand you have raised some concerns about our admissions policy?”

  “Your admissions?...Oh yes, the small matter of the shilling. As a matter of fact, I believe fervently that our nation’s great treasures should be made freely available to the King’s subjects. But that is not why I wanted to speak to you, sir.”

  “It isn’t, my Lord?”

  “No, it isn’t. I understand that you house in your collection a portrait of Sir Reginald Thackeray…”

  As her father explained his errand to the punctilious Mr Tilbury, Purdie slipped away to do some investigations of her own. What she needed was somewhere to store the tripod – somewhere close, discreet, and easily accessible. Somewhere like…a broom-cupboard. There it was, the very thing, situated just opposite the entrance to the Purcell Room and seemingly just waiting for Purdie to make use of it. She smiled quietly to herself and adjusted her cream gloves.

  Serendipitously enough, a key was hanging in the lock, ripe for the filching. Purdie looked up and down the corridor and then moved towards her target, quickly calculating how best to maximise the potential of this sudden stroke of good fortune. If she took the key now and the caretaker thought it had been lost, then there was a good chance the locks would be changed before they could get the tripod in place – or, worse, once it was already tucked away and waiting for its big entrance. The ideal solution would be to have a copy made, but that would still involve taking the key out of the building and risking discovery. Unless….

  Purdie snapped open the clasp of her tan leather satchel and smiled in silent satisfaction as she spotted a bar of Quiggin’s mint cake staring back at her – a solitary remnant from the bracing walk she and Algie had done to Grantchester a few weeks before. With lightning speed, she whipped the key from the lock and pressed it deep into the peppermint, leaving a perfect imprint for a discreet locksmith.

  She was just giving the sticky key a quick wipe with her handkerchief when the clacking of heels announced the arrival of another art-lover; with lightning speed and dexterity she stuffed it into its lock, tucked the sugar-mould back into her purse, and did a sharp about turn before she could be discovered. Her father and Mr Tilbury were, thankfully, still standing by the window, deep in conversation.

  “It is the light in this room which I need,” Lord Alverstock was saying with great energy. “One cannot appreciate Aunt Augusta’s astonishing mastery of chiaroscuro without bright sunlight – don’t you agree, Emmeline?”

  “Oh, absolutely,” Purdie replied, closing her eyes and nodding slowly like a true connoisseur. “It is what she would have wanted. Have you told Mr Tilbury that it would have been Aunt Augusta’s one hundredth birthday on Friday, Pa?” Lord Alverstock’s lips twitched – that was utter nonsense – but he said nothing. “We want to treat the anniversary with the appropriate level of pomp, you see,” she explained. “And what could be better than having a private moment with her most cherished piece? Sir Reginald’s loss was….well, it was a real blow to the family.”

  To Mr Tilbury’s horror, Purdie’s eyes suddenly sparkled with artificial tears. Displays of female emotion inspired a deeply visceral sense of dread in the manager’s chest. Indeed, he had occasionally felt compelled to avert his eyes from some of the more emotive pieces in the Gallery, lest he experience the kind of terror which invariably punctuated his proximity to what he classed as being Rampant Female Hysteria. The single, glistening droplet clinging to the end of Purdie’s long lashes therefore made Mr Tilbury feel r
ather green, and he found himself agreeing eagerly to Lord Alverstock’s demands.

  “It would be our pleasure, your Lordship,” he said, his words falling over one another. “Delighted to make the room available for such an occasion - at your service, unreservedly.” To his enormous relief his response seemed to act like a sponge, and Purdie’s un-spilt tears evaporated before his eyes. He sensed that he had had an exceedingly narrow escape.

  “Splendid. We shall pop by in a day or so to finalise arrangements,” Purdie announced as she offered Mr Tilbury her hand. “Thank you so much for your time – you are too good.”

  Now that the imminent threat of weeping had subsided Mr Tilbury was able to recover his equilibrium, and he guided his charges towards the exit with impeccable solicitude. “Until we meet again, then,” he said as they reached the main doors, selecting the most obsequious smile in his repertoire. “Good day to you.”

  Lord Alverstock and Purdie linked arms, and sauntered across the road towards the Blériot-Whippet as though neither of them had a care in the world. “Where to now, my incorrigible sprog?”

  “A celebratory drink at Claridge’s, I think,” Purdie replied brightly, entirely unperturbed by the fact that it was barely half past eleven. “And then we need to procure a discreet locksmith, sharpish.”

  SEVEN

  Having left her father hunting in the attic for Algie’s tripod, Purdie made her way to Mrs McVities’ sherry party, determined to thwart Cupid’s mind-boggling intention to marry her off to Gussie.

  Laetitia Beresford, she had to admit, was an inspired choice – the only person Gussie was truly afraid of was his mother, and if she and Pongo could persuade Mrs Featherington-Blyth to settle upon Letty as a potential bride for her son, then Gussie’s fate would be sealed, and Purdie would be a free agent once more. A swift pang of guilt threatened to breach her defences, until Purdie remembered what Pongo had said: Laetitia was absolute nutty for Gussie, so really, their Machiavellian manoeuvres would be in everyone’s best interests.