Dandy Gilver and a Bothersome Number of Corpses

by Catriona McPherson

  A very happy twenty minutes later I had made my selections. The little ones were to have Kidnapped, the second form Rob Roy, the third form (who deserved the most pity of all after The Canterbury Tales) were to be rewarded with Tam o’Shanter. The lower fourth were going to see a side of Donne at which his Holy Sonnets had not hinted, although I would avoid the farthest reaches: they were fifteen, after all, not forty. The fifth had to stick with Piers Plowman for their exam but I would intersperse it with Jane Eyre as a corrective. The lower sixth, I decided, could leave King Lear out on the moor to take his chances and turn to the rather more thrilling adventures of Macbeth instead and, to soothe the troubled brains of the upper sixth, busy cramming Paradise Lost, I would require them to read one each day of Shakespeare’s sonnets starting with ‘O, never say that I was false of heart’, Sonnet 109, which was my favourite. (Already I could tell that the power of being the schoolmistress, with the key to the cupboard where the books were kept, was going to my head and threatening to ruin me.)

  At luncheon, where the roast beef fulfilled every bit of its fragrant promise, although one could have played deck quoits with the Yorkshire puddings (for no doubt the cook was a Scotchwoman and it will out somewhere), I slipped the tiniest little border trowel into the palm of my hand and did as minute and discreet a portion of digging as could properly be called digging at all.

  ‘What of your extra-curricular hours, girls?’ I said. ‘I’m very happy to take over Miss Lipscott’s duties there.’

  ‘Cramming,’ said Katie.

  ‘Yes, stuffing Paradise down our gullets like pelicans with herrings,’ said Spring. She had taken the news that it was too late to change the examination paper very badly.

  ‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Yes, poor dears. I remember it well.’ This was a lie, of course; I had never sat an examination in my life unless one could count the beady-eyed way I was watched making introductions at finishing-school sherry parties (and in all honesty one could not). ‘But the other forms? Do you happen to know? Did Miss Lipscott have a weekly round?’ Five pairs of eyes gazed back at me, with varying expressions of interest and disdain, but none with comprehension. ‘Sewing Club on a Monday, Rambling Club on a Tuesday, Country Dancing on a Wednesday, that sort of thing . . .?’ I had put the notion of rambling on a Tuesday into the list with great care.

  ‘Oh no, the mistresses don’t concern themselves much with our Societies,’ said Sally. ‘Too busy marking.’

  ‘I see,’ I said. ‘And what Societies are there?’

  ‘Well, not sewing, thank goodness,’ said Stella. ‘And not country dancing – what a thought.’

  ‘We used to have all sorts of dancing but there’s none now,’ said Sally.

  ‘Miss Lovage does teach Dance,’ said Eileen. ‘But Dance isn’t dancing, really.’ Spring and Katie began to giggle.

  ‘Imagine going to a party and doing Miss Lovage’s Dance!’

  ‘Imagine at our coming-out balls. If we did Dance!’

  ‘We’d be taken to a sanatorium and tied to our beds with stout rope.’

  ‘Now, now,’ I said, although my lips were twitching. ‘And what about rambling? One would have thought with these lovely cliff walks and the ruined castles and all . . .’

  ‘I think some of the younger girls tramp about a bit,’ said Stella. ‘Especially the Scotch ones.’

  ‘It’s on Sunday afternoons,’ said Eileen. ‘Quite fun, actually. We – they, I mean – they take nature sheets and try to collect things. Almost like a treasure hunt, you see?’

  ‘Sunday afternoons,’ I said. ‘Right-ho.’ There was no chance that No. 5 had been in the water six days so, no matter how many girls had been tramping about the cliffs with nature sheets at the last ramblers’ outing, they could not have seen anything useful to me. I tried another tack. ‘I didn’t realise that the art mistress might teach dancing too,’ I said.

  ‘Not dancing, Miss Gilver,’ said Katie. ‘Daahhhnce!’ The giggles started to break out once more and I did not have to summon any schoolmistressishness to start tutting.

  ‘You’re all very silly for such great big girls,’ I said. ‘I could excuse it in the little ones. What of Miss Taylor and Miss Bell? Had they other strings to their bow? I’m afraid I shall only be teaching English to you. Although I do have some circus training, I suppose.’ Thus I attempted to ingratiate and glamorise myself with them, and certainly I loosened their tongues.

  ‘Tinker Bell and The Maid were scholars, Miss Gilver,’ said Spring.

  ‘The Maid?’ I said.

  ‘Of Orleans,’ said Katie. ‘History mistress, you see?’

  ‘Ah,’ I said. ‘And so Juliet for Miss Lipscott, because of Shakespeare?’

  ‘Scholars,’ went on Spring without answering my interruption, ‘dry, dusty and devoted. No time for anything else. They and Miss Fielding were all at Somerville together – pioneers of the day – and we always thought – that is, Mummy always told me – that they had to be whiter than white. No high jinks or they’d be out on their ear.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to suggest high jinks!’ I said. ‘Astronomy, perhaps. Or woodcarving.’

  ‘Or circus tricks, quite,’ drawled Stella.

  ‘What kind of circus tricks?’ Sally asked. ‘I’d love to be able to juggle.’

  ‘Oh, me too,’ said Spring. ‘Or standing up on a horse in a bathing suit. Just to annoy Daddy. He’s still quite keen on side-saddle, Miss Gilver, if you can believe it these days.’

  ‘Dogs,’ I said, and it was rather difficult to keep mopping up gravy with the last of my Yorkshire pudding while crossing my fingers. ‘I can’t juggle myself but I have a Dalmatian at home who can.’ I warmed to it and uncrossed my fingers. There was a kernel of truth in this. Bunty had never quite forgotten the wonderful things she had learned in her short sojourn at the circus three years before and even my bumbling instead of the expertise of the circus folk could not dislodge it.

  ‘Golly,’ said Eileen. ‘I wish you’d brought him. What fun.’ I nodded and smiled, knowing that Bunty was safely stuck in Perthshire and my fibs would never come back to haunt me.

  The maids appeared then to clear the main course and the girls went through their familiar craning and straining to see what pudding might be, looking quite a bit like liberty horses arching their necks in formation in the ring. I was content with what the luncheon table had given to me and did not need the delights of the pudding. Miss Bell and Miss Taylor had been at Oxford with Miss Fielding. It would be easy, I was sure, to track their movements now, for were not these bluestockings all as thick as thieves and did they not gather together for reunions as regularly as migrating flocks of birds alighting on their oceanic islands?

  ‘What about bird watching?’ I said, as the thought struck me. ‘I’m rather an ornithologist.’ More lies, but I was thinking, rather desperately, of what might be seen through binoculars. ‘Or does one of the other mistresses already help out there?’

  ‘Not any more,’ said Sally.

  ‘Miss Beauclerc?’ I asked, with a leap of hope. For how easy it would be, if one’s attention was trained on a distant speck, to take a fateful step too close to the cliff edge and plunge into the sea.

  ‘Miss Lipscott,’ said Eileen. ‘Owls.’

  ‘I thought it was bats,’ said Katie.

  ‘Making her a chiropterologist,’ said Eileen, ‘and not an ornithologist at all.’

  ‘Well, it was night anyway,’ said Spring.

  ‘Twas the nightingale and not the lark,’ said Stella.

  ‘Oh Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou?’ said Katie in a fluttery voice and all five of them, even the haughty Stella, were soon tittering.

  I had meant to ask them to point out Sabbatina Aldo for me, although I could not quite see what reason I could give to allay suspicion about my interest in her, but rolling my eyes at their silliness and looking away to other parts of the room, I thought I had spotted her without assistance. Amongst the third form there was a child with luxurious
raven tresses who could not possibly be either an English rose nor a Scotch thistle (as Grant always described her countrywomen, on account of their dry fair hair and their cheeks purple from the cold). Besides her colouring, she was sitting slightly alone although at a table of twelve, looking as diffident in her neatness as a scholarship girl (or the beneficiary of a wealthy patron anyway) would look amongst the Stellas and Springs of this world.

  First, though, for the obliging Cissie, who might have seen all manner of going-on on the cliff top last Tuesday evening and might yet have more to tell of Mrs Aldo’s mysterious lover, if one asked the right questions and if one were a kind lady of forty-one instead of a mortifyingly handsome young man.

  She was a short and wiry little person, with a slight cast to her left eye and an upper lip larger than the lower one by just about the proportion that a lower lip should be larger than the upper. She was saved, however, by a finely chiselled nose, apple cheeks and a shining cap of bright hair done in the latest style, of which one could see rather a lot owing to the tiny dimensions of her fashionable hat, chosen for the company rather than the setting. All in all, one could see what a young man might find appealing about her, especially since when I discovered her with Reid at the third tee she was gazing at him with slightly cross-eyed but nonetheless heartfelt devotion and hugging his clubs as an obvious substitute for his manly form.

  ‘Reid,’ I said, nodding. ‘And Cissie.’ She let go of the clubs and bobbed nicely. ‘You’ll just have to slum it for a while,’ I said to the constable. ‘Carry your own clubs – it won’t kill you. Cissie, my dear, I’d like you to come for a little walk with me.’ She looked at Reid for approval and when he gave a short nod – although with not a whisper of good grace about it – she opened her little bag, put on her Sunday gloves and waited expectantly for me to lead her.

  ‘Now then,’ I said, when we were under way, before remembering the kind lady and hastily parking the schoolmistress-cum-nanny as whom I had begun. ‘That’s a very pretty hat, is it new?’ Cissie nodded and put a hand up to touch it. I wondered if she was still at the age when she would stop walking and bend over her skirts to look at a new pair of shoes she was wearing. ‘So your mistress doesn’t have any silly notions of you dressing plainly even on free afternoons then?’ Cissie very properly said nothing. ‘Only Reid said she was a bit of a tartar.’ Again, Cissie said nothing but she did allow herself a small smile. ‘I’m glad to hear she’s not as unreasonable as all that,’ I said, ‘but I do want to assure you, my dear, that anything you say to me is in the strictest confidence.’

  ‘I brought it out in ma handbag,’ said Cissie. It took me a moment to realise she was talking about the startling hat, but only another moment to realise that she had shown herself to be my ally.

  ‘Dear me, how old-fashioned of her,’ I said. ‘Now then,’ – cosily, this time, with nothing of the nanny anywhere – ‘I know because your fiancé told me’ – there was a gasp – ‘oh, yes he told me that too and as I say – strictest confidence – anyway, I know that last Tuesday evening you saw someone on the cliffs at Dunskey Castle. I would like you tell me all about it in your own words.’

  ‘Rosie the washerwoman, ye mean?’ said Cissie.

  ‘In your own words,’ I said.

  ‘Aye, I seen her,’ said Cissie. ‘Walking along the path with a man. So I just ducked in a wee bit behind a bush – gorse it was and right scratchy – so’s she didnae see me. That’s all, madam.’

  In story books, witnesses invited to speak in their own words always obligingly rattle on for hours spilling reams of detailed clues and red herrings, so the disappointment was a heavy one. I started the list of questions I had hoped to avoid.

  ‘You didn’t know the man?’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘But can you describe him?’

  ‘He was quite big.’

  ‘Fat?’

  ‘Aye, a bit. And tall. Dark too. Well, it was dark, but he didn’t look fair.’

  ‘Young? Old?’

  ‘No,’ said Cissie slowly. ‘I wouldnae have said he was young. And he couldnae have been old because of . . .’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘I never said this to that other man,’ she whispered and my heart quickened. ‘But he couldnae have been old because of how they were . . . I mean, they were definitely . . . I mean, he wasn’t her uncle.’ My heart slowed again, so suddenly that I felt the slump as a slight dizziness. What an innocent she was, despite the ‘sitting’. Of course, we had guessed at once that the partner of a moonlit walk on the cliffs ‘wasn’t her uncle’.

  ‘And what exactly makes you say so?’ I asked. ‘What did you see them do?’

  ‘Do?’ said Cissie, blushing. ‘Nothing. Just the way they were walking along and the way they were talking. Well, the way he was talking to her.’

  ‘You heard what they were saying?’ I said.

  ‘I heard them talking,’ Cissie said. ‘I didnae understand it, though.’

  ‘Hm,’ I said, almost blushing myself at that. ‘Just as well, I daresay. And they passed along and didn’t turn back while you were there? You only saw them once?’

  ‘Aye,’ said Cissie. ‘And I was watching out for them too – didnae want Rosie to see me.’

  ‘And so you would have seen anyone else who was about?’ I said.

  ‘Who?’ she said, glancing at me. ‘Did somebody see Wullie and me?’

  ‘Not that I know of,’ I said. ‘I just wanted to find out if anyone was around. If you saw or heard anything. Anyone calling out, or any kind of disturbance?’

  ‘No,’ said Cissie. ‘It was right quiet for such a nice warm night. Sometimes you can see smoke or wee red dots if it’s dark. From folks’ cigarettes that are sittin’ in the dips. But no last Tuesday.’

  ‘And you heard nothing either?’ She shook her head. ‘And I don’t suppose you were there on Monday and Wednesday.’ Cissie took great offence at this, as though one unchaperoned walk a week was blameless but three would ruin her.

  ‘I was not, madam,’ she said. ‘And I tell you somethin’ else too. I wish I hadn’t gone the night I did. I’ve had it up to here wi’ all these questions.’

  And so since there was really no point in badgering her – she had been at only one of the places on the cliffs where No. 5 might have gone over, and at only one time when it might have happened – I let her go back to the honour of trundling ‘Wullie’s’ golf clubs around all afternoon and turned my own steps to the school.

  What I really wanted was to find the mistresses in their staffroom together and in the mood for chatting. How difficult could it be to get them talking about their departed colleagues? How I should love to be able to present Alec, in the morning, with a list of their full names and approximate home addresses. My quick peek around the staffroom door, however, revealed that chamber empty of grate and of armchair again, and my surreptitious pause outside Miss Christopher’s door yielded only the scratch of a pen and the rustle of paper. I abandoned the plan, grabbed a passing child and demanded that she find Betty Alder and send her to my classroom to meet me.

  If it were not for my hidden but primary purpose – were I in reality only the new English mistress and not a detective as well, I thought – I should be at a pretty loose end by now and rather disappointed by my welcome. This thought brought another on its heels. What of Miss Glennie, who was not (presumably) sleuthing and skulking like me, but really had just joined the happy band of mistresses? What must she make of the utter lack of collegiate chumminess I had found here?

  ‘Here, little girl,’ I called out to a figure crossing the end of the passageway. To my astonishment, instead of meekly trotting up to see what I wanted, she put on a spurt of speed and disappeared from sight. ‘Hey! Young lady!’ I shouted after her and marched to the corner to find her dragging herself back as though she had weights attached to her ankles.

  ‘Yes, Miss Gilver?’ she said.

  ‘That was very naughty of you,’ I s
colded. ‘I’m half-inclined to hand out . . .’ My voice trailed off as I realised I did not know whether St Columba’s went in for demerits, detentions or the slipper. ‘Anyway, don’t do it again.’

  ‘You know what the girls are calling you, don’t you?’ said the child with blithe impertinence.

  ‘I do,’ I replied. ‘Goody Gilver, but I’m willing to relinquish the honour.’

  ‘Grabber,’ she said. ‘Grabber Gilver. Always collaring us and sending us on errands quite out of our way.’

  ‘Well, I’m only after information this time, you little scamp,’ I said, secretly quite pleased to have got a nickname already and one I did not make up for myself, not to mention one which made me sound so efficacious as a moderator of youthful indiscipline. I only hoped I was not noticeably beaming. ‘Where is Miss Beauclerc’s old room?’

  ‘Oh! All right then. It’s up those stairs at the end there and halfway along the land-side passage. Just beyond the horrible picture.’

  ‘Thank you, peculiar child,’ I said. ‘And run along.’

  One could see what she meant, I thought, as I drew even with the painting, in which Ophelia floated rather smugly in what looked like a fishpond; a paean to suicide which surely had no place in a girls’ school. (Although if the artist had painted what a young woman really looked like once good and drowned, one would no more have hung the results on the wall.)

  Passing by it, I stopped at Miss Glennie’s door, which still bore the name of Mademoiselle Beauclerc, and knocked. There was a pause, a scuffle and then a reply.

  ‘Yes?’

  I opened the door and leaned in with a friendly smile arranged on my face.

  ‘Miss Gilver, Miss Glennie,’ I said. ‘The other new girl. Just wondering how you’re getting on?’ Then my smile faltered a little. Miss Glennie was getting on, or so it would seem, a lot better than me. She had a pile of jotters on her table and a large dictionary with gold-edged pages open on the floor at her side, and it occurred to me that there might be all manner of things I should have been busy doing yesterday and today.