‘Mrs Balfour,’ I began, after another long moment’s consideration.
‘Oh, Lollie, please,’ she said. ‘Not Mrs Balfour when I’ve just told you all that – too ridiculous for words. And certainly not Walburga.’ There was a ghost of a smile.
‘Well, Lollie,’ I resumed, ‘it’s a most fantastical tale. He sounds not only insupportable – that almost goes without saying – but actually mad. He sounds as though he needs some kind of rest cure or some clever doctor. However, he is not my concern.’ I gave her a stern look. ‘You are. And your instincts are sound. You should do just what you threatened to. Pack your bags and go, my dear girl. Or leave your bags behind and go. Just go.’
‘But go where?’ said Lollie. ‘My parents are dead, I have no friends that aren’t his friends too, I have no means of getting any money without his approval. And besides . . .’ Her voice trailed off.
‘Are there children?’ I asked, guessing that they would be a heavy anchor.
‘Not yet,’ said Lollie. ‘I mean, no. See?’ she went on wildly. ‘“Not yet”! I still can’t convince myself that this is actually happening to me.’
‘Is he in the house at this minute?’ I asked. She shook her head. ‘Well then, you can walk out of the front door along with me. Come home with me. And then telephone to a doctor, or to the police. To both.’
‘You do believe me then?’ said Lollie. ‘He always reminds me that I have no proof or witnesses and tells me that anyone I speak to will think I’m mad. And that he’ll give them lots of help to think it when they come to ask him about me.’
‘Hm,’ I said. She was right about the evidence and witnesses, of course, when I looked at the matter coolly. On the other hand, waiting until what they witnessed was her murder could not be recommended.
‘Is there any way you can try to be even more careful?’ I asked. ‘Has he ever given any hints of his proposed method?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Lollie. ‘I should have told you. It would be impossible to go on if I thought every dish might be poisoned or I might be shot in the back at any moment. No, I think he’s going to strangle me at night in my bed.’
‘He told you that?’
‘Not in so many words,’ she said. ‘He whispers as he comes and goes, you see.’ She leaned forward and spoke very softly. ‘The rain set early in tonight, the sullen wind was soon awake, it tore the elm-tops down for spite, and did its worst to vex the lake.’
I could feel a nasty prickling feeling creeping up my back towards my neck, where a nasty shrinking feeling in my scalp waited to meet it.
‘What on earth?’ I said, thoroughly rattled.
‘I wondered for the longest time,’ said Lollie, ‘and then I found it. Well, a line of it – in a volume on the Carlyles.’ I must have looked impressed at this example of her reading habits, because she went on: ‘A volume that Pip left on my desk for me to find, open at the right page. It’s Robert Browning: a horrid, horrid poem all about strangling his mistress.’
‘I don’t know it, I’m glad to say.’ I shook my shoulders to drive off the last of the shivering. ‘So. You need a reliable witness and you need protection in the night-time. You need, in fact, someone to sleep in your room with you. Do you have a sister?’ She shook her head. ‘An old nanny?’ Another shake. ‘A trusted maid of stout heart? Well, stout everything would be best, really.’ Lollie opened her hands in a gesture of despair. ‘Oh! Yes, of course,’ I said. ‘Your maid left, didn’t she, hence today’s interviews. Well, what about the girl before me then? She looked pretty sturdy.’
‘The girl before you,’ repeated Lollie, a beseeching look in her eyes. It took me a moment to see what was being besought.
‘Ah, now,’ I said. ‘Well, as to that. I mean, I don’t think that would be possible, I’m afraid.’
‘Why not?’ she asked me.
‘One would have to . . . Well, one would have to know what one were doing,’ I said, ‘which I don’t. At all.’
‘But in the newspapers . . .’ said Lollie.
‘Oh no, I don’t mean the detecting. I certainly know what I’m doing as far as that goes. And I can see that it would be wonderful to be stowed away in the heart of the household getting to the bottom of it – very practical – but as to the actual . . . I’d be seen through in a minute. I thought Faulds out there had uncovered me as soon as I opened my mouth. Gosh, if I tried to mix up freckle cream or launder lace . . .’
‘But I’d help,’ said Lollie. ‘I wasn’t brought up with my own maid and I know most of it. We could muddle along together. And if it’s your fee that’s worrying you—’
‘I assure you it’s not. No, my worry is Mr Faulds. And Mrs . . . Hepburn, was it? And the chauffeur? And you mentioned a maid or two at the Christmas party? That’s too many to take into your confidence and I couldn’t begin to fool them – not over days and weeks.’
‘Twelve,’ said Lollie.
‘Twelve what?’ I asked her.
‘Servants,’ she replied. ‘Butler, cook, kitchenmaid, scullerymaid, tweenie, parlourmaid, housemaid, a valet, a footman, a hall and boot boy, and the chauffeur.’
‘Twelve servants?’ I echoed.
‘Including you,’ she said, smiling.
And a small part of me wonders even now how much of my agreeing sprang from a desire to find out how, in the name of heaven, in these days of desperate and universal retrenchment, they were managing it.
2
‘And all her hair, in one long yellow string I wound, three times her little throat around, and strangled her,’ said Alec, peering at the volume in the lamplight, and tracing the tiny print with the stem of his pipe.
‘That’s the one,’ I said. ‘Only it’s red.’
‘Not words you’d want your love to come cooing at you in your bedchamber,’ Alec said. He turned the page. ‘Good God, listen to this bit.’
‘Oh, please, no more!’ I said. ‘What a man he must have been – and after his poor wife wrote all those lovely sonnets for him.’
Alec snorted and put his pipe back in his mouth. We were in his library, on the evening of the successful interview. (I had braved the hoots of derision over Miss Rossiter’s adornments to commune with him, as I always did when a new case was stirring and at intervals while it wore on too.) At least, I thought to myself, the hoots of derision were all I should have to brave; there would be no frosty silence nor cutting remarks from Hugh when I got home since, after a great deal of glowering and muttering over the last four years, he had finally managed to find space inside his skull for the idea that Alec and I were friends, colleagues and nothing more, an idea I took great pains not to dislodge again.
‘I have to agree with young Mrs Balfour,’ Alec was saying now. ‘Walburga, was it? – poor girl! It sounds so torrid and mad, she’d have a hard time convincing either the bobbies or docs until he actually strikes. I suppose you’re convinced, are you?’
‘I am but, as to the bobbies, it’s even worse than having to convince them. I’m pretty sure that as long as he keeps to whispered threats she doesn’t have a case. She doesn’t even have a case for divorcing him unless she can unearth one of the philanderees and get him that way.’
‘She can’t divorce him for cruelty when he murmurs about winding her tresses round her little throat? That’s a bit thick.’
‘Apparently not,’ I said, trying to hide my smile. Alec is younger than me and sometimes seems much younger, as when he is troubled and wounded by life’s unfairness, by life’s showing itself so regularly to be ‘a bit thick’. ‘I went to the National Library and looked it up before I caught the train home,’ I told him. ‘Apparently, he can be as cruel as he likes as long as it’s only to Lollie – she doesn’t encourage “Walburga”, for obvious reasons.’
‘Law books in the National Library and grey serge, Dan,’ said Alec. ‘You’re flying all flags on this one, surely?’
‘You haven’t heard the half,’ I said. ‘Here’s what I propose to do next, darling.’ An
d I told him, to his evident and gratifying stupefaction; when I finished his mouth hung open, his pipe cooling, forgotten, in the ashtray.
‘You don’t stand a cat’s chance,’ he said at last.
‘Well, thanks a lot,’ I said, laughing.
‘But seriously, Dan, how do you hope to pull it off? How can you propose to go in and do what amounts to making a fool of a man who is certainly violent and probably raving mad? And why? Why not say you’re a girlhood friend or something?’
All of these were objections I had put to Lollie hours before, but she had answered them and, besides, I had come around to the notions for reasons of my own.
‘He wouldn’t let her have a friend to stay,’ I said. ‘And he won’t take any notice of me. As long as I dress soberly and keep my head down I’ll be fine. And I’ve decided not to attempt too much authenticity. I shall say I’m gently born and recently come down in the world. That should cover any amount of ignorance and unintended slips, don’t you think?’
Alec nodded rather reluctantly.
‘And most important of all,’ I went on, ‘there’s this question of Lollie being followed whenever she goes out and eavesdropped upon whenever she’s in the house. Do you see?’
‘Ah, of course,’ said Alec, who usually does see; it is one of the most comfortable aspects of our collaborations. ‘It must be one of the servants, doing his master’s bidding. Well, all right, you’ve convinced me.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘Oh, to be a fly on the wall though, Dandy, when you’re . . . when you’re busy . . . What exactly does a lady’s maid do all day?’
‘Don’t ask me!’ I said, rolling my eyes in not-completely-mock horror. ‘I have tomorrow and Sunday cramming with Grant – and won’t she adore it! – but for now I can’t imagine.’
‘I’m almost tempted to join you just to watch the fun. Would I make a footman?’ Alec stood up and came to offer me the cigarette box, bending over from the waist like a jointed wooden soldier and clicking his heels together with a beaming smile.
‘You look like a Punch cartoon of a bad waiter,’ I told him. ‘And anyway, there isn’t another opening. The Balfours, if you please, have twelve servants in their Edinburgh house, and goodness knows how many more in the Highlands.’
‘Twelve?’ said Alec, standing up straight again and frowning. He ran Dunelgar on seven and a few locals for the rough work. ‘What does he do, this Pip? Some kind of merchant or something, is he?’ He sat back down again and knocked out his pipe.
‘Well now,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t do anything, but listen to this and tell me if you don’t agree that some earlier Balfour must have sold his soul to the devil.’ I lit my cigarette and sat back to regale him with the history of the Balfours as it had been told to me. (The last thirty minutes of Miss Rossiter’s interview had been taken up with it, almost as though Lollie could diminish the shortcomings of Pip himself by setting them against the triumphs of the Balfours in general.) It was quite a tale.
The first Balfour of any note came to prominence in the early days of the Georgian era, by setting up a bank in his native Edinburgh in 1717: the Edinburgh and Scottish Eastern Merchants’ and Private Clearing Bank, whose name no one – from the founder, James Balfour himself, to the lowliest copying clerk – could be relied upon to reproduce with any accuracy (the pull of ‘Eastern Scottish’ in place of ‘Scottish Eastern’ being a particularly common pitfall) so that it is chiefly remembered among banking historians for the number of notes and drafts it issued with errors upon them. There is many a curio-cabinet which has, in one of its drawers, a family’s famous ‘bad banknote’ folded up and yellowing but still taken out and shown to visitors.
Inevitably, the merchants of the day made life easier for themselves by dubbing Balfour’s pet enterprise with a more descriptive title, and ‘the Silk and Tobacco’ flourished along with the trades which gave it its name. (There is still a public house in a back street of Edinburgh called the Silken Tab, whose hanging sign depicts a wigged and powdered old gentleman with a long pipe in his mouth, but since the associations have become blurred and the etymologies muddled, the current Balfours do not concern themselves about it.)
James Balfour Jr was a less cautious man than his father had been, a man who liked to be in at the start of things, and so it is unsurprising that in 1769 he was among the first to move down the hill, away from the smells and noise of the medieval Old Town, and into the stark majesty of a town house on Princes Street, with a view of the Castle and – once the draining of the old North Loch had finally been resolved, after many attempts and disappointments – as much fresh air as he, his wife and their seven children could hope for.
There was, however, to be little repose for Mr Balfour in his commodious new rooms, for he could not contain his eagerness to be part of the great expansion; new houses outside one’s own window were simply that much more fun than holds of silk and bales of tobacco leaves half a world away and in 1770, when every other financier in the capital was feeling well cushioned and replete with success, Balfour found himself in company not with them but with the rather more hard-bitten speculative builders, who were poised to see if their fortunes would swell with the city or go like tapers up a newly swept flue. Balfour would never have sailed as close to the wind as to endanger his fortune, but he did what was to his peers even more amazing. He sold up his father’s business: the Bank of Scotland opened its door with cold charity as to a waif on its step and the Edinburgh and Scottish Eastern Merchants’ and Private Clearing Bank was no more.
So it was that the Balfour family got out of banking on the high tide just before the beginnings of the great long endless collapse and never had to underwrite a penny of it. And of course the New Town was the success story of the age and grew and grew until there was nowhere in his native city for the old man to put any more of his considerable fortune and his son – Robert Balfour – began to spread it around the land, and most notably to send it underground. From the lead mines of the Scottish uplands to the coal mines of the north of England, the Welsh silver mines and all the way to the tin mines of the West Country, Robert Balfour was chipping out of the earth more and more riches for himself and his own, sending the sons of lesser branches of the Balfour family to manage for him so that the name spread all over Britain and grew synonymous with a kind of far-seeing but hard-working massing of solid wealth.
In time, egged on by a son of his own with a taste for travel and adventure, Robert Balfour finally raised his gaze from the mine heads of Britain and looked to the East again, to India and to cotton, and grew richer still.
Now Robert’s grandson, the first Philip Balfour, was as happy sailing back and forth between Bengal and Scotland as his wife was unhappy, whether accompanying him on the voyages or staying put at either end, for she suffered equally badly from the heat, the cold and the most excruciating, mortifying seasickness. Indeed, there was only one place on earth where she could imagine settling and turning her back on gangplanks and portholes for ever and that was the magical, almost mythical, island whither her more glamorous friends regularly sailed in search of fun and fashions and whence they returned with tales of both which made young Mrs Balfour’s eyes and mouth water. Alexandra Balfour did not wish for the impossible: she could live without gold but every time she was forced onto the dusty streets of Calcutta or was carried through the mud of a mountain road in Kashmir on the neck of an elephant she pined anew for Manhattan, where the streets were paved.
In 1857, after a winter crossing which her husband called bracing but which reduced her to a state of such piteous and unrelieved sickness that their expected fourth child – whose arrival was the sole reason for the journey – came early and promptly left again, Alexandra prevailed. Philip was washed in guilt and grief but the spirit of his grandfather was lit in him as he began to ask around about the wonderful new city and the impossible new buildings rising up and up and up there and to write feverish letters to agents to secure for himself a patch of paradise while it was
going.
And so it was that the Balfours made their second timely escape, from India this time, just before the Great Uprising which left every Company man with burned fingers and placed a mute in the neck of the jamboree for ever after.
Silk House – for Philip Balfour had a mind to family history – was to be the finest mansion in New York; he employed the newest and most daring of architects to plan its halls and cloisters and fountained courtyards, and the watercolour sketches of it, nestling in a green dip amongst hills with a cornflower-blue sky above and lush trees in the distance, had grown soft and faded from repeated rolling and unrolling, and rather grubby from the fingers of the three little Balfours choosing their bedrooms. Philip suffered one moment of disquiet in every ten of joy when he looked at the green dip and distant trees, for he could not quite make them fit into the other picture in his mind of lit streets and theatres and the vast emporia known as department stores. Once or twice, when he was regaling a chum at the club, he found himself not quite admitting of his half-built mansion that he had never set eyes on the place, and it did not bring him much comfort that – presumably because such a thing would never occur to them – none of the chums ever actually asked him.
They landed in November in 1858, in a gale which fired hailstones up the wide avenues like peas from a shooter and turned every cross-street corner into a maelstrom, and it was clear right away even to the smallest Balfour child that the green dip had been fancy. Alexandra prepared to put a brave face on her dismay: there was certainly paving – there was little else. She paled and felt her eyes fill with tears, however, when she saw their mansion. It was the same familiar block of marble and porticoes from the watercolour drawings, but where the gardens should have been there were not only streets instead of glades but, on all four sides, railways. Their dreamed-of home was set about by railway lines like a pig penned in with hurdles and Alexandra began a bout of weeping which lasted on and off until the spring.
Dandy Gilver and the Proper Treatment of Bloodstains Page 2
