After the Armistice Ball

by Catriona McPherson

  ‘I believe,’ I said, ‘and I am not alone, either – I firmly believe that the fire at the cottage was deliberate, but –’ I held up my hand as she started to babble – ‘but that no one died in it. We, Miss Duffy’s fiance and myself, both strongly suspect that Cara left the cottage long before the fire, and this is where I hope you can help me.’

  ‘Who would do sich a thing?’ said Mrs Marshall. ‘There’s never been anything like that here in all my days. I mind of a boy in Kirkcudbright years back but he went into a home.’ I saw that I should have to explain some more, but I did not even get to finish the first sentence before Mrs Marshall’s remonstrances broke out again.

  ‘Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense,’ she said, shaking her apron smooth and glaring at me as though I was one of her own many children with a hole in its stocking for her to darn. ‘What for why would a woman do sich a thing? After getting the whole place newly painted and papered not a month before. It makes no sense.’

  This, it was true, did make no sense that Alec and I had yet established. Why had Mrs Duffy had the cottage decorated when she meant to burn it down?

  ‘Unless it was to guard against these very suspicions,’ I said. ‘Because she thought that people would say exactly what you have.’

  ‘Och, that’s too clever for me,’ said Mrs Marshall, getting to her feet and stamping away inside as the kettle started to whistle. I followed after her and leaned against the doorway. She poured a little water into a fat brown teapot, swirled it around and then sloshed it out into the stone sink with a contemptuous gesture that could hardly have been more so had she actually spat. And I agreed. It was too clever a double bluff, but then so was the photograph album, and that was true.

  ‘Did the cottage need the redecoration?’ I said, thinking that perhaps if they had stayed a week in real squalor it would look as though they knew in advance that a fire was about to remove the need to do something about it.

  ‘Not a bit of it,’ said Mrs Marshall. ‘But there! That’s “ladies” for you.’ I cringed, sure that I came within the sweep of this judgement.

  ‘Mrs Marshall,’ I said, summoning courage, ‘why not just humour me? What harm will it do at least to discuss it? And imagine if I were right, and poor Cara is not dead after all, only hiding somewhere in some kind of trouble and we find her.’ Thus, unscrupulously, I overcame her better judgement and wiping her eyes and sighing, she submitted to my questions at last.

  ‘Think very, very carefully,’ I began. ‘You know which Miss Duffy is which, don’t you? Now, when was the last time you saw Cara?’

  ‘The day before the fire,’ said Mrs Marshall. ‘Her and her mother were out for a walk after their dinner and I heard them laughing away about something and looked up and there they were.’ This was not at all what I wanted to hear and it perplexed me.

  ‘You’re sure?’ I asked. ‘You’re absolutely sure that all three ladies were at the cottage right up until the day before the fire?’ This would undo my idea about why the photographs had to be taken in just one session.

  ‘No doubt about it,’ said Mrs Marshall. ‘I even thought there was four of them to start with, till you tellt me that was a maid. Some maid, I thought, you don’t see a lass in service dressed like that round here, but she’d be Edinburgh, eh? However, that’s by the by. There was definitely three right up until the end. I couldn’t get peace for them marching up and down my lane and talk talk talking at the tops of their voices. The mother and the cheery one, then the mother and the miserable one and I thought to myself more than once if those two lassies were mine I’d take the back of my hand to both. The Dear knows why they could not all go out for their walk together and save their mother’s feet. That poor woman must have been worn out by the end of the day.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Or if the lasses were at daggers drawn why could one of them not go out by her own self? Chaperones! I thought we’d got past all that nonsense by now.’

  I stared at her, my cup of tea halfway between its saucer and my lips. First one and then the other? I banged down my cup and fished in my pocket for Alec’s snapshot of Cara.

  ‘Tell me who this is, Mrs Marshall,’ I demanded. She took the snap and holding it at arm’s length for her long sight she scrutinized it for an agonizing time before pronouncing.

  ‘That’s thon wee maid I saw, and dear God in heaven, this get-up’s even worse than the other one. Where do they get the money to dress like that? I’m wondering if I’m not too old to go into service in Edinburgh myself.’

  ‘This,’ I said, coming to stand behind her and look over her shoulder at the smiling face under its velvet hat and over its squashy fox fur, ‘this is Cara Duffy. Now, tell me again exactly when you saw her.’

  It took a good half-hour and another pot of tea for Mrs Marshall to get off her chest everything that she knew and everything she felt, and to decide whether it was wickedness or merely cheek. The bare bones of it were that she had seen Cara pedalling furiously in the direction of Borgue on Tuesday evening and had not seen her return. No unknown boat and no car at all had been seen or heard. Neither Mrs Marshall nor, we were sure, her daughter-in-law had seen ‘the girls’ together at any time. I cursed my own stupidity as I remembered young Mrs Marshall’s calling them two peas in a pod and old Mrs Marshall herself not being able to tell which was which. Clemence and Cara Duffy were the least like one another of any pair of sisters one could hope to see, and only a dolt like me would not have heard alarm bells long before now.

  ‘Aye well,’ she concluded at last. ‘It’s a wicked thing to do and I’m glad I’ll never likely see them again for I could not promise to bite my tongue and let them think they’d fooled me. But praise God that lassie didn’t go up in flames after all, madam, and I hope you get to the bottom of it so’s I can tell everyone, for I’m sure I’m not the only one that cannot sleep for thinking about it.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll get to the bottom, Mrs Marshall,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry about that. They’ve made far too many stupid mistakes for me not to. I can hardly believe they let Cara cycle away in full view of whoever happened to look and see her. Such a silly risk to take.’

  This thought was still troubling me as I made my way back down the lane at last. Time was getting on, but Drysdale would come and look for me if I missed our rendezvous, I was sure, and I wanted to go and stare. Now I knew for a fact that a fraud had been perpetrated, I felt no concern at all at being seen standing there like a ghoul. I passed Sandy Marshall’s cottage and carried on to the road end and the start of the dunes, then turned left along the path to the Duffys’ cottage gate and stopped. The blackened depression in the earth and sudden cutting off of the bright shingle path seemed even more grotesque than they had before. It ought not to have been so, now that I knew no one had died there, but perhaps it was because I had now seen the place for myself. I had seen the photograph of the tea-table under the tree, the blossom-heavy branches in the foreground half-hiding the cottage behind. Now the tree – cherry, I rather thought – had its blooms and soft green leaf buds shrivelled and browned on one side by the heat of the flames. I felt my mouth twist in distaste and I turned away. Then I turned slowly back, looking at the tree and trying to summon the image of the cottage behind it, with its funny little peaked windows and something else I knew had been there but could not bring to mind. The branches of blossom, the upper part of the house showing through it here and there, and what? I stood opening and shutting my eyes, trying to dredge up the picture as though from my boots, until Bunty, sensing my tension perhaps, or maybe just bored, began to whine.

  When I emerged on to the lane again, I noticed a second path leading off directly opposite, suggesting another house. Immediately, I remembered Mrs Marshall’s scorn about ‘they wooden hooses’. There must be another; the Duffys’ was one of a pair. I walked along the narrow path and sure enough around a bend and past a clump of gorse lay another white gate and another shingle path. Even though I had hoped for it, i
t stopped me short to see a cottage identical to the one I had glimpsed in the photograph album, as though the patch of black earth was a lie. I crept forward and stood at the fence.

  It was a pretty house of the kind one must call a cottage despite its size, although a very different sort of cottage from the Marshalls’ homesteads. It had a wide porch, bounded by decorative wood banisters, and the peaked dormer windows I remembered to its upstairs. Most sweetly of all it had a single chimney right in the middle of its roof which made it look like a toffee apple standing on its head with its handle sticking out at the top. I felt a stirring of misgiving again, one that I could not quite place, but before I could give it my attention I was startled by the sound of a door creaking open, and the untidy young man with the cats appeared on the porch.

  ‘Hello again,’ he said, amicably enough. Certainly as amicably as I deserved, leaning on his gate and staring at his house.

  ‘I was just admiring your adorable chimney,’ I said, adding nothing to the store of dignity which my earlier ramblings on dogs had left me. However, the young man merely laughed and looked upwards.

  ‘I think it looks like a sink plunger,’ he said. ‘Rather inconvenient to tell the truth, but even in a wooden house the chimney must be brick and it’s easier to make one stack in the middle and have all the fires opening off it. And fires and wooden houses are rather a hot topic at the moment, aren’t they? If you’ll pardon my pun.’ I flushed, realizing that he thought I was sightseeing, come like some villager to gawp at the nearest thing to the place it all happened.

  ‘Inconvenient?’ I said, making conversation to show him I was unaffected by his insinuation and plumping for the only bit of his speech which seemed to offer scope for further chat.

  ‘The central chimney. Having to have all the rooms open off one another without a hallway and having all the fireplaces across the corners.’ He stretched luxuriously, a stretch with just a suggestion of a scratch at the end of it. ‘Not bad for me since I live on my own and can draw up my chair and hog it, but I’d hate to be jostling with a wife and a gaggle of frost-bitten children.’

  Feeling very much that I represented the world’s producers of unwanted brats, I withdrew from this unpleasant individual and took myself off to meet my motor car.

  Frustration was evidently the order of the day, however, since Drysdale and I now chugged back to Gatehouse at an infuriating five miles an hour behind a coal cart whose driver seemed not at all concerned with our plight. And when we turned into the wide main street of the town and Drysdale pulled out to work off the tension by roaring the last five hundred yards with his foot to the floorboards, I frustrated him yet further, for having spied ‘E. McNally’ painted on the side of the cart as we flashed past it, I instructed him to stop while I got out and had a word. I had to ask about Mrs Duffy’s coal order, I thought; that final check would establish beyond the doubt we were already beyond that she had set the fire and burned the cottage down.

  ‘Mr McNally,’ I called, hurrying forward to catch him before he hefted a sack on to his shoulder. He turned, showing me that spectacularly dirty face that a coalman always has, and for which I have often felt envy, thinking how very satisfying it must be to bathe when one starts out so filthy, and how unlike my own bathing which is almost completely for the sake of form except when I’ve been hunting. Mr McNally blinked his blue, dolly’s eyes in his black face and flashed a friendly smile with his dazzling coalman’s teeth.

  ‘I’m Mrs Gilver,’ I began. ‘A friend of Mrs Duffy, and I was asked by her to take care of settling up with the housekeeper and anything else that was left unfinished in all the confusion.’ I waited, hoping that this would be blunt enough. It was not. ‘I just wondered, just now when I saw your cart, whether there was anything outstanding that I could take care of.’ Still nothing. ‘Did Mrs Duffy have a regular delivery and pay up at the end of the season or are you all fair and square? Please don’t hesitate at all if you’re waiting to be paid – I’m more than happy.’ Mr McNally was shaking his head.

  ‘No, ma’am,’ he said. ‘Mrs Duffy said she’d drop me a note when she was getting low and she paid me when I delivered.’

  ‘But of course you would know not to deliver it now,’ I said, making doubly, trebly sure. E. McNally looked at me as though I were an imbecile.

  ‘There wasna any order outstanding, ma’am,’ he said. ‘But I’ll venture if there was I’d have known to ignore it.’ I nodded, gave him a little something anyway for his trouble and got back into the car. So, Mrs Duffy was to have dropped a line when the coal got low, and there was the coal hole at Reiver’s Rest scraped clean for all to see with no order outstanding. I wondered if this detail had escaped her planning or if she had decided not to advertise in advance the fact that she had used all that fuel in case the news of the fire should jog an uneasy thought and start the coalman’s tongue wagging.

  Drysdale turned the car again and I knew he took the chance while checking over his shoulder to fire a look at me, searching for some clue as to why I should leap from the car and accost a coalman in the street. His look was matched by that on the face of Mr McNally as he watched me pull away.

  Thus after a single day, with my work in Galloway complete, and one or two more of the world’s populace now believing me to be an idiot, I headed for home again. I was ready to tell Hugh that the puppies were all earmarked for friends of the family and that I had changed my mind anyway after both Bunty and I had been snapped at by the mother with her teeth like little icicles and been told by her doting owner that this was something for which the breed was known.

  We arrived back at Gilverton just as lamps were being lit, and while Grant took herself off in high dudgeon to unpack the case of clothes for a week’s visit she had packed only two days before, I sought out Hugh to tell the tale of woe. I could hear voices from his library and smelled pipe smoke alongside the usual reek of Hugh’s cigar so arranging a smile of wifely and hostessly serenity upon my face I threw open the door and strode in. (When visitors are there I do not knock and keep my feet on the hall carpet.)

  ‘Dandy my dear,’ said Hugh. (When visitors are there he reacts with delight to any glimpse of me.) ‘Just in time. What will you have to drink?’

  ‘Welcome home, Dandy,’ said Alec Osborne. ‘This is an unexpected bonus, I must say. I feared I might miss you.’

  But for some reason the sight of the two of them on either side of the fire like that, a heap of dozing dogs between their feet, presented a domestic and social challenge to which I felt unequal after the long drive and the excitements of the day before. I excused myself hastily, promising that a half-hour’s rest should render me fit for the dinner table.

  Up in my room, Grant was slamming around with her mouth still set in a grim line but with a tell-tale loosening of her shoulders which told me that she was happiest really to be home again with her own irons and well-drilled laundry maids waiting below. I sat at my dressing table and began to remove hatpins until I caught her eye in the glass. She looked significantly at me and then at my bed where, miracle upon miracle, there against the pillows sat a familiar black leather album tied with a ribbon. I threw off my coat, kicked off my shoes and climbed up on to the counterpane, drawing the album towards me like a lover, sure that inside it cast-iron, rock-solid, gilt-edged answers were soon to be found.

  Chapter Eleven

  I saw it immediately this time, of course. Added to the fact of Mrs Duffy’s redecoration, it was so obvious that I felt some shame for not seeing it before. Because really, how could these dowdy stripes and sprigged muslins have been freely chosen by the same woman who had turned her drawing room at Drummond Place into an ice-cube?

  I resolved to subject the idea to my harshest criticism while dressing, and see if it was still standing up by the time I was done. I was late already, but since Grant was in far too foul a temper to be let loose on my hair, I saved myself a good twenty minutes by pulling on a silk turban instead. Thank heavens for turban
s in the evening. I hoped they would stay in fashion for ever, or at least until I was old enough to go on wearing them whether they were in or out. I pulled a couple of curls out at the front and tried to make them rest against my forehead, but this was wasting time. I still could not see any flaw in my discovery and could wait no longer to tell it to Alec, nor to quiz him on how he had wrested the album away from Clemence.

  When I joined him and Hugh, moreover, I could see from his dancing eyes that he was bursting to tell me. Hugh, though, was well away on the relative merits of dry-stone walls and hedges and I had to wait until we were sitting down to dinner before I got in.

  ‘Tell me, Alec,’ I said, ‘to what do we owe this pleasure?’ For I could not imagine on what pretext he had insinuated himself into my household at less than a day’s notice. Hugh is not antisocial but he needs to be led up quite gently to the idea of a single visitor; they require so much more attention than does a crowd of twenty.

  ‘Came to see a horse,’ he said.

  ‘Uncommonly decent of you to take the time too,’ said Hugh. I, with a wife’s keenly attuned sensitivity, understood this to mean that Hugh had mentioned something in passing at Croys and meant nothing by it, so was now more than a little surprised to have it followed through. However, from his tone I also divined that he found Alec Osborne agreeable company and did not therefore mind too much.

  ‘I find myself with time to fill,’ said Alec. ‘I was expecting this week to be the run-up to a wedding, you know.’ Hugh gulped and turned to me beseechingly.

  ‘Have you seen any of the family since we left Gatehouse?’ I asked, knowing he had and wanting to know more.

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ said Alec. ‘Lena is still away of course, but I spent the day with Clemence yesterday. She’s bearing up terribly well, and I took three good friends of Cara to visit which I’m sure helped. She seemed very much soothed by them.’