Dance to Your Daddy mb-42

by Gladys Mitchell

  Dance to Your Daddy

  ( Mrs Bradley - 42 )

  Gladys Mitchell

  DANCE TO YOUR DADDY

  Gladys Mitchell

  "Dance to your daddy

  My bonnie babby,

  Dance to your daddy

  My bonnie lamb.

  You shall hae a fishie

  In a wee dishie,

  You shall hae a fishie

  When the boatie comes hame."

  SCOTS SONG

  CHIVERS

  THORNDIKE

  This large print book is published by BBC Audiobooks Ltd, Bath, England and by Thorndike Press, Waterville, Maine, USA.

  Published in 2003 in the U.K. by arrangement with the author's estate.

  Published in 2003 in the U.S. by arrangement with Gregory & Company.

  U.K. Hardcover ISBN 0-7540-7310-6 (Chivers Large Print)

  U.K. Softcover ISBN 0-7540-7311-4 (Camden Large Print)

  U.S. Softcover ISBN 0-7862-5671-0 (General Series)

  Copyright © Gladys Mitchell 1969

  All rights reserved.

  The text of this Large Print edition is unabridged.

  Other aspects of the book may vary from the original edition.

  Set in 16 pt. New Times Roman.

  Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Mitchell, Gladys, 1901-

  Dance to your daddy / Gladys Mitchell.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-7862-5671-0 (lg. print: sc : alk. paper)

  1. Bradley, Beatrice Lestrange (Fictitious character)-Fiction.

  2. Women detectives-England-Fiction. 3. England-Fiction.

  4. Large type books. I. Title.

  PR6025.I832D35 2003

  823'.912-dc21 2003053311

  To

  Irene Fleming,

  with love from Mike

  CONTENTS

  1 Galliard-Heartless House

  2 Ritual Dance-Lamb to the Slaughter

  3 Morris Dance-Beansetting

  4 Pieds-en-l'Air-Family Gathering

  5 Danse Macabre-The Wicked Uncle

  6 Sarabande-Dancing Ledge

  7 Sword Dance-Kirkby Malzeard

  8 Coranto-Felix Napoleon's Fancy

  9 Bolero-Mother and Son

  10 St Vitus' Dance-Three Wise Monkeys

  11 Oxdansen-Crowner's Quest

  12 Zapatos-Goody Two-Shoes

  13 Basse Danse-Confrontation

  14 Danse Champêtre-Joy in the Morning

  15 Country Dance-Parson's Farewell

  16 Calushari Dance-Evil Spirits

  17 Country Dance-Mage on a Cree

  18 Hornpipe-The Boat Comes Home

  CHAPTER ONE

  GALLIARD-HEARTLESS HOUSE

  '...unmannerly modest as a measure, full of state and ancientry.'

  Measure for Measure.

  (1)

  Eiladh Beatrice Margaret Gavin, having put her fist in the minister's eye, submitted with placid fatalism to the ceremony of baptism. She was a happy baby and, since happiness has no history, she passes, for the purposes of the chronicler, into almost total obscurity.

  'Well, that's that,' observed Laura, her mother, when the cortege had returned to the Stone House in the village of Wandles Parva, 'and now it's time I got back to work.'

  'I may not need you yet,' said Dame Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley, who employed her as secretary and treated her as a favourite daughter. 'I am invited to pay a visit of indefinite length to a certain Romilly Lestrange, who claims to be a distant connection of mine by marriage. He lives, it seems, at a place called Galliard Hall.'

  'Romilly? You haven't mentioned him before, have you?'

  'For the sufficient reason that, until I received his letter, I was unaware of his existence.'

  'Funny he should suddenly pop up out of a trap. I'd give him a two-eyed look, if I were you.'

  'He has offered me a commission on top of the invitation. It appears that he has been extremely worried lately by the strange behaviour of his wife.'

  'What does she do?-make spells and incantations?-dance naked on the greensward by the lee light of the moon?'

  'He says that she has contracted a habit of drowning things.'

  'Drowning things?'

  'She began with a toy trumpet and followed this by consigning to the deep a transistor radio set and a dozen gramophone records.'

  'Not a music lover, wouldn't you say?'

  'I might leave it at that, if she had not continued by drowning, at intervals of nine months, a small cat, a pet monkey and a life-sized baby doll.'

  'Well, there seems to be an obvious explanation. Either her husband won't give her a baby, or else she's had a miscarriage.'

  'You mean she has aborted. Justice may miscarry; human beings do not.'

  'Just as you say.'

  'We must remember, however, that, in her journal, Marie Bashkirtseff informs us that on one occasion she felt impelled to throw the dining-room clock into the sea. I have the impression that, at the time, Marie was unmarried and, most probably, therefore, according to the fashion of the age, a virgin.'

  'Oh, just an anti-mother complex, no doubt. I expect her action relieved her mind of all sorts of inhibitions and frustrations. Mrs Romilly has a different set of worries, that's all.'

  'Worries-yes,' said Dame Beatrice thoughtfully.

  'If this Romilly is a relative of yours,' said Laura, 'I think I had better write him our official letter before you go and see him. Relations always think they're entitled to get something for nothing.'

  The so-called official letter was Laura's own invention and she was proud of it. It did nothing so crude as to give a scale of charges, or even to state, in unequivocal terms, that Dame Beatrice's services had to be paid for; nevertheless, people who received it, signed L. Catriona Gavin, Secretary, had no reason to be unaware that they were to expect a far from moderate bill. What was more, without reference to Dame Beatrice, Laura was always prepared to chase up any laggards. As she herself expressed it to her husband (although not to Dame Beatrice), 'There's always the State. If they're choosy, and want us, they've got to pay through the nose.'

  'Oh,' said Laura's employer, on this occasion, 'there is no need for an official letter. I have accepted the invitation, and am off to Galliard Hall tomorrow afternoon.'

  'Galliard Hall?' said Laura. 'Didn't somebody commit suicide there, or something, a few years back? The place was up for sale and the owner kept reducing the price, so I heard, because nobody would buy.'

  'Because of the suicide?' asked Laura's husband, Assistant Commissioner Robert Gavin.

  'I suppose so. Besides, it's an enormous old barracks of a place. I can't think who'd buy it.'

  'My relative has either bought it or rented it, it seems,' said Dame Beatrice. 'Romilly? Romilly? It sounds the kind of name by which a male Lestrange would very likely be called, but I cannot say that it strikes any other chord. However, a family tree has many branches.'

  'What was all that about the girl who chucked the dining-room clock into the sea?' asked Gavin.

  'Clocks, so I understand,' said Laura's son Hamish, who was holding his baby sister in hickory-tough young arms, 'are thought, in morbid psychology, to symbolise the female cycle of...'

  'Not in front of the child,' said his father, hastily. 'Chuck the brat over here. They talk about bouncing babies. Let's see if this one does.'

  (2)

  'Well,' said Laura, on the following afternoon, 'if Mrs. Romilly asks you to go swimming with her, find some cast-iron excuse.' They had finished lun
ch, the car had been ordered round to the front of the Stone House, and Dame Beatrice was about to set out for Galliard Hall.

  'It is scarcely the right time of year for sea-bathing, and, in any case, I am not as fond of strenuous personal aquatics as you are,' she observed, 'so you may spare yourself all anxiety on my behalf.' She entered the car and waved her hand as it moved off down the drive; then she settled her small, spare elderly body comfortably against the upholstery, and as the car moved on to the New Forest road which linked Ringwood with Burley, she gazed out of the window at the passing scenery.

  The vast stretches of Forest pasture on the common near her home gave way to woods and then to what seemed to be a limitless expanse of undulating country covered in brown bracken with a wayside edge of rough grass, broken by still and shining ponds and stretches of gorse and withered heather.

  The road was a minor one until it merged, at Picket Post, with the highway between Ringwood and Romsey. The car swung off to the left, skirted most of the town and then, speeding up, made for Wimborne. Here a one-way street took a tour round the two-towered minster and then went left again at insignificant crossroads and over an ancient bridge.

  Up a long and winding hill and through a long, dull village ran the road, then it dipped past a farm and alongside a tree-bowered estate until, at a major roundabout, it dropped sharply south-west to Wareham.

  After Wareham, with its defensive earthworks, its Saxon church-on-the-wall, its prominent priory church of Lady St Mary, its river and its flooded, riverside meadows (for the time was late February, a few days away from March), the scenery changed. The road wound on towards the Purbecks and across the moors of Slepe, Middlebere and Creech. Corfe Castle, a stark, defiant shell, reared itself, frowning, on the mound which bridged the only gap in the range. The road skirted skittishly round it.

  One stone-built village followed another, once Corfe was passed, and then, at last, there was nothing to be seen but the clean and lovely lines of the rounded hills. Suddenly, from a valley which dropped to sea-level on the south, a magnificent headland shouldered into the sky and a flat, wide, sea-lapped moorland stretched away into the distance.

  The road soon divided a large, partly-timbered estate into two unequal parks, and on the lesser of these, backed and sheltered by the hills, lay, at the end of a sloping drive, an impressive, intimidating mansion.

  'I think we're here, madam,' said George. They had arrived at Galliard Hall.

  The house belonged to the early years of the Stuart dynasty, having been built in about the year 1610. The front entrance faced north, and two gabled wings had Jacobean bay windows with the mullions and transomes of the period. It was clear that successive owners had done little to alter the original facade. It was equally obvious that this had begun to crumble, and the whole place, including the unweeded, untended drive and the cracked and broken steps which mounted in two flights to an ornate but battered front archway, gave an overall impression of poverty, neglect and decay.

  George drew up in front of the terrace. At the top of the steps an elderly man, whom Dame Beatrice took to be her host, was waiting to receive her. Behind him, and a little to one side, were another elderly man wearing a green baize apron and, in the doorway itself, a couple of youthful maidservants.

  The first elderly man seized Dame Beatrice by her thin shoulders and kissed her rapidly on both cheeks. The second elderly man went gingerly down the worn steps to help George with the luggage. The maidservants stood aside, curtsied, and followed their master and the visitor into the house. Dame Beatrice found herself in the great hall, a magnificent room with windows looking towards the drive, a heavy brass chandelier hanging from the middle of the ceiling and two carved figures, two-thirds life-size, standing at either end of the mantelpiece. There was a gilt-framed Corot on the chimney-breast between them. There were other pictures around the walls. Dame Beatrice thought she recognised a Lely and a Raeburn among them.

  The floor was uncarpeted and was of black and white tiles, each a foot square. At some time the floor of the room above had been cut away and a balustered gallery substituted, giving the great hall height and light appropriate to its size. It was all extremely impressive and, after the dilapidated appearance of the exterior of the house, considerably surprising, for the interior seemed beautifully kept and maintained.

  'You will like to go straight to your room,' said the host. Amabel will show you the way.' The older of the two girls took Dame Beatrice up a splendid, broad, oak staircase, which had finely-carved and pierced panels in place of the usual balusters, and three flights of nine treads each. These, with right-angle turns, led to the gallery which Dame Beatrice had seen from below. From this she was shown to her room, which opened off it.

  Heavy plasterwork covered the ceiling with scrolls, cupids and flowers. The bed was a magnificent four-poster and the walls were hung with tapestries depicting young men and maidens of the eighteenth-century for ever (or until the tapestry fell to pieces) at dalliance in summer woodlands. Dame Beatrice murmured a line or two from Keats and received from the maid the information that there would be tea in the drawing-room as soon as she was ready for it, and that the bathroom was two doors along to the left.

  'Would that be poertry loike, as ee was sayen, m'lady?' she concluded respectfully. [No attempt made to reproduce the local dialect, but merely to suggest country speech. (Author)]

  'Ode on a Grecian Urn,' Dame Beatrice replied.

  '"Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed

  Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu."'

  'Oi loikes poertry. Tes a koind o' wetchcraft, Oi rackon.'

  'How right you are, Amabel. It is Amabel, isn't it?'

  'Yes, thank you, m'lady. Oi've put ee a can of hot water in the barthroom. There eddn't nothen laid on. You tells me what toime you warnts your barth and Oi sees to getten et for ee. Tes best in the marnen, ef that suit ee.'

  'Excellent. How do I find the drawing-room, where I believe I am to have tea?'

  'Down the stairs, through the hall, turn left into the doinen room and left again through the arch.'

  In the drawing-room Dame Beatrice found a young woman of striking appearance, black-haired, red-cheeked and bold-eyed, in charge of two tea-pots. Of her elderly host there was no sign. The young woman gave her a brilliant smile and said, 'Hullo! In case you think I'm Trilby, well, I'm not. Do you prefer Ceylon or Indian tea?'

  'Ceylon, thank you,' said Dame Beatrice, seating herself. 'I have to confess that, except as the title of a book which I have not read for many years, the name Trilby means nothing to me.'

  'Uncle Romilly's wife. Isn't that the girl you've come to see?'

  'I believe it is, but I was not told her Christian name.'

  'Christian indeed!-Bread and butter or a toasted tea-cake?-A limb of Satan, if you ask me! The dance she's led poor Uncle Romilly these last few months!'

  'Suitably so, perhaps, in a house named Galliard Hall.'

  'It isn't any joke, believe you me! Poor Uncle Romilly is nearly off his head with worry. There's no piece of wickedness that Trilby can't think up when she's in the mood.'

  'I understand that she has a habit of drowning things.'

  'That's the least part of it. I suppose I shouldn't say such a thing, but the pity is that she hasn't, so far, poor idiot, drowned herself. And now she's invited all these mixed relations to the house, and, of course, as they are relations, Uncle Romilly can't exactly say he doesn't want them.'

  'I wonder what you mean by "mixed" relations?'

  'Oh, well, some are hers, you see, and some are his, and I can't think what will happen when they all get together.'

  'May I ask why you say that?'

  'Well, it would seem about as sensible to put the Montagues and the Capulets together in one house as the Lestrange family and the Provosts.'

  'I seem to remember that the Montagues and Capulets were reconciled by virtue of the deaths of Romeo and Juliet.'


  The young woman gave her a very sharp glance and continued:

  'I wanted Uncle Romilly to let them know what is happening, and plan to have them at different times, but Trilby wants them all to come together, and, since she's been so difficult, Uncle Romilly gives in to her over everything. Well, if I'm not very much mistaken, this time there'll be murder done. They'll be at one another's throats from the word Go.'

  'You do not, of course, speak literally, when you talk of murder being done?'

  'Oh, don't I, just! You don't know them as well as I do.'

  'I have relatives (of a sort) called Marshall-Provost, but the name Provost, of itself, is strange to me. However, as you probably know, I am a Lestrange myself by my first marriage.'

  'Are you? Uncle Romilly didn't tell me that. He said your name was Bradley, but, if you are connected with the Lestrange family, I expect you know some of those who are coming. There are Hubert-he's a parson-Willoughby-he's a private secretary, I believe-the twins Corin and Corinna...'

  'My late husband, of course, has been dead for many years, and these people would be of a younger generation. I doubt whether I have met any of them.'

  'You might know Corin and Corinna. They changed their names when they became pop singers, I believe. As for the Provosts, well, there are Giles and Tancred-he's a poet-and, lastly, Humphrey and a girl named Binnie, Humphrey's wife, so she's only a Provost by marriage. I don't know what her maiden name was.'

  'At all events, if it comes to a battle, the sides would appear to be well-matched,' suggested Dame Beatrice lightly.

  'There is no "if" about it. It will come to a battle, if the Provosts run true to form. As it will also come to a matter of no holds barred, I'm not clear where to place my bets. Tancred, as you'd expect, is a minor poet-very minor-one slim volume published at his own expense-but he can be a menace, from what Uncle Romilly tells me. I don't know much about Giles, except that he's keen on horses. Humphrey is a master at a third-rate private day-school and Binnie is the original dumb blonde. Quite a nice child, if you don't worry about her having a vacuum where her brain ought to be, but completely moronic, poor dear. The Lestrange twins-you know, those I told you are in show business-take off her and Humphrey in their act. It's terribly funny-not that Humphrey cares much about it, of course. He hates Tancred, too.'