Dandy Gilver and a Deadly Measure of Brimstone
Read Dandy Gilver and a Deadly Measure of Brimstone Online
Authors: Catriona McPherson
Table of Contents
After the Armistice Ball
The Burry Man’s Day
Bury Her Deep
The Winter Ground
Dandy Gilver and the Proper Treatment of Bloodstains
Dandy Gilver and an Unsuitable Day for a Murder
Dandy Gilver and a Bothersome Number of Corpses
Catriona McPherson
First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © Catriona McPherson 2013
The right of Catriona McPherson to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
Ebook ISBN 978 1 444 73189 7
Hardback ISBN 978 1 444 73188 0
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
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For Nancy and Jeff Balfour,
with love
Editrix ‘Suzie Dooré’ Lestrange, Francine Toon, Poppy North and everyone at Hodder & Stoughton in London. Marcia Markland, Kat Brzozowski, Hector Dejean and everyone at Minotaur in New York. Imogen Olsen for the copy-edit, Jessica Hische for the beautiful jacket design and Bronwen Salter-Murison once again for the Dandy Gilver website. My wonderful agent, Lisa Moylett. My family and friends in Scotland for their stupendous welcome when I returned to research this book. My friends (who feel like family) in America for their stupendous welcome back again. I certainly have fallen in with some good crowds. And thanks, of course, to the smallest and best crowd of all: Neil McRoberts.
Every time it was the same: almost midnight and the only light a quarter moon, bleary as a lamp on the last of its oil through the clouded glass of the window far above. Even that dimmed as the vapours shifted, stirred by movement, but was still enough to see by for someone who knew the way.
The thick steam muffled breathing and footsteps so there was near perfect silence, nothing but the occasional plink as a drop of water formed and fell, rippled and slowly calmed again. In the dream just as in waking life, to enter the water when it was still was a ritual. To shed clothes and shoes and slip under without a sound was a sacred thing.
Then came the perfect moment, floating in silence, in moonlight and cold still water. But in the dream something was wrong. The water should have been silken but felt sluggish, sucking and clinging instead of parting clean and clear. How could water be heavy?
Before the thought was fully formed, the touch came. Slow and bumping, far below the surface, a heavy object, rolling now, turning, until a cold soft arm and the trail of caressing fingers could not be denied. It was open-mouthed, tangle-haired, its limbs waving, dirt lifting off the skin. There was not the faintest gleam in its milky eyes, but in the morning and all through the day, when the rest of the dream had faded, those eyes kept staring.
Thursday, 26th September 1929
Dante believed, and has had some success dragging public opinion after him, that the ninth circle of hell, the last and lowest, the blackest and bleakest, the icy innards of Lucifer’s mouth itself, would be the worst one. After recent events, I am unconvinced. Once having been besieged by foul weather with the gluttons, and sunk in ordure with the flatterers, could one really raise a shriek about a serpent or two? One would be numb, surely, long before one were bound in chains with those giants down there – poor giants, anyway: hardly their fault – and long past caring.
So it was with me by late September of 1929. Hugh and the boys had been ill with influenza for more than a month. Or rather, they had all started off with flu but had soon parted company: Hugh to a rumbling bronchial cough, Teddy to the sharp hack of pleurisy and Donald, always so much more trouble than his brother, to a full-blown case of putrid pneumonia which melted the flesh from his frame like candle wax and left him tottering.
I resisted all infection but not, more’s the pity, because I had swept off to an hotel at the first sniffle (as had been my unmaternal and unconjugal impulse). No indeed, I had remained, mopping fevered brows, holding cups of broth to trembling lips and even removing noxious handkerchiefs with laundry tongs to carry them out to the boiler, but my eyes were as bright and my cheeks as rosy as ever. Which is to say, rather sallow, but rouge is a wonderful thing.
Not everyone was so stalwart. A few weeks in, maids and footmen were dropping like grouse on the Twelfth and even village women began refusing to come in and do the rough lest they succumb to our pestilence.
‘Good thing,’ croaked my husband when I told him. ‘This accursed germ must have come from the village in the first place. Let them keep it there.’
I set down the cup of broth smartly enough to make a little of it slop onto his bedclothes and then hurriedly dipped the corner of his napkin in his water jug to dab it away, for washing blankets was far beyond the current skeleton crew.
‘Honestly, Hugh,’ I said. ‘You spent eight hours out-of-doors on the filthiest day of the year and refused to wear mackintoshes. You have no one to blame but yourselves.’
‘Mackintoshes on a grouse moor!’ said Hugh. ‘Why not umbrellas?’
‘Why
not
umbrellas?’ I snapped back. ‘I put Donald on the bathroom scales this morning and he weighed nine stone three.’
‘What bathroom scales?’ replied Hugh, shamelessly changing the subject.
‘Nine stone three at six foot one,’ I said. ‘Which—’
‘News to me we had such an article,’ he went on. ‘Mind you—’
I did not like the glance he cast at my frame as he said this and, although I knew very well he was baiting me, I rose.
‘They are Grant’s. I borrowed them.’
Hugh said nothing, but settled back against his pillows with both hands cupped around the broth and a look on his face that one could only call mischievous. My husband cannot hide his views of Grant, my maid, and my dealings with her: he thinks her above herself and me under her thumb; he deplores her taste in modish clothes and despises me for wearing them; he thrills to remember the many times in our early married life when he instructed me on the dangers of getting chummy with the servants. He imagines (
I
imagine) that I regret not listening and obeying and that I try to hide my regret to lessen his triumph. Marriage would be so exhausting if I really gave it my all but I rather let things wash over me, from maid and husband both, and find life easier that way.
Besides, Grant was another who had remained in peak form through the plague and I was feeling very kindly disposed towards her just then. She had taken on all manner of unseemly duties and the previous afternoon I had actually seen her carry a bucket of coal.
By such means had the household limped along for a month – soup at luncheon and the like – until without warning lightning struck us. Pallister, the butler, Gilverton’s lynchpin, was seen to be red-faced and glassy-eyed one night at dinner and was heard at breakfast the next morning to issue four or five great whumphing sneezes. By tea he was in his pantry, wrapped in a shawl and shivering.
I went to the kitchen to tell Mrs Tilling and there found that the lightning had struck twice. She was blowing her nose into a linen square big enough to line a picnic basket, and was coughing carefully with a hand pressed against her bosom, a pleuritic cough if ever I heard one (and by then I had cause to know).
‘My dear Mrs Tilling!’ I cried, sweeping across the floor and pressing her into the Windsor chair by the range. ‘You must— Gosh!’ I had put the back of my hand against her forehead – the household had become a sort of Russian commune in the last few weeks, where such liberties were taken and no one to blink at them – and was rattled to feel the waves of heat and the high drumming pulse in her temple. ‘Off with you!’ I commanded. ‘Straight to bed with a hot bottle.’
‘Dinner …’ she said in the weak voice of high fever.
‘Rarebit for the invalids, and I shall go to Mr Osborne’s,’ I replied. ‘Now not another word out of you.’
She filled a bottle and one for Pallister and took herself off towards the servants’ staircase and the steep climb to her bedroom, leaving me standing in the silent kitchen meeting the huge startled eyes of the scullery maid with, I suspect, a huge startled look of my own.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Now then. Go and see that Mrs Tilling has a fire in her room, please, Norah, and then send Becky to see me in my sitting room.’ Becky, the head parlourmaid, was unbowed. I had moved the other two maids out of the room they shared with her as soon as temperatures started climbing, had instituted, in fact, a ruthless quarantine all round. There were all manner of bunk-ups going on in the attics now – that Russian commune again – and pride was going to have to be restored by a perfect flurry of extra wages and little gifts when we were on our collective feet again, but the segregation was working.
At least, I thought with a groan, sinking down into Mrs Tilling’s chair, it had been. Without her and Pallister, we might as well be rats in a sewer.
Upstairs in my sitting room, therefore, I tried to make myself ring the agency in Edinburgh again, to beg a cook, a housekeeper, even an extra maid or two, but I held out no great hopes of success. The gorgon in charge of the telephone knew how things stood at Gilverton and appeared to view the girls on her books as orchids to be tended, not as labour for hire at all. It was too disheartening to be borne and in the end I rang the doctor instead, to arrange what was beginning to feel like a standing order.
It was then, at that moment, that the ninth circle of hell was unleashed upon me and, as I say, benumbed by misfortune, I took it calmly.
‘He’s no’ in, Mrs Gilver,’ said his housekeeper. ‘Have you no’ heard?’
‘Heard what? I don’t think so,’ I said, suspecting misfortune.
‘It’s all over Dunkeld. Scarlet fever. Thirteen cases and that was this morning.’
‘Thirteen?’
‘It was a birthday party. And one poor wee soul has been carried away.’
‘Dreadful.’
‘But she’d been bad with the flu already. Laid low, you know. And it’s a terrible fearsome strain of it, I’m thinking.’
Whether she meant the fever or the flu I could not say for sure, but I withdrew my appeal for the doctor’s attention – pressed it hard upon her that he was not required – and rang off. Neither Donald nor Teddy had had scarlet fever and, while I would not ordinarily worry about great lumps of eighteen and sixteen, I could not get the picture out of my mind of Donald shivering in his pyjamas as he stood on those bathroom scales.
‘Come on then, my darling girl,’ I said to Bunty. ‘Let’s walk down and shut the gates, eh?’ She was fourteen now, a tremendous age for a Dalmatian, and the loss of her daily romp while I was nursing had not been the privation it should have been to her even a year ago. Still, she got to her feet, stretched, shook her ears and came to lean against my legs with her tail waving. I put a hand down and felt the just of her pelvis under her warm fur, the slight scrape of bone against bone where all other tissue was gone. As Alec had said, ‘if you boiled her for stock these days, she wouldn’t set to jelly’. Just the sort of remark that the owner of a five-year-old dog will let drop unthinking. I had stored it up meanly deep inside and planned to use it on him when Millie, his spaniel, was toothless and threadbare, that way that spaniels go.