Dandy Gilver and a Deadly Measure of Brimstone (28 page)

Grant tutted.

‘Say what you like about the good old days, madam, but we don’t hang blind children any more. No wonder him and his granny are not resting easy.’

‘Yes, so what I think you should do is pick a very common name – Rose or Jeannie for a woman, James or William for a man – but best stick to women, since most of them seem to be women so far – and claim to have been … contacted.’

‘A man,’ said Grant, ‘because it’ll be so much better when I speak in his voice. Listen to this, madam.’ She finished stretching my net cap over my hair, then half turned away and cleared her throat. When she spoke again it was in a deep, ragged, rumbling voice which seemed to come straight from the pit of her stomach without her lips moving at all.

‘I am William, come down from the hill. Wrongly judged and wrongly hanged, now I seek my revenge.’

‘Good God Almighty!’ I said. There were shivers running through me from head to toe and Bunty, on the bed, had raised her head and was staring at Grant with her lip drawn back from her remaining upper teeth in the closest thing she could ever make to a snarl.

‘It’s really nothing, madam,’ Grant said. ‘Just a question of breath control. I could teach you.’

‘I am glad to say I don’t foresee needing to know,’ I told her. ‘But William it is – wrongly judged and wrongly hanged. Excellent, Grant. You can start in the morning.’

I was lucky enough to witness her arrival too. Mrs Scott, Mrs Davies and the gooseberry-eyed girl, who I had discovered was called Olivia, were taking morning coffee in the ladies’ drawing room, no sign of Mr Merrick, and I was waiting there to see Donald and Teddy safely out of their respective Faradaic heat bath and ten lengths of breaststroke, install them on the terrace with hot bottles and then begin my search for the missing yard-square object. As I sat there I saw a mousy figure enter at the double doors, hesitate and then come creeping towards the party of ladies who were just one table away from me, reading luridly coloured picture papers which I did not recognise –
Spiritualists’ Weekly
, perhaps. Grant was wearing something close to a novice’s habit, a plain grey pinafore dress and white neckpiece underneath it, and had straightened her hair and scraped it to either side of her head. Her hands were clasped in front of her and she made only darting glances up to see where she was going, keeping her head for the most part decently bowed.

‘Excuse me,’ she said, bobbing a curtsy when Mrs Scott deigned to notice her. ‘Are you the … Someone told me I should speak to you. I’m in need of counsel. I just don’t know what to do.’ Before any of the women could answer, Grant seemed to buckle at the knees and she sank into a chair, raising a shaking hand to her brow. ‘I feel sick,’ she said. ‘Oh my, I feel so very sick. Such great evil. I don’t think I can bear it.’ She went so far as to make a couple of rather convincing noises which caused Mrs Scott to edge away as far as she could without leaving her chair. The gooseberry-eyed girl, Olivia, put a hand out and touched Grant’s arm. Grant immediately raised her head and smiled. I would have said that roses bloomed in her cheeks but no one, even from a theatrical background, even a Barrymore, could change colour at will.

‘Thank you,’ Grant said. Then she frowned a little and looked at the girl’s hand on her arm. ‘What did you do?’

‘I am at peace with my gift,’ said Olivia. ‘I simply shared my peace with you.’

‘Gift!’ said Grant. ‘It’s a curse! I pray and pray for it to be taken away and I pray for forgiveness for whatever I did to bring it down upon my wicked head.’

‘My dear girl,’ said Mrs Scott. I was surprised to hear Grant addressed this way. She is slightly older than me and it has been a while since I was a ‘girl’, dear or otherwise. But something about the white collar and meekly parted hair had taken years off her. ‘My dear girl, you have not been among friends. You are among them now. Please, tell us what’s troubling you.’

‘I’m staying in the town with my lady – I’m a maid, you see – and oh, there’s such great evil. I can’t sleep! That voice! I wish I could believe I’m dreaming, but it’s real. And the look of him. I asked for help at the church but the minister scorned me. Then – I’m ashamed to admit it – but I stepped into the Crown for a glass of port, just to help me sleep; because we’re right next door and the sound of the men in the bar put the notion in my head, and someone there was saying that up at the Hydro there was a convention of spiritualists. I thought maybe you could help me.’

‘I’m sure we can,’ said Mrs Davies. ‘This voice, what does it say? And what is it that you see?’

‘Oh, a terrible sight,’ said Grant. ‘A rough, low beast of a man and … harmed. Not right at all. His neck!’ All three mediums were sitting on the edges of their seats now and no one could blame them. It was a bravura performance.

‘And what does he say?’ said Olivia Gooseberry. I hoped that Grant would not unleash the dreadful rumbling sound of her ghost. Not here in the ladies’ drawing room. I felt my shoulders rise as I braced myself for it, but I should have trusted her.

‘He says …’ Grant hesitated. ‘It doesn’t come through my ears, you know. It’s as though I’m speaking it, only not in my voice – oh, it’s too hard to explain.’

‘A channel!’ said Mrs Scott. ‘Don’t fret, my dear. We understand completely. What does he say?’

‘He says …’ She stopped again. ‘It’s such wickedness, I hardly want to tell you.’ All three were wound like springs now. If Grant did not tell them at her next approach, one of them would pinch her.

‘He says, “I am William.” He never says a surname. “I was wrongly judged and wrongly hanged. I am come to wreak my revenge.” And some other things I can never make out and something about his mother but he’s always crying by then.’

The three mediums were dumbfounded, a tableau of rapt stupefaction which lasted so long that Grant raised her head and took a surreptitious peek at them.

Mrs Scott was the first to find her voice.

‘No surname?’ she asked weakly. ‘Not even an initial?’ I thought I could see Grant considering the initial. ‘M’ was always a good bet in Scotland as were ‘O’ in Ireland and ‘T’ in Cornwall, but very sensibly she shook her head no.

‘What does it mean, Mrs Scott?’ asked Olivia.

‘Something stupendous,’ Mrs Scott replied. ‘Something unhoped-for and almost undreamed-of. We must find Mrs Molyneaux, ladies. Or perhaps … dare we … Yes! We must take this straight to Mr Merrick himself.’ She rose. ‘Stay here, my dear. Help yourself to a cup of coffee. Ring for a fresh pot. Tell them to put it on Mrs Scott’s bill if it’s extra. We shall return.’

They stood and sailed out of the room with the wind behind them and the harbour in view, leaving Grant and me gazing at one another over the empty chairs.

‘That seems to have gone down rather well then,’ I said softly.

‘I wonder which part of what I said convinced them,’ said Grant. ‘I hope they tell me. I can suddenly make out the mumbled words if they let me in on what I’m supposed to be hearing, can’t I?’

‘Practise some restraint for now,’ I answered. ‘That would be my advice anyway. You seem to have done plenty to get their attention.’

It was with the greatest reluctance that I managed to drag myself away, for I wanted nothing more than to skulk in my chair and overhear what happened when Mr Merrick appeared on the scene. But generals do not skulk about the front line once the orders are given and I had tasks of my own.

Attics or basement, I wondered as I made my way across the hall to the servants’ door. If the missing object was as heavy as all that I imagined it would be no small matter to lug it up to the attics, even using the invalid lift by which the frailer Hydro guests made their way between bedroom and baths. I would start in the basement, and it seemed sensible to start in the very corridor where Regina, Mrs Cronin and I had all converged that day. There had been doors on either side of it and what could they be except boxrooms? Or possibly boiler rooms, for all that steam had to have its source somewhere.

Finding the place was not going to be easy, though. I could go to the Turkish baths and start from there, but if anyone saw me I could not claim to be lost. If I started at the other end I could, with a little more plausibility, say that I was taking a short cut and had misplaced myself.

I skirted the kitchens, the sculleries and laundry, a boot room, the wine cellar and a boxroom where the casino tables stood waiting for nightfall under their baize covers. What is more, I did it without a single servant seeing me. I even found time to congratulate myself on how much improved in stealth I was these days. When I reached the less populous and well-utilised areas of below stairs, I began to pay close attention to the floor, looking for scraping marks, and I began to try the handles of the doors. Most were locked and I regretted the impulsive way I had thrust Dr Laidlaw’s keys into her hands as she rushed past me the evening before. Those few doors which were unlocked opened to show me guests’ luggage, old deckchairs with their canvas faded and fraying, a collection of toboggans awaiting the winter, a heap of rusting bicycles from early in the century, and any number of moth-eaten tennis nets rolled up and stuffed into tea chests.

At the end of a short corridor leading off the main one, outside yet another locked door, I thought I saw some scratch marks but could not be sure. I put my eye to the keyhole and saw nothing except grey light with strings of cobweb floating in it. I straightened and sneezed, deadening the sound with my finger and thumb pinched around my nose, the way that Nanny Palmer always told me would burst my ear drums, then I lit a match and took a closer look at the scratch marks on the floor. I was almost sure they were about as far apart as the marks on the tiled floor of the empty room last night. Did I dare go back to Dr Laidlaw’s office and re-steal her keys to get through this door? I did not; and besides, she would surely not have returned the keys to the dish from which they had been taken. I was at a loss as to how else I could gain entry to a locked windowless basement, short of hacking the door down with an axe, when I stopped short. It was
not
windowless, there was grey light and cobwebs in there. If I could work out where on the outside of the building that room lay then I could peer in at the window.

I sighed. My accomplishments were over for the day then: I am pitifully incapable of finding my way around strange houses. Outside, if the sun is shining and it is not noon at the equator, I can navigate as well as anyone else who was taught geography along with her letters and numbers as a child. It is not much help in Perthshire, where the admittedly long hours of daylight in the short months of summer are usually filled with driving rain, but at least the capacity is there if the conditions allow. Inside houses it is another matter and I have been given lewd winks more than once before now because I was wandering a corridor at a house party where I had no reason to be.

I did not even try to form a plan in my head of the Hydro interior today. Instead, I used a mental version of the unravelling jersey method. Back on the main corridor I went along muttering ‘left, left, left’ to myself until I found a staircase. I went up to the ground floor and walked along the corridor I found there saying ‘right, right, right’. At the end I emerged into a corner of the dining room. I crossed it and the hall and emerged from the front door, walked round to the dining-room window, kept walking saying ‘left, left, left’ which took me to the corner of the lawn and then, still saying ‘right, right, right’, I fought my way through the dense shrubbery which screened off the servants’ area from the lawns below the terrace where, for the first time in my life, I was pleased to have to brush cobwebs from my face.

Here there were dusty windows a plenty. I peered in at them, seeing the same tennis nets, bicycles and toboggans I had seen before. I passed a garden door, moved on, and saw deckchairs and luggage. I had seen all of these things from the corridor. Where was the room behind the locked one at the end of the offshoot?

And then it struck me. That short offshoot of corridor led to the outside wall. That door didn’t open onto a room. It opened onto this path and the grey light I had seen was filtering through these rhododendrons. I had just brushed away the very strings of cobweb I had seen through the keyhole. I went back and looked at the mossy bricks and, right enough, there were faint but unmistakable scratches there. Darkened now after a few weeks in the weather, but still clear. And the moss had been ripped out too and lay shrivelling.

I followed the path, navigating by the scraped bricks, until I came to a break in the shrubs. The path carried on but led only to the laundry yard and back into the house again. Through the gap in the rhododendrons, however, was the side lawn, rather neglected – no clock golf or croquet here – and shaded by spreading cedars. Was it my imagination, I wondered, or were there faint depressions in the grass? It was not the gardeners’ pride, this unused patch of lawn, being rather spongy with more of the moss and rather sparse under the cedars where the long needles had fallen and never been raked away, and I was almost sure that I could see the traces of two wheels – a sack barrow, perhaps – which had crossed it recently. I set off in pursuit of them.

Halfway over I began to fear that the traces were my imagination, nothing more. They disappeared completely for yards at a time and when I fancied I saw them again they were fainter than ever. I had almost given up when, under the massiest of the cedars in the densest shade, I saw a patch about six feet long where the brittle needles had snapped and sprung up at either end: a clear and undeniable imprint of two wheels, not my imagination at all. I skirted them carefully and then stood beyond them gazing ahead at where they could have been going.

I was near the edge of the grounds now and could see portions of the high grey garden wall between the trees and bushes which bordered them. Then, behind some sort of apple or cherry tree, its leaves just beginning to yellow, I saw what I had not realised I was looking for but realised now that I must have been: the smooth, rounded shape of a ridge tile. There was a roof over there, and where there is a roof there is a building below it and where there is a building there is somewhere to wheel a heavy object and try to hide it. I glanced about me but this was a desolate spot, away from the terrace and the sunshine, so I picked up my pace and made for the shadows.