Lollie’s thoughts must have been running along the same lines as my own.
‘It never occurred to me it was one of the servants,’ she said, rousing me from them. She had got herself out of her shirt and skirt and had wrapped herself up in a dressing gown to sit at her table.
‘Who else?’ I asked her. ‘It was the first thing that occurred to me.’
‘I suppose a private detective?’ said Lollie. ‘Someone could easily wait across the road for me to come out.’
I stepped over to the windows and looked out. Her bedroom was at the front, on the sunny side, and had an excellent view over Queen Street Gardens where a private detective might indeed pass endless unseen hours behind a tree watching her, so long as he had a key. These gardens were not open to the hoi polloi, naturally, but kept scrupulously for the use of the residents, even nannies with perambulators being frowned on in some of the grander squares and crescents in the town. I turned back to the room.
‘I’m not even sure it’s the same person every time,’ said Lollie, who had started brushing her hair.
‘Here, let me do that.’ I came back from the window, took her hairbrush out of her hands and set to work with it.
‘And doesn’t that suggest a firm of detectives, rather than a servant?’ she asked.
I did not answer; her fine, silky hair had responded to my brushing by flying up in a cloud like a dandelion head all around her parting. I dabbed the brush at it trying to make it flatten down again and caught her eye in the mirror.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Do you have a rose-water spray? I’m almost sure I could make some little waves if we dampen it.’
We went together to look and see what there might be in her bathroom, Lollie saying it was a good idea for me to get the lie of the land.
‘And don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Pip won’t be up for half an hour.’
It had once been the dressing room and – although windowless in the middle of the building and surely rather stuffy as a result – made a very comfortable bathroom now. I looked with interest at the little hooded alcove on one end of the bath, something between a sedan chair cover and a grotto.
‘Gosh,’ I said. ‘A stand-up shower-bath! How lovely.’
‘Yes, we had them in our suite in Turkey on our honeymoon,’ said Lollie, ‘and Pip put one in for me. It’s rather delicious, except when the hot water suddenly runs out. I don’t think I’ll chance it while our coal’s being rationed. Now come and see my boudoir.’
She cannot have needed it, what with four rooms downstairs and the ground-floor parlour too, but there it was: a little oasis of satin- and tulip-wood, with Louis XIV salon chairs and floral plaques stuck on to any cabinet, cupboard front or sewing table which presented a flat space for the sticking.
Across the landing to the back, Pip had the larger of the two bedrooms, north-facing like Miss Rossiter’s room four floors beneath it, but with a view down over the Forth to the hills of Fife. I stepped close to the glass and peered downwards, seeing my little cherry tree and patch of grass far below. Then I turned around and studied the room closely. One could surely learn a great deal about a person from his bedroom.
What I learned of Pip Balfour was that he took rather less interest in his own surroundings than in those of his wife. Lollie’s bedroom, no less carefully fitted up than her boudoir, had walls freshly covered in pale lavender silk, with white and lavender chintz at the windows and bed and sumptuous Aubusson carpets scattered about wherever her feet might be imagined to rest for more than a moment, but in here the walls were papered in stripes, the curtains were lined velvet and the floor was covered in a warm but far from beautiful Turkey rug. The furniture was mahogany in both rooms, it was true, but Lollie’s was Georgian mahogany with legs like toothpicks while Pip’s bedroom contained great hulking boulders of the blackest, most bulbous excesses the Victorian age can ever have mustered, from a very strong field.
‘It’s fearsome, isn’t it?’ Lollie said. ‘He’s had it since he was a boy. He told me he once managed to shut himself in the bottom drawer of the chest and slept the night there.’
I nodded but said nothing, still busy studying the room. There were books on the bedside table – Walter Scott, which suggested that Pip read to help with bouts of sleeplessness – and photographs on the chimneypiece – Lollie in various forms and a few of the right vintage and composition to be parents and siblings – but there were no toilet articles anywhere, I was disappointed to note. (Nanny Palmer had dinned it into me that the state of one’s hairbrush and toothbrush was a window on one’s soul – or moral character anyway – and I suppose I thought I might find evidence of Pip Balfour’s villainy near his washstand.)
One thing I did notice was the great number of keys on view. There was one in each of the two doors in the room and one in every drawer and cupboard too, and they had given me an idea.
‘Why don’t you simply lock your door at night?’ I said, thinking that if this were a house in which keys stayed where they were put, there was sure to be a key for Lollie’s room as well as this one. I have always admired such houses; Gilverton is of the other sort, where every lock is empty and there are jars and drawers and boxes full of miscellaneous keys all over the place and no one ever has the time or the patience to put the sundered pairs back together again. Hugh once got a locksmith in to redo the locks on the gun room, wine cellar and silver cupboard, but within weeks the keys had wandered off again and gone to join their chums in odd vases on distant windowsills.
Lollie was shaking her head at me; not just her head either – she was trembling.
‘I couldn’t bear it,’ she said. ‘I’ve never been able to sleep in a locked room – not even in hotels – not since I was a child and my nursemaid slipped out one night to meet her young man and left me locked in my nursery. There was a thunderstorm and I couldn’t get out of my room to find my mother.’ She grinned at me. ‘Pip always says we are Jack Spratt and his wife. I used to hate knowing that Pip locked his door at night, until we came to a compromise.’ She led me back out onto the landing.
Nothing, she told me, could persuade her husband not to turn the key in his bedroom door at night, following a lifelong habit, but there was another door just outside at the top of the stairs which led into a small back hall, thence into Pip’s bathroom – another former dressing room – and from there back into his bedroom again, and Lollie explained that he had consented to a night latch on the outer door, rather than a lock proper, with the little key kept on top of the lintel in case of emergencies.
‘I should be far more wary of that arrangement,’ I said. I did not trust these new-fangled cylinder latches with their flat little keys all looking exactly the same and always thought one could get into much more of a pickle from doors slamming shut with the key on the wrong side or from leaving the little knob up when it should be down or putting it down when it should be up.
‘
I
wouldn’t have one for a king’s ransom,’ Lollie agreed.
‘Did he have an ayah?’ I asked. ‘Perhaps he got a complex from tight swaddling?’ Lollie laughed.
‘No, an ordinary nanny,’ she said, ‘but she told terrifying tales of monsters and burglars, while my nurse stuck to lullabies, so perhaps there’s something in it.’ With that, we returned to her room to choose a dress and some jewels and I noticed that her hair, without any rose-water or fussing, had lain down upon her head again. I left it well alone.
I had just fastened her shoes and was still kneeling on the floor, admiring her, dressed and decorated although with rather more rouge on than usual she told me, when there was a light tap on the door.
‘Pip,’ she mouthed to me, then she turned her head and raised her chin as the door opened.
I sat back on my heels, feeling my mouth suddenly dry and my palms damp. Here was the moment I had been dreading! Thankfully, I told myself, he would not take any notice of me and I should be spared having to converse with him. The bedroom door opened, scraping a little over the luxurious carpet, and Pip Balfour entered the room.
4
There was my villain. He looked even younger than his wife, with a long, lozenge-shaped face and three black dashes – two eyebrows and a moustache – very stark against his skin, which was smooth and pale down to his cheeks and then rather blue, needing its evening shave. His black hair was extremely smooth too and his eyes as he came closer I saw to be brown, like a spaniel’s. It suddenly seemed very unlikely that a devil could have such brown spaniel eyes.
‘Well,’ he said to Lollie, ‘don’t you look lovely!’ Lollie said nothing. As he had approached, her defiance had retreated until her chin was tucked down and she was looking up at him from under her lashes, breathing quickly. He gave a quick frown – of puzzlement or irritation, it was impossible to say – but then with visible effort managed another smile and even rubbed his hands together as he continued. ‘Yes, lovely,’ he said. ‘Thank you for putting on such a good show for me. It’s bound to be dull.’ Then he turned towards me, still at Lollie’s feet, and put his hand out, bowing slightly.
‘Miss Rossiter,’ he said. ‘Welcome.’ I shook his hand before I could help myself and he turned the handshake into a gallant gesture of helping me up. He had remarkably rough hands for a gentleman and his shirtsleeves – he was coatless for some reason – were rolled up just a little too far, well beyond the elbow, which is a very endearing trait in a grown man. ‘You must excuse me,’ he said. ‘I’ve been sanding my model sailing ship. Lollie always tells me I look like a docker, don’t you, darling?’
Lollie gave him an uncertain smile and spoke up at last.
‘Harry will straighten you out in no time.’
Pip laughed.
‘Gosh, yes indeed,’ he said. ‘Harry will certainly put me to rights. Wash and brush up and the rudiments of the Labour movement.’ My smile, which I could not help, appeared to please him enormously and he beamed back at me. ‘But peculiar valets notwithstanding, Rossiter, I hope you’ll be very happy with us. And take good care of my beloved girl for me.’ Then he glanced at his watch, blew a kiss towards his wife and withdrew.
That, I thought to myself, was more conversation than Hugh had had with Grant in the last twenty years. I looked wonderingly at Lollie and she caught the look and threw it back to me.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘He’s very convincing. Now do you see why I could never get anyone to believe me?’
I descended the stairs slowly and spent a good ten minutes staring out at my cherry tree before I wrote another word in my notebook. When Phyllis knocked on my door to tell me it was supper-time I was still puzzling.
‘Mistress looked lovely,’ she said to me as we climbed the stairs. ‘I saw her come down. The last one – Miss Abbott – didnae hold with rouge and lipstick and mistress never could put her foot down, but she looked a picture tonight.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I’ll show you sometime if you like.’ I had correctly interpreted Phyllis’s wistful tone.
‘Oh, Miss Rossiter, would you really? Would you do me for my day out? Not to go and see my ma and fa because my fa would kill us both but every other week I go to the dancing with my pal and she aye tells me I look like a milkmaid.’
I scrutinised her face as we passed under a lamp in the kitchen passageway, and wished I had made Grant instruct me in the mysteries of the kohl pencil and lash black, but I had hardly foreseen the respectable Mrs Balfour needing such attentions. Could I remember it from the times Grant had insisted on painting it onto me? (For the disposition of power between ‘mistress’ and Miss Abbott had its reflection in my bedroom at home.)
That first evening in the servants’ hall was a perfect admixture of comfort, tiredness and boredom, and if one can get these three ingredients in proper proportion nothing is nicer; to be too tired to mind that one is bored and too comfortable to mind that one is tired makes for an evening of guilty pleasure that comes my way rather seldom. Mrs Hepburn and I occupied the armchairs once more, with Mr Faulds joining us between bursts of duty in the dining room; Mattie, Harry and John played gin rummy; Clara was nowhere to be seen – busy upstairs with the dinner guests, I supposed, as was Stanley – but the other girls sat sewing and chatting until the dirty plates began to come down again, then Millie and Eldry returned to the scullery with groans and yawns and Mrs Hepburn sauntered after them to supervise and plan for the following day.
Phyllis immediately took up Mrs Hepburn’s place in the armchair; I was fast beginning to see that these soft chairs were the prize of the servants’ hall and that no amount of time was too short to make it worth claiming one whenever all of one’s seniors had left the room.
‘So have you met master then?’ she said softly to me. The lads at their card-game were not listening. I nodded, trying not to perk up too visibly. ‘And what did you think of him?’ I took a while before I answered.
‘He seemed very nice,’ I said. ‘Very friendly. But I did wonder . . .’
‘Oh, he’s friendly all right,’ said Phyllis. ‘Just make sure you lock your door tonight, that’s all.’
‘Really?’ I said. ‘One of those, is he?’ I felt a thrill of sophistication as I said this and Phyllis nodded, her eyelids half-closed and her tongue exploring her cheek in a triumphal show of ennui.
‘And who goes in to light his fire of a morning?’ I said. ‘Not you, dear, is it? I hope not.’
‘He’s never bothered me – thank goodness,’ Phyllis said. ‘Not in that way.’
‘But Miss Abbott?’ I said. She nodded.
‘And Mr Faulds can say what he likes about that baronet in North Berwick being a step up,’ she said, ‘but we all know why Maggie didn’t work her notice.’
‘Forgive me prying, dear,’ I wriggled forward in my chair and spoke even more softly to her, ‘but when you said he didn’t bother you
in that way
, what did you . . .’
‘I’m on notice,’ said Phyllis, ‘for giving him cheek. I’m on my last warning and if I don’t behave I’ll be out on my ear with no character.’