Bothersome Number of Corpses

2

Of course, Alec Osborne was furious.

‘A school?’ he said. ‘A girls’ school? I thought we had decided, Dandy.’ He spiked his fork into his beefsteak and attacked it with his knife as though he were sawing through a plank. (And since the beef from the Mains is excellent, the butcher at Dunkeld a stickler for hanging and Mrs Tilling, my cook, a fiend with a tenderiser, he got clean through it in a second and the blade made a painful screeching sound against the porcelain below.)

‘How could we decide such a thing?’ I asked him. ‘We agreed that it would be fun for you if a case came in that was a little more… rugged, but we didn’t entertain the idea of turning business away. I didn’t anyway.’

‘What next?’ Alec cried. ‘A lying-in hospital? An harem?’

‘Trouble?’ asked Hugh. He had retired into his own thoughts while I was speaking, naturally, but Alec’s distress had roused him.

‘The curse strikes again,’ Alec said. ‘Gilver and Osborne are engaged to infiltrate a dormitory full of schoolgirls. Or in other words, Dandy is in business and I am to stand and hold her coat.’

‘No one mentioned dorms, darling,’ I murmured.

‘Ah,’ said Hugh, but his interest had already waned. As far as my husband is concerned any man who mixes himself up with such nonsense as detecting has only himself to blame if his path leads to boudoirs, servants’ halls, dress departments or even boarding schools for young ladies.

‘Dear Alec,’ I said, ‘if I could order you up a murder aboard a merchant sea-vessel with a crew of forty bearded sailors in ganseys, I wouldn’t hesitate to do so.’ Alec regarded me coldly. ‘A stolen medicine ball from a boxing gymnasium?’ His lips twitched. ‘Death and dismemberment in a troop of morris dancers?’ Now he really did smile.

‘I’m coming to the town with you,’ he said. ‘Even if I can only press my face against the railings and pine. Where is it, exactly?’

‘Miles away,’ I said. ‘Practically Ireland, and we don’t have any friends anywhere about so it’s the village inn for you. And me too unless I can wangle an invitation to the staffroom sofa.’ Neither of us looked at Hugh. Alec practically strained his neck not doing so.

My husband’s opinion of my new life had been through several shades: blissful ignorance, suspicion of something at once both worse than the truth in its betrayal but miles less troubling by virtue of its being so unexceptional (this when all he knew was that Alec and I were spending more time together than he could properly account for), relief on that score swiftly followed by a bewildered huff about why I should do such an unearthly thing, delight in the money, another bewildered huff lest he was being duped in some twisty double-crossing way by Alec and me, wheels within wheels, treachery inside innocence wrapped in treachery, until we had finally arrived at this uneasy three-legged balancing act. Dinner together discussing a case was fine but one arch comment at a party and Hugh was wont to grow mulish again. I tended just to look the other way and whistle since, while nothing is a greater bore than Hugh in a fully fledged sulk, the thought of losing Gilver and Osborne (especially of losing Osborne, if I am honest) was not to be borne.

‘And it’s not death and dismemberment, is it?’ Alec said. ‘What is it?

‘Her sisters-’

‘Whose sisters?’

‘The schoolmistress. Her sisters fear she’s going to bolt but they don’t know why and they’re not allowed to visit her. She’s obviously in some kind of trouble and they want us – well, me – to find out what kind, fix it and resettle her.’

‘Sounds thrilling,’ said Alec.

‘And I want to find out what she’s doing there in the first place,’ I said. ‘This girl, Alec, was an absolute darling – pretty, lively, clever, adored and indulged, free to live any life she chose… that’s the puzzle I want to solve: how on earth she ended up an old maid teaching in a girls’ school.’

‘I take it back then,’ said Alec. ‘Sounds a bit too exciting when you put it that way.’

‘No, but really,’ I said. ‘Hugh, you remember Fleur Lipscott, don’t you?’ I had been looking forward, rather meanly, to regaling him.

Hugh considered the name and then shook his head. ‘Never heard of her. Lipscott?’

I suppressed a sigh. ‘There were three sisters: Fleur, Pearl and Aurora. They were at our wedding. You danced with Pearl at a ball at the Esslemonts’.’ Hugh was shaking his head as slowly and steadily as the pendulum in a long-case clock. ‘The two elder married rather late on.’ More shaking and at last I relented. ‘They’re all very rich. Left well off by their father, Maj-’

‘Johnny Lipscott’s girls?’ said Hugh. ‘Why didn’t you just say that? Yes, of course I remember them. One of the Forrester boys got one and some magnate no one knows nabbed another. I don’t know who snapped up number three.’

‘No one did,’ I told him patiently. ‘She never married and she’s working as a schoolmistress in Wigtownshire.’

‘Really?’ said Hugh. ‘Now, that is interesting. Is she merely employed there or has she invested in the place? These single women are notorious for sinking funds into tea shops and dress shops.’

‘Hugh, you can’t be serious,’ I said. ‘She’s thirty and she’s got some dark and dreadful secret in her past, probably a child or an elopement or something.’

‘I’m lost,’ Alec said.

‘It could be anything,’ Hugh retorted.

‘A spell in burlesque, gambling debts, opium…’

‘What are you talking about?’ said Alec looking between the two of us.

‘Hugh – it’s too revolting – thinks she might do for Donald, don’t you, darling?’ I said, expecting to shrivel him. He was unrepentant.

‘He’s eighteen,’ he said.

‘Yes, but we’re not living in eighteen hundred and eighteen.’

‘Osborne?’ said Hugh, fixing Alec with a stare. Even a man as lost to silliness as this one, it was to be understood, would side with him when it came to the hard matter of a dowry.

‘I wouldn’t have thanked my father for a thirty-year-old bride when I was eighteen,’ Alec said. ‘But of course, I’m thirty-seven now. If she’s really so very rich and so very pretty, maybe I can steal her away to Dunelgar. Her sisters can always come and visit her there.’

Hugh cannot tell when Alec is joking and got a look upon his face reminiscent of mild toothache at the thought that he had shown his hand and alerted another to the prize. He fell silent, we arranged to set off on what passed for a fast train the following morning and Alec left early to supervise his packing (Barrow, his valet, is a man of decided opinion and forceful nature, but Alec always tries to have some say) and pow-wow with his estate manager about the many jobs which May inevitably brings. I spent a rueful moment reflecting on how deeply entrenched Alec had become in his pasture and crops and his timber holdings since he arrived at Dunelgar five years before. He sometimes seemed as happy discussing barley or pheasant chicks with Hugh as discussing suspects and alibis with me, and it often made me wonder which was the real Alec Osborne, if either.

I was sitting on my bed describing the little I knew about the case to Grant, my maid, to allow her to choose my wardrobe for me (I, unlike Alec, gave up all thoughts of influence over my outfits long ago) when a knock came at the door.

Grant and I stared at one another and ran through all possibilities swiftly. My sons were at school; we had no guests staying in the house; none of the other maids would dare risk Grant’s wrath by attempting to breach the sanctum and if Alec had forgotten to tell me something he would have rung at the front doorbell and sent a message to me. He makes quite free with the downstairs of Gilverton in the hours of daylight but he would never come a-knocking at my bedroom door at night.

‘Come in?’ I said and Grant nodded, approving my handling of this unheard-of development in our lives.

The door opened, revealing Hugh.

‘Ah, good,’ he said. ‘You’re still up, Dandy. Well, I just wanted to say this: Donald is coming down at the end of this term – in a few short weeks, actually. He has no interest whatsoever in university, thank goodness since he has no aptitude for it either, and unless he comes home and takes over Benachally he’s only going to racket about and ruin us. Living at Benachally alone would be rather dull and so why not? I wouldn’t have ordered her off a menu with that size of an age difference, but you yourself said you like the girl and so… a word to the wise. Don’t let Osborne have it all his own way.’

I was speechless, and so said nothing.

‘Different if it were Teddy,’ Hugh said, ‘but Donald has had a ribbon in his pocket since he was ten.’

‘They don’t carry ribbons in their pockets any more, Hugh,’ I said. ‘Even you didn’t carry rib-’

‘Just a figure of speech,’ said Hugh. ‘Don’t quibble. He has had a caravan of village girls following him around since he was old enough to wink at them and if we don’t get him married off in short order I can quite imagine that someday it will be a caravan of village fathers, with shotguns. Which would you rather?’

Grant was rolling stockings in a kind of paroxysm of embarrassment of which Hugh was sublimely unaware.

‘He is too young,’ I said. ‘And she is too old. If you’re worried about shotguns’ – I glanced at Grant but Hugh did not so much as follow my eyes – ‘then threaten him with your own. Oh, how I wish he would just join the army and get rid of his high jinks with his brother officers where he can do no harm.’

‘He’s not joining the army,’ said Hugh, rather shortly. ‘Not now. Not soon and I fervently hope not ever.’

I frowned at him. ‘Why not? One would have thought you’d more quickly shove him into your old regiment than up the aisle with a fading beauty of questionable past.’

Grant was now, frankly, loitering. My case was packed and the drawer she was tidying out was perfectly tidy already.

‘If it comes to conscription then of course he shall go. They shall both go. But I will not encourage them into the vanguard.’

I shook my head at him. Hugh is a doom-monger of the very highest order. He was convinced that a nine-day strike a year or two ago was the coming of the revolutionary hordes and managed to get me thoroughly rattled despite my long experience of his dramatic premonitions (not to mention my long experience of my country not going in for revolutions much these days). His latest conviction, a mere ten years after the Great War ended, was that more of the same was on its way and from the very Hun that we had so thoroughly squashed. I do not pretend to follow the domestic politics of Bavaria with the interest my husband manages to muster, but I knew enough to be sure that this was his hobby-horse and nothing more sinister than that; more akin to campfire tales of ghosts when everyone is safe and cosy than a cool appraisal of the state of the world.

‘Goodnight, Hugh,’ I said.

‘Something to consider,’ he answered, making no move to leave my open doorway.

I stood and put my hand to the back of my neck as though to unfasten a button there, which did the trick. With a curt goodnight he left me.

‘Master’s right, you know,’ said Grant. ‘Madam.’

‘About the gathering clouds of war?’ I said, unfastening my dress buttons since I had all but started anyway.

‘About Young Master Donald,’ she replied. ‘I caught him up a tree with Eliza McManus once, gazing at her like the crown jewels.’

‘Eliza McManus!’ I shuddered. She was the daughter of a blacksmith, as broad as she was tall, with a red face and gaps between all of her front teeth. ‘How did Eliza McManus get up a tree?’

‘This was years ago, before she got so… sturdy.’

‘So they were children,’ I said. ‘Stop scare-mongering.’

‘Nanny said to me once that Donald said to her – in his bath – that when he grew up he wanted to be a daddy.’

‘How sweet. This correspondence is now closed,’ I said. ‘What am I wearing tomorrow?’

‘Leave off wrenching at those buttons and I’ll tell you,’ said Grant. ‘Madam. Turn around and let me at them before they all end up on the floor.’

It was a bright grey day when we arrived at Portpatrick the following afternoon (in Scotland, one must learn to make these distinctions), with a great deal of massing and thinning cloud scudding across the sky on a stiff breeze and, although the sun did not actually break through at all and there was no hint of blue from hilltop to horizon, every so often one could tell that it was getting towards evening from a patch of diffuse light gleaming far out to sea. The station was at the top of the hill and did not run to a taxi, so we descended to the village proper in a cart driven by the porter, a man of dour mien who kept up a droning monologue all the way, in such an impenetrable Wigtownshire brogue that it might as well have been the rumble of thunder.

At the bottom, the cart swung round onto the main (practically the only) street, a straggle of cottages, shops and one or two grander captains’ houses snaking along, all facing the harbour. A fleet of small fishing craft were moored for the night, tied together and jostling as they bobbed in the high water, looking like a flock of chickens settling on their perches, with a little squawking and a little shoving but cosy enough and used to the proximity. A few of the men were still at work on their nets in the lee of the far harbour wall and some of their wives were scrubbing out crates beside them, bent double, shoving their brushes back and forth with a steady rhythm. The sound of the clogs on the cobbled ground as the women rocked back and forth, back and forth, seemed to keep time with the clink of the painters, and the soft knock-knock of the boats themselves, making one great percussion section out of the whole scene.

‘Delightful,’ I said, standing up in the cart as it drew to a stop and spreading my arms to encompass all of the view. It was not in my nature to be so expansive but the last fifty miles from Dumfries to here had been spent on a tiny ancient train with very dark upholstery and very very small windows from which the view was of bleak high moors and glowering valleys, so this sight of the sea was as welcome as a toddy.

I breathed deeply in hopes of ozone, but was met instead with the sharp rich smell of fried fish and vinegar from somewhere nearby.

‘Fish on Friday,’ said Alec. ‘I’m ready for my dinner, Dan; I don’t know about you.’

At this the dour porter let fly a stream of bitter invective, no more decipherable than his previous offerings in its detail but crystal clear as to its broad intent. Alec and I hurriedly descended and stood on the pavement while he tugged our suitcases out of the back of the cart and dumped them onto the ground.

‘Let’s go in and try for a cup of tea at least,’ I said, nodding at the hotel – not much more than an inn really – where we had alighted. ‘Then I think I’ll set off and try to find this school. Eh-hem, I say, Porter? Do you know where St Columba’s is?’

This innocent question set him off worse than ever, a torrent delivered at top speed and high volume of which I understood not a word, but since he was no longer holding the pony’s reins and had finished unloading, this time the words he spat out were accompanied by wild gestures. He shook his fists and jabbed the air with his fingers and, as our gaze followed the way he was so emphatically pointing, up above the roofs of the cottages, up the face of the cliff, all the way up to the headland, we saw a squat grey building, hunched above the village, glaring down. I could not believe – once it was noticed – that it had gone unnoticed before. Almost it seemed to be looming, although in fact it was set back safely with a terrace and a narrow strip of garden, but I wondered if I was alone in wanting to retreat lest it topple from its perch and flatten me.

‘I take it they don’t start with a kindergarten,’ Alec said. ‘I shouldn’t want my precious tot running around up there.’

‘Eleven and up,’ I said. ‘What a supremely unwelcoming facade. Or maybe it’s very different when approached from the carriage drive. One can only hope so.’

But when I came at it after tea – leaving Alec to stroll the harbour and the single street or so of the town – it was up the cliff path under its cold grey gaze after all, since it appeared that to make a more conventional entrance would involve me in a tiresome round trip, much longer but somehow just as steep-looking. I was wearing stout shoes, for Grant has got into the spirit of my new venture rather splendidly, even sewing extra pockets in my new tweed coats ‘for clues and what have you’ as she informed me (although none of our cases has yet produced the traditional cigar butt, scrap of unusual cloth, or hair ribbon snagged on a bush and wound around with one long red waving hair, a perfect match for the crowning glory of our chief suspect and therefore her swift undoing under our scrutiny). Stout shoes notwithstanding, though, it was a scramble and I was panting when I gained the terrace. I stopped, meaning to catch my breath, and was still looking down at the rooftops and watching Alec, ant-like, making his way round the harbour, when a voice behind me made me jump.

‘This is private property.’

‘Oh!’ I wheeled round.

‘Unless you’re Miss…?’

‘Gilver,’ I said. ‘Miss-’ I was going to say ‘missus’ but the woman I found myself addressing was such a very miss-ish miss that it died on my lips and she took it to be my matching curt demand for her name, since I had given mine.

‘Shanks,’ she supplied. ‘Can I help you?’

‘Um,’ I said, only now seeing the foolishness of (practically) climbing in over the back fence if I wanted to make sure of a ready welcome. Miss Shanks waited, regarding me stolidly. She was a high-coloured woman, hair so yellow there was almost an orange tint to it and face ruddy enough to clash with the hair. I thought again of Eliza McManus. Miss Shanks was similarly robust in her construction, with short thick arms, short thick legs and a middle like Humpty Dumpty. And she did not dress her frame well. She was wearing a capacious pleated frock, which made her look like a lamp.

‘I’m the headmistress,’ she said, but thankfully it sounded more like an assurance than a threat. Whatever my business was it was also hers, she seemed to say.

‘I’m here… um… I know Miss Lipscott…’ I said, thinking this was good and neutral.

‘Ah-ha!’ said Miss Shanks. ‘For Mademoiselle Beauclerc?’

‘Ah…’ I said.

‘From the agency?’

‘Yes,’ I said, although surprised at its mention. ‘Yes indeed. Gilver and Osborne.’

‘Bon,’ said Miss Shanks. ‘Très bon. We’ve been expecting you. Well, come in, Miss Gilver, come in. We’re just about to start din-dins.’ She turned and stumped off towards a half-open door leading from the terrace into the school.

For some reason, probably since Pearl and Aurora were not welcome here, I had taken it quite for granted that Fleur’s difficulties – whatever they might prove to be – were secret and I was more than a little nonplussed to be welcomed into the very bosom of the school this way. With one look behind me, I followed her.

Inside the door, which was half-glass, one of many half-glass doors set in pairs along the terrace, I found myself in a long plain dining room, with whitewashed walls and an oak floor washed with soap and left unwaxed so that it was pale and dry-looking. Stretching the length of the room were two narrow tables, set for dinner but with yellow cotton cloths instead of white, jugs of water and cups instead of wine glasses and bottles.

‘Sit here,’ said Miss Shanks, leading me to a seat halfway up one of the tables, facing the glass doors. ‘You can have a nice view of the sea tonight since you’re new. Sehr gut. If only it were German… but there isn’t the appetite for German these days and it’s not as though I haven’t tried.’

I said nothing.

‘Sit! Sit!’ said Miss Shanks, summoning a maid to squeeze in an extra place for me.

Once the maid had returned I sat, noticing that she had brought bone-handled silver where all around was Sheffield plate, and a crystal water glass in place of a cup.

‘Where are your things?’ said Miss Shanks. ‘At the front door? Still at the station?’

‘My things are down in the village at the pub,’ I said. ‘I was planning to sleep there tonight.’

‘In the pub?’ said Miss Shanks, rearing backwards a little. ‘Dearie me no, Miss Gilver, that won’t do. We’re quite ready for you. More than ready. After din-dins I’ll let one of the big-uns off prayers and she can show you to your cell.’ Here she let out a peal of laughter and poked my shoulder. ‘I’m joking,’ she said. ‘I meant your room. Here they come.’

Indeed there was a faint babbling like water just released from a far-off dam. It grew louder and louder and was joined by the tramp of feet, and then two sets of doors burst open at the back of the room and a rabble – there is no other word – of girls, big and small, all dressed in yellow shirts and grey gymslips, spread like a flood through the room and threw themselves into seats at the tables.

‘Up, up, upsie-daisies!’ shouted Miss Shanks, powerfully enough to be heard above the din. ‘If you had a sea view at muncheon you have a wall view tonight. Sort yourselves out, girlsies. Chop-chop. Hurry now.’ None of the girls moved but they did stop talking and many of them sat up straight and clasped their hands together. The crowd around me, amongst the tallest, possibly seventeen or so, went as far as to bow their heads, letting the points of their bobs droop almost to the tablecloth.

‘Grace!’ shouted Miss Shanks. ‘Here we go. With a one and a two and a-’

‘Dear Lord Above!’ Their timing was immaculate but the sound of a hundred girls all droning the words together was not devotional. ‘Some hae meat and canna eat and some wad eat that want it. We hae meat and we can eat, sae let the Lord be thankit. Amen.’ And the babble began again as maids began to hand round plates of thick soup and baskets of rolls.

The girl who served me spoke very slowly and rather loud, welcoming me to St Columba’s, and she called me, to my astonishment, ‘mademoiselle’. I blinked and stared after her, feeling realisation begin to creep up on me from far away.

Of course, the misunderstanding had the usual cause. When I did not understand what Miss Shanks meant – spouting French and lamenting German that way – I assumed she meant nothing, and she took the same view of my mentioning Gilver and Osborne. And then what with us both latching on to the shared notion of Miss Lipscott, and our determination not to challenge one another lest we appear to be fusspots, the whole conversation was a failure from start to end. Or rather, it was a failure as far as communication went; from my point of view it was a rousing success for here I was, in the school, sitting drinking soup with half of the sixth form, and if I had the nerve and could remember enough verb conjugations it appeared I was free to stay.

Of course, I did not have the nerve. Not that ‘going undercover’ was unknown to me, but here at St Columba’s there would be a race between the real new mistress turning up, Miss Shanks deciding she had better ask who Gilver and Osborne were when they were at home, and (most likely of all) the paucity of my French vocabulary and the haphazard mess of my grammar undoing my ruse before the first lesson was hardly begun.

I was going to spin it out through this evening, though, since here was a lucky chance to do some detecting, just when I needed all the luck I could find. I was too late, clearly: Fleur had bolted and gone, long enough ago for Miss Shanks to have rung the agency for her successor, but I surmised that the girls must know something and was pondering how much I could ask them. I wondered too if the mistresses – who were dispersed up and down the tables with a view to discipline – would retire to a common room afterwards for coffee and bluestocking chatter; there were certainly no coffee cups to be seen in the dining room anywhere.

For the present, I decided to plunge in with the girls, who had been shooting me little glances and would be more suspicious, surely, if I did not start talking soon, about something, instead of just sitting here.

‘Hello,’ I said. ‘My name is Miss Gilver. I’m the new French mistress. Thank you for not falling on me, but do let’s chat now.’

‘Welcome to St Cucumber’s,’ said one of the nearest girls.

‘Spring!’ said another. I took this to be a Christian name.

‘It’s affectionately meant,’ said Spring. She was an attractive girl of honey-coloured skin and thick honey-coloured hair, with a broad grin revealing a zigzag of pure-white bottom teeth. ‘On account of how the late and otherwise lamented Fräulein Fielding was such a one for salad. I’m surprised we don’t all have twitching noses.’

‘German mistress?’ I hazarded.

‘Head,’ said Spring. ‘Well, joint head. And Latin.’

‘She wasn’t really a Fräulein at all,’ said the other girl, a dashing beauty of statuesque proportions with ruddy cheeks and striking pale blue eyes. ‘I’m Eileen, by the way. It’s just that her name was Fielding and what with the Froebel method and all that…’

‘One must give one’s mistresses nicknames,’ I said, ‘I quite understand.’

‘Miss Gilver…?’ said a third. ‘What did your last girls call you?’

‘Katie!’ said Eileen. Katie flashed a devilish smile with a dip in the middle and gave a throaty laugh. If I really were the French mistress I should have to watch out for this one.

‘They called me Goody Gilver,’ I said, ‘because I hardly ever give out prep and I very often give out chocolates.’

‘Really?’ said a fourth girl, with a sweet heart-shaped face and a dark red bob.

‘No, of course not, Sally,’ said Katie. ‘She’s teasing us.’ And the look she gave me showed that she was thinking exactly what I had been thinking: need to watch this one.

‘What a pity,’ said a rather sophisticated-looking girl at the end of our little group. She had the poise of an artist’s model and a profile any artist would kill to sketch. ‘Stella,’ she said, indicating herself with a curl of her hand. ‘If you could have substituted cigarettes for the chocolates we might have been great friends.’ Her cut-glass voice swooped dramatically down on the word ‘great’ in a way that snagged on my memory and something too about the way she looked was familiar.

‘Stella…?’ I said.

‘Rowe-Issing,’ she drawled.

‘Oh, right,’ said Eileen. ‘Rendall.’

‘Warren,’ said Spring.

‘Madden,’ said Sally. ‘Sally Madden. And Katie Howard.’

I was barely listening as the introductions went on, so surprised was I. The Rowe-Issings were friends of ours, or acquaintances anyway – some of our very grandest connections, in fact, always invited to everything and seldom accepting – and it was the echo of her mother Candide’s face in her own which had made young Stella so familiar to me. I looked around the dining hall again. If Basil and Candide were sending their girls here it must be quite an outfit – the odd little headmistress notwithstanding.

‘How long has your old French mistress been gone?’ I asked Eileen. She seemed, of all of them, the best combination of common sense and eagerness to please.

‘Just four days,’ Eileen said. ‘We’ve been reading a play with Hammy – Miss Shanks, I mean – but we’re thrilled you’re here now. In time to help us with our exam prep.’

I hoped my smile was not too sickly. Pearl Lipscott had told me on the telephone the day before that St Columba’s went in for university places for its girls but I had not followed the thought through to its conclusion: that to get into a university one had to pass examinations (even though the fast-approaching end of Donald’s brush with education had been hastened by his tendency to treat three-hour exams like bear attacks through which one had only to sit perfectly still and keep breathing). The tin lid was firmly pressed on any plan to keep this subterfuge going.

As to the hard fact that Eileen’s answer had provided along with the little fright, four days was welcome news in a way, since it meant that I could not have stopped Fleur from bolting if I had set off in a fast car the minute Pearl had engaged me.

‘Exams aside, though,’ Spring was saying, ‘old Pretty-vicar is no loss. She had a mean streak when crossed and it was getting worse.’

‘Ill-bred,’ said Stella in that same drawling tone. ‘Badly brought up anyway.’

I could not help smarting for poor Fleur. She was a little spoiled, it was true, and I had heard her being catty, but I would never have accused her of a mean streak and I could not imagine what she had done to be saddled with ‘Pretty-vicar’. Even without knowing what it meant, it sounded beastly enough to have made me cry if someone used it as my nickname. I hoped briefly that Goody Gilver stuck, before reminding myself once again that my schoolmistress life would be over after pudding.

At the moment we were still on meat and potatoes and I shovelled it in as though gardening, but I noticed that the girls – at least the more elegant ones – picked and scowled and grumbled as all schoolgirls ever have always done.

‘And where did she go?’ I asked, choosing Sally this time to fix with my nearest approximation of a schoolmistress’s stare (wishing I had half-spectacles to stare over). ‘Rather inconsiderate of her to leave at this stage of the summer term, eh?’

Sally frowned a little and smiled a little, unsure what to make of this woman who did not shush their own gossiping but rather joined in.

‘She was called home to care for a relation who’d been taken ill,’ she said. ‘That’s what Ham-miss Shanks said anyway.’

‘That’s what Ham-miss Shanks always says,’ said Katie. ‘The relations of our mistresses aren’t a very stalwart lot. How many have we mislaid now?’

‘Well, science and history,’ said Eileen. She leaned back to let a maid take her dinner plate away and then leaned forward sniffing deeply as another replaced it with a pudding bowl. ‘Steamed chocolate and coconut, yum. And Latin, of course.’

‘And music and PE – although that was just one – and now French,’ said Katie, all the devilish sparkle in her face replaced with a frown. ‘It sounds quite a crowd when you say them together that way.’

‘And no one ever sees them go,’ said Spring in sepulchral tones.

‘They just vanish,’ said Stella, ‘leaving no signs of their passing.’

‘Except,’ said Katie, ‘for the deep tracks of their heels where they were dragged across the earth to the-’

‘Who’s left?’ I said, belatedly realising that no schoolmistress in her wits would sit and listen to such impertinent nonsense. ‘I certainly can’t teach you history and Latin. If Miss Shanks wanted a good all-rounder she ought to have made it clear to the agency. Well, well, we shall just have to see.’

Of course, with this little outburst I was paving the way for a swift retreat back to Alec at the pub but the girls were not listening to me. They were glancing at one another as though the respective totals of mistresses departed and mistresses remaining had only just occurred to them for the first time.

‘I shall mention it to my father when I write on Sunday,’ said Stella Rowe-Issing. ‘It’s too bad, really, considering the fees she rakes in. The Fräulein would never have stood for it.’

‘She’d have said Nein in the strongest terms,’ said Spring, making the rest of them giggle again. ‘Nein! Ich es… What’s refuse to countenance?’

‘Something nicht,’ said Stella. ‘Such a dull language and so ugly.’

There was indeed coffee in a staffroom as I had hoped (once the girls got to making up German words and giggling there was no return to sensible conversation and I left them to it). The serving maid collected me after pudding and led me most solicitously through the corridors to a corner room on the ground floor which had probably started life as a business room – terribly masculine and panelled in walnut to within an inch of its life – but was now the haven of the mistresses and their retreat from the grey-and-yellow hordes.

Despite the wave of departures which the girls had related to me, there was still a good handful of mistresses in there, sitting around in what were quite clearly their personal little upholstered empires, each with a table drawn up close at the side and each of these tables bearing evidence of its owner’s habits and concerns. Miss Shanks’s winged velvet had a lumpy patchwork rug thrown over it and more patches and batting escaping from a cloth bag on the papier-mâché table top. She did not, however, sit down and start stitching, but stumped off to a decanter of port warming by the fire, after pointing me into a low bergère tub chair (which creaked a little but was more comfortable than many bergère chairs I have encountered in my time) and introducing me to a Miss Christopher, a little woodland creature of a maths mistress, and a Miss Barclay, an out-and-out geography mistress of a geography mistress, with tight curls scraped into a crinkled bun, wire-rimmed spectacles and a collar and tie, who were perched at either end of a hard-looking empire sofa in yellow pleated silk with a buffer of exercise books delineating the border halfway along its length.

‘Call me Barbara,’ Miss Christopher said, once Miss Shanks had gone. ‘If you’re staying. If you’ve decided to.’

‘Ssssh,’ said Miss Barclay softly. ‘Help yourself to a chocolate truffle, Miss Gilver. They’re very good.’ She nodded at a petits-fours plate on the low table between us, as she poured a cup of coffee for me.

‘Or are you trying us on appro?’ Miss Christopher went on. ‘Any other jobs in the offing? You are from Lambourne, aren’t you?’

‘Barbara!’ said Miss Barclay. ‘Don’t pay any attention, Miss Gilver.’ She gave me a smile. I returned it, but I did not miss the tight grip she had on the bon-bon dish as she proffered it to me, nor the sharp look she gave her colleague as she turned back to her. ‘Don’t quiz the poor woman after her long day,’ she said. ‘I’m sure Miss Shanks has seen to everything.’

‘Excuse me, I’m sure,’ said Miss Christopher. ‘Naturally nosy. And I can plead overwork too, fraying my manners.’

‘You must indeed be run ragged,’ I said, taking a sweet. ‘Double duties and all that.’

Neither woman answered; Miss Barclay stood, straightened her rather severe coat and skirt (St Columba’s, it appeared, did not dress for dinner) and set off to offer the chocolates around the other armchairs in the room. Barbara Christopher busied herself with sugar and cream. My eyes followed the departing sweets and I looked at the three mistresses to whom Miss Barclay was taking them. Right by the fire was a stout woman wedged into a clubbish armchair and knitting very fast; beside her, half-reclining on a red shot-silk chaise, was a black-haired, beak-nosed creature with handkerchief-points to her frock who had to be the art mistress and beside her (hence almost escaping notice) was a poor beige slip of a thing who did not benefit from her proximity to such glamour and who blinked and shrank away as Miss Barclay approached her. Or so I thought until I looked again, whereupon I became convinced it was me the poor dear was blinking at, I who had driven her backwards into her cushions with my very presence.

‘Who are those three?’ I asked Miss Christopher. She wiped her hands – very stubby, very brown little hands, which made me think of a mole’s paddles with dirt ground into them – down her frock and made a great display out of swallowing a mouthful of truffle.

‘Housekeeper – she always sits in here with us on account of… Well, she always does. Miss Lovage, the art mistress.’ I was right then. ‘And,’ she went on, ‘the English mistress, Miss Lipscott.’

I made a disgusting noise caused by gasping mid-sip which put Miss Christopher’s rough manners into deep shade and had to be banged on the back with one of those little mole hands until I finally managed to stop coughing.

‘Miss Lipscott?’ I said, staring over at the woman, ‘I thought she was missing.’

‘No,’ said Miss Christopher. ‘Why on earth would you think that?’

‘And so Miss Shanks sent for a replacement,’ I said.

‘No,’ said Miss Christopher again. ‘We need a new French mistress. It’s Mademoiselle Beauclerc who’s disappeared.’ She jumped and looked over her shoulder. When she spoke again it was in a low voice. ‘I don’t mean disappeared, of course. I mean gone.’

‘Beauclerc,’ I said, light dawning. ‘Miss Pretty-vicar.’

‘Those terrible girls,’ said Miss Christopher, looking rather rattled. Across the room, Miss Lipscott was standing up and brushing down her frock, although as far as I could tell she had not eaten a morsel, ‘It’s Stella R-I,’ Miss Christopher was saying. ‘She’s the ringleader, but such a feather in our cap to have her here.’

I cleared my throat with one final splutter.

‘Are you all right, Miss Gilver?’ said Miss Barclay, passing with the plate of petits fours. ‘Coffee down the wrong way? Miss Fielding had a marvellous remedy for a frog in the throat. Something to do with opening the oesophagus. Quite yogic.’

From the corner of my eye I could see Fleur – except that how could that faded woman be pretty little Fleur? – lean in close to the headmistress and whisper something. Miss Shanks whispered something back. Fleur looked over at me, whispered again and then slipped out of the room, whereupon Miss Shanks spun to face me like a top which had just been given a good flick with a whip. Her round little pudding of a face was as long as it ever could be, with mouth dropped open and eyebrows arched high. Then, with a jolt, she came back to life and bustled over.

‘Mrs Gilver?’ she said in tones of numb dismay.

‘Yes?’ I said, trying for an innocent air, even though Fleur had evidently shot my cover to smithereens.

‘You’re a widow?’ said Miss Shanks.

‘No, no, not so far,’ I said, smiling. ‘My husband is alive and well and… very modern.’

‘But I couldn’t possibly allow a married woman to teach in one of my classrooms,’ Miss Shanks said. It flashed across my mind to ask her why. Presumably all of the girls had mothers who were married women and, universities notwithstanding, were mostly bound to end up married women themselves one day. Perhaps seeing one in the wild at a tender age could be part of the education St Columba’s offered them. But Miss Christopher was gawping at me enough already. ‘The agency certainly didn’t mention anything about it,’ said Miss Shanks. I gave it up as a bad job then and turned to extrication.

‘Gilver and Osborne?’ I said. ‘Why would they?’

‘Who are they?’ said Miss Shanks. ‘It was Lambourne Scholastic and Domestic we approached.’

‘Who?’ I said, eyes wide.

‘There seems to have been some considerable misunderstanding,’ said Miss Christopher. She had drawn her set of chins right down into her neck with disapproval.

‘I agree there must have been,’ I said. ‘I’m with Gilver and Osborne.’ Here I fished out one of our cards from my coat pocket, where I always keep a supply, and blessed their vague wording. Miss Shanks read it with her lips moving. ‘We were very much hoping to be engaged to help you with this rather pressing staff shortage you’ve come in for.’ I swept along, feeling the wind of good fortune under me. ‘Five, isn’t it? Four in the academic subjects – French, Latin, science and history – and also music and PE. What rotten luck.’

‘How did you…?’ said Miss Shanks. ‘I asked Lambourne for a French mistress only. Who told you…?’ Miss Barclay had rejoined us, bringing the dashing art mistress with her. I noticed that what I had taken to be a glint of sheen on her dark head was actually a white streak, which only added to her allure.

‘I should have to ask one of the secretarial staff,’ I said, thinking of how Pallister, my butler, would not even go as far as to set my business letters out separately from my social correspondence on the breakfast table, ‘but I rather think it was a parent.’

‘But we’re fine, we’re fine,’ said Miss Shanks. ‘We feel the loss of poor dear Fielding not least as a Latin mistress, never mind how we all treasured her, but the vicar at St Ninian’s is helping and the girls all ado- I mean they’re very satisfied with his- and I’m taking PE myself. Dorothy and Barbara have shouldered some extra load, Mrs Tully in the village is an excellent piano and violin teacher. All we need is the right French mistress and we shall be fine. Absolutely fine.’ But she did not sound absolutely fine, or even one good French mistress short of it. She sounded, as her voice rose and her cheeks grew hot, as if she were about to let off steam like a tea-kettle. Miss Lovage took a step away from her side to avoid being scalded, but Miss Barclay put out a hand and said a faint there-there.

‘Very well,’ I said. ‘I shall take my leave, if you’re sure Gilver and Osborne can be of no assistance to you. Now, just before I go I wonder if you could tell me the way to Miss Lipscott’s private room.’ The Misses Christopher and Barclay turned wary eyes on Miss Shanks, who spoke up stoutly.

‘Miss Lipscott’s ‘private room’ is just that, Mrs Gilver. I’m afraid-’

‘But we’re old friends,’ I insisted. ‘I used to know her family.’

Miss Shanks redoubled her efforts.

‘Miss Lipscott seems to have made it perfectly clear-’ she began.

I put on a guileless look and interrupted her. ‘She’s all right, isn’t she? She was always a shy one, but I can’t imagine why she wouldn’t want to see an old friend of her family. If she’s one of the Somerset Lipscotts, that is. Is she?’

A few of them nodded, but I had not fooled Barbara Christopher, not nearly. No one inhales their coffee because they have suddenly seen an old family friend. Luckily, however, the mood in the room was one of desperation to be rid of me before I asked any more awkward questions about their growing misfortunes and my demand for directions, at last, carried the day.

It was a large house, and after climbing to the second storey I walked for quite five minutes through long corridors where the sound of gossiping, giggling, Latin-memorising, violin-practising girlhood squealed and droned away before I found her room, well into the other wing, on the landward side.

She answered before I even knocked, quietly drawing the door just wide enough open to show her face.

‘Dandy,’ she said. ‘It is you, isn’t it?’

‘It is,’ I said. I was searching her for the girl I had known, the gleaming flaxen hair, the flashing blue eyes, the quick dimpling grin of mischief, but I found none of them. The bones were still there, as how could they not be, but she was more changed in ten years than some fortunate women change in fifty, as though the girl had been rendered by Rubens or Botticelli but the woman was a work by Augustus John, a pale oval lozenge of a face with loops of hair drawn back to the nape and a figure which hardly made so bold as to show against the draping of her clothes.

‘What do you want?’ she said. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘May I come in?’ I glanced up and down the corridor. It was silent and absolutely empty, but who could say whether interested ears were at the many closed doors I saw? Fleur hesitated and then stepped back.

I entered her room thinking only of privacy and a chance to talk, but stopped amazed at the sight that greeted me.

That summer at Pereford we were never out of one another’s rooms. It was part of the wonderful air of Liberty Hall (compared with most other houses where the children were not allowed in their own bedrooms during the day and were certainly forbidden to enter any but their own). We lazed on the beds flattening out the feather quilts, borrowed hairbrushes, tried on clothes and dried our hands with any old towel that was nearby, in a way that would have given Nanny Palmer fits if she had seen me. The nanny and nurse at Pereford sat in the shade of the upstairs verandah and did the mending – or rather flipped through the pages of film-star magazines with the mending undone on their knees – and could not care a fig what any of their charges were up to.

So I was quite familiar with them all: the blowsy, rosy confusion of Mamma-dearest’s boudoir; the satins and scents of Aurora’s lair which was going through a dramatic season just then; the bookish, boyish campground that was Pearl’s particular sanctum, with brown bags of apples for midnight snacking and an army cot under the window for reading in. And little Fleur’s room was of all the most exuberant and endearing. She had inherited all the grown-out-of toys of her sisters, leaving her shelves and cupboard-tops stacked three deep with elderly dolls and decrepit bears and then she could never be persuaded to leave the treasures of the day outside in the garden at bedtime, so that her room was full of wildflower posies in jam jars and the floor was covered in watercolour sketches, spread out to dry half-finished and never to be finished since the next new day brought its fresh demands and adventures. There were bowls and teacups – doll-sized – she had made from river mud and transported home and in the corner on a piece of board there was a sandcastle made at Watchet which Fleur could not leave behind when the rugs were rolled and the flasks tipped out at the end of a picnic. She had brought it home and tried to keep it damp with an orchid pump full of water before more treasures claimed her. So there it sat, a heap of yellow sand with shells and feathers still adorning it and all her sisters ever said if they strayed too close and felt the crunch under their bedroom slippers was:

‘Isn’t she a poppet? Isn’t she a love? Shall we take it back to the beach, Florissima, and let these grains see all the other grains in their family?’

‘I shall rebuild it one day,’ Fleur said, very grandly. ‘I have that snap of it, remember. And I did sketches too.’ Then she turned back to her dolls’ house and continued with the endless renovations she was undertaking there.

The study-cum-bedroom of the English mistress at St Columba’s shared only the features of having four walls, a window and door. The narrow bed was covered with a plain woollen blanket and the bedside table held only a glass and a Bible. The desk was bare, the dresser top bore not so much as a hairbrush. I thought again of the convent I had imagined, but here was not even a cross on the wall as there might have been there.

Fleur – and I still had to work to convince myself that it really was Fleur – drew out the hard chair from under the desk and bade me sit down. She leaned against the windowsill and I thought of her as she had been, sprawled on her bed in her outdoor shoes, eating bread and jam and sharing it with her angora rabbit, who often slept there.

‘Did they send you?’ she said. Her voice was without inflection, no way of knowing whether she feared or welcomed or even cared what had brought me there.

‘Pearl asked me to come, yes.’

‘And how did you get past- I mean, how did you end up having dinner with the girls?’

‘Miss Shanks got the idea into her head that I was a French mistress and somehow I was swept up in things.’

‘You’re not, are you?’ said Fleur, her eyes wide, looking very stark suddenly in her pale face.

‘Of course not.’

‘Of course – silly. Only all sorts of people are doing all sorts of things these days.’

She was right; but I chose, for the moment, not to tell her. She was studying me very speculatively.

‘Miss Shanks doesn’t know you’re not, though, does she?’ she said. ‘And she doesn’t know you came to see me? That’s good. That’s something anyway. And so, please, Dandy, just go. Before she finds out.’

‘But Fleur – why shouldn’t you have a guest? Pearl told me she couldn’t gain admittance – or Aurora – but she didn’t tell me why and I don’t understand.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Fleur. She was speaking in an urgent whisper. ‘Please just go.’

‘I’m afraid I can’t,’ I said. ‘I promised your sisters I would come and see that you were all right.’

‘And I am. It’s my choice not to see them. I send letters. I’m fine.’

‘Yes, well, clearly that’s nonsense,’ I answered. ‘Clearly you’re not. Fleur? Darling, what’s wrong?’

‘Nothing!’ Fleur said, bending over towards me at the waist to make her whisper do instead of shouting. ‘I’m quite quite content and perfectly well and I kept telling them that but they wouldn’t stop ringing up and bothering me and that’s precisely why I don’t want to talk to them any more.’ She swallowed hard at the end of all this and then straightened up, breathing in a long gathering breath and blowing it out slowly again like someone trying not to panic. I shook my head at her.

‘That’s not at all what Pearl told me,’ I said. ‘She told me you were indeed fine for a long time and she and the others knew it, but that something else has gone wrong now and they’re worried again. As they were before. They’re worried you’re going to bolt.’

‘What?’ said Fleur. It was the loudest she had spoken and I thought I heard the creak of a chair as someone in the next room overheard and turned to listen. Just in that creak and its timing I felt I could see the head raised from study and the shoulders twisted round, the enquiring glance at the wall shared with Miss Lipscott. Fleur had heard it too and when she spoke again she was whispering as she had before, harsh and sibilant.

‘Leave me alone,’ she said. ‘You don’t understand and neither do Pearl, Aurora or Mother.’ I almost gasped. For one of the Lipscott girls to call Mamma-dearest ‘Mother’ was like one of my children calling me ‘you there’.

‘Well, I don’t understand yet,’ I said, ‘because I haven’t heard the story, but I’m very understanding as a rule.’ Fleur closed her eyes and murmured through lips barely moving.

‘Stay away from me,’ she said. ‘For your own good. I told them too. Stay away. For their own good.’

‘Why?’ I said. ‘What on earth do you mean?’ Fleur swallowed hard. I could hear her dry throat clicking.

‘I have killed four people,’ she said.

Outside, a barn owl gave its unearthly shriek. I jumped, heart hammering, and was sure that the listening neighbour through the wall jumped too. I had heard the knocking sound of someone startled letting her knee or foot bang against a table leg. I even thought I heard a soft groaning. Fleur did not so much as flinch.

‘I have killed four people,’ she repeated. ‘And no matter how hard I try I have no way of knowing when it will happen again.’