The Burry Man’s Day

Chapter Three

Buttercup and Daisy might, I am sure, have put poor Robert Dudgeon callously out of their minds and had a perfectly pleasant evening; certainly they kept lapsing out of assumed solemnity and beginning to giggle over old memories of school until a glance at Cadwallader sobered them again. For Cadwallader, awash with guilt, sat with arms on knees, hands hanging down, staring at the floor. Every so often he would raise his head, catch someone’s eye and heave a great sigh before looking down again, until one began to wish he were more like the husbands one was used to, who at least would be sighing and hanging their heads all alone in their library. But then I should be the cold spoon in the souffle, for I did not feel quite as unperturbed as the other two at the thought of Robert Dudgeon’s death. I alone had spoken to the man for one thing and I had played my small part in persuading him to spend what transpired to be his last day in life doing something he very clearly did not want to do. So I could understand Cadwallader’s feeling awkward, but he was wallowing rather.

‘I’ll never forgive myself,’ he said for the dozenth time. Daisy broke off in the middle of a story and composed her face, hardly sighing at all. Buttercup had no such scruples, but issued a moan that I hoped was partly in jest, for one should not be able to summon such scorn for a husband of six months’ standing.

‘You have nothing to reproach yourself with,’ I said, ignoring the memory of his heavy-handed blustering the evening before. Cadwallader rolled his eyes at me.

‘He knew,’ he said simply.

‘Don’t be a goose, darling,’ said Buttercup. ‘How could he have known?’

‘Search me,’ said Cadwallader. ‘But he did. Look how hard he tried not to do it. And I made him. And now he’s dead.’

‘But Cad,’ I said gently, ‘he didn’t die of being the Burry Man. We don’t even know why he did die yet, do we? And he’s done it for twenty-five years without coming to any harm, so -’

‘Exactly!’ said Cadwallader. ‘All the more reason we should have taken him seriously when he put his foot down this year. He knew.’

‘Knew what?’ said Daisy, crossly. She was tugging at her fox fur and hungrily eyeing the drinks tray. Cadwallader had come straight into the Great Hall and we had followed him, expecting a decent little interlude of serious thought and quiet remarks – five minutes maybe – and then a leisurely bath and a large cocktail, but we had been sitting around the edges of the table for forty minutes now, marooned by Cadwallader’s gloom, and it was getting rather irritating. Even when my own father died, my mother changed in time for dinner.

‘Daisy does have a point,’ I said. ‘What could Mr Dudgeon possibly have known? If it was a heart attack or an aneurysm, which it must have been, then it came out of the blue. And if he had known that his heart was weak or whatever, he would have told us last night and he wouldn’t have climbed that wretched pole.’

This seemed unanswerable and Cadwallader changed tack.

‘I should have known,’ he said. Daisy and Buttercup both groaned.

‘Now you’re just being silly,’ I told him.

‘At least, I should have known better,’ said Cadwallader, and this was said in such a small sad voice that no one groaned or moaned or sighed at all and my heart went out to him. It was all new, I supposed, this being in charge of a staff, and although Dudgeon’s death could not possibly have had anything to do with the Burry Man it was an unfortunate sequence of events to occur so early in Cad’s stewardship of the estate.

He was staring at his feet again. Daisy tapped her watch and mimed eating and then below us, startlingly loud, we heard a dull clanking sound.

‘Front door bell,’ said Buttercup. ‘Melodious, isn’t it?’

‘I bet that’s the police,’ said Cadwallader.

The scrape of the door and the rumble of voices carried quite clearly up through the murder hole towards us and then, after a pause, light footsteps came hurrying up the stone treads and a maid appeared in the doorway. She was in black with her linen cuffs and frilled table apron on and she brought with her a rich waft of cooking. A slow rolling rumble emanated from Daisy’s middle.

‘Please, madam, sir,’ said the maid, rather breathlessly. ‘The police are here.’

‘Land sake’s alive,’ said Buttercup in a mock American drawl. ‘All right, Jean, show them into the library. Cad? You’d better go up and be ready to meet them.’ But Cadwallader was shaking his head.

‘Bring them to the drawing room, Jean,’ he said. And then to Buttercup, ‘We will face them together.’ The maid looked from one to the other, bobbed a curtsy and left, and then all four of us scurried out of the hall behind her and made for the stairs. At the drawing-room landing Daisy and I naturally began to carry on up but Cadwallader let out an exclamation, almost a squeak of protest.

‘Don’t leave us,’ he said.

‘Very well,’ I said, glad to have my nosiness indulged, but at his look of relief I had to giggle. ‘My dear Cadwallader,’ I said, ‘they’re not coming for you.’

Of course they were not, but anxiety is terribly catching and Cad’s hand-wringing trepidation, as we arranged ourselves in natural-looking poses and waited, infected all of us a little. Then the ringing tread of policemen’s boots on the stone steps did have rather an ominous feel to it, and so by the time the footsteps arrived in the passage outside the drawing-room door and the two men appeared in the flesh we were all cowering a little and inclined to gulp. There was a uniformed man, young and gormless-looking, busy casting his eyes around with interest at the interior of the castle, and an older figure, dressed in a light overcoat, carrying a soft hat, and looking surprised; not as though something in particular was surprising him right at the moment, more that surprise was the look of his face when at rest; surprise or a suppressed sneeze, one or the other. Anyway, it saved him from looking at all intimidating and one would have expected Cadwallader to rally.

I waited for him or Buttercup to rise or at least to say something but nothing happened, despite Daisy kicking Buttercup’s ankle quite hard, and the senior policeman spoke first.

‘Inspector Cruickshank, madam, sir, madam, madam,’ he said and I marvelled at the composure it must have taken to get to the end of this without faltering. Still nothing from the host or hostess.

‘Good evening, Inspector,’ I said at last. ‘I’m Mrs Gilver, a friend of Mrs de Cassilis’s, and this is Mrs Esslemont. Mr and Mrs de Cassilis are…’ I tailed off, ‘hopeless’ being the only word I could think of, which was hardly apropos.

‘I’m not surprised,’ said Inspector Cruickshank. ‘What a terrible thing to happen. Robert Dudgeon, you can scarcely credit it. Hardly fifty.’

This seemed to point very comfortingly down the heart attack or aneurysm route and Buttercup brightened visibly although Cad still hung his head like a dog expecting a kick.

‘Anyway,’ said Inspector Cruickshank and shifted rather awkwardly.

‘Do please sit down,’ said Daisy with another swift kick at Buttercup, which connected only with her chair leg and so had no effect. ‘And um…’ She glanced towards the young man hovering in the corner, but Inspector Cruickshank waved his hand and tush-tushed to say we need not worry about him.

‘The police surgeon is on his way,’ he said.

‘On his way here?’ said Buttercup, round-eyed. Inspector Cruickshank frowned and shook his head.

‘The fever hospital at Killinghouse Road is empty, given the time of year,’ he said. ‘So the post-mortem can be done there without delay. There is a room in a wee place by the gates of the cemetery too, but it’s really more for exhumed corpses and I thought Mrs Dudgeon would rather he was at the hospital.’

‘That’s a very kind thought,’ I said.

‘An autopsy?’ breathed Cadwallader, paling.

‘It’s a sudden death, Mr de Cassilis,’ said Inspector Cruickshank. ‘I’d go as far as to say a suspicious death, so certainly the body must be examined. I daresay Dr Rennick won’t find anything, but we have to be sure. And in the meantime, I’m just asking around, to see what I can see.’

I am sure the inspector had no idea how threatening he sounded in his vagueness so while Cad continued to shrink into his seat and stare I tried to take matters into my hands and move them along a little.

‘How can we help you?’ I said. ‘Anything that any of us can do, obviously.’

Buttercup made some kind of echoing murmur.

‘Two things,’ said Inspector Cruickshank. ‘Mrs Dudgeon was very keen to get Robert’s body home with her, and she’ll need to be told there’s no chance of that until tomorrow at least. She’ll need to be told about the post-mortem and it will all be better coming from you, Mrs de Cassilis, than from one of my men, don’t you think?’

Buttercup looked quite stricken at the thought and shook her head slightly. I felt a little irritation. After all, running a place was not all playing at castles and had it been our estate carpenter at Gilverton I should not have relished the task but I should not have shirked it.

‘And the other thing?’ said Daisy.

‘Yes, well, as I say,’ said Inspector Cruickshank. ‘My guess is that Rennick will find natural causes, but just in case he doesn’t, I might as well get ahead of the game while I can.’ This did not quite ring true, I thought, and looking at him closely I wondered just how sure he really was. ‘So,’ he went on, ‘I believe Robert Dudgeon came to speak to you yesterday night, Mr de Cassilis. What can you tell me about that?’ A surreptitious sound from the corner drew my attention and I saw the constable flicking open a notebook and drawing out a pencil he had threaded into its spring.

‘He seemed very well,’ said Cadwallader. ‘In good health, you know. No signs of any illness. So it must have been terrifically sudden.’

‘And how was he in himself?’ said Inspector Cruickshank. ‘In his spirits?’ Cad shrugged as though to suggest he had nothing to add and I stared at him, shocked. The senseless guilty conscience act was one thing but he could not seriously intend to lie to a policeman. I blushed inwardly at my own moral outrage (after all, lying to policemen was not unknown to me) but this was different.

‘He was troubled,’ I said in a loud, clear voice. Cadwallader could say what he liked to me later; there was no point in making this any worse than it was. Inspector Cruickshank cocked an eye at me and waited for more.

‘He didn’t want to do the Burry Man,’ I said. ‘I was there too, you see, Inspector. He didn’t want to do it one little bit, but he wouldn’t say why.’

‘And how did you persuade him in the end?’ said Inspector Cruickshank. I thought about this for a moment before answering.

‘I can’t honestly say,’ I told him. ‘I can’t quite remember what I said that made the difference.’ I looked towards Cad, before remembering that he had left by the time it came to that. But came to what? ‘I made a little joke about Mr de Cassilis taking over, but he knew I didn’t mean that. Then he just seemed, all of a sudden, to change his mind.’

‘Interesting,’ said Inspector Cruickshank. ‘Would you say he seemed frightened of the job?’

‘No,’ I said slowly. ‘Cad, did he seem frightened to you when he first turned up?’

Cadwallader shook his head. ‘He seemed exactly the same as when I was up on the roof with him earlier. Quite himself and perfectly calm, only absolutely determined not to dress as the Burry Man.’

‘Until he changed his mind,’ said Inspector Cruickshank. ‘And when you were with him earlier in the day, sir, he said nothing about these misgivings?’

‘Not a word,’ said Cad. ‘That’s a curious thing now that you mention it, Inspector. Why would he not?’

‘Perhaps looking for an opening and not finding it?’ I suggested. This would be absolutely up my street, I was sure – spending an hour with a person I had to tell something to and funking it completely so that I had to summon twice as much courage, pay a special visit and blurt it out standing on the carpet twisting my hat.

‘No, that wasn’t it,’ said Cadwallader, ‘because I was joking about it with him. We were up on the roof, as I say, and we could see some of the people still picking the burdock seeds. They’re scarce this year, I believe, but there are some good big clumps of them on my land. They came to ask my permission and all that, and I was delighted to let them.’ A note, not quite petulant, had crept into Cadwallader’s voice. He must have felt such a rush of well-being to be up on his castle roof with his trusted servant watching peasants below picking at the bushes on his say-so. An age-old tradition carrying on thanks to his carpenter, his bushes and his magnanimity must have been more than many Americans ever dream of. How horridly awry it had all gone since. Poor Cad.

‘Anyway, I was joking with Dudgeon about it,’ he said. ‘Shouting down to them to be careful to get only the prickliest ones, and Dudgeon laughed and said there wasn’t much to choose between one burr and another and besides he was used to it.’

‘So at that point – when would this be, sir? – at that point he was intending to go ahead.’

‘Oh, definitely,’ said Cadwallader. ‘This was just before tea. Three o’clock or something. So whatever it was that made him change his mind happened between then and seven when he came back to tell me the thing was off.’

This was a puzzle to be sure, but who could say whether it had anything to do with what had happened at the greasy pole? Inspector Cruickshank appeared to be thinking along similar lines to me, because he rolled the thought around for a minute or two, glancing at the constable to make sure the man was getting it all down in his notebook, then he seemed to shake it out of his head and he returned to business with an expressive sniff.

‘Well, we’ll see, we’ll see,’ he said. ‘Meantime, Mrs de Cassilis, would you be so kind as to pop along to Mrs Dudgeon’s house and explain.’ Buttercup nodded; the same hopelessness which meant she would rather die than do it also meant she had no idea how to wriggle out of it. Or so I thought.

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Dandy and I will go together.’ I did not even bother to protest.

‘We must take something,’ I said ten minutes later, standing in my petticoats in Buttercup’s bedroom, as we tried to divide what black clothes she had between us. ‘Oh, heavenly!’ I exclaimed, falling upon a figured silk tea dress in black with the merest hint of purple. Buttercup had already bagged the only black skirt in her collection that did not look like a coal sack.

‘Purple roses, Dandy, be serious,’ said Buttercup, rootling through dark blouses. I took the silk frock over to the window and looked at it in the light. The figuring was roses, I could see now, but I was not going to give it up without a struggle.

‘Purple is perfectly funereal,’ I said. ‘And it’s so deep as to be practically black upon black anyway, and in the twilight, and in a cottage -' There was a sharp rap at the door which made Buttercup jump and drop what she was holding, but which I recognized with long experience as Grant.

She marched in, holding over one arm a black linen frock with bottle green ribbon-threading and carrying a bottle green small-brimmed hat and black kid shoes in the other hand. I did not recognize any of them.

‘Your mourning, madam,’ she said, depositing them on Buttercup’s bed and whisking the figured silk away from me with a pitying lift of her eyebrows.

I bought them in the spring,’ she added, by way of addressing my look of puzzlement. I didn’t bother you with it, madam, for who likes to be reminded of the need for them?’

‘And you brought them here because…?’ I always pack them, madam,’ said Grant, sounding astonished that I might doubt it. ‘Otherwise…’ She glanced again at the black and purple roses and her lip curled. ‘Can you manage?’ she went on. ‘The hat will cover everything.’ Grant, it will be clear, thinks little of my talents as a hairdresser. I nodded and she left.

‘Well,’ said Buttercup. ‘Talk about the spirit of Nanny Palmer living on, Dan really.’

‘Nanny Palmer was a darling,’ I countered. But I knew what she meant. Nanny Palmer was a well-starched darling who stood no nonsense and it is perfectly true that a great many of my retainers since have been along the same lines.

‘We have to take something,’ I said again. ‘Soup? Might there be a pie? Or a bottle of cordial? Flowers certainly.’

‘We’ll ask Mrs Murdoch on the way out,’ said Buttercup. ‘What a pity she’s only just arrived, though. A pie is a possibility, but as for a cordial or anything in a bottle I should think the chances are slim. What about cherry brandy? We have gallons of that somehow and it’s absolutely filthy.’

‘So generous,’ I said, as I set the bottle green hat on my head. It did indeed cover everything, and although one would think that a bottle green and all-enveloping hat would make someone of my sallow complexion look like one of the swamp creatures for which Queensferry was renowned, it suited me rather well. Grant is an angel in serge.

Mrs Murdoch, an angel in a linen pinny, was ready for us when we reached the ground floor and clearly the household tom-toms had related our mission to her for she had put together a basket with not only a pie, a bunch of lilies and a bottle of the cherry brandy, but also a fruitcake in wax paper and a bottle of tonic (her own recipe) which, she said, helped her own dear mother no end when her own dear father was taken.

I drove us, directed by Buttercup, threading through the estate on grassy tracks and glimpsing Cassilis House as we passed. (A boring Georgian box, Buttercup had called it, and it was short on the architectural furbelows and tassels which adorn many houses in the Scotch baronial style, but since her precious castle was three medieval cubes one on top of another, I could not quite see her objection.) Within minutes we had arrived at a pair of cottages sitting in some woodland about a mile away. Buttercup hesitated at the gate, clearly unsure which cottage was the one we were after, but a glance at the washing lines criss-crossing the gardens showed one teeming with little shirts and pinafores neatly arranged in order of size while the other line held only three men’s vests and a tablecloth. Furthermore, a row of bright red heads – the owners of all the shirts and pinnies – popped up at a window in the left-hand cottage to watch us and so, hazarding a guess, we negotiated the path to the one on the right. Buttercup squared her shoulders, heaved the basket high up in front of her like a breast shield and knocked on the door.

It was answered by a sturdy woman in her forties, with sleeves rolled past the elbow and a cloth tucked into her skirt waist as a makeshift apron. Her ruddy, mottled face was fierce and grimly set at the jaw. She glared at us and shook her head even as she stood back to let us enter.

‘Chrissie’s in there,’ she growled and jabbed a finger at an open doorway. I was at a loss to explain our transgression, but when we entered the kitchen-livingroom of the cottage she gave just the same look to Mrs Dudgeon and then to the crockery she was busy drying and I realized that her outrage encompassed us all. It was not too hard to understand – grief and shock settle quite readily into indignation in those whose personality is predisposed that way – but one can imagine that it does not make for the most suitable atmosphere in a house of mourning. Mrs Dudgeon, sitting upright and pale with misery in a hard chair, one hand clenched around a crumpled handkerchief, looked uncomprehendingly into the fierce face then lowered her eyes.

Buttercup, predictably, boggled and shifted her feet and so it fell to me to sit down beside the woman and lay my hand over hers. The handkerchief was quite dry but as soon as I spoke – no more than saying her name – quantities of tears began at once to course down her cheeks and splash into her lap.

‘There, there,’ I said, thinking what an ineffectual little phrase that was, as Mrs Dudgeon spread out her handkerchief, pressed her face into it and wept with abandon.

‘Where might I put these things?’ said Buttercup in a panicked voice.

‘Aye, come away through the scullery,’ said the fierce companion. She put down the cooking pot she was drying, slammed it down actually, amongst the others still draining by the sink and led Buttercup out of the room. Mrs Dudgeon continued to sob and I continued to pat her shoulder and shush-shush uselessly.

I looked around the room as I did so, as though not to gawp at her shaking shoulders would afford her some dignity. It was a typical cottage kitchen-livingroom, more prosperous than some I had seen with its thick rug and good mahogany sideboard, but quite typical nonetheless. The range in the hearth was gleaming as was the kettle atop it, and on either side of it sat two comfortable chairs of the Windsor type, their seats adorned with cushions in knitted covers. Between them was one of the tiny wooden stools they call creepies in Perthshire, which I have always liked and long wished I could insinuate into my own sitting room somewhere. Another knitted cushion sat on this and, imagining the many evenings Mr and Mrs Dudgeon must have spent in these two chairs sharing the creepie stool between their four tired feet, I could quite see why she was perched comfortless at the table now. It would have been as unthinkable to sit in her chair and look at the emptiness opposite as it would be to sit in his chair where, if cottagers were like the rest of us, she would never have rested for a minute in her life. I withdrew my eyes from the morose tableau the armchairs made but, looking up at the mantelpiece, found no respite from the sorrow. I had forgotten what Mr Dudgeon had said last night, but there was the photograph of the young man, stiff although beaming, in a uniform so new that the sleeves and breeches’ legs stuck out like the paper clothes one cuts for dolls. Beside the picture was a spray of rosebuds tied with a ribbon of Black Watch tartan and below it little flat case, resting open, which I was sure would hold his medal. I looked away as a hard lump, impossible to swallow like one’s twentieth walnut, formed in my throat.

At last, Mrs Dudgeon’s sobs turned hoarse and dry and eventually stopped with a gulp. She raised her head and tried a small smile with trembling lips. It was not successful.

‘What must you think of me?’ she said, blowing her noise tremendously on the sodden handkerchief. I offered my own and she took it and wiped her eyes, which were spongy with weeping. I smiled at her.

‘I think what a man your husband must have been and how you must have loved him,’ I said.

I realized as soon as I had made it that this remark, honest as it might be, was hardly more helpful than grumpy housework in terms of comfort. It sent Mrs Dudgeon off into such a storm of weeping that I feared the dish-drying woman might come back and box my ears. What were she and Buttercup up to anyway? And yet, I do not know, for when Mrs Dudgeon finally raised her head from my shoulder again she did at least look cried out. She glanced at me and then looked beyond me to the window and out into the woods.

I heard movement from beyond the scullery door; Buttercup and the woman were returning.

‘Is there anyone we could fetch?’ I asked Mrs Dudgeon quickly, before I could be overheard. I only just managed not to say ‘anyone else’.

‘No, no,’ she said, still looking out into the fading light. ‘My sisters -' she began, then broke off as the door opened.

‘Very well, then,’ I said with one last pat on her hand, before settling back in my seat to a more normal social distance. Her sisters must be on their way, I thought. Much the best thing. They would soon see off the stop-gap.

Buttercup seemed mysteriously emboldened when she reappeared and started by assuring Mrs Dudgeon that the next day’s Ferry Fair was to be cancelled. The widow would not hear of this.

‘It’s not fair on the bairns,’ she said. ‘And Robert would never have wanted it.’

Perhaps encouraged by such doughtiness Buttercup then launched into relaying Inspector Cruickshank’s message, but at the news of the post-mortem and even more so at the news that her husband’s body was to be kept from her, Mrs Dudgeon’s store of courage ran out.

‘They can’t,’ she said faintly. ‘They cannot do that. I must have him back with me. I must have him here.’ As she spoke she looked at the picture on the mantelpiece and I wondered about her son’s final resting place. If he were one of the thousands who lay somewhere in France in a row of graves, I could see why Buttercup’s news could cause such anguish.

‘It won’t be for long,’ I told her. ‘He’ll be brought back just as soon as can be. You’ll have him here before you know it.’

‘But they can’t… I don’t want them… interfering with -’ She stopped and her face suddenly drained of colour. For a moment I thought she was about to faint but she stayed upright, rigid and still, just her eyes darting around.

‘Don’t dwell on it,’ I said, thinking how unbearable it would be to imagine a post-mortem being carried out on a loved one. Mrs Dudgeon said nothing and did not seem to have heard me and, since Buttercup was jerking her head towards the door in a disgustingly unsubtle signal, I thought the best I could do was go. I gave a murmured goodbye, a last squeeze of her arm and quite a fierce look of my own at her friend, and we let ourselves out of the front door at last.

‘Phew,’ said Buttercup on the doorstep. I saw what she meant but hoped fervently that Mrs Dudgeon had not heard her.

As we made our way back to my motor car, the door of the other cottage opened and three little children – three of the redheads we had seen before – burst out and shot down the path overtaking us easily.

‘Wheesht yerselves,’ a voice hissed behind us, and we turned to see a girl with a baby on her hip and a toddler held firmly by the arm. She looked to be about twelve or thirteen, her own flaming red hair still loose down her back although she was well grown and strong. The toddler keened after its siblings, who were now vaulting or scaling the garden gate according to their age and agility and clustering around the Cowley.

‘Get away in the woods before you make a single sound now,’ their sister said, still in her stage whisper. ‘Or I’ll be after you and then you’ll be sorry.’ She turned to us and gave a sheepish half-bob. ‘I ken it looks bad,’ she said, ‘but I cannae keep the wee so-and-sos quiet another minute, and I thought it would be worse for Auntie Chrissie to hear them whining and bickering if I tried.’

‘Oh quite,’ I said. ‘One can’t stop children playing. I shouldn’t worry.’

The girl looked a little relieved as she hauled back the whimpering toddler and shut the door.

‘Missus! Missus!’ said the largest of the three children as we approached them. ‘Can we get a hurl in your wee car, missus?’ The other two joined in with the pleading; none too quietly and I could see their sister standing at the cottage window shaking her fist, although not liking to rap on the glass and cause a disturbance of her own.

‘Do you know who I am?’ said Buttercup, nonplussed I think by their complete lack of bashfulness, confronted by their liege lady.

‘Aye,’ said the smallest child, a girl whose copper-red hair and ice-blue eyes were ruined by a pink ribbon which clashed and by a runny nose. ‘You’re the wifie from the castle what’s married to a Red Indian.’

Buttercup hooted with laughter at this and so to get her, as much as to get the red-haired terrors, out of poor Mrs Dudgeon’s earshot, I opened the back door of the motor car and shooed them all inside.

They were momentarily awestruck by the wonder of its interior – as overwhelmed at finding themselves in my little Cowley as I should have been upon entering an aeroplane – and I managed to get the thing started, manoeuvre it around on the track and set off for home before they found voice again.

Around the first bend we passed a group of village women dressed in black, all ages, shapes and sizes and all carrying parcels.

‘Thank goodness,’ I said to Buttercup. ‘These must be the sisters at last. Now then, children, where are you off to? Where shall we let you down?’

‘We’re goan in the woods to kill the demon,’ was the startling answer from the youngest, which met with furious shushing from the others.

‘Shut up, Lila,’ said an elder brother. ‘We’re jist playing at monsters, missus, in the woods.’

‘You said we were gonny catch the d-’

‘Shut up, Lila,’ said big brother again. ‘Or we’ll drop you doon a shell hole for the ghostie soldiers to eat you.’

‘Good Lord in heaven,’ said Buttercup under her breath, and I quite agreed.

Soon we passed out of the trees and into the open parkland surrounding the new house, where I drew up and parked.

‘Out you get,’ I said. ‘Run around on the grass and play catch. Or hide and seek. And don’t put your little sister down holes. Now, off with you.’

‘I’m not sure I’d encourage them to rampage around the parkland,’ said Buttercup mildly as we watched them roar off.

‘Oh my dear, no, of course, I didn’t think,’ I said, ashamed of myself, for the various ragged little warriors of Gilverton do not have any such privilege. ‘Well, it’s a special case tonight, isn’t it? But if they keep at it you can tell Cad to buy some ornamental cows. Ones with great big horns. Or stags even.’

‘Who would you fancy, darling, between a poor defenceless cow and those savages?’ said Buttercup. We watched the children throw themselves into the ha-ha and emerge from it again on the other side, red hair almost pulsing with light as the setting sun caught it.

‘Very fair point,’ I said. ‘Do you think there really are shell holes? Has Cadwallader mentioned any?’

‘Oh Dandy,’ said Buttercup. ‘I think we can class the holes with the demons and the ghosties, don’t you?’

I shivered.

‘I’ve never known a place like it,’ I said. ‘Did I tell you? A child watching the greasy pole this evening – quite a tiny child – declared to all around that the Burry Man lived in the swamp and got to and from it on a ghostie pony. And the grown-ups simply laughed fondly and ignored it.’

‘The swamp I can see,’ said Buttercup. ‘I mean the Burry Man is rather fungal, isn’t he? But whence the ghost horse for him to ride on?’

‘Although, if you imagine riding in a suit of burrs,’ I said, ‘our side-saddle torments would be as nothing.’

Buttercup giggled along with me. ‘Yes, a ghost horse would be de rigueur, when you think about it.’

I quelled my laughter.

‘Rather nasty to be making jokes about it,’ I said. ‘We’re as bad as the children.’

‘Hm,’ said Buttercup. ‘Come on, I need another drink.’

‘Another drink?’ I said.

Buttercup giggled again.

‘Yes, Isobel and I did a bit of sampling while you were chatting to Mrs Dudgeon,’ she said.

‘Chatting! Buttercup, you’re impossible. And I’m surprised at “Isobel” too. A taste for strong drink is hardly the norm amongst her sort.’

‘Oh heavens, no,’ said Buttercup. ‘She stuck most resolutely to the tonic pick-me-up – apparently Mrs Murdoch’s bottles of tonic are quite renowned. But actually I’d have said, from the smell of it, that it could knock the cherry brandy into a cocked hat.’

‘Well, who knows,’ I said. ‘Friend Isobel can’t have got that complexion from barley water, can she?’

‘And there’s to be no escape from Ferry Fair day,’ said Buttercup as we reached the castle and ascended to its door, the engine whining slightly at the slope. ‘I must say Cad’s and my year in charge of the thing is hardly likely to go down in the annals as a classic!’

Shocking as it must sound, I too had been hoping that one faintly silver lining in the monstrous cloud of Robert Dudgeon’s death would be that festivities would be suspended as a mark of respect and I would thus be able to avoid the unwanted and unwelcome duty that hung over my head. Mrs Dudgeon’s stoic insistence that Robert would have wanted things to go ahead as usual, however, left me facing the bonny babies with nowhere to hide.