The Proper Treatment of Bloodstains

3

The train, at least the third-class part of it, was packed to the walls, every seat in every compartment taken, luggage racks bulging, corridors jammed tight and thick with pipe smoke. I had been banged on the elbow twice already by a sample case – I could not guess what its owner was selling but the case itself was painfully sturdy – and on shifting away from him had been dripped on by the melting iced lollipop of a child drowsing on its mother’s lap to my right. I tucked both elbows in tighter, hugged the plump umbrella and peered out to see where we had got to.

‘Today doesn’t suit me at all as it happens,’ said a woman opposite. She had been carrying on a conversation of loud complaint with her travelling companion since joining the train at Dunblane, or actually since joining the compartment at Bridge of Allan, after spending the first part of her journey standing in the passageway glaring in at two young men, silently demanding their seats. ‘Half-day closing Wednesday is my usual day for Edinburgh and this has thrown me right out for the whole week. I’d not be surprised if I got one of my sick headaches tonight.’

‘I did say that, Minnie,’ her friend put in mildly. ‘I was happy to wait and see what happened. I don’t think they’ll really stop the trains.’

‘Transport, building, printing and heavy works,’ said the salesman, in a thick Glasgow accent. ‘Of course, there winnae be trains.’

‘Och, they’ll sort it all before midnight,’ said an elderly man in the corner, speaking around his pipe. ‘Mr Baldwin and Mr Pugh’ll get it seen to between their two selves.’

‘They might try right enough,’ said the stout salesman, ‘but what about Red Bevin and that wee Churchill toerag – they’re just itchin’ for a dust-up.’

With some relief I saw the large white lettering on the Jenner’s depository building go by outside the window and felt a jolt as the brakes gripped and the train began the long slow pull in towards Haymarket station. The young salesman stood up, giving me a farewell bang on the knees with his case, and talk of the strike sank under the shifting of bodies and parcels and the general struggle of departure.

I was very glad to be leaving the train at its final destination, for I should have been at a loss on the question of how to extricate myself and my bag from a compartment and get my trunk out of the guard’s van during a short station stop. Did servants summon porters? Grant’s instructions had not covered this point but I hardly thought so, and even if a porter volunteered to help how was one to manage the tipping? As it was, I stood helplessly on the platform looking in at my trunk through the opened doors and wondering if I should try to shift it.

‘Needin’ a wee hand, hen?’ said a voice beside me and the two young men – apprentice boys, perhaps – who had been ousted by Minnie hopped up into the guard’s van and turned their caps backwards.

‘Which one’s yours?’ asked one of them and, when I pointed, they hefted the small trunk between them and leapt back out onto the platform again.

‘Where do you want it?’ asked the other.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. I gazed about myself. Lollie had not gone into any details about my arrival and I had no idea if I was to be met. I could not, obviously, hail a cab but nor could I manhandle this trunk onto a bus and off again.

‘Startin’ in a new place, eh?’ said one of the lads, squinting at me past the smoke of his cigarette. I nodded. ‘Maids’ store, Sandy,’ he said, and they set off towards the station building with me trotting after.

The maids’ store was in a part of the station I had never seen before, under some brick arches with metalled walkways crossing overhead. A queue of girls in serge and bad hats shuffled forwards, kicking their trunks or rolling them on barrows, towards an opening with a counter where a middle-aged man in uniform was writing down details in a ledger and tearing off pink tickets from a roll.

‘Name?’ he said when I got to the head of the queue.

‘Miss Rossiter,’ I said. He looked up and frowned at me.

‘Address?’

‘31 Heriot Row,’ I said. He put his pencil down, folded his arms and stared at me.

‘There’s no Rossiter in Heriot Row,’ he said. ‘Are you taking a lend o’ me, lassie?’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t quite understand,’ I began, feeling my face start to change colour. There was some tittering from behind me.

‘Get yourself round to the left luggage and pay your tuppence,’ said the man with the pencil. ‘This is the maids’ store.’

‘I am a maid,’ I told him. ‘I’m starting today as a lady’s maid for Mrs Balfour of Heriot Row and my name is Rossiter.’ The struggle between wounded dignity and maid-like meekness was making my voice tremble.

The man explored the inside of his cheek with his tongue and regarded me.

‘Aye, Balfour, that’s right,’ he said at last.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s my first position, you see.’

His face softened with understanding and, I think, pity. He ripped off a pink ticket and closed my hand around it with a fatherly pat.

‘I do see,’ he said. ‘Well, you take that there wee chitty and give it to the housekeeper. She’ll get a pair of lads to lift your trunk round for you. And sorry I was that wee bit short, there. It’s been going like a fair all day and I’m run off my feet with it.’

‘It’ll be a quieter day tomorrow for you,’ I said. ‘If this strike goes ahead anyway.’

‘I’ll be on the pickets, hen,’ he said. ‘On my feet all day and no’ getting paid for it.’

I stared at him. A striker! I was face to face with one of them. He did not look much like a revolutionary, with his uniform jacket open over a Fair Isle jumper in bright colours and with a stub of pencil behind each ear as well as the one in his hand.

‘See if you can get the lads down for your case nice and sharp, eh?’ he said. ‘The store’s fillin’ up fast already and we’ve still the late rush to come.’

There was no front door and butler for me today, of course. The maids’ store might have thrown me for a moment but I knew that much, and I passed through the iron gate and descended the area steps to the door below. It opened before I had reached the flagstones and a smiling face appeared round it.

‘Miss Rossiter? I’m Clara, the parlourmaid.’ She opened the door completely, came out into the area and took my bag from me. ‘Mind they steps,’ she said. ‘They get right mossy when it rains.’ She was a tall, vigorous girl in her twenties, with a long oval face and small dancing eyes, and her smile – perhaps to hide imperfect teeth – was more a bunching up of her lips into a bud than a stretching of them, which was most appealing.

‘Mrs Hepburn’s making toffee nests for tonight’s sweet,’ she said, ‘and she cannae leave them, but come away back and say hello a minute, before you go to your room, and you can pick up a wee cup of tea and take it with you, eh?’

‘That would be lovely, Clara,’ I said, envisioning kicking off Miss Rossiter’s shoes and lying back against pillows, sipping and dozing.

‘So what’s your Christian name?’ asked Clara over her shoulder as she closed the area door behind us and started along a stone passageway towards the back of the house, squeezing past the filled scuttles and zinc liners which waited in a row there.

I stopped walking. What was Miss Rossiter’s Christian name? I had not imagined that she would need one. Grant was Grant to me and Miss Grant to the others as far as I knew. Before I could speak, Clara turned around and gave me a cold look out of her little eyes, not dancing at all now.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘It’s like that, is it?’ and she flounced into the kitchen with her head held very high.

‘It was Miss Rossiter you heard right enough, Mrs Hepburn,’ she said. ‘Here she is. Miss Rossiter.’

I stepped inside behind her. It was a cavernous room dominated by the black Eagle range which took up most of one wall and sent shimmering waves of heat to stir festoons of flypapers all around the ceiling. At the table, directly under the electric light, a formidable-looking cook in a rose-pink dress and enormous apron, with a bunch of keys twinkling at her waist, was letting ropes of syrup drop from a small ladle onto a wooden contraption like a large darning ball on a stick, held up by a kitchenmaid who was quivering with the effort of holding it steady and was cross-eyed from staring just in front of her face. By the range, a very young boy was sitting with his stockinged feet on the fender, plucking a chicken and throwing the feathers onto the flames.

‘Fanny,’ I said, rather louder than I had intended.

The young boy looked up, Clara bit her lip and the cross-eyed maid jumped.

‘Millie-molly-moo,’ said the cook, ‘how many times have I told you?’ She wiped up a blob of syrup from the table-top with her finger and stuck it out for the girl to lick. ‘You have to hold the paddle steady.’

‘Sorry,’ I said, meaning it to take in all of them. ‘I always tell myself that next time I meet someone I shall say Frances and I never do. I got close this time, though – said nothing at all!’

Clara was smiling at me again; she had swallowed it.

‘Nothing wrong with Fanny,’ she said. ‘Better than Millie-molly-moo, anyway.’

Mrs Hepburn took the paddle and stuck it into a kind of pipe-rack affair where a few others were cooling, then she put the sugar pot on the back of the range to keep warm, wiped her hands on her apron and turned to greet me.

‘Kitty Hepburn,’ she said. ‘And this wee chookie is my niece, Amelia, the scullerymaid. She gets Millie, though. And Mattie, the hall and boot boy.’

‘Miss,’ said Mattie, dipping his head.

‘Kitchenmaid now, Auntie Kitty,’ said Millie. ‘I mean, Mrs Hepburn.’

The cook’s face clouded very briefly.

‘Well, let’s just see, will we?’ she said. ‘Make a cup of tea for Miss Rossiter to be going on with anyway.’

Millie trotted towards the scullery door then turned and took a few paces back in the direction of the large dresser which filled the wall opposite the range.

‘What cup does a lady’s maid get, Auntie Kit- Hepburn?’ she said.

‘I’ll get it, Molly-moo,’ said Clara, rolling her eyes at me. The scullerymaid, unperturbed by the teasing, sat down opposite Mattie by the fireside and put her hands between her knees, like a toddler who is trying ostentatiously to stay out of mischief. She was fifteen perhaps, with the face of a pink-and-white china baby doll and a round, dumpy figure that one could easily believe was made of stockinet stuffed with sand. Her brown hair was plaited and pinned over her head and her innocent eyes blinked from behind round spectacles. She caught me studying her and beamed at me with the guilelessness of a child.

‘I’ve put two lumps in,’ said Clara, holding out a teacup with the saucer balanced on top to keep it hot, ‘seeing you’ve been on the train getting all trauchled.’

‘There’s a good girl,’ said Mrs Hepburn. ‘I’ll take you down to your room now, Miss Rossiter. Clara, you better get into your blacks before Mr Faulds comes in. Coal scuttles, Mattie-boy. And potatoes, Millie – ten big ones and mind you set them in the salt water straight away and not leave them out on the bunker to brown.’ Mrs Hepburn gathered up my bag and umbrella in one hand and taking my teacup in the other she swept out of the kitchen.

‘Isn’t she lovely spoken?’ said Millie as I was closing the kitchen door behind me. The others shushed her furiously but I caught her eye and smiled.

‘Down to my room?’ I said, following the cook, and right enough she had crossed the passageway and was descending a set of worn steps, her wooden heels knocking on the stone with a rather mournful sound. ‘I was expecting an attic.’

We arrived in the sub-basement, and I peered around waiting for my eyes to adjust to the gloom. When they did I saw dark green walls, dark brown doors and a dark red painted stone floor, covered with a narrow strip of grey hair carpet. There was no furniture, only two deep laundry hampers set against the wall, one open and half-filled with white bundles and one buckled shut, an address label tied to its handle, awaiting collection or just returned.

‘You’ve never been in an Edinburgh house then?’ said Mrs Hepburn. ‘The nurseries are in the attics and our rooms are all down here.’

I had indeed noticed the almost subterranean windows below basement level in some of Edinburgh’s houses but had never stopped to wonder what was behind them. Mrs Hepburn turned right and opened one of the brown doors.

To my surprise, light flooded out into the passageway.

‘Here you are then,’ she said, bustling in and putting my teacup down on a shelf to the side of the fire, which was burning cheerfully. ‘You’re at the back but there’s no slight meant to it because the front rooms are black as caves and here you’ve a good view down the garden. Clara and Phyllis – she’s the housemaid – are across the way and the rest of them – well, it’s just the two of them now – have the front room.’ She stopped and smiled at me. ‘I’ll let you get settled then,’ she said. ‘Servants’ hall is in front of the kitchen and dinner’s at six. Mrs Balfour said she’d not need to see you until seven, so there’s a nice easy start for you. The – ahem – is just out the back there, up the steps to the walkway and on the left beyond the scullery and it’s ladies only, so there’s no need to worry about that. The menservants have their arrangements down at the mews.’

‘Thank you, Mrs Hepburn,’ I said. ‘You’ve been very kind. And regarding the ladies’… arrangements, is the back door open?’

‘Until Mr Faulds locks up at night it is. Now do you have your chit for your trunk? I’ll get Mattie and John to slip down for it before tea.’ I fished out the pink ticket and gave it to her. ‘We’re a happy house, Fanny,’ she said, then hesitated as though wondering whether to say more. ‘Young Mrs Balfour is a dear girl and you’ll not have much to do with the master, I don’t suppose.’

Which, I thought to myself once she had left, was commendably discreet but still spoke volumes. It need have no connection to Lollie’s troubles, of course, but still I should have liked to know why my predecessor had left before a replacement could be found for her. The loss of a servant from a household of such friendliness, in which fires burned in bedroom grates on afternoons in May, needed at least some explaining.

My new home, now that I had a chance to look around it, was a great deal better than I had been expecting; a very great deal better than the attic rooms at Gilverton anyway. It was perhaps ten feet square, with a tall window, modestly clothed in muslin halfway up, which looked out over a patch of grass and a cherry tree. There was a black iron bedstead – exactly the same as those at Gilverton – with fat pillows and a fat quilt, an armchair near the fire, a chest of drawers with jug and basin on top, a bookcase and a hanging cupboard. A door beside the window revealed a tiny room housing a small china sink with hot and cold taps, a very small mangle fitted to it at one end and a clothes airer on a pulley above it. Boxes of Sunlight soap and packets of Robin starch lined up along the windowsill told me that this was where Miss Rossiter would lovingly launder Mrs Balfour’s most delicate garments. I sniffed at the packets, of course. Armed with Grant’s notes I would raid the kitchen for lemon and lavender; I knew the right way of things. I leaned over the taps and peered out of the window wondering if there might be a butt of rainwater I could lay claim to, but the fire, armchair and sweet tea were calling to me.

When I left my room at five minutes to six for dinner in the servants’ hall, I had already made it wonderfully cosy. Photographs of Bunty – and one of Nanny Palmer whom I was proposing to pass off as my mother – were ranged on the chimneypiece; my clothes were folded away or hanging over the airer to uncrease themselves, and I had upended my trunk and covered it with a gay shawl as a nightstand, a trick learned at finishing school where the furnishers of our dormitory bedrooms had taken great care to discourage reading in bed by failing to provide anywhere to put a candle or cup of cocoa.

Before I was halfway up the stairs to the basement again I could hear talking – men’s talking – and I hesitated, smoothing my hair under the restraining pins and patting flat the starched collar of my frock. When I pushed open the door a sea of faces turned towards me.

‘Here she is,’ said a jovial voice, and the butler I had met on the day of my interview stood up from a fireside armchair and opened his arms in welcome to me. Mrs Hepburn was sitting in a matching armchair on the other side of the fire with a small glass of some brown liquid in her hand. There was a third chair in a less exalted position just off to one side and a plump young man sprang out of it and began shaking up its cushions before turning towards me.

‘Miss Rossiter,’ he said, with a slight bow.

‘Sherry, Miss Rossiter?’ said Mr Faulds, taking out a fat watch and peering at it. ‘There’s just time before dinner, I see.’

Slightly bewildered, I sat down and accepted a glass with a thimbleful of thick, dark sherry in it.

‘Now,’ said Mr Faulds. ‘Here’s where we test your memory for you!’ As he sat back down again he waved around the long table, covered in oilcloth but laid for a meal, where the rest of the staff were sitting.

‘Clara, Millie and Mattie I know already,’ I said, nodding at the three of them, the known faces in the crowd. As I spoke a young man in grey britches and braces, with his collar open and sleeves rolled, sat up very straight and whistled.

‘Mind out for your glass with they vowels flyin’ about, Mrs Hepburn,’ he said.

One of the maids tittered and I smiled too, to show willing.

‘That’s John,’ said Mrs Hepburn. ‘He’s the chauffeur. Cheek of a monkey but no harm in him.’ John grinned at me and stretched out in his chair, crossing his legs at the ankle and lacing his hands together behind his head. Chauffeurs are most often chosen to complement an elegant motorcar and this one was no exception: tall and broad-shouldered with a square jaw and straight brows, as though the word ‘strapping’ had been invented to describe him.

‘Next to him,’ said Mrs Hepburn, ‘is Harry, master’s valet.’ Harry took his nearly finished cigarette out of his mouth and saluted me with it, touching his fingertips to his temple in such a way that the insolence was as hard to define as it was to ignore. I smiled at him regardless and he looked away. He was as young as John and as tall, but nature had been less kind, giving him a weaker chin, a larger nose, a rather red and angry-looking complexion.

Beside Harry was the man who had vacated my armchair. He was clearly a butler-in-waiting, natty in dress, stout in outline, dressed in the same striped trousers, yellow-edged waistcoat and butterfly collar as Mr Faulds.

‘Stanley,’ he said to me, half rising to bow. ‘I’m the footman.’ He tweaked at his trousers as he sat back down and I noticed that Millie’s eyes, soft behind her spectacles, were fastened upon him with something approaching rapture. I had to purse my lips not to smile. For if the scullerymaid was a china doll fashioned by Mabel Lucie Attwell, then Stanley the footman was made to match her with his large blue slightly pop eyes, his pink cheeks and his egg-like figure. They put one in mind of the carved couples who trundle out one on each side of a cuckoo clock to mark the halves and quarters with a bang of a mallet.

‘And then there’s Phyllis, the housemaid,’ said Mr Faulds, gesturing with a broad smile.

‘Nice to meet you, Miss Rossiter,’ said Phyllis. She was a taking little thing, perched at the end of the table with her feet up on the spar of her chair and a small embroidery frame held up close in the dimness as she sewed. She had that very pretty Celtic colouring of dark hair, pale skin, light eyes and sparse pale brows, with curling lips which looked as though they had been rouged but were really just naturally pink, and a shiny little spade of a chin. I could not help glancing at John and Harry to see if there were any more rapturous glances to be intercepted, but I found none.

‘And finally,’ said Mrs Hepburn, ‘Eldry, the tweenie.’ Eldry, the tweenie, when she looked up and nodded a greeting – for she was sewing too – was revealed to be a plain girl with a bony nose and teeth which, at rest, were always visible against her bottom lip. She should have scraped her hair back, painted her lips red and pointed that sharp nose to the sky, I thought – I had seen girls who had managed to make themselves striking that way if they had enough confidence to pull it off – but Eldry had taken the much more common route of pressing her hair into little curls around her face, lowering her head to hide the nose and pursing her mouth to hide the teeth, after which of course there is no helping it.

‘That’s a very unusual name you have,’ I said to her. Phyllis – I guessed that she was the giggler amongst the girls; there always is one – tittered again.

‘Etheldreda,’ said Eldry. ‘Only my ma’s Ethel and my grandma’s Dreda so there was only the middle bit left for me.’ She sounded so plaintive as she said it that the laughter spread around the room, even as Eldry blinked at us all wondering what the joke was.

‘Eh, dear,’ said Mrs Hepburn. ‘Ah well, if you can’t laugh, eh? Right then, girlies! It’s sausage and onion pie and treacle pud, Fanny. Drop of pea and ham soup to start with. I knew you’d be wanting a good dinner after your long day.’

Eldry and Millie jumped up and Mrs Hepburn, one hand on each knee, hauled herself to her feet too. Clara, who had come to drape her long frame on the arm of the chair during the introductions, now slid into its seat and stretched her feet out towards the blaze.

‘Is there someone missing?’ I said, looking around and counting them off surreptitiously on my fingers. The butler, the cook and me made three, the four menservants – handsome John, plain Harry, round little Stanley and sweet Mattie – made seven and Clara, Phyllis, Millie and Eldry, the four maids, made eleven in all. Lollie had definitely told me there were twelve. Stanley and Mr Faulds glanced at one another, but it was Harry who spoke up, his voice as rough and awkward as his complexion.

‘Maggie,’ he said. ‘Kitchenmaid. Done a flit on Saturday night.’

‘Really?’ I said.

‘Silly wench,’ said Mr Faulds. ‘Didn’t know when she was well off.’ I saw Clara shift in her seat, her long face solemn and her small eyes beady, and Phyllis put her embroidery down and leaned over to squeeze the other girl’s arm. ‘Took off after a promotion, Miss Rossiter, down by Berwick in a big house with a chef and a lot of girls to boss about. Kept it to herself and didn’t work a day of her notice. Mistress would have let her off with a week and given her a reference, but there’s no talking to these youngsters.’

Privately, I agreed. To have left a post with no reference was a reckless move for any servant and if the Berwick job fell through, good luck to Maggie finding another.

‘Mind you, Mr Faulds,’ said Stanley, looking up from the newspaper spread over his place setting, ‘if she’d stayed her week she’d never have got there. It says here there’s no trains on tomorrow with this general strike.’

‘It’s not a general strike,’ said Harry, sitting forward suddenly so that his chair legs banged against the floor. ‘It’s a selective co-ordinated industrial action.’

‘Harry is our resident Red, Miss Rossiter,’ said Mr Faulds.

‘It’s a menace is what it is,’ said Stanley, folding up his newspaper in brusque angry movements. It is always pointless – either annoying or amusing – for the under-thirties to attempt pomposity and Stanley failed to do anything but make Phyllis giggle again.

‘And you’re the… valet?’ I said to Harry. I was still trying to get them straight in my head after the whirlwind of introductions.

‘He is indeed,’ said John, grinning. ‘It’s all part of the plan.’ Then he ducked as Harry aimed a punch at the side of his head.

‘Now, now, lads,’ said Mr Faulds, as Stanley looked on with his mouth pulled down in a cod-like pout of disapproval. The butler heaved himself up to his feet. ‘There’s a bottle of burgundy needs using up,’ he said to himself, ‘but sausage and onion pie wants beer, really.’ Picking over a large bunch of keys, he left the kitchen and I heard the hobnails on his heels ring out against the stone steps as he descended to the sub-basement where, I guessed, the beer cellar must be.

‘All part of what plan?’ I asked the lads once he was gone. John grinned again and Harry gave me a long appraising look.

‘Don’t encourage them,’ said Phyllis, who had taken up her sewing again.

‘All the valets are Trots,’ said John. ‘Just waiting for the word and then ccrrrkkk!’ He drew a finger across his throat. ‘The lords and masters struck down while they get their morning shave and the revolution begins. Easiest way, really.’

‘Disgraceful!’ said Stanley.

‘You should recruit Miss Rossiter, Harry,’ said John. ‘Get the lady’s maids as well as the valets and you’re laughing.’

‘Eldry would have plenty to say if she caught you sweet-talking Miss Rossiter,’ said Phyllis to John. I looked at her, startled. Poor plain Eldry and this rather arrogant young man? Surely not. But I thought, from John’s shout of laughter and Phyllis’s look of mischief, that this was a tease more than an indiscretion.

‘You wouldn’t dare go on like this if Mr Faulds could hear you,’ said Stanley.

‘Aye, we would,’ said John. Stanley flushed.

‘Well, you wouldn’t dare if we had a butler like the butlers that trained me,’ he said. ‘Like the butler I’ll be one day.’

‘Oh Stan,’ said Clara, stretching out a long leg and poking the footman with her toe. ‘Don’t let him rile you, he disnae mean anything by it.’ But Stanley was not to be soothed.

‘I’ll go and help Mr Faulds,’ he said, rising and patting at imaginary specks on his waistcoat. ‘Heaven knows, he needs it.’

‘That’s my boy,’ said Harry. ‘We’re all workers together. We shall surely overcome, united in toil.’

So Stanley’s exit was marred by yet more giggling and his slightly pendulous cheeks were aflame as he passed me, his pop eyes shining.

‘They were saying on the train that Baldwin and Pugh are meeting tonight,’ I said, hoping to sound knowledgeable, wondering what Miss Rossiter would, and therefore what I should, make of the affair.

‘Uncle Arthur’ll never give in,’ said Harry.

‘Fingers crossed,’ said a small voice. I started. It was the first time since I had come into the room that Mattie the hall boy had spoken. With his white-blond hair and his pale skin, he appeared not only childlike but positively elfin and anything less like a troublemaker could scarcely be imagined.

‘They’ll be awright, Matt,’ said Phyllis, and she and Clara swooped down on him from each side and kissed a cheek each. ‘Mattie’s worried about his family, Miss Rossiter. With the lock-out, you know.’

‘Mrs Hepburn’ll give you such a basket to take to them on your day off, you’ll not be able to carry it,’ said Clara, trying to make him smile. ‘You’ll have to eat the lot to keep your strength up and then you’ll have an empty basket and your ma’ll leather you and call Mrs H. all sorts and you’ll wish the strike was all you had to trouble you.’ Mattie did, indeed, give a small chuckle at that.

‘Who’s this and what are they calling me?’ said Mrs Hepburn, coming back in with an enormous tray, steam rising from six deep plates of soup. Eldry followed with another tray and Millie brought up the rear with a breadboard and butter dish. ‘Where’s Mr Faulds and his shadow got to now, then? This soup needs supped before the pies get over-browned. Come on, come on – get your legs under. You too, Fanny. Grub’s up.’

The journey from the servants’ hall after dinner was a long one. Of course, any upward journey is hindered by the recent ingestion of pea soup, sausage pie and treacle pudding – I was blowing like a whale by the second landing – but it was more than that. Across the linoleum, past the scuttles, up the worn stone steps, across the glittering tiles on the ground floor, past the hall table with its salvers, up the marble stairs with the gilded banisters, across the gleaming parquet of the drawing-room floor, up the carpeted stairs with the ebony banisters, all the way to where Lollie waited, peeping around her door, looking out for me, and when I arrived it took a moment for the idea to fall away that I was simply going to help her into an evening frock, stud her hair with a few ornaments and take her stockings away to rinse out for the morning. Miss Rossiter had possessed me body and soul.

‘In here, Dandy,’ she hissed. She drew me into the room beside her and closed and locked the door. ‘How was it?’ she said, looking searchingly at me, ‘I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you down there. Are you all right?’

‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘I like your Mrs Hepburn, Lollie dear. She calls me Fanny and plies me with drink. And the girls and boys are all very lively. I slightly let Miss Rossiter’s accent fall by the wayside, but they’ve decided en masse to treat it as a sort of joke, so there’s nothing to worry about on that score.’

‘Splendid,’ said Lollie. She crossed the room and sat at her dressing table where an overflowing ashtray spoke of her nervous afternoon. ‘It’s just a couple of Pip’s friends for dinner tonight – nothing too fancy. But let’s talk while I change.’ I thought of Mrs Hepburn’s spun toffee nests and the coconut ice she had been finishing off to fill them with when I had left her, and I wondered what ‘fancy’ would have looked like.

‘Very well, then,’ I said, taking out my little notebook and sitting down on the end of her bed. ‘First of all: do you have any suspicions about who it is that’s following you when you go out?’

‘None,’ said Lollie, stopping with her shirt halfway off over her head and staring at me.

‘Male or female, even?’

‘Why?’

‘I was trying to think who it might be myself,’ I told her. ‘Some of them are absolutely impossible: Millie and Mattie, for instance. Their innocence shines out of them.’ I nodded to myself. Of course, it was terrible detective work to discount a person on that score but, more pertinently, a scullerymaid is always under the eye of the cook and a hall and boot boy hardly less so; harried and chivvied and nagged and kept up to the mark with endless little jobs all day. I could not imagine that young Mattie could easily slip away.

So perhaps the only candidates were Mrs Hepburn or Mr Faulds, with no one above them to check their movements and demand accounts of missing time? But as soon as I had thought it I could see how hopeless it was, for a butler is always there, upstairs and down, drawing room and servants’ hall, always at the other end of a rung bell, opening doors, bearing trays, bowing over salvers. If Pallister, at home at Gilverton, were to take up secret missions the very walls would crumble by teatime. And if a butler is the walls and floors and door bells of a house then a cook is the foundation stone, square and solid and always down there, in the kitchens, toiling away. I am not often in the kitchens at Gilverton, it is true, but I had certainly never been there when Mrs Tilling was not, could scarcely imagine such a thing.

No, if anyone were slipping out and following Lollie it was to the middle ranks I should be looking. Not perhaps the footman, for footmen are as visible as butlers all day long, and not the tweenie who, even though she spent half her time above stairs and half below, had a daily round not of her own devising. Besides, poor shy Eldry, biting her lip and blushing, did not seem the girl to dash out and then cover her tracks upon her return. The two upper maids, languorous Clara and pert little Phyllis, were a livelier pair of prospects; I should have thought either of them quite equal to a bit of spying. But then I thought again of Clara’s flouncing huff over Miss Rossiter’s Christian name. Surely that sprang from some quite solid sense of fair play? And then think of Phyllis giggling and stitching her embroidery and comforting poor Mattie with cuddles. A snooper? It did not seem likely.

Which left those two boys: John and Harry. John, being the chauffeur, could certainly – easily – be sent off on errands by his master without the other servants missing him. And I knew from my own experience how much time Grant spends mysteriously employed away from the house, even with only a dressmaker in the village to absorb her attentions. If we lived in a town she would never be out of the shops, buying up yards of ribbon and stockings by the score, and I imagined the same was true of a valet, if not even more so, what with shaving soap and tobacco and hair brilliantine. Again though, apart from the free time at their disposal, neither of them seemed all that likely: John had the easy, open manners which come from good looks and early advancement and Harry the brusque insolence of plain features and too much politics, but of watchful cunning and furtiveness I had seen not a whisker.

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.