Catriona McPherson
After the Armistice Ball
The first book in the Dandy Gilver series, 2005
For my parents, Jim and Jean McPherson,
with all my love and thanks
Prologue
Lustre. That was what had been missing and was suddenly back. The Esslemonts’ Armistice Ball was lustrous in a way feared to have disappeared for ever; and for once, as Daisy Esslemont observed, the emphasis was not on lust. Husbands were recently demobbed and there was none of the usual marital ennui, so in spite of the glitter a strange wholesomeness prevailed.
The ladies dazzled. Young and old, their hair shone with setting lotion or twinkled with ornaments; lips glowed red if maquillage had been ventured upon, cheeks glowed pink if not; frocks sparkled or gleamed with the bristle of sequins or the stately drape of satin. The ladies, though, were not uncontested. Men, usually no more than a backdrop to their wives, were resplendent that night since no man without a dress uniform in which to strut around would have dared show his face. The epaulettes and medals from the Boer campaign and the one or two surviving costumes from the Crimea lent a faint air of light opera along with their whiff of camphor and outdid, somewhat impertinently the young men felt, the lesser peacockery of more recent heroes.
So everyone glistened. And they laughed and the music was sprightly and even the smell was different. In the heat of the ballroom, the ladies’ sweat and sweet talcum mixed with the spice of cigar-breath and drove away sourness, the reek of worry, which was all there had been for five chill years.
Then there were the jewels. Out from the safes, home from the banks, tipped from their velvet bags, came the jewels. Tiaras, brooches, bracelets and bangles, clusters, half-hoops and solitaires. The rubies, the emeralds, the sapphires, the diamonds, the diamonds, the diamonds.
The Duffy diamonds, almost forgotten, newly mesmerizing, raised a round of applause as Lena Duffy shed her wrap; people jostled to the banisters to look down at them and cheer, enchanted. Then Lena’s simpering and swishing about made the onlookers turn away, murmuring that she might, she really might, have let one or other of her daughters have a look in instead of hoarding it all to herself still. Silly to have two pretty girls in pearls and their ageing mama stooping under the weight of the family jewels.
Later, when a footman came round at supper to make the collection for widows and orphans, she took off her bracelets and dangled them over the hat, laughing, before snatching them away again in whitened fists and fastening them back around her arms. Silas Esslemont frowned until the younger Duffy girl, twinkling at him, brought a smile back to his face. After all, if one were honest, what was being celebrated here was things going back to how they were before when one owed no sombre piety to life and cruel little jokes gave it savour. It was half the joy of this evening, if one were honest, that only those whose loved ones had returned were here; that the others, of whom there were so many, could be forgotten and that just for tonight glee could bubble up and over unchecked.
Chapter One
I am not – and I say this with neither pride nor shame – a sensitive soul. Not one of those women whose recreation lies amongst ‘things she cannot explain’, sudden powerful convictions of who knows what exactly. I should not go so far as to say I have no finer feelings, but whenever I compare mine with those of my acquaintance they do seem somewhat coarser in the main. I have never smiled that curling smile and nodded when told of some engagement, some divorce. Rather, any news of that kind tends to take me by surprise and leave me, let us face it, coolish.
How am I to explain then the conviction I held from the earliest stage of the Esslemont affair that somewhere here was such hatred, malign and unstoppable, that it must lead, as flood-water up and melt-water down, to violent death? On the surface (my usual habitat) it was a matter merely of commerce. At stake was a good business name – a livelihood at the very most – and while the theft of property might be distressing it does not usually, need not, stir the dust of life to much extent. I am at a loss, therefore, to account for my instant certainty last spring that somewhere near at hand and sometime rather soon blood would spurt and be staunched in murder’s furtive scuffle.
Who can say how far back it had its beginning, at what moment the first turning was taken away from light and cheerful ordinariness towards the festering dark where thoughts of killing can gather? As far as I was concerned it all began on a squally spring morning in my sitting room, the little room of mine overlooking the flower garden which my mama-in-law insists on calling my boudoir, conjuring up images of Turkey rugs thrown over low settees, air thick with burning pastilles and me with satin sleeves dragging on the floor as I pace. This is a picture gapingly at odds with reality since I do not recall that I ever have paced in the whole course of my life, in my sitting room or anywhere else.
Anyway, there I sat sans satin, sans incense, dressed in wool and tweed, in a room smelling frankly of coal and nothing much draped over anything beyond a dog blanket on my pale chair since it had been wet on our walk. I was bored, and the pleasure of boredom was beginning to run out just then, in the spring of 1922. For a few years after the Armistice it had been delicious to be without occupation. The war had ended at last, and Hugh had come home as I had always known he would, since he had been tucked away miles and miles from the front, behind even the hospitals, so that my worrying had been no more than a wifely duty and a politeness, saving me from the crime of too much visible tranquillity in front of other women whose worries were real. Now none of us was worried nor were we busy and I daresay I was not the only woman in the land for whom, her husband home, her children at school, her uniform growing musty in an attic, boredom was getting to be a burden again.
Understandable then that to help a couple of hours shuffle past we clung to the routine of doing our correspondence and managed still to make a morning’s work of it, but the silliness of it all made me cross; not the best mood for considering a sheaf of invitations and had I not forced myself to accept in spite of it Hugh and I might have ended as hermits.
Daisy’s letter made me even crosser than usual. Before, an invitation from Daisy and Silas would always have been accepted and if Hugh grumbled (which he did) about the company, I could retort (which I did) that if he cared to take over the organization of our social life I should be happy to go where he chose.
The problem with Esslemont, as far as Hugh was concerned, was Esslemont Life. Esslemont Life, begun by Silas’s grandfather in the 1860s, was exactly what it sounded as if it was. Where Grandfather had got the notion no one knew, since for generations before him Esslemonts had been content to kill their stags and collect their rents like everyone else. When the old man died – I was too young to remember this but it was still murmured about – people waited for Silas’s father to sell the shameful thing and retire to his grouse moor with a sheepish shrug But far from it. Esslemont Life became by degrees Esslemont Life, Fire, Theft, Flood, Retirement Pensions and heaven only knew what next. Eventually, the Esslemonts having an insurance company with offices in George Street and advertisements in the worst sort of morning paper came to be seen as a mere quirk, something to smile and wrinkle one’s nose about, something which gave one the chance to feel broadminded as one forbore to mention it.
Still, when Silas took over, upon his father’s death in 1910, we all once again expected he would sell. Indeed, Hugh pronounced more than once that he should have to sell, to raise the estate duty. Or rather that he should have to sell something, for everyone did, and that surely he would sell a grubby old office and a lot of dusty papers before he would touch an acre of land.