I padded lightly towards the door, not quite on tiptoe for it would be too ridiculous to go to such lengths to avoid waking a dog, but certainly taking care. Bunty believes, with the perfect confidence of all dogs, that her presence at my heels (or under them) is my heart’s desire every time I move from my chair, but she annoys Hugh. I do not mean that she barks at him or takes his cuff in her teeth or anything, but her very existence annoys him and so any errand of supplication is the better for her having no part in it. I closed the door almost silently and breathed out. A little housemaid was busy with a dustpan on the breakfast room rug and she smiled at the soft click of the latch.
‘I’ve escaped,’ I said, and she giggled, before ducking her head lower still and redoubling her efforts with the brush.
My sitting room is delightful, and the breakfast room, facing east to the morning sun, has walls of yellow stripe and cheerful pictures of flowers, so it is not until one emerges from this jaunty corner of the house that one begins to feel the true spirit of Gilverton. Mahogany the colour of dried liver encrusts the passageway and hall; the cornicing so very elaborate, the picture rail so sturdy, the dado intended apparently to withstand axe blows and the skirting board so lavish, almost knee-high I should say, that there is barely room for wallpaper, and what wallpaper there is is hidden behind print after sketch after oil of the outside of the house. Views from every hill, taken every ten years since the place was built it seems, go pointlessly by as one passes, and from above them glower down the mournful heads of stags and the snarling masks of foxes. I suppose though that I should be grateful for the hall; it serves as an acclimatization to brace one against what waits as one passes the front door and enters what I think of as the Realm of Death.
In this part of the house are the business room, library, gun room and billiard room. They sit in a miasma of cigar smoke, stale gunpowder and damp leather, and are adorned by corpses – no creature being too mean to be stuffed and stuck behind glass. I always avert my eyes from the pitiful squirrels, scuttle past the horror that is the eel case, and hold my nose as I round the corner past the forty-pound salmon landed by Hugh’s father and most inexpertly stuffed but still, more often than not, I turn back deciding that whatever it is can wait until luncheon.
Today I felt quite different, although I still took great care not to breathe in anywhere near ‘Sir Gilver’ or look too closely at the mouldy patches on his noble sides where the scales had sloughed off to lie in heaps beneath him. Daisy’s call, lacking in useful detail as it undoubtedly was, seemed to have acted upon me like a patent tonic and I felt, as I neared the library, as though a Japanese servant who knew his business had stepped on the knobs of my spine and reset it with extra bounce and slightly longer than before. I was going to sort it, whatever it was, and my chin rose like a ballcock.
‘Dear,’ I said, putting my head round the door. I swung on the heavy handle but kept my feet on the hall carpet and therefore did not, technically, enter the room uninvited. ‘We had no plans for the next week or so, did we?’
Hugh looked hard at my feet then glanced at the door hinge as though fearful that my weight might bring all twelve feet of oak crashing down.
‘Only I’ve just accepted an invitation for the Esslemonts.’ Hugh started to rumble. ‘For the twenty-first,’ I added hurriedly. Brown trout opened on the twentieth and Silas’s river was simply bursting with them, I knew. Poor Hugh, stuck between the end of the ducks and the first roe buck and with his one winter run of salmon long gone, stroked his moustache and weighed the competing temptations and irritations the visit held out to him.
‘The Duffys are going, I’m afraid,’ I said, hoping to slip it all past him while he wasn’t really listening, ‘and, worse, some business pals of Silas. Daisy seems to think she might need a shoulder or two.’ I watched, while recounting this, as Hugh’s initial frown unravelled and his eyebrows climbed higher and higher up his head until his crow’s feet showed white against his brown cheeks.
‘Duffys going to Esslemont’s?’ he echoed, then blew out hard as though cooling soup. ‘How interesting.’ He waited for my assent, and when it did not come he spoke again with some exasperation. ‘You have heard, haven’t you? About the jewels?’
‘No,’ I said, feeling a chill begin to creep around me which might, might, only have been the through-draught from the open door.
‘They’ve gone,’ said Hugh. ‘All of them, the whole lot. I had it from George and he had it direct from… I forget. But the young Duffy girl took them to be cleaned or something and – paste!’ He laughed, not a kind laugh. ‘George said the jeweller started to polish the things, they crumbled under his hands, and the poor chap fainted, fell off his high stool and broke his arm. Although that might just be George making a better story.’
‘How extraordinary,’ I said. The chill was seeping further into me. ‘Why though, should Daisy and Silas…?’
‘Well, that’s the thing,’ said Hugh, bridling over his news most unappealingly. ‘They’ve all gone, you see. Head, neck, arms and ears.’ (Jewellers’ terminology was not Hugh’s strong suit.) ‘And guess when and where they were last worn together? George said Lena Duffy is going around telling anyone who’ll listen that it was an “inside job” at Esslemont’s. So what with this stock market thingamajig coming off any day now -’
‘But that’s ludicrous,’ I said. ‘Or even if it was some servant of Daisy’s gone to the bad, surely Silas himself can’t be blamed. They must be insured, after all.’
‘You don’t know bankers,’ said Hugh. ‘They are not like us, my dear. A whiff of a scandal and they scatter like pigeons. No substance, you see. One generation from a flat above the shop most of them. No nerve. I’ve always wondered how Silas could bear to rub shoulders with them so. And now see where it’s…’
I straightened and let the door swing shut. Hugh is not really a spiteful man and I did not want to witness this, most understandable, lapse. Besides, I was shivering by this time, my memory of the Armistice Anniversary Ball playing like a faulty newsreel in my head, flashy, raucous and swirling, so that I sank on to the bottom step and caught my lip, waiting for it to pass, as I had had to do in the mornings when the babies were coming, but never since. I tried to pep myself up, telling myself that fate had handed me an occupation again at long last, one with no ghastly uniform, but I could not quite, with such bright speculations, shake it off. So there I sat, feeling for the first time the sickening thump of dread which would become so familiar in the days ahead of me that when what was to happen finally did, I met it not with the shock one might think, but with recognition and, almost, relief.
Chapter Two
Looking at the map, one might imagine that the Esslemonts’ place is at one end of a good straight road, the other end leading right to us at Gilverton, and Hugh can never resist this notion. So while there is an excellent train from Perth to Kingussie taking the lucky passengers within five miles, there never has been and never will be the remotest chance of my finding myself on it. As I expected, I found Hugh poring over his Bartholomew’s half-inch at tea-time on the day the invitation came. He started slightly as I happened upon him, but thrust out his chin and prepared to convince me. Poor thing, I can see how irritating it must be; the road on the map marches across the countryside like a prize-winning furrow, cleaving forests and moors with an almost Viking-like forthrightness, but there are a good many features in each actual mile which cannot be packed into those neat little half-inches. The real mystery is why Hugh should imagine, having found out the first time how great the discrepancies were, that it might be the road which would change before next time, bringing itself in line with the map. Suffice to say that once again we arrived dishevelled and wretched after slightly more than twice the length of time he had calculated, and several hours after the other guests had stepped down from the train and been whisked five little miles in the greatest of comfort in Silas’s Bentley.