I took no more than that rather graceless persuasion. I climbed under the covers, and I think I had fallen asleep before the door had softly closed behind them.
Sunday, 27th October 1929
It was Hugh who woke me, at daybreak, the blank grey light of steady rain falling from thick cloud, just the weather one would want to put out the last smoking ember of a fire.
‘Damn dog,’ Hugh was saying. I felt a tug on the covers as he tried and failed to make Bunty shift.
‘Good morning, dear,’ I said, sitting up. ‘Thank you for not waking me when you came up.’
‘A bomb wouldn’t have woken you,’ Hugh said. ‘I waited up until Laidlaw arrived, about five, but by then everyone was settled in their billets. It looks like a field hospital downstairs, Dandy. If we can’t get shot of them today, I’m for taking the boys and going home.’
‘I’ll go and see what’s what now,’ I said, carefully not responding to the suggestion.
The blankets were rolled and the furniture put back in the drawing room, but I could hear low voices in the dining room and so I made my way there with Bunty padding in her stiff morning way beside me.
Ten people were sitting at the dining table, eating porridge, while Pallister stood like a formal footman on one side of the door and the constable stood like a bad copy of him at the other. Some of the guests looked perfectly at home – the bright young things – but a few of the Hydro’s long-time patients were turning huge eyes on Pallister as though he was their headmaster and might at any moment decide to cane them. One could hardly blame them; even after all these years he sometimes produces just those feelings in me.
Alec was there, Donald and Teddy too, and Merrick, and at the head of the table was Tot Laidlaw, slightly weary about the eyes and blue about the chin, but holding his audience in the palm of his hand with all his usual brio.
‘My poor sister,’ he said, ‘my poor dear sister. Well, I hardly have to tell all of you who loved her too. She was just so very absent-minded. I’m sure when the firemen look through the wreckage they’ll find it started in her study. That paraffin heater of hers, probably. Poor Dot. But what she did to Dr Ramsay… Well, she must have lost her mind.’
‘I can’t believe it,’ one of the older women was saying. ‘A terrible shocking thing.’ But her eyes were wide with delight.
‘She loved him,’ Laidlaw said. ‘And he just didn’t love her back. Any excuse to get him up there and talk to him, you know. She even dragged him out of bed one time to sign a death certificate she could have signed herself. Poor Dottie. And poor Dr Ramsay. She must have tricked him into a windowless room and locked him there. She must have lost her mind.’
‘I think she possibly did lose her mind at the end, Mr Laidlaw,’ I said. ‘But she didn’t kill Dr Ramsay.’
Tot Laidlaw raised his head and stared at me.
‘Aren’t you wondering why my face looks this way?’ said Alec. He was indeed a dreadful sight this morning, shining with ointment and blistered where he wasn’t raw. ‘I tried to get to Dr Ramsay.’
‘But you failed,’ said Laidlaw. The relief in his voice was unmistakable.
‘He did,’ I said. I drew out the last remaining chair at the foot of the table and sat down. ‘But I didn’t. I had a very interesting talk with him before he died.’
There was a moment of perfect stillness and then Tot Laidlaw leapt to his feet and raced for the door. The young constable was after him like a dog at the track, but it was Loveday Merrick who foiled his plan. He stuck out his silver-topped cane and when Laidlaw sprawled on the carpet, Merrick planted one of his enormous feet squarely in the middle of his back and leaned enough of his weight on it to start Laidlaw squealing.
‘Ladies,’ I said, ‘coffee will be served in the other room.’ The women stood – I have always been excellent at drawing off the ladies, even inexperienced ones such as some of these – and began to shuffle around the far side of the table to avoid the squirming Laidlaw and the young constable who was advancing with his handcuffs open.
‘I’m stopping here, though,’ Donald said.
‘Yes, me too,’ said Teddy.
I threw them a glance. Perhaps it was because the rest of us were wan from exhaustion and adventures but they really did look a lot better than they had a week ago, rosy and bright-eyed, the Moffat Hydro’s last two satisfied customers.
In the drawing room, Hugh was sitting behind a newspaper with a cigarette in his mouth. This was very odd, for he normally does not smoke until at least luncheon-time. He took one glance at the party of women and raised the newspaper higher than ever.
The women began to twitter like a flock of little birds.
‘Old Dr Laidlaw must be turning in his grave!’
‘-been coming here for twenty-three years. I’ll have to go to Peebles now.’
‘-never have dreamed Tot could be such a sewer.’
‘-sister was dull but she didn’t deserve that, darling.’
‘And why did he do it?’
‘Yes, why would you burn down your own hotel and destroy your livelihood?’
‘For the insurance, of course. Now that doesn’t surprise me about dear old Tot at all.’
Hugh cleared his throat and spoke from behind his newspaper barricade.
‘He’d better get onto his insurance broker quickly then, because if they’ve been buying common stocks like the rest of us he’ll be lucky to see a farthing.’
I walked across and peered over the top of the newspaper.
‘Hugh?’ I said. ‘Is something wrong?’
‘Just reading the news from America, Dandy,’ he said. ‘I’d like a quiet word, please.’
I left the guests as Mrs Tilling advanced with a laden coffee tray and followed Hugh upstairs to our bedroom again. He shut the door and rubbed his face hard with his hands. I had not seen him indulge in such a gesture since the night when Teddy was small and his temperature from measles went higher than Nanny’s thermometer would show.
‘Hugh, what is it?’ I said.
‘While we’ve been here in a little world of our own,’ he said, ‘the American stock market has crashed, Dandy. Through the floor. I’m very sorry to tell you this, my dear, but we’ve taken heavy losses.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Well, money won and lost isn’t really lost at all, is it?’
‘Did you read any of those papers I asked you to sign and post to the broker?’ Hugh said.
‘No,’ I replied. ‘Should I have?’
He did not answer. He turned and looked at the room, surprised I think to see that it was a strange one.
‘If we leave Mrs Tilling and Pallister here to hold the fort,’ he said, ‘and Drysdale to bring them home whenever these walking wounded are off our hands, can we just go home this morning, please? You and me? Home to Gilverton, while we can.’
‘Well, actually, Hugh, I said, ‘there’s some good news and some bad news. About those papers. I didn’t want to release the funds from the stuff you sold because I had plans for them, you see. But I didn’t have time to look those particular ones out from that enormous bundle. I was nursing all of you and half the servants, remember. And so I didn’t post them. The papers. To the broker. They’re in my desk in my sitting room at home.’
‘You didn’t post any of them?’ Hugh said.
‘Not a one.’
He strode over and took a firm hold of my upper arms as though he were about to shake me. Instead, he made an announcement.
‘I’m going to buy you a sable coat, Dandy,’ he said. ‘And a mink one too.’
‘You might not want to,’ I answered. ‘That was the good news. The bad news is that we might not be able to go home just now.’
‘Oh?’ he said. ‘Why not?’ I wriggled out of his grasp before continuing. Hugh had never shaken me like a rag doll until my teeth rattled, of course, and never would. Still.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘the plumbers are in. I’ve spent that money on central heating radiators and new bathrooms for Gilverton and Benachally.’