When set against all of this, Cassilis was very small beer indeed, or so Frederica’s letter led Daisy and me to believe; neither of us knew the place. To be sure her Mr de Cassilis was a Mr de Cassilis of Cassilis which is always nice – I rather like being Mrs Gilver of Gilverton if it comes to that, although I would not call myself a snob in most ways – but he was a Mr de Cassilis, and a cousin come back to the old place from across the Atlantic what is more, and although Frederica reported that Cassilis Castle was a real castle and not just a house with a silly name and small windows, the estate itself she said was tiny. We had been amused and puzzled, then, to learn that shortly after arriving Frederica had found herself suddenly promoted above all her neighbours into the post of Lady Bountiful for the imminent celebration of the Ferry Fair. How this could have happened in a neighbourhood so heaving with more suitable females was beyond Daisy and me. (The Rosebery noses had to be particularly out of joint, for the family had only just built a splendid new town hall for the village and could reasonably have expected a lifetime of gratitude.) We could only surmise that no one on the committee had got to know Frederica very well yet.
I am far from being an Angel in the Home myself and am capable of mucking things up in ways that most adults of normal intelligence find incomprehensible, but Frederica made me look like an ambassador, his wife and his entire staff of diplomats rolled into one. To take just one example: at her first big party in New York where a great many of her guests were members of her husband’s family, that is to say Felsteins, and most of the others were friends of theirs – various Levys, Cohens and the like – Frederica had taken it upon herself to serve a roast suckling pig as the centrepiece of the dinner. One would have come a lot further than Perth to Queensferry, then, to see what she would make of presiding over the Ferry Fair. However, one thing that must be said of Frederica is that she knows her limitations and when she invited us it was made very clear that we were there to help, not just to watch and giggle. There is a phrase in the Army, I believe – to be booted upstairs – meaning to be promoted far enough beyond one’s competence to prevent one doing any actual damage and Frederica, by drafting in Daisy and me, had in effect booted herself upstairs. We were to make the speeches, fire the starting pistols and judge the competitions, leaving her to smile and look decorative, which task – unless the years had been very unkind to her – she would have no trouble carrying off at all.
Daisy and I converged indeed, almost drove into one another at the Cassilis gate lodge in fact, and she hopped out of her motor car and into mine to trundle up the drive together.
‘Hello, darling,’ she cooed. ‘Hello, Grant. Heavenly shade of lilac, Dandy.’ I blinked. My frock was white.
‘The stockings, I mean,’ Daisy went on.
‘Ah, well, yes. Thank you,’ I said. The stockings were white too, but white over sunburn is a peculiar colour; I had spent the previous day with the children to stop them whining about being left behind now and had lain a little too long on the riverbank in my bathing dress.
We bumped over a humpbacked bridge spanning a little burn, rounded a copse and then Cassilis Castle lay before us.
‘Good God,’ said Daisy. ‘It’s a castle. I mean, it’s a castle.’
I knew exactly what she was getting at. Frederica had told us it was a castle, and so we should have been surprised to see Tudor beams and horsehair plaster, but even so. What faced us now was a tower six, possibly seven, storeys high and about fifty feet square, built out of huge craggy lumps of grey stone. It sat plonked on top of a steep, grassy hill, which was utterly unadorned by trees or even the shrubs and flowers one might look for – positioned, that is, the way that castles used to be when their occupants needed a good view of approaching marauders and a clear run to pour their boiling pitch down. There was no obvious door, nor any windows on this side at least, just arrow slits and what looked suspiciously like the outlets for slop channels. We might have concluded then that this was an earlier version, kept as a garden ornament, and that the real Cassilis Castle lay somewhere beyond, but as we drew nearer the signs were against it: there was bright new timber on the roof behind the crenellations and new glass winked in the arrow slits and pistol crosses. Furthermore, on top of the roof I could see coloured cloth billowing halfheartedly in the warm air and a chance puff of stronger wind showed me just for a second a lion rampant, a Union Jack and a Stars and Stripes. No doubt about it, then, we had arrived.
I rounded the bottom of the hill and saw that on this side a track just wide enough for the motor car zigzagged up to the castle walls. Cheeringly, there were a few windows round here as well and a door, massive and heavily studded with black iron rivets, through which Frederica now burst to stand hopping up and down and waving both hands like a jazz dancer as we approached. Daisy and I stepped down, although Grant remained in her seat with her mouth hanging open.
Frederica beamed and hunched her shoulders at us in the way she always did when planning some devilment or other and immediately, as though a spell had been cast, the years fell away.
‘Buttercup!’ Daisy and I shrieked in chorus and threw our arms around her.
‘No!’ Frederica shrieked back. ‘Absolutely not. If Cad hears you he will never call me Freddy again. Besides, it’s much too accurate these days, don’t you think?’ She patted her hips and shook her curls and, granted, both hips and curls were very buttery indeed and disconcerting when attached to the face and voice of the thin, brown-haired, most unbuttercuplike Buttercup of my memory.
‘Yes, what about your hair?’ said Daisy. ‘A touch of the Oscar Wildes, was it?’
Buttercup chortled. One could always say anything to her and never cause offence.
‘No, my darling. Not “gold from grief”, I’ve had it this colour for years. It’s called April Sunrise – isn’t that killing? But thank the Lord it was gold already when the mourning came along, otherwise – shriek! Edith Sitwell. I’ve brought cases of it with me, if you’re interested.’
She cast piercing looks at my dark head and craned to see under Daisy’s hat but made no actual offer, saying only: ‘Hmm. We’ll talk later.’ Daisy and I grimaced at each other.
‘Now, come in and see the castle,’ said Buttercup. ‘You won’t believe it.’
‘I don’t already,’ said Daisy, but Buttercup had turned away and did not hear her.
Inside the massive door, a narrow stone passageway with a rounded ceiling and an uneven floor led to the corner of the tower and a spiral staircase. Up this we trooped, with Buttercup urging us to caution saying that one got used to the bevelled steps in the end but it took a day or two.
‘That’s the Great Hall,’ she said as we reached the next level, ‘but look here first.’ We stopped in the doorway to the Hall and peered down at the floor of the passage, finding under our feet an iron grille which showed us to be standing just above the front door.