Catriona McPherson
The Proper Treatment of Bloodstains
The fifth book in the Dandy Gilver series, 2009
For Catherine and Olivier, with love.
Thanks to:
Lisa Moylett and Juliet Van Oss.
Suzie Dooré, Imogen Olsen, Katie Davison, Alice Laurent and Jessica Hische.
Caroline Lyon, David Hicks and Kerrie Smith at the Edinburgh World Heritage Trust.
Hil Williamson and Ruby Woods in the Fine Art Dept of Edinburgh City Libraries.
Nancy Balfour, Jim Hogg and Ann Morrison in the Edinburgh Room (again).
Bronwen Salter-Murison at Oppo for the Dandy Gilver website.
All the staff of the Scottish Mining Museum at Lady Victoria Colliery, especially Tam and John for their memories of mining life and their wit – drier than coal dust.
Nancy and Jeff Balfour for allowing me the use of their name.
Catherine Lepreux, for the sickroom recipes. Fish custard, anyone?
And Neil McRoberts, of course, for everything.
1
I had been standing under this tree, against these railings, looking at that house from the corner of my eye for almost ten minutes now while I waited for my heart to stop dancing. It was beginning to dawn upon me that I waited in vain. I scanned the windows once more – all seventeen of them; I had counted – but saw no movement anywhere. I glanced along the street both ways, hoping for an excuse to abandon the enterprise, and found none. I looked down at myself, wondering whether my disguise would pass muster, and concluded that it would. So, ignoring the watery feeling in my legs, at last I marched across the road, mounted the steps and pulled hard on the bell.
Stupidly, I had imagined having to conjure up a performance of nerves for the looming interview. I had even doubted whether I could pull it off, for I have no dramatic experience beyond Christmas charades at home each year and one pageant at my finishing school in which I started as Clytemnestra but was so unconvincing that I ended up as a broken column, wrapped in a bed sheet and clutching a fern.
Today, I need not have worried: when the door swung open and my name was demanded of me there was nothing theatrical at all in my answering squeak.
‘Miss Rossiter,’ I said. ‘To see the mistress.’
The butler did not answer – did not so much as blink as far as I could tell – but merely turned his back and sped away, leaving me to close the door and scurry after him.
Miss Rossiter, squeaking like that, was evidently a bit of a ninny for I had given her an impressive professional history and she might have been expected to take this new chapter more easily in her stride. I on the other hand, Dandy Gilver, could be forgiven. I had a handful of cases under my belt but this was, without a doubt, my first job.
The letter had come on an ordinary Tuesday morning at the end of April, in amongst a typical batch of thank-you notes, invitations and demands for subscriptions and looking so much like another of them that, as I slit it open and scanned it through, I was already moving it towards the ‘bore’ pile at my left elbow, always so much taller than the ‘fun’ pile at my right.
Dear Mrs Gilver, it began in a clear but feminine hand, the ink bleeding a little into the good, thick paper. My husband is going to kill me, and I would rather he didn’t.
I had jerked up in my seat, sending the bore pile cascading and making Bunty – asleep on the blue chair – twitch her ears, although her eyes remained shut. I took a closer look at the address: Mrs Philip Balfour, 31 Heriot Row, Edinburgh. One of the most respectable streets in that most respectable of cities and a name to match it.
I cannot arrange to meet you, the letter went on, because he would have me followed if I tried. I am followed whenever I leave the house now. Naturally, I cannot telephone either and I must implore you not to telephone to me. However, I have thought of a way to manage it. I have recently lost my maid and am seeing girls next Friday, hoping to find a new one. If you could come along, suitably attired, at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, we could be sure of some time in private when I might explain. Please do not send a reply to this – he would steam it open as he does everything.
Until Friday then. Yours faithfully, Walburga Balfour.
The butler passed through the outer hall with its hat glass and umbrella stands and into the chilly grandeur of the stairwell, where a row of wooden chairs was set against the banister wall. He nodded me towards one of them and I sank down onto its edge, tucking my feet in and holding my bag handles in both fists. I had learned the pose from a girl on the train. (This was in the third-class carriage; I had decided to get into character good and early.) The butler was clearly beguiled by it, and he proceeded to set me at my ease by slipping his hands into his trouser pockets and putting one foot up on the spar of the chair beside mine.
‘Come far?’ he asked.
‘Perthshire,’ I said, in all honesty. ‘And it was ever such a slow train.’
The butler gave me a long, enquiring look before he spoke again and I prayed that my face would not colour, for this of course was the greatest hurdle: my triumph or my undoing lay in the voice, in the quashing down of my own perfectly accentless, perfectly neutral way of talking and the cloaking of it in Miss Rossiter’s words and Miss Rossiter’s sounds – particularly in the strange notes of Miss Rossiter’s vowels.
I had unearthed from a trunk the standard-issue grey wool coat and skirt from my days as a nurse-volunteer – they were still in excellent condition, since I had not worn the vile things above twice, and they smelled most appropriately of camphor and attic – and had daubed my oldest brown brogues with black polish to make maid’s shoes of them (this was successful enough, but I did fear the polish coming off onto my stockings). No amount of scraping and pinning could produce a bun out of my short hair, but I had washed it straight, parted it in the middle and fixed it behind my ears with three grips each side until there was nothing of the shingled bob left about it anywhere. (And it felt delicious, I must say, to be free of setting lotions again after fifteen years of their fumes and itching.)
But all of this should be as nothing and as a thing of naught without the voice and I peeped up at the butler, once again free of the need for any acting. He was rather older than me, perhaps fifty, with a pleasant, open countenance – red cheeks, red lips, not quite the long nose which can be such a help to a butler when it comes to looking down it, and black hair in crisp curls across his head like a bad drawing of a choppy sea, but very short and twinkling at the back against his neck.
At length, he smiled.
‘I’d have said you come up from the south, not down-a-ways,’ he said and picking up the silver card salver from the hall table he breathed on it and then polished it by rubbing it hard on the seat of his striped trousers.
‘Northamptonshire, prop’ly,’ I said, trying not to boggle at the antics with the salver. My reply had the virtues of being true and of ending all enquiry, since the county of my birth and childhood is as obscure as it is dear to me.
‘Cornishman myself,’ said the butler and I could tell that he revelled in his association with such an effortlessly more thrilling corner of England. ‘Come up to London and kept on going, I did.’
Before we could continue the discussion, before I had the chance to regain some stock with news of my mother’s Cornish relations, there came from one of the back rooms of the house, the unmistakable sound of a conversation ending: a voice lifted to deliver the closing courtesies and the movement of chair legs against a hard floor. I glanced at my wrist, but Miss Rossiter wore no watch.