What I learned of Pip Balfour was that he took rather less interest in his own surroundings than in those of his wife. Lollie’s bedroom, no less carefully fitted up than her boudoir, had walls freshly covered in pale lavender silk, with white and lavender chintz at the windows and bed and sumptuous Aubusson carpets scattered about wherever her feet might be imagined to rest for more than a moment, but in here the walls were papered in stripes, the curtains were lined velvet and the floor was covered in a warm but far from beautiful Turkey rug. The furniture was mahogany in both rooms, it was true, but Lollie’s was Georgian mahogany with legs like toothpicks while Pip’s bedroom contained great hulking boulders of the blackest, most bulbous excesses the Victorian age can ever have mustered, from a very strong field.
‘It’s fearsome, isn’t it?’ Lollie said. ‘He’s had it since he was a boy. He told me he once managed to shut himself in the bottom drawer of the chest and slept the night there.’
I nodded but said nothing, still busy studying the room. There were books on the bedside table – Walter Scott, which suggested that Pip read to help with bouts of sleeplessness – and photographs on the chimneypiece – Lollie in various forms and a few of the right vintage and composition to be parents and siblings – but there were no toilet articles anywhere, I was disappointed to note. (Nanny Palmer had dinned it into me that the state of one’s hairbrush and toothbrush was a window on one’s soul – or moral character anyway – and I suppose I thought I might find evidence of Pip Balfour’s villainy near his washstand.)
One thing I did notice was the great number of keys on view. There was one in each of the two doors in the room and one in every drawer and cupboard too, and they had given me an idea.
‘Why don’t you simply lock your door at night?’ I said, thinking that if this were a house in which keys stayed where they were put, there was sure to be a key for Lollie’s room as well as this one. I have always admired such houses; Gilverton is of the other sort, where every lock is empty and there are jars and drawers and boxes full of miscellaneous keys all over the place and no one ever has the time or the patience to put the sundered pairs back together again. Hugh once got a locksmith in to redo the locks on the gun room, wine cellar and silver cupboard, but within weeks the keys had wandered off again and gone to join their chums in odd vases on distant windowsills.
Lollie was shaking her head at me; not just her head either – she was trembling.
‘I couldn’t bear it,’ she said. ‘I’ve never been able to sleep in a locked room – not even in hotels – not since I was a child and my nursemaid slipped out one night to meet her young man and left me locked in my nursery. There was a thunderstorm and I couldn’t get out of my room to find my mother.’ She grinned at me. ‘Pip always says we are Jack Spratt and his wife. I used to hate knowing that Pip locked his door at night, until we came to a compromise.’ She led me back out onto the landing.
Nothing, she told me, could persuade her husband not to turn the key in his bedroom door at night, following a lifelong habit, but there was another door just outside at the top of the stairs which led into a small back hall, thence into Pip’s bathroom – another former dressing room – and from there back into his bedroom again, and Lollie explained that he had consented to a night latch on the outer door, rather than a lock proper, with the little key kept on top of the lintel in case of emergencies.
‘I should be far more wary of that arrangement,’ I said. I did not trust these new-fangled cylinder latches with their flat little keys all looking exactly the same and always thought one could get into much more of a pickle from doors slamming shut with the key on the wrong side or from leaving the little knob up when it should be down or putting it down when it should be up.
‘I wouldn’t have one for a king’s ransom,’ Lollie agreed.
‘Did he have an ayah?’ I asked. ‘Perhaps he got a complex from tight swaddling?’ Lollie laughed.
‘No, an ordinary nanny,’ she said, ‘but she told terrifying tales of monsters and burglars, while my nurse stuck to lullabies, so perhaps there’s something in it.’ With that, we returned to her room to choose a dress and some jewels and I noticed that her hair, without any rose-water or fussing, had lain down upon her head again. I left it well alone.
I had just fastened her shoes and was still kneeling on the floor, admiring her, dressed and decorated although with rather more rouge on than usual she told me, when there was a light tap on the door.
‘Pip,’ she mouthed to me, then she turned her head and raised her chin as the door opened.
I sat back on my heels, feeling my mouth suddenly dry and my palms damp. Here was the moment I had been dreading! Thankfully, I told myself, he would not take any notice of me and I should be spared having to converse with him. The bedroom door opened, scraping a little over the luxurious carpet, and Pip Balfour entered the room.
4
There was my villain. He looked even younger than his wife, with a long, lozenge-shaped face and three black dashes – two eyebrows and a moustache – very stark against his skin, which was smooth and pale down to his cheeks and then rather blue, needing its evening shave. His black hair was extremely smooth too and his eyes as he came closer I saw to be brown, like a spaniel’s. It suddenly seemed very unlikely that a devil could have such brown spaniel eyes.
‘Well,’ he said to Lollie, ‘don’t you look lovely!’ Lollie said nothing. As he had approached, her defiance had retreated until her chin was tucked down and she was looking up at him from under her lashes, breathing quickly. He gave a quick frown – of puzzlement or irritation, it was impossible to say – but then with visible effort managed another smile and even rubbed his hands together as he continued. ‘Yes, lovely,’ he said. ‘Thank you for putting on such a good show for me. It’s bound to be dull.’ Then he turned towards me, still at Lollie’s feet, and put his hand out, bowing slightly.
‘Miss Rossiter,’ he said. ‘Welcome.’ I shook his hand before I could help myself and he turned the handshake into a gallant gesture of helping me up. He had remarkably rough hands for a gentleman and his shirtsleeves – he was coatless for some reason – were rolled up just a little too far, well beyond the elbow, which is a very endearing trait in a grown man. ‘You must excuse me,’ he said. ‘I’ve been sanding my model sailing ship. Lollie always tells me I look like a docker, don’t you, darling?’
Lollie gave him an uncertain smile and spoke up at last.
‘Harry will straighten you out in no time.’
Pip laughed.
‘Gosh, yes indeed,’ he said. ‘Harry will certainly put me to rights. Wash and brush up and the rudiments of the Labour movement.’ My smile, which I could not help, appeared to please him enormously and he beamed back at me. ‘But peculiar valets notwithstanding, Rossiter, I hope you’ll be very happy with us. And take good care of my beloved girl for me.’ Then he glanced at his watch, blew a kiss towards his wife and withdrew.
That, I thought to myself, was more conversation than Hugh had had with Grant in the last twenty years. I looked wonderingly at Lollie and she caught the look and threw it back to me.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘He’s very convincing. Now do you see why I could never get anyone to believe me?’
I descended the stairs slowly and spent a good ten minutes staring out at my cherry tree before I wrote another word in my notebook. When Phyllis knocked on my door to tell me it was supper-time I was still puzzling.
‘Mistress looked lovely,’ she said to me as we climbed the stairs. ‘I saw her come down. The last one – Miss Abbott – didnae hold with rouge and lipstick and mistress never could put her foot down, but she looked a picture tonight.’