I felt a fluttering in my throat as my pulse quickened. I had laughed at Hugh, even at Harry, but this was no Edinburgh I had ever known, this was no country of mine, and just for a moment, I feared for us all.
Then I heard a shout from the other side of the street and, looking over, saw Alec silhouetted under the arches of the monument waving wildly at me. I looked to both sides for traffic – for one cannot suppress these instincts – and crossed the deserted street towards him, towards the whining, circling bundle of pent-up ecstasy on the end of the lead.
‘My darling!’ I sank onto my knees and let Bunty yelp and sniff and lick my hat and trample her paws all over the front of my coat and skirt and wipe quantities of her stiff white hairs onto me and wheel away to gallop off some of her joy and then come back to do it all again. Eventually she dropped down, rolled onto her back and wriggled this way and that with her eyes half-closed and her tongue lolling out of one side of her mouth and I stood, brushed myself and resecured my hatpin.
‘Well, I can’t compete with that for a welcome,’ said Alec, ‘but it is good to see you, Dandy.’
‘And you,’ I said, returning his quick hug. ‘Hello, Millie.’ Alec’s spaniel, sitting primly at his side, waggled her bottom briefly.
‘Shall we go down out of the breeze? I said, for it was rather gusty.
‘If we can get past the doormen,’ said Alec, pointing to the top of the steps where two policemen were standing shoulder to shoulder, their mouths set and their eyes grim.
Of course, both policemen stepped aside and one touched his hat as we passed them, and we descended to the lower level and claimed an empty bench, one looking down over the railway lines which emerge from the glass roof of the station and briefly bisect a portion of the gardens before disappearing into a tunnel which runs under the rest of them. Princes Street Gardens, I thought as I looked around, are at their best in May, crowded with tulips and pansies and wearing fresh new cloaks of green on the ground and in the air. (Later in the summer the green grass would turn yellow if it were dry or wear through to the earth from the tramp of feet if it were rainy, the green leaves of the trees would darken with smuts from the trains, the growers of the bedding plants would have outdone themselves for double and treble and quadruple begonias all of monstrous size and unlikely colour, and the benches would be dusty and sticky so that even if one were not actually sitting amongst picnic litter with spilled lemonade under one’s feet, it always felt that way.)
‘Very odd with no trains, isn’t it?’ said Alec. ‘You get used to there always being a few chuffing away at the platforms. It’s like being in a summer meadow today.’
‘Apart from the shouting,’ I said. From the station I could hear voices and what sounded like a drum being beaten in slow threatening time. I jumped as a particularly lusty yell reached our ears.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Alec. ‘There are so many special constables in the station there’s hardly room on the tracks for the strikers and they were sharing out cigarettes and playing cards together when I looked in on them.’
‘You went down there!’
Alec grinned at me. ‘I told the bobbies I was a volunteer.’
‘Are you going to volunteer?’ I said. ‘Do be careful.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Alec. ‘I just put a ten-shilling note in the strikers’ collecting tin at Platform 3, so it would be rather inconsistent. Oh, don’t look at me like that! The Prince of Wales sent them a tenner. Now, Dandy – fill me in.’
I heaved in a huge breath, planning to expend it on the start of my tale, but long before I had decided where to begin I had to let it go all in a rush, for fear of bursting. The same thing happened with the second breath. Bunty, who had come to rest her muzzle in my lap, looked up at me with wrinkled brows and blinked at the draught.
‘A hippo in a mudhole,’ said Alec. ‘Top marks.’
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Very well, I shall try and you must make of it what you can. You knew already what sort of husband Pip Balfour was, but what I’ve discovered is that it wasn’t just Lollie. Everyone hated him, with very good reason too, except…’
‘Except?’
‘Except… I don’t know. I can’t put my finger on it. Look, he forced his beastly attentions on several of the maids. Clara, the parlourmaid, a high-spirited colt of a girl, long legs, long nose – prettier than I’m making her sound, though – got the worst of it, since she, as she put it, “fell”.’ I saw Alec’s puzzled frown and translated. ‘Was made with-child, darling, which – at Pip’s insistence, I should add – she successfully concealed with tightened corsets and bigger aprons.’
‘Really? Is that possible?’
‘You’d be surprised,’ I told him.
‘And what happened to… it?’
‘It was stillborn. She crept off on her own to the attics, Alec, and never told a soul.’
‘Dear God.’
‘He also pounced on Eldry, the tweenie,’ I continued. ‘Rather an unfortunate girl. Pitifully plain, all bones and teeth. Edith Sitwell, except that she arranges her hair like a character from Beatrix Potter and so only draws attention to herself. Also Millie, the scullerymaid, truly a character from Beatrix Potter – round and pink and guileless, and by the way absolutely besotted by the most unattractive young man – Stanley, the footman.’
‘What’s wrong with him?’
‘Fastidious,’ I said. ‘Faints at the sight of blood or the mention of it.’
‘He can’t help that,’ said Alec.
‘Also pompous, boastful, ostentatiously servile, insinuating and sanctimonious. I’d love to be able to suspect him, but no one who pales at a drop of blood on a pricked finger could have wielded that mutton knife, you know. And no one who wasn’t innocent would dare to drone on so about what he knows and could tell.’
‘What does he know?’ said Alec. ‘What could he tell?’
‘Nothing, he’s just one of those annoying hinters. He had good reason to revile Pip, all the same. Pip refused him leave to visit his father when everyone thought he was just about to peg out from TB. And threatened him with the sack if he went AWOL. And he’d do it too, because Phyllis, the housemaid – she of the pawnshop visit – was on warning for cheek and would have been out on her ear if Pip hadn’t died. That was Phyllis’s particular complaint. She can’t even say, with any certainty, what it was she did, so one suspects she did nothing.’
‘He just wanted rid of her? What’s she like?’
‘Delightful,’ I said. ‘Little impish, freckly thing with those very round blue eyes. Irish, perhaps.’
‘Doesn’t sound like the kind of girl one would cast easily aside,’ said Alec, with rather unguarded honesty it seemed to me. ‘Do you really believe she can’t think what she did? Clumsiness? Breaking the Meissen? Pilfering? Corrupting the grocer’s boy?’
‘Well, pilfering is a possibility,’ I said. ‘I never did manage to work out where she got that seventeen pounds, after all.’
‘That’s not pilfering,’ said Alec. ‘That’s theft. Fingers as sticky as all that would have got her much more than a warning.’
‘Yes, but I wondered if perhaps she was in the habit of a little very minor pinching – the pawnbroker thought the rug and nightie – and then after Pip’s death she swooped in and pocketed the seventeen pounds she knew was lying around.’
‘But that would be senseless,’ Alec said. ‘To do something to draw suspicion towards one when one knew there would be policemen sniffing about.’