Bury Her Deep (38 page)

‘I think you’re right,’ said Alec, nodding slowly. ‘I think that’s why she’s been so worried about her father getting a frock made for her. It never did seem all that likely, if you ask me, but because she dreaded it, it looked all the more certain.’

‘Yes, I wondered at that assumption too,’ I said. ‘Although I suppose if the ladies she saw trooping up and downstairs were known seamstresses, it could just about have been plausible. That’s all done with, by the way. Mother’s room is open again. I tried the handle this morning.’

‘Right,’ said Alec. ‘Quick, here she comes, what have we decided? You tell Mr Tait all is well, go home and wait for the party. I think I’ll take off too, in case she goes off at half-cock before the big night and I fluff it because I’m not ready. Then on Birthday Night I’ll reel her in and drop her like a brick.’ He said this with rather too much relish, and I had to concentrate very hard on the poor kitten not to feel a little sorry for Lorna again.

The Howies were the sort of people who throw parties simply by asking everyone they know and then standing back and laughing. Some raffish-looking chums were there, the Taits were there, the tenants were there – including the innocent Mr Christie – as well as a large contingent of SWRI ladies, resplendent in starched ruffles and witch-heart brooches and sipping uncertainly at their drinks as they stood around the room in little flocks. Captain Watson was there, naturally, and so was Hugh.

I had been thrown into a panic by Hugh’s insistence that he come with me; Alec could hardly just leave by the window this time since our plan depended on him being there to soak up Lorna’s affections, but I was reassured.

‘I’m planning an outfit that will keep Hugh pinned against the opposite wall,’ Alec said. ‘I’ll wear a hat with a big brim and  . . . wait for it  . . . I’ve grown a goatee. Barrow’s been topiarising me every morning. Wait till you see.’

He was right, both about Hugh and about the goatee being well worth seeing. Hugh stared coldly across the ballroom at the spectacle of Captain Watson and said in a hostile murmur without moving his lips:

‘He’s never from Fife.’

‘No, indeed,’ I said. ‘That’s the artist who ran off to be inspired instead of coming to the chamber with us all that day.’

‘Good thing he did,’ said Hugh. ‘I shouldn’t have been so ready to carry
him
out when he fainted, which I expect he would have. What a creature.’ And he turned his back resolutely on Alec for the rest of the night, although facing the wall brought him little comfort, for the Howies’ ideas on decoration combined Nicolette’s penchant for excessive ornament with Vashti’s rather slapdash theatricality and the ballroom was a perfect circus as a result.

The peeling painted walls were hidden behind towering stalks of dry hogweed hung with tinsel and what looked like stuffed hummingbirds. The bottoms of the stalks were poked into little heaps of wet sand to hold them steady so that, as the evening wore on and feet stepped into the sand heaps, the hogweed started to list and flop about and the dance floor under our feet began to feel gritty. The little supper tables – actually packing cases as one found out with a painful clunk if one tried to get one’s feet under them – were covered with swathes of fuchsia-pink art silk, torn roughly from the bolt and fraying already, and the centrepieces were an odd collection of old bottles, slapped over with gilt paint and stuffed with feathers and beads on sticks in lieu of flowers, which would admittedly have been prohibitive in November. The room was lit by purple candles raging away smokily in wall sconces and in vast iron candelabra hung from the ceiling too, melting in great dollops all over anyone who happened to stand underneath and leaving permanent-looking wine-coloured stains on their shoulders. Through it all, Lorna Tait sailed like a great pink iceberg, looking as out of place in her setting and as pitifully unromantic in her over-trimmed frock as it was possible to be, but exuding confidence like a lighthouse.

I was lucky enough to witness her first full assault on the Captain.

‘Are you a dancing man?’ she asked, coming up to where Alec and the Howies were standing, after a turn around the floor with her father to a military two-step. (The Howies had had to take what they could get by way of a band.)

‘Not as a general rule,’ said Alec, bowing over the hand that she held out to him as elegantly as though she were trailing it off the back of a punt in summer. He looked up again and fixed Lorna with such a liquid gaze that I felt a sudden flash of worry. If the love charm actually had potency he would be on one knee promising undying devotion before she had cut the cake. ‘I should be honoured to dance with you tonight,’ he said.

Lorna’s eyes, already dewy from tender feelings, or perhaps smarting from the kohl pencil into which one of the Howies had persuaded her, melted yet further at that.

‘Only not to this, darlings,’ said Vashti, glaring at the band. ‘Honestly, Niccy, I thought you had spoken to them.’

‘I have,’ Nicolette said wearily, ‘but they’re terribly set in their ways. Country dances now and slow ballroom after supper to aid the digestion.’

‘How revolting,’ said Vashti. ‘I’m going over to put my foot down. It’s one thing to have to do without the black bottom but this is only one step up from the Grand Old Duke of York. Come with me, Lorna darling. They wouldn’t dare refuse you on your birthday.’

‘Hurry back,’ called Alec plaintively as Vashti swept Lorna off towards the stage where the troupe of elderly gentlemen were puffing away at their accordions and scraping their fiddles, with feet tapping. Nicolette made a strangled sound in her throat and rushed off after them.

‘What’s wrong with
her
?’ said Alec. ‘Was I too much?’

‘Not at all,’ I assured him. ‘You almost had me convinced it was working.’

‘So why the chortles?’ he said. ‘Why is it that Nicolette finds me so endlessly diverting, Dan?’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘the thing is, she doesn’t believe you’re an artist. She thinks you’re an  . . . aesthete of a more general kind.’

He looked down at himself, the oyster-coloured trousers and the soft lemon-yellow shirt with the rolled collar.

‘Ah,’ he said, grinning. ‘Is that what Lorna thinks too?’

‘I doubt it’s a subject which Lorna has ever pondered.’

‘Good,’ said Alec. ‘We don’t want Lorna declaring the experiment null and void. Have you spotted it, by the way?’

‘What? The love charm?’

‘Mm. It’s in her hair, aptly enough. A tiny little waffle of plaited strands. I only noticed it because she keeps fingering it. Otherwise it’s fairly unobtrusive.’

Lorna was returning, the Howies like a pair of handmaidens just behind her, and now that Alec mentioned it, she did keep putting her hand up to the back of her head as she sailed along.

Alec met her with his arm outstretched and ushered her reverently into the middle of the floor as the elderly gentlemen wheezed into a waltz.

‘Dandy?’ said Hugh, suddenly at my side. ‘Care to dance?’

I managed not to let my mouth drop open in astonishment, and ignoring the Howies’ titters – their husbands had shown their faces briefly and retired to a bridge table in another room with a pair of friends – I let Hugh lead me onto the floor.

‘What did you find to say to
him
?’ he asked me, nodding over at Alec, who was swishing around the floor as though he were a dancing instructor, with his chin in the air and his arms high and rigid in that silly pose that makes all men who adopt it look like broken umbrellas.

‘This and that,’ I answered airily. ‘I was asking how his painting of the local landscape goes on.’

‘Why?’ said Hugh. ‘Is he any good?

‘Awful,’ I told him. ‘If there were one of his efforts hanging in one’s house, one would never go outside again, for fear it had all come true.’

‘Now look, Dandy,’ said Hugh, confirming what I had suspected: this invitation to dance was just an excuse to boss me around about something or other without interruptions. ‘We’ve come and done our duty. When can we go?’

‘We haven’t even had supper yet,’ I said. ‘We haven’t sung Happy Birthday.’

‘Well, conjure up a headache then,’ said Hugh. ‘If we left now we could get home tonight and I could be back at work in the morning. It so happens that I’m extremely busy just now and this dance has put me out considerably.’

‘Well, you have the headache then,’ I said. ‘They’re your friends and it was your idea that I got mixed up with them in the first place.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Hugh. ‘What a fool I’d look, falling out over a headache at nine o’clock in the evening.’

‘Yes, well. It’s just the same for me,’ I told him. ‘So we’ll be here until midnight, or until at least six others have left before us, whichever comes first.’ It was our habitual agreement whenever Hugh wanted to get away from a party, which was often.

This one certainly was a challenge, though, and had I not needed to stick around to help with the bringing down of Lorna’s little magic show, I should have been as eager as Hugh to get out of it. The Rural ladies enjoyed it well enough, once they had stopped trying to fit in and instead decided to treat it as an extended social half-hour. They paired up with their particular chums and got very hot and dishevelled, carrying out complicated patterns in the eightsome reel – the band, having made an exception for Alec and Lorna’s first waltz, had since reverted.

After supper, rather heavy and tepid, and very far from the exquisite little salty nothings that help down the champagne at the parties of one’s imaginings, Hugh and I were sitting amidst the candle wax at one of the tea chests and eyeing the plates of birthday cake which lay before us when, at the other end of the room, I saw Alec slipping in through a door in the panelling and closing it behind him. He stepped over a toppled hogweed stalk and sauntered around the dance floor towards us. As he approached, Hugh turned away almost rudely and fixed his gaze upon the far horizon so Alec was unobserved by any but me as he flashed his eyes and jerked his head at the door by which he had entered.

‘I give in,’ I said to Hugh. ‘I’m going to get my wrap.’

‘Should think,’ muttered Hugh, and he banged his legs audibly on the tea chest as he rose to bow me away.

Slipping out of the ballroom into the draughty corridor beyond, I paused and wondered where to begin seeking Lorna but, as soon as the noise of the band was cut off by the door shutting, I could hear her. An ugly, hacking, gulping noise as painful to listen to as it must have been to produce was coming from across the passageway. I stepped over and knocked softly.

‘Is anyone there?’ I said.

‘Go away,’ Lorna sobbed.

‘Lorna?’

‘Please go away,’ she said, and no matter what she had done I felt a pulse of anger at Alec. Surely he could have let her down gently? How could he have done this to her and then sauntered back that way? I pushed the door open and crept inside. It was a kind of glorified cupboard, perhaps a linen store, and Lorna was perched on a little stool at the back of it, with her head on her knees and her arms wrapped around them.

‘Mrs Gilver, please,’ she implored me, raising her head and seeing who it was, ‘leave me. Don’t even look at me.’ The kohl pencil was streaked down her cheeks like clown’s paint and her elaborate party coiffure was unravelled over her shoulders. On the floor in front of her lay a little brown lump like a disembodied patch of darning.

‘My dear Lorna,’ I said, feeling an absolute heel. ‘What has happened? Come now, you shouldn’t cry on your birthday – it’s the most fearful bad luck.’ This was hardly the most opportune angle to take with her and the sobbing redoubled as soon as I had said it.

‘Come, what’s happened?’ I asked again.

‘I thought he liked me,’ she said. ‘He acted as if he liked me.’

‘Who did, dear?’ I said, kneeling in front of her and trying to do a bit of mopping.

‘C-captain,’ she managed to get out.

‘Has he been nasty to you?’ I said. ‘Shall I fetch your father?’

‘No!’ wailed Lorna. ‘And he hasn’t been nasty. He’s just  . . . He asked if he could speak to me on my own and I thought  . . . So we came in here, and then he said it was a most delicate matter and he hoped he wasn’t going to shock me.’

Oh, Alec, I thought. What did you do?

‘Then he said he had come to Luckenlaw to paint but almost immediately he had realised that Providence must have sent him here to meet his heart’s desire, and if only he could be sure that his affections were returned he would be the happiest man alive.’

I waited, while a fresh bout of weeping swept over her. Time was I should have been thrown into confusion by watching people weep, but it is something of which a detective has to do a surprising amount, at least the way my cases seemed to unfold anyway. Presently she gulped, blew her nose and resumed.

‘And then he asked me if he could be so bold as to press me into service for him. He asked if I would speak to the lady and see if she returned his affections. He said he could not bear to approach her and be turned down, because he thought it would kill him.’

‘Who was it?’ I said, genuinely keen to hear.

‘Effie Morton,’ shrieked Lorna.

‘Miss Morton, the bishop’s niece?’ I blurted. ‘I thought she was an old maid?’

‘She is,’ Lorna cried with an hysterical bleat in her voice. ‘She’s forty-three and he loves her.’

I brought all my self-command to bear to keep from laughing, for really it was not at all funny.

‘Well, Lorna dear,’ I said at last, when she seemed to be growing calm. ‘I think Miss Morton is welcome to him. If he came badgering you for favours, on your birthday, if he was that full of his own concerns on what should have been your special night, then he is just the kind of selfish  . . . nincompoop you can well do without.’

‘You sound like Hetty McCallum,’ Lorna said, smiling unsteadily, and she took a deep shuddering breath. ‘There are worse people to sound like, I suppose.’ She gave me a brave look. ‘There are worse people to
be
like, I suppose.’

‘Come, come,’ I said. ‘He is not the only, or even the best, young man in the world. And you are a lovely girl with plenty of time left to meet a better one.’ Right now, of course, she was quite freakish, with rivulets of kohl and ravaged hairdressing, but there were no mirrors in this linen cupboard.