After a moment, she said loudly and clearly, in a voice of frost pitched for me to hear because she knew I was listening, ‘Whatever Housman may have had in mind when he removed his clothes for the last time, Inspector Milne, you will never hear me speak ill of Jean McEwen’s people.’
‘It’s possible that young Euan is the one who struck her,’ said the policeman.
‘I positively don’t believe it,’ Mother said firmly.
Inspector Milne went back to muttering and mumbling, finishing with: ‘Perhaps your daughter interrupted a rendezvous.’
The next thing I heard was Mother saying explosively, ‘Of course it wasn’t Solange who struck her!’
Milne raised his voice in response. ‘We have to take into account that your lady’s maid admits to relations with Dr Housman, and to doing him violence,’ Milne pointed out drily. ‘And she has no alibi.’
WHAT HAPPENED
11TH–23RD JULY 1938
7
WE DON’T KEN HALF WHAT’S BURIED IN THE PEAT
The rain continued, rather unbelievably, for some two weeks. Solange was not arrested for anything but she was sure she was going to be, and spent so much time sniffing into Mémère’s endless supply of lace-edged handkerchiefs that she spread a cloud of gloom everywhere she went. The uncertainty was hard to live with.
Jamie attempted escape.
He first went back to Inchfort Field to deliver Frank Dunbar’s (or rather, my) offer of a digging job to Euan McEwen, but Mother wouldn’t let me out with the river running so high and fast and the path so muddy and slippery.
Then Jamie went every day.
He’d always surreptitiously primp a bit before he set off, suddenly cleaning his teeth or running his fingers through his hair with a quick glance in Mémère’s dressing-table mirror.
‘What do you do up at Inchfort Field all day?’ I asked crossly. ‘Crouch in a tent in the rain weaving willow baskets?’
‘I talk to Ellen.’
I was very jealous.
But all I could do was sit with Mémère and Colette and the miserable Solange in the torrential gloom of the morning room, sorting china and table linen and three generations’ worth of French novels.
My blasted trunk still wasn’t here, and the Schiaparelli blouse Jamie brought from home wasn’t really suitable for such dusty work, so I got him to fetch me all the frayed and faded summer clothing abandoned in the nursery bathroom. Sandy’s outgrown athletic shorts came down to my knees; his kilt had to be double lapped and pinned around my waist. I was quite desperate not to let Frank catch sight of me in drag as Davie Balfour – with my shorn hair I looked very like a Bohemian thirteen-year-old boy, and to be seen as such would have ruined all my credibility as an aspiring debutante.
Jamie went back and forth to Inchfort so often that he and Ellen missed each other when she came to the Big House herself one morning.
She first came to the front door, which would have been entirely inappropriate a year ago, but this year nobody even bothered to answer the bell. So then she came around to the terrace at the back – even less appropriate – and knocked on the French windows of the morning room.
I leaped to meet her. ‘Come in! Oh –’
She shook her head. She wouldn’t come in.
I stepped outside into the drizzle. I hadn’t seen her, or any of the McEwens, since the terrible day at the library.
We stood about a yard apart, looking at each other.
‘I’m sorry about Mary Kinnaird,’ I said. I hadn’t seen Mary since that day either; I didn’t know how to face Mary.
‘You’ve got your grandad’s eyes but not his say in matters,’ Ellen commented drily.
‘Is Euan all right?’
‘“Aye, nae bother” – so he says. He’s going to take the work you’ve offered him, helping to dig that pipeline in the riverbed for the Glenfearn School. But they’ve told him not to come till it stops raining.’
‘Come in and talk to me,’ I begged. ‘You talk to my brother all the time.’
‘I’m drookit. I’ll drip all over your gran’s fine carpet.’
‘I’ll go around to the front with you and you can go in there. It’s all painters and dust cloths in every room but this one. No one will care if you drip.’
We walked around to the front of the house in silence. I wondered why she’d come.
‘Looking for Jamie, are you?’ I asked as we entered the reception hall.
Out of the rain now, she pushed the damp hair back from her face and straightened her skirt. She gave a little laugh.
‘Are you jealous of your brother?’
I frowned. I was, a little – of his healthy independence and maybe, a little, of his being able to sit and do nothing while I ran the supper dishes to the kitchen. But something about the way she’d asked the question gave a different twist to her meaning.
‘Well, are you looking for him?’ I asked impatiently.
She gave a dismissive shrug. ‘Any of you will do. I wondered if you could mend things with the librarian a bit. Euan promised the Water Bailiff not to set foot on Inverfearnie Island, but that means he has to go round by the village at Brig O’Fearn to get here to the Big House for the work you’ve offered him.’
‘It’s ten miles by road that way!’
‘Isn’t it! I don’t suppose you thought of that when you were playing Lady of the Manor, finding him work?’
‘Look, he doesn’t have to do it,’ I said hotly. ‘I thought it might help. Why are you stopping here anyway? You won’t harvest the flax for another three weeks at least. Didn’t you all go to Blairgowrie for the strawberry picking while I was in the hospital? There are berries all over Perthshire just now. You could go away and come again in August. Maybe you should go away. Otherwise everyone will just work out a way to blame you for Dr Housman’s suicide somehow.’
‘You’ve mucked it up with your bountiful job offer. It’s not as easy to move on as it was: the Council authorities keep closing off old camping greens. You turn up and it’s all posted Keep Out with barbed wire all over. So Mammy wants Euan to do the work here. He’ll get three times as much as he would at a day’s berry picking. And that gives Dad one long last chance at Fearn river pearls.’
Then Ellen made a sound like hnnph that rather stopped me being able to respond. I sat down on the bottom step of the old oak staircase.
Ellen didn’t sit. She gazed down at me with that look of cold challenge and asked, ‘So how shall you mend it? I expect you’ll send your chauffeur round to collect Euan first thing the morning the rain stops.’
I knew that was Traveller sarcasm, but I still found myself retorting defensively, ‘There isn’t a chauffeur at Strathfearn any longer. You know my grandmother had to let her staff go.’
‘And have you found other work for them too? No, that’s no’ your business. Or even hers. And why would she need a chauffeur when your mother drives her own car?’
Her face suddenly lit with amusement.
‘Ask your lady mother to bring Euan round here when the rain stops,’ Ellen said. ‘Tell her it’s because of you he needs the ride and see what she says.’