The Turning Tide

Book 13: Dandy Gilver

by Catriona McPherson

Genres: Historical Mysteries; Amateur Sleuth

Synopsis

It is the breezy Scottish summer of 1936, Lady Dandy Gilver has been called, with trusted colleague Alec Osbourne, to solve the strange case of the Crammond Ferrywoman on the Firth of Forth.
A small island is home to a woman, Vesper Kemp, who has lost her mind, spending her days rambling in rags.
What is more troubling, is that Vesper claims to have murdered a young man. A concerned group of residents have good reason to believe she is innocent. But Dandy and Alec will have a dangerous journey ahead if they are to uncover the truth in the River Almond's murky waters.

Release date: November 14, 2019

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 304

Sample

The first time we, meaning Gilver and Osborne, were asked to look into the case of the Cramond Ferry, we declined.

It was May of 1936, and life at Gilverton was offering plenty in the way of interest and activity. My elder son, Donald, had married Miss Mallory Dunnoch of Wester Ross the previous midsummer and they had come back from their peculiar Norwegian honeymoon full of plans to restock the timber at Donald’s estate and do all sorts of strange things to the farm cottages to increase what Mallory called ‘insulation’, a scheme that sounded unhealthy in the extreme. I shuddered to think what sickly state the farmworkers’ children would be in by spring once their cottage walls were baffled with wadding under new plaster and their windows re-glazed to banish all draughts. I mentioned fresh air as often as I dared and then left them to it.

When my husband Hugh caught the infection however and started striding about our own cottage rows, tape measure in hand, I rumbled as stiff a warning as I could rumble. Then, when I saw him eyeing up the windows of Gilverton House itself, with a view to encasing us all in glass like so many fairy-tale princesses, I put my foot down.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m surprised at you, Hugh. What would Nanny Palmer say? What would my mother say? Or yours? What would you of five years ago say, when you were making such a fuss about a few radiators? What the dickens has happened to you?’

‘What does Osborne think of the notion?’ Hugh said slyly, which I took as indication that Alec Osborne, my fellow detective and our neighbour here in Perthshire, had been beguiled by the Norwegian nonsense and that Hugh knew it.

‘It’s all very well over there,’ I continued. ‘With all that crisp air and frost waiting when one ventures out, I daresay huddling like a rabbit in a burrow between times does no harm. But here, in our damp drizzle, no chance to fill the lungs with Nordic what-have-you, we need all the air we can get, day and night.’

‘I think there might be a flaw in your logic,’ Hugh said. ‘If the air is so below par, shouldn’t we try as hard as we can to banish it?’

‘They jump into icy water too, Mallory tells me,’ I said. ‘And beat themselves with branches. Are you suggesting we add that to the daily round?’

Then, one day in November, all thought of building works and renovation schemes suddenly receded, although the replanting on high ground sailed on. Donald came over after breakfast and hung around my sitting room, spilling tapers into the hearth and disarranging letters on my desk.

‘Are you quite well?’ I said.

‘Fine,’ Donald said. He went over to the window and tied the curtain ropes into some kind of Scout’s knot.

‘Is Mallory well?’ I said.

‘Mallory is fine,’ Donald said with an excess of heartiness.

I exchanged a look with Alec, who was there, as is his wont, going through our correspondence.

‘I think I’ll take a turn, Dandy,’ Alec said. ‘I’ve got a bit of a head this morning. Come on, girl.’

Bunty, my Dalmatian, leapt up and raced Alec to the French window, nosing ahead of him and then plunging out onto the lawns as though escaping a month’s incarceration.

‘Well?’ I said, when they were gone.

‘Mallory’s going to have a baby,’ said Donald. ‘And she misses her mother so. She’s sick and sad and she’s scared to ask you to step in in case you tell her to buck up.’

‘In case I what?’ I said. ‘Is this the reputation I have? Good grief, Donald.’ I was on my feet already and ringing for my head housemaid Becky. ‘How is your cook looking after her? Has she ordered ginger? Can Mallory manage arrowroot? I’ll set Mrs Tilling on it. Good God, Donald. How long have you been shilly-shallying about telling me? What a goose you are!’

‘I felt bashful,’ he said.

‘Bashful? Why?’

‘Why?’ He blushed to the tips of his ears. ‘Why do you think?’

‘Oh for heaven’s sake,’ I said. ‘Babies happen, my dear Donald. It’s no mystery. Everyone has been managing to welcome babies into families without dying of embarrassment since Cain and Abel. Where do you think you came from?’

‘Mother!’ His face was purple now, and to be fair to him I might have put it more delicately. I felt a slight warmth in my own cheeks as he strenuously did not look anywhere near the area of my person where he had come from.

‘Don’t worry, darling,’ I said. ‘I shall look after her. Mrs Tilling and me between us. Congratulations.’ I gave him a quick hug. ‘Well done.’

‘Well done?’ he said, a new flush suffusing him. ‘Well done?’

Poor thing. But it was good practice for dealing with Mrs Tilling, our cook, who has known him his whole life and takes a great interest in all babies. Not to mention Grant, my maid, whose special area of interest is mystical rather than medical but who is equally encroaching in her way.

Besides, Mallory really was spectacularly unwell throughout her pregnancy. She was not, in fact, having a baby; she was having two and as she grew, like something from a German fairy tale – her stomach of course, but also her arms and legs and fingers and toes and at last her very eyelids swelling – we all of us became inured to conversations around the dinner table that would have seen our parents take the vapours.

‘I was reading an article about beetroot juice,’ Hugh said one evening. ‘As a diuretic. I’ve sent over a basket to see if they can get any pressure off Mallory’s bladder.’

‘Mallory?’ said the acquaintance who was dining with us. ‘A pig?’

Hugh is not prone to fits of the giggles; it is one of the reasons I set such store by Alec as a companion of my days. But his lips twitched then. We let the chap go on thinking Mallory was a prize breeding-sow and tried a little harder to maintain a decency or two.

By the time of the first letter from Cramond, the expectant couple had fled their own place and come back to us at Gilverton, the better to organise shifts of companions. Mallory was spending her days upon a couch, banked up with roughly seventeen strategic pillows, and her nights wandering the passageways, courting sleep and failing.

‘Do we want to look into a mad ferryman?’ Alec said one morning, as we sat to either side of the fireplace ripping through the letters as smartly as we could before he started work on the replies and I went to rub Mallory’s feet and advise her on engaging a monthly nurse.

‘Wouldn’t they be better with a doctor?’ I said.

‘Reading between the lines, it’s being kept hush-hush. Oh!’ I looked up. ‘Not a ferryman. A ferrywoman. That’s more interesting, isn’t it?’

‘A ferrywoman is certainly more remarkable than a ferryman, generally speaking,’ I said. ‘But I’m no more interested in curing her of madness. Even if I could.’

‘I think they think, or at least hope that is, that it’s not actually madness in the meaning of the act.’

‘You’re not making much sense, darling,’ I said. ‘Pass it over.’

The letter, when he had shied it into my lap and I had taken a moment to read it through, did not make much more. ‘You will have heard of the Cramond ferry,’ it began with more confidence than was warranted. ‘You may have taken it on trips from Fife to Edinburgh. Even if you prefer the train or the inland road, you will have heard of our dear Vesper Kemp, for twenty years the toast of Cramond and with every reason to anticipate many more years of “reign” at the oars, until the current situation arose. Recently, you see, our dear Vesper has begun exhibiting signs of distress we are at a loss to explain. We are naturally loath to broadcast our concerns and do not wish to take recourse to medicine (having found that, when it comes to ladies with nervous trouble, the cure is frequently more severe than the complaint). We would welcome the gentle attentions of a confidential expert such as yourself. Matters are becoming difficult to manage. Yours sincerely.’

‘I can’t make out the signature,’ I said. ‘Could you?’

‘No,’ said Alec, ‘and there’s no one obvious that might be this “we”, is there? I can’t imagine the parents of a ferrywoman could turn a phrase like “gentle attentions of a confidential expert”. Shall we, Dandy?’

‘Ordinarily,’ I said. ‘But I don’t much want to be far from home this next while.’

‘Hardly far,’ Alec said.

‘And stranded,’ I added. ‘The whole point seems to be that the ferry’s not running.’

‘Very well,’ Alec said. ‘I shall send our standard regrets.’

I mentioned it to Hugh over lunch. I was slightly trying to distract Donald, who had taken to looking up every couple of minutes as if he could see through the ceiling above him and the floorboards above that to where Mallory was reclining, hoping to divine her current state by some kind of telepathy.

‘I heard as much,’ Hugh said. ‘Well, it’s overdue.’ I arranged my features into a look of interest and encouragement and after another mouthful of lamb, he went on. ‘Edinburgh’s very own Grace Darling. Less thrilling by far, but still. She was the only child of the Cramond ferryman and when he went off to the war she took up her oars and carried on in his stead. When he failed to return, poor chap, she dug her heels in. It caused something of an upset, as I recall.’

‘How do you mean?’ I said, although truth be told I could guess exactly what she dug her heels into and the kind of upset it caused.

‘Hundreds, nay thousands, of chaps coming home with injured legs and healthy arms who could easily have rowed a little coble over the mouth of a river, but Miss Kemp denied them all.’

‘How unseemly,’ I said. ‘At least Dr Inglis had the grace to die when she got back from her field hospital. What an upstart the girl must be.’

Hugh, finally, sensed the reception his tale was getting and harrumphed lavishly.

‘Dr Inglis is a case in point,’ he said. ‘She overtaxed herself and died. And now this Miss Kemp has, likewise, overtaxed herself and become unreliable. If women would stick to—’

‘Father,’ Donald said. Hugh, surprised to find himself interrupted by his son, stopped talking. ‘I bet if you asked Mallory whether she’d rather do what she’s about to do or a spot of rowing, she’d leap at the chance to be a ferrywoman.’

I hid my smiles by taking a sip of water before speaking again. ‘And Dr Inglis survived a POW camp as well as the battlefield hospital, Hugh. She died of cancer. She would have died of cancer at home in Edinburgh at her embroidery, I daresay.’

‘The fact remains,’ Hugh said, ‘it’s no kind of ferry service at all if the ferryman won’t put out unless the weather is to his liking. I don’t,’ he added holding up a hand to my objections, ‘I don’t mean storms fit to cause a shipwreck, but George at the club tells me she moored her boat and refused to row seven times in the month of April alone. Which is a scandal. With so many men looking for work? It’s a disgrace.’

I agreed with him and was glad that Alec had refused the commission. Then, just at that moment, Mallory’s maid – who went somewhat unconventionally by the name of Julia, rather than ‘Preston’ – put her head around the door with a worried look. Donald shot to his feet, Hugh tutted, I hurried out of the room, and the question of Vesper Kemp, the Cramond ferrywoman, was forgotten.

The second letter, a veritable cri de coeur this time, arrived in early June, neck and neck with the babies, and I have only the sketchiest memory of reading it at all.

‘More from Cramond,’ Alec said. He was walking round my sitting room, bouncing at the knees as though upon a rope bridge, the better to soothe the squawking scrap of humanity he held in the crook of one arm as he manipulated the morning’s letters with his free hand.

‘Cramond?’ I said. I was rocking from one foot to the other, swinging my arms as though scything, except that I held not a scythe but a wailing grandchild. I could not recall ever being left alone in a room with one of my own babies, sans nanny, sans nursery nurse, sans even useful housemaid who had graduated from a childhood beset with younger siblings, but my grandchildren were obtruding into my life much more than either of my sons had ever done. This was because Mallory had sacked her monthly nurse before her nanny arrived and lasted only one night at Benachally before Donald packed her and both babies into his motorcar and brought them back to Gilverton. Julia, the maid, had stayed put but was no help at all. I privately wondered if she had been taking lessons in insubordination from Grant.

‘But why, dear?’ I said, when I had been alerted to the invasion and had gone to find Mallory in Donald’s old bedroom, where she sat surrounded by baskets and bundles. ‘She came very highly recommended from the agency and Nanny is still in Alnwick until Tuesday.’

‘She was a brute,’ Mallory said. ‘She swaddled them so tightly their little faces changed colour. When I unwound them for their baths they were covered in creases.’

‘Swaddling has to be pretty firm to be any good,’ I said. ‘If you let them lie on a towel and kick their legs for a bit after bath time, the creases usually fade.’

Mallory gave me a troubled look. ‘And she had some very strange notions about me too,’ she said. She gave a significant glance in Donald’s direction. He started to life and shuffled off mumbling something about scaring up some tea. I looked after him fondly. He adores Mrs Tilling and she him; it would be a while before we saw him again.

‘What sort of strange notions?’ I said.

‘Well,’ Mallory said. ‘I know she was the monthly nurse and I merely the mother but … look at me.’ I looked but, not knowing to what aspect of herself she was drawing my attention, I could not grasp at an answer. ‘She was adamant,’ Mallory went on, ‘that I should bind myself and drink strong coffee and that she would take sole charge of their feeding.’

I blinked at her. I was terribly fond of Mallory and I know times change but if my monthly nurse had ever offered to suckle my babies all by herself and spare me the indignity I should have jumped at it.

‘Well, good for you,’ I said diplomatically.

‘But, after she left, I gave it a go and it’s awful!’ Mallory said. ‘It hurts, Dandy. And I’m exhausted. So we came here. Don said your good Mrs Tilling had all his old bottles.’

‘But they’ve been used for orphan lambs for the last twenty years!’ I said. ‘Do you know where the nurse has gone? We could entice her back with a rise in wages. I could put my foot down about the swaddling, if you’re sure about her over-zealousness.’

‘They had lines round their necks!’ Mallory said. ‘And I don’t mind about the lambs. If the tops were boiled, where’s the harm?’

It did not come to that, thankfully. Once Mallory was settled in a warm bed, with Mrs Tilling, Grant, Becky and me all twittering round her (although Julia was nowhere to be seen), she gave the enterprise another try and found it just about bearable. Hugh wrote to the new nanny at Alnwick, pleading with her to set off sooner than she had planned and offering inducements, while the rest of us hunkered down to see the adventure through to its conclusion.

Bunty, daffy as most Dalmatians usually are, took a dim view of the change in her circumstances. She sniffed the new arrivals once and removed herself to the kitchen away from the din. Alec, in contrast and to my surprise, delighted at the babies and pitched in.

We needed him. Mallory’s position was that whenever the twins were not actually taking nourishment they should be far from her, to allow her to rest before the next bout. Resting had more picture magazines and chocolates about it than I might have expected but they kept her serene and the rest of us were just about coping. Hugh was not troubled by any of it, naturally; he retired to his library with his dogs, and if either of the twins set to and really tried to shatter glass with their squeals, he and the pack of hounds simply went for a walk. As for Teddy, he had taken off for London within hours, as who could blame him.

‘Oh, do be quiet,’ I said, staring down into the tiny, cross, sweaty face as my impersonation of a scything farmhand entered its eleventh minute. I was watching the clock because at the quarter-hour we were going to swap them over and see if perhaps the change would settle them. My granddaughter, Lavinia Dahlia Cherry Gilver (the poor mite), took a deeper breath than ever and managed to reach an even higher pitch of yelling.

Alec was having more luck with my grandson, Edward Hugh Lachlan Gilver, who was now snuffling and wuthering instead of shrieking. Alec lifted him up and clasped him to his shoulder, giving his well-padded little bottom a series of rhythmic pats in time with the knee bounces.

‘You should put a cloth over your coat,’ I said.

‘Pfft,’ said Alec. ‘We’re past that. Anyway, Cramond, as I was saying. Do you remember the ferrywoman?’

‘Vaguely,’ I said. Those mornings of sitting in peace to open letters seemed like the misty days of a distant past now.

‘Well, it’s worse,’ Alec said. He held the letter up behind Edward’s downy head and began reading. ‘“It was bad enough when she refused to cross in fine weather but instead forced passengers to wait for clouds and rain”.’

‘What?’ I said. ‘When Hugh said she was making trouble about the weather I assumed it was bad weather that was the problem. Perhaps whoever wrote the letter made a mistake. Missed out a few crucial words.’

‘Perhaps,’ Alec said. ‘But shush, Dandy. Let me finish.’

I raised an eyebrow. Of all the people in the room I was the last one who needed shushing. Edward had started up again in earnest and Lavinia was sobbing as though her heart would break. I put the knuckle of my little finger in her mouth to let her suck it, a habit I despise but one which I have been forced to succumb to. She spat it out, the minx.

‘It goes on,’ Alec said, ‘“but now she refuses to row across the river at all. She fills the dog cart with passengers and drives all the way up one side of the river to the crossing at the Cramond Brig then all the way down the other side, a terribly inconvenient journey of some four miles instead of five minutes in her natty little boat. She makes no charge but there have been grumbles from people missing appointments or being late for meals. We are seriously concerned. We are, to speak plainly, at our wits’ end. That is why we renew our petition to you today. We can offer very pleasant accommodation in either a private home or a charming inn and we are willing to pay a bonus on top of your fee. For confidentiality and sympathetic attention from your most unusual firm, we are willing to pay handsomely. I await …” etc.’

‘Are you tempted?’ I said. ‘I must admit to being intrigued. If it’s not a mistake of the letter writer, if Miss Kemp really stopped sailing in good weather and has now stopped completely and stopped charging for her carting services too, I do admit to being intrigued by the puzzle.’

‘Stuff!’ said Alec. ‘You’re thinking of a pleasant private home with no infants in it.’

‘Or even a charming inn,’ I admitted. ‘But I can’t abandon my post at a time like this. You could go.’

‘I could,’ said Alec, ‘but don’t you think the unusual feature of our “most unusual” detective firm that makes us perfect for this case is probably you, darling Dan?’

‘Hmmm,’ I said. ‘Who’s it from anyway, Alec? Who is this “we” with the range of accommodations and the deep pockets?’

Alec had folded the letter but he shook it out again. ‘It’s more than one person,’ he said, which told us precisely nothing the pronoun had not already revealed. ‘I shall send them, whoever they are, our continuing regrets. I’ll try to make them even more regretful.’

When the third letter came, we leapt on it. It was now July, Lavinia and Edward were growing more bonny every day, the Alnwick nanny – Nanny Plantagenet, which beggared belief but she said it in such a severe tone and with such a warning look in her eye that none of us, not even Teddy, essayed a quip – was installed at Benachally and peace had descended upon Gilverton again.

‘Donald’s besotted,’ Teddy said at breakfast one morning. ‘Were you like that with us, Pa?’

Hugh was behind The Times and said nothing.

‘Was he, Ma?’

‘Take a wild flying guess,’ I said. ‘And don’t call me Ma.’

‘I thought not,’ said Teddy. ‘If I ever get landed and it takes me the same way, do give me a clump on the side of the head and tell me to can it, won’t you?’

‘Landed?’ I said. ‘Good grief, Teddy. I thought your slang would get better once you came down and stopped racketing about with that bunch of dilettantes. But it’s getting worse. “Can it”? When I think what your education cost us, I could weep.’

‘Mother dear,’ Teddy said. ‘Should I ever enter matrimony and be blessed with children I charge you with ensuring my devotion to them causes no nausea. Better?’

‘Much,’ I said. ‘But I refuse the commission. I think it’s sweet that Donald adores them and they are certainly adorable.’

‘You’re going soft in your—’ Teddy began, but he did not finish. I was delighted with my grandchildren and yet the fact of being a grandmother was unsettling in ways I had not expected. ‘What’s adorable about them?’ he said instead. ‘They’re hardly conversationalists. They leak from every possible leaking point. They’re noisy. They stink to high heaven off and on. And they look like medicine balls.’

I had to bite my cheeks at that. When I described them as ‘bonny’ I was being kind. Nanny Plantagenet apparently viewed the inhabitants of her nursery the way a dedicated competitive gardener views the contents of his cold frame: that is, if one is not going to grow a whopper then why bother growing anything at all. She had them on sugared rusks far too early, in my – admittedly shaky – opinion, and had begun putting cocoa powder and Ovaltine in their bedtime bottles almost as soon as she arrived. One result of this regime was that they slept for endless hours every night, stupefied by rich food like Roman emperors, and that fact alone meant that no one, from Mallory herself to the lowliest nursery maid taking a turn on the night shift, had a bad word to say. They were as fat as little pink piglets by mid-July, bursting out of their first sets of garments and, at bath time, quite jaw-dropping. Even Teddy had come to marvel once.

‘Stone the crows,’ he had said. ‘Are they supposed to have rolls and rolls of blubber? Do all babies look like that under the ruffles?’

‘Get out if you can’t be civil,’ Donald said. ‘They are perfect, aren’t they Mother?’

‘They’re very healthy and sweet.’

‘Edward looks like … what’s he called … the round god who’s always laughing. The one with his tummy resting on his knees.’

‘The Buddha?’ I said. ‘Nonsense.’

‘How dare you!’ said Donald.

Unfortunately, just at that moment Edward tucked both his feet under him, waved his arms and poked his tongue out of one corner of his mouth. The resemblance was undeniable. Donald’s brow lowered but Mallory laughed.

‘My beautiful little Buddha!’ she said. ‘And what about Lavinia? Who does she remind you of, Ted?’

But Teddy, wisely in my opinion, declined to answer. Lavinia looked like Edward after a good feed. From her pouch-like cheeks to her little fat feet, she resembled a bunch of pink balloons in varying sizes. Besides, Nanny P was muttering in the background, clearly displeased that not only Mummy but also Granny, Daddy and an uncle, of all things, were cluttering up her day nursery along with two baths and the accompanying kettles and towels. I dropped a kiss on each damp head and left. Teddy followed me out.

‘That’s made my mind up,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to be at home for the jamboree.’

‘What jamboree is this?’ I said, pulling on my gloves as we made our way downstairs to where my motorcar was waiting.

‘Mallory’s picnic,’ Teddy said. ‘Hasn’t she told you? “Asked” you rather?’

‘Mallory doesn’t need to ask me before she goes on a picnic.’

‘She’s not,’ said Teddy. ‘Going on one, I mean. She’s hosting one. Apparently her mother did it at Applecross and her sister took over. So Mall’s trying to get it off the ground here.’

I was still barely listening. I did not live in my daughter-in-law’s pocket nor she in mine.

‘Did you hear me, Ma?’ said Teddy. ‘Mallory is bringing three charabancs full of mothers and babies from the East End of Glasgow to have a weekend’s camping and picnicking. It was supposed to be at Benachally but Donald reckoned the low meadow at Gilverton is better suited and the lavatories are closer.’

I did not know which bit of this extraordinary report to splutter over first. ‘Don’t say “weekend”,’ was what I went for eventually. ‘Friday to Monday, darling, please. Your poor father already thinks you’re some kind of revolutionary, because of the hair and what have you.’

‘Thursday to Tuesday,’ Teddy said.

I sank back into the comfortable seat of my Morris Cowley and let the horror wash over me. Three busloads of East End women and children, camping on Hugh’s precious wildflower meadow, making use of the stable-block lavatories and, no doubt, ransacking the . . .