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Book: Dandy Gilver and the Proper Treatment of Bloodstains by Catriona McPherson
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Authors: Catriona McPherson
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beneath it, but with a view down over the Forth to the hills of Fife. I stepped close to the glass and peered downwards, seeing my little cherry tree and patch of grass far below. Then I turned around and studied the room closely. One could surely learn a great deal about a person from his bedroom.
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
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