‘Fanny Price,’ I said.
‘What?’ said Alec.
‘She’s quoting Jane Austen.’
‘I doubt it,’ said Alec. ‘“Soppy old rot”, she calls it.’
‘And it came completely out of the blue?’ I said after sitting a moment looking the letter over again. ‘Have you no idea what lies behind it?’
‘Only this,’ said Alec. ‘Which came earlier.’ He fished in his inside pocket again and drew out an envelope on which I could see more of the same large, looped writing in the same purplish blue ink. He took a single sheet of paper out of the envelope and handed it to me.
‘Dear Alec, Mummy, Clemence and I have come away to the beach cottage for a few days but I should like it so much if you were to come and visit us here. There is something momentous I need to tell you. Please, when you arrive if you could pretend to Mummy that you came in search of me off your own bat that would help enormously. I think she’s being perfectly ridiculous but I don’t want to make her any crosser than she already is. Sorry to be so mysterious, Alec dear, but I do think it would be best told not written. I trust completely in your affection for me and hope that I am right to do so. All my best love, Cara.’
‘And have you no idea what she was referring to?’ I said. ‘It’s all very vague.’
Alec took the letters back from me and studied them both, frowning.
‘She had something to tell me, which her mother believed would make me want to call off the wedding,’ he said. ‘Between the first letter and the second she clearly had a change of heart. I can only assume that her mother managed to talk her round.’
‘But why would Mrs Duffy go from trying to persuade Cara to keep the thing secret, to trying to make her break it off?’ I said. ‘I mean, surely the only reason for keeping quiet was to make sure that the wedding went ahead.’ Alec was nodding.
‘If we knew what it was,’ I said, glancing at him and catching him glancing at me.
Neither spoke for a while, each waiting for the other to take the first step. Alec Osborne gave in first, but he inched forward only very slightly.
‘What were you talking about while you walked by the river?’ he said.
‘The wedding a little,’ I said. Another glance and a deep breath and I gave in. ‘But the jewel theft, mostly.’ Alec relaxed with a puff of breath.
‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘And did Cara seem to you to think the two were related?’
I nodded.
‘I agree,’ said Alec. ‘She hinted the same to me but as to exactly what’s up… Let’s try to work it out, Dandy. If you don’t mind, that is. I mean, it’s my problem really, mine and Cara’s, but if you don’t mind.’ I was shaking my head vigorously and he looked pleased, but neither of us had a clue where to start. I decided to try one of my two previously successful tactics: the one where I start to talk and listen for what comes out.
‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘Cara was mixed up in the theft.’ I bit my lip and waited for him to leap to his feet and shout slander, but he only nodded, so I carried on. ‘That might easily be what she trusts will make no difference to your feelings, and what Mrs Duffy assumes will send you fleeing.’
‘Possibly,’ he said. ‘But what would suddenly make Cara go from being sure I wouldn’t mind, to being so sure that I should mind that she doesn’t even give me a chance, but breaks it off herself? And if Cara was tied up in the theft, why on earth would she have willingly taken the fakes to the jewellers?’
I was suddenly aware of a well-upholstered woman in an elaborate hat, and her droopy daughter, both leaning precariously towards us from the far edge of the ottoman, clearly agog.
‘Let’s walk around a little,’ I said in a loud voice and I was vindicated by seeing the stout woman sit up sharply and fix her gaze at a painting opposite.
‘Any number of reasons,’ I went on in a suitably hushed voice as we moved at the required reverent pace past some portraits of scowling Puritans. ‘Perhaps she wanted to find out the value of the pastes. Perhaps she needed money and that would be enough. Perhaps not all the jewels were meant to be replaced in the first place, but her accomplice “double-crossed” her.’ Alec’s mouth twitched. ‘I have two little boys,’ I said, with an attempt at dignity. ‘And their taste in reading matter is not what it might be.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Just that I can’t quite take it seriously – Cara with an accomplice!’
We passed one of those nasty Flemish paintings of greasy goblets and overgrown vegetables – barely still although only too life-like.
‘But the undeniable truth is that she did try to sell them,’ I said, ‘and it’s not really such a step from that to stealing them, is it? They do actually belong to her father, after all. Anyway, the real mystery as far as I’m concerned is why on earth she came clean about it. Surely she could have hushed the little jeweller man?’
Alec had stopped and was staring at me, reminding me unpleasantly of Daisy. I decided to keep talking.
‘Unless – and don’t laugh at this – unless she just wanted the whole thing out in the open to be off her conscience before the wedding. Perhaps she couldn’t face going through the sacrament of marriage with such a stain on her – You are laughing.’
‘Yes,’ he said with a lift of one eyebrow that threatened to tug an answering laugh from me, even though it also made me want to box his ears. ‘The sacrament of marriage, quite. But never mind that. Did you say that Cara tried to sell the jewels?’
‘Didn’t you know?’ In my surprise, I spoke much, much too loudly for the gallery and we were both startled to hear my words echo around the high room. ‘Really, didn’t you?’ I whispered. ‘That’s why she had them at the jeweller’s. To sell them.’
‘I can’t believe it,’ said Alec. ‘Cara would never take it into her head to do such a thing.’
‘It’s true,’ I began. ‘She told me so herself.’ But even as I said this, I felt the facts begin to shift and resettle. Cara had said to me that she was a good girl who did what she was told and I had not known what, if anything, she meant by it and so I had dismissed it. I should add this, in thick black letters, to my growing list of Very Important Facts: people always mean something whenever they speak; if they appear not to, the fault is my own.
‘That is,’ I went on, ‘it’s true that she did it, but it might not have been her own idea. In fact, she gave me the clear impression that she was doing someone else’s bidding.’
We lapsed again each into our own silent thoughts. Why would anyone want Cara to sell the jewels? And why would she allow herself to be forced into it if she had been mixed up in the theft? And most of all, who might it be? The obvious person to sell a thing is the thing’s owner, but why would her father sell his diamonds?
‘Utterly enthralled!’ The voice cut into my thoughts no less because of its acoustics – it was a just suppressed shriek – than because of its undoubted and unwelcome familiarity. ‘Two circuits of the room, with not a glance at the pictures, really!’
Renée Gordon-Strathmurdle, the last person on earth I should wish to see at such an awkward moment as this, was bearing down on us flapping her gloves and pursing her lips coquettishly.
‘Dandelion, my darling,’ she cooed as she bent her head – she is immensely tall – to kiss me. ‘And sweet Alexander, plucked from darkest Dorset to join the happy hielanders.’ Renée always talks like that, a mixture of hell and damnation preacher and circus barker. Loud with it.
‘Your dear sweet mother was worried, Alexander darling, that Perthshire for all its air and fish might prove too, too plain pudding for you. I’m simply thrilled to be the one who can write and tell her how marvellously you’re settling in.’