‘Not to mention not taking the register,’ put in Miss Christopher.
‘And your discipline in the refectory is abysmal,’ said Miss Barclay. ‘Giggling fits from start to finish and you just sit there and let them.’
‘And to cap it all,’ said Mrs Brown, ‘you go drinking in pubs. Don’t think you kept that one quiet.’
‘Rather difficult to keep anything quiet when there’s a member of the Brown family to hand,’ I said coolly. My face did not feel cool, for when they set out my last few days like the sweets stall at a bazaar they made pretty rich pickings.
‘I’ve done a wee tate of checking up on you,’ said Miss Shanks. My heart was hammering now. ‘And do you know what I found?’ I shook my head, dreading the answer.
‘I can’t find the Gilver and Osborne Agency listed anywhere. I rang the number on your wee card and all I got was some hoity-toity fellow-me-lad who wouldn’t give his name and had never heard of it.’
Pallister, I thought, not knowing whether to bless him or curse him. His wilful determination not to countenance the existence of my career had no doubt cost me a case or two in the past (and I thanked the gods that most requests came by written letter) but at least he had not regaled Miss Shanks with the news that Gilver and Osborne were detectives.
‘So we’ve been having a wee confab to ourselves,’ Miss Shanks went on. ‘And we reckon you’re no more an English mistress than I’m a kangaroo.’ I kept my gaze level and waited. ‘We reckon you were just chancing your arm slipping in here when you knew your pal was slipping out, looking for a roof over your head and three square meals a day.’ Still, I made my face remain impassive. Was it possible that they had, in Teddy’s phrase, rumbled me as a counterfeit schoolmistress and yet completely missed the truth?
‘So we’re all agreed?’ Miss Barclay said, looking round.
‘I’ve been saying it since Friday,’ said Mrs Brown.
‘We’re all agreed,’ said Miss Shanks. ‘We’d like you to leave, Mrs Gilver. Anderson will take your things down to the Crown directly.’
‘What about the girls?’ I said. ‘Who’s going to give them their English lessons?’
‘I’m sure Miss Glennie will oblige,’ said Miss Christopher. ‘And it’s really none of your concern anyway.’
‘So I’m being sacked,’ I said, ‘for using a telephone I was invited to use and for going on walks no one told me not to go on and for spending time in a village inn that you knew I was staying at when you employed me, because you visited me there.’
‘You’re being sacked,’ said Miss Barclay coldly, ‘for perpetrating a fraud.’
‘Och, come on away!’ trilled Miss Shanks. ‘No need to get so het up.’
‘I’ll make my farewell then, ladies,’ I said. ‘I wish you well and give my regards to Miss Lovage and Miss Glennie.’
I bowed my head briefly and left them. Part of me was glad to be released, I thought on my way upstairs again, for now I could investigate the case instead of reading stories with schoolgirls and letting Alec have all the fun. Another part of me, however, could not bear the thought of leaving this strangest of places before I had discovered what was going on here. A third part of me, despite the fact that it was happening with depressing regularity these days, still felt that the touch of a boot to the seat of my skirts made rather a dent in my dignity.
But there was no time to nurse it. Before I left St Columba’s for ever there was something I had to do.
9
‘Miss Glennie?’ I said, opening the door in response to the timid invitation to enter.
‘Miss Gilver,’ she said. ‘Again.’ She was hunched over her desk with a great number of sheets of paper spread around, but looked up as I entered.
‘I’ve come to warn you,’ I said, closing the door behind me. ‘I know you’ve only just arrived but if there was another opening you turned down in preference to this one, I’d urge you very strongly to see if it’s still there.’
‘There wasn’t,’ Miss Glennie said. ‘Lambourne only sent me this one and I was lucky to have that. And then Miss Shanks has been very kind to me… most accommodating. Bent over backwards, actually.’
‘No doubt,’ I said, thinking of the way Ivy Shanks had given over her study to me and allowed Alec to visit me in my room until her swift volte-face and my even swifter sacking. ‘And do you know she’s expecting you to teach English as well?’ I saw from her quick frown that this was news. ‘I’ve been given the boot, you see. And I want to help it not happen to you.’
‘I-’ stammered Miss Glennie. ‘I’ll very happily take on English if there’s time. I mean, the other mistresses help out in areas not their own, don’t they?’
‘Well, then, at the very least, if there’s any way that you could…’ I fell silent. This next bit was rather difficult to work one’s way round to. ‘If you had said anything, out of nerves perhaps, over-egging or maybe even slightly exaggerating your curriculum vitae, I think it would be a good idea to see if you could perhaps tone it down a bit. Rescind, if possible. Recant. Miss Shanks can be a bit capricious when it comes to… she might seem to have countenanced something that she later will pounce on. You might not even know why.’
‘What are you talking about?’ said Miss Glennie. She looked baffled; no sign that she had caught even a wisp of my meaning.
‘Well, if you didn’t want her to know that you’d been without a position for a while and you said something… unlikely… that you regretted.’
‘My last position?’ said Miss Glennie, cottoning on at last. ‘She’s been nothing but sweet about that. And I didn’t tell her. Lambourne told her.’
‘You told them, presumably,’ I said, thinking she was rather splitting hairs.
‘I think they knew anyway,’ said Miss Glennie. ‘They hinted as much when they rang me. I was… very surprised.’
Not as surprised as me, I thought, staring at her. Could it be true after all that this awkward woman really had been a member of the royal household? How did she come from that to Miss Shanks’s school? Or even to a scholastic agency? Would she not be desired by every family in the land to teach their little ones the French she had taught to the princes and the princess there?
‘Naturally, I hadn’t said a word,’ said Miss Glennie. ‘But one of the Lambourne ladies is Aberdonian and maybe there was a domestic connection.’
‘Very possibly,’ I said, thinking of the Browns and how they ran the Crown, the Post office and St Columba’s amongst them. ‘And very commendable of you, Miss Glennie, I must say, not to trade on your illustrious acquaintance. It must make you uncomfortable that Miss Shanks is so much less circumspect, eh?’
‘I’m in no position to complain,’ Miss Glennie said. ‘Thankful to have a job and to be accepted by these good people.’
Almost as though, I thought to myself, it was something of which to be ashamed. A very odd position to take, unless one had fallen in with Bolshies, which Miss Shanks and her mistresses were not.
‘Well, I’ve said my piece,’ I concluded, ‘and I wish you all the very best, in spite of it. I hope you will be happy here.’ Miss Glennie gave a pained smile, although whether to indicate that she doubted it or simply that she had had enough of this odd woman bothering her was hard to say.
‘You seem to have settled in anyway,’ I said, waving a hand around at the watercolours hanging on walls which had been bare the day before and the crowd of photographs on the chimneypiece. I am ashamed to say, I even sidled towards these to see if among them were any of the exalted household; for governesses, like nannies, were much given to mementoes of their charges. To my disappointment, if not my surprise (for I still did not quite believe the Balmoral angle), the photographs in their ornate frames were two ancient ones of a couple dressed in high Edwardian style, and a enormous number of just one child from infanthood to the army.