There could be no doubt of her meaning and I should have been able to sneer back, shrug and shut my door but I was possessed of some devil all of a sudden. I could not help thinking of all the girls who would hang their heads in the face of it. I saw Jeanne Beauclerc’s drooping head in my mind’s eye and remembered her saying her family did not own her. I saw Fleur’s pinched, pale face and her fathomless reserve. I saw the scared eyes of Miss Thomasina Glennie as she huddled over her papers, shrinking away from me. I could picture too Miss Blair’s look of hurt and bewilderment, as Alec had described it, and I wondered what we would see in the faces of Miss Taylor and Miss Bell if we should ever find them. Something – some idea, vague and shapeless – shifted deep inside me like a shipwreck dragging across the ocean floor when a current catches it broadside.
I blinked and the widow came into focus again.
‘Gossip is a nasty habit, my dear madam,’ I said, ‘but slander is a crime. Or is it libel when it’s written? I can never remember. And lying is a sin.’
‘I don’t know what you mean!’ she said, thoroughly ruffled.
‘And the poison from a pen travels up the arm more readily than it does onto the paper,’ I went on.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Imagine if you died tonight. And met your Maker.’
‘You’re not right in your head!’ she said. ‘I shall go to the police tomorrow and tell them you’ve threatened me.’
‘You do that,’ I said to her, smiling, ‘and see what they say.’
I allowed her to turn, with a swish of her shiny dressing gown, and slam her door. It would have been very satisfying to beat her to it and leave her standing there, but I wondered if the idea would come back and take form if I kept still and let it return to me. I was still waiting motionless, when the electric landing light, set on a timer I supposed against the profligacy of the guests, clicked off again and left me in blackness.
Inside my room, I set Jeanne’s cases by the door for the morning and began the dreary task of unpacking the jumble of belongings I had swept into my own. A box of powder, improperly clasped, had burst open and liberally doused the top layer of items. I banged my hairbrush and blew the worst of it off my sleeping cap, then I lifted an untidy heap of papers and shook them like maracas. One green sheet drifted free and eddied to the floor. Oh Lord, I thought, as I dumped the rest of them down and bent to retrieve it. It was an examination paper. In all my muddle I had not returned it to Miss Shanks and in all hers she had forgotten to ask for it from me. But should I burn it or send it back to her in the morning? I sat down on the low fire stool and started leafing through the rest of the pile – newspapers, scribbled notes on the case, scribbled notes on my abandoned lessons – for the other one. Halfway through the heap, I caught a glimpse of the pink paper I remembered taking from Miss Shanks’s hands. And there on top of it was something else. Something I could not understand coming to be there.
It was a letter, a pale mauve envelope, and the address, written in blue ink with a thick pen, was Miss I. Shanks (Headm.), St Columba’s School, Portpatrick. I picked it up and stared at it, then I ran over the scene in Miss Shanks’s office in my mind: she opened the safe and stirred the disorder of papers inside it. Aha! Yes, she had stopped a small landslide with her knee and shoved the things back. She had handed me two sheets, and this envelope must have been caught between them.
It had not occurred to me then but it struck me as very odd now. No one kept letters in a safe, did they? One kept examination papers (if one ran a school), deeds, bonds, cash, jewels, one’s chequebook if one were the cautious sort. But not letters, unless it were that one happened to have an autograph letter from some great man – the Duke of Marlborough on the eve of battle, say. And yet Ivy Shanks had had a heap of them, and great men did not write on the eve of battle using blue ink and mauve paper.
I turned the envelope over and lifted the flap with not even a moment’s hesitation. The sender was a Mr Thos. Simmons. His name and address (The Rowans, Moffat) were embossed on the paper along with a reproduced etching of his house in a little oval lozenge, two dark patches on either side representing the eponymous rowans, one supposed.
Dear Miss Shanks, the letter began. Thank you most kindly for yours of the seventeenth. My lady wife and I will most certainly look forward to seeing you on ‘Parents’ Day’ at St Columba’s and are already anticipating with eagerness getting down to the ‘nitty-gritty’. Ship ahoy! Or as it might be – Tally-ho! We are delighted to hear that Tilly is ‘doing so well’. Yours most faithfully, Mr & Mrs Thos. Simmons.
Of course, I thought. The name of Simmons had rung a bell. ‘Tilly’ who was ‘doing so well’ (why the quotation marks there? Who could say?) was Clothilde Simmons, to whom Miss Shanks had alerted me during my one and only day as English mistress. That one part of the letter made sense to me: the rest of it was a mystery. Tally-ho? Ship ahoy? Nitty-gritty? And had Miss Shanks really written a letter to every pair of parents inviting them to the Parents’ Day, which must come around with foreseeable regularity every year? If she had found the time for such a pointless gesture, why on earth was she keeping their replies in the safe?
Thoughtfully, I folded the letter and returned it to the envelope, then I tucked it and the examination papers back into the gloves pocket of my bag. The letter was a crashing let-down when it came to the puzzle of Ivy Shanks and the greater (if more nebulous) puzzle of St Columba’s in general, but it was good to have some reason to go back there should the need arise, if only because that little brown envelope of money from Miss Barclay showed me how very much they hoped I would not do so.
I finished my rough unpacking, paying less and less attention to the removal of powder as the task went on, and then crawled, exhausted, into my little bed in a dusty but sweet-smelling nightgown and was dead to the world before the midnight high tide came crashing and booming into the harbour.
I was up and off long before the landlady had started frying bacon the next morning, and all was quiet behind the convalescent widow’s bedroom door. The station, in contrast, was greatly a-bustle, fish crates stacked under sacking waiting for the goods train to take them to town and enough housewives in their good coats and farmers in their good trousers to imply that today was a market day somewhere and a train bound for it was due along soon. Checking with the ticket-master, I decided to wait instead of dropping off Miss Beauclerc’s bags and was rewarded less than a quarter of an hour later when a figure in a bulky checked overcoat of an unlikely blue and with a headscarf pulled far forward and tied on the chin so that only a sliver of face was showing, and that in shadow, stopped in front of me and cleared her throat. The slim legs and narrow, hand-stitched shoes did not go with the garish coat and dowdy headgear and when I looked up it was into the face, pale and stark, of Jeanne Beauclerc.
‘Thank you, Miss Gilver,’ she said, sitting down on the bench beside me. ‘Your good husband rang me last evening and he has told me I will be met at your little station. He has told me that I am to be a guest in your house, not a servant after all.’
‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘Glad to help. We’ll find Fleur, and as soon as we do I shall ring home and let you know.’ She nodded and bit her lip. ‘I don’t suppose, now you’re on your way, that you’ll tell me any more of what’s going on?’ She shook her head. ‘I thought as much, but I had to try. Well, can you tell me this? My husband asked me and I assured him, so I’d like you to assure me. You’re not mixed up with any rascals who’re looking for you, are you? Or in trouble with the police?’