Dandy Gilver and a Bothersome Number of Corpses Read Online Free PDF Page A

questionable past.’
    Grant was now, frankly, loitering. My case was packed and the drawer she was tidying out was perfectly tidy already.
    ‘If it comes to conscription then of course he shall go. They shall both go. But I will not encourage them into the vanguard.’
    I shook my head at him. Hugh is a doom-monger of the very highest order. He was convinced that a nine-day strike a year or two ago was the coming of the revolutionary hordes and managed to get me thoroughly rattled despite my long experience of his dramatic premonitions (not to mention my long experience of my country not going in for revolutions much these days). His latest conviction, a mere ten years after the Great War ended, was that more of the same was on its way and from the very Hun that we had so thoroughly squashed. I do not pretend to follow the domestic politics of Bavaria with the interest my husband manages to muster, but I knew enough to be sure that this was his hobby-horse and nothing more sinister than that; more akin to campfire tales of ghosts when everyone is safe and cosy than a cool appraisal of the state of the world.
    ‘Goodnight, Hugh,’ I said.
    ‘Something to consider,’ he answered, making no move to leave my open doorway.
    I stood and put my hand to the back of my neck as though to unfasten a button there, which did the trick. With a curt goodnight he left me.
    ‘Master’s right, you know,’ said Grant. ‘Madam.’
    ‘About the gathering clouds of war?’ I said, unfastening my dress buttons since I had all but started anyway.
    ‘About Young Master Donald,’ she replied. ‘I caught him up a tree with Eliza McManus once, gazing at her like the crown jewels.’
    ‘Eliza McManus!’ I shuddered. She was the daughter of a blacksmith, as broad as she was tall, with a red face and gaps between all of her front teeth. ‘How did Eliza McManus get up a tree?’
    ‘This was years ago, before she got so . . . sturdy.’
    ‘So they were children,’ I said. ‘Stop scare-mongering.’
    ‘Nanny said to me once that Donald said to her – in his bath – that when he grew up he wanted to be a daddy.’
    ‘How sweet. This correspondence is now closed,’ I said. ‘What am I wearing tomorrow?’
    ‘Leave off wrenching at those buttons and I’ll tell you,’ said Grant. ‘Madam. Turn around and let me at them before they all end up on the floor.’
    It was a bright grey day when we arrived at Portpatrick the following afternoon (in Scotland, one must learn to make these distinctions), with a great deal of massing and thinning cloud scudding across the sky on a stiff breeze and, although the sun did not actually break through at all and there was no hint of blue from hilltop to horizon, every so often one could tell that it was getting towards evening from a patch of diffuse light gleaming far out to sea. The station was at the top of the hill and did not run to a taxi, so we descended to the village proper in a cart driven by the porter, a man of dour mien who kept up a droning monologue all the way, in such an impenetrable Wigtownshire brogue that it might as well have been the rumble of thunder.
    At the bottom, the cart swung round onto the main (practically the only) street, a straggle of cottages, shops and one or two grander captains’ houses snaking along, all facing the harbour. A fleet of small fishing craft were moored for the night, tied together and jostling as they bobbed in the high water, looking like a flock of chickens settling on their perches, with a little squawking and a little shoving but cosy enough and used to the proximity. A few of the men were still at work on their nets in the lee of the far harbour wall and some of their wives were scrubbing out crates beside them, bent double, shoving their brushes back and forth with a steady rhythm. The sound of the clogs on the cobbled ground as the women rocked back and forth, back and forth, seemed to keep time with the clink of the painters, and the