“Punctuality costs nothing,” said Duncan, tapping his watch. “Not you, Evie, you’re very welcome.”
I did a double take.
No gleaming candelabra. No dining table. No butler.
Instead, round a long scrubbed pine table sat Duncan and Ingrid McAndrew and Sheila Graham. Sheila was still in the same twinset and skirt, but Ingrid was wearing a mushroom-colored tracksuit, and Duncan had changed into a blue velvet smoking jacket and a hat with a tassle.
If you didn’t count Duncan’s bizarre hat, I was the only one who’d dressed up. My expression froze, along with the rest of me.
“Good Lord, Evie, you must be a warm-blooded girl, wearing a dress like that!” barked Duncan. I was still thinking what on earth to say to that when he turned to Robert and added, “She obviously doesn’t feel this terrible cold you’re always whining on about.”
“I’m not whining,” said Robert—heading for the chair nearest the Aga, I noted. “I’m just pointing out that there are parts of this bloody freezing house that you probably couldn’t legally keep animals in.”
They didn’t dress for dinner! Robert could have said something when he saw me, for God’s sake. He could have told me that everyone else would be bundled up to the nines when I still had time to go and get several cardigans. We were eating in the kitchen!
“Evie, that’s a beautiful dress,” said Sheila, noticing my discomfort. “And orange and black to match the Kettlesheer tartan—did you know?”
Ingrid’s face dropped. “Oh, Evie, you needn’t have bothered,” she said. “We never dress for dinner. I mean, we dress in that we put more clothes on. . . .”
“This? Oh, it’s nothing special,” I lied. “I, er, have thermal underwear underneath.”
“Jolly sensible,” said Duncan. “Be prepared.”
“Come and sit here, where it’s warm,” Ingrid said, getting up to give me her own seat. “And let me get you a drink,” she went on, pushing a glass in front of me. “Red? White?”
“Wow, are these Georgian?” I forgot my annoyance in a nanosecond. The table might have had generations of servants who sat round it, but the place settings were fit for a duke: big porcelain plates with gold rims and purple thistles flanked by heavy silver cutlery.
Like the kitchen, it was a funny old mixture of fancy and plain, but I was completely charmed. It had atmosphere, with its worn stone flags and polished brass pans sitting next to a very modern KitchenAid mixer. There’d been some hustle and bustle in here over the years, I could feel it.
“You tell us, Evie!” Duncan said at once. “We’ve got about a hundred upstairs—worth much, do you think?”
“Dad, Evie’s already valued half the tat in Rennick tonight,” said Robert. His voice was light, but his eyes were warning. “Give her an hour off, will you?”
“Tat? Tat!”
Duncan glared at Robert and I was reminded of the painting in my room of two stags glowering at each other in a handbags-at-dawn standoff.
Sheila Graham offered me the bottle of wine just as Ingrid McAndrew closed her eyes and reached for her glass in one practiced movement.
Normally, I didn’t drink much in new places (I had a bad habit of getting rather mystical about people’s valuables, which was embarrassing if they’d only just bought them), but the sudden frost in the air had nothing to do with the conditions outside, and I pushed my glass toward Sheila. She filled it with an almost inaudible sigh and a conspirational wink.
Seven
I was woken the next morning by a strange smell—the sort of burning-rubber whiff you get when you don’t take the plastic off a microwave-ready meal properly.
I pulled the four-poster’s heavy curtain aside, ready to face the bright Scottish sunlight streaming into the room, and found myself staring into the eyes of a burly black Labrador bearing a silver teapot on its back.
I squawked and jerked backward into the pillows, nearly knocking over the water jug on the bedside table.
Once the room swam into focus, however, I realized that the dog was stuffed, and a solid mahogany breakfast tray had been placed on a small table behind it. I wasn’t surprised that someone had come in and left it without me noticing; the drapery was so thick the Scots Guards could have piped the breakfast in without disturbing me.
I sniffed warily. The smell was coming from beneath a silver dome. Next to it was a battered silver pot of coffee, and some milk, and a bowl of solid oatmeal that you could stand a spoon up in. There was no sugar, just a small bowl of salt. Proper Scottish porridge, in other words.
And—I leaned over and lifted the dome with some trepidation—kippers.
To be perfectly honest, kippers were one of those things that I always liked the idea of more than the reality. These looked as if they’d been freshly scraped off the outside of a trawler. But on the other hand, they were sitting under a silver dome on a crested porcelain kipper plate. With kipper knives and some kipper implement I’d never even seen before.
How often did you get the chance of a breakfast-in-bed that crossed over with the life of Queen Victoria? Not very often.
Gingerly I maneuvered the tray onto the eiderdown, and poured myself a cup of coffee in readiness for the fishy challenge ahead.
It was a gorgeous cup: fine porcelain and crested with a thistle wrapped in little flowers. I sipped more delicately than I usually did with my first coffee of the day, and admired the Labrador, which had obviously once been a much-loved family member. It still had its collar on: Lord Bertold had been its name. I felt a twinge of sympathy; I kept our cat’s old collar in a treasure box, having retrieved it from Mum’s merciless tidying of Cleo’s basket after The Long Dark Trip to the Vets.
Between the romantic Reel of Luck and their inability to throw anything away, including deceased pets, I was starting to think the Clan McAndrew could be one after my own heart. Or maybe I was just a thwarted aristocratic collector trapped in the body of an underpaid London singleton.
Then, with a deep breath, I tackled the first kipper.
Once I’d finished the porridge and coffee and forced down half a kipper, I pulled on as many layers as I could manage, then headed downstairs with my breakfast tray, ready to tackle the castle and all its hidden nooks and crannies.
In the kitchens I was greeted by the sound of Duncan bellowing some rousing Scottish song in the worst Scottish accent I’d ever heard. Mhairi was washing up at the big Belfast sink, wearing fur-trimmed fuchsia washing-up gloves with giant plastic solitaires and gazing impassively into the bubbles, presumably praying to be struck deaf.
“Good morn, good morn!” he roared as I appeared at the door with my tray. “How’d you find the kippers? Put hairs on your chest!”
“Um, I couldn’t finish them as well as the porridge,” I lied. “Delicious, though.”
“I had one when we first moved in here two years ago, and it’s still repeating on me,” said Ingrid. She was sitting at the kitchen table with a pile of notebooks and pens around her, and yellow Post-it notes fluttered from every surface as she flapped her hands around, looking for something. “Give me muesli anytime. Duncan, how many loo rolls do you think three hundred people reasonably need? Barring accidents?”
Duncan didn’t answer. Instead, he rubbed his hands together and advanced toward me. “Now, the guided tour!” He beamed. “As my noble kinsman, Merry Ivan McAndrew, famously commented in 1564, ‘There’s aye fashing in mickle muckle.’ “
He adopted a strange hunched, one-eyed posture as he said it, and I smiled nervously. Was that a question or a statement? I had no idea.
“Duncan, don’t forget Janet Learmont’s coming over at eleven for the committee meeting.” Ingrid sounded as if she were talking about a dental appointment. “Please don’t tell her about your sporran.”
“It’s in hand,” said Duncan cryptically.
“I meant to say,” I started, “thanks so much for the breakfast in—” but Duncan was ushering me out and up the spiral staircase, outl
ining the history of the castle as he went. I managed to insert a question every now and again, but it didn’t seem to make much difference to the general narrative theme: the McAndrew passion for stuff.
He marched me through the oak-paneled hall, where my eyes were drawn to the bloodthirsty decoration. Where other people might have a nice Canaletto, the McAndrews had wall after wall of grisly medieval weaponry. It looked as if someone had put an enormous magnet next to the Battle of Bannock-burn.
I made a mental note to ring Max and ask him if we had any bloodthirsty clients with a Braveheart fixation.
“Were these family weapons?” I asked. “Or were they . . . collected?”
“Probably picked up off the field of battle,” said Duncan cheerfully. “Or found in the gardens. It’s always been a lively area, Berwickshire. Sometimes English, sometimes Scottish, with reivers—or bandits, I suppose you’d call them—mounting raids over the Border on both sides, Scottish lords trying to control the northern lands. Lots of to-ing and fro-ing. Marrying, slaughtering, pillaging. And that’s just the prince Bishops! Nothing like that now, of course! Well . . .” His face went thoughtful. “The Ball Committee has its ups and downs, but that’s Janet and Sheila for you! Old habits die hard!”
“Ooh!” I said, intrigued by a massive parchment painted with a family tree, the red lines surrounded by thistles and ferrets rampant. “Is this the McAndrew line? Wow! How far does it go back?”
“All the way to 1269!” he said proudly. “There I am. And Robert, of course.” Duncan peered and pointed to himself, right at the bottom. The line of succession swung wildly from generation to generation as unmarried heirs failed to grab the prize and other brothers’ urgently produced children sprouted like grapes on a vine. There were also a lot of nuns.
I loved a family tree. I’d tried to persuade my parents to help me do ours, but they couldn’t see the point. And looking at this, I could sort of see why: there were McAndrews here when the Spanish Armada was passing by, whereas all I’d discovered was that most of my dad’s male relatives were called Ernest.
I tried not to touch the glass with eagerness. There was Ranald Claude Duncan, born in 1879, and Violet Esme, born 1884, married in 1902; their five children, Clarence, born in 1903, James in 1904, Beatrice in 1907, Carlisle, 1915, Lachlan, 1916 …
“Robert’ll have to get a move on,” observed Duncan. “Don’t want to run out of space! Still, fingers crossed things are moving in that direction at last! Wink, wink! Now, up we go! I thought we’d start upstairs.”
“Oh, aren’t we going to begin in the main living rooms?” I asked, thinking of Max’s mysterious table. If I could find that, it’d be a good start. “I—”
“No, no!” Duncan interrupted. “I’d rather you had a look at some of our—how shall I put it?—surplus furniture first.” He ushered me onward, past a cabinet full of Venetian glass and up the main staircase. He moved pretty quickly for a big man in tight trousers, and I found myself jogging up the stairs to keep up.
“We pop a lot of stuff out of harm’s way before the ball, you see,” he explained, stopping by a thick door. “Gets a bit raucous, if you know what I mean: people swept away by the party spirit, champagne flowing all night . . .”
“Really?” I breathed.
He had to put his shoulder to the door to get it open, and I flinched at the ominous cracking noise. I couldn’t tell whether it came from the door or Duncan.
“Yes, well, between that and the reeling, the blood fairly gets going! It’s a marvelous night. Dinner beforehand’s a family tradition, started by my grandmother, Violet. Bit of an entertainer in her day, brought a full Limoges dinner service for sixty people over from New York when she married and made Ranald promise they’d use it once a year. Ingrid’s got a hard act to follow, bless her.” He stepped back triumphantly as the door swung open. “Now, I’m confident you’ll find at least ten wonderful items in here.”
I took a deep breath. China-blue walls with white molded swagging were just about visible behind the stacks of brown furniture and lumpen china. It was as if the furniture had gone feral and bred indiscriminately—tables with chairs, sideboards with linen racks, and everything covered in crocheted antimacassars. I could barely imagine the carpet, let alone the historical scenes that had once taken place in here.
“And this is just one of our spare-furniture rooms!” Duncan guffawed. “You should see the attic!”
I couldn’t see where to start. I gazed around, but all I could see was brown. Brown wasn’t great, when it came to finding cash-convertible antiques.
Was Max’s table in here? It could be. But so could a whole stuffed polar bear, for all I could make out.
“Take your time, pull out the drawers, do whatever it is you experts do,” said Duncan, tenderly wiping the dust off a glass case containing an owl making short work of a stoat. “Would it help to hear a few of the amusing anecdotes about Kettlesheer? Such as the time Uncle Carlisle had the pest controllers in to get to the bottom of the rattle in the attic, and ended up calling the parish exorcist! Turned out to be the ghost of . . .”
I was torn. Part of me was longing to hear some rip-roaring tales of country-house antics, but the larger part of me needed to get on with the task at hand. It was a bigger job than I’d anticipated. Much bigger. Plus I wanted to poke around in the hundreds of drawers on offer and really lose myself in the deliciously dusty atmosphere.
“Maybe we could do both?” I said. “But I do need to get online. Where’s the best place for me to connect to the Internet?” I gestured to my laptop bag. “I might need to e-mail some photos back to my partner in London, for a second opinion.”
“Internet?” Duncan raised his eyebrows.
“You do have broadband, don’t you?”
“Broad band,” repeated Duncan. “No, I don’t think we do.” His face brightened. “There’s a fax machine in my office, if that’s any good?”
“No Internet?” I croaked.
“If you ask me, you young people are too reliant on it.” Duncan actually wagged a schoolteachery finger at me. “You need to use this!” He tapped his head, then his eyes. “And these!”
“Right.” I swallowed. “So, tell me about your childhood here! Did you fish for salmon and that sort of thing?”
“We did indeed.” Duncan began edging his way between the sideboards toward the leaded windows, his hands behind his back like Prince Philip. “I remember learning to make butter from the cows that my grandmother kept down in the field behind Robert’s house, churning it in the old dairy and—Oh, dear.”
I looked up. Duncan was staring out at something, panic visibly freezing his eyebrows. He swiveled round, nearly knocking over a Chinese dragon, and started to squeeze his way back out.
“Something the matter?” I asked. “Please, do go on.”
“No, no! No, I’ve just noticed that Mrs. Learmont has arrived. For her Ball Committee meeting.” Duncan grimaced. “And I haven’t quite finished the, ahem, list of tasks she . . . Would you excuse me?”
And, like one of the ferrets on the family tree, he wriggled off.
Curious, I tiptoed onto the landing, and heard the front door open. Voices and a chill draft drifted up.
“. . . yes, Janet, I have. . . . Yes, I’ve done that. . . .”
It was an excellent balcony for eavesdropping. I leaned farther over the solid banister, at which point my eye was caught by a morose Regency-period nun, who could almost have been hung there on purpose, to deter nosey parkers. I jerked backward, and crept back into the Room of Writing Desks.
I spent nearly two hours dutifully going through every item, taking photographs and trying to put dates on things so Max could value them. The whole lot would fetch about two grand at auction, and to my immense disappointment there weren’t even any love notes or interesting trinkets left in the drawers, just old newspaper linings, which were fascinating—the adverts! the news!—but definitely not the valuable table Max had wanted me to find. br />
I sat back on my heels. I was going to need more help.
But when I got my phone out of the bag, I discovered the castle was even more resistant to modern life than I’d thought: there was no reception.
I tried climbing on a desk, then standing near the window, then leaning out of the window, but still nothing. Even going out onto the landing and leaning out of the window seat didn’t help.
Footsteps echoed from the hall downstairs, and I could hear more posh Scottish voices discussing fire exits and “crash zones.”
I tucked my phone into my bag and racked my brains. I didn’t have time to waste photographing Victorian reproduction writing desks. Max needed something big, and by the sound of it, so did Duncan and Ingrid.
I closed my eyes and tried to listen to my instinct.
If I were the owner of this house, where would I put all the really good stuff? Not in a junk room. Not upstairs.
I’d put it where people would see it. Where it was warm. Where the social business happened.
The drawing room.
To my relief, there was something rather fabulous in the drawing room: a magnificent inlaid mahogany console table that I hadn’t noticed behind the huddled bodies of last night’s guests.
I laid my hands on it and felt the beeswax polish layered over hundreds of years, the bored rubbing of housemaids’ yellow dusters. I could picture tea being served on this, when tea was a real ceremony. I could imagine Violet arranging a bowl of pink roses, fresh from the garden. It was a lovely thing.
The delicate inlay on the top was partially hidden by the froth of knickknackery that covered Kettlesheer’s every surface, in this case a cricket ball bowled in the 1979 Ashes series, many small pigs, Ingrid and Duncan’s wedding photo (bride and groom both sporting mad ’70s flares). I took some photos of the table on my phone, then made some notes. I reckoned it was George III, the quality plain to see in the pale ribbons and swags that rippled out of the polished wood.