April 1936
Dust motes swirled in the shafts of light filtering through the schoolroom window. Squinting through them, Vera Lovelock chalked algebra equations onto the blackboard, copying them from a faded sheet that had seen her through many a slow morning in various schoolrooms over the years.
In her last position (two girls and a boy in Peterborough) even the youngest had been able to complete these sums, but she suspected she was being optimistic in giving them to Alice Carew. The child spent more time gazing out of the window or at the map on the schoolroom wall than she did writing anything, never mind correct answers. The old saying about horses and water came to mind.
It was all the same to her. Any illusions the young Vera Lovelock may once have had about firing up young minds and filling them with knowledge had long since been abandoned. Age had made her cynical and taught her to look out for her own interests, because there was no one else to look out for them. Experience had shown her that teaching itself was a thankless task, but having a roof over one’s head, a room to oneself with meals provided made it a practical option. Especially when one’s charge was as quiet as Alice, leaving one plenty of time to pursue one’s own interests.
She finished chalking and looked at the clock on the wall. ‘Three quarters of an hour until lunchtime,’ she said, in a cheery, encouraging tone. ‘Let’s see how many of these you can do before then.’
The child jumped a little, as if she was surprised to see the algebra equations, or to realize that they were any business of hers. Miss Lovelock saw her slide a scrap of paper off the desk and shove it into her pocket. The younger, keener version of herself would have swooped down and performed a confiscation, followed by a sharp reprimand about disrespect and underhandedness, but these days she lacked the will. She doubted that little Alice Carew would be writing notes to herself poking fun at the governess (Miss Lovelock has teeth like tombstones was one that she had come across several times. Ten-year-olds were an unoriginal lot when it came to similes.) Another bonus of having a solitary pupil.
She was a funny little thing. Sweet-natured, certainly, but not quite all there as far as Miss Lovelock could tell. One had to make allowances, of course; circumstances were certainly … testing. Sitting down behind her own desk she felt a moment of pity for the forlorn little figure staring blankly at the blackboard, but it was quickly forgotten as she slid out the publication she had concealed beneath her papers, the arrival of which she had been eagerly anticipating for days.
The Blackshirt was a weekly newspaper to which Miss Lovelock was an enthusiastic subscriber. The latest edition carried an article written by Adeline Pugh, a great friend from her suffragette days, entitled Women Answer The Call to Fascism! in which she reported on the number of women swelling the ranks of the British Union of Fascists, and the variety of roles they were undertaking. Miss Lovelock knew all of this because she and Adeline had exchanged much correspondence during the writing of the piece. Adeline had sent her the final draft, so she felt no particular urgency to find the printed article now, and took her time turning the pages, enjoying the many photographs of Sir Oswald Mosley instead.
Miss Lovelock removed her spectacles and gave them a polish on the edge of her cardigan, the better to study one of these. In it, Sir Oswald stood, champagne glass in hand, beside an elegant blonde woman in a neat black suit. Diana Guinness, whose passionate affair with Sir Oswald was the whispered talk of the B.U.F., had been a member of that privileged set of partygoers the papers used to call ‘The Bright Young People’. As had Selina Lennox. This tenuous connection had been the primary reason Miss Lovelock had overlooked the drawbacks of the position at Blackwood Park – the house’s isolation and distance from London – and decided to apply for the post. One never knew. Packing her things in the dingy room she had rented in Clerkenwell she had let her imagination carry her a few months into the future, to the time when Mrs Carew would return to Blackwood to be reunited with her daughter. Miss Lovelock, she would say, taking her hands, I can’t thank you enough – my daughter has spoken so warmly of you. It so happens that I have a friend who is looking for a governess for her young sons …
That would put her one up on Adeline for a change.
Remembering this fantasy rekindled a flicker of professional enthusiasm in Miss Lovelock’s breast. She glanced up from Lady Guinness to look at the solitary figure in front of her. Dark curls obscured Alice’s face as she bent over the desk with a focus that was unusual and rather gratifying. The imagined scenario gathered substance.
‘How are you getting on? Any questions?’
The child lifted her head, frowning slightly. ‘What does interred mean?’
Alice had expected to be told off for her lack of progress on the equations, but instead Miss Lovelock – exasperated rather than cross – dismissed her early for lunch. ‘Spring fever, I expect,’ she said as she gathered up the papers on her desk. ‘Difficult to concentrate when the sun is shining outside. We’ll try again tomorrow.’
It was difficult to concentrate on equations whatever the weather, but Alice wasn’t going to admit that the real reason for her distraction was the clue that she had discovered that morning, just before lessons started. It had been slipped inside the folds of her flannel on the edge of the bathroom basin; she would have discovered it earlier and had all of breakfast to ponder it if she hadn’t tried to get away with just splashing her face with cold water instead of washing it properly, which – as Polly teased – just went to show it didn’t pay to cut corners.
With twenty minutes still to go until Polly would be bringing the lunch trays up, Alice crept along the corridor and slipped through the door to the servants’ staircase. She had discovered a place on the turn of the stairs where she could sit, out of sight of anyone passing by in the passageway below, but close enough to be able to hear snatches of conversation in the kitchen (particularly from Ellen, whose voice was the most strident). It was draughty, but then so was the nursery, which was also a lot more dull and lonely without the diversion of listening to Ellen and Ivy plan a trip into Salisbury to look for dress fabric on their half day, or talk about a film they’d seen at the picture house. (‘I don’t know what she was making such a fuss about – I’d have been his in a trice.’ ‘Ellen, you wouldn’t!’ ‘You bet I would. Maurice Chevalier? You’d have to be wrong in the head to say no to him.’)
Settling herself down on the wide step at the staircase’s turn, Alice took the slip of paper from her pocket and smoothed it out on her knee. The hairs lifted on the nape of her neck as she ran her eyes over the mysterious lines.
A Roman Queen, a circus clown
Mrs Andrews’s pale blue gown.
French dancing girls, a Cavalier,
All interred together here.
Questions buzzed in her brain like bees around a hive. Miss Lovelock, clearly caught off guard, had explained ‘interred’ (‘It means buried, in a grave or a tomb, though I can’t think why you need to know. I mean – I can’t think what it has to do with algebra’), but that only made things more puzzling. Why would those people be buried together … and who was Mrs Andrews?
There was a chapel at Blackwood, at the end of the carriage drive near the boundary to the park. That was where Cousin Archie’s distantly recalled Christening had taken place, though from what Alice could remember it wasn’t a very grand resting place for a Roman Queen. Perhaps Miss Lovelock would agree to walk down there this afternoon. The chapel itself would probably be locked, but it was the graveyard that Alice was interested in and she was confident that Miss Lovelock would think that a suitably serious subject for study.
The smell of frying onions and roasting meat drifted up from the kitchen, along with the echo of voices. Alice tried to pick out Polly’s, but as usual it was Ellen’s that was the clearest. ‘She’s a piece of work, if you ask me…’ she was saying. ‘Nice looking, I’ll give her that, and some lovely clothes, but she can be a right cow.’
Alice folded the clue and slipped it back into her pocket, settling herself in to listen. She had never heard anyone express opinions as freely as Ellen did (Mama and Miss Ellwood were united in the view that in the absence of anything nice to say it was best to keep quiet) and found it both shocking and fascinating. Ivy’s reply came from further away, at the far end of the kitchen, and was lost to Alice amid a clatter of saucepans. Ellen’s laugh was loud and sharp-edged.
‘Just you wait – you won’t be saying that when they’ve been here for a few days. They’re bringing a nanny for the kid, but I don’t suppose she’ll bring a maid. It’ll be muggins here who gets lumbered with all her fetching and carrying, but you’ll end up spending all your time preparing food for the nursery.’
There was a loose thread on the hem of her dress and Alice pulled absently at it as she tried to work out who they might be talking about. Visitors to Blackwood? It seemed unlikely. Ivy’s voice was distant and indistinct, but Alice caught the word ‘nursery’ again, before the rest of the sentence was drowned in a rush of water.
‘Well she’s no bother, is she? Poor kid don’t say boo to a goose; you hardly know she’s here. It’ll be a different matter with Master Archie, you mark my words. You’d think he was bloody royalty the way they treat him – he’s got to have a fire lit in his room, fresh eggs for breakfast, complete quiet in the house when he’s having his nap. It amazes me that her Ladyship puts up with it – she’s all for children being neither seen nor heard where the other one’s concerned, but with little lord Archie…’
Alice’s cheeks tingled with sudden heat, as if they’d been slapped. They were talking about them – the family: Grandmama and Aunt Miranda and Cousin Archie. About her. She was rigid with embarrassment, and though part of her wanted to get up and go back up the stairs, she didn’t move.
Neither did she hear the door open high above her, or the sound of footsteps on the stairs. It was only when they stopped, and Polly cleared her throat loudly that Alice looked up and saw her there, leaning over the banister.
‘And what are you doing, young lady?’
‘Oh – nothing! Waiting for lunch, that’s all. Miss Lovelock finished lessons early.’
She stood up, noticing with dismay that a long stretch of her hem was now sagging down, feeling disorientated and caught out. Polly began to clatter down the stairs, and Alice watched her hand (the only part of her that was visible) slide along the banisters, getting closer, and wondered what she was doing up there in the attics instead of being down in the kitchen.
‘Seems like it’s your lucky day today then,’ Polly grinned, appearing round the corner. ‘Come on; run along and wash your hands – properly this time – and I’ll go down and get your lunch.’
The child’s request to walk down to the chapel was a surprise, but not an unpleasant one. It was a bright day, almost warm in the sunshine, and a change was as good as a rest, as the saying went. (Miss Lovelock, whose life as a governess had been ruled by routine, could attest to this.)
Blackwood Park looked a little less gloomy with the weak spring sun on its face and a thin swathe of daffodils straggling along the line of the ha-ha, like a jaunty yellow scarf. Miss Lovelock had a firmly held belief in the health benefits of fresh air whatever the season, but she was convinced these were increased tenfold when combined with warmth and sunlight. As she walked her mind turned towards the summer. How wonderful it would be to travel to Italy, or Germany perhaps, and see the Blackshirt cause already in effect. Her funds, swelled by Mr Carew’s generous rate of pay, could probably stretch to a trip, though the indefinite nature of her contract was irksome. One didn’t want to be insensitive, but surely it wasn’t unreasonable to ask for some idea of when her services were likely to be no longer required? She resolved to raise the matter with Lady Lennox at the next opportunity.
The chapel was a simple, low rectangular building made of the same grey stone as the main house. The row of arched windows that stretched along its wall were plainly glazed, and the only nod to ornamentation came from the little gabled bellcote in the middle of the roof and the carved coat of arms above the porch door. As a girl, Miss Lovelock had experienced a phase of quite devout religious belief, during which visiting churches (as well as copying out the Bible’s more dramatic verses in her best handwriting) was one of her favourite pastimes. The phase had waned when she’d discovered the suffrage cause (in which women were not merely supporting players to the starring roles, like in the Bible) but her knowledge of ecclesiastical architecture remained. ‘Victorian, I should say,’ she declared, going through the rusted gate. ‘With a nod to the Norman. Plain, but certainly not unattractive…’
Alice Carew looked distinctly unimpressed. As Miss Lovelock went up the path she hovered at the gate, looking around at the unkempt grass, the straggling tentacles of brambles and ivy beneath the obligatory yew tree, in obvious disappointment.
‘But – there are no gravestones!’
‘No.’ To Miss Lovelock’s surprise the church door was very slightly ajar and creaked open easily at her tentative push. ‘It was never a parish church – just a convenient place of Sunday worship for the family and staff.’
‘I thought Uncle Howard was buried here?’
‘Well, I believe there is a family vault, but I doubt Captain Lennox will be in it, having been killed in—’
She stopped. Lady Lennox was seated in the front pew, her head bent. Miss Lovelock experienced a moment of agonizing uncertainty. Should she grab the child and retreat? Pause and apologize? Continue, in respectful quiet? She had just decided on the first course of action when Lady Lennox raised her head and turned round. Miss Lovelock cleared her throat nervously.
‘Lady Lennox. I do apologize for disturbing you. The child asked if we might come down here on our walk and I—’
‘Please, Miss Lovelock – there’s no need to apologize.’
Her tone suggested otherwise. She stood up, her cool blue gaze finding Miss Lovelock like a searchlight, exposing her darns and patches, the cheap fabric of her coat and the frayed edges of her collar. It came to rest momentarily on the circular silver brooch with its lightning strike emblem, then moved down to the child.
‘Hello, Alice. You wanted to see the chapel?’
‘Y-yes, Grandmama.’
‘I heard your question.’ The heels of Lady Lennox’s patent shoes (very impractical for outdoor wear, to Miss Lovelock’s mind) rang on the floor as she went across to a brass plaque on the wall, near the altar. ‘Miss Lovelock is correct. Your Uncle Howard died in Belgium, in the war. It wasn’t possible to bring him home, but we remember him here.’ A curt movement of her head invited the child to come closer and examine the plaque. ‘Can you read what it says?’
Miss Lovelock squirmed as Alice began to stammer her way through the brief inscription, although the child’s inability to read certainly wasn’t due to any failing on her part. She just about managed ‘In loving memory of’ and obviously remembered her uncle’s full name – ‘Howard Robert Kinross Lennox’, but then she ground to a halt. After a frozen pause Lady Lennox took over.
‘Captain, 19th Royal Hussars,’ she read. ‘Only son of Sir Robert and Emilia, Lady Lennox, of Blackwood Park. Killed in action at Passchendaele, 26th October 1917. Aged 20 years.’
The words died away into the chapel’s echoing silence, like stones falling into a pool, spreading ripples. At length, just as Miss Lovelock was wondering how to extricate herself and the child, Lady Lennox spoke again. ‘Was there anything else you wanted to ask?’
‘Is anyone buried here?’
‘Not buried exactly,’ Lady Lennox said. ‘Interred, in the vault.’
‘Where is the vault?’
‘Beneath the floor.’
‘Can I see?’
Dear God, what the dickens had come over the girl? One could never usually get a word out of her. Miss Lovelock would have quite liked the vault to open up and swallow her at that moment, as Lady Lennox cast her an accusing look, as if she was responsible for the child’s interest in burial rites.
‘No. No one goes down there, except for during an interment, of course, and we hope that it’ll be a very long time before we have one of those.’
She spoke firmly, drawing the subject to a close. Yet still the child persisted.
‘Is anyone called Mrs Andrews … interred there?’
‘Of course not. The vault is for family members only.’ Lady Lennox collected the gloves she had left on the altar rail and began to walk back up the aisle. ‘The only Mrs Andrews I know is from the Gainsborough painting – wasn’t that the name, Miss Lovelock?’
‘Oh – yes.’ Miss Lovelock’s mind was blank. For the life of her, in that moment the only painting she could think of was the nude that Mary Richardson had taken an axe to in the National Gallery (the glory days of the Suffrage campaign) and she was sure she wasn’t Mrs anything. Miss Lovelock had never had much time for art.
Lady Lennox stopped at the door to put on her gloves. ‘I only remember it because Miranda copied the dress for a costume ball. Blue satin. A long time ago.’ She deployed her chilly smile and was about to leave when she appeared to remember something. ‘Oh – that reminds me. Miss Lovelock, you might like to know that you won’t be required here over Easter. My elder daughter and her family will be visiting, so you may take four days’ holiday, beginning on the Thursday evening. Alice can have a break from lessons to play with her cousin. Won’t that be nice, Alice?’
Miss Lovelock’s thanks were rather more enthusiastic than the child’s agreement. Four days wasn’t much, but it was long enough for a trip to London, where some Party activity was bound to be going on. She would write and ask Adeline, and hopefully secure an invitation to stay into the bargain.
The subject of holidays reminded her of her unresolved plans for the summer and the matter of her contract. She almost opened her mouth to ask, but changed her mind at the last minute. She didn’t want to push her luck. And besides, if there had been further news Lady Lennox was unlikely to divulge it in front of the child. Especially if …
Well, anyway. Four days was enough, for now.
In the night nursery Alice, still wearing her coat, slid the Maison D’Or box out from beneath her bed and lifted the lid. Her thoughts shimmered and swirled, like dust in the sunlight of the little chapel. All the items were familiar now, so she didn’t linger over the handkerchief or the bow tie, but went straight to the gold-edged invitation card. Come as a work of art.
So Mrs Andrews’s pale blue gown had been worn by Aunt Miranda, to the party in Grosvenor Square in July 1925. Alice recited the clue in her head again, her excitement mounting as the pieces slotted together. Putting the lid back on the box she shoved it under the bed and raced out into the corridor, straight into Polly.
‘Where are you going in such a hurry?’
‘I’ve worked it out! When Miss Lovelock told me what interred means I thought there might be graves of a Roman Queen and dancing girls at the church, but we went to look and there are no graves at all.’ She didn’t want to think about the vault. ‘But we saw Grandmama there, and she said that Mrs Andrews is from a painting, and Aunt Miranda once went to a party as her, and so I think they’re all fancy dress costumes! You said that costume parties were all the rage—’
Polly smiled. ‘Very clever. So where do you think you’re going to find all these costumes?’
‘The attics!’
That’s why Polly had been up there earlier. Alice had been too preoccupied with what Ellen had said to think much about it at the time, but it made sense now.
Polly’s smile widened to a grin. ‘You’d give Sherlock Holmes himself a run for his money. Off you go, then. Give me a shout if you need help.’
It was colder up in the attic. The air had a damp, mossy quality, as if it had thickened with age and neglect. At the top of the stairs she found herself on a dingy landing with doors opening off it. The ceiling was much lower here than downstairs, and everything was on a smaller scale, so it felt as if she’d climbed into a doll’s house. Looking over the banister she saw the stairs spiralling down to the familiar world she had left behind, and if she listened hard she could just about hear the distant rise and fall of voices in the kitchen. Reassured, she went forward and saw that the first door was half open.
The room was small, with a sloping ceiling and a tiny fireplace. The walls were covered with sprigged wallpaper, across which sepia patches of damp stretched like a map, and sooty cobwebs quivered in the corners. The light from the little window fell on the confusion of tea chests and suitcases, stacks of paintings, their faces turned to the walls, and a jumble of furniture. There were tennis racquets, Alice saw with a rush of excitement, before noticing how the damp had twisted them and remembering that she had no one to play with anyway.
If the fancy dress costumes were here they were likely to be in a trunk, she thought, edging tentatively through the clutter. She could see one on top of an old chest of drawers by the fireplace and made her way towards it, shutting her mind to the thought of scuttling spiders and scrabbling mice (she didn’t mind mice, actually, with their bright little eyes and tiny pink hands, but spiders were a different matter). The trunk was khaki-coloured canvas, banded with brown leather, and had the initials HRKL stamped upon its top. She lifted the lid and found herself looking at a khaki tunic, folded flat, and breathing in the smell of wool and mildewed earth and something rank and rotten that made her recoil, dropping the lid with a shudder.
Unnerved, she retreated, tripping over a tapestry fire-screen on a spindly stand. Back at the door she rubbed her palms on her skirt and thought about going downstairs to find Polly. As she weighed up the comfort of having her there against the undeniable defeat of enlisting help she realized that she was looking straight at another trunk. And that from beneath its heavy black lid a corner of pale blue satin was visible.
In an instant she was in front of it, opening it up and pulling out the dress. Its slippery skirts were huge: Alice held it against herself and was swamped by folds of satin. She bundled it up and laid it aside, eager to see what else the trunk contained. It was easy to spot Cleopatra’s gold headdress (cleverly made from papier-maché and collapsing a little now) and some rummaging amongst the jumble-sale tangle of tweeds, mothy velvets and fragile silks revealed the white ruffled collar from a clown’s suit. And a thick cream envelope.
Hastily she shoved everything back into the trunk and let the lid fall with a puff of ancient dust. The broken chairs and unloved paintings settled back into stillness and silence as her footsteps echoed down the stairs.
Darling Alice,
Another clue solved – well done! You must have found your way up to the attics and had a look around, which is very brave! I hope you found the fancy dress trunk easily – dear Polly said she would make sure you didn’t have to search too deeply through all the junk. When I was your age that part of the attic was where the maids slept. It was only after the war, when the staff was so much smaller and lots of rooms in the house were closed off that they moved down to the old footmen’s rooms in the servants’ basement, and the attic filled up with all those odds and ends. The Grands should have a giant bonfire one day and clear it all out; I can’t think that anyone in the future would be interested in a broken clothes horse or twenty cracked chamber pots, can you?!
It’s been a long time since I opened the fancy dress trunk myself, and I had to think hard to remember what was in there. I believe it began life as Grandfather’s school trunk, but when Aunt Miranda and I were quite young for a brief time we had a governess (none of them ever stayed very long, mostly because I was so naughty) who was very keen on theatricals, and used to make us learn endless scenes and speeches from Shakespeare. I think we decided that reciting these would be more fun if we could dress up, and that was how the fancy dress trunk came into being. At first it was filled with whatever cast-offs we could swipe – petticoats and tea gowns from Grandmama, Howard’s school shirts and cricketing whites, and a rather lovely silk dressing gown of Grandfather’s that I think was probably taken without his say so, but made a marvellous robe for stately roles – but later, when we had long left the schoolroom, it came into its own again as the craze for costume parties got underway.
I’m not sure how it started, or whose idea it was, but we thought it was frightfully good fun – mostly because people of our parents’ generation found it intolerably childish and infuriating. Their disapproval only encouraged us, I’m afraid. At first the costumes were rather low key – the sort of thing that might easily be dragged out of the nursery fancy dress trunk and completed with a smudge of burnt cork for a moustache or a bit of panstick – but as time went on they got more elaborate and more expensive, until it got to the stage where people would contact their clever little Knightsbridge dressmakers the moment an invitation card arrived.
That’s what Aunt Miranda did, with the blue gown. Did you look at it? Isn’t it quite something? It was an old dress of Grandmama’s from her Season (in 1889!) which Aunt Miranda dragged out of mothballs when word got out about the Napiers’ party. The theme was ‘Come as a Work of Art’ (perhaps you found the card? I think it might have been in my box of treasures) and it was typical of Miranda to be so well organized, and organize Lionel too. The party was just a week before their wedding, so she had lots of other things to think about, but they certainly attracted lots of attention.
I was far less well prepared, as always. I cheated a tiny bit on the clue I gave you because, although I mentioned the French dancing girls, you wouldn’t have found the costumes in the trunk. My friends and I left it terribly late to decide what to go as, but luckily Theo was chums with someone who worked at the Savoy Theatre, and he pleaded with him to let us raid their wardrobe department. What fun that was! We weren’t allowed to borrow any of the main character costumes, so we decked ourselves out in chorus line corsets and frilled petticoats with wide skirts over the top and – with the addition of thick black stockings and long black satin evening gloves – went as a trio of Toulouse-Lautrec’s Moulin Rouge girls. (I showed you one of his paintings in the Tate once, though maybe you were too young to remember.)
The party was held by the Napier twins, Eva and Lucille. You might hear Lucille’s name sometimes; she married an American millionaire and went to New York for a time, but she came back – with a large collection of vulgar jewellery, but not the American millionaire – just before the Wall Street Crash. (Eva fared less well, and I believe is in a sanatorium somewhere suffering with fragile health.) Their father, Josiah Napier, was a mill owner who made an awful lot of money during the war manufacturing webbing used by the army, and he was happy to spend whatever it took for his daughters to be accepted in society.
The Napiers’ parties were always right at the end of the Season, which meant they were still being talked about weeks later in chilly Scottish castles, on country house lawns and sun-baked terraces overlooking the Mediterranean. Perhaps because they came from a slightly different background, their guest lists were always a little more adventurous than those of the more established hostesses. They knew all sorts of people – actresses and businessmen, artists and music hall singers – and weren’t afraid to mix them all up, which was another thing that set their parties apart from the others. One never quite knew who one was going to meet. They were always absolutely spectacular too; designed to be remembered long after the sun had risen and the last guest had left.
That party, in July 1925, was certainly no exception.