Dandy Gilver and a Deadly Measure of Brimstone Read Free Page B

that a hydropathic one would also be devoted to the doctrine of temperance there was not a chance of getting him to stay there. Surely though, I told myself, there would be a house somewhere in the environs that we could have on a short let. If Moffat were anything like Crieff and Peebles, or indeed Harrogate or Buxton or Bath, or
any
town where sulphurous waters bubbled up and Victorian merchants got rich from them, there would be any number of sandstone villas left over from the heyday. I would set Gilchrist, Hugh’s factor, on it in the morning.
    Before retiring, I composed a letter to Mr Addie, stipulating terms as he had asked but also requesting a meeting, for his to me had been as short on useful detail as it was long on epithets. At the beginning of the third paragraph I hesitated long enough to make a blot and then plunged on. It was easier in writing than face-to-face and if I offended him it would save me the trip on the train.
    ‘Mr Osborne and I will carry out our investigations with the utmost rigour and attention,’ I wrote. ‘If we find cause to question the Fiscal’s findings we shall report to you with all possible haste and shall stand by our conclusions as far as testifying in a court of law or at a second inquiry. Furthermore, in this case as in any, if we discover evidence of a crime we shall turn it over to the proper authorities as any responsible citizen would.’
    Nice and pompous. My hope was that he would be so impressed with the rectitude of my expression that he would miss the veiled rebuke. I signed myself D.D. Gilver, thinking that there was no point in meeting trouble at the gate, and took myself off to bed, walking at Bunty’s pace and listening outside all three bedroom doors on the way. Pages were turning in Teddy’s room but his breathing was too quiet to be heard through mahogany; Donald was wheezing a bit in his sleep but it was nothing to the dreadful gurgling and rattling one might have heard even a week ago, and Hugh was snoring with rampant abandon. No one who was not well on the mend could snore that way without coughing, surely.
    In my room, I dragged the low stool from my dressing table over to the side of my bed and Bunty ascended in her new stately way, like a dowager clambering into her carriage. I banished from my mind the memory of her taking the width of the room in three bounds and sailing through the air to land in the middle of my counterpane with feet splayed and tail whipping strongly enough to flutter the curtains.
    It took over a fortnight, in the end, to arrange our removal to Moffat but the delay was propitious in a number of ways. First, it gave me plenty of time to commune with plumbers by letter and on the telephone. Also, Hugh and the boys were at the perfect pitch of convalescence, rallied enough to be ready for a change of scene after weeks of their bedroom walls and the west terrace on warm afternoons with many blankets, but not so far recovered as to impose their masculine wills and drag the party off northwards to a moor or river to start the whole exercise again. What is more, the short wait for quarters meant that we could take Pallister and Mrs Tilling with us. They could hardly have come along in their dressing gowns when they were utterly bedridden and they would have baulked at missing out on the joys of Gilverton sans Gilvers in the ordinary way of things, but when I floated the notion of the healing waters and the sitz baths they each got a wistful, yearning sort of look in their eyes, never mind that neither they nor I knew what a sitz bath might be. (I have since learned that it is a fussy arrangement of large and small tubs filled with hot and cold water, between which one hops about, feet in the hot, seat in the cold, then seat in the hot, feet in the cold, until the doctor declares the process complete. It seems designed to frustrate the very reasonable hopes one might have that a bath will provide relaxation and comfort and it is one of