Gunpowder Plot (Daisy Dalrymple Mysteries #15)

Chapter 1

I’m going to learn to drive,” Daisy decided as the Triumph twoseater slowed on entering the village of Didmarsh-under-Edge.

“I quite enjoy it,” said Gwen. “Except for cranking the engine when it’s cold.”

Though the November air was chilly, the sun shone on pale gold Cotswold stone, and Michaelmas daisies still bloomed in cottage gardens.

Here and there, the last bronze and yellow leaves clung to the twigs of tall beeches and elms. “It would be spiffing to be able to hop in the car on a beautiful day like this and buzz out of London into the country for a few hours. I could go and visit Belinda, my stepdaughter, at school. Imagine not having to worry about train timetables and being picked up at the station and all that rot.”

“I don’t mind picking you up at the station,” Gwen assured her, her thin face earnest. Turning into a narrow, steeply rising lane between the churchyard and the Didmarsh Post Office and General Store, she raised her voice to be heard over the roar of the motor. “Would your husband let you drive?”

“Alec? Good gracious, he doesn’t tell me what to do! Just because he’s a policeman, it doesn’t mean he tries to lay down the law. At least . . .”

Daisy paused. She had been going to make an exception for the times when she found herself involved in one of Alec’s cases, when he most definitely, if unsuccessfully, did attempt to control her actions.

But those times were best not talked of, though Gwen had probably heard rumours through the Old Girls’ network.

“I wouldn’t have married him if he’d shown signs of wanting to dictate what I can or can’t do,” she amended.

“This is 1924, after all, not the Victorian Dark Ages. By the way, I hope you haven’t told all your family that Alec’s a policeman.

Lots of people get a funny look in their eyes when they find out I’m a policeman’s wife. ”

“No, you asked me not to and I haven’t. But I wasn’t thinking so much about that; more about . . .” Gwen took her eyes from the road to cast a quick glance at Daisy’s bulging midsection.

“The baby?” Daisy patted the bulge, which her coat so nicely concealed when she was standing but seemed to emphasize when she was seated.

“I suppose I’d better not take driving lessons until after it’s born.

Soon I won’t be able to fit behind a steering wheel.

Another three months! I never dreamt nine months could seem so long. But that has nothing to do with Alec.”

“Daisy!”

Daisy laughed. “Sorry, I mean my being pregnant doesn’t have anything to do with Alec being, or not being, dictatorial. If you see what I mean.”

“I do. I’m just so used to my father always getting his way—not just with Mother, with all of us—that I can’t quite fathom how a modern marriage works. Here we are.”

The lane continued slanting upward across the steep slope, the Cotswold escarpment, between hedges wreathed with old-man’s beard and berried briony.

Soon the hedges gave way to drystone walls.

After a quarter mile or so, always climbing, Daisy saw on their left stone gateposts bracketing a gap in the wall.

Gwen neatly negotiated the sharp turn into the drive between open wrought-iron gates.

In curlicued script picked out in gold, the left-hand gate bore the legend Edge, the right-hand Manor. The small gatehouse looked deserted.

“No gatekeeper since the War,” Gwen observed. “Biddle, our gardener, lives there now. He’s not there during the day, of course, and Mrs. Biddle ‘obliges’ in the house, so we leave the gates open for convenience.”

“Hardly anyone has gatekeepers these days.”

A row of yews sheltered the cottage to the north. As the Triumph drew level with the bushy evergreens, a series of ear-shattering explosions rang out. Daisy’s heart skipped a beat before she realized the car was backfiring.

Or was it? Gwen stamped on the brake, staring back at the trees. Following her gaze, Daisy saw movement amid the dark green foliage, and then her ears rang with a second set of bangs and pops. This time, guessing the cause, she spotted flashes on the road behind the car.

“Squibs.”

“Those little devils!” Gwen jumped out of the car and tore in among the trees.

She emerged triumphant a few moments later, each hand grasping the collar of a small, wiry, and decidedly grubby boy. She marched them over to the car. “Apologize to Mrs. Fletcher at once,” she snapped, “or I’ll tell your grandfather and he’ll give you a proper whopping.”

“Mummy won’t let him,” the younger whined. He was eight or nine, the elder perhaps ten.

“Your mother won’t hear about it till it’s over. Addie’s brats,” she said to Daisy. “I expect you remember my sister Adelaide from school?”

“Vaguely. She’s a couple of years older, isn’t she?”

“Yes, she’ll be thirty in January.” She shook the boys. “Hurry up and apologize, or it’ll be too late.”

“Sorry,” the elder muttered sullenly, echoed by his brother.

Gwen gave them another shake. “You can do better than that.”

“We’re very sorry, Mrs. Fletcher, but it was only squibs. They’re not dangerous or anything.”

“They jolly well are when you throw them at a car,” their aunt pointed out. “I could have been startled enough to run it off the road. Get into the dickey, both of you, and be careful of Mrs. Fletcher’s luggage. Adrian will have to sit on your lap, Reggie.”

“We don’t want to go to the house,” Reggie said mutinously.

Adrian panicked. “We said sorry, Aunt Gwen. You can’t tell Grandfather now!”

“I ought to. But I won’t if you both empty your pockets and give me every squib you possess.”

“But we bought them with our own money!” Reggie protested. “What if we promise not to throw them at cars?”

“Every one,” Gwen said, uncompromising.

Well acquainted with the contents of her eldest nephew’s pockets, Daisy was not surprised at the odds and ends laid out on the running board.

Besides a dozen squibs, and a roll of caps, which Gwen also confiscated, the collection included three fluffy toffees, a matchbox containing two dead beetles, quantities of string, a stub of pencil, several small, smoothly rounded stones, and a catapult. Gwen hesitated over this last.

“Didn’t Aunt Babs take this away from you?”

“She just gave it back. We promised not to shoot at the farm animals or the greenhouses or anything. She kept it for a whole week, and it’s a ’specially good one!”

“Oh, all right. Take your stuff and get in.”

“Why?”

“Because I say so. Because you’re going to tell your mother exactly what you did.

Not that she’ll do anything about it,” Gwen muttered, resuming her place behind the steering wheel, her comment supported by the boys’ insouciance as they climbed into the dickey.

“I have a feeling I’m going to regret giving in over that catapult. ”

“But they’re easy to make,” Daisy pointed out. “They could easily replace it.”

“Too true.”

“Boys will be boys,” Daisy murmured, though she had always hated the second part of her nanny’s favourite saying: “but girls must be young ladies.”

The drive led back across the hillside, for the most part on the level. As they passed some farm buildings on the lower slope, Gwen waved to a woman in trousers talking to a man perched high on the back of a massive cart horse.

“My sister Barbara. She’s the eldest of us.”

“Aunt Gwen?” came Adrian’s quavery voice from behind. “You won’t tell Aunt Babs, will you? About the squibs?”

“Why shouldn’t I?”

“Because she said if we do anything else bad this week, she’ll duck us in the horse trough and she doesn’t care if we catch our death of cold.”

“It would jolly well serve you right.”

“It would be murder,” Reggie said self-righteously.

“Well, we don’t want murder in the family, so I won’t tell her, as long as you behave yourselves till bedtime. Sorry, Daisy, when I invited you, I’d forgotten it was the boys’ half-term holiday. And there are other ructions in the family at present, I’m afraid.”

“Never mind, I’ll just ignore all that and concentrate on my article.

It’s jolly decent of your people to let me come.

My American editor is really keen. They don’t know about the Gunpowder Plot over there, so he thinks it’s frightfully exotic.

It came just before the Mayflower and the Pilgrims and all that, which is when their history begins. ”

Gwen laughed. “If I recall correctly, we started at school with Caesar’s invasion of Britain in something b.c.”

“But after that, there wasn’t much besides Alfred and the cakes until 1066. I hope you’ll be able to tell me the history of your Guy Fawkes celebration. It’d be nice to have some background as well as a description of tomorrow’s fête.”

“Father will be only too glad to expound.”

“Good.” Daisy’s insatiable curiosity got the better of her. “And if you want to let off steam about the ructions, I’ll lend a sympathetic ear . . . or not, as the case may be.”

“It might help to have an outside opinion,” Gwen said thoughtfully. “Besides, after all, your father was a viscount and Father’s only a baronet.”

“I shouldn’t dream of interfering! On that basis or any other.”

“What’s a viscount?” Adrian enquired.

Gwen and Daisy looked at each other in dismay. They had forgotten the little pitchers with big ears in the dickey.

“A lord, you dunce,” said Reggie, his manner insufferably superior.

“I’m not a dunce!” Adrian was at a disadvantage, seated as he was on his brother’s knees, but he made a spirited attempt to bring his fists to bear.

“Horse trough!” Gwen warned.

The rest of the journey was accomplished in peace.