Free After the Armistice Ball by Catriona McPherson

deeper into Lena’s favour. So long as nobody signed anything, surely it was worth a sprat to catch a mackerel; ladies could not, I was sure, be accused of entering into gentlemen’s agreements. I should have to conduct the entire thing with my fingers crossed behind my back, of course. In fact, should I perhaps check with Daisy first that she approved of my spinning a line to reel them in on? No, I would fix my bait and land this all by myself.
    ‘Are you all right, Dandy?’ asked Alec Osborne. I had been staring in his direction, not looking at him exactly, but he and Cara had fallen silent and were both watching me.
    ‘You look as though you’d seen Banquo’s ghost,’ said Cara, and Alec shouted with laughter.
    ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘Lady Macbeth. What dread deed are you plotting?’ I gaped, which of course only made it seem worse, and Daisy had to hurry to my aid.
    ‘Or are you trying to remember if you’ve left the bath taps running?’ she said, raising a good laugh from the banking ladies.
    ‘I was just concentrating hard on something,’ I said, then to make sure I had thrown them off I added, ‘Fishing, actually. Bait, cast, catch. There’s a great deal more to it than at first it seems.’
    Clever, clever Dandy. Making my little plans and dropping my little hints. At that point, you see, I still thought it was a game. And my intuitions? I had never had any before, and so had never learned to respect them as others do. I ignored the distant, sickening drumbeat and, full of pride at how I had winkled out my little pile of facts, for the first time in my life I tried to play a cunning hand. If only I hadn’t, if only I had bumbled and blurted as usual, I could have prevented it all. And so although I know they are right when they tell me that evil and madness cannot be contained, I blame myself and I always will.

Chapter Four
    Imagine my surprise and disappointment when I heard that the Duffys would be at their Edinburgh house until the wedding and not in London, where I had been looking forward to following them buoyed along on Daisy’s expenses. I wondered again if there could be money troubles greater than the depressing pinch we were all pretending not to feel. Severe money troubles after all might go some small way towards explaining Lena’s behaviour to Daisy and Silas but Mr Duffy, so far as anyone knew, was still comfortable enough. He had a great deal of his property in Canada of all places; and it was well-tended property, that I did know, because I remembered that he and his young wife had been obliged to go there and look after it for what must have been a few rather bleak years in their early marriage when forests in Canada were all the rage.
    Hugh had tried to persuade his father to buy some of his own. I just remembered this, since he had not quite given up by the time of our wedding although his efforts were beginning to move from urgency towards a sulky despair as the march of the cross-Canada railway made the venture more and more alluring even as the price crept ever upwards out of his reach. In the first year of married life I had heard the words ‘Grand Trunk Pacific Railroad’ repeatedly until I was ready to scream and I could almost feel sorry for Lena Duffy when I thought about her ordeal and could believe that this period of exile was when she began to turn sour. Perhaps, though, one’s mental image of Canada is unfair; perhaps she did not actually live in a log cabin with teams of Chinamen clanging their mallets against the tracks right outside. On the other hand, sometimes cliches get to be cliches by being true, as is the case with the heather, whisky and tartan view of Scotland; these can be found, at least in Perthshire, in unfortunate abundance.
    Even if Canada was civilized, however, all the evidence pointed towards a distinct lack of social whirl for Lena went a bride and returned a matron, her two girls born in quick succession out there, and one imagines