Chapter 11 #2
I stared down at that last letter, my eyes tired from reading them over and over again. I rubbed them, wincing slightly at the bruise on my cheek. I had been at the task for hours after Munro left, and found nothing that might be helpful...
The words seemed to swim about on the notepaper. The ink seemed to almost fade completely, then grew bolder. I rubbed my eyes again as other words slowly appeared.
My imagination? Weariness from too many hours struggling to read all the letters again?
I continued to stare at the letter as a number and other words slowly emerged—a place and a name, No. 4 Morriston Place and the name, Jacobson.
I pushed the letter away as I came out of the chair.
Impossible! It must be my imagination. Words didn’t suddenly disappear and others appear in their place.
Only moments before, there was the simple message that I had read twice that explained Dory had been unable to find any information about the name that I remembered. Yet, it was there now, as if that address and name had just been written.
I paced across the floor of the library, trying to understand things that had happened since I returned.
The movement of a vase that I had not touched.
Thoughts that were not my own. That sense of things, as if I knew them before they occurred.
The encounter at the Grassmarket with the man who was seen outside Dory’s flat in the Close the night she was murdered.
And now words that appeared in her last letter to me.
A gift, Elizabeth Cheney called it. Or a curse? The sort of things people were locked away over.
“Are ye a witch then?” I remembered Munro asking me. I had replied that if I was, I would turn him into a toad. I was confused and angry at the time. And now?
I returned to the table and stared down at those words on that notepaper—No. 4 Morriston Place.
The address meant nothing to me. What was important about it? Had I merely imagined it?
As I stared down at that last letter from my friend, the words slowly began to fade on the page until the original message returned.
I glanced at the clock on the wall. It was very near four o’clock in the afternoon. It would be dark soon, and Munro had not yet returned.
I quickly gathered the letters, tied them together once more, then returned them to my bag. I put on the coat Elizabeth had provided, then returned to the front office.
“Miss Montgomery?” Simon looked up with some surprise, then even greater surprise at my coat and bag.
“Do you know Morriston Place?”
I had no way of knowing the reason that name had appeared. It might have been an illusion—that was still there only moments before. I needed to know what it meant, if anything.
“Morriston Place?” Simon stammered, obviously confused. “Yes, it’s part of the Old Town restoration with some older residences still to be removed.”
I thanked him and turned to go, in spite of the promise I had made not to leave alone. A driver would obviously know how to find it. Not far, Simon had said. Considering his past visits with Campbell, I could easily be back before Munro returned.
“Wait! Miss Montgomery! Mr. Munro did say that ye were not to leave alone while he was gone.”
Yes, well...
“He will not be pleased. He did ask that I remain...” He appeared somewhat uncomfortable at the obvious meaning of that. That I was a child that needed watching over.
“What am I to tell him if he returns and finds ye gone?”
“You could always tell him that you failed in your attempts to dissuade me from leaving, or...” The idea was suddenly there.
It was splitting hairs over the matter, as I had once heard someone say. It had worked. Not without a bit of an argument, but it had been a convincing argument.
“You may accompany me,” I suggested. “Therefore, I will not be alone.”
“Oh dear, Miss Montgomery. You have put me in a very difficult position...” He looked at me as I opened the door to leave.
“I will get my coat and accompany ye. I must lock the office as well.”
I smiled to myself.
He was still lamenting the decision to leave as we found a driver at the edge of Parliament Square.
“How will I explain this to Sir McQuarrie when he indicated that he needed the information I was searching for?”
“I will help you when we return,” I announced.
“You would do that?”
“Of course, in exchange for your silence over the fact that we left the office in the first place.” That was upon the condition that we did return before Munro.
“Agreed,” he said, and locked the door to the office.
I would never have been able to find Morriston Place on my own. Simon was familiar with that part of Old Town and provided directions to the driver.
“Sir McQuarrie had me serve a summons very near there on a past case,” he explained as we crossed the Royal Mile at Princes Street and continued into Old Town at the Cowgate.
“Most cases are usually quite boring, but this was most fascinating.”
As we continued along Cowgate, he told me about the case Sir McQuarrie was given. In the process of the investigation, charges were brought against a man for defrauding the Scottish Government and charity organizations that assisted those who were impoverished and destitute.
It seemed that the man originally appeared before the court in response to charges that he was arrested for robbery, where it was revealed that part of his scheme was to dress as a woman and then solicit men and rob them.
Not an original idea, I thought, considering some of the stories I remembered from when I worked at The Church.
However, a subsequent arrest revealed that he had apparently added extortion to his list of offenses.
He claimed, dressed as a woman once again, that a notable person was the ‘father’ of his unborn child.
One thing led to another, the scheme was revealed when the man hired a private inquiry agent to investigate the poor ‘woman’ and discovered that she, or rather he, was actually a man, including a pregnancy bump as part of his costume.
“It was all most entertaining,” Simon commented, as the driver pulled to a stop at the corner of Cowgate and Guthrie Street.
He pointed out the tenement where he had served the summons as we rode past.
“Morriston Place is the next street over,” Simon called out to the driver.
Or had been at one time. It was now reduced to a pile of charred rubble as the driver pulled to a stop.
I stepped down from the coach, even as I felt a sharp stab of disappointment. Strange as the experience was when the address appeared in that letter, I had hoped to learn something from it.
“What do you know about the place?” Simon inquired as we stared at what was left of the tenement.
How to explain that I knew absolutely nothing about it, except for the address and that name that had appeared in that letter?
I shook my head.
“It was information that I received.” That seemed the easiest way to explain it.
“Terrible shame, that is.”
That had us both turning around.
A slender man in a wool coat with a cap, white beard, and old but sharp brown eyes nodded as he leaned on a walking stick.
“Do ye live nearby?” Simon inquired.
“Hmmph,” he replied in that way, not exactly a word, more a sound. “Some thirty odd years after I turned the livery over to me son. I live just across the way in one of the other tenements that has presently been spared destruction.
“Then I’ll be on the street just as the poor folk in this one. It is said that the fire began at the back of the building in a rubbish pile with embers tossed out. But I have me own thoughts on it.”
He was more than happy to share those on his late afternoon walk.
“What might that be?” I asked.
“The tenants were good people, kept everything neat and clean in spite of the demolition that was to happen. One of the men was constantly sweeping the sidewalk, though I canna argue the need to get out and about even in the bloody fog and rain.
“And the women were always after the young ones to pick up any trash there about. It makes no sense that it started in a rubbish bin as it was picked up the day before.” He shook his head. “Now, they’ve gone scattered about.”
He seemed to know a lot about the people who had lived there.
“I’m told a woman by the name of Jacobson lived here.”
“Aye, miss. That be Mary Jacobson, a verra religious woman. She worked most of her life as a lady’s maid.
“She lived in a flat on the top floor in the last years, poor woman. Seemed to be unhappy. She once spoke to me wife about something she needed to repent for.”
Repent. Forgiveness for something?
I was hoping he might know where she had gone after the fire.
He shook his head. “She didna make it out of the building. The stairwell collapsed and she was trapped on the top floor.” He made that sound again.
“She was a God-fearin’ woman, attended church sometimes twice a week. There was no family that anyone knew of. She was buried in the kirkyard near St. Mary’s Catholic Church.”
I had hoped to meet the woman with that name I remembered from many years before.
What might she have been able to tell me? Something? Anything?
Nothing, as I thanked the man. Simon and I returned to the coach for the ride back to Parliament Square.
Mary Jacobson lived alone, and as far as anyone knew, she had no family. It was said that she had once been a lady’s maid to a well-placed family. Yet, she had lived here in a tenement that was to be torn down, and someone had seen to it that she was properly buried.
The church that she had apparently attended faithfully? One of the charities that often provided such services for the poor?
“Such a sad ending,” Simon said as we crossed Princes Street very near the Square.
But it wasn’t ended. I still did not know who Mary Jacobson was and how I knew that name since childhood.