Epilogue
OLD LODGE, THE HIGHLANDS
In that way that the forests that surrounded the highlands were timeless, it seemed that we had been there only a few days instead of the past few weeks after leaving Edinburgh.
It was done. My friend’s murder, and that of old Meggy Adams, had been solved. The man who had murdered them was himself now dead.
Yet there had been those final moments, when I looked down at Mr. Elias on the sidewalk after his fall from the roof, broken and dying, and it was impossible to feel any remorse.
He stared up at me with a strange expression, something very near fear from a man who seemed to fear nothing. In his fine clothes with those blue feathers, his arrogance, and the coldness that had taken two lives, and very nearly three.
Then he was gone, his spirit appearing to simply vanish, as if he had never really been there, except for the disgusting shell of the charred body that remained.
All I knew in that moment was that he was gone and would never harm anyone again. I was grateful for that. And if one believed that a spirit could rest in peace, then I hoped it was true for Dory.
She had been a true friend to me a long time ago when I had none. In many ways, I suppose it could be said that she had saved my life. I would always be grateful for that, would always miss her, and would always regret that I had not done the same for her.
As for Mr. Elias? Let the devil have him!
Munro said afterward that a man like Elias was merely a man sent by another to do his work. The man who had paid for him to kill Dory and Meggy Adams, and it appeared to kill me as well, was still out there.
“Why?” I asked myself that question a dozen times since. There was no answer.
Munro brought me to Old Lodge, a place with forests that surrounded the rambling hunting lodge that was now a distillery of very fine whisky, a place we had both been to before.
There was no argument as in the past. He simply accepted that I needed to come here, that I had made my own decision, and I would not go back to London. At least not for now.
I took long walks while he worked with Mr. Hutton, who was manager of Old Lodge.
In the long barns where the whisky fermented and shipments of cases of the whisky were sent off in wagons.
The last for the year that would be shipped before winter made it impossible for the wagons to get out.
Or in the office he occupied where he went over the billings for those shipments, with invoices to be sent on his next trip into the nearby village.
I was still trying to understand the ‘gift’ that Elizabeth Cheney had first recognized. She had called it both a curse and a blessing in the days after that encounter on the roof at Albany Street.
What was it? Where did it come from? Was it something I was born with, this strange ability that seemed to grow with each passing day? Did my mother possess this ability?
Munro had spoken of it, in a moment of anger.
‘What are ye, then? A witch?’
Women had been persecuted for witchcraft for centuries.
“That doesna mean it isn’t real, dear. Only ye can decide what ye will do with the gift ye have,” Elizabeth had told me before leaving Edinburgh.
“Ye have a good heart. Otherwise, Kip and myself might be dead as well. You are the only one who can decide if ye will accept your gift or not, and how ye will use it.”
Perhaps that was the reason Munro had remained distant, leaving each morning with Mr. Hutton, the manager at Old Lodge, to inspect the distillery or go over the records, or some other task that pulled him away.
There were times when I looked up to find him watching me with a frown, as if he expected me to change into some creature. And then he would be gone again, closed off in the room he usually occupied when he visited Old Lodge on business for Lady Antonia.
I had sent letters to both Lady Antonia and Mikaela and explained things that I had not previously. I informed them both about Dory’s death, that it had been resolved, without the details of how it all finally ended.
In those letters I had also explained that I intended to remain in Edinburgh.
As they both were aware, there was still the reason I had come there in the first place—to find my real family.
I had simply closed each letter by saying that I felt the need to go to Old Lodge, and Munro had agreed to travel there with me.
It felt like coming home, in a strange way. It was something that was difficult to explain, and so I had simply left it that I wanted to see Old Lodge again, even as winter set in. And it was here that I experienced things even stronger than I had in Edinburgh.
There were places that were familiar in Edinburgh, but I was certain I had never been before, that ‘knowing’ of something before it happened, images that appeared then disappeared, and that strange energy that began in my hands as it had when I first encountered Mr. Elias.
And then that last night on the roof of the tenement at Albany Street.
I didn’t know how to explain it, and so I hadn’t spoken of it.
Munro was there now, very close, a presence felt rather than heard as he approached through the new-fallen snow that had covered Old Lodge and the surrounding forest.
In a way, we were both castoffs, I thought. One who chose not to look back, and myself, who wanted very much to know where I had come from. It was an answer that was not there yet.
Possibly the curse that was part of the gift, that Elizabeth Cheney had spoken of. Things I saw and knew, and other things that seemed to appear almost every day. As if a door had finally opened and refused to be closed again.
“Mrs. Hutton was worrit when ye didna return, although she was certain no harm would come to ye out here by yerself. There will be more snow by nightfall.”
“Not for a few more hours yet,” I replied with that way of knowing things that had grown stronger since arriving.
It was the most conversation we’d shared the past few days.
My coat, that had replaced the one Elizabeth had provided me, hung over his arm, along with the wool scarf I had purchased at the Grassmarket just before that encounter with the man we now knew as Mr. Elias.
When I left the lodge, I hadn’t intended to be overlong, just a walk about as I had almost every day. I had worn only a pair of Mr. Hutton’s old work pants belted tight about my waist to prevent them falling to my feet, a wool jumper, and a pair of rubber boots from an earlier visit.
Munro held the coat for me. I slipped my arms into the sleeves. He wrapped the scarf about my neck, his fingers lightly brushing my cheek.
“The bruise is almost gone,” he commented, his fingers warm and gentle.
“There’s only a wee bit of yellow left.”
He was thoughtful. “Mrs. Hutton told me about wot ye saw just before evening last night. A white stag?" he was thoughtful.
“I’ve heard the stories about them. Still, I never knew anyone who saw one. I thought it an old superstition. But she believes in the old ways,” he continued. “It’s said there’s power in those who see the white stag.”
He seemed to be searching for something more to say. His shoulder shifted against the cold as he thrust his hands into the pockets of his long coat.
“I know the pain of losing someone ye cared about, but ye canna change wot happened. Or the choice yer friend made to help ye.”
I had met Munro years before when Mikaela Forsythe brought me to London. He was always stoic, closed into himself, going about quietly while managing Lady Antonia’s business affairs. Yet always with that way he had that seemed to see and know everything.
There were stories among the servants at Sussex Square that none dared cross him, that he had a dark past I had glimpsed more than once while working with Mr. Brodie and Mikaela on one of their inquiry cases.
Uncompromising was a word that came to mind, dangerous, cold, someone who had no feelings for another. And then the ‘stories’ the servants whispered about. One that he had killed a man when he was just a lad.
How was it then that he seemed to understand wot I was feeling now? The loss of someone who had protected and cared about me? And the guilt that I had been the cause of her death?
I was grateful for the cold as I blinked back tears at those simple words he shared. Impossible as it seemed, I knew he was right. Dory had made her own decision to help me. But that didn’t take away the pain over her death.
I would always miss her, and yet I thought of that strange encounter when it seemed that she appeared to me, as real as if she was still alive. I would always carry that with me.
“Wot do ye want to do now?” Munro asked, his breath forming a cloud in the cold air.
I smiled to myself. There was a time when he would not have bothered to ask what I wanted, but would simply have ordered me about.
I had given that a lot of thought. It should have been enough that I had helped find the one responsible for Dory’s murder.
“I want to find the man who hired Mr. Elias,” I replied.
“Ye should go back to London. Ye would be safe there. Ye would have work with Brodie and Miss Mikaela.”
I looked over at him, that intense blue gaze watching me. One final attempt to persuade me to do wot he thought best?
“I am not a child,” I replied. “I make my own decisions. Sir McQuarrie has offered me a position as an assistant. I can take care of myself.”
He nodded and let out a long sigh.
“Aye, it appears that ye can.”
There was no argument.
It had started to snow once more, the flakes coming down light at first, then thicker.
I began the walk back, following the path he had made through the snow from the lodge. And Munro was there, his hand on my arm, steadying me as the toe of my boot caught on a branch hidden beneath the snow.
“Ye canna do this alone. I will go with ye when the weather turns.”
I smiled to myself.
“If we are to work together, you should call me Lily, particularly since I have no way of knowing my real name.”
I caught the side look he gave me as we neared the main lodge.
“Ye should do the same,” he replied. “My given name is James, though I dinna know where it comes from. Or the name Munro, for that matter.”
Compromise. How remarkable.
And now there was Kip. A boy with no name, except the one given to him on the street.
“Aye, the wee beggar, a future thief in the makin’ if ever there was one," Munro replied.
I was convinced that the future was already firmly in place. Whenever he was about, I found things missing from my pockets, usually returned with a devilish grin.
He was presently with Elizabeth Cheney. I was confident that she could handle the situation. And he was most fond of the biscuits and scones she prepared.
As I had left the flat at Albany Street to travel north, she had made the comment that it was quite an adventure to have a child about, as she and Mr. Cheney had no children.
I had been concerned that Kip might pinch the china or a piece of tableware, then sell it to someone on the street. There had been a brief conversation with him in parting, that some might call a threat.
“Ye are to be respectful, and nothing is to go missing,” I told him. “Or I will turn ye into a toad.”
“Told him that, did ye?” Munro commented with a glint of humour in that blue gaze.
It was, of course, an idle threat. It only mattered that Kip believed it.
So, it was decided that we would return to Edinburgh together, and take up the search for the man who had hired Mr. Elias, even though Munro warned that it could be dangerous.
“A person who has already had two people killed, will not stop,” he had told me on the train north from Edinburgh.
I understood what he was saying. Still, it was something I had to do.
I stopped now as I felt rather than heard a sound and looked back over my shoulder.
A white stag stood where we had been in that clearing only a short while before. It was mysterious and magnificent, with a rack of antlers that were almost as invisible as he was amidst the white of the snow.
For a moment the creature’s dark gaze met mine and I sensed something I had not before. Whatever the gift was, whatever it revealed, it was part of me, and I shivered at the certainty of it.
“Are ye all right?” Munro asked.
Did he see it? Perhaps not. He would surely have said if he had.
Was it only my imagination?
Old stories of crows, white stags, and witches?
Munro reached out to steady me once more in the thick snow that rapidly filled our footsteps and made each new one treacherous.
I took his hand, my own suddenly cold with the weight of an old secret that had revealed itself.
I glanced back at the clearing once more.
The stag was still there beautiful, powerful, and mysterious.
It continued to stare at me.
What did I see there?
It slowly turned back toward the forest, stopped, and looked back at me, then disappeared through the swirling snow...