Chapter 14
Ihad my suspicions about that in the days that followed.
While I remembered what happened on that roof, how it happened was something I struggled with.
Elizabeth insisted that I rest at the flat to recover, as she put it. She refused to hear of my going anywhere else. She also refused to ask any questions about what had happened. I was certain that would come.
“And who would take care of ye?” she had demanded, with a narrow-eyed look at Munro.
There had been the details to attend to. The report he gave Inspector Landry about that night, after he had found a constable on that ride back to Albany Street and ordered him to find the inspector. After what he learned from a woman by the name of Big Kate at a brothel.
I didn’t want to know how he learned of her connection to Mr. Elias, and did not ask.
Mikaela Forsythe once told me there were times it was best not to know some things.
I had provided a statement to Inspector Landry regarding Mr. Elias’s death in the fall from the roof.
“He must have slipped.” I had looked over to Kip, who grinned but said nothing to the contrary.
“Wot of the burn marks on the body?” he had then asked to be thorough.
Kip provided the answer to that question.
“Cigarette.”
“A cigarette? His coat was burned away from his body. It was as if the man was roasted alive.”
“It was a large cigarette. I saw it,” Kip insisted.
He had become a regular companion at the flat as well.
I taught him how to play checkers when Elizabeth provided the game board. He preferred the game of Monopoly that he acquired in a manner I did not want to know.
He simply showed up with it. I beat him two games out of three. But he was a very quick learner. It was good that we played for tokens not real money.
Munro called at the flat every day, but there was something different in his manner. He was quiet, as if there was a great deal going on behind that blue gaze every time I found him watching me.
He had not asked about that night, nor had I spoken of it.
The fourth day after, when he called once again at the flat, I announced that I had enough of checkers, Monopoly, and coddling. I was going out.
There was another reason as well. An important one.
Without a word, and no question regarding the expense, Munro had made arrangements for Dory to be buried in Greyfriars kirkyard. The small ceremony was to take place this day. I insisted on attending.
There was no argument, he simply made arrangements for a driver to take us there for the midday burial, in that same quiet manner of the past days.
I have often thought of cemeteries as gloomy, sad places, yet there was a moment when the sun broke through, a very brief moment, as the vicar said words over Dory even though he never knew her.
There was no judgment or criticism over the life that had been forced upon her. He simply repeated the words that were inscribed on the simple stone marker along with her name—Dear friend.
“Who had those words engraved?” I asked.
“It seemed appropriate,” Munro replied. “She was yer good friend, and I know the value of that.”
I paid my respects. Yes, I thought, the best good friend.
We rode in silence to Parliament Square, where I learned from Sir McQuarrie there would be no further inquiries regarding my part in Mr. Elias’s plunge from the roof of the tenement at Albany Street.
He also expressed his gratitude for the research I had done for his court case.
“Most admirable,” he said.
I waited for the rest of it. For a woman? I thought.
He didn’t say it, instead he offered me a position in his office.
“Mr. Sinclair has reminded me that he is often overburdened with the work I give him. If ye should chose to remain in Edinburgh, I would offer ye a position as an assistant. That is, providing Lady Montgomery would not object.”
I assured him that she would not.
It was a very generous offer. And the truth was, there was still the reason I had come to Edinburgh, to find my family. And now?
“I want to pay a visit to the Foundling Hospital where I lived for a short time,” I confided in Munro, even though Sir McQuarrie made inquiries and learned that it was now a hospital for wounded soldiers.
I insisted and Munro accompanied me.
It was a good distance from the central part of Edinburgh. Set apart years before, and now, so that it was not an unpleasant reminder for others?
I walked some of those same hallways and corridors that I had as a very young child, and that last time with Abby, who remained behind. I found a small stone in the adjacent graveyard where there were far too many small headstones of children who arrived but never left.
There were no longer any records at what was now called the Queensferry Hospital for the War Wounded. Those had all been removed and sent to nearby St. Mary’s Church, as had the nuns who worked at the hospital when I was there.
My search at Saint Mary’s was for another day. Once again, Munro accompanied me. He seemed to understand that it was important for me to unravel the secrets of my past. As he might have done as well? I wondered. He never spoke of it.
I did learn that first day that the nun who had beat me for stealing an apple had died the year before. I felt no remorse, only relief that she would never again inflict the sort of pain that I had experienced on anyone else.
She was buried in the cemetery adjacent to Saint Mary’s. I had no interest in seeing a stone monument to someone so cruel. It was enough that she was gone.
I spent three days after, returning to go through another set of voluminous records in search of some information that might tell me something about myself, my family, how I came to be at the Foundling Hospital.
It was painstaking, but I persisted. It was a cold, wintry afternoon, when an assistant to the bishop returned to the room where records were kept that I was allowed to use.
“Miss Montgomery, you did say the name of the woman was Jacobson?”
I looked up to find Father Michael with a leatherbound registry in hand.
“I may have found what you are looking for from the date 6 April 1880.” He crossed the room and placed the enormous book before me and pointed to the faded ink.
It was there, along with the name of the person who had brought me there!
Female, age three years, goes by name of Lily.
Surrendered into the care of St. Joaquim’s Foundling Hospital by Mary Jacobson, no relation.
06 April 1880
I read it, then read it again, then sat back in the chair where I had spent the last days.
I had found myself, or at least that part of myself that had been surrendered to the Foundling Hospital by Mary Jacobson—whose name I had somehow remembered, now gone.
But I was unable to answer so many more questions.
I wrote the information in my notebook, thanked Father Michael, then waited on the steps at the main entrance of the cathedral for Munro to return.
“I won’t need to return tomorrow,” I told him.
“Ye found wot ye were lookin’ for?”
A name and a date. Yet, I had hoped for more.
Who would surrender a child? Cast them off, unwanted? Or was there another reason? Something so dangerous to someone that it made her a target for murder?
Mary Jacobson was the connection, but she was no relation.
How had I come into her care as a child? Was I no more than a nameless bairn on the street, cast away by a poor woman who couldn’t care for one?
“I have handled business for her ladyship,” he said on the long ride back into the city with its monuments and parks, tenements and marketplaces soon under a new layer of snow that began to fall.
I had thought about all of it. Everything that had happened. The secrets, and other things I didn’t yet understand.
“I’m not going back to London,” I replied. I looked at him then, that sharp blue gaze softer around the edges, a change that I had noticed the past few days after he found me on the roof of the tenement on Albany Street.
There were other things that had changed, small things. When we had argued afterward with no small amount of criticism over the danger I had put myself in with the encounter with Mr. Elias, he had simply stopped, shook his head and walked away.
I considered it a small victory, but a victory, nevertheless.
And now…
“I need to think, to try and understand everything.”
In the past, he would have made some Scottish sound, called me an irresponsible chit, and added that someone should put me over their knee.
None of that was there. No criticism, no reprimand as if I was a child, no threats to pack me back to London where I belonged.
“Aye, then.”