Chapter Two
It feels odd to stand steady three days later when they dock at Leith, disembarking to a party of smart soldiers come to greet the colonel.
In high spirits, the men sing a ditty about the Midlothian Boys, by which, Araminta surmises, they mean their own regiment.
There’s something alarming in the third verse about beheading Irish rebels.
The February weather after a choppy few days on the water seems settled but biting-cold, far worse than London, though Araminta comforts herself both cities lie under the same bright winter sky.
The journey has felt long, due in part to the weather but also to the company.
The captain, a thin, capable man from Liverpool, allowed the colonel to run on each night at dinner.
‘Edinburgh Castle is not open to the public,’ Fraser announced.
‘Yet the sheer volume of requests to visit the place has become overwhelming, tourists arriving in the Scottish capital in increasing numbers.’ It transpired that tour guides have lobbied the colonel for open afternoons when they might bring any Tom, Dick or Harry to gawp at the battlements.
Foreigners included. Fraser has naturally resisted.
Edinburgh Castle is a military installation.
‘You of course, madam, are not a tourist,’ he allowed Araminta with a gentlemanly flourish.
One morning she caught him tarrying with Eleanor outside her cabin door, when the girl was fetching a breakfast tray from the galley. Araminta, barefoot, declared, ‘I’m seasick, Eleanor.’ A lie. ‘I need you.’ Then once the maid was inside: ‘What did the colonel want?’
Eleanor was forthright as ever. ‘Nothing, ma’am. He asked where I was from.’ Her soft green eyes were clear.
‘Did you tell him?’ Araminta enquired.
‘Yes, ma’am. I don’t think he meant anything by it. He’s never visited Wimbledon but seemed set to talk about how he had never been there, nonetheless.’
The women laughed. The unwanted attention of gentlemen has not yet come up in the three years the maid has been in Araminta’s employ, but both women are aware that gentlemen sometimes take their chances and that it does not generally work out well for young women in service.
Araminta felt glad the girl was billeted in her cabin, sleeping in a hammock strung between the beams.
Now, along the dock at Leith the cobblestones are bound by icy puddles that catch the sunlight like intricate mirrors.
Araminta turns up the collar of her sober, chocolate-brown overcoat and flexes her fingers inside oxblood leather gloves.
Eleanor has wrapped an extra dun woollen half-blanket over her shoulders.
Having extracted themselves from the colonel’s repeated offers of help, the women travel in a hired carriage up Leith Walk, past cottages where snowy washing hanging on line after line looks as if it is frozen stiff.
At a church at the entrance to the city, two pink-faced young ministers, one very thin and one very fat, argue as they push past each other into a carriage.
From a distance they remind Araminta of crows squabbling over scraps in Richmond Park.
Continuing through the New Town, Eleanor squeals, ‘Oh look, ma’am,’ as she catches a glimpse of the castle, perched impressively on a craggy lump of volcanic rock that makes an incongruous backdrop to the pale sandstone townhouses built in a pleasingly regular grid according to Mr James Craig’s design.
Sweeping past the elegant Robert Adam facades on Charlotte Square and down a steep hill on the far side, the carriage pulls up at number four Glenfinlas Street.
The townhouses here run to five storeys, which Araminta thinks is a lot for one old lady to keep up and she not in good health.
Eleanor supervises the coachman unloading the luggage as Araminta climbs the four shallow stone steps that lead to the front door.
She lets out a sigh, her breath clouding, and wonders if she is in time, envisioning a tiny, exhausted, grey woman, skin and bone on her deathbed, waiting for the great niece she has never met before she can be at peace.
She rings the brass bell and the door is opened by a butler who is unaccountably tall, with fading ginger hair and bright eyes.
‘My name is Araminta McKenzie Moore,’ she starts, unsure how to explain.
‘Ah yes,’ the man cuts in. He clicks his fingers and a smartly dressed footman appears. ‘Douglas will fetch the bags,’ he says. ‘Please come in, Mrs Moore. Miss McKenzie is waiting.’
The hallway is painted pale green and there’s a large gold-foiled mirror beside the front door next to a substantial statue of Apollo in pristine white marble and a coat of arms mounted on the wall.
Araminta cocks her head. The motto above the arms is written in some foreign language. Not Latin. Nor English either.
‘I’m Brodie,’ the butler introduces himself, as he takes her coat.
Araminta’s fingers feel weak. The hallway smells of tea leaves and brass polish. On an oak table there is a porcelain vase of surprisingly early daffodils, which must have been brought on in a greenhouse. Even in Richmond the snowdrops are scarcely out.
‘Miss McKenzie is in the drawing room,’ Brodie says and leads the way up the thickly carpeted stone stair.
On the landing they pass a wide window of old-fashioned leaded glass that distorts the view of a garden with a low mews beyond.
Araminta can just make out a fat white gull with a vivid-orange beak perched on a neighbouring roof.
‘How is my great aunt’s health?’ Araminta asks. She has helped to nurse two mortally afflicted neighbours in her time. One before her marriage and one afterwards. Their ends were slow but peaceful, sleep taking the last rattling breath. She’s not afraid of death, but still.
‘Miss McKenzie is a marvel,’ Brodie says and opens the door to the drawing room.
Inside, the yellow satin upholstered seats are empty.
The room, in fact, is over-furnished, as Araminta judges it.
Endless paintings in contrasting frames dot three of the walls: an infant in a white frock beside a pug; a young woman wearing a tartan sash next to a harpsichord, in her hands a ferret, alongside another woman next to a globe, holding a sword.
There are too many to take in. The fourth wall is furnished with a packed set of bookcases that run from floor to cornice.
A fire roars in the grate, surrounded by an ornate forest-green marble mantle with wide creamy veins, that Araminta is sure would excite Johnathan.
‘Good Lord!’ says a woman’s voice. ‘You look just like your dear mother.’
Araminta scans the busy room again and realises that the observation comes from a figure balancing on a ladder that runs along the bookcases. The old woman is dressed in red, in contrast to her snowy-white hair, which is mostly covered by an old-fashioned, pink turban.
‘Allow me to assist, madam.’ Brodie offers his hand.
Miss McKenzie bats him away and descends the ladder alone. ‘Let me look at you,’ she commands.
Araminta finds she has nothing to say. She opens her arms. It’s the only thing she can think to do. She isn’t going to twirl like a child.
‘Pale, aren’t you?’ the old lady pronounces.
‘You say I look like my mother?’
‘I think so. Yes. But whiter. Dear Grainne was a sonsie lass,’ Miss McKenzie pronounces.
Araminta has no idea what this means. ‘I thought you were dying.’ The words escape.
The old lady laughs. It’s a thick, chesty sound. ‘Oh aye,’ she says. ‘The doctor says I’ll be lucky to make it to Easter. We don’t have much time. How was your trip?’
‘Satisfactory.’
‘I always think by stage is best. When I visited Paris in my younger days, I only took the boat where I had to. One has much more a sense of the journey by road. You’ve made excellent time, my dear.’
‘The solicitor’s letter said it was urgent,’ Araminta gets out.
‘It certainly is.’ The old lady sits down on one of the yellow chairs. ‘I shouldn’t have left it so long, but one becomes busy and I hoped not to bother you. Brodie, we shall require tea. Nettle, I think, and mushroom flan and orange thyme cake.’
Brodie disappears obediently. Great Aunt McKenzie motions towards the sopha. ‘Please sit.’
Araminta does so elegantly, her hands in her lap, her legs folded to one side. There’s a pause where neither woman knows where to start.
‘My name is Eilidh in the Gaelic. You might call me Aunt Helen, I suppose, if you can’t manage it,’ Great Aunt McKenzie announces. ‘Or Ellie. Some of my friends used to call me that when I was younger.’
Araminta studied Greek, Latin and Aramaic as a schoolgirl. Her first interest was in ancient stones with carvings inscribed upon Roman graves and Greek temples. She shifted her focus to the stone itself when she met Johnathan.
‘Eilidh,’ she sounds the name. Aay-lee. ‘I think I can manage even if I don’t speak Gaelic. Great Aunt Eilidh,’ she repeats, trying it out.
Now the old lady is staring in a manner that seems outright rude. ‘I wonder . . .’ she says, but her voice trails.
‘I’ve never met any of my relations,’ Araminta announces. ‘Not as an adult. I can’t remember my mother.’
‘Your father lived abroad as I recall.’
‘Bombay.’
‘I met him once,’ Aunt Eilidh reveals. ‘I thought he was a handsome, resourceful lad. He left you well provided for as I understand it.’
Araminta blushes. Johnathan deals with the money. It doesn’t feel fitting to talk about it with another lady, but then Eilidh McKenzie is unmarried. ‘Who deals with your affairs, Aunt Eilidh?’
‘I do, of course,’ the old lady replies, her expression making it clear that Araminta is disappointing her.
‘And we have no other family?’ It feels indelicate to say it, but Araminta wants to be clear.
‘Not anymore,’ the old woman says sadly.
They are both glad when Brodie returns carrying a mahogany tray inlaid in ivory with the same crest as on the wall downstairs. He sets everything down. Araminta peers at the words.