Chapter Three
Eleanor knows she ought to be unpacking, but she has other concerns, and with her mistress occupied and the luggage in the care of Douglas, the footman, she decides to attend her own business while she has the chance.
She dodges out of the house by the basement door, up the stone stairs and down the steep slope of Glenfinlas Street, before turning right along a thin, whinstone pavement at the end of which there is a half-frozen water trough for the horses.
Edinburgh is considerably colder than London, the chill nipping her cheeks.
To the rear of one of the houses Eleanor notices a young man smoking under a tree.
He’s wearing livery. Most likely a coachman, she decides, as she dives into her pocket to withdraw a crumpled piece of paper.
‘Excuse me,’ she says. ‘I’m looking for Princes Street.’
The young man showily exhales a long cloud of tobacco smoke and eyes the young housemaid. ‘You’re new in town?’
Eleanor holds out the piece of paper on which the name is scrawled. ‘I’m commissioned by my master, sir, to visit Mr McGhie’s establishment at number two Princes Street. We’re lately arrived from London.’
The fellow eyes the paper. ‘Yes, that’s what it says.’
Eleanor bites her lip. She cannot read, but she assumed so. The note feels like it gives her authority. That’s why she keeps it with her.
‘That’s the other end of town. A good mile off.’ The fellow motions back up the hill and adds, ‘Princes Street runs below the castle. You cannae miss it.’
Eleanor worries about the time. Two miles there and back means she’ll need most of an hour, but Mrs Moore is likely to spend a decent stretch with her great aunt, being only just now introduced.
‘Thank you,’ she says and drops a strange little half curtsey before turning up the hill.
Sparrows and robins are eating crumbs from the pavement as she passes onto Princes Street, taken aback by the scale of this town.
Edinburgh seems unexpectedly grand for somewhere so far from London.
Along the street, at intervals, fine carriages are waiting.
On the other side of the road, a maid with three French poodles emerges from the private garden at the foot of Castle Rock.
A costermonger offers beetroot as if she’s singing at the opera.
Eleanor keeps walking, her earlobes numb with the cold, until at the end of the street, the castle behind her, there’s a shop with a green and gold sign and crates of spirits in the window.
She can read the number two and other words which must be Mr McGhie’s name, she supposes.
A bell sounds as she enters and a shop boy in a brown cloth apron approaches. ‘Can I help, miss?’
‘I’m looking for Mr McGhie,’ Eleanor gets out, her eyes darting.
This feels ludicrously dramatic. Her hands are quivering.
She shoves them into her pockets and wishes she hadn’t promised to come, but she owes the gentleman.
She lied to the lad who was smoking. She’s on a mission not for Mr Moore but for the gentleman in Kew who got her the position with her mistress three years ago.
The man who has been paying her an extra shilling a month ever since he did so.
A man whose name she doesn’t know. Her stomach shifts as it occurs to her that in fact, despite the shillings, it’s possible she now owes Mrs Moore more loyalty than she owes the gentleman.
She isn’t sure. When she was homesick for her parents’ tiny cottage at Wimbledon, those first months of the job at Richmond, Mrs Moore was kind to her.
Apart from anything else, as a ladies’ maid she should really be known as Thrale, but she asked Mrs Moore to use her given name and Mrs Moore said that she should be known by whichever name she liked and allowed her to choose the fabric for her uniform besides: two apricot cotton dresses she sewed in the first fortnight of her employment along with three long, almost sheer linen aprons to tie on top.
The large brick house at Richmond was intimidating at first, but Eleanor now feels at home there.
The shop boy disappears into an office behind the mahogany counter. He reappears with a handsome man wearing a fancy taffeta cravat. The gent smiles in a way to which Eleanor is most unaccustomed – as if he is receiving a visit from a dear friend. The air smells of sawdust with a touch of brandy.
‘Miss Thrale?’
‘Yes, sir. Eleanor.’
‘I’m Angus McGhie. Come through.’
The office adds the scent of leather ledgers to the air, one of which is lying open on the desk.
Mr McGhie sits down but does not offer Eleanor the other chair which remains against the wall.
He smooths his moustaches as she stands as if in the dock.
She suddenly feels as monochrome as a shadow.
Mr McGhie is hale, his hair chestnut and his skin lit with a healthy glow.
‘You’ve arrived, then,’ he says at length. ‘I expected you yesterday.’
‘The ship ran into weather, sir. We docked this morning at Leith.’
‘Your address in Edinburgh?’
‘Glenfinlas Street, sir. Number four.’
‘Of course. Well, Miss Thrale, we’ve been waiting a long time for this visit.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘You have no idea.’
Eleanor really hasn’t, but she has never been in the position to turn down the shilling a month picked up on her day off from the gentleman in Kew, who sometimes asks odd questions about the mistress’s household.
Letters received. Visitors at Christmas and Easter.
Books that the mistress is reading. Over the months and years Eleanor has told herself that this contribution is ‘money for jam’.
That is, until a few evenings ago when according to the ongoing instructions of her secret benefactor, she sent a message boy with a note simply marked X when she learned the mistress was leaving town.
Later she sneaked out at one of the clock into the freezing darkness to meet the gentleman in his carriage, parked, as arranged, at the foot of the hill.
He seemed excited. That’s when he gave her the scrap of paper that directed her here.
‘Has your mistress said how long she intends to stay?’ Mr McGhie asks.
Eleanor shakes her head. ‘She only said that she wants to get home to Richmond as soon as she can sort out her great aunt’s estate.’
‘But Miss McKenzie is not dead,’ Mr McGhie points out.
‘No, sir. She’s mortally ill, or so my mistress was told in the letter.’
Mr McGhie considers this. ‘The old woman attended the races two weeks ago and was at church last Sunday in her usual pew,’ he states, quite baldly. ‘She gave a spirited rendition of the hymns as I understand it.’
Eleanor can hardly comment on this although she thinks Edinburgh seems rather large for every one of its residents to know what the others are up to.
That is the stuff of the village where she grew up, her father’s three sheep grazing on the common.
She wants to ask if the gentlemen are planning to thieve Mistress McKenzie, for she will not be party to that.
She has always assumed the gentleman with the shillings was a jilted suitor and harmless, but there’s an edge to Mr McGhie’s questioning which is making her uneasy.
‘I want to know what your mistress and her great aunt talk about. You will come on the daily, Miss Thrale, and let me know.’
Eleanor loiters. She wants to say with it being an hour from Glenfinlas Street and back, she might not have time to come every day, but McGhie opens the drawer of his desk and removes not one, but two shillings.
‘If you take a cab, I’ll instruct the boy to pay the driver,’ he says. ‘We don’t want them to miss you.’
Eleanor pockets the money and manages a curtsey. ‘Yes, sir.’
She walks back along Princes Street as fast as she can.
As she passes the muddy wasteland at the bottom of the large mound that leads to the castle, it occurs to her that she should have asked the gentleman to supply a cab, though it’s too late now.
When she gets to the townhouse, Eleanor worries that she’s been too long.
Hoping for the best, she sneaks through the basement door and immediately it’s clear something is wrong.
From the kitchen emanates the sound of wailing.
A young, grubby kitchen maid with several teeth missing sits howling at a scrubbed pine table.
The two housemaids stare at their well-blacked boots, holding hands, while Cook, wisps of greying hair peeking out from her cap, pours cheap Cognac into four pottery cups.
‘What’s happened?’ Eleanor asks.
Cook looks up. Her cheeks are wet. ‘God save us,’ she says, ‘the mistress has up and died. Why aren’t you with your lady, lassie? She’ll have need of you.’
Eleanor pulls off her shawl as she climbs the stairs.
On the first floor, the drawing room door is open.
Araminta perches on the edge of a canary-yellow sopha, her face even paler than usual.
Eleanor loiters, realising that someone else is there; a long-faced gentleman who hands the mistress a glass of an odd, vivid-green mixture.
‘Thank you, Dr Anderson,’ the mistress says.
The doctor, who is middle-aged and wearing tan britches that are too large, hovers.
‘Down in one, Mrs Moore,’ he advises. ‘I’ve included a peppering of Dover’s powders.
For the shock. I told your great aunt to restrict her usage of the drops.
They’re excellent for energy but in a lady of her age and condition .
. . her heart, you see.’ He sighs. ‘The prescription is proving efficacious but patients find it moreish. The drops, once taken, mitigate against caution. I warned your great aunt. She was a good deal more ill than she appeared, that’s the truth of it. ’
Araminta puts down the glass on a side table without venturing a drop.
‘We’d only just met,’ she says sadly. ‘Aunt Eilidh and I.’
‘You made it in time then. That was lucky.’