Chapter Three #3
‘Whatever she would have liked,’ Araminta sighs. ‘Perhaps she already told the minister.’
‘Yes, madam.’
‘I’m only sorry that I didn’t know her better.’
‘It’s been a cruel blow,’ Brodie agrees, and Araminta feels these words not only as a condolence but also a judgement. She should have been quicker.
‘I didn’t even know I had a great aunt,’ she says. ‘Not until I got her letter.’
Outside, the sky is beginning to darken as if Edinburgh were in mourning. Brodie takes his leave.
Araminta sits on the yellow sopha and watches the light dim.
Before it falls to complete blackness there’s a brief interlude of illuminated royal blue streaked with shadowy clouds; a mackerel sky.
A lamplighter, muffled in layers of knitted wool, makes his way round Charlotte Square kindling the gas lamps, and suddenly Araminta understands why the drawing room is decorated in yellow, for it feels unaccountably cosy by firelight.
She gets up and sets flame to a few candles and a small oil lamp on the desk.
This prompts her to check the drawers. Underneath the sheaf of good writing paper and everything needed to use it, she finds a small leather-bound address book which she starts to read.
Almost immediately she is surprised to find the name of the headmistress of the school she attended in London, Mrs Archer, and the address on Manchester Square.
Mary-le-Bone NOT Mary-le-Bow, someone has scrawled underneath.
Someone who does not know London, for the two churches are not close in anything other than name and there is no Manchester Square in the East End.
‘How odd,’ Araminta muses, and sets to searching the rest of the room, coming quickly across a document box on a low bookshelf.
Inside, there’s a sheaf of receipts from booksellers and letters, faded with age.
Three, tied with a dark-brown ribbon are love letters from a young man, desperate for Great Aunt Eilidh to return his affection.
These are dated August 1798. Then another two undated letters in a different hand from another man, wanting the same.
Eilidh might have married then, which means she was a spinster by choice.
The other letters in the box are from Mrs Archer.
Araminta kneels on the patterned carpet to read them.
Araminta is progressing well in Latin and mathematics.
Miss Cooper, her tutor, says she is a regular Miss Sommerville who takes an interest in a variety of natural sciences and algebra as well as history and the classics.
(These last two subjects are underlined.) She is a healthy, sensible girl who is well-liked by her classmates.
Araminta laughs, shocked, and opens another.
Last month the girls visited the gallery of royal paintings at Southwark.
Araminta greatly enjoyed this outing. She is well, Miss McKenzie, and will go to a friend’s for Christmas this year, outside town at Richmond.
The letter is undated but Araminta knows the year.
It’s the Christmas she met Johnathan, her last as a pupil at Manchester Square.
She pours a small glass of sherry from one of Great Aunt Eilidh’s decanters which, she notices, are filled to entirely different levels.
Why did Eilidh never write, never visit nor issue an invitation?
After she had matriculated Araminta went to stay with friends as a paying guest because she had no family.
She resided in Kensington for almost two years.
Yet she could have come here, to Edinburgh, to this large, well-proportioned townhouse.
If Aunt Eilidh cared about her enough to be in regular correspondence with Mrs Archer and, indeed, keep the letters, why did she not make herself known?
She slips the key from her pocket onto her palm. She feels intrigued; a surprising sensation which she’s not experienced for a long time. She wonders if she’ll sleep tonight, still pondering Great Aunt Eilidh’s behaviour. There’s a knock on the drawing room door and Eleanor puts her head round.
‘They say you don’t want dinner, madam?’
Araminta smells the sherry’s sweetness rising from the little glass on the side and concludes that she’s hungry. ‘Perhaps a plate of soup. Bread with butter. On a tray in here,’ she decides. She doesn’t want to sit in the dining room alone.
Eleanor’s eyes fall to the papers scattered on the floor. ‘Would you like me to tidy your things?’ she asks, knowing she has no way to ascertain what the papers refer to.
‘It’s fine.’ Araminta waves a hand. After almost three years of insisting everything is properly tidied away, something has loosened inside her, easy as an old ribbon off a bundle of letters.
With a shrug Eleanor departs to deliver the news about the soup.
She has plenty to relay to Mr McGhie tomorrow.
And if there’s any hint that the gentleman is planning a robbery, she’s decided that shillings or no shillings, she won’t visit him any longer.