Chapter Twenty-Nine
Cillian Brodie checks at St Giles’ when Winifred commissions him to do so.
But he finds nothing, for his visit takes place more than two hours before Araminta McKenzie Moore escapes from her prison.
Having made enquiries to no avail at the church, he asks at the police office, where Mr Neill’s instructions have already been received.
Davey turned up nothing at Mr McGhie’s where the shop boy explained that the gentlemen had quarrelled.
‘I doubt Mr Thom will be back. It was a humdinger,’ he confided.
Now, Brodie decides to walk back down the Mound to consult once more with Mr Neill.
The McKenzie coach is not distinctive. It’s more than ten years old and painted black, though with fancy brass fittings, admittedly.
Still, now Brodie comes to think on it, it may be that finding the coach will be easier than finding the mistress and doing so might provide a clue as to where she’s been taken.
He wants to check that Neill and his men haven’t neglected this matter.
At Heriot Row he rings the bell and is admitted to the magistrate’s office. It’s late afternoon now and Neill is at his desk, halfway through a bottle of port.
‘News?’ he enquires brusquely.
Brodie shakes his head. ‘I wondered, sir, about the coach?’
‘I’m a good deal more concerned about the lady, Mr Brodie,’ Neill says drily.
Brodie explains his thinking and the magistrate considers this, sipping his Douro.
He notes Brodie’s description of the conveyance and the horses, which are, again, not unusual.
Two chestnut mares. Eilidh McKenzie did not hold with stallions for drawing a coach about the town, though some gentlemen prefer them.
‘Giving the coachmen a harder task,’ she termed it.
‘I’ll pass this on to Mr McLevy, the detective in charge. Good thinking, Mr Brodie,’ Neill allows.
‘McLevy has men searching then?’ Brodie checks.
‘Everywhere we can think of. Several have been dispatched to Holyroodhouse. Folk will have seen the fellow leave and might have noted which direction he took. He may well be holding Mrs Moore nearby. All about the district, there are yards where a coach could easily be concealed. Mr McLevy is a good man in a crisis, never fear. Now, if that’s all, sir, I’ve correspondence to attend.
’ Neill gestures at the scatter of papers across his desk.
Back outside, in the chill on Heriot Row, Brodie finds himself walking eastwards under the frozen branches which overhang the pavement.
It’s getting dark and the temperature is dropping.
At Dublin Street he stares in the direction of the building where Sister Winifred is residing.
He doesn’t want to go back to her without news, but still, he climbs the steep hill and cuts back along Queen Street.
Instead of knocking at the main door, however, he rounds the corner, where the Campbells’ basement opens onto the lane.
He raps briskly, and the side door is opened by a kitchen maid even smaller than Bella.
Brodie asks for Cook and the girl lets him inside.
In the kitchen, Cook is making potted haugh and the air is tinged with marrowbone and bay leaves.
Her sleeves are rolled up to her elbows as she piles the meat onto a walnut chopping board.
‘That’ll be on account of my mistress, I expect.’ Brodie gives a little bow. ‘You’re taking good care of her.’ Cook takes in the handsome butler and smiles. ‘Sister Winifred,’ Brodie adds and introduces himself. ‘I expect the magistrate’s officers have been here.’
Cook shakes her head. ‘Nobody’s been, Mr Brodie. Nobody like that. This is a respectable kitchen.’
Brodie worries that the men are not doing a thorough enough job whatever Mr Neill believes. Where are they looking for Mrs Moore, if not questioning the staff here, where Mr Thom has resided?
‘I wondered about the gentleman who’s caused the trouble. What do you know of him?’
‘Sir, I don’t go upstairs.’
‘Come now,’ Brodie coddles her. ‘My guess is you know more about this man you never met than the man’s own sister does.’ He flashes his most charming smile. Cook tips the meat back into the jelly.
‘Fetch the small beer from the shelf, Senga,’ she says.
Brodie sits at the table and lets the kitchen maid serve him. ‘I wonder if Bella might join us,’ he suggests. ‘I’m interested in everything about the fellow.’
They make an odd assortment at the table, for the staff at North St David Street don’t wear livery. Brodie naturally takes charge, at first answering the servants’ questions for nobody has fully explained to them what’s happened.
‘Lucifer himself,’ Cook declares. She’s a woman, it seems, who is all opinion. ‘Your poor mistress. The fellow wanting his way with her and she a married lady. And Mistress Campbell’s poor friend, attacked anaw and she in holy orders.’
‘I suspect it’s Mrs Moore’s inheritance the man is after,’ Brodie says. This is as close as he can get to what Mr Thom wants. It’ll serve as an explanation anyway and keep Mrs Moore’s virtue safe.
Bella has gone quiet, the girl’s eyes honed on a soft oat-and-honey biscuit that has been placed before her along with an untouched glass of milk.
‘You must’ve met the gentleman a few times,’ Brodie opens the conversation.
Bella nods. ‘Aye, sir. I told the mistress. I think he’s a mason; a lodge man, that is. He has a fancy sash and some tokens.’
Brodie raises an eyebrow but before he can speak, Cook bursts out.
‘Well, them’s devils. Secret meetings. A nod and a shake. I wouldnae join such an undertaking if they paid me.’
Brodie does not point out that Cook would most certainly not be invited.
‘Did the gentleman attend a meeting that you know of?’ he asks Bella. ‘Here, I mean. In Edinburgh?’
‘I dinna ken, sir.’
Brodie wonders if Mr Neill might be a member at the lodge. He’s certain that several of the policemen will have taken the sash. It is, as he judges it, that kind of profession. He feels justified in not entirely trusting them.
‘He hired his horse at the inn at the far end of York Place,’ Bella adds. ‘It’s handy stabling. The boy there said he drove a hard bargain.’
‘That’s helpful, Bella. Thank you,’ Brodie says.
‘I hope you find him, sir. He hurt the lady and she has taken orders. He’ll no get to heaven.’
‘He will not,’ Mr Brodie agrees, and after a little more questioning, he bids the women goodbye and heads back into the cold and dark.
*
Upstairs at North St David Street, unbeknownst to Brodie, Cook or indeed Bella, Eleanor and Araminta have arrived.
Spirited inside by Grizel Campbell, the women are closeted in Sister Winifred’s room where, after a brief recap of events, Araminta tries to explain to her great aunt the nature of the twelfth clue, a representation of which she draws on a piece of paper.
She runs through the clues in her mind, thinking she will add what she has found to her notebook soon enough.
Aunt Eilidh left me a tartan kerchief.
Clue 8 led to the castle.
Clue 9 from the castle to Heriot’s: a third point on the triangle.
Clue 10 The third point was a plague pit.
Clue 11 Inverted, the point led to the Maitland house. Which led to the insignia of St Giles’ roof on a grave.
Clue 12 Roses in a picture frame.
‘The roses are a Stuart symbol,’ Winifred says. ‘King James and his sons. The true heirs to the crown.’
Grizel looks appalled. ‘Lord, Saoirse, what have you got us into?’ she demands.
‘My dear, as James and his sons are long dead, I’ve got you into nothing at all,’ Winifred snaps back.
‘We’re following an ancient trail. Almost a hundred years old, in fact.
’ She peers at the curlicues round the roses.
‘The Bonnie Prince famously plucked a white rose at Fassfern. Here the flowers are framed, as a picture.’
‘Is there such a picture? Of James and his sons?’ Araminta enquires. ‘Or the prince picking the rose perhaps?’ It seems whimsical.
‘Hundreds,’ Winifred declares. ‘Every Jacobite with means will have had something of the sort.’
‘Was such a thing not treasonous?’
‘The treason, of course, was in saying that the Stuarts were the rightful heirs to the throne. Not the possession of an image. James was noble. A cousin to the Hapsburgs. How could it be treasonous to have a picture of a member of the nobility? Some were afraid, however, of prosecution, and as a result there were many symbols for the rebellion, such as these three flowers which folk used to hide their allegiance. Thistles. Roses. Bears.’
‘Did Berenice own anything like that?’
‘I’ve not seen a picture of the Stuart royals anywhere among our things, though there used to be a set of brandy glasses engraved with thistles in the dining room.’
Araminta sighs in frustration. She grips the edge of the padded quilt on Winifred’s bed. ‘I don’t understand why Berenice made it so impossible,’ she says.
‘The times,’ Winifred lets out. ‘She must have been terrified. But much of this will have seemed more obvious to her than it does to us today.’
Araminta thinks the times feel dangerous enough now, with Thom in pursuit. But if Berenice had to bear it, she decides she must too. ‘Is there a monument to the Stuarts?’ she asks.
Grizel lets out a ‘pah’ and looks as if she might choke.
Measured, Winifred continues. ‘A painting in a private residence is one thing, a miniature kept amongst one’s things, but a dedicated monument would have been a place to mass.
There’s nothing I can think of though I’ve seen these roses on old graves.
And there’ve always been rumours of folk gathering at Culloden on the anniversary of the battle but there’s nothing there. It’s only a moor.’
‘This isn’t a gravestone.’ Araminta indicates her drawing. ‘It’s a frame, as you said. I think I should return to Glenfinlas Street. Perhaps there’s a print in the library. A picture need not be in oils.’
Grizel rises. ‘I’ll send to the magistrate to say you’ve been found, Mrs Moore.’
‘Yes,’ Winifred chimes. ‘We’d best call them off.’
‘I wish you’d come with me,’ Araminta cuts in. ‘We have men at Glenfinlas Street. Mr Brodie, Davey and Douglas. We could arm them.’
Winifred says nothing but thinks that the men at Glenfinlas Street are rather the problem.
‘I cannot be moved, dear,’ she says. ‘Doctor’s orders.’
Grizel doesn’t say that the doctor specifically said that Winifred might move as long as she was careful.
‘Very well,’ Araminta concedes. ‘Where was the place the prince picked the flower?’
‘Fassfern,’ Winifred repeats. ‘In the north. There’s little there.’
‘I’ll check the maps. You never know. And I’ll look out for the glasses with the thistles. Perhaps there’s something nobody’s noticed.’
‘And Thom?’ Winifred checks.
‘I think it’s unlikely he’ll find this clue. He knows I was on the roof of St Giles’, that’s all.’
‘You climbed onto the roof?’ Winifred is shocked. Somewhere among Araminta telling her the story, she hadn’t realised this.
‘Like my great great grandmother before me,’ Araminta points out. It strikes her that such acrobatics no longer seem particularly unusual to her, though she was afraid. She bends to kiss her great aunt on the cheek before leaving with Eleanor.
Downstairs, they decide it’s too dangerous to walk the mile home in the dark.
Mr Campbell sends for a hired cab and dispatches a note to Mr Neill to call off the search though the detectives must still catch Harry Thom.
He’ll be charged, no doubt, when they do.
But at least, as Mr Campbell puts in the note, the lady is safely recovered.
Back at Glenfinlas Street, Douglas attends the women. Mr Brodie, he says, is out. Agnes, appearing from below stairs, seems relieved when the mistress heads upwards with Eleanor to change her clothes. The fussing over corsets hasn’t suited her.
In the drawing room, the clock on the mantle strikes and sandwiches are brought with mulled wine and, on a separate tray, the thistle glasses from the dining room.
Slowly Araminta peers inside each glass, then turns them upside down looking for some kind of message, but there’s nothing.
She takes a sip of mulled wine and turns to the library shelves, pulling down maps of the Highlands and searching for engravings.
After over an hour she flops onto the sopha and stares at the painting of her great grandmother, hoisted between the long windows in a complicated gold frame.
She’s young in the picture. Like many of the paintings, allegorical symbols are depicted.
A dove hovers overhead; the Holy Ghost. The background is streaked with shadows.
‘You were from the west,’ Araminta recalls, out loud.
‘Clementina. A temptress. An event.’ She echoes Great Aunt Eilidh’s words.
It strikes her that Berenice McKenzie would have called the same woman, ‘daughter’, so the girl must have been born by 1747 – much earlier, in fact.
Yes, she recalls the list in the bible, Clementina might be seventeen in the picture, easily.
In which case it was painted before Berenice’s death and most likely was in her possession.
Araminta puts down her glass and fetches the library ladder.
A week ago she’d have considered this a duty for Douglas, but so much has changed that she doesn’t even think of ringing the bell.
Studying the portrait more closely, along Clementina’s intricate lace collar she notices tiny white roses worked into the design.
Stuart symbols; a detail too small to be seen when the painting was mounted.
‘The flower of Fassfern,’ she mumbles, curious, and checks the back of the canvas which is secured into the frame by bent nails.
Fetching the letter opener from Eilidh’s desk, Araminta levers these upwards.
There’s nothing hidden behind the painting – no words written on the wooden frame or tacked into the back.
‘The next clue will lead me to the crown,’ she says to herself and slumps against the cushions.
She should keep going but it’s been a terrifying day, and safe now and on her third glass of Cook’s honeyed wine she falls asleep.
Later, Brodie will return and he and Eleanor will bring a Paisley cashmere rug and lay it over her sleeping frame.
‘She doesn’t look harmed,’ Brodie will say, and Eleanor will whisper that Araminta’s skin is a little bruised but that she’ll be fine and then, sneaking out of the room as if it’s a nursery, they’ll go to their separate beds.
Eleanor, exhausted, will sleep as soundly as her mistress, but Brodie will toss and turn until dawn breaks over the other end of George Street.