While Araminta McKenzie Moore sneaks round the Old Town, Brodie cuts out of the McKenzie townhouse at the rear, across the small square of garden and into the back lane. The steep path into the Dean Village is a mere five minutes away, but beyond the paved byway is a world apart. James Craig’s celebrated plan for Edinburgh was made solely for the benefit of the toffs with few allowances for the needs of working men and women – public houses and the like. On their days off the household staff of Edinburgh’s grand townhouses must look further afield to fulfil their pleasures. Some of the needs of ordinary life remain available in the Old Town but many prefer not to return across the old loch and to look instead to the new fringes of the capital. Along the frozen, muddy path beside the Water of Leith, before the oat fields and orchards open out, ramshackle buildings have sprung up along the steep-sided valley. Brodie’s tastes don’t run to what’s on offer at the whorehouses but he likes a pint of purl at Mrs Hamilton’s, and once a week, he visits Old Mill Yard where at night sacks of sand are hoisted on the rafters so men can train in pugilism. On Sundays after dark, bare-knuckle fights are held beneath the flaming torches mounted on these walls. The matches are attended by footmen and valets on their monthly day off, carriage men, blacksmiths, shop boys and other workaday fellows as well as a smattering of the more adventurous sons of the New Town’s elite. It’s an extra bit of business for the family who own the place, and Mrs Hamilton sends along a couple of barrels and everyone is happy for they all make a profit.
Brodie ignores the rats along the river. He slips a tuppence to the lad minding the yard door and cuts inside. Taking off his greatcoat and hat you’d never guess he was a butler for one of the country’s oldest families for he changed before he left his quarters into a plain knitted semmit with canvas britches. With little ado, he squares up to the bag of sand and pummels it hard. Brodie has been asked to fight in the barrel-sided ring several times. His height is impressive and over the years he’s developed excellent technique despite his advancing years. But he always refuses. A butler cannot present the next day with a black eye or swollen jaw. Still, the exercise is most welcome. Today, he lays into the sandbag with such gusto that he bruises his knuckles and will have to wear white gloves the next day about the house.
A boy, similar in appearance to the lad on the door, comes round with a bucket of water drawn from the river. Brodie pulls another coin from his britches and the child disappears to fetch a horn cup of something stronger: Mrs Hamilton’s world-renowned ale. At least that’s what she calls it.
‘You all right, sir?’ the child enquires, as Brodie drains the cup.
The butler nods curtly and returns to pummelling the sandbag, a greying ginger lock flopping over his brow. After a good twenty minutes he’s out of breath, a dark slick down his back. Another fellow vomits in the corner, having over-exerted himself, or drunk too much, or both. Brodie puts on his outerwear and heads east to Mrs Hamilton’s establishment where he orders a beef and oyster pie. In the low light of the tallow lamps the hubbub is gentle tonight, a mixture of Scots and Gaelic, even a little English here and there.
‘Cillian,’ Mrs Hamilton greets him, bringing the food.
‘Ina,’ Brodie acknowledges her.
‘I was sorry to hear about Mistress McKenzie,’ Mrs Hamilton says. ‘You’ve bided there a long time.’
Brodie suddenly finds he can hold his grief no longer. There’s something about being here, among his own people, the closest he has to a home. He puts up his bloodied hands to cover his face and starts to cry, shame pumping through him at this loss of control. He’s no butler in these parts. Mrs Hamilton passes a motherly hand round his shoulder. ‘Now, now,’ she says. ‘I’m sure the family will want to keep you on.’
But Cillian Brodie doesn’t care about that, for he has lost the love of his life. He adored Eilidh McKenzie from the moment she recruited him over twenty years before, when she was in her fifth decade and he only beginning his fourth. She asked him where he came from and when he said Perthshire she spoke softly, in Gaelic, and he replied the same. The Perthshire dialect became their secret language. Later, the sisters fell out and Saoirse McKenzie entered the nunnery because the women discovered that Cillian Brodie loved Saoirse McKenzie too. It had never been his intention, but the McKenzie women were two sides of the same coin, one that Brodie had flipped in the air and caught in his hand over and over for almost a decade. Heads and tails.
He knows it might seem like he was some manner of merry friar, taking advantage of one woman and then another, but that was not the case. He genuinely loved the McKenzie sisters, neither woman truly available to him. To Brodie, there’s never been a limit to love. One woman did not diminish his feelings for the other. He was open with each sister about how he felt about her, but deadly discreet about his feelings towards the other. When he was with Eilidh he was hers entirely, when he was with Saoirse, the same. Some nights he went from one suite to the other, neither sister the wiser until Eilidh found a stupid billet doux her sister had left for her lover. Butler by day, she’d teased him. That was all it took.
He should have been the one to leave, but the mixture of fury and shame was an unsettling cocktail that inebriated thehousehold for about a month, during which all conversation was suspended. He’d pass one silent sister in the hallway or bring up a card to announce a guest and not once did any of them break the circle of discretion they had, after all, created. It was too shameful. The sisters, it turned out, were jealous, and in the end, it pulled all three of them in too many directions. Saoirse broke it. She entered the nunnery at Sciennes with the help of the minister at St George’s who provided a carriage and an introduction. Eilidh was shocked. Her sister had abandoned the family duty – everything they’d been brought up to honour. Saoirse wasn’t even that devout, Eilidh raged furiously as she paced the drawing room the day the news came. Her sister had attended church regularly of course, but only as a way to reflect. To think. And to see other people. She was never religious in her habits. Not really. But that wasn’t why she left. Saoirse’s decision did not entirely surprise Brodie, for she’d confessed to him many times her admiration for the convent on Holyrood Road to which she occasionally made charitable donations. ‘Another kind of duty,’ she called it. Helping people. Poor folk.
Incandescent at being abandoned, Eilidh summoned the poor minister and gave him a dressing down. She strode about the drawing room, cursing her sister. Sharing a lover was one thing, but Saoirse leaving her to bear the brunt alone was quite another.
Brodie wanted to reach out, to heal his mistress’s wrath. He bided his time. And slowly, his need to win her back became a further devotion. He worried that she’d employ a housekeeper and a ladies’ maid, the absence of which had made their long affair easy, but number four Glenfinlas Street continued to be run by Brodie with the help of two housemaids, Cook, a grubby kitchen girl, Douglas and the coachman. Now and then Eilidh still let him visit her at night, but she would not take his hand to descend from the carriage. For years now, more than anything,he’d wanted her to say his name as she used to, a plaintive ‘Cillie,’ whispered in his ear, breaking the rule of the house that a butler is known by his surname. His name never crossed her lips again.
Now, weeping openly at Mrs Hamilton’s he remembers Eilidh as he knew her two decades before. Younger and pink-cheeked in her blood-red dresses, taking his hand. Letting him help. The blossomy scent of her perfume. The swish of rosy fabric as she passed. Her elegant, flame-red silhouette up and down the stairs. The day she’d held his gaze too long and he first kissed her with his heart pounding, in case he’d misjudged her interest.
‘I’m sorry,’ he apologised.
But she’d only laughed. She was, he remembers thinking, as scarlet as she appeared. Warm, passionate and haughty. The word mistress in this context is usually meant a different way but she was Brodie’s mistress in all senses. He wonders if he’ll miss her like this every day for the rest of his life.
Mrs Hamilton opens the door of the newly instituted snug and guides him through. A fresh cup of ale and the pie appear before him as he gathers his emotions, brushing the errant lock of greying hair from his face. Across the partition, a fiddler plays a familiar strathspey. Time seems to concertina and he’s at once a child at the cottage where he grew up; a young man with a footman’s position on an estate south of the city and a lover, creeping out of his mistress’s New Town bedroom in the early hours. She’s gone, his scarlet siren. In the old songs, bereaved lovers take to sea. The idea of becoming a sailor, however, is so ridiculous that it makes Cillian Brodie smile. He will stay, he knows, to help Mrs Moore, who in his estimation is nothing like as great a lady as her great aunt. Once he’s dispatched this duty, he’ll retire. He has more than enough saved to take him home to Kinross, where his sister married the village baker and a different kind of life beckons – a but-and-ben and a daily dookin Loch Leven. Today, Drummond the solicitor contacted him for Eilidh bequeathed Brodie an edition of Robert Burns’ poetry bound in Moroccan red leather. When he opened it, he found that she’d doodled round each of the love poems in Gaelic.My pale-eyed lover, how I will miss you even from the grave. It’ll take a good few weeks to take it in. The things she couldn’t say in life. No wonder he’d wanted to pound a sandbag.
Now he finishes the pie and the beer and rises to put on his coat and hat and walk back to Glenfinlas Street. Mrs Moore will soon be home from her visit to the lawyer. He feels better for the hour he’s had away. Turning off Queensferry Street at Charlotte Place he spots an unfamiliar carriage and the mistress’s maid, Eleanor Thrale cutting up the side of St George’s. He doesn’t call out for he wouldn’t like the girl to see him dressed like this. Brodie never appears to the household staff anything less than dapper. ‘I better watch that one. She has a fancy man already,’ he thinks, noting that she didn’t seem like that kind of girl. He’s not, he knows, in a position to judge. Then he takes the back route through the garden gate and into his room to get changed.
Chapter Seven
Eleanor knows there are changes afoot. For a start, Araminta McKenzie Moore is in the habit of going to bed at ten of the clock. She’s done so nightly since Eleanor first started in her service, so the change in the mistress’s routine is quite a turn up. Extra candles require to be brought to the drawing room and the fire stoked. Brodie offers the lady a nightcap at midnight. She waves him off, then calls him back, demanding a ham sandwich. Cook, at the end of her tether for she has been up since six, has no ham in the larder for the late Miss McKenzie had not touched a slice of meat for the last five years and in the kitchen hogget stew is preferred. Luckily, however, the household has a long association with a residence on Moray Place where the housekeeper has an unrequited fondness for Mr Brodie and where Cook once shared a receipt for lemon marmalade when a sufficiency of the fruit arrived at Leith docks in the dead of winter and caused culinary excitement about the town. An urgent message is sent. This results in half a dozen slices of ham wrapped in waxed paper, with a glass jar of chutney. At one of the clock, her sandwich eaten, Araminta dismisses Brodie and sends Eleanor to bed, but Eleanor is, firstly, so curious and, secondly, so concerned for her mistress that she waits up, dozing fitfully in the hallway on an ancient carved chair next to the wrought-iron butler’s tray.
In the morning the embers glow in the grate, the candles have burned down and Eleanor finds Mrs Moore asleep on the sopha amid a messy scatter of open books and unfolded papers. The air smells of cigar smoke for at three in the morning Araminta came across Great Aunt Eilidh’s cedarwood box of Cuban cigars and asmart, Venetian glass ashtray. Now she regrets lighting up, her head muddled by lack of sleep and copious nicotine from which her mouth is horribly dry. Brodie discreetly opens one of the windows and has the housemaid stoke the fire.
Eleanor brings breakfast on a tray – two boiled eggs with buttered toast, a saucer of Cook’s famous marmalade and a dainty silver pot of tea, with the cup and saucer her great aunt preferred – Wedgewood creamware, now rather old.
‘Madam, is everything all right?’ Eleanor asks, not for the benefit of the gentlemen but because she is concerned.
Araminta hesitates. A lot has transpired over the last two days and it feels as if she’s evolved to meet her new circumstances. This is a process in which she’s become, somehow, more like herself. She wonders if the McKenzie blood was always going to out once she crossed Hadrian’s Wall. She feels strong. Confident. A vivid version of her schoolgirl self. Johnathan would like her this way, she thinks. More self-assured. Coming from a noble family with ties to a royal court. On the other hand, she has no idea how to explain it to her maid; a scrap of tartan cloth, a map and an unexpected great aunt. Eleanor is so forthright and Araminta is not yet sure where she will come to settle among these new subtleties. ‘I’m fine,’ she says.
Once the tray is finished, Araminta tidies the papers, holding on to the map she found last night. As Sister Winifred said, it is from 1746 and depicts a different Edinburgh. Araminta realises Richmond has not changed half so much over the same century. Mayfair neither. She hardly knows the Scottish capital, but the transformation is plain. The Carmichael thread when laid over the old parchment fits exactly the odd shape of the Old Town from Castle Rock to the Palace of Holyroodhouse. ‘It’s a key,’ she breathed long past midnight, feeling a rush at having solved Winifred’s mystery. The stitches she had taken as darned moth holes mark two different sites, now shown on the map as tinypinpricks that she pushed through the wool with her mourning brooch. The whole thing is most intriguing, though she has no idea of the locations Aunt Eilidh has picked, it’s clear that one of them is inside Edinburgh Castle. Perhaps, she thinks, Sister Winifred is right, and Eilidh meant to go herself. It’s an exhilarating idea.
She walks to the window and gazes out, sorting once more through the calling cards on the silver tray. Below, Colonel Fraser, unbidden and unexpected, dismounts a fine, black stallion and tethers the animal opposite. Araminta curses silently. The colonel’s a bore. She never expected to see him again after they disembarked the ship. However, it dawns quickly that in fact, this call is most convenient. Her eyes wander furtively to the papers now tidied on the desk. She grabs the Carmichael thread and secretes it in a drawer, safer than her pocket, where it was spotted yesterday evening by Sister Winifred.
In London when someone was at the door she would check the mirror to make sure her hair was tidy and her collar flat. Today, she slips her finger across the saucer not to waste the last of the marmalade. Great Aunt Eilidh was right about Cook, she thinks. Perhaps she’ll tempt the woman back to Richmond. Johnathan likes marmalade and a decent bowl of soup.
Brodie knocks. ‘Mrs Moore there’s an officer—’ he starts.
‘Yes, yes, bring him up, please, Brodie,’ Araminta cuts in.
