‘Our members are king’s counsels. The court is the king’s own.’
‘Might I see St Giles’s records from the time of Mistress Maitland?’
Mr Winter’s cheeks colour. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘They belong to our members. You’d need special permission. And even then... as a lady...’
Araminta sighs. Scottish law it would seem is not that different from English. She’s about to thank him and leave, when she has an idea.
‘Might you be able to look on my behalf, Mr Winter? It’s an academic interest. For my husband. Mr Moore isn’t with me but he asked me to check. I could certainly pay a generous fee.’
Winter considers this.
‘I’d be most grateful,’ Araminta adds.
‘How grateful?’ he ventures.
She tries to guess how much a librarian earns. Most likely as little as a clerk. ‘If you can get me details of her burial... Say ten shillings?’
Winter’s cheeks become suddenly rosy. ‘Most generous.’
‘Good. I reside at number four Glenfinlas Street. Please let me know as soon as you turn anything up.’
In the back of the carriage she’s glad she’s made progress. She instructs Davey to take her to Greyfriars Kirkyard where, just as Mr Winter said, there are stones piled like sticklebacks, covered with moss. Carved angels lie scattered on the grassy mounds like at some kind of heavenly picnic. It would take a team of men to move all this, she thinks, and much of the engraving is badly weathered. She can’t make out a single name. Araminta stares at the sunshine through the bare branches. The solution to Berenice’s tenth clue will have to wait. Hopefully Mr Winter will uncover it.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Thom leaves North St David Street at ten of the clock that morning. Grizel asks if he’ll be back for lunch, and he gruffly shakes his head. As soon as he’s out of sight of the drawing room window, the women sweep up the close to the rented apartment. Grizel has provided her friend with a simple, blue day dress, prettier than anything Sister Winifred has worn in a decade. She catches sight of herself in the mirror by the door and laughs. ‘Your old dress needed a good wash,’ Grizel comments. ‘Why shouldn’t you look respectable?’
This concept is so far from Winifred’s normal life now that she takes a moment to understand it. A nun’s habit, after all, is the most respectable robe a woman might don. She no longer speaks the language of well-cut sleeves and laced bodices. Though, she notes with some surprise, she still has a waist as small as when she resided in the West End.
Thom’s room is tidy. The tiny maid runs ahead of the women like a wisp and immediately sets to making the bed and removing the wooden plate on which Thom’s breakfast was served and the crystal glass stained red by his morning wine. She bobs a curtsey and disappears downstairs as Grizel and Winifred get their bearings.
‘What is it we’re looking for?’ Grizel asks.
Winifred’s eyes narrow. ‘I want to know why he came to Edinburgh. Anything about him.’
She crosses to the large travelling chest under the window.
‘That’s his,’ Grizel confirms.
The lid is not locked. Inside there are two neat piles of well-packed linens; stiff collars and a selection of taffeta cravatswhich, as Winifred lifts them, remind her of the colour of bruises. She puts this out of her mind as too poetic.
‘Aha,’ she chimes, for under the clothes there are books and papers. She lifts the books one by one.
Grizel inspects them. ‘No novels.’
‘Nor poetry,’ Winifred adds, opening a leather-bound volume about military tactics and another by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Winifred flicks through the pages noting passages underlined about the inferior physiognomy of women. Below that, an older book. ‘Reverend John Knox,’ she reads, recognising the name, and then the book’s title, sensing a theme, ‘The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. A polemical work, I should think.’ She finds more passages underlined, including a diatribe against the rule of queens. ‘A ponderous argument,’ she comments. The letters seem workaday: a notice from a club on Pall Mall where Thom is a member and a few lines from a relation in the matter of a younger cousin’s education.
Grizel checks the chest of drawers on the other side of the room. ‘Nothing here,’ she says, ‘only hose and woollen semmits.’ She moves on to the bed, shifting the long pillow and then the mattress, to see if there’s anything underneath.
Winifred runs her eyes across the room. On the nightstand beside Thom’s half-drunk bottle of Burgundy is a leather wallet which opens into a double picture frame. Inside, there’s a miniature of a woman on the left. This, she expects, is Harry Thom’s mother, for the lady has his high cheekbones, higher than those of Thom’s father, Winifred recalls. She’s wearing an empire-line frock that would have been fashionable about the year Harry was born. In the other frame there’s a painting of a bearded man, his head framed by a golden halo. He’s holding a deer in his arms.
Grizel looks over her friend’s shoulder. ‘Mr Thom doesn’t seem a devout sort,’ she says. ‘Is that St Francis?’
Winifred shakes her head. ‘St Francis usually has a lamb; sometimes doves. I think this is St Giles.’
‘The kirk in the town seems too fancy for that loon,’ Grizel grins. ‘He looks as poor as you did in that old brown robe.’
‘I took a vow of poverty,’ Winifred says. ‘So did he.’ Then she notices a candle lamp in the painting, small in the corner, and she recalls something. She snaps the leather case shut. ‘A hermit!’ she says delightedly. ‘St Giles is the patron saint of the lame and the unworthy. He was a hermit! Do you see?’
