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 downmaps 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’llbe 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.
Chapter Thirty
The same evening.
Sister Gloria has not left the convent in several years. After Eleanor’s departure with the convent’s horse and cart, she’s dispatched into town in a carriage borrowed from one of the neighbouring houses. She peers out of the window at the inevitable changes along the road, her spectacles clouding in the cold as the light fades from the sky. In the pocket of her robes she fingers the iron key to the ecclesiastical library that Mother has entrusted to her, and when the carriage draws up at Forres Street she steps nervously onto the pavement. Gloria comes from ordinary folk, her education an unexpected boon resulting from her childhood tragedy. She isn’t accustomed to five-storey townhouses though she draws up her courage on the doorstep and recalls that, at first, the grand architecture of the convent felt intimidating. Perhaps she’ll get used to this as well. She knocks on the door. Mother has given her a letter of introduction, but as nobody comes, Gloria thinks she won’t need it. The carriage is to wait and the coachman has climbed down and drawn an apple from his pocket. He’s standing in the pool of light under a gas lamp. Gloria turns the key and looks to him, perhaps for approval. The man winks cheekily. ‘Go on then,’ he says.
‘I’ll be a while,’ Gloria replies.
‘I’ll tether the horses and take a wander,’ he ventures. ‘It’s not often I’m in Edinburgh of an evening. When I get back, I’ll kip in the carriage till you need me.’
Inside, there’s a lamp on a table. Gloria lights it. She can smell the books, the musty combination of ink, leather and old paper. There are four rooms on this floor, she notes, and the stair ahead. Her first job is to ascertain the extent of the library so she walks into one room and then another, perusing the shelves with the lamp held high. Each has a chair and a desk. There are thousands of publications. It would be the work of a lifetime to read them all, but Gloria reassures herself that Mother’s brief was clear. Anything to do with St Giles. Anything to do with hermits. Anything to do with masonic lodges and the like. She tuts at the sloppy shelving in the fourth room, which is dedicated to maps, mostly of the Holy Land and architectural drawings of cathedrals. No need to look further there. The second room is floor-to-ceiling copies of the bible, some editions of which are now considered blasphemous. She passes them by. The third room is a kind of fancy stationery cupboard with bottles of pre-made ink (an unnecessary luxury in Gloria’s opinion; the quality is never as good), large, uncut sheaves of paper, various lengths of string in a terrible fankle and some journals which belong to a bishop, perhaps the original owner of the library. Yes, only the first room is of interest, she thinks, containing commentary upon biblical scriptures and lives of the saints and, also, books pertaining to the running of religious institutions. Still, some challenge.
She pauses at the foot of the stair and decides she’d best check above. On the first floor, what must have once been a drawing room is now fringed with shelving and, raising the lamp again, Gloria squints at the old bindings. These are copies of ancient texts, none of them in English or Latin, but from what she can immediately see there are more bibles and commentaries on biblical texts, some in Hebrew, some in Arabic. Jewish perhaps. Mohammedan. One section would appear to be mathematical in nature and very ancient, with marginalia written in Aramaic.Gloria crosses herself. The only run of books here that looks potentially interesting is mostly in German from the time of the Reformation. In what would have been the main bedroom suite there are oddities; remnants, she realises from the witch trials; handwritten testimonials and a glass case containing what look like instruments of torture. A stack of slate boxes full of strange, gritty ashes. She flees back into the hall. On the upper bedroom floor the bookcases are locked and only one of them has glass doors. Peeking through she sees an array of pentangles and goats’ heads branded into the leather-bound spines.
Her heart racing, Gloria draws up her courage. She has been sent by Mother and her mission is important. She must execute it well. She takes the final set of stairs, simple pine this time, a curving tight, little flight that rises to the attics, where once the maids slept on one side and the footmen on the other. The ceiling is coombed and casts strange shadows across the bare boards. A set of wooden trunks and boxes are piled haphazardly. She gives these a cursory check, but mostly they’re empty and what books are in them are pedestrian copies of hymnals and bibles. ‘Right,’ she thinks. ‘I’ve two rooms to work through.’ Far off in the distance, a church bell sounds. Gloria counts eight bells. It’s going to take all night but she will not let Mother down.
*
Harry Thom is in less comfortable surroundings tonight. He has rented a garret room off the Cowgate where no questions are asked. The two floors below are a grubby kind of brothel where working men come and go and there’s a good deal of noise. Thom has no interest in such pleasures today. He takes a deep draw on a pipe that he had one of the lads downstairs fetch. It’s cheap tobacco but it’s all he can put a hand to. That and an elver pie with a tankard of small beer; claret being out of the question. The lodgings on North St David Street were more comfortable and a lot cleaner but worldly considerationsare fripperies; Thom has a greater mission. He’s painfully aware, however, that again, he’s at a low point in his quest. The police have been making enquiries. James McLevy, the detective, was summoned when a whip-smart junior clerk in the office on the High Street made the connection between the gentleman who was concerned about his dear, widowed sister and the man who stole away a lady.
Thankfully, Thom had time to check the roof of St Giles’ before he fled but Araminta McKenzie Moore had taken a stone and with it, he assumes, the clue. He trailed her through the Cowgate but didn’t so much as catch a glimpse of the woman and his enquiries as to where she went have come to nothing. He has to be circumspect now. He has to hide. The boy who fetched the tobacco also brought second-hand clothes; a poorly cut, dun-brown woollen coat, unfashionable, coarse-tweed trousers and poorly-made boots. No longer in the guise of a gentleman he’ll be able to traverse the city tomorrow, scarcely drawing notice. He decides not to shave, to complete the disguise.
Sipping the last of the small beer, he pats his stomach, where, wound round his frame, he’s concealed a good deal of cash. He intends to buy the information he requires, not from the McKenzie servants who have proved too loyal to their mistresses, but from others in the district. The bitch, he tells himself, will not get away. He’ll catch her all right and the clue she fled with too. He has to.
*
Sister Gloria pinches herself to stay awake come six of the clock. It’s still dark outside. There are small bruises up her left arm for she’s done the same all night. The Bishop of Aberdeen, it transpires, cross-referenced his collection and this has been extremely helpful in her quest. Beside Gloria, on an apricot wood table there’s a pile of books. She’s collected these mostly from the two main rooms she first identified but also among them arejournals concerning the witch trials and three books in German from the bishop’s Reformation collection. She’s learned a good deal, in fact, which has taken her field of enquiry to John Knox. From what she’s seen she can’t judge the old minister a hater of women, exactly. In fact, it seems he spent a good deal of time talking to his female parishioners, mostly to encourage what he considered suitable behaviour. Which is to say, guiding the women to fulfil their roles as wives and mothers and to pray while they went about it.
Gloria has kept aside a letter in Knox’s own hand, furiously scribbled when Queen Elizabeth I, having knighted a swathe of church ministers, refused to elevate him on account of the tome Sister Winifred identified among Thom’s travelling library:The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women.Sister Gloria thinks she’ll investigate Elizabeth I later. She seems like a sonsier lass than might be expected of an English queen. In his letter, Knox calls her a ‘vile aberration’ and ‘a sweetmeat for the Devil’s mouth’. Sister Gloria considers Knox’s disapproval something to which she and her sisters might aspire. Wives and mothers indeed.
The key, though, is in the witches’ papers. Two intriguing references, some years apart, long after Knox’s death, to ‘the Hermits’ duty’. Further digging among the German books turns up mention of some kind of ‘league’ as Sister Gloria translates it, controlled from St Giles’ centuries ago. This comprised gentlemen, not churchmen, who took a vow in line with Knox’s creed. ‘The Hermits,’ she mutters under her breath. It seems this order was instituted at the time when women were hunted as witches. Centuries later, Gloria wonders, could this league still exist? It chimes with Mother’s brief. The only other reference is in the bishop’s diary where he was, some years before his death, summoned to London to a meeting that was not ecclesiastical in nature and which is marked with a pencil drawing of a hermit’slamp and a few scrawled notes.I prefer the Speculative Societyamong them. Sister Gloria feels a tingling anticipation rarely felt by a librarian. She jumps at a knock on the door. Outside, the coachman stands on the step, his hair ruffled from sleeping in the carriage, dawn breaking behind him. He offers her a tin cup of warm milk. ‘From the cart,’ he explains. ‘I thought you might be hungry.’
The milk is delicious. Gloria downs it almost in one and, thanking him, adds that if the coachman will only give her a moment to reshelve the books, she’ll be ready to go.
Chapter Thirty-One
Araminta wakes around eight of the clock. It takes her a moment to recall that she’s in the drawing room at Glenfinlas Street. That she was kidnapped and escaped. That Eleanor is back in her service. Her eyes fall to the picture of Clementina McKenzie propped against a side table, a slice of bright winter sunshine cutting across it like a knife. The line falls above Clementina’s head, making the dove glow. She rings for breakfast and takes a turn round the sopha, regarding the image of her great grandmother. She peers at the odd pattern of shadows behind the woman as Brodie arrives with a tray.
‘Mr McLevy is waiting, ma’am,’ he says.
Araminta doesn’t look up. ‘I’m not receiving, Brodie.’
‘Mr McLevy is a police detective,’ the butler continues. ‘He’s on the trail of the man who abducted you.’ His tone makes it clear that Araminta has to admit the fellow.
‘Very well,’ she says, pouring a cup of tea from the pot and lifting a slim slice of toast. ‘If I must.’
James McLevy comes up. He’s unprepossessing, slightly rough, even, with a whiff of wash-house soap. Somewhere in his early forties, his eyes seem older, as if he’s witnessed a great deal. His gaze is steady.
‘Mrs Moore.’ He bows as he takes her in and straightens his waistcoat when he stands upright. Araminta changed her clothes last night, so the only visible sign of what happened is the bruise blooming on her cheek. ‘You’re hurt, madam,’ he observes. ‘I’m sorry.’
This is kind of him, but for obvious reasons, Araminta doesn’t trust the police. ‘I’m fine,’ she dismisses his concern. ‘Shall I ask Mr Brodie to bring you something, Mr McLevy?’
The detective waves off this suggestion as she gestures him to sit. ‘We’ve found your coach and the horses,’ he says. ‘My men are returning them to your stable as we speak.’
