Linlithgow. Only a few miles off. That’s where they’ve gone in the carriage. He shoves the map into his pocket and strides out of the drawing room past Agnes, still prone on the carpet, leaves the front door open and makes for the mews. One of the stableboys will lend him a horse if he offers enough coin. He’ll promise to have the beast back by nightfall.
Chapter Thirty-Four
The building of the canal to Glasgow has changed Linlithgow, and not all its residents consider the differences for the better. The town is busier for a start. Boatmen moor for a half pint, walking down the hill to the local hostelries and frequenting the bakery where Margaret Hall, or Mags as she’s known, the comely daughter of the baker, serves mutton pies and drop scones for thruppence and tuppence respectively. Today, three such boatmen stand on the corner, eating Hall’s pies and smoking as the McKenzie carriage pulls up in front of the Cross Well on the Kirkgate. The horses haven’t fully come to a halt as Brodie jumps onto the cobblestones. As the animals settle, he hands down the ladies. Araminta brings her deadly walking cane.
‘Where’s the palace?’ she demands bluntly.
Brodie indicates the hill behind the cross with a laneway up the side of the Burgh Halls. ‘We can’t pull into the grounds of a royal palace, ma’am,’ he says. ‘It’s up there.’
He motions to Douglas and Davey to mind the horses, then hurries to follow Araminta and Eleanor who are already making their way across the small, paved square. At the top of the hill, past a few cottages, the old covered entry gate is worn, the remains of a burned-out palisade beyond it and a medieval abbey on one side, surrounded by an overgrown ornamental garden. Far below, there’s a view through the bare winter trees to a lake. Araminta surveys the exterior of the roofless palace, getting her bearings in relation to the image of the building shown in Clementina’s portrait. The pale sandstone is long blackened by the fire that destroyed the palace almost a century before. As Grizel noticed in Edinburgh, the real gateway isn’twhere it appears in the picture, but the ground is paved. It’s been paved for hundreds of years. Araminta walks along the long, stone wall with carvings high above on what would have been an upper floor. A crown. A lion. A thistle. And there, a dove. She points. It is, she reckons where the doorway on the painting is shown. ‘We must go there,’ she says.
Brodie and Eleanor follow her. Inside is a finely carved hexagonal well in a courtyard. A worn stone stair runs up the inside of one wall, though there’s no banister. Across from it, ragged, leaded glass panes hang like torn pieces of lace, but the façade of the building has clearly been the most affected by the fire. It’s a shell. Moss has grown on the stonework and a small tree has taken root, growing out of what was once a window.
‘Careful, ma’am,’ the butler warns, and Araminta casts him a black look as she takes the open steps upwards and edges along what remains of the ruined floor. At the nearest window void, she leans out. The dove is in view, carved onto a stone at least three feet square. She cannot see how Berenice could possibly have left the crown here. She must have been desperate, Araminta thinks. Knowing she was going to die, yet trailing breadcrumbs across Edinburgh and beyond. She leans a little further but there are no tell-tale scratches anywhere on the bird as there were at Heriot’s Hospital, and even with a proper floor to work from, it wouldn’t be possible to scrape out the lime and remove the carved stone to conceal something behind it. It’s too heavy even for a strong man. One would need a scaffold, winches, ropes and three, maybe four people. It might take a day. Would that be possible, she wonders. Did Berenice bring a crew to help? Would she have had time? She glances below at a forlorn sandstone fireplace open to the elements, as she dismisses the idea. All the other clues were left by Berenice alone. Why here, with the crown to conceal at last, would she trust anyone else with her family honour?
Back on the ground once more, Araminta paces the courtyard for a goodly while. ‘The abbey wasn’t ruined,’ she says eventually and leads the others back outside. There’s no indication that Berenice left anything in the church or the graveyard surrounding it, but Araminta requires a moment’s reflection.St Michael’sit says by the door, which isn’t locked. ‘Michael the Archangel,’ she thinks and pictures an angel wearing battle armour in the oriel window at St Mary Magdelene. Inside, the church is grand; a fitting place of worship for Scotland’s royals, larger than the tiny chapel at Edinburgh Castle. It’s been well maintained – better than the Chapel Royal. The roof looks almost new. She wonders how many McKenzie women have worshipped here over the centuries, for it seems some of her foremothers, at least, must have done so when they were in attendance on the Stuart queens. She slips into a pew and tries to reason out the thirteenth clue.
She guesses the painting of Clementina McKenzie might already have been completed when Berenice got into trouble. She then altered whatever was originally in the background to the image of Linlithgow in the mirror. She didn’t have long to do so. Did she also add the dove, Araminta wonders and decides that she must have. Winifred said that her mother wasn’t Catholic, and a dove is a Catholic symbol, particularly overhead. Araminta has seen pictures of Jesus that way. It seems such an odd thing to add to a painting, at a time of great trouble. To a painting of your daughter, most particularly. Jacobites were being executed and yet Berenice left this as the final and arguably most important clue. One that she expected her sister to understand and her daughter too. They must have known Linlithgow, Araminta concludes. Was Berenice directing them here, to somewhere they’d recognise? If not the palace, then where?
The town is small. She decides she’ll look round. Back at the carriage Davey and Douglas have availed themselves of Hall’s famous pies, which they’re eating on top of the box. Davey slips his, half munched, into his pocket while Douglas stuffs what remains of the crust into his mouth as the mistress’s party approaches.
‘Sorry,’ he gets out, and the carriage man and footman jump down and stand to attention.
Araminta pays them no mind. It’s one long High Street, she thinks. More than one church. More than one hostelry. A town hall. A few shops. The houses run along either side of the main street, with thin riggs up the hill. From here she can see vegetable plots and fruit trees on the steep slope, a few slim chickens pecking the ground and a pig sty. Nothing catches her attention.
From a shop further up the street a woman emerges with a box over her arm, tied with string. She looks respectable.
‘Madam, do you live here?’ Araminta asks as she gets closer.
The woman nods.
‘I’m a tourist,’ Araminta continues with a charming smile. ‘I heard a story about a dove in Linlithgow – something from history. Do you know anything about it?’
The woman’s lips tighten. ‘You can’t have come about that. The doos. Surely not. The minister can take you round the palace, you know.’
‘How helpful,’ Araminta exclaims. ‘Where might I find the minister?’
The woman motions in the direction from which they’ve just come. ‘Last wee house on the hill,’ she says.
‘And the dove?’
‘She was only a child, but.’
‘A child?’
The woman shudders. ‘I cannae talk of it,’ she says and carries on down the street.
‘Stay here,’ Araminta tells Brodie. Then she and Eleanor return up the paved slope, Araminta raps on the door of the last house which at length is opened by a maid with her sleeves rolled up to her elbows. The smell of carbolic soap oozes onto the cobblestones.
‘Ma’am?’
‘I hoped to see the minister,’ Araminta says.
‘He’s not here. Washday.’
‘I wonder if you might be able to help us?’
‘I don’t know anything about the palace, if that’s what it is,’ the girl snaps.
