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A small marker indicates this is indeed the address on the paper. We look around. It’s vacant land and the smell is… ripe.
“Bog,” Gray says. “Or so I hope, though thisisdownhill from the city.”
I shudder. “Prime land then.”
“Indeed.”
We can pretend it’s just a bog, but yes, chances are it’s not fresh spring water creating the swampy land. I try not to think too much about Victorian sanitation. Try really, really hard. Oh, it’s better than it was, as Isla has explained. At least they’re now aware that overcrowded cities mean polluted waterways, which mean disease and death. London has its first proper sewer system, and Edinburgh diverted sewage away from the Water of Leith in a major project a few years ago.
We follow a narrow road. At first, there’s nothing to see. It’s scrubby, wet, stinking wasteland. After about fifty feet, the road forks. I’m looking both ways when Gray points out deep grooves at the end of the left fork, as if a coach has parked there more than once.
We walk along an ever-narrowing path until we reach the ruins of several rustic stone buildings.
“Diverted water flow,” Gray says as he circles it. “It could be natural in nature, but more likely from the city.”
“The city installs something that changes the water flow, for their own benefit, and it causes flooding down here, which collapsed the farmhouse and rendered the farmland unfarmable.”
“That would be my presumption.”
It’d be easy to blame the city for that, but as an urban center grows, its need to bring in fresh water and get rid of wastewater increases. I can only hope the city compensated the farmer for his lost land.
“How long ago do you think it happened?” I ask, gesturing at the ruined buildings.
“A decade or so.”
I shade my eyes against a rare burst of sunshine. “And someone has now bought the land and is using it for…?” I frown as I keep looking. “Nothing. Between the smell and the damp ground, it would take twenty-first-century engineers to turn this into usable land. For now, the only thing it’s good for is a con job.”
Gray’s brows lift, as if he doesn’t recognize the word.
“Fraud,” I say. “Someone is trying to pass this land off as something it isn’t. Getting people to invest in a proposed project. But anyone who comes out here will know it’s bullshit.”
“Yet someonehasbeen here, according to those coach tracks.”
We walk past a crumbling barn and make it maybe twenty feet, around a small forest, before I say, “Oh!”
Gray shades his eyes. “It appears this piece of land hasoneexcellent feature.”
“This view,” I say.
Edinburgh rises before us over a field of verdant green. A picture-perfect view. Is this how someone is selling the property? Bring prospective investors here, keep them preoccupied—and keep their noses plugged—until they can see this view?
“And here is our answer,” Gray says.
I think he means the view. Then I notice the mausoleum. Kind of hard to miss in this wasteland, but it’s tucked to the side of the forest we just passed, and I’d been so entranced by the view that I had indeed missed it.
“There’s… a mausoleum in the middle of nowhere,” I say.
“There is indeed,” Gray says as he picks his way over.
“Little small, isn’t it?”
“It is.”
Gray circles the building, which is barely big enough to hold four tightly packed caskets. Something about the perspective seems off, and it takes a moment—
“Samples!” I say.
When he looks over, I explain, “You have sample coffins in your showroom. When I first saw them, I thought they were for babies, given the infant mortality rate. But that’s what this looks like. A model mausoleum. Like what you’d show prospective buyers. A scale model that lets them see the proposed outside andinside.”
