Service of the Heir: An Edinburgh Murder (Murray of Letho Book 3)

by Lexie Conyngham

  Service of the Heir:

  An Edinburgh Murder

  by

  Lexie Conyngham

  The Third in the Murray of Letho Series

  Copyright Alexandra Conyngham 2011

  Published by The Kellas Cat Press.

  The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work as been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express permission of the publisher.

  ISBN: 978-0-9563731-6-8

  Dramatis Personae

  Charles Murray of Letho, a significant character

  Charles Murray, younger of Letho, his eldest and anxious son

  Edinburgh Society:

  Mr. and Lady Sarah Dundas and sons, he a lawyer who really doesn’t need to practise

  Mr. and Mrs. Thomson and family, he a lawyer of upper income

  Mr. and Mrs. Armstrong and family, he a lawyer of middle income, she a sister to Mrs. Thomson

  Mr. and Mrs. Balneavis and vast family, he a lawyer of very little income at all

  John Douglas, a lawyer with no apparent dependents

  Alester Blair, gentleman

  Ebenezer Hammond, the greatest advocate in Edinburgh

  Miss Christian Gordon of Balkiskan, a remarkable relic

  Household:

  Mrs. Chambers, a perfect housekeeper

  Mrs. Mutch, a charming cook

  Mr. Robbins, surprisingly a senior manservant

  Mary and Jennet, upper maids but otherwise unalike

  William and Daniel, junior menservants of limited promise

  Iffy and Effy, kitchenmaids of no promise

  Dunnet, the coachman

  Jamie, the stableboy

  Other inhabitants of Edinburgh, including:

  Dandy Muir, smith

  Matthew Muir, notary

  Sundry members of the Town Guard, of little efficacy

  Henry and Robert Scoggie, troublesome students

  Two unnamed mammals of the genus mustela putorius fero

  Chapter One

  It would have been better if the ferrets had not disappeared at the same time.

  Well, not better, exactly, but not quite as bad.

  Well, not disappeared exactly, but they certainly made themselves difficult to catch. They were both silvery grey, and they slid, like drops of living mercury, through the bars of their cage and off amongst the assembled chair-bearers, causing chaos, confusion and minor blood-letting wherever they went.

  Charles Murray would have sunk his head into his hands had he not known it was vital to have at least two eyes on the whole situation. His landlady was shrieking, and most of the chairmen were shouting or swearing or both, which did not aid the concentration and had the additional effect of rousing most of the neighbourhood from their beds. The ferrets scented fresh blood, and rampaged on, doing more damage than one would have thought two small rodents could. A charitable person would have said that they were frightened and upset: Charles had known them far too long to be charitable.

  Henry Scoggie, on the other hand, the person nearest to being legally responsible for the ferrets, was frightened and upset, and was trying to chase them. He headed off into the crowd, collar up against the snow, calling them with tones of affection Charles could certainly not have managed. Instead, with a practised move he pinpointed Robert Scoggie, Henry’s younger brother, attached finger and thumb to his ear, and relocated him abruptly to the parlour, closing the door firmly. Then, ignoring the ferret-induced panic (and privately hoping the damned rodents would escape and vanish for good), he began systematically to identify, pay off and dismiss the bearers of the fourteen sedan chairs, and associated link boys with their torches, currently parked outside his lodgings. It was not cheap.

  It took the neighbours longer to disperse, though the way the darkness crept back as the link boys left helped. The neighbours were rewarded in their vigilance, however, when Murray’s landlady, whose shrieking had subsided, suddenly let out a violent scream, and Henry, who had been rushing in her direction, stopped at once. Mrs. Fyfe began to batter her skirts with her hands, turning and twisting, while Henry stood frozen in the light from the hall door. Murray was at a loss, but then realised. He leaped forward, seized Mrs. Fyfe from behind and pinned her arms to her sides, then instructed her to stand absolutely still. Then,

  ‘Henry,’ he instructed, ‘call your – your ferret.’

  Henry made the kissing sound required, and with a sudden ripple of fabric a ferret shot out at the bottom hem of Mrs. Fyfe’s gown. Henry, who had the first ferret in one hand, managed all the same to field this one, and for a moment there was only the sound of deep breathing and the occasional angry cheep of the ferrets. Then Mrs. Fyfe drew breath.

  ‘Mr. Murray,’ she said, very solemnly, and he released her arms with a little bow. ‘Mr. Murray, this is the very last time. You and your charges will leave my house tomorrow. And that is final.’

  ‘Mrs. Fyfe, please ...’

  ‘Final, Mr. Murray. You and the boys have caused enough grief, believe me.’

  The little cheer from the remaining neighbours did nothing to lighten Murray’s mood. When a figure broke free from the crowd and came towards him, he braced himself, half-expecting a sympathetic punch in the face, but instead the stocky figure was faintly familiar.

  ‘Mr. Charles, sir?’

  He blinked. He had not been called Mr. Charles for some time – four years, he thought.

  ‘Yes – wait – Dunnet, is it not?’

  ‘That’s right, sir. Mr. Charles, you must come at once. Your father, sir: there’s been a terrible accident. You’re to go at once – he’s asking for you.’

  ‘Where is he?’ Charles asked quickly. ‘Here or Fife?’

  ‘Here, sir, Queen Street. Hurry, sir.’

  Murray thought fast.

  ‘Henry, fetch the ferrets’ cage and put them in it. Bring them with us. Tell Robert to come at once. Bring your coats. Mrs. Fyfe, we’ll send for our things in the morning.’ He turned back to the man who was his father’s groom. ‘Is it serious?’

  ‘Aye, sir. Very serious indeed.’

  Charles shifted in his seat, and tried to flex his leg muscles without obviously moving them. As long as he did his duty, everything would be all right.

  The heavy face of the – the corpse - was as pale as the candles that dangled from their still, bright flames in the cold air. On the other side of the coffin, Mr. Blair appeared to be asleep, his lower lip flapping regularly with a tiny clicking sound. At the foot of the bed, where his father’s deerhound sat alert and miserable, the minister from Greyfriars was openly snoring, head back on the hard carved wood of his chair. Henry Scoggie was less easy in his rest, hands tucked hard beneath his elbows, shoulders hunched forward, knees pressed together. Charles could see he was feeling the cold. The fire was dying down. He wanted to rise and see to it, or rise and walk to the window to see if there was any sign of the dawn – pointless at this hour, at this time of the year – but somehow he had lost the ability to move.

  The coffin looked well, anyway, he decided, his eyes straying back to it. The black cloth was smoothed over the wood with not a crease, and the braid caught a little of the candlelight reflected in its dark silk threads. Beneath it, the bed was enveloped in white sheets that the housekeeper had produced, with a meaningful look, from a chest in her own room, and hand
ed to the chambermaids as a sacred duty. With them had been stored the shroud with its neat ruffles, all smelling of lavender, a strange, summer scent in the depths of winter. Charles’ eyes dwelt on the ruffles for a moment, and then slid back inevitably to his father’s face, eyes closed, lips a little loose, cheeks sunken. A decent linen cap covered his head, covered, too, the strange dent that drew from high behind his right ear to the top of his forehead, and the rainbow of bruising that had surrounded it. Charles had not seen it. By the time he had arrived, it was smothered in bandages and salves, and the face beneath it was already settling, even while the breath was still in him, into this yellowy, waxy mask. If they had walked a little faster – but what good would that have done? And he had walked them as fast as he could.

  He breathed in deeply, but all he smelled was lavender and the faint, woody smoke of the dying fire. Henry shivered in his sleep. There was no shame: it had been good of him to offer to sit up, and he was young. The minister snored. There was a polite scuffle and a clank at the door, and a maid entered, a black mob cap making her face startling white and her face in turn making the smudge of ash on her chin the more striking. She had a bandage on one finger, and looked tired.

  She crossed the room, pausing to bob a little half-frightened curtsey in the direction of the corpse, and quickly revived the fire. The minister, roused by the sudden noise, jerked his head upright in a way too fast to be comfortable and exclaimed ‘Aye!’. Henry jumped slightly, then woke and stretched his legs. The deerhound flinched, but did not move. Charles looked across the coffin at Mr. Blair. He had not moved either, but as Charles watched, he opened his eyes, gazed solemnly at Charles from amongst a network of wrinkles, then gave him a reassuring wink. He had, Charles noticed, done his oldest friend the honour of finding a relatively subdued waistcoat for the occasion, in pearl and grey silk. He smiled at Blair, knowing him for a kind of ally, then roused himself to open the door for the maid. He closed the door gently behind her, and asked,

  ‘More brandy, Dr. Inglis?’

  ‘Thank you, Mr. Murray, I will,’ said the minister, fumbling for his glass and his glasses. Mr. Blair accepted a small one and a slice of cheese, which he began to nibble minutely, and Henry took a large helping of both, gulping the cheese then holding both hands against the brandy glass as if it would warm him. The minister and Henry both glanced over at the coffin, Henry probably to see that his tutor’s late father had really not moved, Dr. Inglis possibly to reassure himself that no one had purloined the fine velvet mortcloth that the minister had brought along himself from the kirk. It lay, still folded, at the foot of the bed, ready for use. The Murray family’s own mortcloth, Charles had discovered in the midst of the familiar, unfamiliar, frightening, comforting preparations, was kept at Letho, on the assumption, presumably, that most family members had the decency to go home to their country estate to die. Charles did not mind hiring the kirk’s cloth: the money went to the poors’ fund, he had discovered, and he had selected the finest there was – his father would have approved.

  His father had been lying in this bed – coffinless, then – when Charles had thrown himself in at the front door and run through the hall. The housekeeper had followed, explaining again something about building works and a fall which she had to repeat, in hushed tones, before Charles could grasp anything beyond his father’s awful appearance. His father, late on Friday evening, had unaccountably gone with Dunnet the groom to view the building work going on at the new feus some distance north of the far end of Queen Street. Although he quite frequently walked in the evening, and sometimes took the groom with him for a purpose somewhere between protection and company, he had never previously shown much interest in the new terraces. At some point in the walk Dunnet had been asked to return home to fetch, he had told the housekeeper, a particular walking cane, and by the time Dunnet had found it a link-boy had arrived to say that Mr. Murray was on his way home on a board, as the new coping on a wall had fallen and landed on him and another man. The other man was killed outright, but Mr. Murray was still alive and was asking for his son.

  Now that his son had arrived, Mr. Murray, hearing himself addressed as father, had struggled to open his eyes. He found Charles leaning over his bed.

  ‘You came,’ he observed, and Mrs. Chambers hurried forward with a cup of water to moisten his lips.

  ‘Of course, father.’ He wanted to say he was sorry they had quarrelled, but could not find the words. He took his father’s hand, possibly the first time he had ever done so except in a hearty shake.

  ‘A shame George could not be here.’ His father’s eyelids slipped down, then with an effort lifted again. ‘I had intended to die in better order for you, Charles, but then I’m sure you have the talents to arrange my papers.’ The barb almost gave Charles hope: surely his father would not taunt him if he were really dying? ‘My will is in the bookcase in the study here. I know you will see to it that George is always secure.’

  ‘Father ...’

  ‘You’re thinner, boy. I hope you’ve been exercising properly.’ He swallowed, with difficulty. ‘I should say, you know, that none of this was Dunnet’s fault at all. Not at all,’ he finished firmly, and his eyes sagged closed again. A few moments later, Dr. Harker and Dr. Falconer, a pair of solemn angels guarding the gates of the living, pronounced Mr. Charles Murray senior to be dead.

  The clunk of glass on table brought Charles’ attention back to the present, and he looked up to see that the minister was once more asleep, his head held upright this time only by the angle of his collar and looking as if his powdered wig was pressing him down into his neck cloth. Charles drew out his watch and turned it to the light. It was eight o’clock, and in the distance he could hear the faint stirrings of the household. They would not have slept, but the minister had gone down to say a prayer with them after the kisting, when the undertaker’s men had slipped the heavy corpse into the coffin, and now, bleary-eyed, they would be preparing food for the funeral. The housekeeper had given him, for his approval, a lengthy list of the funeral meats. He had glanced down it with a rising feeling of nausea, remembering funerals at which he had eaten well and drunk a little too well. Mrs. Chambers was distracting herself with business: she had been part of the household for years, since before Charles’ mother had died, an exemplar of devotion and propriety. Charles was relieved to rely on her familiar confidence, and to be guided through all the endless duties of the bereaved. Under her direction, he had signed his name to elegant, swiftly-printed letters informing the recipient between the neat black borders of the death of Charles Murray, Esquire, of Letho, funeral to be held on the eighth of January, friends to attend at eleven at the Queen Street house. He had pressed his father’s signet ring into the black wax and let it fall at last after a hundred letters, to dangle solidly on his watch chain, for his own long fingers were nothing to his father’s strong, stout, muscular ones. He wondered what else he had to do, as his father’s tailor came to measure him for mourning which was delivered so promptly he suspected it had been made up already. He wrote letters, all much the same, to neighbours in Fife, to the factor at Letho, to aunts in London who could not be expected to come to the funeral. He wrote to Lord Scoggie, his employer and the father of Robert and Henry, to explain (on one level at least) their sudden change of address. He tried to write to his brother George, found that no words would come to mind, and put off the task until after the funeral.

  When dawn, only distinguishable from the night to those with a keen eye and an eagerness to look for it, finally paled the grey of the eastern sky, Dr. Inglis stretched his legs, loosened his collar round his mighty chins, and arose. Henry leapt up, too, and Blair dragged his elderly powdered wig from his head and shook it out, fortunately not in the direction of the corpse, as a heavy cloud of particles of dubious origin flew out and plummeted on to the carpet. One or two specks adhered to the black wall hangings, and Charles had a sudden urge to laugh.

  A polite knock came at the door, and the same m
aid who had earlier stoked the fire bobbed her curtsey to the corpse again and announced,

  ‘Mr. Charles, sir, there’s hot water ready in the bedrooms upstairs, sir, and Robbins is ready standing by.’

  ‘Thank you. Will you tell Robbins to go to the blue room first? And show Dr. Inglis there, please, first.’

  Was that right? Was that the right thing to do? Maybe it should have been Blair first. But if he kept looking assured, maybe no one would question him. But the deerhound looked at him dubiously.

  Charles followed his guests upstairs and waited in what had been his old room for Robbins to come and shave him. The room had been redecorated since he had last been in Edinburgh, and there was nothing of his left in it – he made a mental note to find out where his books had gone. He hoped not to the salerooms.

  The room was cold, the fire only recently lit, but he made himself strip off coat, waistcoat and shirt before pouring the steaming water into the broad basin in his closet, and splashing it, light with soap bubbles, all over his face, arms and neck. He rubbed at his skin with the soap, wishing it were rougher, and then with the thin towels, watching the flesh redden, alive with blood moving under the pale skin and the fine black hairs, growing, vivid, vital. He thought of the waxy flesh of the corpse downstairs, all his father’s fine flesh already turning to ruin, and shuddered.

  Henry, stiff with cold, had no intention of removing the least article of clothing before he absolutely had to. He returned to the room he was sharing with his brother Robert, filled for the moment with all their belongings from Mrs. Fyfe’s lodgings in Kirk o’Field. Robert groaned and sat up in bed, knowing he was there but not ready to open his eyes.

  ‘Did you sit in that wretched room all cursed night?’ he asked.

  ‘I did.’