‘Oh, really?’ asked Davina, sorting that scrap of information into a mental deedbox.
‘She is too like Papa. It is from him that she has her quiet disposition, her wish not to be noticed, which is so irritating. And, of course, her regrettable freckles and her sandy hair.’ Almost unconsciously, she tilted her pure creamy face towards the light. Davina had the same colouring, but her face was sharper, thought Catherine, and of course, that little bit older.
The street bell rang, and after a moment a smartly-dressed maid announced Miss Balneavis. Davina rolled her eyes at Catherine, and they stood to greet the innocent victim of their unwilling charity.
Miss Balneavis’ father, visible through the crush of lawyers by his fire-red face and the bouncing wave of cheeriness surrounding him, was making his way across the coffee house to where Thomson and Armstrong were waiting for him. The corner table was their usual one, and whichever of them was free from duties in the Law Courts up the High Street was usually to be found there. The irrepressible Balneavis was in fact almost resident at the corner table, spinning out a pot of coffee the length of the day if need be: he had fewer and shorter cases than the others, and not much room in his overcrowded tenement to attract the business he needed. Armstrong and Thomson considered him more unfortunate than incompetent: unfortunate to have married for love where money did not follow; unfortunate to number four daughters among his seven children, unfortunate to lack influence in society, and unfortunate to be brought up to advocacy in a town where advocates ruled and standards were high. In Perth or Glasgow, he might have done well enough. Yet he seemed persistently happy, and today, when he had had work and had done it well, his face in the tallow light shone like the city illuminations for the Battle of Trafalgar: Thomson reckoned you could charge a shilling a head for the spectacle.
‘Well, well, a splendid funeral yesterday for Murray, eh?’ Balneavis asked as he took his seat. ‘Everything as it should be, and an excellent meal. I was telling Mrs. Balneavis again this morning, an excellent meal. We are so lucky in our review of past pleasures.’
‘Oh, aye,’ said Armstrong, for whom the dinner was still very much a present evil. ‘Fortune’s knows how to lay on the comestibles. But a sad day, too.’
‘Oh, yes, oh, yes,’ Balneavis’ dismay was brief. ‘No sign of our friend Dundas yet, then?’
‘He’s in the middle of conferring with Montgomery about the Campbell case. It could be a good thing for Dundas if he manages it well.’ Thomson absently penned a note in the margin of a speech he was preparing. ‘Not that Dundas needs much more success. He could retire nicely on what he has, to judge from his way of living.’
‘Aye,’ said Armstrong, managing not to sound bitter. ‘Though using his well-kent surname might not be so good an idea soon, if what they’re saying about Henry Dundas of Melville is true. Misappropriation of public funds while he was Lord of the Admiralty – how would the Lord Lyon represent that heraldically?’
‘Oh, on a fess argent a pocket filled with filthy lucre proper, and a hand gules,’ Thomson chuckled. Their friend Dundas had recently applied, with the appropriate fee, to the Lyon King of Arms for his own heraldry, just before the scandal concerning his cousin Viscount Melville had come to light. ‘But Melville will not be charged,’ he asserted. ‘And if he is, he will not be convicted.’
‘Not even if there is a Whig government?’ asked Armstrong quietly.
‘Aye, I hear Pitt is not like to recover,’ added Balneavis, at the same volume.
‘There will be no Whig government till Bonaparte is dead.’ Thomson did not even bother to look up from his work. ‘It is too much of a risk to bring in reform at home when the army is overseas. Sir Ilay said the same thing to me himself the other day.’
Armstrong looked dubious, Balneavis plumply reassured.
‘Now,’ said Balneavis, ‘turning to more important issues than the governing of the country. How can I marry my pretty daughter Margaret to Charles Murray’s heir? For he’s the only young man I know rich enough to take her without a dowry, and you know how delightful that sounds to my poor old ears.’
‘What about one of the Dundases? They’re well to do.’
‘Oh, Gavin and Willie Jack are still bairns – well, Willie Jack is, and Gavin acts like one. Harry, now, is the right age, and steady, though a dull boy. Not stupid, but dull.’
Armstrong, ever cautious, glanced around to see if any Dundas was about.
‘Young Murray is five years her senior, surely?’
‘Aye, true enough, true enough. But I think that is a good age difference. Or perhaps he would take one of the younger ones? and Harry Dundas could have Margaret?’ He smiled dreamily. ‘She’d be a good daughter to look after me in my old age, but I’d sooner move to her household than keep her in mine.’
‘I take your meaning,’ said Armstrong, thinking of his own daughter Ella. His wife constantly despaired of the girl, but there was a steadiness about her that he liked, a calmness and a kindness that he feared his younger daughter Catherine lacked. He felt in his heart that Ella would never marry, and it grieved him deeply.
‘Oh, I have some news,’ said Thomson suddenly, putting up his papers. ‘You remember young Murray was late for supper yesterday evening? Well, here is the reason: his stable boy was found murdered in his very stable!’
‘His stable boy?’ repeated Balneavis. ‘That’s dreadful.’ His kindly face was briefly distraught.
‘Aye, I had it from one of my servants this morning.’
‘And you’ve never mentioned it till now?’ Armstrong was curious.
‘Forgot,’ stated Thomson, waving his speech. ‘Mind on other things.’
‘Och, poor Charles,’ said Armstrong, taking a sip of wine and regretting it, as it burned a path down to his disturbed stomach. ‘Tragedy on tragedy. Do they know who murdered him?’
‘Well, apparently the groom was found with the body, but the doctor says he could not have done it. The wee lad was cold when they found him. The groom has been acting very strangely, they say.’
‘Aye, well,’ Armstrong swallowed, to try to dilute the fatefully settling wine. ‘I daresay it’ll come up before one of us before long. Horse thieves, most likely.’
‘But it does make you wonder,’ said Thomson, rising to go, ‘it does shed an unfortunate light on the death of Murray himself. After all, murder is one of those unpleasant things that repeat on one. It is difficult to restrict oneself to the one incident.’ He paused thoughtfully and buttoned his coat. ‘So was Murray murdered, too?’
Chapter Six
As Murray set out along Queen Street in the afternoon sunshine, he felt as if he were conducting some kind of experiment, a test to see how the world would react to the near replication of a set of circumstances. Of course, it was not evening, and he was not his father, but he was going to inspect the building work on the new feus at the far end of the street, and Dunnet was coming with him.
You could fit two St. Andrews streets into the sweeping breadth of Queen Street, he reckoned, and the whole village of St. Monance would be lost between the east end where his father’s house stood and the west end where the country began, the Earl of Moray’s undulating estates. People he met as he walked noted and nodded at him, acknowledging the black crape weepers and knowing for whom he wore them, though he did not know all of them.
He had not mentioned to Dunnet where they were going, as he had a series of duties in mind of which the visit to the building site was merely the first. The groom, however, who had set out with movements like a child’s crude wooden doll nailed at the joints, was becoming increasingly shaky in his walk and, though he had not uttered so much as a syllable to Murray, could now be heard giving an occasional mutter under his breath, as though engaged in conversation with some invisible companion. He walked a pace behind Murray, who, though he had brought the man out for a change of scene as much as for his service, was beginning to find his groom’s habits rather disturbing.
&nbs
p; At the building site, however, Dunnet became inaudible again, although this was chiefly because the competition was stiff. The noise was astonishing: the shouts of the workmen, the grating of stone against stone as another block was set in place, the singing chisels of the stonemasons working decorative carvings on stones set on wooden runners on the ground, ready to be hoisted into place when they were needed, while their apprentices worked on the simpler tasks of adjustment and basic shaping with bulging wooden mallets. Men slapped horses that hurled themselves against their harness in response, hooves slipping on ground worked into mud, pulling ropes that creaked through tackle high on the wooden scaffolding to hoist stone blocks up to the waiting builders, shirt sleeves peeled back from wind-scoured forearms, who swung the stones into place. Further along the row carpenters worked with saws on floorboards, with hammers and nails on window frames, and blacksmiths, their apprentices dancing around the fires like the devil’s own disciples, wrought the elaborate railings and balconies that were slotted in place along the houses like combs in a lady’s hair.
‘Where did you leave him?’ Murray shouted to Dunnet. It did not seem appropriate to shout, but it was that or nothing. Dunnet pointed to the front of a house where the builders were at work on the second floor: there were as yet no window frames, and the top edge of stonework, obscured by scaffolding, was castellated like a ruin. Murray peered up at it, and then looked down about him at the mud where his dying father and the dead notary must have lain, surrounded by toppled stone.
A man in a coat, who had been talking with some of the workmen, saw them and approached, looking somewhere between apologetic and belligerent. When he spoke, his accent was Glaswegian.
‘Now, look, gentlemen, I’m sorry to have to say this, but could you move back? Two gentlemen were killed here last week, and if anything happens to anyone else the people who have bought these feus are going to start asking questions.’
‘It was the place where the two gentlemen died that we came to see,’ said Murray, moving back from the building and waving Dunnet further away.
‘Och, not more sightseers!’ said the foreman in disbelief. ‘Why in the name of Heaven – or are you not sightseers at all?’ He was suddenly wary. ‘Are you one of the purchasers?’
Murray said,
‘How did the accident happen?’
The foreman’s whole anxious face became part of his shrug.
‘I cannot say, sir. It’s very unlikely, but it must be that a stone was left unsecured at the top of the building that evening, and fell. The scaffolding was badly damaged, and most of it fell, too. It was particularly cold that night, and it may be that that unsettled the stones.’ Murray felt he could have sounded more reassuring.
‘I see,’ he said, and smiled at the man, feeling suddenly sorry for him. ‘Thank you for your help.’ The man nodded, still somewhere between anxious and puzzled. Murray took a final survey of the site from where he stood. A pleasant one, he thought, although the houses would face away from the view of the Forth he cherished.
The cold air and bright sunlight combined made his eyes and nose water, and he reached into his overcoat, and failing that, into his coat pocket, for a handkerchief. His fingers met a series of curious objects, and when he had finished the urgent business with the handkerchief he drew them out and spread them flat on his hand in the sunshine.
The collection surprised him for a moment, until he recollected his climb to Jamie Paterson’s lair in the hayloft the evening before. There were in his hand the treasures that Jamie had kept so safely on his windowsill, to see last thing at night and first in the morning. There were a couple of pieces of wood, one roughly painted with his name, the other a piece of bone-white jetsam; there was a large, smooth pebble, probably from the same beach as the driftwood, perhaps both souvenirs of a day at Leith; there was a button, in fancy enamelwork, old rose in colour with a flower cloisonnéed on it, lost from a gentleman’s waistcoat and a little scuffed at the edges, where it had survived a life in the gutter before being gathered in by the eager fingers of a young lad. There were a few shells, and the last item was a small piece of leather, expertly worked and stamped with a neat geometric pattern, but the stamp had somehow shifted and spoiled the design, and the piece had been cut away and discarded. There was nothing here of any value, except perhaps the button, but Murray found his spare handkerchief and wrapped them solemnly in it, for they had been his stableboy’s most treasured possessions, and he was to take them to him.
After one or two attempts, he caught Dunnet’s eye and, turning, led him back to George Street and on to the Old Town.
Margaret Balneavis, privileged to dine with such society darlings as Catherine Armstrong and Davina Thomson, was quiet when she arrived home to the dark stair in the High Street, and the stone steps, worn almost to a continuous slope in two hundred years of use, gave away little of her presence as they met her thin-soled, flat-heeled boots. Her mother, however, had been keeping one ear constantly towards the stair, and the second the risp rattled she was there at the door to answer it, all anxious curiosity, and she bounced the little maid back into the kitchen with a nod of her head.
‘Well, my dear girl, how was your meal?’ Mrs. Balneavis bustled her out of her bonnet and cloak and into the parlour, a relatively quiet room at this time of day. The younger children and John were still at school, and Helen, released from her morning’s sewing, had taken a walk with some friends. The man in the flat across the stair, who made his money by giving fiddle lessons, was out. Upstairs, in the top flat, an elderly and impoverished peer from Ayrshire was bedridden and quietly mad. Margaret went to the window where the sunlight continued to warp the thin panelling of the shutters, and looked down at the bustle of the High Street. One or two of the Dragoons’ black horses from the Castle were being ridden cautiously down the hill through the crowds, and when a ray of sunlight caught their furnishings they glittered like creatures from legend. The subalterns on their backs, however, made uneasy trying to control the huge beasts in the crowds, looked more as if they had stepped from a fair, and not in the least worth their eight shillings a day. Margaret smiled and continued to scan the crowds, leaning against the glass to see as closely as possible to their own front door.
‘Did you enjoy your visit, dear?’ Mrs. Balneavis repeated, plumping an arm around her daughter’s waist.
‘It was perfectly pleasant, Mamma.’ Margaret smiled at her, but met her eye only fleetingly. ‘Miss Thomson and Miss Catherine were quite charming.’
‘They are, aren’t they?’ Mrs. Balneavis heaved a deep, happy sigh, and settled in an armchair by the dark fireplace, taking up her mending. ‘And both so pretty! But then both their mothers, always so lovely. I remember them, you know, when they were only your age. Oh, it won’t be long now till we see fine marriages made in both families, I don’t doubt!’
She eyed her daughter speculatively, and saw fair hair and rosy cheeks and a round figure, all just as pleasing to her as Miss Catherine Armstrong and Miss Thomson could ever be. Pleasing, too, to men, she had no doubt, for had not she herself looked just so when Mr. Balneavis had asked her to make him the happiest man in the world?
Margaret came away from the window and seated herself on the edge of one of the hard branderback chairs at the dining table. From habit borne of the self-imposed necessity of making the best of herself, she sat with a perfectly straight back and feet, rather too large for a girl’s, neatly side by side, peeping from beneath her grey wool dress. She selected a piece from her own mending pile, a worn sheet from the bed shared by her and her sister Helen in the second bedroom. It would have to be patched, not simply darned. She would have liked to have continued with the pretty embroidery she had taken with her to the Thomsons’, a little thing for her own trousseau, but such silks were for company, and here there was work to be done.
‘And who else was there?’ asked Mrs. Balneavis eventually, after waiting in vain for Margaret to volunteer information. There had been a time when
she had despaired of Margaret ever ceasing from talking. Now, even this question seemed to require consideration.
‘Oh, no one at the meal, Mamma. Mrs. Thomson sent down to say she was unwell, and I left word with Miss Thomson to say that you sent your best regards, and I was sure you would join me in wishing her a swift recovery. And Miss Armstrong had a prior engagement, so we were a small party altogether.’ She glanced at the table as she spoke, remembering the satin-polished mahogany at Thomsons’. The cloth here, a soft green, showed signs of its continuous passage, spinning, like the earth itself, as her mother moved it around the table to let it fade evenly. It had been fading evenly for as long as Margaret could remember.
‘That was an intimate arrangement! And lovely for you, my dear.’ She took great pleasure in any signs of particular notice of her daughter, real or imagined. ‘And after the meal?’
‘Mr. Gavin and Mr. William James Dundas called, briefly,’ Margaret said. Try as she might, her mother could detect little more than indifference in her daughter’s voice.
‘Mr. Gavin and Mr. William James! My.’ William James was little young, she thought, but a Dundas would be wealthy and elegant, and better than some of the options. ‘And Mr. Gavin.’ More charming, perhaps, but a little less gravitas. He tended towards fat, but it could be that Margaret liked that in a man – as she herself did, and kept Mr. Balneavis as well fed as was possible. ‘And how were they?’ she asked.
Margaret cut a careful patch to fit the worn area on the sheet.
‘They were in good health, and were both perfectly pleasant.’ She glanced at her mother, but her eye was caught by the armchair in which her mother sat awkwardly by custom, on bumpy stuffing and uneven cushions, the cloth of the arms and back patched again and again.
‘Perhaps there is a match there for one of the girls,’ her mother speculated aloud, ‘though Willie Jack is a whiles young to think of marriage yet. Though both are presentable young men,’ she added hopefully.
Service of the Heir: An Edinburgh Murder (Murray of Letho Book 3) Page 7