The link boys now were few and far between, their distant guiding torches an unsteady blur in the light rain and black night. Once or twice, a chair hurried past, the bearers panting with the effort of carrying some comatose gentleman back from his drinking club to his New Town comforts. There were few other walkers, and the pair of them could hardly be seen on the Bridge, but as they moved up into the Old Town they could feel, rather than see, other shapes around them, brief outlines against lit windows, the scuff of cloth as they passed, the smell of wet wool, or of ale or tobacco or worse from damp bodies, mercifully invisible.
They had decided before leaving Queen Street to descend to the Grassmarket by way of the West Bow at the top of the Lawnmarket, under the final steep alley to Castle Hill. Murray had tried not to lay too much stress on his aversion to the Cowgate in front of Mary. It made him feel like a coward. The Lawnmarket, and the High Street from which it continued, could be seen quite clearly even tonight, misted with rain but outlined and glowing in the light from hundreds of windows, from below street level to points impossibly high above them. Here life went on at night even outdoors, unlike the sedate New Town: here the police officers, cloaks over their new uniforms, watched as the latecomers and late-leavers went to and from their dwelling places, as groups and couples met and parted, and each shadowy figure hurrying through the damp night was a fragment of the view from a thousand possible openings, lit and dark. Murray had looked finally at his watch before leaving it safely above his bed, and reckoned that by now it must be about two in the morning. There was no sign of the old town settling for the night.
They passed Balneavis’ elderly stair on their right as they climbed the Lawnmarket, all lights economically out, as they were too in Douglas’ flat which, Murray believed, was directly below Balneavis’. All good advocates were safely in their beds, he thought to himself, and grinned. Mary, glancing about at that precise point, saw the grin and gave an angular one of her own, her eyes suddenly full of mischief. A shiver ran down his spine and he drew breath to speak, found he had nothing to say and waved to indicate that they should proceed. His jacket creaked ominously about his shoulders as he turned to follow her.
The gallows at the crossroads was invisible, though as always it made its presence felt. They turned left and immediately began the steep descent of the West Bow, clutching the worn wooden posts that held up the wigmaker’s on the corner. The Bow dog-legged between precipitous tenements, wider at their summit than their narrow bases could reasonably bear. The ground was slippery with the rain, and in Dunnet’s boots he was more vulnerable underfoot than Mary, whom he would have liked to assist. She, however, carried on blithely as though walking on level ground, while he clung to the wall or the fronts of closed-up cloth stalls. He fingered his way gently down, stepping in one or two spots of discomfiting softness as he did so. Unseen in the dark, something had evidently been tidied against the wall, and gave off a peculiarly powerful smell when disturbed. When they finally reached the bottom and the spreading entry into the Grassmarket, Mary drew him to one side and stopped him.
‘Now, sir, with your permission that is the last time I shall call you sir this evening,’ she began. Murray nodded obediently. ‘You are only moderately well disguised in these clothes, and there is no call for drawing attention to ourselves. Think about what you look like, now. Keep your hands hidden if you can, or make them dirty. They are far too white, unless you wish to claim that you work in flour or bleaching linen.’
Murray looked at his ungloved hands, which were now somewhat marked by the progress down the West Bow. One knuckle was gashed and filthy. He knew little of work in flour or linen. He turned, and rubbed the backs of his hands, too, against the wall’s lichened dampness, and rubbed them again until they finally met with Mary’s approval.
‘Walk a little less proudly, too, loutch along. Stoop your shoulders, hang your head a little.’ She stepped back and surveyed him, chin pointed at him critically. ‘Aye, well, it’s the best we can do without a surgeon and three years’ diet of potatoes,’ she remarked. He did not know whether to smile or not. This woman was, after all, one of his servants: on the other hand, until recently he had been a servant himself. ‘The first place we shall go,’ she announced, turning towards the lights of the wide-open Grassmarket, ‘is to a howff.’
‘A howff?’ he repeated, concerned. To draw Mary down into this undesirable part of town was one thing: to take her into a drinking establishment was quite another. She, however, grinned again.
‘Aye, an alehouse. A place where they serve the very milk of Auld Clootie himself, and the language and the doings of the inhabitants would make the hearts of all good Christian folk turn to stone at the very mention of them.’ She raised her pointed eyebrows wickedly, and strode off into the dark heart of the Grassmarket, and Murray, not at all sure of himself, forced his ill-shod feet to follow at their best speed.
The howff was well hidden from any passersby who happened to be deaf and deficient in sense of smell. The entry was along an unlit passage at the bottom of a stair, and the premises were down a flight of steps at the rear of the building, below ground level. There were no windows, and the candles had evidently been made from the fat of some very elderly and unwell animals, to judge from the reek. The ale itself added a rich, heavy scent, which slid on the greasy tallow smoke and wound its way out of the rooms and into the passageway, and oozed out into the street like a river of treacle. Along with it, as if an integral part of it, came the noise of a large number of very happy people at varying levels of intoxication, striving to make themselves heard over each other and over the deafening effects of insobriety.
The candles were more efficient in producing smell than in producing light, to such an extent that Murray wondered which was their primary purpose. Had he been coming into the room from daylight rather than from darkness, he imagined that it would have taken him some time to see anything at all, but as it was dim shapes were perceivable, becoming slightly more defined the closer they were to the soggy light of the candles.
Not many people looked up as they entered, silent compared with the noise around them, but one round red face did turn their way, broke off in mid-laugh, scowled horribly as the mind behind it was put to work, then split into a wide smile.
‘Mistress Macdonald!’ the man cried. ‘I thought you were long away frae here?’
Mary made a serene progress through the throng towards the bench where the man and his cronies sat. Murray followed the path she drew, and was, like her, squeezed on to the bench amongst them. The strain on his breeches was considerable.
‘Aye, well,’ she said, her eyes modestly downcast, ‘I’m just back on a visit. You’re looking fair and fat, Eck Moffat.’
‘All the better for seeing you, hen!’ cried one of the other drinkers, with a generous nudge to Eck. A third drinker, squatting on the filthy floor next to the bench, sang ‘All the better for seeing you, hen!’ in a wavering tune that seemed to Murray faintly familiar. He was a thin man, but his breeches were thinner still and barely decent. They made Murray’s own feel quite secure by comparison.
Mary and Eck Moffat began to talk of common acquaintances, ably supported by the Greek chorus around them. Murray, half-listening to them, took the opportunity to look about him as his eyes grew more accustomed to the light. The place was, he had to admit to himself, better than he had expected. There was considerable drunkenness, it was true, though tasting the decent mug of ale that was pressed into his hands from an unseen source he could understand why. But although he could see perhaps three women in the place besides Mary, and none of the three looked particularly savoury, there was none of the debauchery he had been led to believe characterised the alehouses of the Grassmarket. While part of him was relieved for Mary’s sake, the rest was rather disappointed: when the risk was lessened, the adventure was lessened, although to whom he could possibly have told his story he was not sure. Blair was probably the only one in his circle who would appreciate
it in the least. He remembered suddenly an inn in Naples which had been much, much worse than this one, and smiled at himself.
‘And what about yourself, Mistress Macdonald?’ Eck asked at last.
‘I have a grand job in the New Town, now,’ said Mary with mock pride.
‘Oh, aye?’ responded the chorus, gleefully.
‘I’m in service to a very good family – well, to a young gentleman.’ The chorus made appropriately scandalised noises. ‘Oh, not like that!’ said Mary, pretending to be shocked. ‘It’s very respectable. But I have been thinking of seeking a new place.’
‘What?’ said Murray, and received a sharp Macdonald elbow in his poorly protected ribs for his trouble. He shut his mouth abruptly. Mary had her audience captivated and no one even noticed him.
‘It seems just lately to have been an unlucky household. First the master dies – not the young gentleman, but his father – and then at his very funeral his stable boy is found with his neck broken!’
‘That would be John Paterson’s eldest,’ said someone, nodding solemnly.
‘Young Jamie?’ said Eck. ‘His parents live just across the Grassmarket. And you work for the family, too? It’s a gey small world here.’
‘I know,’ said Mary. ‘I was here last week for the funeral. His poor mother is very brave. How she can bear it I cannot tell, and when not a soul can even tell her who throttled her son’s life from his wee body, nor why.’ Her audience were all wide-eyed and quiet now, in the face of the row from the rest of the room.
‘Was it someone hoping to steal the horses?’ asked the man on the other side of Murray.
‘Well, the horses were left in their stalls,’ said Mary, ‘and it seems a strange thing to murder a lad to steal horses and then not to steal them.’
‘There was some talk that the groom had killed him,’ said Eck.
‘No, the groom is innocent of all blame in that,’ said Mary firmly. The chorus nodded, accepting the word of someone they knew.
‘It’s terrible,’ said Eck at last. ‘And them such a respectable, decent family and all. They work awful hard, the pair of them. You’d never see them in here, would you, boys?’ Relieved by this, the chorus laughed, shaking their heads in agreement.
‘Now, tell me,’ said the man on the other side of Murray – he heard him referred to as Patie – ‘Your master that died, was he no the one in the same thing as Mattie Muir that lived up the Vennel?’
‘So I hear,’ said Mary.
‘Aye!’ Patie laughed. ‘It would have suited Matt just down to the ground to die in the New Town! For him it would be the next best thing to living there!’
‘Oh, he was that big,’ agreed Eck. ‘He was muckle, the way he put on airs! Nothing would do him but he’d elevate himself out of the Grassmarket – nothing near good enough for the likes of him – and pross in the Canongate. Just the next step now would have been the New Town. He had all the connexions, from all he said to me, all the gentlemen friends that would come calling. He’d have fitted in just fine. He’d have been having breakfast with Viscount Melville himself in a week!’
The chorus laughed, as much at Eck’s assumed genteel accent as at anything he said. Then the man on the floor spoke up.
‘Aye, but his brother’s no bad. You canna say the same thing about Dandy, now.’
‘That’s true enough,’ said Patie without hesitation. ‘Dandy’s a fine lad, and a hard-working one, though he has a temper on him that would show Bonaparte a thing or two if he ever landed on these shores and took his Imperial army a thing too near Dandy’s whisky bottle.’
‘He made a fine thing of Matt’s funeral,’ said the man on the floor, and Murray realised where he had seen and heard the man before, kneeling on the floor of Dandy Muir’s flat playing troubadour to the poker. It seemed he had been wearing his best clothes for the funeral: these ones were truly dire. Fortunately he did not seem to recognise Murray.
‘And did Matt bring any of his fine gentlemen friends in here?’ asked Mary innocently. This caused another moment of laughter at the very thought.
‘Gentlemen in here?’ sputtered Eck. ‘It was a rare thing for Matt himself to be seen in here, we were so far beneath the soles of his boots. No, it’s few enough gentlemen that make their appearance in this establishment. Although sometimes a herd of they pluffy young gentlemen from the University will pay us a call, which is well-bred of them, and play their cards and drink our ale and avail themselves of other local pleasures’ – that his gaze wandered at this point to a well-set-up young lady in an economically-cut dress on the other side of the room was, of course, coincidental – ‘and return refreshed to their labours.’
Murray’s attention was drawn to the young lady by this, and as he hoped that Robert and Henry had not been among the said pluffy gentlemen he studied her more closely. She was perhaps older than he had first thought, the impression of youth created by her red hair flowing loose down the low back of her green dress. As she turned in the middle of the small crowd of which she was a part Murray could see that the front of the green dress was even lower than the back, and would have benefitted better from a modest covering of hair, like Mary Magdalene. However, it was the front of her dress, however limited, and its contents that seemed to be the principal topic of conversation within her group, and two men in particular seemed intent on this subject of debate, on which they appeared, from their waving hands and scowling faces, to have two very different opinions. As he watched, the argument was becoming more and more heated, and the smaller man poked the larger with his finger – a simple action, but one designed to give as much offence as possible. The larger man’s fist was clenched and on its way to the smaller man’s face faster than thought, but even so the smaller man jerked to one side, and dodged the impact. At this, the crowd around them surged forwards and with a yelping like hounds on the scent, they bore the two men outside on to the street. The alehouse emptied behind them, and Murray found himself being rushed along with the crowd.
Outside, the two men had been granted a circle of space, outlined by their friends, including the lady whose charms had started the trouble. They stood opposite each other, the large man with his heavy jaw tight and his fists great newel posts on the half-flexed pillars of his arms. The smaller man looked more relaxed, ready, but unconcerned. They appeared to be waiting for a signal.
Murray never heard or saw it, but suddenly the fight began. The large man lunged, and the small one stepped back neatly, leaving his opponent unbalanced. Then he sauntered around behind him.
The crowd roared with laughter, and pressed forward collectively to see better. Murray felt the hot, living force pushing at his arms, his back, his legs, crushing him. They stank of ale and tallow. A hatless head of hair, thick with grease, was shoved backwards into his face, and he turned his head away as far as he could. His hands were too far away from his pockets. His heart began to thump.
Beside Murray, a man was taking bets with a professional air.
‘Three to two on Archie,’ he murmured to his customers. ‘The man from Lithgae’s bigger, but I’ve seen Archie at this before.’
The man from Linlithgow, thus identified, was circling again, staring hard at Archie as if to frighten him with a mere look. Archie circled too, watchful but still not tense. The Linlithgow man swiped with his right, and Archie ducked. He swiped again with his left, more to keep his balance than to attack, but Archie had seen it coming and was elsewhere.
And where was Mary? The crowd surged and swayed with every action in the ring, and despite his comparative height, Murray could not see her. He felt suddenly alone in this madness, where the crowd’s movements dragged his feet from the ground, shoved his arms back and forth, punched out his breath. Where was she? They should never have come, not at night, it was an insane risk. He struggled to see the mass of people on the other side of the circle.
At last through the grinning faces he saw her, about a third of the way round the circle from him. She winked
at him, and returned to a philosophical contemplation of the fight, on which Eck was commenting almost constantly. Murray could not hear him above the noise of the crowd, whose sympathy was with the big man but whose money was chiefly on Archie.
Archie had broken into a kind of leisurely, high-kneed trot around the ring, bowing politely to the green gowned lady as he passed like a knight at a tournament. Linlithgow, too slow to pursue him, stood in the centre of the circle aiming blows at his head as he turned. Archie kept jog-trotting until he was bored. He stopped to remove a well-placed handkerchief from the apparel of his lady and wiped his brow with it. Linlithgow, seizing the opportunity, raised his hands above his head and brought them down in a whistling, double-fisted hammer that had it connected with any part of Archie would have done him some permanent damage. But Archie was somehow already around the back of the large man, and hooked one foot casually around his opponent’s leg. At the optimum second, he pulled, and Linlithgow crashed resoundingly on to the ground. To the cheering of the local supporters, Archie trotted another circuit of the ring, waving the handkerchief graciously to left and right, and the bookmaker near Murray began to collect his money. Murray noticed that most of his debtors had Linlithgow accents.
Mary joined him again with a faintly contrite look.
‘And after that entertainment, time to move on, I think,’ she said. ‘There is a place down here where people meet to talk, even at night, and to watch what the world brings to them.’
Service of the Heir: An Edinburgh Murder (Murray of Letho Book 3) Page 20