The Unquiet Heart

by The Unquiet Heart (retail) (epub)

  He still blushed when he met my gaze, he still stammered when he spoke. But there was a gravitas to him now, and when he stumbled over his words he did so calmly, as though what he had to say was important, and the world could damn well wait until he managed to say it.

  I realised what my mother saw when she looked at me now – a stranger in her daughter’s skin, changed by experiences she could never comprehend. Broken once, but stronger in the places where I had been put back together. Miles was already growing into the position he had unexpectedly inherited, and I was growing too – into whom I wasn’t sure, but I knew I liked her.

  This was the stuff fairy tales were made of – the unassuming but kind boy revealed to be the heir to vast wealth asking for the maiden’s hand after she had assisted him along his journey. The entire Greene fortune could be at my disposal if I simply said the word, and with that money would come respectability. I would never have to worry about my reputation again.

  And then these new wings of mine would be clipped once more. A cage was still a cage, even when you could see daylight through the bars.

  He knew my answer before I gave it, but he sat there patiently as I forced the words out.

  ‘I can’t. I’m so sorry. You of all people deserve happiness, but I can’t give you that. I don’t want to marry – not you, not now. Maybe I never will.’

  He took my hands in his. They were softer than mine, even after everything he had been through. There were calluses beneath my second and fourth fingers from gripping a scalpel, the raised blister of a burn on the heel of my other palm, and the skin was rough from scrubbing with carbolic soap. His skin felt like the echo of the girl I once was, cosseted and protected from the world right up until the moment I wasn’t.

  ‘I could give you an easy life.’

  Accepting his proposal would not give me that softness back. I twisted the ring he had given me off my finger and placed it on the table, sparkling where it caught the light. It was such a little thing, really, and yet I felt as though a great weight had been lifted off my shoulders.

  ‘I don’t think I want easy,’ I said. ‘I don’t think I know how.’

  He nodded, and I felt the promise of the future I was supposed to want crumble into ash.

  ‘Perhaps it’s for the best,’ he said, in a voice that only shook slightly. ‘With my new position . . . I have family responsibilities that will take time to resolve.’

  I thought of Aurora’s unconscious body as Merchiston and I had carried her in a makeshift stretcher to the police carriage; of the gutted rooms and the acrid smell of smoke that still lingered in the New Town. The servants had escaped only because most of them had been given the evening off by Alisdair on his arrival; it would have been easier for him to dispose of my body, and perhaps Aurora’s too, if there were no witnesses.

  There had been little left of Alisdair by the time the firefighters had arrived from Lauriston Place, and if a post-mortem had picked up on the crack in his skull, then the professor had not seen the need to bring it to anyone’s attention but my own. Aurora had confirmed my statement in monosyllables, clearing her younger son’s name, but I had not seen her since.

  ‘My mother is unwell,’ Miles said. ‘The death of my brother so close to losing my father took its toll on her nerves and she is recuperating in the countryside. It’s a private hospital,’ he continued. ‘The effect on her nerves . . . The doctors aren’t sure that she’ll ever fully recover. They say she blames herself for everything that happened.’

  He met my gaze steadily, as though daring me to challenge his version of events. He was a far better man than I had ever given him credit for. Aurora had thought herself a murderer and been prepared to let her child hang for it, and their future relationship would be forever tainted.

  ‘You think I’m weak.’

  ‘I think you’re kind. Far, far kinder than I could ever be.’ I thought of my own mother, safely back in London now and out of my life perhaps for ever.

  ‘She couldn’t survive prison.’

  Privately, I wasn’t sure how much longer Miles would have been able to survive, and wouldn’t that have been a perfect end? The Greene family name spared even the stigma of the gallows and the whole incident swept under the carpet with all their other secrets. Perhaps it was best that they were getting a fresh start with a new heir, their collective past nothing but ashes.

  ‘Will you keep the house?’

  ‘I couldn’t sell it even if I wanted to. Even before the fire, a house that had seen two murders would be a millstone around my neck. And I was happy there, for the most part.’ His lips twisted in a wry smile shot through with sadness. ‘I loved my father, you know. He was bluff and strict, but he only ever wanted the best for me. And Alisdair – he was my protector. My best friend. He was the captain of our pirate ship when we were boys, and at school he thrashed any bully who so much as called me names. He was going to be best man at our wedding. We talked about you like gossiping schoolgirls – he liked you, you know. Thought you’d bring me out of my shell.’

  I couldn’t reconcile these tales of fraternal support with the man who had framed his brother for murder and tried to seduce his fiancée. But I was comforted that at least some of Miles’ illusions about his family remained intact. He would grieve for the people he thought his mother and brother were, and I knew how fiercely he would need to cling to those happy memories.

  ‘I’ve told Frances she can have the place if she wants. Alisdair left her drowning in debt and she has a child on the way who will grow up without a father.’ He shook his head. ‘I should have seen how desperate he was.’

  ‘You couldn’t have known what he was going to do.’

  ‘You did.’

  ‘I ask too many questions and make a nuisance of myself. You’ve had a lucky escape, really.’

  He smiled sadly. ‘Which brings me to my next point. I stand to inherit a considerable sum of money, and I’ve looked at my father’s business records. It seems that on our marriage, he was planning to invest in your uncle’s brewery. I would like to honour that commitment. If it hadn’t been for you . . .’

  I swallowed thickly. I had rejected his offer of marriage and I knew that my family would never forgive me for walking away from him and everything that he represented. But while my uncle would never understand female emancipation, he did understand money. Miles had bought my freedom, at least for a time, and I would always be grateful for that.

  I pressed a kiss to his cheek.

  ‘Find someone who loves you. Find someone who thinks you’re the most wonderful man in the world.’

  I let him hold me for a moment, willing my pulse to race, my cheeks to flush. It would be so much easier if I loved him.

  ‘I would have made you a terrible wife, Miles, but I can be a good friend if you ever need one.’

  ‘As can I. You deserve to be happy too,’ he said softly.

  I thought of my calluses and burns, of the long hours spent in cold lecture theatres and of the way I had coaxed Clara Wilson’s body to give up its secrets. I thought of a future filled not with a husband and children, but with colleagues and patients, and I felt a shiver, giddy with the promise of a future of my own devising.

  ‘I am.’

  Chapter 35

  I pushed open the heavy door, my nerves fluttering with anticipation about what I would find behind it.

  ‘Ah, Gilchrist.’ Professor Turner nodded without looking up. ‘We’re on hearts today. Take a look at this beauty.’ He waved a jar of formaldehyde in my general direction, and I gazed fascinated at the lump of dark flesh swimming around in the viscous yellowish liquid.

  ‘It doesn’t look like much, does it?’ he asked rhetorically. I had made the mistake, in my first week, of attempting to answer one of these questions, but he had simply talked over me as if I had made no response at all. In fact, I sometimes suspected him of a slight deafness – not that it mattered, since he was more interested in the work of my hands rather tha
n any opinion I could offer.

  I took the jar from him, and gave it an experimental slosh.

  ‘The poets say that all of human emotion originates here,’ Turner said conversationally. ‘In reality, it is far more important than that. Love is a paltry thing in comparison to circulation.’

  I was willing to agree with him there.

  ‘We hear such sensationalist rubbish from the popular press, and even some of my own colleagues. But, Miss Gilchrist, always remember this: the heart is nothing but a cog in a sophisticated machine. And when something breaks down, as I am told machinery parts so often do, everything grinds to a halt. Terminally, in the case of the poor chap who owned this one. Now, if you would be so good as to remove your gloves?’

  I peeled them off and handed them to my unsmiling companion.

  ‘Open the jar and scoop the fellow out then, Miss Gilchrist.’ This was a test, I realised. Would I swoon in horror, or wince at the feeling of the preserved muscle against my fingers? I was determined to do neither of those things, but nevertheless I couldn’t stop myself from taking a deep breath before removing the lid and plunging my hand into the freezing liquid.

  The heart was soft as silk and cool to the touch – they had to be kept in the cold to prevent them stinking up the place, I supposed – and heavier, far heavier than I had expected. I turned it over in my hands, tracing the blue veins gently with a fingertip.

  ‘One thing the poets have right,’ Turner said softly, ‘is that in this organ lies all the mysteries of human existence. Why don’t we open it up and have a look, hmm?’

  I placed it on the table reverently. He handed me a small, sharp scalpel and I hesitated for a moment.

  ‘It seems almost a shame,’ I murmured. ‘It’s quite beautiful in its way.’

  ‘Don’t get sentimental, Gilchrist. Make the first incision and stop wasting both our time and that of the good lady over there.’

  Elisabeth, absorbed in reading Lady Audley’s Secret for the third time, didn’t look as though she were in a rush to go anywhere.

  I pressed down with the blade, then harder, and felt it sink into the purplish muscle.

  ‘Right in half, if you please,’ my tutor said briskly. With a swift, decisive motion, I cleaved the heart in two as though it were an apple, and stared in fascination.

  ‘And so the heart gives up its secrets at last.’ Turner smiled. ‘Now look at the left side and tell me what you see.’

  The diagrams in my books had not prepared me for the reality of the thing – the papery skin of tissue that fluttered against the light touch of my breath had looked so much more substantial when rendered in pen and ink, and the pulmonary artery was, in its way, quite beautiful. I described it all in wonderment, and when I picked up its mirror image, I realised that I too was smiling.

  ‘Feel, Miss Gilchrist, the weight of it. It is far sturdier than those poets would have you believe. Next time you fear that your heart is broken, take comfort in the fact that it takes a great deal to really damage it.’

  His voice was wistful, and a little sad, and I wondered what had occurred in his past to make him remind his students – and perhaps himself – of the imperturbability of the organ.

  I bisected the halves again, and repeated my task of describing what I saw. Eventually, when Professor Turner was satisfied, he set me to sketching the heart and labelling the attendant parts. He nodded at my work.

  ‘You’ve a good and steady hand, Miss Gilchrist. Let me know when it comes time for you to choose a specialty. If you can keep your head in a crisis, we might make a surgeon of you one day.’ I flushed with pleasure, and handed him the sheet of paper. He shook his head. ‘Keep it. In fact, frame it, and when you think you’ve lost your heart, remember exactly what it is you’re losing.’

  I nodded mutely. I would have pressed his hand with mine had it not been an appalling breach of etiquette to be so familiar with one’s tutor. I settled for a grateful smile and an effusive ‘Thank you, Professor,’ before traipsing off to two torturous hours of botany, where the stamens and pollen sacs that I sketched failed entirely to make my blood pound the way that the heavy weight of human muscle had.

  Not for the first time, I wondered if I was entirely normal, but I realised this had ceased to bother me. My heart beat rhythmically and securely beneath my ribcage, but I knew that it was no longer entirely my own.

  It was still light when I emerged from the lecture theatre, and I felt a sense of freedom, of possibility that I had not felt in the longest time. More than a year had now passed since the fateful encounter with Paul Beresford that had so altered the course of my life, and in that time I had carved out a new path for myself. I had lost so much – family, friends, even myself for a while. But what I had gained was worth so much more.

  ‘Miss Gilchrist? Could I have a word?’ Gregory Merchiston stood squinting into the sunlight, and it was all I could do not to run to him.

  We had not been alone since I stumbled out of the burning building, soot-stained and carrying Aurora Greene, to find him arriving with cavalry in tow. Even then, in the hubbub that followed, he was able to do little more than check me for injuries, mumbling thanks to a God I didn’t even know he believed in for keeping me safe.

  My aunt had kept me off lectures for a week before either her sympathy or her patience ran out and she dispatched me to the university with a barely concealed sigh of relief. Although my broken engagement must have rankled, my close brush with death had frightened her into silence, and even Uncle Hugh was uncharacteristically mute. Miles’ investment in his company must have softened that blow, otherwise I was sure he’d have been happy to see me burned to a crisp and out of his house for good.

  My classmates hailed me as a heroine, and someone – I suspected Alison – had torn out the page from the Edinburgh Evening News about the fire and pinned it to every noticeboard in the medical school. DARING RESCUE BY LADY MEDICAL STUDENT, it shouted in a bold font, and I felt an odd mix of pride and embarrassment. At least my aunt and uncle didn’t subscribe to the Evening News, although the headline could hardly have escaped my uncle’s attention. Well-brought-up young ladies weren’t supposed to find their names plastered over the front page of a daily newspaper, and was it really necessary for them to call me a ‘charming young undergraduette’? I had been damp with sweat and reeking of smoke, and the only person who could possibly have found me attractive in that state was standing before me now.

  ‘The lady of the hour,’ he teased. ‘Do you have any more heroic acts to carry out today, or could I give you the assignments and reading you missed?’

  My heart thumped in my chest as I followed him back into the building. My uncle’s carriage could wait. Elisabeth trotted at my heels, although I had no doubt that she would find a way to make herself absent. True to form, when the door closed behind us, she had excused herself to powder her nose.

  Alone, Merchiston looked almost shy, but my boldness made up for it. I kissed him fiercely, feeling him gasp into my mouth and return the kiss with an ardour that matched my own. Out in the corridor, students were talking and professors were arguing with them and there was nothing but an unlocked door standing between us and total ruin, but I didn’t care. I had faced down murderers, escaped from a burning building and saved a man from the gallows. I might still have been a woman with a scandalous past, but in that moment I had never felt stronger or more untouchable.

  ‘Marry me,’ he murmured against my skin, pulling me closer against him. ‘Forget that boy. Even if he lets you practise medicine, he’ll never make you happy.’

  ‘I’m not marrying Miles.’

  I had never expected to see such unfettered joy on Gregory Merchiston’s face, and it killed me to be the one to dash it.

  I wanted the man in front of me, but I wanted a room like this of my very own more. Georgina Robinson and her ill-timed elopement had taught me that I couldn’t have both, not right now. If I wanted a future where I had patients and a plaque with my nam
e on, as well as a husband to go home to at the end of a long day on the hospital wards, I would have to build it myself.

  ‘I’m not marrying anyone,’ I told him, extricating himself from his embrace even though every fibre of my being wanted nothing more than to stay in his arms, press closer and not leave until we were both thoroughly sated. ‘Not now, at least.’

  He swallowed hard, fighting to collect himself.

  ‘I know. That was unfair of me. I just keep thinking about arriving at that house to see the smoke and wondering if you had managed to escape.’ He drew a ragged breath. ‘I wanted to give you something.’

  He handed me a small, square package that was far too heavy and large to contain jewellery, but whatever it was, it came from him and it was just as precious in my eyes.

  ‘Don’t open it here. And you might want to hide it from your aunt – and Elisabeth.’

  My eyebrows rose as I wondered what on earth he had given me that I needed to keep a secret, and I felt a warm flush wash over my body.

  ‘It’s nothing scandalous,’ he said quickly, reading my reaction. ‘But I think you’ll find it useful.’

  I didn’t care what it was, although I knew my curiosity would get the better of me sooner or later. I didn’t want to waste these few precious moments of privacy when I had him all to myself. I allowed my hand to drift across the planes of his face, tracing the stubbled line of his jaw. I had sketched him once, in the course of another investigation, and it had embarrassed me then that I was able to draw him from memory. Now his face, his body were the source of my most private imaginings, and I would not feel shame for it.