Death in a Scarlet Gown (Murray of Letho Book 1)

by Lexie Conyngham

  ‘Will you be gone all night?’ asked George. ‘Only, remember I’m away in the morning.’

  ‘Aye, you can have the bed, George. I’ll be in about three in the morning, so I’ll take the chair for a change. I’ll try not to waken you.’

  The dead hours in a dead-room were dark indeed. Charles had drawn Boxie as his companion – Picket and Rab had not been around to join in the rota, no doubt to their relief – and the pair of them sat by the light of two of Charles’ precious store of wax candles, stunned by how much their lives had changed in the course of only a week.

  ‘Tuesday,’ said Boxie, as if he could not believe it.

  ‘Well, Wednesday, now.’ Charles peered at his watch. ‘This time last week –‘

  ‘This time last week we were in a howff in Edinburgh,’ said Boxie bleakly.

  ‘I was at home in Edinburgh, asleep in bed,’ said Charles, not quite truthfully. He had in fact been lying awake thinking of how to evade his father at Letho, but there was no sense in going back to that now. He had hardly thought of his father over the last few days.

  ‘If I hadn’t told Picket that stupid story from school about the Spanish fly,’ said Boxie, ‘none of this would have happened.’

  ‘It would: it’s just that Alison wouldn’t have been ill. You didn’t poison Keith, by accident or otherwise, and therefore I suppose you didn’t poison Thomas. Oh! If I’d been with him no one would have had the chance to poison him!’

  ‘The trouble is that Picket can make you feel so clever, so necessary to his schemes. I don’t know where the ideas come from: I suddenly think of something to do, like hanging a skeleton outside his gate, and I blurt it out and I see that gleam in his eye, and for about half a minute I feel so proud of myself! And then, of course, I start thinking about the consequences, and I could bite my tongue off.’

  ‘The consequences, indeed.’ Charles caught the word. ‘You see all I could think about was the consequences. I thought Thomas had killed Professor Keith because of the living, and because he’d made him look stupid, and maybe even to punish him for his treatment of Mrs. Walker, but all I could really think about was that he had all the knowledge and all the chance to do it. And then he tried to make Allan Bonar look guilty by leaving arsenic in his bunk, and I realised he couldn’t have done it, unless he was being really devious, because it wasn’t arsenic. And I was going to talk to him about the whole thing, but all I could think of was the consequences, as you say, and so I kept putting it off, leaving him to sulk while I found out more and more in order to accuse my friend ... If I’d just gone after him, if I’d stayed and talked with him –‘

  ‘If, if, if, it’s always if,’ Boxie agreed. ‘If Professor Keith had not been such an obnoxious, self-righteous, arrogant man no one would ever have killed him. As it is it was just a matter of time. As I see it, someone was going to do it some time and we should just leave it at that. Let him who has no guilt in his heart cast the first stone.’

  Charles tried to think of anyone with an abundance of innocence.

  ‘Professor Shaw, then, or Mungo Dalzell. And yet even Professor Shaw ... no, that’s ridiculous. Whatever the provocation, Professor Shaw would never kill anybody.’

  ‘You’re right there.’

  They stared for a moment at the corpse, as if it might sit up and offer an opinion: Thomas had rarely been short of them. Mrs. Nicolson, or her niece, had done her best with him. He looked as freshly shaved as he ever had, and a napkin held his mouth closed, white as the pillow and his freshly laundered nightgown. He was laid flat with a black sheet pulled straight up to his chest, his arms outside and down by his sides. The neatness was not Thomas, any more than the sallow complexion. The straw hair looked like a wig borrowed for the occasion from someone with a larger head. Charles sighed.

  ‘Beer?’ Boxie asked, and poured two cups from the unstoppered flask. They sipped at it, trying to make it last.

  ‘Was that the whole of Picket’s plan, then, to drug Alison Keith into an indiscretion?’

  ‘I think so. I wouldn’t have agreed if I’d known: I thought he was going to use it on Barbara, the maid.’

  ‘She would have been equally ruined. Maybe more so.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’ Boxie looked shamefaced. ‘But the difference was that I loved – love – Alison Keith.’

  Good heavens, another one, Charles thought, but just managed not to say. What did Boxie and George see in the scrawny girl? Charles began to wonder if he was missing something.

  ‘Of course, there’s nothing I can do about it, not for a long time yet. My father would never let me take on a wife at least until I’d served my apprenticeship – I’m to be an advocate, you know, like him.’

  ‘That would be a good prospect for the future, though,’ said Charles, thinking that on the whole George had less to offer. Advocates were the nobility of Edinburgh: few fathers would object to allying their daughters to the Scottish bar. ‘Had you spoken to Professor Keith?’

  ‘I’d hardly even spoken to Alison. I brought her presents, sometimes: the bracelets she was wearing the night of the party, those were from me. You probably didn’t notice them. I don’t think I noticed such baubles until I started to imagine how they would look against her lovely skin.’

  Charles swallowed hard, and tried to think instead of Patience Walker or the girl whose shawl had blown into that tree. He did not want to think about Alison Keith’s freckled, bluish arms. It grew quiet in the stuffy room, and they could hear the soft hiss of the beer cork, the candle guttering in the draught from the tiny empty fireplace, and the rats scrabbling behind the panelled walls. Leaving Thomas’ corpse unattended would have led to more than just a lack of respect for his spirit: the rats were probably as tired of rabbit as the students were.

  Their watches ticked loudly and not quite together, making an urgent double sound that stopped them from entirely relaxing, and made them think that the time was passing more swiftly than it was. Charles found his eyes closing, and pinched himself hard on his earlobe. Boxie’s eyes had closed. Charles settled back on their shared bench, trying not to shake it too much, and applied himself to thought.

  Thomas had not murdered Professor Keith. Even if he had, he would certainly, definitely, never, never, never have killed himself, so there was still a murderer about either way. The fact that yew had almost certainly been used for both murders pointed to the same killer being responsible for both, unless he himself, the doctor or Jamie Corsane, the apothecary, were the killer. But who would want both Thomas and Professor Keith dead? What possible gain could Thomas’ death afford anyone? He had no money, no influence. He had perhaps secured himself a parish, through the courtesy and patronage of Lord Scoggie: perhaps someone else had wanted it? Charles knew of no one. Other students were perhaps heading for the church, but could afford to spend a year or two as assistants, first, or wanted a forward-looking city parish, or hoped to take over a parish from their own father. No one, as far as he knew, had as urgent a need or desire for a parish as Thomas.

  But Peter Keith had been considered for it. Now, there was an interesting thought, Peter Keith, at least periodically, hated his father, and he would have studied, some years ago, the same chemistry course as Thomas with Allan Bonar, had considered medicine, had been brought up with the facts and methods of natural philosophy. What had he been doing in the garden on the morning his father’s body had been found – the garden where the yew trees grow? Why would his sister not speak to him? And had he sent someone back to Mrs. Walker that Saturday to return her forfeited brooch?

  Peter certainly looked likely: he was destructive, violent and unbalanced, and he might well have felt that his powerful father could only be brought down from a distance, with poison. But Charles was going to be more cautious, this time, and think through some other ideas as well. It was important to find the right answer, not simply one that fitted.

  Rough hands on his shoulder woke him.

  ‘Three o’clock,’ whispered He
nry Barchane, ‘and our turn. I hope you left us some ale.’

  Charles and Boxie staggered outside into the college yard, where a single torch spat above the gate to the street. Charles wished he had thought to bring Daniel, and then saw a light flicker in the gateway itself. It was Daniel, sent to fetch him.

  ‘Good boy, Daniel. We’ll just see Mr. Skene back to his bunk first.’

  Shivering and dull of thought and speech they walked to Mutty’s Wynd and on to South Street, reassuring the watchman with an attempt at a courteous greeting, fumbling keys in the lock. Mrs. Walker, wrapped in several thick shawls, had cocoa ready and Charles and Daniel drank it down swiftly. Within a few minutes they had all retired, though some fell asleep again better than others.

  George left for Letho straight after breakfast, and paid his bills to Mrs. Walker who tried to refuse his money. George could be charming, though, when he thought Charles was watching him. His horse was saddled and his various accoutrements, including the new cravats and gloves he had needed to buy while in St. Andrews, were neatly packed and rolled, and his fine boots burnished like walnutwood. The Walkers, Charles and Daniel all came out on to South Street to wave him goodbye, but he left without a backward glance, and Charles, with a shrug, took Daniel to a Latin lecture.

  After dinner, Charles and Boxie had another turn at sitting with Thomas. Boxie was late but Charles had only just sat down when he heard footsteps on the stairs. The voice that accompanied them was not, however, Boxie’s.

  ‘... a little surprised to see you here, madam.’ Professor Urquhart’s unmistakably honed tones slid ahead of him.

  ‘We had to pay our respects, of course. Thomas was a frequent visitor to our little house. And I thought that if we came now, when dear Charles was to be with him, it might be less awkward.’

  Charles was already on his feet when Mrs. Walker entered, followed by Patience and Professor Urquhart, whose outstretched arm held the door for them. As a minister’s widow, Mrs. Walker was a practised dead-room visitor, but this death had upset her more than most. Charles lent her an arm across the tiny room to the bed recess, and steadied her politely as she wept a little. Her hand in its neat black glove held Thomas’ stiff fingers tightly for a moment, before she moved back to let Patience take her turn. Then they sat on the bench, the only seat in the room, side by side and doleful. Patience was not so hard that she could not feel even this death keenly.

  Professor Urquhart drifted over and touched the corpse in his turn, staring down at it analytically.

  ‘A tragedy,’ he remarked at last.

  ‘Indeed.’ Mrs. Walker had her handkerchief out now, but she was not uncontrolled.

  ‘Particularly when he had just secured a great deal of his future, and greatly to his satisfaction,’ Professor Urquhart added.

  ‘How do you mean?’ asked Patience, eyes narrowed. The Professor arranged himself against the wall beside the shelves.

  ‘Lord Scoggie had agreed to present him to a vacant parish he has in his gift. Not a grand place, perhaps, but prosperous enough: he could have been ordained to it soon after his degree examinations this summer.’

  ‘Oh, the dear, dear boy,’ sighed Mrs. Walker, between pride and despair.

  ‘Indeed, as you say.’ Professor Urquhart’s smile said nothing at all. ‘Lord Scoggie’s patronage, too, is a recommendation in itself. He is most careful as to who is to receive the benefit of his gifts. Professor Keith and I had the honour to be invited to dinner and to stay the night at Scoggie Castle two weeks ago to discuss that, and other matters. A great friend to the University.’

  A fortnight ago, thought Charles glumly. He had not even been sent to Edinburgh by then. No one had been poisoned, no one had bought any packets of Spanish fly, and the world had seemed a brighter, less complicated place. Why had all this happened?

  ‘Still, as they fall, so shall they rise,’ added Professor Urquhart. Mrs. Walker evidently took this as some reference to death and salvation, for her face assumed a pious look, until Urquhart went on. ‘Thomas here has had bad fortune, but Allan Bonar, with whom I think you are also acquainted, has been very lucky. It seems that his future is quite settled.’ He eyed Patience with a look on the near edge of decency.

  ‘In what respect, sir?’ hissed Mrs. Walker. Patience had gone white.

  ‘Oh, in that he is to be Professor of Natural Philosophy now, of course. He was always named to be appointed to the chair when Keith went, and now he has both that security and the relief of no longer having to work, if you’ll forgive the indelicacy, for a thoroughly obnoxious man.’

  Charles watched in fascination. There was no doubt that Professor Urquhart knew the exact standing of Thomas Seaton and Allan Bonar in the Walker household: Urquhart knew every scrap of gossip from Cupar to Earlsferry. Just as it looked as if Mrs. Walker was going to walk out in angry confusion, he stooped a little and peered at the neck of her chemisette.

  ‘What a charming miniature,’ he exclaimed. ‘And if the likeness is as good as the technique, the original must have been a fine gentleman indeed. A relative, perhaps?’

  The three mourners left, still discussing the brooch, abandoning Charles to the impression that he had just been the audience to some amateur one-act play. Had Professor Urquhart taken the notebook from Professor Keith’s study that morning, with the body still on the floor? It was exactly like him, bold but sly, and Charles could not believe that it could have been anyone else. But what could he have wanted it for?

  ‘Thomas, my friend,’ Charles addressed the corpse, ‘If you were still alive, I’d suggest a little housebreaking, and you would look shocked, and that might even be the end of it. It would certainly be the end of me if I were caught. And I’m not even sure I could do it on my own. Stupid idea, anyway. And here’s Boxie, at last.’

  Boxie was not alone. Mungo Dalzell had joined him in the yard, and had also come to pay his respects, hurrying, like everyone else, to do so before Thomas’ father might come and whisk the body away for burial. He brushed the black cloth with his fingers, a look of deep sorrow on his long face, and sat on the bench with Boxie and Charles, to wait out some of their wake with them. A chink of light showed from behind the improvised window curtain, and outside in the college garden they could hear the thump and slice of spades and the click of pruning shears, life going on. In the midst of life, thought Charles again, we are in death.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  It was all very well for the men still in college, Charles thought with a deep, early-morning disgust. When they had finished their turn sitting with Thomas’ corpse, all they had to do was to stagger back down the corridor, or at most up some stairs, find their bed and collapse into it. It hardly required consciousness. He and Boxie, on the other hand, had to brace themselves against the cold night air at three in the morning, find their ways home, then unwind themselves from overcoats, scarves, gowns, hats and gloves before they could sleep – although leaving them all on was tempting. But as usual, early on Thursday Mrs. Walker had set and lit a fire for him in his bedchamber, so he made the effort and undressed, splashing water over his face from the jug and basin waiting for him. He found his nightshirt and tunnelled into it, struggled for a moment with the bedclothes, then blew out the candles and sank instantly into sleep.

  His awakening was by every standard rude. Into the midst of a confused dream about Patience Walker and a carrot pudding there broke a sound like a cannon, and he was propelled from his bed in an undignified scramble to find himself standing, heart pounding, crumpled, unwashed and unfed, before the towering figure of his father.

  It was unlikely that the effort of climbing the stairs, or even of riding here fast after an early breakfast at Letho, could have made Mr. Murray’s face quite that shade of scarlet. No: he was furious – so furious, in fact, that for a long moment he seemed lost for words. Charles used the time to assess the space between his father and the door, to decide that he himself could not fit through it, and resign himself to whatever was
to come.

  ‘So, it is true,’ said Mr. Murray at last. His jaw seemed to be set solid. ‘George finally dropped your name into conversation last night at supper, forgetting, presumably, that you were still believed to be in Edinburgh. And here I find not only that you are guilty of the grossest disobedience and deception, but also that you are wasting a fine morning by lying late abed, and not even pursuing the studies you affect to find so essential to your wellbeing! What have you to say for yourself?’

  Charles found he was winding his fingers abashedly into the side hems of his nightshirt, and stopped. This would not do. He had a life and responsibilities here, and he was not going to abandon them, not until he had at least seen Thomas’ killer brought to justice. He would have to stop acting like a little boy.

  Not meeting his father’s eye, he stepped across to a stool and reached for his stockings.

  ‘Do not dare to ignore me, Charles. I will have none of it.’

  ‘Indeed, sir, I was gathering my thoughts.’ It was true.

  ‘You have betrayed my trust in you. What about the business for which I specifically dispatched you to Edinburgh?’

  ‘The business with Mr. Simpson the agent? I completed it and returned the papers to Letho. Mr. Simpson assured me that they were not urgent.’

  He was momentarily distracted by an odd smell near the fireplace, where the ashes still smouldered. In the back of his mind he made a decision to investigate it later, and pulled on his breeches. Now that his nether quarters were covered by something more than the folds of a cambric nightshirt, he felt more confident, but his father was more angry than ever.

  ‘Not urgent? Nor urgent! You would take the word of a mere notary over that of your father?’