‘Verney Castle is an exception in that I have never seen so many original great works of art outside a gallery. Everywhere one looks there is evidence of wealth and there is the irony of it all. His lordship takes it as a personal affront that surrounded with so much of the world’s goods, nature has denied them the simple blessing bestowed on the humblest mortals of an abundance of children. A blessing I have to say that many of his tenants would be pleased to avoid.’
Pausing he smiled and looked at me. ‘I take it that you have not yet been invited to the castle –’
I shook my head. ‘Indeed I have. I’ve been specially requested to attend Alexander’s birthday party – and instructed to bring Thane too.’
Vince laughed. ‘I wish I could be there. That will bring a touch of mayhem to Lady Amelia’s caste of small very noisy lap dogs.’
‘Did you meet Alexander?’ I asked.
‘No, just a fleeting glimpse – Lady Amelia pointed him out – walking in the gardens with his governess –’
‘Who is his lordship’s young cousin, Annette Verney. And thereby hangs a tale –’
But the complicated story of Annette’s love life was to remain untold as the carriage cornered sharply, narrowly avoiding collision with a farm cart and earning our inscrutable coachman a steady flow of ripe abuse.
‘That was nearly a nasty accident,’ said Vince as the coachman, having ascertained that we were unhurt, set off again. ‘And talking of accidents, it was as well I had my bag of tools with me at Verney, as I had to administer first aid to Lord Verney’s new secretary. Just arrived a few days ago – from Dublin. Fell running for the train.
‘I had some patching up to do and I must say, the condition of his back and chest would suggest a lifetime in boxing or other aggressive sports, rather than the peaceful life one would attribute to a don from Trinity College.’
‘Indeed?’
‘Indeed. Dr Finbar Blayney had some very interesting scars for the scholar Lord Verney has engaged in the belief that he will add his expertise to cataloguing ancient family documents and his collection of art.’
‘You sound doubtful, Vince. Was it just the scars?’
Vince shook his head. ‘For a classics scholar, his knowledge of Latin was extremely shaky. There were some medical terms in frequent use which seemed well above his head. And you know how fond I am of my Latin tags.’
Pausing he grinned at me apologetically since they had been a sore trial to my sister Emily and I in childhood days.
When I groaned, he laughed. ‘You still remember “nunquam non paratus”?’
It was my turn to smile. ‘“Always ready” is engraved on my heart!’
Vince grimaced. ‘The simplest most common quotation that every schoolboy or schoolgirl with a decent education might recognise. But not so Dr Finbar Blayney, Classics scholar. He just frowned, stared at me blankly.’
And shaking his head, ‘the incident left me with considerable doubts about his abilities to perform the cataloguing task that Lord Verney has in mind.’
‘There might have been a simpler reason, Vince.’
‘Indeed. Name one!’
I smiled. ‘A very ordinary reason the clever doctor failed to diagnose. Perhaps the scholar is a little deaf.’
‘Hmphh,’ grunted Vince, who did not like to be put at fault.
And there the conversation ended. The carriage was now bowling along the Dalkeith Road. Arthur’s Seat held the skyline to the east, dominating, majestic.
I felt a growing sense of excitement, once we reached Coffin Lane, Solomon’s Tower would be in sight. I would be home once more.
Chapter Twenty
The carriage stopped outside the Tower, its ancient stone suggesting that it had evolved independently as an extension of that extinct volcano, Arthur’s Seat, looming above us.
Waving the coachman’s assistance aside, Vince handed me down and, taking the key, opened the front door. Staring into the dark interior, he asked anxiously: ‘Are you sure you will be all right, Rose?’
I said of course and, solemnly consulting his watch, he sighed: ‘I would love to come in for a while, but – the Ballater train. I have so little time –’
A kiss, a hug and an assurance that we would meet soon and he was back in the carriage, a hand out of the window. I waved back, watching it disappear down the road again towards the city, momentarily overcome by sadness at yet another brief interlude with Vince and that inevitable parting.
True, he always tried to leave me in good heart, holding on to the promise of an early meeting which, alas, mostly failed to materialise and, as I stepped into the Tower, I already had doubts whether he would manage to fit my wedding into Her Majesty’s erratic and constantly changing plans for the Royal household.
However, my gloomy thoughts were soon overcome by the excitement of this temporary homecoming as I thought of the many times in Eildon when I had been longing for just this moment.
But like all such dreams the reality was somewhat different and homecoming not quite as I had imagined. I was alone for the first time in weeks and once inside the Tower with the door closed, I felt its vast emptiness, the high ceilings and stone walls closing in on me.
Suddenly I felt vulnerable, bereft without Jack, without Thane and even without the Macmerrys: Jack’s father’s warm geniality, his mother’s warm food. How large, cold and dark the rooms seemed, the ancient tapestries on the high walls with their Biblical scenes somehow threatening.
It was as if in my short absence the ghosts of Solomon’s Tower’s long lost history had settled in again. The past had taken possession and I had become a resented intruder from a future world incomprehensible to them.
At that moment I realised how fortunate I had been in having found Jack Macmerry – at least I would never be lonely again – even if our short absences when duty called him away for days on end infuriated me. He was mine and he was my reality.
I wandered across the cold flagged stone floor into the kitchen, my footsteps loud and strangely echoing. This was not my usual kitchen. In my absence, a rare tidiness had set in. Bleak and sterile surfaces, a well-scrubbed table with cupboard shelves immaculate and starkly empty, apart from a few neatly stacked tins.
Opening the pantry door set off the scuttling sound of a mouse’s hasty exit – although there had been little left for sustenance.
Up the stone spiral stair to my bedroom. The air was stale and I opened the window, moving aside spiders’ delicate webs with a feeling that I was marooned in Sleeping Beauty’s palace, especially as the garden below had become overgrown with weeds and in my short absence lush but alien vegetation had choked my pretty pot plants out of existence.
I turned round with a start as the cheval mirror reflected a ghostly image – a different ‘me’ from the Rose McQuinn who had stood before it just a short while ago.
Quickly moving out of range, I smoothed the coverlet of the vast ancient bed with its oak panels, its carvings of angels and Biblical characters which had escaped the ravages of invaders or changing fashion. Since the problem of moving it down the narrow spiral staircase was beyond man’s ingenuity, the logical answer to its survival intact was that it had been built into the Tower sometime in the fifteenth or sixteenth century.
Beyond any guess of mine the vast procession of those who had been born and died under the once handsome tapestried canopy. But I was fond of my great bed and when I returned to slumber in its depths, I would be married. Jack would sleep at my side and we would take our place in its long cavalcade, its unwritten history.
With less than two hours before the train back to Eildon left Waverley Station, I quickly opened the wardrobe, gathered my wedding gown, bonnet and shoes, new lace camisoles, nightgowns and underwear. Closing the door, I had a fleeting thought for Jack and remembered just in time the handsome new shirt and cravat I had bought for him.
Packed in two valises, carrying one in each hand, they were evenly balanced, and no great weight. I had a q
uarter hour walk into Waverley station and thought longingly of my bicycle, out there in the garden shed, abandoned and forlorn. How I wished I could take it back with me to Eildon.
All this effort had made me hungry and I returned to the kitchen. Without lighting the stove or fire, never among my shining achievements, even boiling a kettle for the cup of tea I longed for would take hours. Grateful to Jack’s mother, I eagerly unpacked the parcel of beef sandwiches, cake, apples and a container of milk that she had so thoughtfully provided and while I ate, on an impulse I wrote to Jack.
His almost daily letters were brusque and businesslike, irritable bulletins about the progress, or lack of it, in the Glasgow criminal court. Even the most imaginative reading between the lines could hardly have placed them in the category of love letters.
I never responded. Truth was, I always expected him to arrive next day. Now, in case he was not too busy or harassed with other matters to notice or feel anxious about my lack of communication, I assuaged my conscience by writing him an affectionate letter. I told him how much I was missing him and of my trip to pick up the wedding clothes, sealing it with the satisfaction that post from Edinburgh would reach him in Glasgow next day.
As my walk to the railway station would take me down the Pleasance passing close to the convent of the Little Sisters, I wished I had left enough time to visit Sister Angela, to once again be reassured that the old nun’s certainty that Danny had written to her belonged to the confusions of age.
I decided I would write to her. For a moment at the gates I hesitated, but then popped my note into the post-box and hurried on.
After Eildon’s pure air, I was very conscious of the acrid smell as I reached the city centre. Edinburgh had well-earned Robert Burns’ epithet of ‘auld Reekie’. Even on an early summer evening, smoke from a thousand chimneys in houses cooking supper, as well as bakeries, laundries and small factories clouded the sunshine.
The peace and country air of the Borders that I had taken for granted was replaced in the busy city streets by carriages, cabs and horse-drawn omnibuses noisily clanging their way along the North Bridge.
Bicycles were now a common sight, especially among the young blades who regarded ringing their bells as a great lark. However this mode of transport was still considered somewhat unseemly for young ladies, as one newspaper described it; ‘shamelessly revealing their nether limbs.’
As for the ‘horseless carriage’, the Benz motor-car I had encountered last year as a phenomena in Orkney was no longer a nine-days wonder in Edinburgh. Adding its acrid belches of blue smoke to the air, it bounced along, drivers swathed in goggles leaning on the horn and putting pedestrians to instant flight.
Such behaviour occasionally aroused shouts of anger and indignation, including some fists shaken by gentlemen of an older generation who consoled themselves that such monstrosities were but a new-fangled idea.
‘The horseless carriage would never last, it could never stand the test of time.’
As I walked into the railway station, the air was heavy with yet another version of black smoke and grime. The train from London had just arrived and descending passengers were hurrying along the busy platform.
Edinburgh had long enjoyed the popularity of a holiday resort with Scottish families, particularly the nearby beach at Portobello. In more recent years, thanks to the Queen, towns and villages in the Highlands, particularly on Deeside now readily accessible by train were enjoying a boom in holiday accommodation.
This was evident by the dialects from south of the Border as harassed parents gathered together children and luggage, shouting for porters, as they hurried in the direction of connecting trains.
In the now emptied train which had arrived late and was leaving almost immediately, I managed to get a compartment to myself and, as we steamed out past the ruined Abbey of Holyrood Palace, I remembered that other journey on the way to Eildon, my fellow passenger the young nun who I now knew as Annette Verney.
So much had happened in the space of a very short time. Two fatalities: Father McQuinn’s ‘heart attack’, which I was certain was murder and as for his housekeeper Mrs Aiden, I was firmly convinced her fall was no accident either, but was linked somehow to the death of the priest.
Staring out of the window I found myself recalling Mrs Fraser’s remarks about having gone to visit her friend that fatal night, fearing that she would wish for company with the priest lying newly dead in his parlour. And how, on hearing voices, one of them belonging to a man, she had returned home without making her presence known.
This man I was now certain had probably killed them both, but I was well aware that there was little hope of finding a solution to the two deaths or of bringing their killer to justice before the weekend when, along with the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations, Jack and I would be celebrating our marriage in the Scots kirk.
I sighed in exasperation, two unsolved mysteries to add to my log book. For a Lady Investigator, Discretion Guaranteed, two admissions of defeat I would certainly not advertise.
Outside the sun was setting, throwing a golden glow over the fields. Away to the west, the Firth of Forth glistened and the hills of Fife settled into sleep. A pleasant uneventful journey, through local stations including Musselburgh, Dunbar where we gathered a few more passengers.
At last we steamed out of Berwick, the shreds of a castle around the railway station as a reminder of the bad old days. Walls built by the Romans in the first century AD were still standing, remarkably preserved despite it all, for they had been of little interest or significance to raiders from the south when Berwick became a constant target for vengeful medieval English kings.
We would soon be at the whistle stop at Eildon. What news from Jack, I wondered –
Suddenly the train jolted forward and ground to a halt. Doors opened, and the guard who I realised must be Mrs Fraser’s husband ran along the track.
Passengers opened doors, leaned out of windows. Shouts of, ‘What on earth has happened? Has someone been hurt?’
I joined the curious, leaning out of the window.
In the next compartment, a lugubrious passenger saw me and nodded sadly: ‘Aye, it’ll be another o’ yon suicides – d’ye no’ ken, it was all in the papers last week.’
Chapter Twenty-One
Craning my neck to see what was happening at the front of the train, I remembered Jack’s father reading an article about a man who had plunged to his death down a railway embankment just out of Berwick.
Was this yet another suicide?
There was nothing to be seen through the smoke.
The minutes passed, then, at last, the guard hurried back along the line to be greeted by anxious cries from the passengers demanding to know what had happened, what was the delay?
‘Nothing serious,’ he said. ‘No one injured. A dead cow on the line – come through the broken fence on the field back yonder, slipped and fallen on to the line.’
Sighs of relief and murmurs of ‘Poor beast’ from animal lovers as he continued, ‘We’ve removed it, so we’ll be on our way now. No more delays, I hope,’ he added cheerfully, and blowing his whistle the train, gathering steam, moved slowly off down the line.
Ten minutes later we arrived in Eildon. As I stepped down from the compartment, Fraser was talking to his replacement, the guard who had left the London train on its way north to Edinburgh and was rejoining it for the journey back south.
As I walked past, they were discussing the reason for the train’s delay and as I reached the exit gate, Fraser caught up with me, saluted and said:
‘Miss Faro, isn’t it? My wife, Ina, has told me about you,’ and stretching out his hands, ‘Allow me to carry those bags for you, if you please, miss. They look mighty heavy.’
Thanking him, I gratefully put them in his keeping for the ten minute walk down to the farm.
Fraser was prepared to be genial. ‘I hope the delay back there didn’t upset you too much, miss,’ he said apologetically. ‘I d
are say your fiancé’s family would be worrying about you.’
Explaining that I had been in Edinburgh for the day, I said I was glad that the accident on the line was nothing serious this time. ‘I must confess I was rather alarmed – I hoped it wasn’t another suicide.’
‘Aye, miss. The same thought went through my mind. So you heard about the poor chap who topped himself. I was on the train that night.’ He shook his head. ‘Strange business, it was, right enough.’
‘Did they ever identify the man?’
‘Not as far as we know, miss. But there was something very odd that didn’t go into the newspapers. The police were very interested in why he took off his jacket and shirt, before he jumped.’
That did seem curious. But the disordered confused state of a man’s mind in those moments before he decides to end his own life, are often inexplicable to all but himself.
‘Presumably the garments were found in the compartment.’
‘Not a sign of them, miss. They just vanished too. There was no one we could ask either as he was alone when he made that terrible decision.’
‘You’re certain of that?’
The guard seemed surprised. ‘Of course, miss, or surely someone would have tried to restrain him and told us about it.’
‘Then who was it who pulled the communication cord and stopped the train?’
He shook his head. ‘Must have been someone passing the compartment who saw the door standing open.’ He thought for a moment. ‘When we left Edinburgh that night it was a busy train and there were two other passengers in the compartment. One with a ticket to Alnmouth and the other passenger with a ticket to Newcastle – I met him later when the accident happened and we were making general enquiries.
‘I gather there was a bit of an argument. The Newcastle gentleman asked me to find him another compartment. Said he had moved out because the Alnmouth fellow complained that he was feeling ill and pipe smoke offended him. I remembered him, sitting in a corner, all muffled up to the eyes, as if he had toothache.’
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