The House of Hidden Wonders

by Sharon Gosling

  “I should have given her coltsfoot sooner,” Sadie said, wringing her hands as she watched. “But at first I thought it was just a cough and I’d used all my stores. I should have found more, though. I should have—”

  Zinnie reached out and squeezed Sadie’s hand, wrapping her fingers round her sister’s. “It’s not your fault. It’s not.”

  “You’re clever to think of coltsfoot,” the doctor said, glancing up at the bunches of leaves hanging over her head. “This is quite a collection you’ve got here. Do you know each one?”

  Sadie nodded, biting her lip.

  “Sadie knows every plant and how it’s good for what ails a body,” Zinnie said, proud despite her worry over Nell. “Everyone in the closes comes to Sadie when they’re ill.”

  Jex-Blake didn’t answer, busying herself with her bag instead. From it she pulled a strange instrument – a short pole with a shallow bowl at each end, made of white clay.

  “What’s that?” Zinnie asked.

  “It will help me listen to your sister’s heart and lungs, to see if they’re working correctly,” the doctor said briskly, loosening the top of Nell’s grubby dress and pressing one end of the apparatus to her skinny chest. Nell moaned and coughed, trying to twist away. The doctor glanced up at Sadie. “Can you hold her still?”

  Sadie kneeled on the other side of Nell and did as she was told, murmuring soft words to her sister as she held her shoulders. The doctor took a watch from her pocket and put her ear to the other end of the device.

  “What—” Zinnie asked.

  “Hush!” she said. “I need to listen.”

  Zinnie pressed her lips together. The doctor was silent for at least a minute, moving the device to a new place once or twice and staring at her watch as if she were counting seconds. Then she sat back and looked at Sadie.

  “Do you want to try?”

  “Oh!” Sadie looked between the doctor and Zinnie, shocked. “But I don’t know – I wouldn’t know what it should sound like.”

  “That’s all right, I can tell you,” said Doctor Jex-Blake, holding out the apparatus. “This is called a stethoscope. Here – try. Be quick because we must help your sister. Place it here, on her chest, and then put your ear to the cup.”

  As Sadie did as she was told, Jex-Blake turned to Zinnie. “Go and fetch Mr Conan Doyle. We need to get this child to a hospital as soon as possible. I can’t carry her while I’m wearing this blasted skirt.”

  Zinnie’s heart leaped and then sank in her chest. “You’re taking Nell away? But—”

  “Go,” Doctor Jex-Blake said shortly. “If you want your sister to live, go now.”

  The doctor’s words shocked Zinnie into action. She pushed her way out of the curtain and scanned the maze of bodies in the room for him. But Arthur Conan Doyle had gone.

  “Mr Conan Doyle!” Zinnie shouted over the hubbub around her. “Where are you?”

  She searched the dim room, but he wasn’t anywhere in the flickering candlelight. Zinnie stumbled out into the next room beyond but there was no sign of him there, either. She swore under her breath and began to push her way between those propped up against the crumbling walls.

  “Have you seen a young gent pass this way?” she asked the people at her feet. “Jacket and tails, waistcoat, kerchief, definitely don’t belong down here?”

  Most ignored her, but there were a couple of murmurs and one raised hand, an unsteady finger, pointing.

  “Thanks,” Zinnie muttered. She moved through two more derelict, crowded rooms and then out of the ruined tenement building on to the narrow alley of what had, a long time ago, been Mary King’s Close itself.

  Once, this would have been a street with tenements either side just like Writers’ Court, but now, several storeys overhead, the lower floor of the Royal Exchange had given the place an unnatural ceiling that cut out almost all light. A hundred years ago or more the crumbling buildings around Zinnie would have loomed even higher, but the upper levels of the ones closest to the Royal Mile had been cut off to create the foundations for the Exchange. They became taller and taller as the paper-thin street sloped steeply down, what was left of the old tenement walls reaching up to keep the huge building overhead level as it jutted out over one of the largest of Edinburgh’s seven hills.

  Further down the slope, more of the old buildings had been demolished to make way for the curve of Cockburn Street, so that now the abandoned close ended in the blank back walls of other townhouses. Between these and the rear wall of the Royal Exchange, the mouldering remains of Mary King’s Close were still open to the sky. Even here the most desperate wouldn’t venture into the remaining higher storeys, though, so decayed and crumbling were their wooden staircases and floors. The upper levels had rotted completely or in some cases caught fire and burned, built as they had been from wood on top of the lower levels of stone and brick. What was left were skeleton remnants of buildings that most people didn’t even realize were there, and would have very little desire to visit even if they did.

  Zinnie knew most of this place like the back of her hand. She’d spent hours exploring as much of the ruins as she could. There were bits of it too dingy and dangerous even for her, but to Zinnie it was home. It could never scare her. As dark as it was, as dirty as it was, it was still better than being trapped behind the walls of the orphanage.

  “Mr Conan Doyle!” Zinnie yelled again, her voice echoing over the uneven flags under her feet and away down the dark slope. “Where are you?”

  She began to make her way down the close, peering into the darkness of the broken buildings on either side. Usually, there would be at least a few people in all of them, but now each was empty. Zinnie couldn’t understand it. There had always been talk of ghosts down here, but that hadn’t stopped anyone from making use of the space before. It wasn’t as if anyone had ever actually seen a ghost, after all. They’d just been afraid that they might see one, which wasn’t the same thing at all, especially for people with nowhere else to go. They might have been afraid to be down here, but what other choice did they have?

  What had changed down here, to drive these people away? Zinnie wondered. What was different now?

  The darkness thickened around her as Zinnie hurried on. She passed from beneath the shadow of the Royal Exchange and into the open, looking up to see the walls vanish into a thin sliver of night far above, so clouded it was devoid of moonlight. The remnants of the buildings around her conspired with the heavy shadow of the Royal Exchange to make this place as dark as midnight. The rain was still falling, turning the hidden filth of the rough flagstones slick beneath her thin shoes. Zinnie was still wearing the maid’s dress she’d been given at Montague House and had to hitch up the hem with one hand to stop it dragging in the muck.

  “Mr Conan Doyle!” she shouted again, feeling her words fall dead against the walls. “ARTHUR!”

  There came a sound somewhere to her left, inside one of the pitch-black rooms, followed by a muffled cry. Zinnie held out her candle and slipped through the doorway, careful to watch where she was putting her feet.

  “Miss Zinnie! Here! I’ve dropped my light!”

  Zinnie picked her way across the uneven, rubble-strewn floor to find Conan Doyle up to his knee in a hole. His foot had stepped right through a rotten board.

  “Help me, please,” he said. “I can’t free my leg.”

  Zinnie set down her light and grabbed him by the arm, dragging him out. His trousers were torn and his leg was bleeding from a shallow graze.

  “I told you to stay put,” Zinnie said.

  “I couldn’t,” Conan Doyle said, dabbing at the blood with a handkerchief. “This place is the stuff of legends, Miss Zinnie. And this ghost that everyone’s so afraid of—”

  “Ach, there is no ghost, just people with too little food and too much whisky in the gut,” Zinnie said. “Come on. Nell’s got to get to a hospital, the doctor says. We need you to lift her.”

  Conan Doyle began to follow her out of the
room, stepping gingerly over the broken floor. “Why are you so certain there’s no ghost?” he asked. “It seems as if plenty of other people are convinced it’s real.”

  “If you were going to spend eternity anywhere, would it really be down here?” Zinnie asked impatiently. “Anyway, if there’s a ghost, why has it only just appeared?”

  Conan Doyle shrugged as they made it back on to the close. “Maybe it’s a recently deceased soul. Maybe it needs to tell someone something before it can rest. Maybe it died here.” He stopped. “Aren’t you at least curious?”

  Zinnie turned. “No. Why are you? Why do you care?”

  “Because this could be the proof the world needs that spirits do exist!”

  “It’s not a ghost.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because there are no such things as ghosts.”

  “Then how do you explain what you saw earlier tonight? I might not have got the answers I wanted from Madame Khartoubian’s seance, but other spirits convened with her, didn’t they?”

  Zinnie only just managed to stop herself from telling him the truth by biting her lip, hard.

  “There,” Conan Doyle said, a satisfied look on his face. “You can’t argue with that, can you?”

  “We’re wasting time,” Zinnie said through gritted teeth. “We’ve got to go. Nell needs—”

  An ear-splitting shriek tore through the air, followed by the most hideous screeching that Zinnie had ever heard. It was so terrifying that she threw herself against the wall and dropped to a crouch, her arms over her head. The sound went on and on, becoming louder as if whatever was making the noise was right over their heads. Then it faded away, sucked deeper and deeper into the darkness around them. Zinnie found herself trembling, her heart beating wildly. The screaming stopped and there was a moment of absolute silence.

  “If that wasn’t a malevolent spirit,” Conan Doyle said, sounding out of breath, “then what was it?”

  Zinnie pushed herself to her feet, taking a deep, steadying breath. There was no sign of anyone or anything else except them in the street. She willed her heart to stop beating so hard. Conan Doyle was looking at her with both of his eyebrows raised, waiting for an answer, but she shook her head.

  “Might have been a bird.”

  He made an annoyed sound in his throat. “There’s no bird on this earth that could make a sound like that.”

  “A moggie then, trapped in a hole down here somewhere. It happens.”

  “That wasn’t a cat!”

  “I don’t care!” Zinnie yelled, losing the last of her patience. “I don’t care what it is or isn’t! There are more important things in this world – living things – don’t you know that? And right now one of them is getting my sister to a hospital. Are you going to help or not? Because if not, I’ll just leave you with your ghost and carry her out of here myself!”

  Conan Doyle had the good grace to look chastened by Zinnie’s outburst.

  “You are right, of course,” he said. “I apologize. Lead the way. Let’s go and help your sister.”

  “Where are we going to take her?” Conan Doyle asked, as he scooped Nell up, still wrapped in her blanket. In his arms she looked very small.

  “Will the Royal Infirmary not have her?” asked Doctor Jex-Blake.

  An uncomfortable look passed across the medical student’s face. “I don’t know. Even if they would … I don’t know how long the wait would be before a doctor would see her. And I … have no real say over these things, you know.”

  Jex-Blake nodded. “Then we’ll go to my clinic.”

  They made a strange procession passing through that underground world – Zinnie, her sisters and the two doctors. As they reached the steps up to Writers’ Court, Zinnie thought she heard a faint echo of that terrible shriek again, far away in the darkness of the lowest levels, but she was too worried about Nell to care. She reached for Sadie’s hand and the two sisters held each other fast, fingers twining together to form a bond that Zinnie promised the world would not break. She wished she could take Nell’s hand too, but Conan Doyle was striding ahead.

  They reached the trap and got in. Conan Doyle held Nell as the trap rattled on its way with the doctor in the driving seat. The little girl shivered and moaned as Sadie held a blanket over her, trying to protect her from the incessant rain. Zinnie ignored the cold, wet through and tired though she was. She was thinking only of Nell and how she had failed her littlest sister. Every time Nell rattled out another horrible cough, Zinnie flinched. She’d promised to keep both her sisters safe, but she hadn’t been able to and now Nell was suffering for it.

  The streets sped past – the long slope of Johnston Terrace, through Spitall Street to Bread Street, past the pawnbroker’s where the girls had found the missing pocket watch for Conan Doyle. It was dark now, windows empty of wares like the vacant eyes of a dead body. There was the railway line into the Caledonian Railway Station, black tracks snaking under the bridge that was on Tobago Street. Zinnie had always wondered what it would be like to jump on to one of those carriages, to let the locomotive take her to somewhere strange and far away.

  On, on the trap rattled, and Zinnie shivered, not just from the rain turning cold on her cheeks, but also from a sudden memory of the day she had run away from the orphanage. If there had been a convenient train then, she would have jumped on it. Instead, she had run along these very thoroughfares, desperate to get away from the orphanage, to be anywhere but the place she had been abandoned before she was old enough to walk. Halfway along Morrison Street and then left into Grove Street, and there, finally, they stopped outside a tall house bearing the number 73.

  The place was dark, with no lights burning in its windows. When Zinnie ran up the steps and knocked hard on the door, there was an interval before it was opened by a sleepy-looking maid with a crooked cap on her untidy hair.

  “Wilkins,” Jex-Blake called from where she and Sadie were helping Conan Doyle with Nell. “Is Mrs Collins awake?”

  Wide-eyed now, the maid bobbed a curtsey. “I can hear her on the stair now, Doctor.”

  “Good. Shout to Bill to come and take the trap. I need you to light a fire in the ward room.”

  Wilkins muttered a “Yes, ma’am,” and disappeared, the light of her oil lamp bobbing up and down as she went.

  Jex-Blake helped Conan Doyle to get Nell down from the trap, and then the rest of them followed. Inside, the building was clean, functional and uncluttered, smelling faintly of something that caught sharply at the back of Zinnie’s throat.

  “This way,” Jex-Blake directed, and she led them along a corridor into an empty room that held four plainly made beds and a fireplace.

  Conan Doyle put Nell down on one of the beds and Doctor Jex-Blake unwrapped the shivering girl from her blanket. Nell’s eyes were closed and she was breathing in harsh rasps that filled the room like the sound of a saw against wet wood.

  The door opened again and another woman came in, stern-looking and dressed neatly in a starched grey dress with a perfect white pinafore over it. She glanced round at the figures in the room, assessing Sadie and Zinnie with calm precision.

  “Ah, Mrs Collins, there you are,” said the doctor. “I’m sorry to drag you from your bed but we have an urgent case here. This is Nell. I need hot water and plenty of cloths for her.”

  “Yes, Doctor,” said Mrs Collins. Zinnie watched her face as she regarded the little girl in the bed, but her expression didn’t change. “I will see to it immediately. Is there anything else?”

  “Yes,” said the doctor, straightening up and indicating Sadie. “This young woman is Sadie. She is going to be in charge of making sure her sister drinks water and will otherwise assist with her treatment. Please show her where to find all she needs.”

  Mrs Collins hesitated for a second. “That will mean giving her access to the medical supplies, Doctor, as well as the kitchens and all the spaces between the two. It will mean access to most of the house.”

 
Doctor Jex-Blake was busy pulling Nell out of her damp clothes. “Yes.”

  Mrs Collins glanced at Sadie. “If you think that is wise, Doctor.”

  “It is,” said Jex-Blake, still not sparing Mrs Collins so much as a glance. “My advice is that you give her a set of keys. It will mean you do not have to run hither and thither every time a door wants for opening.”

  There was another tiny pause and then Mrs Collins looked at Sadie again.

  “Very well. Follow me, Miss Sadie.”

  It was Sadie’s turn to hesitate, but only for a moment, and then she squeezed Zinnie’s hand before she followed the forbidding woman from the room.

  Zinnie stood, watching Jex-Blake and Conan Doyle examine her sister and feeling helpless. Every now and then, the doctor would pull something from her medical bag – the stethoscope again, to listen to Nell’s heart, as well as a strip of thick black material that she wrapped round Nell’s arm before holding one of her tiny wrists and looking at her watch. Nell coughed and squirmed beneath the clean sheets, waking enough to realize she was no longer in familiar surroundings.

  “Zinnie!” she cried in a frightened voice.

  Zinnie ran to her, pushing Conan Doyle away to reach her sister. “I’m here,” she said, grabbing Nell’s hand. “I’m here, pippin – I’m always here, you know that.”

  Nell struggled up until she was sitting and threw her arms round Zinnie’s neck. Zinnie hugged her, feeling how hot she was, and then pushed her gently back down.

  “Where am I?” Nell asked groggily, looking around with feverish eyes. “I want to go home. Take me home!”

  “I can’t, pippin,” Zinnie said, stroking Nell’s hair and holding on to her hand. “You’re not well but you’ll be better soon. Then you can come home. I promise. Hush now. Let the doctors make you well.”

  Nell’s eyes fluttered shut again and Zinnie leaned back, just in time to catch a glance between Doctor Jex-Blake and Arthur Conan Doyle that made her stomach drop to her knees.