Trick of the Light

by David Ashton

  Who could believe?

  The words never passed his lips.

  The little man made a sweeping gesture under the table and both men seated on the other side froze as if an icy hand had been laid upon them.

  The money was scooped swiftly up and then some words were finally uttered.

  ‘Thank you, gents.’

  Having said this, Alfred Binnie turned and made his unhurried way through the swirling smoke and heaving bodies of the Rustie Nail.

  The paralysis of their nether abdomens being sliced through by a razor-edged knife that might disembowel an ox, held the two sharpers in suspension for what seemed like an eternity.

  Both looked down and saw the blood seeping out of the deep cut in their lower bellies through the thick material of the tweed trousers worn to support the pretence that they were from the outlands of Jedburgh or the like.

  Then the pain bit in and their groans mingled with the frenzied whoops of the tavern throng as two of the mariners burst into an impromptu hornpipe.

  One of them reeled backwards and crashed into the alcove.

  He apologised in Dutch. His native language.

  14

  And so I lie with her and she with me,

  And in our faults by lies we flattered be.

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Sonnets

  Muriel’s small bedroom overlooked the side lane and a crack upon her window brought her awake with a start of fear.

  The breath caught in her throat – she had been dreaming but of nothing she could easily remember, vague feelings of shame, and accusing voices in her mind.

  For a moment she lay quite still. Unable to tell what had disturbed her sleep.

  Another crack of pebble on glass solved the mystery.

  She shifted eyes to the window, the counterpane pulled up just under her nose like a frightened child or old maid in a country cottage.

  But she was neither.

  Muriel Grierson was a respectable widow. Or was she?

  She slipped out of bed and padded with an oddly feline gait, bare feet upon a lush carpet, to the glass where she looked out into the lane.

  He was standing where she knew he would be; silver hair flattened a little by the evening damp, shining wetly in the faint gleam that spilled down the narrow track from the streetlight.

  Samuel Grant. Her lover.

  The man she had met by chance in the street when a cab driver had splashed her skirts with his carriage wheel and when she taxed him, the fellow had responded in a most impolite fashion. A passer-by then berated the miscreant until the brute apologised.

  The passer-by. A well-set man with silver hair.

  From this accidental beginning he had courted her but of course most discreetly; it would not be proper for Muriel to be seen enjoying such company.

  How could one put it? She was yet, though decked no longer in widow’s weeds, carrying the indefinable marks of grief and he was somewhat…not quite of the same class.

  Well mannered to be sure, a trifle flamboyant in his dress, stocky of frame, in age perhaps some years less than her but…how can one put it?

  In fact there were more years between them than she realised but ignorance is often bliss as regards age in love. And so Muriel mused on regardless.

  He was a little short of grace. Not coarse exactly, just lacking a certain refinement. But she liked that. An uncomplicated, unconfined vitality. She liked that.

  They had met, therefore, in secret in areas of the city where she was not known and the clandestine nature had brought a certain spice as if she were having an affaire de coeur.

  Then one night when her maid Ellen was having her regular evening away with her family, Muriel had permitted Samuel the house. It was dark enough that no-one might notice from the street and so she had allowed him in. And then she had allowed him quite a lot.

  She had never enjoyed the act of love, it was something to be endured, like an affliction. Her husband Andrew had approached it as if measuring out a corpse.

  A grim undertaking.

  But Samuel Grant enjoyed what he termed rough and tumble and, to her surprise, she found that the act was not divorced from a certain…pleasure.

  Besides Ellen’s regular absences, she encouraged the woman to vacate the premises on other evenings and Muriel was worried that her maid smelled a rat.

  Yet she grew more reckless; sexual pleasure does have that effect. Rules the roost.

  They pulled the curtains shut and Samuel had the run of the house. The master bedroom where the marital rites had been grindingly performed was abandoned in summary fashion and, pleading melancholic memories, Muriel had shifted to a smaller bouncier mattress in a more compact room. With no family portraits looming above.

  This space she decorated in bright, vibrant colours, indulged in feminine frills and boudoir fripperies that would have given her late husband a heart attack had he not been already deceased from exactly that.

  And it was from this chamber of guilty excess that she looked down upon the cause.

  Samuel waved up cheerily. She had warned him previously that even though Ellen had her evening off, a long-standing social engagement must be fulfilled this night.

  No matter, declared bluff Sam. He’d come late or he wouldn’t come at all. This was his style.

  And she liked that.

  But this time when she opened the front door and he slid in fast to embrace her in manly fashion, she retracted from desire in order to tell him the terrible events of the day.

  Samuel’s eyes widened and he let out a small whistle of surprise.

  ‘That’s a lift tae lose,’ he announced.

  ‘I want my mother’s brooch. I was fond of the music box. The rest is not important.’

  ‘What about the money?’

  ‘I do not mourn it especially.’

  Muriel shook her head to emphasise such and stepped back. A light from the hall lamp outlined her body through the thin nightgown and Samuel’s mind, never a strong, fixed point at the best of times, wandered.

  But a lustful lunge might be misinterpreted as a cavalier attitude and there was no telling where this conversation might lead.

  ‘As I told you, I suspected Andrew had kept the money hidden for a reason.’

  ‘Some things are best paid for in cash.’

  ‘Such as?’ she asked sharply.

  Whores for one, came into his mind but he kept his expression bland and open; it had served him well with many women to act the child in man.

  They suffered the flinty exactitudes of matrimony and flowered like cherry blossom at a friendly face and joyful rumpling of the bed sheets.

  Muriel was such a woman.

  Cherry blossom. But not at the moment. At the moment she regarded him with a wary questioning stare.

  ‘I showed you where that money was kept.’

  ‘You did, my dear.’

  ‘And now it’s gone.’

  ‘It has. For certain sure.’

  ‘As if the thieves knew exactly where to find it.’

  He nodded as if she had made an irrefutably wise assertion but cursed his big mouth because putting two and two in summation, a boastful whisky speech in the Foul Anchor tavern to a certain Seth Moxey might yet come back to haunt him.

  Samuel had a round, pleasant face with a little goatee beard and radiated a kind of damaged innocence, as if life’s tribulations had left a mark but the spirit was undaunted.

  He was known to his acquaintances as Silver Sam both because of his hair, which had prematurely attained this hue and gave him a gravitas far beyond his actual age, and the fact that he enjoyed personal artefacts of the precious metal. Watch and chain, silver ring, tiepin, take your pick.

  He enjoyed the glitter; however, this was not the time for outward show.

  Muriel was not directly accusing but harboured suspicions that she longed to be disproved because women, despite their innate mistrust of men, always hope to meet an improved specimen somewhere along the line.

>   Yet Samuel knew that protesting innocence too loudly might imply a feeling of guilt. A man’s excuses never quite ring true.

  ‘I will make enquiries,’ he said.

  ‘So will Inspector McLevy,’ she replied.

  Samuel winced internally. That was not a name he wished to hear. No-one of the fraternity wanted that bugger on his trail.

  ‘Yet he is a policeman, my love. Certain doors may be closed against him.’

  ‘Unlike my own, which seems to be open to all comers.’

  A bitter riposte. They trembled on the edge of their very first quarrel.

  We all begin with such high hopes, do we not?

  She knew that he was a dabbler on the fringes of respectable society, a buyer and seller of this and that, as he was wont to say, and it added to her relish of cocking a snoot at accepted custom.

  But witnessing that unlicensed, licentious freedom was the grim effigy of her husband who looked down from the various portraits in the house that she dared not remove for fear of adverse comment.

  Perhaps Andrew was correct. She was cheap. Besmirched. This was no better than she deserved.

  A deep breath then out with it.

  ‘Give me your word,’ she said.

  ‘For what, Moumou?’

  His pet name for her brought no softening to her face.

  ‘Swear that you are not compromised by this theft.’

  He placed his hand solemnly over the heart area, or as near as he could, given that his pocketbook resided there.

  ‘I swear upon my mother’s grave.’

  The mother that had thrown him out as a young boy to make his living on the streets of Leith by whatever his wits might conjure up. Samuel had pimped, lied, stolen, been abused and defiled many times one way or the other but had somehow managed to haul himself out of the mire.

  And he was never going back.

  Not if he could help it.

  Muriel looked into his eyes. They did not flinch. He had learned this at an early stage. Steadfast mendacity.

  ‘Upon her grave,’ he repeated.

  A long silence where he noticed that there were some thin lines from the sides of her eyes as if a crow had walked past in the snow. Age withers us all.

  ‘I believe you,’ she finally declared.

  He bowed his head to hide a relieved smile.

  ‘And I shall strain every nerve to find your jewels,’ he murmured.

  Later in the bouncy bed, having tested the springs with vigorous consummation, they lay side by side.

  She was snoring. Lightly. Ladylike. But snoring.

  He watched her with some fondness but not enough to alter the train of his thought.

  Seth Moxey was a dirty dog. And he, Samuel Grant, was a bletherskite.

  A liar and a buffoon. But still alive.

  What a bugger that McLevy was involved.

  Muriel came awake with a jolt and looked down at an admittedly naked breast, the nipple of which was like a sentry at attention under his absent-minded caress.

  ‘Jezebel,’ she announced to the ceiling.

  ‘Who might that be?’ he asked cautiously.

  ‘A wicked woman who was trampled by horses and eaten by dogs. In the Bible.’

  Samuel blinked. His knowledge of scripture was not vast but it sounded like one of those punishments from on high. He was not a follower of that sort of retribution, in fact religion struck him as attracting stiff-necked folk who then dished out God’s will to make up for what they lacked.

  He was more for live and let live.

  ‘She must have been wicked, right enough,’ he offered, transferring his thumb to the other nipple in the interests of equality.

  ‘Andrew was forever talking about evil women in the Bible. It seemed to fascinate him.’

  Muriel shook her head, troubled by pleasure’s close connection to guilt, for instance in the case of papillary stimulation and worried memories.

  ‘I was called by such a name tonight.’

  ‘By whom?’ he demanded with indignation. ‘I’ll punch their nose aside!’

  Muriel thought of trying to explain that the nose in question might not be materialised, finding its physical expression through a sensitive’s visage behind a veil, but decided to leave things be.

  Yet the timbre of the spirit voice had sounded weirdly like her dead husband and Jezebel had been his crushing verdict on any woman who wore trace of cosmetic covering or flaunted an improvement upon what nature had provided.

  What if he’d been watching them all this time?

  What if he were watching them now?

  Muriel was not someone who liked to delve into the dark crevices of the mind and regretted most bitterly that she had agreed to accompany Mary Doyle and her son to the Spiritualist Society, but Mary was an old friend, Muriel had welcomed the distraction, and Arthur was…well, shameful to admit such, but in her new-found sense of fragrant release, she was attracted to his courtly manners and massive frame.

  Plus vibrant innocence.

  Innocence always attracts the opposite.

  Was she depraved, or merely awakened?

  ‘What if he’s watching us?’ she whispered.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Andrew. His ghost.’

  Samuel glanced around somewhat uneasily but then his essential practicality came to the fore.

  ‘Well if he is,’ he said, ‘he’ll just have to thole it. We’re alive and he’s departed. Life is hard.’

  It was not the only thing.

  Muriel had been trying to keep her mind focused on the dark events that seemed to presently lurk in her life but found that her hand, not unlike herself, had strayed into temptation.

  And provoked the risen Adam.

  A creature of sensation.

  She wheeled over suddenly and straddled him, the first time she had performed such an action.

  If Andrew was watching he might as well get his money’s worth.

  ‘Do you think I am wicked?’ she demanded of Samuel.

  ‘Only when you smile,’ he answered.

  And they rolled down the hill into love’s oblivion.

  15

  ’Tis not what once it was, the world,

  But a rude heap together hurled.

  ANDREW MARVELL, ‘Upon Appleton House’

  When Jean Brash approached the gates of the Just Land she was astonished to see all the lights ablaze and three extremely drunk young men roaring fit to burst upon the verdant lawn – for Jean had green fingers.

  Facing the men was an indignant Jessie Nairn; she seemed to have taken the place of the ex-blacksmith Angus, who doubled as Jean’s coachman, doorman and keeper of order in the Just Land. He was out in the streets with a paper likeness of the acid-pourer clutched in his meaty fist and woe betide the little swine if he was found.

  Jean Brash and Hannah Semple had been closeted in a safe house in Laurie Street not far from the Leith Links, one of Jean’s many mansions. There they had met with various street-Arabs and keelies, a substratum of criminality but invaluable for reconnaissance. Her people.

  It would not be wise to have so many visitors to the bawdy hoose, so therefore the safe house.

  Now the hunt was on. But with no success so far. A reported knifing in one of the taverns, two sharpers cut savage deep and a man answering the description of the quarry. But he had disappeared out into the night.

  A watch was also being kept on the Countess’s ‘hotel’ but nothing to report except various respectable pillars of the community ducking in for illicit pleasure, one of whom, Gilbert Morrison, had been politely screened from the delights of the Just Land due to a predilection for inflicting punishment and was indeed the very man who had left the welts on the derrière of Simone.

  Which had provoked her to leave the Countess.

  Which was the cause of this war with Jean.

  Casus belli.

  Cherchez la femme.

  There had been a violent run-in in the back wynds of the Tolbooth with
one Patrick Fraser, who was a bully-boy for the Countess and had gathered a crew of like-minded thugs around him. During the fracas Patrick had received a sharp reminder from wee Donnie Toms that size is not always the point at issue. Donnie had kicked up a storm.

  Blood had been spilled, bones broken.

  The streets were hotting up. Various guisers on a Halloween approach were also on the randan; imps of hell, witches, satanic figures in livid finery roamed the byways, startling the carriage horses with ghostly apparition.

  The city was seething with disquiet and everywhere there was a feeling of things breaking apart, as if the earth was moving under the scrabbling feet of Edinburgh gentlefolk.

  Nowhere more apparent than within her own grounds, Jean observed. For a moment she was tempted to plunge headlong into the rammy, because it had become so itchy-scratchy in the safe house waiting for news to break that she had left Hannah Semple to run the operation and walked briskly back through the streets praying that she might bump into a man answering the likeness of Lily Baxter’s sketch.

  No such luck.

  However, she would not take her grievance out on other folk but employ a stately approach.

  Like Victoria Regina.

  So Jean walked softly.

  As for the roaring boys on the lawn?

  Logan Galloway was a contemptible young snotter whose father had made a fortune exporting horses to France where they were no doubt cooked and eaten, hooves and all.

  He was a skinny runt, nebby by nature, temper not improved by an earlier incident that evening when he and a companion had thought it great high jinks to don Halloween disguise and terrorise a meeting of the Spiritualist Society, in the certain knowledge that none of the impotent attendance would be able to lay a glove upon them.

  They had been unpleasantly surprised to find themselves picked up by the scruff of the neck and booted out by a man mountain that Galloway vaguely recognised as a rugby player for the University.

  Then they had been pursued through the streets by a madman brandishing a placard.