‘A poor murderous soul,’ argued the minister, but the change of emphasis had distracted him as she had hoped, and shortly he left her, pondering questions of guilt and repentance. After all, there was to be a Communion service on Sunday.
IV
On Tuesday, the post coach crossed the Bridge of Dee and entered Aberdeen, sharp and grey in the sun. Scratching dismally at the flea bites he had acquired the night before, Smith lowered himself and his waterproof pack down from the top of the coach. The bells of the town kirk were striking midday weightily, as he made his way from the Union Street hotel where the coach stopped to the Castlegate. The stall holders there around the mercat cross were taking advantage of the dinner time lull in trade to sit beneath the cross or on the Plainstanes for the easier digesting of the morning’s gossip and their midday meal. The closest of them eyed Smith with a hopeful look, seeing his pack, wondering what urgent commodity they could press on him. They did not eye him for long: he had that useful way of looking through traders that seemed to persuade them that he was not even there.
However, on this occasion he did have to try speaking to someone, even if it was only to find himself some food. A reluctant stall holder, hauled back into his shadowy premises from the warm sun of the Plainstanes, sold Smith a pie which looked, at least, unlikely to have any unpleasant repercussions, and when the trader went back to his own dinner he discovered that he had acquired a dining companion. Smith settled down next to him, tucking his pack neatly between his feet away from thieving hands.
‘Fine enough weather we’re getting, anyway,’ Smith began, as if the conversation were already in progress.
‘Aye,’ said the stall holder, conceding this small point to a customer.
‘Whiles colder than further south,’ Smith went on.
‘I’ve never went.’ The stall holder did not seem open to the reception of such exotic detail.
‘Have you no, now?’ Smith allowed it as a misfortune, and looked sympathetic. ‘Then you’ll have been around here a gey long time.’
‘I have right enough,’ said the stall holder. The ensuing silence, during which each man chewed at his pie and stared out at the street, seemed to serve to emphasise just how long the stall holder had in fact been there. Then Smith, making the most of his peripheral vision, noticed what a more experienced traveller would have spotted sooner: the stall holder was eating a pie, but it was not one of his own. Smith looked down at his own half-finished pastry, and decided to waste no further time.
‘You may ken a Mrs. Everett, then, maybe an Englishwoman?’ The stall holder thought about it, and Smith tried to help. ‘She may be in service, maybe as a housekeeper or the like.’
‘What like is she?’ asked the stall holder, thoughtful.
‘I don’t know, man! I’ve never set eyes on the woman. But do you know of anyone likely to be her?’
The stall holder gave another couple of chews, and waited politely while Smith brought two large and shiny coins out of his waistcoat pocket and laid them flat in his hand. The stall holder eyed them and seemed to be doing sums in his head. Smith watched the street, casually. Eventually the stall holder said,
‘I have an idea she is somewhere in the midst of the town, but I’m not sure where. But I can say who can help you – the minister at St. Nicholas’ Kirk. I see her there each week, and Mr. Sheriffs has been there a gey long time – he would ken fine where she stays.’
Smith nodded, pleased enough, and still without looking directly at the stall holder slid his open hand a little further in his direction. The stall holder looked again at the coins, gave a little exasperated sigh as if at his own weakness, and took the money. He stood up, shook the crumbs from his apron, and walked back to his stall. Smith looked down at his own palm. One coin remained: the stall holder had given him only part of the information he had asked for, so had taken only part of the payment. Suspicious about the motives of an apparently honest human nature, Smith set the rest of his pie on the ground beside him and hoisted his pack to start on his round of the town churches, beginning, of course, with the town kirk of St. Nicholas.
V
‘Robbins asks, in his diffident way,’ said Murray, ‘where Smith has gone.’
It was just after dinner on Wednesday, and Blair and his host were giving the ladies a sporting few minutes to settle themselves before going up to join them in the drawing room. Murray was hoping that Isobel would also pull herself out of her current depression, as she was nipping the heads off his favourite garden flowers to count the petals, which she then left in a trail across the hall. Through the ever diplomatic Robbins, both Mrs. Chambers (on behalf of the household staff) and Carlisle (on behalf of himself, the flowers, and Nature in general) had complained in rare unison.
‘Smith?’ repeated Blair, raised from a reverie.
‘I believe Robbins is reassured by his presence. He sometimes seems to find his post a little daunting, I think. Consequently, he has asked me to confirm with you that Smith intends to return on Saturday. He mentioned something to do with bedlinen, but I think he would like more general information.’ Murray himself was quite keen to find out whither Blair’s manservant had been sent at such short notice, not least because Dunnet the groom had sulked for the rest of Monday and half of Tuesday after being asked to take Smith to Perth. The stableboys were in revolt.
‘Smith has gone to Aberdeen,’ said Blair, as if a little puzzled by Smith’s motives.
‘I thought so,’ said Murray contentedly. ‘It is about time somebody did. I should have thought of it earlier.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Blair, ‘perhaps. But it is done now and cannot be undone and redone earlier, I should have thought. We all have to manage with that.’ He smiled beatifically, missing Murray so that the smile passed him and went to the tapestries behind him. Amongst the hunting scenes was a pastoral idyll in blues and greens, where amidst dense forest a sprightly gentleman in a pink coat was reading from a large book to an improbably well turned out young lady in white, attended by a vaguely oriental lapdog. Blair looked at the lapdog, following a long trail of concatenated thoughts.
‘Shall we call at the manse this afternoon, then?’ he asked. Murray looked up behind him at the tapestried miss and her literary beau and in a flash saw what Blair’s thoughts had been. He nodded, and drained his brandy glass to go and pay a courtesy call in his own drawing room.
VI
The little maid ushered them into the hallway of the manse and darted off, familiar feet steady on the uncertain stairs, to find out who would receive them. Murray noticed, as he waited, that the mirror loosened from a crack in one wall had now been moved to another wall, and someone had been trying to shave some of the rougher edges from the apple tree support. He found his mouth was pursing in irritation at both the minister and the heritors for allowing matters to reach this point. He heard the maid coming back, and deliberately relaxed his face, then tried to emulate Blair’s benevolent smile. On his face, it felt like the smile of a madman, so he assumed a more sober expression, then fearing that the maid would think him fierce, he added an anxious frown. It had now passed the point where he could arrange his face unconsciously, and he was glad when the maid did reappear and distract him.
‘Mr. Gilbert Helliwell is in the drawing room, sir, and the rest will be along in a minute,’ said the maid helpfully, and led them back upstairs again.
To find Gilbert Helliwell prepared to receive visitors was unexpected: to find him apparently pleased to see them was astonishing. Gilbert rose as they entered, beaming from ear to ear, and bowed with genuine welcome. There was a glow in his face that made Murray wonder if Gilbert had been drinking, but there was no other evidence of such a thing.
‘My mother and perhaps my father will be here shortly,’ said Gilbert cheerfully, seeing them settled. ‘Can I offer you some tea?’
‘Tea would be most welcome,’ said Blair warmly.
‘The weather is still very hot,’ said Gilbert, nodding to the m
aid. ‘Your walk from Letho must have been uncomfortable.’
‘Not too intolerable, thank you,’ said Murray. A Gilbert Helliwell capable of social conversation was not a creature with which he felt very familiar. He was saved from struggling against a fit of laughter by the entrance of Mr. and Mrs. Helliwell and their daughter Anna, now happily much recovered though smelling faintly of tobacco. Evidently Mrs. Fairlie’s aunt’s remedies were being put to use.
Mrs. Helliwell, led into botanical subjects by Blair, fell into easy conversation about the planting of asparagus, about which Murray noticed Blair had unusual knowledge for a man never known to have grown it himself. Left with Mr. Helliwell and his son, Murray found the son much easier than usual and the father much more difficult: he mentioned one or two village matters and tried a venture or two into the quality of preaching to be expected at the Sunday Communion service, but felt he would have had as much reaction from one of his cows in the pasture beyond the manse. Gilbert, on the other hand, was full of his plans for going to university with a view to entering the church, like many a son of the manse before him. It came as a surprise to Murray, who had broached the subject with him a month or two before for want of anything else to talk about, and had received a surly reply, not indicative of a strong calling to the church.
The two male Helliwells and Murray were suddenly distracted by Blair thrusting himself back in his chair, bob wig jerking perilously, to declaim,
‘Where’er you walk, cool gales shall fan the glade,
Trees where you sit shall crowd into a shade:
Where’er you tread, the blushing flowers shall rise,
And all things flourish where you turn your eyes.’
‘Lovely!’ said Mrs. Helliwell, applauding with the rest as Blair rose to make a self-mocking bow. ‘If only all gardens would behave themselves like that!’
‘Say it again,’ said Gilbert, and listened with some concentration as Blair ran through the little verse again. He mouthed a few of the words to himself, then turned with shining eyes and thanked Blair. His mother watched him oddly. ‘And who is the author, sir? Who is the poet?’
This was almost too much for Murray, and he said,
‘You should go and write it down quickly, before you forget it.’
‘Indeed I shall, if you will excuse me,’ he said, leaping up. ‘But I must hear, Mr. Blair, who the poet was?’
‘It was Pope, Gilbert: Alexander Pope,’ said his father impatiently. Gilbert fled in joy.
‘But there is more of it,’ said Blair, ‘if only I could remember ... You have an edition of Pope, I think, Helliwell?’
‘Do I?’ said the minister, surprised into a natural response.
‘I seem to remember, though I could quite easily be wrong, for it has been known before, and on more than one occasion, I can assure you – but I seem to remember seeing it in your library the day I fetched your medicine cabinet for young Miss Anna there.’ He beamed at the girl, who smiled back, showing slightly yellow teeth.
‘You may be right,’ conceded Mr. Helliwell. ‘Come down with me, if you will, and see if we can discover it. I have no recollection of its purchase ...’ The two older gentlemen left the room and could be heard negotiating the stairs. Murray was left with Mrs. Helliwell and Anna.
‘Gilbert seems well,’ Murray remarked irresistibly. Anna giggled, and her mother glared at her, though not very sternly.
‘We think he is in love,’ said Anna gleefully.
‘Anna!’ said her mother. ‘Though,’ she said to Murray with a grin, ‘it is true we cannot think of any other explanation. He has reported no knocks on the head ...’ She looked comically anxious, and Murray laughed.
‘But do we know the object of his affections?’
‘Well,’ said Mrs. Helliwell, ‘perhaps.’
‘Yes we do!’ said Anna helpfully. ‘It is Mary Fairlie, for I heard him trying to make up a poem about her.’
‘Oh, Anna, when will you learn discretion?’
‘But he was,’ said Anna, ‘and you know it. You remember, we heard him trying to rhyme ‘early’ and ‘girlie’ with ‘Fairlie’, and he was sighing like this.’ She took a deep breath and let out a passable imitation of a man in the throes of some kind of pain, and then began to cough. Her mother reached into her pocket and pulled out a handkerchief sprinkled with something sweet-smelling, through which Anna breathed gratefully.
‘He certainly seems to be suffering badly,’ Mrs. Helliwell admitted to Murray. ‘Gilbert and poetry are not subjects I would have thought before of mentioning in the same conversation, unless it were very broad-ranging. Yet now I have hopes of living to see him marry, if any girl is daft enough to take him. And no, Anna, do not tell him I said so!’
Murray and Mrs. Helliwell had disposed of most of the tea by the time Blair and the minister returned. The minister looked the calmer for his little literary discussion, and Blair was clutching a thin, flat book in brown calf, a simple blind design on the spine worn shallow with age. He and Murray left soon after, and were just clear of the little wood on their way back to Letho House when Blair ran out of patience and sat down plumply on the grass by the side of the path to open the book he had borrowed. Murray crouched beside him, propped on his stick, and looked over Blair’s shoulder. The book was an edition of some of the essays and poetry of Alexander Pope.
‘It is undoubtedly the book from which the letter fell,’ said Blair excitedly. ‘See just here, the front board is coming away from the spine: I remember it just like that. There was no other book in the library like it.’
‘But what does it tell us,’ asked Murray, ‘except to indicate the minister’s taste in poetry? I did not have him down as a Burns man, anyway.’
‘Well,’ said Blair, more in hope than in expectation, ‘perhaps there are other papers here.’ He pawed through the pages until Murray, who could not bear to watch dogears in the making, politely took the book from him and leafed through with more kindly fingers. There were no other loose papers. Blair sighed impatiently, but Murray turned carefully to the endpapers, and at the front of the book finally found some information. Pasted firmly to one page was a bookplate, but it was not the bookplate of Mr. Helliwell. Instead, under a little crest, was a brown ink inscription: ‘This book is from the library of Dures House’. Murray and Blair sat back and stared at it.
‘Hi!’ said a small voice behind them on the path. They looked round to see that Anna had followed them, carrying another stick. ‘Is this yours, Mr. Blair? You left it behind.’
‘Oh! Thank you, thank you, miss,’ said Blair, and found in his pockets with remarkable ease the Indian gold mohr he knew he had put there that morning. He explained what it was as he made her a present of it, and she was suitably impressed. The gift, indeed, seemed to encourage her confidence.
‘I don’t see why Ma was all for me being discreet about Gilbert: he’s no being so very discreet himself.’
‘Is that a fact?’ said Murray, interested.
‘It is,’ said Anna. ‘I mean, he talks to himself out loud about her. And there was the Sunday night a while back he was standing under her window talking up at her.’
‘How do you know all this?’ asked Murray, trying to sound admiring rather than doubtful.
‘Easy,’ said Anna, smug. ‘Pa was gone over to Pitmen for the evening service, and Ma and I had gone to take broth to old Mr. Jenner beyond the doctor’s house, and on our way back I saw him jooking back into the shadow by the Fairlies’ front steps, and Mary was at her window looking out but she didn’t see me seeing her at all. Mind, I don’t know that he was in love with her then,’ she added innocently, ‘because he wasn’t very happy when he came back home that night.’
‘You’re a very well-informed young lady,’ remarked Blair.
‘Aye, well,’ Anna replied, ‘sometimes it pays to be.’ She curtseyed with a flop of her full skirt, and skipped off home.
VII
By late on Wednesday afternoon, Smith, walking
tenderly on overused feet, was pacing from the Castlegate to the harbour down Marischal Street, examining the granite houses for signs of pink curtains.
It struck him as a not entirely sensible means of locating an individual, but it was the best information he had, and might lead to the only information with which he could go back to his master. He had tried both established church parishes in the town of Aberdeen and in Old Aberdeen, where the cathedral perched in a bend of the Don, though all this had involved not a simple visitation of buildings but a lengthy tramp after session clerks and ministers and back to see the registers themselves. After all that, despite his elegant letter of invitation and an open offer from each parish to view the registers at his leisure, he had found no trace of any marriage involving a Francis George or a Peter Kenny over the required period. Nor, going back and looking more carefully, could he find any names that struck him as the least bit familiar, and he had been visiting Letho long enough with his master to know the family names of the village, if not the individuals.
Mr. Sheriffs, the clergyman recommended to him by the stallholder who had sold him dinner, was the first Smith had seen: he had confirmed that a Mrs. Everett did attend his church but he could not call to mind the name of the family with whom she was in service. It had been his wife, appearing briefly behind him at the manse, who had remarked on the pink curtains. The stallholder’s pie had caused Smith some considerable discomfort the night before and was still making its presence felt, and Smith very much hoped that any pink curtains he might see would be at the top of the street.
Inevitably they were not. He walked, with a few pauses to rest first one foot, then the other, then to bend over to ease the pain in his stomach, all the way down Marischal Street to the harbour, where he stared blankly at the boats and the long line of Futtie, before lunging to relieve himself behind some creels. The smell of fish made him retch, but he forced himself to breathe it in deeply and steadily to accustom himself to it before sitting down on a creel and one by one removing his boots, exchanging the hot, wet stockings on his feet for fresh ones from his pack. The sensation was luxurious, and the first few tentative steps back up Marischal Street were almost comfortable. Even when his feet began to ache again he trudged on, looking out for pink curtains, but finding none. At last he stopped to ask a passing maidservant, who directed him straightaway to a house he had already passed twice. On enquiring at the door, he was told that Mrs. Everett was in her sitting room and would see him. Smith noted balefully that the curtains in the front windows were what he would have called cherry red, and went inside.
An Abandoned Woman (Murray of Letho Book 4) Page 24
