She sat down, removed her gloves and smiled. ‘I came by train and got off down the road, but the horse omnibuses from Portobello are also convenient for those of us without carriages. Don’t you agree?’
I nodded. She didn’t know about my own unique form of transport, the bicycle parked in the barn.
‘Nanny and Adrian are looking after the baby—’
‘Adrian?’
That accounted for the radiance, I decided, as she clasped her hands delightedly.
‘Yes, Adrian! I am so happy, Rose, I just had to let you know. We have been reunited and he and his actor friend Steven are staying with Nanny just now.’
And so the story she longed to tell began to unfold.
‘Adrian was so upset, I can’t tell you, about my parents’ foul treatment. They turned him from the door, told him sternly that I wanted nothing to do with him and refused to tell him where I had gone.’
She paused for breath and I asked what was intriguing me most at that moment. ‘Is he pleased about the baby?’
A wry smile. ‘A little taken aback. He had no idea, of course, nor did my parents mention that I was pregnant and that I had not found out until he was away on tour. He wants her called Lillie – after his favourite actress Lillie Langtry, who he once had the pleasure of meeting in London.’ She frowned, and as I waited for her to continue, I asked, ‘You did not mention that your own baby was a little boy?’
She shrugged and said firmly, ‘No. He was so pleased to have a little girl – he had always wanted a girl. When he said that, I did not want to spoil it for him with a disappointment, or throw in all those horrible complications, that awful business of the substitution.’
Pausing, she shook her head. ‘I just didn’t know where to begin. I wanted to forget it all, just be happy together again, pretend it had never happened, like a bad dream.’
She looked at me as if for some comment, hopefully approval. I said nothing, thinking only that this situation bore all the roots of further disasters. Beaming at me, she said, ‘You know, I have grown so used to little Lillie now, that I almost believe she was always mine.’
I shook my head. It might well be complicated for Adrian to understand the truth, but this attitude of building a life on such a shaky foundation was quite beyond me.
‘I hope we will marry as soon as I come of age next year,’ she went on. ‘Adrian thinks we should wait, as I come into an inheritance from my great aunt when I am eighteen, but I lose all claim to it if I marry before that without my parents’ consent. I do have a small personal allowance which keeps me going, without any luxuries, of course.’
A sigh and I thought of the thousands of young girls in poor homes who had been in a similar predicament, disgraced, thrown out by angry parents and forced in despair to end it all with a leap from the Waverley Bridge, or if they were of stronger stuff, take to the great army of prostitutes walking the Edinburgh streets, selling their bodies to keep from starving.
As for the unfortunate babies, they belonged in the chronicles of baby farmers who made a lucrative business of conveniently disposing of unwanted infants. Not by adoption but by murder – for a small fee and no questions asked.
Beth was saying, ‘It isn’t long to wait, especially as Adrian has expectations of his own. It’s a big secret, something he cannot talk about, not even to me, but it will bring him fame and fortune. I think it has to do with a recent audition in London. Now isn’t that exciting news?’ Her eyes gleamed bright. ‘Oh, I should dearly love to move to England.’
I smiled and said, ‘I hope it all works out well for both of you.’ Truth to tell, it all sounded a bit unreal, a bit too much of a fairy-tale ending and I was used to tougher reality.
‘I am sure it will, and you must promise to come to our wedding. I insist on that, Rose.’
Preparing tea, I asked, ‘Have you seen your parents yet?’
And that was the equivalent of throwing a bucket of cold water over her. She shivered. ‘I have tried to tell them, to explain what happened and that their granddaughter Lillie is lovely – they would adore her – and that Adrian and I plan to marry.
‘They were not pleased, to say the least … very angry in fact. They had hoped that I would allow the outcome of my indiscretion to be adopted, sensibly put the whole unfortunate business behind me and go ahead and marry Frederick as they wished. They reminded me, once again, that if I did not obey their wishes and married against their will, I would lose my inheritance and they would have nothing further to do with me.’
She paused, suddenly tearful again, a reminder to me of the old Beth lurking below that surface radiance of high hopes. ‘It is so unfair, Rose! As I was leaving, the obnoxious Frederick was driving up to the front door in his carriage. He stopped, of course, and I had to speak to him politely. He said how glad he was to see me again, restored to health once more.’
A sigh. ‘He then offered to drive me wherever I wished to go. I tried to refuse but a carriage was so tempting, especially as a long walk lay ahead. The drive up to our place is a mile long. So I took a seat, and when he repeated that he was sorry about what had happened, I wondered suddenly if he knew about the baby – or guessed.’
Her eyes widened. ‘Then I remembered an incident – before I knew positively about the baby. My parents and I were dining at the home of a doctor friend of Frederick’s. I felt sick and, leaving the table, I fainted. I came to in the library with Frederick and his friend bending over me. They were whispering together but neither said anything to me. Excuses were made that the room was too hot but perhaps the doctor knew the true reason even at that early stage. And, after all, Frederick had been married. He is a man of the world.
‘When the carriage reached Nanny’s house, she insisted he came in for refreshments. I watched them, both delighted by this unexpected meeting after several years. She had been Nanny to his own children who are now married and gone their separate ways. I was ignored completely and thankfully little Lillie was out of sight in my bedroom.
‘As Frederick was leaving, I followed him out to his carriage. He took my hand, said he would always have the utmost regard for me and made me promise that if ever I needed him, or any help whatsoever – he stressed that – I was not to hesitate to contact him, that I was to think of him first and foremost as a true and loyal friend.’
She shook her head. ‘I knew that was true. The thing is, I liked him well enough when I was a small girl; he was like a kindly uncle. It was only when my parents tried to marry me off to him that I began to dislike him.’ A sigh and a smile. ‘Now it was good to hear that in my present circumstances, Adrian and I could rely on him as a trusted friend.’
I did not express doubts about the inclusion of Adrian in her admirer’s scheme of things, and as she was leaving by the front door, we walked again through the Great Hall and she seemed conscious of her surroundings for the first time.
Looking at the ancient tapestries, the high stone walls, and windows with their embrasures, she said, ‘This is a beautiful room, Rose, so large and most impressive, more like a castle than a mere tower.’
I explained about the difficulties of heating and so forth and how the centre of activities had become the kitchen.
‘I would feel as if I should be having a dinner party every evening here.’ She smiled, running a hand along the edge of the massive table with its elegant chairs dating from the time of Charles II.
‘Having to live in the kitchen premises, the servants’ quarters, must be very inconvenient.’ And gazing around with a sigh, ‘Especially when this is so beautiful, so romantic. It must be sad for you,’ she added regretfully, staring towards the stone spiral staircase. ‘And I have only seen one of those before in the home of a duke we used to visit.’
Her tone was so wistful I had to show her the rest of the tower. Pausing, she looked down on the Great Hall from the now disused Minstrels’ Gallery. ‘Just to think of this in the old days, with music and dancing.’
I wondere
d if any of her imaginings had ever happened and suspected that in those old days the residents were fully engaged in defending their property and keeping a lookout for the armies of the English kings bent on subduing northern Britain.
I opened the door to the main bedroom, a vast space occupied by a mammoth-sized postered and curtained bed.
Her eyes widened. ‘Sleeping here must make you feel like someone out of a fairy tale. Tell me, how did you come by such a lovely place, did you inherit it?’
‘No. And it isn’t mine. It was bequeathed to my stepbrother who is a doctor in London’ – I omitted the royal-family connection – ‘by an eccentric old gentleman. We knew nothing of his aristocratic family connections, if he had any. A bachelor and a recluse, he filled the rooms with stray cats for company.’
I remembered the smell of them, which seemed to linger still in that master bedroom. ‘We use this as a guest room. I prefer the one across the corridor here,’ I said, opening the door. ‘Not so grand but comfortable and easy to heat. I love my twin turrets.’
Beth ran across to them. ‘So pretty, Rose. You must feel like Rapunzel looking down waiting for your handsome prince.’
I smiled wryly. ‘I gave up that idea a long time ago, Beth. But look – through this one – you can see straight across Arthur’s Seat.’ And leading her to the other, ‘There’s Salisbury Crags, and see, a glimpse of the Old Town.’
The other less impressive rooms were only worthy of a fleeting glance. And I omitted the secret room from our little tour.
As we went back down the spiral stair she sighed. ‘Adrian will be so envious when I tell him that I have actually been inside Solomon’s Tower – “an ancient house of mystery”, he calls it. He is a keen student of local history, you know,’ she added, her wistful tone begging an invitation. And I was very curious to meet Adrian who believed Lillie was his child. Would meeting him reveal some facet of character that would indicate why she had not told him about the substitution for his own baby son? That made me decide.
‘Then you must bring Adrian sometime.’
‘May I really? Oh, he would love that.’
And I thought Jack would enjoy a chat with someone interested in his pet hobby too.
Watching her rush off again and closing the front door, I saw that she had dropped her gloves in her flight.
With a sigh, I put them aside to deliver later and, taking out Mrs Lawers’ package which had caused so many insoluble problems, I sat down at the kitchen table, drew a deep breath and broke the seal.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Papers yellowed with age – letters inside a parchment wrapped around a silver snuffbox. Inside, a mourning ring encased in small diamonds and containing a lock of the loved one’s hair. A family heirloom reminiscent of the mourning jewellery of the late Queen’s reign, made popular after Prince Albert’s death.
I put it aside and concentrated on the letters. One was very difficult to read, creased and stained; the ink, having faded to brown with age, was almost illegible, as were two others written in French.
Then, one of more recent fate. ‘This snuffbox was given to my ancestress who bore my name by Prince Charles Edward Stuart while in this house in Duddingston. He took the ring from his finger and gave it to her. It contains a lock of his hair, his mother’s and his father’s, James VII, the rightful king of Britain.’
A closer look. Yes, twists of hair, brown, grey and fair, and smoothing out the parchment that had bound the package, I saw that it was in fact a roughly drawn map.
That struck a chord. It was almost identical to the map we had found in the secret room, alongside the uniform cape which Jack decided had been the property of an officer at the time of the Battle of Prestonpans and the siege of Edinburgh, when the Tower might have been used to billet some of the prince’s soldiers.
‘If that was the case,’ I had argued, ‘why was a Jacobite hiding in the secret room?’
‘Possibly a wounded Hanoverian – or a spy?’ Jack had shrugged. ‘Too late now – we’ll never find the answer to that particular riddle.’
And although we had agreed to consign the secret room and its contents to history, I guessed that it had been our discovery, this intriguing question – an unsolved mystery in our home – which had triggered off a detective inspector’s interest in the period.
He would be fascinated by this new evidence. I expected to find ‘our’ map in the file containing the research documents he had gathered in his desk in the Great Hall; I searched in vain – the file was there but the map was missing.
That seemed odd and I wondered what had happened to it. I felt frustrated, as it seemed that Mrs Lawers’ legacy confirmed Jack’s theory that there was a link with ancient Solomon’s Tower, the Battle of Prestonpans and the house in Duddingston where the prince had lodged and planned his campaign for the siege of Edinburgh.
Perhaps the map, rough as it was, had been drawn by the prince. I sat back, fascinated by a sinister thread, linking past and present, but most of all frustrated that the vital clue that I’d hoped to find, which would explain the reason for the two murders, was still missing.
I could hardly wait to tell Jack of my discovery and was delighted to find the nurse smiling and saying that the patient was improving each day.
‘The danger is not completely over, Mrs McQuinn, although he prefers to believe so and he is proving a difficult patient to keep inactive,’ she said, adding a stern warning. ‘He is healing well and puts up a good front for the doctors. But you must take care not to exhaust him. He has very little strength still, much less than he imagines.’
Jack certainly looked more like himself, his colour restored, and after a kiss and the preliminary exchanges between patient and visitor, his first thought was for Meg. How did she look? Did I think she would be happy there and well cared for?
Explaining about the Blakers’ absence and that I hadn’t seen her yet, I moved swiftly on to tell him what I had unearthed in Mrs Lawers’ package. Describing the contents, I said, ‘The map. I feel there might be a link with the one we found in the secret room, so I took the liberty of searching your file of Jacobite papers—’
He shook his head. ‘I could have saved you the trouble, Rose. It isn’t there. I guessed it was a valuable historic document, so I took it in to the National Library. They introduced me to a reader who was in changing a book at the same time. A retired professor of history, he was very interested in the map, so I left it with him. He said a quick glance suggested that it was only a sketch, or part of a map, but promised to do what he could and consult the archives.’
He shrugged. ‘I would have done it myself, but I’m so busy.’ He looked at me with a wry smile. ‘I could have asked you to do all this, of course, but I never felt that you were particularly interested in the old map.’
‘When was all this?’ I asked.
He frowned. ‘Oh, months ago. If there was anything important, he would have got in touch with me, and I must confess I’d almost forgotten about it. Too many other important matters on my desk.’
That was true. I knew how these important matters frequently cut into his leisure time; small domestic matters of joinery, like broken shutters and the creaking floorboard in the kitchen – often the work of a few minutes but considered of no importance by comparison. ‘When I have time’ was his favourite and well-worn excuse.
As for the map, at the time of its discovery it was true that I had not been wildly interested; my leisure hours were concerned with the present and the future, particularly women’s suffrage and social reforms.
Suddenly all that had been changed. I had been drawn into the web, not by the map’s historic connection but its possible link with Mrs Lawers’ legacy, very possibly the reason for her murder as well as the attempt on my own life.
‘Perhaps your historian friend imagined you were donating it to the library archives.’
Jack shook his head. ‘No, that was never my intention. I’m sure he understood. It belonged
to me – or rather to the history of Solomon’s Tower.’ He sighed. ‘Never mind, I’ll track it down once I’m out of here and on my feet again.’
I sighed too. That belonged to the ‘when I have time’ category. It would not do. It couldn’t wait that long, a sense of urgency was involved.
‘Tell you what, Jack. Give me a letter of authority and I’ll recover it.’
‘If you think it is all that important.’
I gave him a sheet from my logbook and watched while he wrote. Then, suitably armed, I left and headed towards the National Library on George IV Bridge. One vital thing was missing – Jack had forgotten where he had written down the historian’s name and couldn’t recall it offhand!
I had pursed my lips, a silent reprimand. There were seldom times I could compare efficiency notes with Jack but this was one of them. As a lady investigator the success of my profession relies on being meticulous about precise details, never relying on memory alone and keeping an exact record by writing everything immediately into my logbook.
After waiting at the library desk for some time while a search ensued, the receptionist returned. Enquiries with my limited information had been made, his sigh indicating that this had been very exhaustive, until someone guessed the identity of the keen historian, a retired professor, Trevor Hayward.
‘Unfortunately, we are not permitted to divulge personal details, such as an address, without permission. Would you care to call back in a couple of days?’
Cross and frustrated once again, I was gently but sternly informed that the gentleman – Jack Macmerry – should never have left an important document out of his keeping without obtaining a signature to be produced before the document was returned to him.
There was no more I could do that day, so I decided to return Beth’s gloves and made for Nanny Craigle’s address in Portobello that she had given me, a pleasant bicycle ride on a calm sunny autumn day, interludes to be cherished before the storms came raging in from the North Sea.
Deadly Legacy Page 10
