Service of the Heir: An Edinburgh Murder (Murray of Letho Book 3)

by Lexie Conyngham

  Robert and Henry had waited for him, so all three were late at the Tontine Hotel. Murray felt ashamed at the kindly reproachful looks of his father’s friends, all there before their host. David Thomson was the first to ask, avuncular hand on arm, if anything had happened to detain him.

  ‘An accident,’ Murray said briefly. ‘An accident at home, to one of the servants.’ He was looking about him as he spoke, checking to see that all were there who had been asked, finding himself shouldering small and unlooked-for responsibilities. A huge pool in his mind was completely empty, had been since the moment his father’s doctors had declared him dead. It was as if he was busy trying to fill it, but all he was succeeding in doing was cluttering the shoreline.

  ‘Nothing serious, I hope?’ asked Dundas, smoothly. Charles gave him a brief, bright, smile, and found Mrs. Freeman to lead in to supper.

  The meal was passable, the wine good, and the party, although still dressed in black, was beginning to take on the air of a normal supper engagement. While Murray felt disinclined to talk, his neighbours were poles apart: Lady Sarah Dundas was her normal monosyllabic self on his left, and on his right Mrs. Freeman, Alester Blair’s widowed sister, spoke about a hundred words to Lady Sarah’s one but with slightly less useful content. Hers was not the kind of conversation to stimulate a weary head. Murray often wished he had known Blair’s parents, to find out if he could how one family could produce two such disparate intellects. Blair was an intelligent man, though he could be called eccentric, and certainly Murray’s grand tour, made several years previously under Blair’s unique guidance, had not been entirely conventional. There had been the back streets of Seville, for instance, and the Señora’s flowerpots and the two gentlewomen from Bath whose good opinion of Scotsmen had undoubtedly been shattered forever. There was the incident of the geese in St. Mark’s Square, when Charles, helpless with laughter and crippled by embarrassment, had followed Blair’s fleeing coat tails, picking up the scattered contents of his pockets which had included, he remembered with sudden clarity, an egg (fortunately hard boiled), two withered rosebuds, and a well-thumbed pamphlet on the advantages of planting Swedish turnips.

  Mrs. Freeman was eager to be up to date.

  ‘Now, your two young charges – the Scoggies?’

  ‘That’s right.’ Murray wondered what he was going to do with them.

  ‘They are the boys you’ve been tutoring in Fife?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’ A familiar defensive feeling came over him. He could almost feel his lips forming the usual apology. ‘Yes, my charges – yes, yes, so sorry. Of course – any reparation you might feel to be appropriate ...’

  ‘The elder – Henry, is it? – seems most promising ...’ Mrs. Freeman’s eyes lingered on poor Henry. Apart from the ferrets he was much less trouble than Robert. He would have gone to the funeral if Murray had asked him, and had sat up all night with the body: Robert had taken the first opportunity to head for bed.

  ‘Yes, Henry is a fine boy,’ he agreed. ‘They are both, ah – talented in their different ways.’

  ‘Oh, yes: the younger is also ...’ Mrs. Freeman tailed off, staring at Robert. Blair leaned across the table quietly, opening his watery eyes wide.

  ‘The younger is also very young, my dear. And quite challenging, in his way, I believe?’

  Murray blinked: Blair always seemed to know everything about everyone before anyone else. Mrs. Freeman clutched at the lace at her throat and looked dismayed. She was silent for a moment. Dr. Inglis, seeing a rare opportunity, drew her attention in his direction with a wave of his fork.

  ‘Now, Mrs. Freeman, did you read that pamphlet I sent you about the missions to India, ma’am?’

  Murray smiled inwardly. Robert had told him about Gavin Dundas’ successful bet earlier, and wondered if he had repeated the experiment. Willie Jack would have been foolish to take him up on it again, anyway.

  Robert Scoggie was near the far end of the table, between Willie Jack’s older brother, Harry, and the eldest Miss Balneavis. Mrs. Balneavis had cried off sick, apparently, but the daughters were out in force, probably with full instructions. The next Miss Balneavis, Miss Helen, sat across the table. She was possessed of a rounded fairness that promised a middle age running to fat, and a perplexed innocence that seemed constantly overwhelmed by the world. At present, surrounded by the two younger Mr. Dundases, Helen, new to society, was so muddled by the sophistication of the Dundases, their reputed importance, and their proximity, in addition to her awareness of the impoverished status of her own prospects, that she could scarcely eat, and when one of the gentlemen directed at her any simple remark or question she could venture a reply only in the form of a nod or shake of the head.

  For Mr. Gavin Dundas in particular, the contrast between Helen on his right and Davina, Miss Thomson, on his left, could not have been more pointed. Gavin saw himself as a wit and probably the most eligible bachelor at the table: John Douglas was his father’s age and therefore past all thoughts of women, and his own brother Harry, who might have been considered fit competition, was himself nearing thirty and was besides as dull as a Sunday evening in Wamphray. Davina Thomson had inherited her mother’s sharp good looks, fine eyes, and dark brown hair, and possessed, moreover, a wicked wit that licked like wildfire at the tinder of anyone else’s stupidity, plainness or other social inadequacy. She possessed the ability to draw those around her into a conspiracy of venom that was all the more contagious for being funny. Gavin Dundas thought her splendid, a fit foil for his own clever remarks, and he performed with her a duet of delighted vitriol for the benefit of those he reckoned privileged to hear. Henry Scoggie on her left was silent, and Miss Balneavis, the eldest, smiled occasionally when she thought one remark to be kinder than the rest: both of them seemed intensely uncomfortable. Robert found Miss Balneavis on his left, who agreed with everything he said, pleasant but dull, and he had the impression that her mind was elsewhere. Instead, he talked to Harry Dundas on his right, feeling rather grand at fourteen to be holding his own here. Harry turned out to have an interest in horses, and Robert was interested in having an interest, when he could eventually afford it, so they found that, at least, in common.

  Horses were also the subject under discussion further up the table.

  ‘Out of Miss Whip,’ David Thomson was saying with enthusiasm, ‘by Scorpion. A lovely ride. I got her at Wordsworth’s repository last February. Twenty-eight pounds and seventeen shillings. She’s been worth every penny.’

  ‘That was the Pencaitland sale, was it?’ asked Dundas.

  ‘That’s right. And one of the fillies is up again. Two year old, now, went for twenty pounds as a one year old. You should buy her, Armstrong. And there are some grand little spaniels up at the same sale.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Armstrong anxiously into his boiled chicken. When his friend Thomson’s powers of persuasion were at their strongest, his freckled face grew pale and powdery. Why could he not stand up to him? What was he – a rumble of dyspepsia held together with a half-decent coat?

  ‘Why is the filly up for sale again so soon?’ asked Dundas cannily.

  ‘Oh, wouldn’t a spaniel be lovely, Mr. Armstrong, dear?’ cried his wife. She sat at David Thomson’s elbow and did not miss a word of the conversation, while dissecting her fowl with sharp efficiency.

  ‘The auction is next Wednesday,’ added Thomson, plumply persuasive.

  ‘Och, to be honest, Thomson,’ said Armstrong with a sigh, ‘I can’t afford it, neither horse nor dog, not and everything else, too. I’ve been thinking of buying some land in the new development up at Newington. They’re going to start selling the feus this year.’

  ‘Newington?’ Thomson was astonished. He glanced across at his own wife, Armstrong’s sister-in-law, but she was deep in conversation with Dr. Harker.

  ‘Yes, nice little estates, they seem. I thought it might do the family good, a breath of air, green fields, that kind of thing.’

  ‘But I tho
ught you were going to take one of the new houses in Charlotte Square?’ Thomson, who lived in George Street himself, had been looking forward to having his friend move into the vicinity.

  ‘Ah, well, now, Charlotte Square ...’ Armstrong tailed off awkwardly. ‘We can’t really afford –’

  ‘Nonsense, man. You can’t afford not to,’ said Thomson good-humouredly. Elizabeth Armstrong hid her embarrassment with skill and eyed her sister, who was still, thankfully, apparently engrossed in Dr. Harker’s account of something medical. Elizabeth Armstrong considered her marriage to have been her one significant mistake. It had seemed like a good one, until her younger sister had trumped her with Thomson. Thomson was still speaking. ‘Think of your daughters – you’ll never get them married off from some farm yard building site.’ He smiled the smile of a man with one daughter married and the other unlikely to give cause for concern in that direction. ‘Invest in the New Town,’ he went on. ‘The air’s better, and they could go on expanding at Newington forever, while here there’s a limit to what they can do. The countryside will never be far away.’

  ‘They’re talking of building further north even than the new feus in Queen Street.’ John Douglas made a brief contribution to the discussion and returned to his own brand of ominous silence.

  ‘Oh, that,’ said Thomson dismissively. ‘They’ll never get the land for it, not down there. Queen Street will have a clear view to the sea for as long as the sea is there. No,’ he returned to Armstrong, ‘invest in the New Town. It’s solid, been around for years. You don’t know what will happen at Newington. The whole scheme could fall through.’ His heavy round eyes were half-lidded in relaxed self-assurance. Armstrong wiped his mouth diffidently on his napkin. The curry sauce was heading down towards his stomach in a faintly menacing fashion. He noticed that he had spilled a little on the knee of his passable black breeches, and worry creased his amiable face.

  ‘Well, James Reid is involved, and he’s in the Exchequer.’

  ‘And the other man is Bell, isn’t it? A surgeon, eh? Bone-sawing body snatcher, no doubt – saving your presence, ladies,’ he added facetiously. His breeches were no doubt spotless, thought Armstrong, and his tailor would have charged a good deal more for them than for Armstrong’s own.

  ‘They’ve been planning it for years,’ said Dundas, his own black just as crisp and dark. Armstrong sighed inwardly. ‘Bell has bought up all the land himself, now. I might think of investing a little there myself. A feu, or maybe two. St. Andrew’s Square is all very well for business time, but a little place in the country, without having to travel far, would be very charming.’

  Lady Sarah Dundas, caught in a gentle flow of conversation from Blair, looked sick. She was a woman who had once been the toast of Edinburgh, her beauty the kind that even other women hardly envy but must instead wonder at and delight in, as anyone might delight in the beauty of a flower or a view without wishing in utter futility that one could also possess that beauty. Yet while Elizabeth and Catherine Fleming, now Mrs. Armstrong and Mrs. Thomson, had possessed only ordinary loveliness, they had defeated the onslaughts of middle age simply, it seemed, by the expedient of ignoring them. But Sarah Dundas’ once bright eyes were now dull, her high cheekbones stark, her smooth, glowing complexion dry and tired, her hair, once reddish blonde, quite white and confused with the lace of her cap. Though his father had often commented on it with sadness, Murray could even mark the decline through his own memory. His father, he remembered, had spoken of some family tragedy, which had reduced Lady Sarah to the husk of what she had once been. Yet she still entertained, and went about in society, and Murray wondered with a shiver what it might be like to possess beauty and to watch it fade in the reflections of the eyes of others.

  Blair, he noticed, was always at his kindliest with Lady Sarah, and drew from her occasional whole sentences, and the memory of a smile. Seeing Murray glance at them, Blair tugged him into the conversation.

  ‘I was just remarking to Lady Sarah how well the building work is going at the other end of Queen Street. You have no notion, of course, but I am ancient, now, and can well remember when this was all farmland, and whole idea of building here was a midnight fantasy at a town council meeting.’

  ‘Oh, come, Mr. Blair,’ replied Lady Sarah, lightly for her, ‘you are scarcely that old.’

  ‘Aye, aye, I am, ma’am. I am the Old Man of George’s Square, and I shall sit in splendour and wear a turban, and smoke my pipe and the giddy youth of Edinburgh will come to crave the favour of my advice and wisdom.’ Blair beamed, and jiggled happily in his chair. He was the only man at the table wearing a wig, and it sat with an inevitable lopsidedness on his head as if it were a bag of ice he was using to draw off a hangover. A thought seemed to strike him as he mumbled his way through a mouthful of food.

  ‘The notary – was it a notary? What was his name?’

  Murray floundered.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The notary who was found dead where your father had his accident.’ Murray felt something almost physical hit his stomach. The rest of the table seemed to have fallen silent. Thomson, Armstrong and Dundas glanced at Blair then exchanged looks of despair and irritation. They had been trying to avoid the subject of old Murray’s death: the funeral was done, after all, let the son mourn in peace. Blair, however, had not been party to this policy and Thomson knew they should have had a word with him beforehand. It was not as if he could be relied upon to behave in a normal manner.

  Blair was oblivious, and mashed his food happily behind closed but alarmingly mobile lips, waiting for a response. Murray strove to find any memory at all of what had been said to him about the other victim of his father’s accident, and through his dismay grew irritation, first at Blair for being so indelicate as to ask, to remind him – as if he needed reminding – that his father was dead, and then irritation at himself, a dissatisfaction that in his concern over the endless details of his own mourning, he had forgotten his duty to the man and the family of the man who had died where his father had begun his own dying.

  ‘I believe it was a notary,’ he said at last, remembering something Mrs. Chambers had told him on the morning he had arrived from Fife. ‘I am afraid that I cannot recall ever having heard the name.’

  ‘Not exactly Ebenezer Hammond, then,’ Thomson remarked, naming the most prominent notary of the day.

  ‘Matthew Muir,’ came an absent voice from further down the table. Blair turned, and Dundas looked up, apologetic. ‘I believe his name was Matthew Muir. There was an account of the accident in the newspapers,’ he explained.

  ‘Was there?’ Murray was surprised. He had not seen the death of his father as something affecting more than the two dozen people here with him, and had not, himself, seen the newspapers since he had arrived. He wondered if he should try to obtain a copy, then felt slightly sick at the thought.

  ‘It is a curious fate,’ said Blair, contemplatively, ‘that leaves one man dead and the other dying. Did it say where he lived?’

  Dundas shrugged.

  ‘Somewhere about the Grassmarket, I believe.’

  ‘That sounds familiar,’ agreed Murray, ‘though I’m not sure why.’ He could go there tomorrow, he thought, adding it to the long mental list of duties he had to perform now that he was released from his dead room watching. He was grateful for them, the litter on the shore, a framework in which to hang an empty day. An empty day could so easily be devoted to an intense contemplation of just how unready he felt to deal with Letho and the Queen Street house and his father’s various interests and investments, while part of him cried out unexpectedly to be back in Fife, ideally a week ago before his father had died, with all his duties for Lord Scoggie but so few responsibilities, so few difficult, unfamiliar decisions. How could his father have taken this last petty revenge, dying before Charles felt anywhere near ready to deal with it?

  The party broke up at a decorous hour as befitted a funeral supper. Prince’s Street was still busy, but the dark
hulk of the old town above it was distinguishable against the night sky only by the lights prickling the tall buildings. Murray bade farewell to his guests, seeing them into their carriages or into chairs from the rank further down the street, refusing or postponing several kind invitations to supper that evening. Blair’s was the least pressing invitation, but, he felt, the most warmly meant, and the resentment that he had built up against Blair in the course of the dinner dissipated much of its energy in confusion. Blair and his sister left last, and Murray watched their shadowy carriage trundle towards the North Bridge, back to the old town. To avoid passing the Dundases as they alighted in St. Andrew’s Square, Murray steered the boys around and up Hanover Street, over the brow of the hill and down to Queen Street. Robert was full of chat about horses: Henry was unusually silent, even for him. Murray noted both but his mind left the note somewhere in the heap of jetsam on the shore.

  Mrs. Chambers met them at the door and herself helped to remove their overcoats. Jamie Paterson’s parents had arrived downstairs in the kitchen, she explained, where she, helped by Mrs. Mack and Mary, had begun to lay out Jamie’s body. His parents had insisted on taking him home, despite pressing invitations to stay at least until daylight, and Mrs. Chambers had seen fit to lend them a spare blanket to cover the poor child on their long walk back to the Grassmarket. Murray nodded his approval, and sent the boys to bed.

  A fire had been lit in the street parlour, and he made his way there. The hound, Squirrel, was near the fire but scuttled under the table when he entered, and refused to come out. He sighed, and threw himself into one of the comfortable armchairs by the fire, with a footstool set just near enough. He pondered a little on the deaths of his father, his stable boy and the unknown notary, before he finally succumbed to the unutterable weariness that had held him in its fleecy grip for days.

  The scrape of shovel on bucket woke him with a start. A maid was attending to the darkened fire, crouching in grey wool topped with a bulky mob cap. This was not Jennet, whom he knew and whom he had seen in the dead room. He moved slightly and she heard him, rose and curtsied, and made to go. He was surprised to see her almost as tall as he was, with a pale complexion in which her triangular eyebrows and the dark half-moon lashes of her downcast eyes stood out like penstrokes in Indian ink. He turned his automatic wave of dismissal into a signal to pause, astonished at his father’s having employed such an extraordinary-looking creature.