For the first time Jessie Kirk looked uncertain. ‘I don’t understand. He always rides a black horse.’
‘But it was Mr Blackwood’s tan-coloured horse that was found in the woods that night.’
After a few worried seconds Jessie said, ‘Maybe I was wrong about the colour of the horse. I mean, at the time I wasn’t thinking of that exactly.’
‘I understand,’ Stirling said kindly. ‘And of course you naturally took it for granted it was Kelso’s horse?’
‘That’s right, sir,’ Jessie agreed gratefully. ‘I mean, it’s what you’d expect, isn’t it?’
‘Exactly. Just as you would expect the rider to be Kelso.’
‘That’s right,’ Jessie quickly agreed before a worried look clouded her face again.
Stirling continued, ‘You didn’t expect to see Mr Blackwood?’
‘No, sir.’ She was beginning to sound cautious.
‘And that was why you didn’t see him.’
‘Objection!’ The Lord Advocate boomed out. ‘Counsel is leading the witness.’
The scarlet silk stirred slightly. ‘Objection sustained.’
Whatever small success Stirling might have achieved by his questioning of witness number four was soon dispelled by witness number five. Andrew Scott was the ploughman who had been out walking with Jessie Kirk. He was a surly-looking fellow with an untidy moustache, suspicion in his eyes and rough square hands that gripped the edge of the box with aggression, not fear. He too was positive he had seen Kelso riding towards the wood.
‘What colour was the horse?’ Stirling asked eventually.
‘I wasn’t looking at the horse. I was looking at Kelso,’ Scott growled. ‘Anyway, it would have been difficult to tell what colour it was with such a big man as Kelso on it as well as what he had in front of him. I thought at the time it was the body of a young deer he had under that plaid… .’
And so it went on, with witness after witness building up damning evidence against his client. From the beginning, when it was established that the blow to the deceased was more likely to have been delivered by a left-handed person, and of course Kelso was left-handed. To the end, when it had been established by the prosecution that Kelso had a motive. Blackwood was not only proposing to dismiss him from his job and the farmhouse that the grieve had made his home, but had threatened to use his influence in preventing Kelso from being employed anywhere else. If Blackwood had been allowed to have his way Kelso’s life would have been ruined.
Stirling decided that for the most part he would have to fall back on the evidence of Kelso being a man of unimpeachable character, and appeal in the strongest terms to the sympathy of the jury.
Only too well aware that he would do this, the Lord Advocate in his address to the jury, after giving all the reasons which indicated why they should find the accused guilty of murder, added, ‘Do not allow sympathy to play any part in your deliberations. You must be impartial and dispassionate towards both the deceased and the accused. We are concerned with facts, not sympathies. The sentence is for the judge. You, members of the jury, must concern yourself only with the evidence, only with the facts, of which you are the masters.’
After the Lord Advocate sat down, Stirling rose.
‘May it please the court?’
The judge nodded his assent and Stirling continued to speak carefully and sincerely. First of all he concentrated on working on the emotions of the jury.
‘Look at the man in the dock. Would you send such a man to his death on the evidence of a poacher and two illiterate farmworkers, all of whom could have a grudge against Kelso because he was such a conscientious and strict taskmaster?’
Meticulously he explained the unique position of Scottish law.
‘The onus of proof of guilt rests with the Crown and the standard is not on a balance of probabilities but proof beyond reasonable doubt. Unlike England, indeed unlike any country in the world, we have a third verdict, a safeguard against any miscarriage of justice—the verdict of “Not Proven”.’
He concluded his speech by telling the jury, ‘You must be really certain. We can all err. If error there might be, then err on the side of safety by acquitting, not the other way round.’
Stirling stood for a few seconds, staring at them as if quietly willing them to echo what had been ringing so strongly in his mind from the start—’This man is not guilty.’
Then he sat down.
For Lorianna the sharp eyes of reality had softened and blurred. It was not true that Robert was in Calton Jail—he was in the farmhouse kitchen. The fire glowed warmly through the mellow shadows and low-ceilinged room. They were both naked and he had his big arms wound round her, her cheek smooth like petals against his chest. They were in a dream of love. Her hair was unpinned and gently swaying and she could feel its silky caress against her hips.
Sometimes the dream faded and the sharpness returned like the shock of icy water. Then she cried out and struggled up in bed, only to be forced back again by cruel hands and the sound of keys and the feel of them, cold and hard and threatening.
But she wanted to know what was happening to Robert. She demanded to know and Mrs Musgrove said the trial was nearly over.
No more laudanum. Oh, no! She wanted to be alert and able to greet Robert when he came home. She would wear her most beautiful dress and together they would walk on the hills and look across the fields and woods. Together they would gaze at the silver water of the Forth. Never again would they be separated from each other. She waited, hands tightly clasped, as eager-eyed as a child.
On the day of the verdict, Jacobs went to Bathgate for the paper. Mrs Musgrove met him at the door on his return and took it from him, but she no longer had it in her hands when she went back upstairs to the sitting-room.
‘Where is the paper?’ Lorianna rose from her chair. ‘Give it to me at once.’
‘It’s better you should not dwell on such things.’
‘What things? What are you talking about?’
‘Just accept and then try to put it all out of your mind. It’s the only way.’
‘Give me the paper!’
‘He has been found guilty and sentenced to death.’
Lorianna shook her head. A pulse had begun to leap and throb at her temple.
‘Accept it? Put it out of my mind? You must be mad!’
‘What else can you do?’
‘Anything! Everything!’ Lorianna said wildly.
‘Calm yourself! Don’t talk foolish.’
‘Calm? Calm?’ A huge, thunderous wave of horror was fast approaching her. ‘I must go to him right away.’
Mrs Musgrove caught her before she reached the door ‘He doesn’t want you there. He said so—he doesn’t want you.’
Lorianna flailed about, struggling with the woman with all her strength.
‘Robert! Robert!’
Then suddenly the black of Mrs Musgrove’s dress completely engulfed her and she slithered into it, sick and suffocating. When she awakened she was lying in bed in her nightdress and the doctor was bending over her. She gazed at him from a dazed blank mind.
‘Just rest, my dear,’ he said. ‘You’re going to be all right. You took these little fainting fits when you were carrying Clementina, remember? You just need to be careful and ensure that you get plenty of rest.’
Lorianna continued to stare at him.
The doctor sighed. ‘I know how you must be feeling, my dear… . Your poor husband… . But everything’s mixed with mercy. Try to look at it this way… . At least you will have something to remember him by. You will be very proud and comforted, I’m sure, if you have a son in his image.’
Mrs Musgrove showed the doctor out and when she returned Lorianna said, ‘I’m pregnant?’
Mrs Musgrove gave one of her terrible travesties of a smile. ‘Perhaps it will be a girl.’
Lorianna tried to keep calm.
‘I shall get up and get dressed; then I shall go straight to the governor of that prison
before it’s too late and plead for Robert’s life.’
‘If you refuse to believe me, believe him. There is absolutely nothing you can do except make things worse.’
‘You fool of a woman!’ Lorianna said. ‘How can they be any worse?’
‘They would hang you.’
‘Let them! I would rather die with him than live without him.’
‘Don’t be so foolish.’
‘Can’t you understand? Don’t you know what loving someone means?’
‘Oh, I know all right.’
‘Well, if that is so, how can you speak to me like this? How can you try to stop me going to him? How can you imagine I could live without him? I can’t do it; I won’t do it!’
‘You’re pregnant.’
‘I don’t care. I don’t care about anything except living with him or dying with him.’
‘You’re not leaving this house.’
‘Oh no, Mrs Musgrove, you shall not do this to me.’
’For you.’
‘No, nothing’s for me except him. I mean to go.’
‘It’s no use. He dies first thing tomorrow morning.’
The wave hit her now, buffeting her in horror and panic, snatching her breath away. She felt herself physically struggling in it, clawing at it, gasping in it, trying to scream out. Praying to keep calm.
‘Mrs Musgrove, for pity’s sake, help me! There is still time to get there in a fast coach.’
‘Madam, it’s no use, believe me. I am acting for your own good and you will see that in the end.’
The end? The end?
‘I’m going to Robert.’
‘I must stop you, madam. It is my duty to do so.’
Dear Jesus! Robert’s life was ticking away.
‘Don’t touch me, Mrs Musgrove. I’m not going to let you do this to me—it’s wrong.’
The housekeeper’s strength was like iron and Lorianna’s struggles were like those of a butterfly against it—and like a butterfly she was pinned down.
‘I shall call for Gilbert,’ she sobbed. ‘Or Malcolm. They will help me.’
‘Master Gilbert is staying with his fiancee’s family and Master Malcolm is back at university,’ Mrs Musgrove said calmly. ‘You and I are the only ones here, madam, and I’m going to look after you. It will be a long night, but it will pass.’
She thought of Robert in his cell. No, this night would never pass. They must be together just once more. Even to die together, only to be in his arms.
Did she struggle all the long night? Did she wail and sob and scream? Or did it all happen in the prison of her heart and mind? Heart of my heart. Love of my love. Life of my life.
Don’t leave me… .
A group of sightseers had assembled in the bright sunshine on the Calton Hill in the hope of getting at least a glimpse of the procession to the scaffold. The merest glimpse was all they were afforded, and that only because Kelso was so much taller than any of those with him. The baillies, clergy, warders, prison governor, victim and hangman soon covered the fifty yards or so to an outhouse on the western side of the prison which had been selected as the place of execution.
It was soon over and everyone was impressed by his tranquillity. The chaplain began to recite the Lord’s Prayer, but Robert Kelso didn’t seem to be listening. He was thinking about Lorianna and when the bolt was drawn the last thing he saw in his mind’s eye was the flower of her face.
* Trans: ‘one witness, no witness.’
PART 2
DISILLUSIONMENT
28
Alice Tait had gone to the Calton Hill to watch the procession. She remembered Kelso from her days in Blackwood House. Not that she had really known him except as one of her many persecutors. He had been a figure of authority—someone to be feared, someone you hid from or ran from when you had been stealing turnips or apples or keeping Eck McColl off his work by having a bit of houghmagandy in the corner of the hayfield. She had always flown like the wind at the sight of the grieve, but somehow she felt resentful and angry at the Edinburgh folk who had brought him here to destroy him. She felt a kinship with and a loyalty to the big countryman. He was of peasant stock like herself; they had shared the same fields and trees and hills above Bathgate. And as far as what Kelso was supposed to have done to Mr Blackwood was concerned, that was one cruel sod who deserved to die. Him and his holy ways! The devil, more like. She remembered the vicious way he used to beat Miss Clementina.
After Kelso had been hanged she felt sad, as if a part of herself had been destroyed, had disappeared forever along with him. She never got over it, although often she thought she had. Then she would be parading along at the eastern end of Princes Street, glance up at the Calton and remember him and feel homesick. It meant that she avoided the east end when she could and tried never to look up at the Calton. Not that this was easy, because it was one of the places that overlooked and dominated the city.
It was daft, Alice kept telling herself, to think about the man. Why should he, of all people, make her feel anything at all? There was no answer to that, except that he did. Two years after the hanging her eyes still wandered towards the prison rearing high on the Calton Rock like a brooding evil over the city. It had swallowed up the grieve and she imagined that if she allowed her feet to stray too near again, it would swallow her up too.
This became quite a superstition with her and when any of the girls she knew landed in the Calton, she greatly angered and embittered them by refusing to go anywhere near them at visiting times. In fact they never forgave her and she could not regard one of the girls as her friend. She developed great ingenuity, a gift of the gab, not to mention fleetness of foot in order to avoid ending up as a prisoner in the Calton herself.
When first she had come to Edinburgh, plump and rosy-cheeked from the country, she had been taken in and given shelter by an elegant lady—or what seemed to be an elegant lady—dressed in an elegant gown and a feather boa, with feathers in her hat and very pretty boots showing from beneath her skirts. Queenie Dunlop, she was called, and she had been parading along Princes Street when Alice bumped into her. Queenie had been very friendly, and professed to he extremely interested and concerned about Alice’s predicament. She had taken her to a house in St James’s Square and it soon became obvious that the place was a brothel. Not that Alice had known the meaning of the term at first and anyway the word was never mentioned.
Queenie always boasted that she ran a very high-class establishment and there could be no question that the steady stream of gentlemen who visited her house were high-class. There was an elder of one of the most popular churches in Edinburgh. There was even one, Queenie said, who trod the floor of Parliament House. There were stockbrokers, merchants and doctors all happily married men by all accounts, some arriving on foot, discreetly muffled up and with hats drawn down; some dashing out of cabs and in through the door that was waiting open for their convenience. Unmarried men, soldiers and commercial travellers were less sneaky and sly. They marched up the stairs boldly, sometimes in noisy groups out for a lark. Queenie, on that first day, had given her a few glasses of wine and something to eat; Alice hadn’t enjoyed anything so much for years. She needed food more than most; it stoked her up and gave her round ball of a body the fuel needed to bounce it along at its usual pace, and to fire her equally energetic imagination.
Alice used to imagine that one of these jolly young soldiers would take a fancy to her and whisk her away to foreign parts. In her mind’s eye, she had even seen herself being married and having a guard of honour of soldiers with swords making a silver roof under which she and her beloved walked from the church. She fancied being married and having children. But in her heart of hearts, it was the wife of a countryman she would like to be and live in a cottage like her Granny who was now dead and buried. Even her auntie Bella had gone, she had no idea where. The farmer’s wife had chased Alice when she had once gone to see her at the farm. ‘A wicked, lying hussy’, the farmer’s wife had called her; ap
parently Auntie Bella had become pregnant and blamed it on the farmer.
It had come as a terrible blow when eventually, after some months, Queenie had flung Alice out. Apparently the customers no longer admired her as a sonsy, rosy-cheeked lass from the country. Now she was just a pasty-faced, fat girl.
It was truly dreadful to be out wandering the windy Edinburgh streets with nowhere to go and nothing to eat. She had had to pawn her coat and hat and wear the shawl out of her box. She never managed to redeem that coat and hat, although in time she had managed to buy another hat, a real dashing one with purple ribbons and scarlet feathers. But even that hat had gone now.
She couldn’t compete with the girls from Queenie’s place. All the clothes there belonged to Queenie and they had to skud about the house half-naked or play cards or do whatever they could to kill time until dusk. Then Queenie got them all together, unlocked the rouge and hair-oil, the scent and silks and satins and they all dressed up and went out to parade along Princes Street. Except Queenie, who kept a check on the door and the girls as they returned with lovers. Queenie only took an airing in Princes Street during the day. After promenading for an hour or two she would do a little shopping in some of the best shops and eat a cake at a confectioner’s counter.
The hours of darkness were the time when her girls had to go out no matter what the weather was like—as often as not shivering in their silks and getting soaked to the skin.
All the same Queenie’s place, Alice realised now, had been a very genteel brothel and there was all the difference in the world between the prostitutes of Princes Street and those of the High Street of whom she was now one. She hated the Princes Street crowd now and she and the other High Street girls called them ‘Flash Mauls’. She told herself that she was lucky to be away from there; St James’s Square was much too near the Calton to her liking.
Of course, the ‘Flash Mauls’ in their long rustling silk gowns hated the High Street girls in return and contemptuously called them ‘Petticoats’, because of the short woollen petticoats they wore instead of gowns.
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