The House of Hidden Wonders

by Sharon Gosling

  “She won’t. When I tell her I need you there, she’ll go along with it. Lady Sarah Montague is game for anything, the more daring the better. Six months ago, she was fording rivers in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. A child from Old Town Edinburgh isn’t going to scare her off.” He raised his eyebrows. “You can be a maid for the evening.”

  Zinnie looked down at herself. She was dressed in the only clothes she owned – a threadbare pair of rough brown trousers with a grubby shirt over the top. “Will I have to wear a skirt?”

  Conan Doyle grinned. “Afraid so. A clean cap too, to hide that short hair of yours. But don’t worry about all that. Subterfuge will suit you, I know it already. Be at thirty-three Queen Street at six o’clock tomorrow and Lady Sarah will arrange the rest. I’ll make sure of it.”

  Zinnie still wasn’t keen. Her doubt must have shown on her face.

  “I’ll pay you, of course,” Conan Doyle said.

  “All right,” said Zinnie. “Six o’clock it is.”

  Zinnie made her way back towards the Old Town, the cold night wind turning her fingers and toes to ice. Above her the rain clouds had tattered into thin scraps, lit a smudged grey by the moon. A scatter of stars pricked the darkness beyond and she realized she had taken far longer with Conan Doyle than she’d intended. Sadie and Nell would be famished.

  The market was dwindling by the time she got to the High Street, but she found a loaf, a chunk of drying cheese and a little milk that hadn’t yet turned. The bread and cheese she shoved under one arm, then dug in her pocket for her candle stub and matches, sticking the stoppered milk bottle in there instead.

  Writers’ Court passageway was a pitch-black mouth as she approached. Zinnie struck a match and walked into the darkness of the narrow street, her candle casting an indistinct circle of yellow against the damp walls. Noises shivered from the tenements that reared high above her head: children crying, muffled conversations, drunken laughter. An echo rattled behind her, a stone skittering from underfoot. Zinnie glanced back towards the dim light of the Royal Mile, but she could see no one there.

  On her left was the entrance to the tall tenement buildings of Writers’ Court itself, but Zinnie carried on, ever deeper into the darkness, beside the wall of the Royal Exchange. Further down her candle picked out rickety steps to a broken door that stood below the level of the newer wall. The authorities had boarded up this entrance to Mary King’s Close more than once, but it was always torn open again. Zinnie slipped down the steps and between the jagged slivers of wood. Beyond were more steps, leading to what might once have been a cellar for the building that used to sit above it.

  Mary King’s Close had once been just like Writers’ Court, with tall buildings slouching towards each other either side of a narrow street. It and several other closes had all been built beside one another on the steep hill that led away from the Royal Mile. Even then, the buildings had been overcrowded and unsanitary, with families crammed in side by side. Buckets served as toilets and, when full, their contents would be flung out of the windows on to the cracked flagstones of the closes below – as well as on to any poor person who happened to be passing by at the time. The filth gathered on the ground and seeped into the lower levels, where it was dark even at noon. There was nowhere else for the people who lived there to go – Edinburgh was crowded and those that had rooms paid dearly for them, whatever state they were in. Sickness spread easily, and when the plague came to Edinburgh in the 1600s it had raged in the closes as wildly as an unchecked fire.

  After that, the closes were thought to be haunted and were left to the ghosts. Eventually, the new Royal Exchange was built over the top of the abandoned streets. Below, though, the closes were still there, and so too were the lower levels of the houses, their rooms left in darkness, empty and crumbling. If one knew how to get down there, however, there was space to sleep – to live, in fact, for people like Zinnie who had nowhere else to go.

  The air thickened as she descended. It was fetid with damp, with the filth of both people and vermin, growing worse and worse with each step she took. At the bottom was a room, its curved stone ceiling almost too low to stand up straight in. Her own candle was beginning to die, but there were others dotted here and there. They flickered uncertainly in the darkness, illuminating the dirty, hungry faces of the people crouched around them. In one corner an old woman was lighting a makeshift hearth on a flat stone set in the dirt floor. The smoke belched in acrid clouds, clogging the throats of those nearby, making them cough. There were no windows through which it could escape. Eventually, most of it would seep into the cracks, but the air would never properly clear.

  Zinnie passed through two connected rooms like this, weaving between knots of people as she made for the spot where Sadie and Nell would be. It wasn’t much, the place they called home, but Zinnie was proud of it. She’d found an old drape large enough to close off a little nook between a wall and what would have once been a fireplace. Beyond the curtain was a space just big enough for the three of them to fit.

  She blew out her candle and pushed the curtain aside, clutching the girls’ supper.

  “Zinnie!” Nell cried, sitting up from beneath the tattered blanket Sadie had wrapped her in. “I thought you weren’t coming back.”

  “Ach, now, don’t be silly, pippin,” Zinnie said, passing Sadie the milk and food before dropping to a crouch beside her sister. She ran her fingers over Nell’s forehead, worried by the unnatural heat in her skin. “You know that whatever happens I’ll always come back. I’m sorry. I hadn’t meant to be so long.”

  Nell threw her arms round Zinnie and held on tight. Zinnie could feel her littlest sister trembling and felt guilty. It wasn’t so long ago that Nell had been left on her own in the street like a stray when both her parents had died of sickness. She clearly had still not forgotten that fear.

  “Here,” Sadie said, holding out their one battered tin bowl for Nell to take. Into it she had poured some of the milk and added a hunk of the bread to soak. “Eat.”

  Nell let go of Zinnie and took the bowl, coughing harshly. Zinnie looked over at Sadie, who was busy tending the small fire she’d lit. They’d made a hole in the side of the fireplace by chipping away at two of the crumbling stones so that most of the smoke went up the old chimney. It probably still came out somewhere not far overhead, but at least it wasn’t right in their faces. Over the flames, water was heating in their tin mug. Criss-crossing the nook above their heads was a branch that Sadie had found in Princes Street Gardens. From it hung bunches of plants, filling the place with their herbal scent as they dried. As Zinnie watched, Sadie chose a single sprig, crumbling the leaves into the water.

  “There,” Sadie said, setting the mug down in front of Nell. “Yarrow tea. We’ll let it cool a little and then you must drink it all down – it will stop you coughing and help you sleep. Tomorrow I’ll go and gather some more,” she told Zinnie. “That’s the last of it in my stores. I need coltsfoot too. I hadn’t realized I’d run out.”

  Sadie’s mother and grandmother had brought her from Ireland to escape poverty and starvation, but here in Edinburgh they had both died of consumption, leaving Sadie alone with the knowledge of which plants could heal and how. It had been a family tradition – all of the women in Sadie’s family learned plant lore from their mothers as they grew up, and it was as natural to her as breathing. Some of the older folk in Mary King’s Close muttered about Sadie. Witch, they called her. However, when they were desperate and sick, with no money for a doctor, they seemed to forget all about their suspicions and came to Sadie for her cures.

  By the time Nell had finished her supper and drunk her tea, she was struggling to keep her eyes open. Sadie sang a quiet little lullaby as Zinnie tucked Nell in again, watching until she was sure she was asleep.

  The two older girls were sharing out the last of the bread and cheese between themselves when the noise of a commotion gusted in beneath the curtain.

  “Is that a fight?” Sadie asked,
her face anxious. Fights in Mary King’s Close were dangerous – one knocked candle and the cramped space could be alight in seconds.

  Zinnie listened, frowning. “I don’t think so. I—”

  “A ghost!” came an indistinct cry, and then the distant sound of running feet. “A spirit! We’re haunted! Haunted!”

  The footsteps died away as the room beyond the curtain came alive with chatter.

  “Stay here,” Zinnie whispered to Sadie. She got up and slipped out into the main room, pushing her way between bodies until she reached the empty doorway that led out on to the old close. Beyond there was no sign of anything untoward. Whoever had been shouting was long gone. She turned back.

  “Too much whisky,” she said to her neighbours. “That’s all. The only demon is in the drink.”

  The next morning, Zinnie woke to the sound of Nell moving restlessly beneath her blanket, wheezing and coughing in her sleep. She fumbled for a candle and lit it, setting it in their makeshift hearth. There was no sign of Sadie. Zinnie felt Nell’s forehead and found it was as hot as a furnace. She was just reaching for the bucket in which they kept their water when the curtain shifted and Sadie reappeared, worry pinching at her face.

  “There you are,” Zinnie said. “Where have you been?”

  “I went to get yarrow but there’s none left,” Sadie told her, sinking to her knees on the blankets. “It’s been pulled up. The coltsfoot too. I asked the park keeper and he said they were making way for new borders with prettier plants. ‘No one wants to look at weeds, lassie.’ That’s what he said.”

  Nell coughed again, turning on her side in her sleep, muttering under her breath as if she were dreaming.

  “What are we going to do?” Zinnie asked. “Is there another plant you can use?”

  Sadie shook her head. “Maybe there’s somewhere else I can find it. The Meadows or Arthur’s Seat…”

  Zinnie shook her head. “It’ll take too long to search on your own. And you might know what you’re looking for but I don’t.” She put her hand in her pocket and felt the second of Arthur Conan Doyle’s two half-crowns. “I’ll go to Constance McQuirter. She was always talking about how she had cures for everything, wasn’t she, when she lived down here? Perhaps she’ll have something for Nell.”

  Sadie nodded. “Maybe she’ll have yarrow or coltsfoot herself. Ask her first, before you let her give you anything else.”

  “Do you want to go?” Zinnie asked, holding out the coin. “You’d know better than anyone if she’s trying to pull the wool over our eyes.”

  Sadie looked down at her hands. “She calls me a witch.”

  “Ach, that’s just blather and nonsense. She wants people to go to her instead of you, that’s all. Everyone knows you’re better with the herbs than she is. She’s just jealous and greedy.”

  Sadie nodded but the shadow on her face didn’t lessen.

  “It’s all right,” Zinnie said, getting to her feet. “I’ll go. You look after Nell – I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  “Wait,” Sadie said. “There’s something else. The police have put posters up. Wanted posters. Zinnie – there’s a picture on them. It looks just like you!”

  Zinnie dropped back to her knees. “What?”

  “It’s true. They’re calling you a boy, but it’s about us taking that watch from Bread Street.”

  Zinnie’s stomach turned over. “But no pictures of you and Nell?”

  “No, but it mentions us. It … they know what we look like.”

  “All right,” said Zinnie, thinking. “Well, don’t worry. No one in here will give us up, no matter what they think of us.”

  She went to leave again but Sadie caught her arm. “Be careful. We can’t do without you, Zin.”

  Zinnie patted her hand. “Don’t you worry,” she said. “There’ll never be a copper quick enough to catch me.”

  She went out, making her way through the crowded underground rooms and towards the steep steps that delivered her into a grey, wet morning. She didn’t have to go far once she’d stepped back out on to Writers’ Court. She crossed the narrow street and went to the door in the opposite wall, beyond which was a flight of stairs leading up. Inside, noises echoed round the cracked and crumbling walls: babies crying, drunken shouts and scuffles, an old woman’s blunt, hacking cough. The air smelled of burnt porridge, old beer and worse, much worse. Zinnie made her way up, heading for the third floor.

  Constance McQuirter had somehow raised enough money to move out of Mary King’s Close and rent a room in this tenement instead. It wouldn’t be much to most folk but to Zinnie it seemed like a palace. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have a room of your own, a space that belonged to only you.

  Zinnie found the door she was looking for and knocked loudly enough to be heard amid the rest of the Court’s racket.

  “Come,” said a haughty voice. Zinnie rolled her eyes. Clearly, Constance thought that living in Writers’ Court meant she could put on airs and graces. She pushed open the door with a grin on her face.

  Constance’s home was a small space that looked out over the passageway outside. The room wasn’t much grander than any in Mary King’s Close, despite the window. A pallet in one corner did for a bed, piled with blankets that had been smoothed out in a strange gesture of tidiness. There was a bucket of water that must have been pumped from the same well on the Mile that Zinnie and her sisters used. Zinnie’s eyes were drawn to a wooden crate, which had two or three old but fine dresses draped across it. Since when did McQuirter ever have need of good clothes? Moreover, how had she been able to afford them?

  Constance was standing by the window. She was a tall, thin woman with creases round her eyes and mouth and dark hair that she had twisted into a coil against the back of her head. She wore a plum-coloured dress, frayed at the edges, and had draped an old lace scarf around her shoulders.

  “Zinnie!” Constance said in surprise. “I wasn’t expecting you. I’m waiting for a client.”

  “A client?”

  Constance gestured to the corner and Zinnie saw a small table on which was spread a pack of tarot cards.

  “You … read fortunes now?”

  Constance gave a thin smile. “Among other things. I’ve always had an aptitude for the spiritual.”

  It was the first Zinnie had heard of it. “We need medicine for Nell. She’s getting sick.”

  “Nell… She’s the newest sister, isn’t she?”

  Zinnie was not in the mood for Constance’s games. “Can you help me or not?”

  Constance tipped her head to one side and a small strand of hair uncurled itself to hang against her shoulder. “Your little Irish witchling kin doesn’t have a spell to cast over her for a cure?”

  “You’re a fine one to call anyone a witch,” Zinnie said. “You do exactly the same thing as Sadie – you just don’t do it nearly as well.”

  Constance’s eyes flashed with anger. “Watch your tongue. There’s a difference between an apothecary and a witch, and if you can’t tell that you’re more of a fool than I thought. Dabbling like your sister does – that’s witchy. What I do – that’s proper doctoring.”

  Zinnie tried to keep calm. There was no sense in letting McQuirter rile her. “She’s run out of yarrow and coltsfoot. Do you have any?”

  Constance raised one hand, palm up, and waved it in a careless circle. “Do I look as if I have a garden?”

  “Well then, what do you have?”

  “It depends on what you have to offer in exchange.”

  Zinnie held out one of the half-crowns Conan Doyle had given her. Constance regarded the money in a way that made Zinnie’s hackles rise. “It’s all I’ve got and you know it,” she said. “You’d let a bairn suffer for greed?”

  Constance narrowed her eyes. “I forget you’ve never had a mother to beat a civil tongue into your head. No matter. I do have something for you. It’s precious but I’m moved by your sister’s predicament.”

  She went to a
wooden box that stood in one corner and lifted the lid to reveal a store of bottles within. Constance took one out and handed it to Zinnie. It held a clear liquid in which a few sprigs of greenery were floating.

  “What is it?” Zinnie asked.

  “It’s made from an ancient recipe passed down to me by my ancestors,” Constance said. “It will help the girl’s upset stomach.”

  “She doesn’t have an upset stomach. She has a cough and a rising fever.”

  “That too,” said Constance quickly, and then smiled with exaggerated patience. “It is truly a wondrous concoction.”

  Zinnie took it and handed over the coin in return. Constance pocketed it so quickly that Zinnie barely even saw her move.

  “Now run along, there’s a good girl,” the woman said, turning her back. “My client will be here at any moment and I must prepare properly for the session. Readings can be so very draining for me.”

  Zinnie left without a word, going back down the stairs and across the narrow passageway to Mary King’s Close. It was even more crowded than usual and there seemed to be an agitated sort of muttering about something going on as she passed, but Zinnie was too worried about Nell to take any notice. She pushed through their curtain to find Sadie bathing Nell’s forehead with the last of their water and an old rag.

  “Here,” Zinnie said, thrusting the bottle that Constance had given her at Sadie, who took it and held it up.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. Some ancient family recipe she said.” Zinnie took the last of the coins left over from Conan Doyle’s payment out of her pocket and passed them to Sadie. “Have these too. Stay here and look after Nell. I’ll go up to Princes Street on my own today. And remember, I won’t be back until late – I’ve got to be at Montague House at six. With any luck, she’ll be over the worst by the time I get home.”

  After a long day of begging for coins and avoiding the policemen patrolling Princes Street, six o’clock that evening found Zinnie at 33 Queen Street. The house was five storeys high and as grand as any she had ever seen. Montague House faced the lush and leafy greenery of the gated Queen Street Gardens, a private park that was for the exclusive use of the residents of the streets that edged its land. The sun was only just beginning to set and in the last glance of the day’s warmth the park’s flowers were giving out great gusts of scent, wafting like perfume across the thoroughfare to where Zinnie stood on Lady Sarah’s steps. It was half a mile and an entire world away from Mary King’s Close.