‘Did you ever meet anyone else in my family, Brodie? Other than my aunt?’
‘Yes. Her sister, but she left us many years ago. Your aunt was a sociable lady and well connected in society. The McKenzies were famed for their dinner parties. They invited only the creamof Edinburgh. There were always games. Puzzles, I mean. I cannot recall an occasion on which a member of the family called upon Mistress McKenzie, not in the twenty years I’ve worked here.’
‘I’m the only one,’ Araminta lets out. She wishes that Johnathan had come. She knew Aunt Eilidh would die, of course, from the moment she embarked. That was the point. But still, it was so sudden.
‘The maids can prepare your aunt for burial,’ Brodie continues. ‘I’ve notified the undertaker that the coffin she ordered should be delivered.’
Araminta smiles. This was highly organised of Great Aunt Eilidh; telling of her practical personality.
‘And the burial?’ she asks.
‘I’ll have a message sent to the church. Might you have specific wishes?’
‘Whatever she would have liked,’ Araminta sighs. ‘Perhaps she already told the minister.’
‘Yes, madam.’
‘I’m only sorry that I didn’t know her better.’
‘It’s been a cruel blow,’ Brodie agrees, and Araminta feels these words not only as a condolence but also a judgement. She should have been quicker.
‘I didn’t even know I had a great aunt,’ she says. ‘Not until I got her letter.’
Outside, the sky is beginning to darken as if Edinburgh were in mourning. Brodie takes his leave.
Araminta sits on the yellow sopha and watches the light dim. Before it falls to complete blackness there’s a brief interlude of illuminated royal blue streaked with shadowy clouds; a mackerel sky. A lamplighter, muffled in layers of knitted wool, makes his way round Charlotte Square kindling the gas lamps,and suddenly Araminta understands why the drawing room is decorated in yellow, for it feels unaccountably cosy by firelight.
She gets up and sets flame to a few candles and a small oil lamp on the desk. This prompts her to check the drawers. Underneath the sheaf of good writing paper and everything needed to use it, she finds a small leather-bound address book which she starts to read. Almost immediately she is surprised to find the name of the headmistress of the school she attended in London, Mrs Archer, and the address on Manchester Square.Mary-le-Bone NOT Mary-le-Bow, someone has scrawled underneath. Someone who does not know London, for the two churches are not close in anything other than name and there is no Manchester Square in the East End. ‘How odd,’ Araminta muses, and sets to searching the rest of the room, coming quickly across a document box on a low bookshelf. Inside, there’s a sheaf of receipts from booksellers and letters, faded with age. Three, tied with a dark-brown ribbon are love letters from a young man, desperate for Great Aunt Eilidh to return his affection. These are dated August 1798. Then another two undated letters in a different hand from another man, wanting the same. Eilidh might have married then, which means she was a spinster by choice. The other letters in the box are from Mrs Archer. Araminta kneels on the patterned carpet to read them.Araminta is progressing well in Latin and mathematics. Miss Cooper, her tutor, says she is a regular Miss Sommerville who takes an interest in a variety of natural sciences and algebra as well as history and the classics.(These last two subjects are underlined.)She is a healthy, sensible girl who is well-liked by her classmates.Araminta laughs, shocked, and opens another.Last month the girls visited the gallery of royal paintings at Southwark. Araminta greatly enjoyed this outing. She is well, Miss McKenzie, and will go to a friend’s for Christmas this year, outside town at Richmond.The letter is undated but Aramintaknows the year. It’s the Christmas she met Johnathan, her last as a pupil at Manchester Square.
She pours a small glass of sherry from one of Great Aunt Eilidh’s decanters which, she notices, are filled to entirely different levels. Why did Eilidh never write, never visit nor issue an invitation? After she had matriculated Araminta went to stay with friends as a paying guest because she had no family. She resided in Kensington for almost two years. Yet she could have come here, to Edinburgh, to this large, well-proportioned townhouse. If Aunt Eilidh cared about her enough to be in regular correspondence with Mrs Archer and, indeed, keep the letters, why did she not make herself known?
She slips the key from her pocket onto her palm. She feels intrigued; a surprising sensation which she’s not experienced for a long time. She wonders if she’ll sleep tonight, still pondering Great Aunt Eilidh’s behaviour. There’s a knock on the drawing room door and Eleanor puts her head round.
‘They say you don’t want dinner, madam?’
Araminta smells the sherry’s sweetness rising from the little glass on the side and concludes that she’s hungry. ‘Perhaps a plate of soup. Bread with butter. On a tray in here,’ she decides. She doesn’t want to sit in the dining room alone.
Eleanor’s eyes fall to the papers scattered on the floor. ‘Would you like me to tidy your things?’ she asks, knowing she has no way to ascertain what the papers refer to.
‘It’s fine.’ Araminta waves a hand. After almost three years of insisting everything is properly tidied away, something has loosened inside her, easy as an old ribbon off a bundle of letters. With a shrug Eleanor departs to deliver the news about the soup. She has plenty to relay to Mr McGhie tomorrow. And if there’s any hint that the gentleman is planning a robbery, she’s decided that shillings or no shillings, she won’t visit him any longer.
Chapter Four
The following morning sixteen calling cards are handed to Brodie across the threshold between the hours of eleven and midday. Araminta sorts through them on a silver tray. Reading the names conjures a picture of her great aunt’s social life. Mrs Robertson. Mr Iain Hall. Miss Angela Donohue. Lady Wemyss. Lady Stair. Mr James McDonald. Were these people guests at her aunt’s famous dinner parties? In the normal run, she’d return her own card and introductions would be made, but that seems wrong in mourning. She’s not sure what to do, and among the many books on Great Aunt Eilidh’s shelves is a startling lack of tomes on the subjects of etiquette and domestic management. No Rundell at all.
Eleanor helped her mistress dress this morning in a black, woollen frock with blousy shoulder puffs. It’s clasped at the waist by a wide belt of buttery leather with an ornate silver buckle. This mourning dress provokes Araminta to feel the loss of the old lady more keenly. A single conversation and the striking memory of Great Aunt Eilidh descending from the library ladder in her bright outfit feels too little by way of remembrance. Araminta wonders again why her father arranged for her to go to school in London. There must be educational establishments for young ladies in Scotland.
After a heartier breakfast than she expected to be able for, Araminta retires to the drawing room where she sits under the gaze of several generations of grand-looking McKenzies. She wonders what Great Aunt Eilidh meant when she said she’d tell her everything. Was she going to relate her mother’s favourite dish or describe her childhood home? Araminta can’t recallcrying when Mama died. She was little more than an infant, and she doubts she understood what had happened. But this morning she woke in tears, because she has lost her great aunt, and so much more besides.
Brodie has distributed black armbands among the staff and Eleanor has put one over the sleeve of her plain, apricot dress. Araminta notices the girl seems on edge and concludes that death makes people uncomfortable. Mr Drummond, the solicitor, visited this morning, the only one to be admitted. He said he’d arrange a notice in the local broadsheet for the funeral has been set for two days hence. Araminta asked him again about the key. He turned it over in his hand for some time. ‘It’s hard to say what it might fit. Small for a door but perhaps a cupboard,’ he suggested. There are no locked cupboards in the house or in the mews on Charlotte Place behind it, where Great Aunt Eilidh stabled two horses and a carriage and where the coachman sleeps in the eaves. Before lunch, Araminta summons Brodie.
‘Do you recognise this?’ she asks.
Brodie squints at the key. He asks to be excused and then upon his return, having donned a pair of spectacles, examines it carefully. ‘I’ve never seen it before. I’ve a fancy it might have something to do with the bank, Mrs Moore.’
Araminta brightens. ‘The bank,’ she repeats.
Brodie points out a tiny stamp inside the loop. ‘That’s the St Andrew’s cross,’ he says. ‘It’s on a shield – the same as the crest outside the new bank. The Royal Bank of Scotland on Princes Street. The premises moved recently from the old Exchequer on the High Street. Your aunt occasionally did business at that bank, and on the side of the key, here at the bottom there are three bumps that are too small, I should think, to have anything to do with the mechanism. I wonder if they might identify the key to the teller.’
