The nun nods. ‘For the twelve disciples and our Lord. Thirteen at the table for the last supper. Berenice was a churchgoer. Honestly, she was probably more devout than I am.’ She sighs once more for she cannot explain. The shame still stings. ‘When I took orders some years ago, we were merely at clue number four.’ She continues. ‘Eilidh has done extremely well.’
Araminta lets this information sink in. ‘But it’s almost a century since 1746,’ she says. ‘That means each clue has taken more than a decade.’
‘In the beginning they didn’t even manage that,’ Sister Winifred admits. ‘It was my sister Aoife who cracked the first. That took decades alone. As I said, Berenice was clever – no one since has matched her intellect. Numbers eight and nine,’ Winifred repeats, clearly pleased. ‘Excellent progress.’
Araminta decides to leave further questions until she has been to the garrison chapel. Sister Winifred has made a deal and pinning her down will be easier when she has something to barter with.
‘I’ll go on your ridiculous treasure hunt tomorrow,’ she promises and makes for the door. Then she turns. ‘What’s Hingy’s House? A child warned me of it, when I was visiting you the last time.’ Edinburgh, it seems, is a city of endless stories.
Sister Winifred looks up wearily. ‘It’s where the city’s hangman resides. Close to Haddow’s Hole – the old jail at St Giles’. I shouldn’t worry about it. It’s only a superstition.’
Chapter Ten
Though Mr Angus McGhie and Mr Harry Thom hadn’t met until this week, they’ve been in occasional correspondence for many years. McGhie was charged with monitoring Eilidh McKenzie’s activities in Edinburgh on the death of his father, while Thom remained in London, assigned to Araminta since she left school. Eleanor Thrale’s reports about her mistress’s life have been dull as Kew ditchwater, and when at last Araminta was summoned to Edinburgh, Harry Thom was delighted to receive an order to follow her. He hadn’t been in Edinburgh since he was twelve years of age, and he remembered the city with fondness. He attended Dr Rutherford’s lectures at the Royal Botanic Garden in the company of his uncle, and at Christmas went skating on Duddingston Loch, the line of carriages from the New Town causing what his aunt called ‘a fykie guddle’ on the steep hill off London Road.
He no longer has family in the city so he’s taken rooms on North St David Street, round the corner from Angus McGhie’s place of business. The suite is serviceable and though on the second floor, the rooms are well furnished with a maid who comes daily. Mr Thom, like most gentlemen, doesn’t care to think of household matters. He has greater things to attend and considers himself the senior partner in these. McGhie is the son of a butler, risen in society through his father’s connections at Leith, which provided the means to set up his shop. While both men are members of the same lodge, The Grand Masonic Order of The Hermit, and as such should think of each other as brothers, Thom is acutely aware that McGhie’s connection is by chance, his grandfather being inducted at his master’s insistenceat a time when the pursuit of the McKenzie sisters was, Thom supposes, more active.
Now he’s arrived in Edinburgh, Harry Thom is perturbed by McGhie’s excessive drinking and lackadaisical attitude to physical exertion. Thom keeps himself sharp with a five-mile ride each morning and no more than a half bottle of claret with lunch. He fences on Tuesdays and Thursdays at a club in Mayfair, in the normal run. And he reads, of course – philosophy, economics and history. He cannot abide novels or poetry. Byron he considers a wastrel. Shelley was foolishly led by his passion for women and questionable politics to say nothing of his much-famed atheism. What could such weak men possibly have to teach Harry Thom? When Thom occasionally visits his mother, who resides at the estate of a second cousin in Surrey, she often asks him if he is considering marriage. This irks him. At thirty-six years of age, he has no intention of changing his rigorous lifestyle with its many advantages to take responsibility for another man’s daughter – some brood mare. He despises everything he’s learned over the years about Araminta McKenzie Moore – her domesticity, her naivety and her husband, who Harry Thom made it his business to encounter in the city. Johnathan Moore’s main interests at the time were the myriad properties of calcium carbonate and the action of pressure upon this multi-faceted mineral. Thom floated conversational gambits around his own hobby horses – the breeding of racehorses and vital investment in new cannon for naval ships, but Moore did not pick him up. Nor did he let anything slip about his wife’s background or nature, which Thom had hoped might prove more illuminating than the titbits of domestic gossip that Eleanor Thrale brought him on her monthly day.
Once a month Thom attends a lodge meeting in London, a mere block from the Grand Lodge on Great Queen Street, from which his order separated several centuries before. TheGrand Masonic Order of The Hermit despises its parent sect and refuses to concern itself with business connections and slap-on-the-back deals made under the table. It does not treat with liberals, as the Grand Lodge does, backing the abolition of practices which have made England the world’s greatest nation. ‘Shooting the country in the foot,’ as Thom has been known to term the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. The Hermits are men with a mission and Thom’s inheritance holds an important place in that, which is to uphold the king’s peace; the country’s real interest. Bleeding hearts, if allowed to continue unchecked, will pollute everything that makes the nation great, and the Hermits are the king’s own bastion against that tide, among their number presently, two erstwhile Tory prime ministers and several peers of the realm. These last members are kept appraised of the McKenzie women’s quest for the women are rumoured to be the keepers of a fabulous Stuart jewel imbued with a power that is female in its nature. Whispers have circulated about the queen’s crown and what it symbolises for two hundred years. The hermits are all monarchists, of course, but there are standards to keep up and as far as they are concerned the last century of male rule by Hanoverian kings is a grand improvement on what has gone before.
Recently at a meeting of the lodge, Harry Thom overheard a conversation between two dukes about the prospect of the British crown coming into the possession of the king’s niece or, as they put it, ‘his present heir’. This is an unmarried girl not yet of age; Princess Victoria of Kent. ‘Madness,’ one of the peers termed it, but the king, or Silly Billy as he’s often known, is in failing health and because he despises Victoria’s mother, has taken little interest in preparing the girl to rule. ‘She’ll never last,’ the duke spat. ‘Still, God alone knows what the child might enact before we replace her.’ Most of the Hermits are similarly perturbed at the prospect of Victoria’s ascension to the throne.The order habitually hates women. Its genesis was in the time of the witch hunts, in which the Hermits played a large part both in England, where the law protected women better, and here in Scotland, where the men had their way.
The connection between the McKenzies and the princess has not been spelled out to Harry Thom, but masons are used to undertaking orders that aren’t fully explained and he feels certain there’s a connection of some sort. It’s women’s business and therefore nefarious. ‘We can’t trust to fate, Harry,’ the Lodge Master charged him. ‘Find out what these damn females are up to with this crown. My predecessor writes in the Great Book that they are vile wenches with a dangerous legacy that will rock the nation. It’s a totem. A piece of magical heresy. Are you up to the job? A trip to the wilds?’
Harry laughed. He’s been watching Araminta for years, waiting for her to be pulled into this long game. He considers her nothing more than a sheep, a follower of every convention, and as such, she poses him no threat. This crown, on the other hand, is imbued with power. All Hermits believe their natural place is at the apex of society, with all supernatural and natural power under their control. ‘I’ll be the one to finish it,’ he swore.
‘I don’t doubt it,’ the Grand Master replied, laying a fatherly hand on Thom’s shoulder. ‘We’ll bring this matter to the sticking place, eh? Be the ill wind, Harry. They need not even know you’re there.’
Harry’s father, who was a Hermit all his adult life, like his father before him, was not so circumspect in the matter of Araminta’s mother who died in a riding accident, or rather from his pursuit of her over ground that proved too soft for her horse. Mr Thom Senior had spent months in Edinburgh, convinced that if he could lay his hands on the crown, he would be a hero among men. After she fell, when he searched her body it transpired she had not been holding anything of interest. At thelodge it was said the killing of Grainne McKenzie set the hunt back by years for afterwards the McKenzies went to ground and became, were it possible, even more prudent in their activities.
‘This one. Araminta’ – the Grand Master sounded the name as if it were a foreign word – ‘is the last of the line.’ Harry was kneeling before him. ‘This whole thing’s been going on too long. Get your hands on the crown. Bring it back, Brother Thom,’ the Grand Master exhorted him.
Now he’s in Scotland, Thom understands why matters have dragged. McGhie is arrogant, ineffective and, despite talking a good game, lazy with no eye to the detail. The man is a blunt instrument and rather pleased with himself to boot. All that must change and Harry Thom believes himself to be the man to change it. His grandfather hunted down hundreds of Jacobites in his day, but did not get the nub of what the McKenzie women were up to. In a way, Thom’s glad it’s fallen to him, for it leaves him the pleasure of outfoxing these troublesome dames. For this reason if no other, glory is his birthright. It’s there for the taking.
This evening, however, he has business so private that he’s not shared it with McGhie or anyone else. He’s procured an introduction to a young lady who keeps a house beyond the Water of Leith, at Howard Place where for an inflated fee a gentleman might indulge himself in any way he sees fit. Harry Thom has no interest in the regular pleasures advertised in Ranger’s Impartial List or in the louche tour of the city’s public houses that McGhie offered when Thom first arrived. It seems the butler’s son relishes impressing young women of low society with his burgeoning wallet. The fool has mistaken the relationship between them. Thom is not McGhie’s friend nor his acquaintance, and increasingly Thom feels that the butler’s son is not even a true brother of the order. As far as Harry Thom is concerned, he’s McGhie’s master and the master does not reveal his plans to the staff. So tonight, Thom is off to relish aprivate arrangement, where he might be treated badly before he is treated well. He likes to pay for the attention of women, and occasionally men. In fact, he insists upon it because it satisfies him to pay his debts and it also keeps him sharp. McGhie’s simpering efforts to seduce a haphazard selection of lowlife women disgusts him.
At the bottom of Dundas Street he crosses the old bridge and ties his horse at the tethering post at the end of the terrace. It’s darker here than at St Andrew Square for the gas lamps are fewer. The crisp night air is scented with woodsmoke. An owl hoots as he walks up the path and raps on the door, feeling a pulse of excitement. As the hinges creak, he glances over his shoulder. ‘Don’t worry, sir,’ the maid says, standing in a pool of candlelight on the threshold, ‘we’re beyond the city limits.’
Thom doesn’t reply, merely pushes past the girl into the hallway, which smells pleasantly of cinnamon.
‘This way, sir.’ The maid takes his hat and coat and guides him upstairs. She opens the door of the drawing room and Thom gasps before he smiles. Inside, the young lady of the house is living up to her reputation, a haughty expression upon her face as she sits with her skirts hoisted above her ankles, a leather switch in hand. She has a high colour, her cheeks flush and shocking red hair piled into a tall arrangement. Most importantly, round her shoulders a masonic robe is clasped, falling to one side to reveal a stunning decolletage. She’s wearing nothing but a pair of royal purple bloomers tied with red ribbons above her knees. This picture is beyond the bounds in a dozen ways. Thom smiles. The fire crackles. The maid steps backwards into the hallway and closes the door.
‘You’re Mr Thom, you filthy Hermit,’ the young woman says insolently. Thom nods. ‘How dare you expect me to wait? Get down on your damn knees.’
Chapter Eleven
The next morning at Glenfinlas Street, Araminta pens a note to Colonel Fraser and sends it to the castle. Then the coach is brought round.
‘Mind Mrs Moore,’ Brodie instructs the coachman. ‘The haar is rolling in.’ He stands on the doorstep and watches the carriage leave. He’s like a mother hen, Araminta thinks.
Inside the cab, Eleanor asks, ‘Do you like the colonel now, ma’am?’
Araminta isn’t sure how to reply. She’s not in the habit of outright lying. ‘I’m curious,’ she says. ‘Edinburgh Castle is as old as the Tower of London. You said yourself you were intrigued by it.’
Eleanor reluctantly nods as the coach sets off even more slowly than yesterday, the wheels casting water on both sides.
At the Esplanade the women dismount, no private carriages being admitted beyond the wooden palisade. The city is partly obscured on either side by low cloud, or haar as Brodie would have it. It’s made a phantom of the panoramic vista that Araminta recalls the colonel describing over turgid ship-bound dinners. In the rain, Eleanor struggles to open Eilidh’s red Hanway so the mistress pulls up the hood of the green velvet cape she took from the old wardrobe. The women follow a young lieutenant who has been sent to see them safely inside. The hill is steep beyond the arched entrance though it’s paved with shards of stone, not as regular as the setts about the town but less slippery in the rain. ‘An invading force would require to fight upwards,’ the officer explains. ‘This castle is difficult to take, bydesign. The last time these walls were breached was through the Sallyport.’
