And they laugh some more.
There are few moments that have changed Eleanor’s life. One was when her parents agreed she could remove from school. Another was when the gentleman sought her out and placed her with Mrs Moore’s household. And, as Eleanor will later cometo consider it, there’s this moment, right here under the stairs when the second girl chimes, the pipe’s glow lighting her face, ‘Where does she go?’
Just like that.
‘Go?’ Eleanor repeats. ‘Who?’
‘Your lady. At night? Twice now she’s left the house. Douglas said she was in St Giles’ for almost an hour the first time and never went to the lawyer’s. And the second time she just walked out of the place, but not like a lady, more like a...’
‘Sneaker,’ the other girl adds, relishing the word.
‘A sneaky sneaker,’ the first girl confirms.
Eleanor realises this means of the handful of nights they’ve spent in Edinburgh, Mrs Moore has gone out twice without her noticing. Up until now, she’s thought she’s been defending her mistress against the gentleman. She’s thought Araminta was innocent and Mr McGhie was some kind of fool. The gentleman from Kew, too, perhaps not a fool but an erstwhile lover. Now it comes to her that, despite all appearances, maybe her mistress is indeed up to something.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she says. ‘The mistress loves to walk. She strides out every day in Richmond. Miles along the river.’
‘I think she has a fancy man,’ the first girl giggles. ‘I would, if I were the mistress.’
The second girl punches her friend’s arm. ‘Agnes,’ she says. ‘You wouldnae.’
‘Don’t be daft, Hester. It’s only the likes of us that don’t get away wi’ it,’ the first girl declares. ‘When Douglas worked for the Macdonalds, one of their cousins came. French, of course, and married. He says you wouldnae believe the comings and goings. At night,’ she adds ominously.
Agnes and Eleanor lean forward, for these are details relished by maids across the world. Hester looks smug as she pulls on thepipe. She holds out for a good five seconds and is about to spill further beans when the basement door creaks open suddenly to reveal Cook outlined in the thin light from the kitchen hallway. Hester nearly falls off the end of the bench.
‘Lasses!’ Cook pronounces. ‘Whit have I told the pair of you? And you, Thrale, should be ashamed of yersel’! Out here encouraging the housemaids. Puffing like lums, the lot of you! Gie me it.’
She holds out her hand and Hester reluctantly gives her the pipe, which Cook takes between her thumb and forefinger as if it’s a dead fish that has turned in the heat. ‘It’s a disgusting habit! You know how I feel about it.’
In Richmond, the cook is not in charge of the housemaids. The housemaids (three of them) are under the instruction of Mrs Rhodes, the housekeeper. The question flickers across Eleanor’s mind: why doesn’t this household have a Mrs Rhodes? But so much in Scotland is different from Richmond.
The girls troop guiltily inside, the maids sent straight to bed, the toothless kitchen drudge watching from her straw mattress beside the stove.
‘Really,’ says Cook, ‘you should have more sense, Thrale.’ However, she cannot order Eleanor around, even though a ladies’ maid does not trump a cook, certainly not down here, in the kitchen.
‘I’ll see to my lady,’ Eleanor says.
‘Here,’ Cook thrusts a liquorice stick in her direction. ‘The mistress will not want to sniff your smelly tobacco mouth.’
Eleanor does not tell her that Mrs Moore stank out the drawing room the other night with her great aunt’s cigars. In any case, she likes the taste of liquorice. She turns to go.
‘Yon tobacco’s terrible for the palette,’ Cook calls after her. ‘You’ll never be able to taste the seasoning if you continue. Go on, your lady will be missing you.’
But Eleanor does not attend Mrs Moore, or at least not directly. Nor does she go to bed. Instead, she hovers in the first-floor hallway out of sight, in a doorway, chewing absent-mindedly, savouring the aniseed flavour with her back against the door jamb in a disgraceful display of poor deportment. Dinner has been removed on a tray by Brodie long since. Upstairs, Mrs Moore’s sheet was turned down even before Eleanor left the house that evening, the fire in the green bedroom already stoked. A glass of milk and a glass of watered brandy on the bedside, like always. Eleanor waits and thinks this is why her lady has said she doesn’t need help to undress. She listens as the clock on the mantle chimes ten times behind the door. Then, she pulls back as Mrs Moore creeps silently downstairs wearing her green, fur-lined cape and kidskin winter gloves. Eleanor follows. Right out of the front door like a lady, silently onto the flagstones of Glenfinlas Street. Hanging back so the men around the brazier cannot see, Eleanor watches Mrs Moore cut down the alleyway at the near side of St George’s, and staying in the shadows, she goes down there too.
Chapter Thirteen
When Saoirse McKenzie was admitted to the convent at Sciennes, to the south of the city, past Hope Park, she found it a relief not to have to keep up appearances. She was, in truth, the comeliest of the McKenzie sisters even into her fifties when she gave up her array of green outfits for the stark black and white of a nun’s habit. But it wasn’t only her colourful wardrobe that Winifred forwent. She was glad of her cell, a far cry from her warm, carpeted bedroom in Glenfinlas Street. She quickly realised that despite the lack of the daily luxuries with which she grew up, she liked the gentle rhythm of living with the sisters. The regular services, the mealtimes and bedtimes, the comfort of not having to socialise. The ability to disappear among the ranks. Gradually she understood that if she didn’t want to wash, she didn’t have to. That she could eat raw onion if she chose, without reproach. That she could make conversation or not. That her stockings needn’t match.
Some months after taking her vows, Mr Drummond, the McKenzies’ solicitor, arranged the transfer of Saoirse’s share of the McKenzie family trust to the convent, and although the ethos of the nunnery was for the women to be equal in all things, the generosity of this bequest meant that the abbess was, in practical terms, compliant towards her new sister. In any case, they’d known each other since they were children, when they lived only a close’s distance apart in the Old Town, before the turn of the century. It took some weeks before Winifred remembered to call the abbess Mother rather than Lizzie.
In her new life, Winifred is, in truth, no more devout than she was when she lived in town, which is to say, not particularly.She chooses to play music in the mornings, practising on the chapel organ almost every day. She accompanies the singing of hymns at the sisters’ services. In the afternoons she writes letters and reads in the library. She has started to teach herself French. From time to time, Mother asks Winifred’s opinion on the convent’s accounts, which are reviewed monthly. Over the years Winifred has suggested both savings to be made and investments to be considered. The funds from the trust have thus not been her only contribution to the convent’s prosperity. Because of Sister Winifred’s sound financial advice, the sisters have been able to set up a service at the apothecary in nearby Bruntis Field for mothers and babies and also give alms on the Canongate to the indigent, distributed through their sister house on Holyrood Road.
After the nuns’ final devotions, the night is Winifred’s own, said to be for spiritual reflection and, of course, sleep, but oftentimes even before her great niece came to Edinburgh, Sister Winifred preferred to leave the convent to walk through the trees in the moonlight. This part of town has had a nunnery since the sixteenth century; indeed, the name Sciennes derives from that convent’s saint, Catherine of Sienna. Winifred feels secure in the long tradition of devotion embedded in the landscape. The medieval nuns’ gravestones line the wall of the old convent, near the place the Jews have started burying their dead. At first these walks eased Winifred’s humiliation, the sting of the affair unmasked. Now they’ve become a pleasant habit where she processes the events of the day. Occasionally on her rambles, Winifred meets Reverend Reid near his manse at Hope Park for he is another night walker. They converse about interesting matters: the two orphaned pauper girls he has taken in; sisters born on the Cowgate one of whom has read her way through the reverend’s entire library between chores. Or their mutual acquaintance, Miss Susan Ferrier, who resides duringthe summer in nearby Church Hill, and who has given up writing novels for she could not bear the limelight. ‘Such is the way of spinsters,’ Reverend Reid comments. It is Reverend Reid who, through his Cowgate connections, on short notice, provided the key for St Andrew’s Kirk where Winifred met Araminta for the first time only a few days before.
At first the humiliation of not being Brodie’s only love stung. But now, Winifred misses neither her sister nor her lover. Still, this doesn’t mean that from time to time when news from Glenfinlas Street has reached her, she hasn’t taken an interest. The sisters, while sequestered, remain part of the capital’s social fabric and women, even nuns, like to talk. When Sir Walter Scott died, only five years ago, the news reached the convent before the Assembly Rooms, through a sister with a cousin who resides near Abbotsford. News of Eilidh McKenzie’s death came from the minister at St George’s. A letter was delivered within three hours of her passing, also containing the information that when she knew she was infirm, Eilidh had sent to London for Araminta McKenzie Moore, not to Sciennes for Winifred. The truth is, this stung poor Winifred. They might not have spoken these last ten years but a sister is a sister most especially when both remain unmarried, and it would have been good to say goodbye. The last few days have weighed heavily on the old nun – Araminta looks disarmingly like her mother, Winifred’s only niece. Winifred however recognises that her religious duties have been easier than her domestic duties would have been at Glenfinlas Street. Eilidh has done her bit and now the old nun is beginning to feel the tightening of old promises like a pair of shoes that have been made too small. Duty is duty. And the truth is Winifred abandoned hers. Not without reason, for she was humiliated. But still.
St George’s is the next place she has arranged to meet Araminta. The minister is a lifelong friend and the side doorkey was easily obtained. Winifred expected their first meeting to be a one-off, so she walked the two miles from Sciennes to the Cowgate. The second time at the watchtower she walked again, but now, as the duty has become regular and her old knees stiff, she decides to ride into town swaddled in thick home-knitted mittens and a scarf that can only be termed ‘chunky’. She tethers the convent’s old nag, whose usual job is pulling an equally old cart, at the junction with Queensferry Street and dodges the puddles so as not to get her tan leather sandals soaked. She did not anticipate the proximity to her old home would rekindle memories of her old life. Passing the mews transports her to a time when she hosted candlelit dinners and was feted for her wit. When she sculpted her body inside laced stays and shopped on George Street for Bristol glass bottles of the popular bath oil manufactured near Canonmills. Reminded now, she smells it in memory, as if the days when it scented her chamber were closer. She’d hoped to set aside being a lady and being a lover too; yet here she is reminded.
