Mother waits for the door to close. She casts her eyes over the vegetable patch through the window which at this time of year is mostly comprised of roots. Placing the key Winifred sent onto her desk, she rings the brass bell to summon assistance.
‘How might I serve, Mother?’ the nun asks, her eyes falling to the unaccustomed state of the tray. Mother’s favourite biscuits uneaten.
‘Send for Sister Gloria,’ the old nun says decisively. ‘I’ve a duty for her to undertake. And have the chapel bell rung, please. As a community, we must pray.’
‘Yes, Mother,’ the nun replies.
As the door closes, Mother hopes Gloria will find something by way of proof that will allow her to contact the bishop. ‘Men,’ she says, the word dropping from her lips into the empty room as if it were a curse.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
When Araminta wakes, all of her head is sore, including her face. She pulls herself onto her elbows and ascertains that she is contained in a dingy room, with tiny barred windows at the top of one of the walls. It’s light outside but she can’t tell the time of day. Slowly she gets to her feet and steadies herself through a wave of nausea. As soon as she’s able, she carefully walks to the door and tries the handle. It’s locked. She shouts, ‘Hello! Let me out!’ But nobody comes. She bangs. Nothing. On tiptoes she tries pulling the bars but they’re solid and she can’t make out anything beyond the glass other than the sky. Her head, though, is clearing. She must get to St Giles’. She must get to the roof.
The windows are so small that even if she managed to remove the bars, she would never be able to squeeze through, certainly not without removing her skirts, so she turns her attention to the door. There’s no key in the lock on the other side and when she peers through the keyhole, the hallway is nondescript. ‘Hello!’ she calls, but there’s no reply. At length, however, a grey-haired man in a uniform walks along the corridor. His step is heavy and there’s a ring of clinking, iron keys on his belt.
‘Let me out!’ Araminta calls. ‘What is this place?’
‘Leave off your nonsense,’ he snarls and bangs on the door.
‘This is an outrage!’ she declares.
His laugh is like gravel as he recedes.
Momentarily, hopelessness settles round her, but she rallies. She has to get out of here. Whatever’s happened, she’s a McKenzie with a duty to solve the next clue. She’s heard of locks being picked but has no idea how to do it. Upon examining the door, the hinges seem more promising than the windows.Though sturdy, they’re screwed on the inside. If she can get out the screws, she’ll be able to open the door. This seems impossible. For a moment Araminta panics but then she thinks of Sister Winifred’s steely determination. Invoking the spirit of her forebears, she pats down her dress, considering whether the whalebone corsetry might be of use, though she concludes that bone will be too soft. Then she realises her wedding ring is slim enough to fit into the grooves on top of the screws. She wonders how Johnathan would feel about her using it like this, but, she concludes, he would most assuredly want her to escape. She removes her gloves, takes off the sturdy band of gold and gets to work. It’s slow and the screws are rusty but she patiently removes them one by one until she can pull the door open. Then she peers into the hallway. The jailer is nowhere to be seen. She listens. All is quiet. So she takes a breath and squeezes into the hall.
The ring has bent a little but she slips it back onto her finger and, looking out of the window along the corridor, ascertains she’s on the top floor of a building on the High Street. Below, on the ground, tidy stacks of freshly cut sandstone sit on the setts. From the angle of the winter sun, it’s late in the afternoon. Ahead, there’s a staircase with a wooden banister. Hardly thinking about the danger of barrelling into Thom somewhere below, she descends. A man, a clerk, she assumes, comes out of one of the rooms ahead rather suddenly. Her heart pounds but she manages to nod at him, as she might acknowledge anyone. He averts his eyes and gestures her down the next flight of stairs in an act of good manners. She proceeds as quickly as she can. The floors below house offices. She pulls into a doorway as two men wearing the same uniform as the jailer burst out of an office and hammer downstairs without noticing her. In the main hallway, at the bottom, there’s a mirror and she catches sight of her face. Bruises are forming over her left cheek. Shewonders if that’s where he hit her, or perhaps where she fell. She can’t remember. No wonder the clerk looked away. Still, she thinks, she looks respectable enough. Her hands, she realises, are shaking.
She passes a palm over her hair. She’s left her gloves in the room upstairs but she can’t go back for them. ‘Can I help you?’ says a man who appears from what looks like a library room.
‘I’m fine. Thank you,’ she manages, and trying not to hurry, she steps outside. She can’t see any sign of Harry Thom but she recognises her location. She’s only two buildings away from Parliament Square, and the dark, looming form of St Giles’. This must be some kind of administration office for the court. Perhaps the top floor is where they hold prisoners or witnesses. These buildings seem interrelated; the law library, chambers, places to house clerks, officers of the court and these men in uniforms. Policemen, she thinks, remembering the newspaper she neglected to read on her last day in London. The woman locked away. Fleetingly she realises that Thom has made connections that allow him access here. The men in uniform can’t be trusted.
Checking she isn’t followed, she passes across the square and into St Giles’ as the clock chimes five. Soon it will be dark. Her knowledge of church architecture means she doesn’t dilly-dally finding the roof, but passes through the nave towards a door which she guesses must lead to a stairway. Three or four people sit in silent contemplation in the pews as she moves like a shadow. It’s a steep, tight spiral and she has to pull in her skirts as she climbs, past the clock’s mechanism, the great bell and a collection of carved wooden angels and saints. At the top she realises she’s climbed almost a hundred steps. There have been alterations and part of the roof has recently been raised, which she can see from the colour of the stone. The new windows are surrounded by creamy, virginal white compared to the worngrey of the medieval kirk. Her heart pounds as she steps over a raised threshold onto the roof. The slates are glossy from the rain earlier. It’s cold up here. The steep fall makes her wary. It seems odd that the people below don’t notice her, incongruous, looking down. A seagull lands on one of the finials at the far end and Araminta gasps as beyond the bird she catches sight of Harry Thom, barrelling round the corner at Bank Street and past the Royal Exchange. She recoils involuntarily. She’s afraid of him and hates herself for it. Unable to peel her eyes away she watches him cross the High Street and disappear into the building from which she’s just escaped.
Quivering now, she turns her attention towards the crown at the top of the tower and deliberately slows her mind, to recall exactly the carving on the Maitland-McKinnon tomb. The roof might have been raised but the crown is original. Getting her bearings, she chooses the south-western corner at its base, on the buttress. The stones are roughly hewn and each one is different in size. She checks carefully for carving on the surface, like the writing on the window ledge in the castle, but there’s nothing and no obvious point in the pattern of stonework to draw her attention. Quickly, she runs her gaze over the other corners, in case she calculated incorrectly. Then she notices there’s a difference. In the first corner the smallest stone is smaller than the others, by far. It’s barely the size of a brick-end, rounded at the corners, and the lime fixing it in place is a shade thicker than on the other stones.
Araminta fumbles under her cloak and lays her hands on her bodice. She undoes half a dozen tiny buttons, tearing the fabric to expose her boned corset. Her fingers are cold and she stubs a nail, but she picks apart the stitching until she can get at one of the thin whalebones that form the structure of her undergarment. Then she slowly slides the bone out of the seam. A trowel would be better. A knife, perhaps, but this is what shehas. An image of Eve in the Garden of Eden flicks into her mind – a woman made of Adam’s rib. She dismisses it and begins to hack at the old mortar which comes away in small chips. She wonders what Thom is doing. He must be aware by now that she’s escaped and she tries to calculate the odds of him being able to track her. The clerk who waved her ahead down the stairs couldn’t know which direction she took, but she doesn’t know who might have seen her on the street as she left the building. If the man who asked her if she needed help noted which way she turned... Who noticed in St Giles’ below when she entered and took the door to the spiral stair?
Her eyes dart to the little threshold where she emerged, but she keeps hacking at the mortar, a small pile of lime forming at the base of the old buttress as her fingers get pinker in the cold. She sticks at it. The light is leeching out of the sky and up the hill, what little she can see of the castle framed in the peachy glow of dusk. Finally, she manages to manoeuvre the smallest stone out. On the rear there’s an image scratched into the rock; a rose and two buds surrounded by a rectangle made of curlicues. Araminta stares, unsure what to do. Her fingers are so cold now they’re painful. She silently curses Berenice because she has no idea what this clue means though she’s risked her life to get it. Flowers in a frame, she thinks, desperately, but nothing comes. She can’t put the stone back – the lack of mortar will make it too obvious. But if she takes it with her and she’s caught by Thom, she’ll be handing him the twelfth clue.
She quickly settles on wedging the stone behind a gutter beyond the lead flashing. She edges carefully along the roofline and glancing down sees Thom once more, this time emerging from the building she was held in, with another man. They’re in animated conversation, looking up and down the High Street, stopping passersby. Araminta has to remind herself to breathe. She reaches to jam the stone behind the gutter, but her fingersare so cold that she lets go too soon. The stone scutters downwards. She reaches to catch it and loses her footing, gasping as she falls, saving herself by grabbing a gargoyle’s ear. Her feet scramble on the wet slates and she manages to pull herself up as the twelfth clue comes to rest above the gutter, under its own steam. She rests for a moment, panting, hardly able to believe that she didn’t fall. That nobody below noticed.
Then on the street past County Hall, a lamplighter carrying a ladder points upwards. ‘Hey!’ he booms. ‘Lassie!’
She steps backwards, out of his line of sight and makes an assessment. The stone isn’t wedged where she wanted it, but neither is it obvious. The wind might dislodge the clue, but it isn’t windy now. And no doubt, Thom is coming. She must flee. She scrambles back into the church and thunders down the stairs in a panic, pulling herself together with deliberation before emerging into the rear of the nave. As she steps onto the flagstones, she draws the green cape round her body so that the damage to her clothes isn’t visible. She tells herself she must simply disappear into the darkness. There’s a kerfuffle at the door, the lamplighter, having divested himself of his ladder, is explaining loudly to one of the ministers that he’s seen a woman on the roof. Araminta ducks behind the pulpit. The church is lit only by candles, and now the windows are darkening, it’s getting dimmer and dimmer. She pulls up the hood to shield her face. The minister is remonstrating with the lamplighter and it looks as if he might get rid of him when suddenly Thom appears in the doorway and realises immediately that the man is talking about her. The concerns of a gentleman are a different proposition. Thom raises his voice. ‘My sister. Quite mad. Widowed.’ She catches the concern in his tone. ‘I’m afraid what she might do...’ The charlatan. This is how it happens, she thinks. This is what the lady in the newspaper had to endure. Araminta feels anger stir in her belly. He had her locked in that room inthis shabby guise of caring. By lying that they’re related. That she’s somehow mad. And nobody asked. Nobody checked. How dare they? The minister doesn’t question Thom’s story any more than it seems the men who jailed her did. He points towards the doorway that leads to the staircase. Araminta watches Thom pass through it, scarcely able to believe that he doesn’t notice her. But he’s focussed on going upwards. He thinks she’s there. She can hear his first few steps, hammering up the stairs, so she takes her chance, moving smooth and low past the pews, towards the main door. The minister is talking to a congregant. Just as she reaches the exit he looks up.
‘Madam,’ he says loudly. He makes a movement as if to flag her down, but she keeps going, gives an elegant nod and steps outside.
The lamplighter is smoking on the setts as she emerges into the freezing dusk.
‘Ha!’ he lets out. Perhaps it’s the cape. ‘I’ve caught you bonnie now.’
Araminta silently puts her finger to her lips, her mind racing over which direction she ought to take as she makes off as fast as she can across Parliament Square and down the steps to the Cowgate. The minister emerges. ‘Madam!’ he exclaims again, but she doesn’t stop. St Giles’s roof is not afforded a view in this direction. It burns her that Thom has got away with his lies. But, she reasons, she’s shot three bullets into a tomb and climbed onto the roof of the cathedral. She must keep going. Casting a glance behind she sees the minister in conversation with the lamplighter, as they decide whether to pursue her. She continues swiftly down the close.
A drunk man birls out of a door. ‘Och, lassie,’ he says, wagging a finger. But she presses onwards down the hill past Hingy’s house, superstition be damned. At the bottom, she glances back again. The lamplighter loiters at the top of the stairs. Theminister, she concludes, must have gone to raise the alarm. Glancing left and right, she thinks that the road east will take her to the church where she first met Sister Winifred. She knows nobody in that direction so instead she turns westwards. She’s glad the light is fading and that her clothes are dark. Her senses heightened, she takes off, feeling the cold so keenly that her teeth chatter. She smells burning coal and a tinge of hops from cheap beer being brewed. A child crying. Two men laughing. The sound of a drum far off. Now and again she glances over her shoulder but it seems she’s not being followed, or at least, her pursuers are far enough behind. She keeps her head down for Thom is sure to come after her and the lamplighter saw the direction she took. She must go as fast as she can and not draw notice; that’s the main thing.
After perhaps three hundred yards, the road opens onto a paved market with the castle above. The Grassmarket, she thinks, recalling the name from Aunt Eilidh’s maps and the view of it from above when she visited Colonel Fraser. She keeps to the south side of the cobbles, as far from the public houses as she can. An old woman slumped in a doorway snores suddenly, and the sound makes Araminta jump but she doesn’t stop. Head down, she takes the muddy bow on the far side of the square into a rats’ nest of streets with ramshackle tenements and tumbledown hostels on either side.
‘Hello, lovely,’ a male voice says and a hand catches her arm, but she pulls away. ‘You’re not a cheery one, are you?’ She doesn’t stop to remonstrate, and as she turns, Harry Thom and two men in uniform appear in view on the far side of the market square. She starts to run beyond the tenements, dodging in and out until she emerges at a rough patch of waste ground. Ahead in the distance, there’s a road along which an old cart pulled by a Clydesdale is being driven by a nun.
