It was there, as easily as if I stood once more in the marketplace and the crows swirled overhead in that frenzied flight.
An omen some believed evil, I was told as a child, and I saw it again across the library—in images that slowly faded—that encounter at the Grassmarket.
I didn't understand it all those years before, only that it brought punishment as if the 'evil' could be beaten out of me. I had buried it deep inside me, refusing to acknowledge the foreknowledge of things, the strange whispers that came as warnings. Those moments when I felt the heat burn inside me. All of it smothered down so that no one would call me evil.
It was there now, a whisper as if someone else stood in that room.
“It was the same person who attacked me at the marketplace,” I struggled to acknowledge something I already knew was true.
There was no laughter now.
“Are ye certain?”
Iwas, even though it made no sense.
11
“Iknow it makes no sense, but he was there,” I insisted, certain of it as I paced the library floor, the memory of that encounter vivid, needing to understand the reason he had returned and had then attacked me. For what?
“He doesn’t know me, nor I him,” I tried to understand. “Why was he there?”
“Apparently he does know ye,” Munro replied. “Or someone does. A man such as the one who killed yer friend often works for another. And by the clothes he wears, he is well paid. Her murder was not for the usual reasons one sees in brothels.
“It would seem it has something to do with yerself. Wot else do ye have in yer bag that he might have been after?”
I had set my bag on the library table when we returned. I went to the table and emptied everything out—my notebook with that feather tucked inside after our visit to the taxidermist. But the person who attacked me had no way of knowing that I had found it.
There were also my gloves, the scarf I had purchased at the Grassmarket, my reticule with the little money I had left after paying Elizabeth for the room, and the letters Dory and I had exchanged.
Two years of letters, since I first asked her to make inquiries for me regarding the Foundling Hospital and a woman I vaguely remembered went by the name of Jacobson.
She was determined to find information about the Foundling Hospital for me, and had written of it in the last letter I had received from her several weeks earlier.
She once said at least she knew her father. He was mean and badly mistreated her, then threw her to the streets.
“At least I had that much. Some dinna want to know where they come from. But I think it helps to know. That way if I ever see him again on the street, I’ll throw a brick at him.”
“There could be somethin’ in the letters,” Munro suggested.
I thought the same and had gone through them after I found them in Dory’s secret hiding place. Yet I had to admit I might have missed something in one of them.
“It could help to go back through them.”
I was willing to do whatever it took to learn the reason my friend had been murdered. The thought that it had something to do with me...
“I’ll read them again.”
Munro nodded. “I want to pay a visit to Mr. Campbell and see what he might know about wot happened at the Grassmarket. It is one of the places in what he calls his territory where the merchants and vendors pay fer protection.”
He gave me a long look. There was something different in the expression on his face. A thought that he apparently chose to keep to himself.
“I will let Simon know that you will be staying. You will be safe enough here.”
There was more that he wanted to say. I sensed it.
The same that I had heard a dozen or more times in the past at Sussex Square in London.
“It’s not safe to be out and about for a young chit.”
