“You will be careful? This man, Mr. Elias...” The rest of it went unspoken simply because I had no idea wot to say.
Munro had lived on the streets and knew them well, not unlike the man he was determined to find. Yet...
“Are ye worrit?”
“The man is dangerous,” I replied when he obviously found something amusing.
“He’s murdered two people, and might have killed Kip at the Grassmarket, if...”
“If ye hadna stopped him and been injured for it?”
The man could be so frustrating.
“He doesna care who his next victim will be. Ye heard yerself wot Kip told us.”
He reached out and touched my bruised cheek.
“Then ye might speak to yer friends, to see wot might be done about the man? Perhaps run over by a carter or a tram?” he suggested, the amusement still there.
Friends? Wot was he talking about?
“The crows that seem to follow ye about. ’Tis said they bring messages to those who understand them. Ye might persuade them to help me find the man.”
“Munro...!” This was a new side to him, to make light of something dangerous, reckless some would say.
“If I have not returned by morning,” he added, “then the thieves will be picking at me bones.”
This side of him, how easily he made light of his own death, left a strange hollow feeling deep inside. And then he was gone.
I crossed the parlour and watched from the window as he disappeared into the night as easily as the ‘thieves’ he had spoken of.
I preferred when he glared and shouted at me.
13
Munro
There were parts of Edinburgh that never slept. The brothels along Rose Street and at the Cowgate. Then there was Nicholson Street in the theatre district, with marquee lights that advertised pantomimes, animal acts, and ‘other’ entertainments.
He knew it well from when he and Angus Brodie worked the streets, legitimate work for two lads when it could be found, and otherwise when it could not.
Such were those early years both had worked hard to leave behind. And now he’d come back.
It was more than the whisky trade he handled for Lady Antonia. It was almost as if he was searching for himself at the same time he was there for Lily Montgomery.
From stories he’d heard since she arrived in London some years before, she no doubt knew some of these places as well—a young girl forced to live in a brothel. She no doubt saw and heard things, found a friend as he had, and learned to survive.
He would not have allowed her to return here. She had found her place. She was educated, strong, and stubborn. She had a future that few had when they began where she had.
Yet, she came back. To find her past. And now she stayed, for a friend, determined to find the person responsible for the woman’s murder.
He wanted to give her that reckoning without even fully understanding the reasons, and so he put the word out that he was looking for a whore who went by the name of Big Kate and the man who dressed like a performer at the theatre.
‘Ye might speak to yer friends,’ he told Lily. Those glossy black thieves who owned the skies at night and what was left in the streets when morning came.
Not that he believed it or tales about the creatures that others believed: one crow for sorrow, two for laughter, and so on... something about six crows for gold, seven for a secret...
But he saw something in the expression on her face when they parted. Did she believe it?
