Chapter 2

 

A few miles away, Charlotte Liddell was also waking up. Stretching, she pushed her legs down the bed. With a piercing shriek, she drew them up again. Her linen sheets were as cold as ice. She was wideawake now, catapulted into the painful awareness that her mouth was dry, her stomach sour and her head aching. Everyone at Eastfield House had drunk themselves into a stupor last night. Both above and below stairs. It wasn’t an uncommon occurrence.

She and her brother Cosmo really shouldn’t tolerate it from the servants. She’d bawl them out about it today. Just as soon as her head hurt less than it did right now. She reached out one hand to the other side of the big high bed. The sheets were cold there too. She couldn’t quite remember if she’d had a bedfellow last night, had only a confused recollection of slurred words and thrashing limbs.

Propping herself up on her elbows, she screeched out a name. ‘Joshua!’ The young African boy acted as her personal footman. The glorified cupboard which was his bedroom was a few yards along the corridor from her own grand one.

‘Where are you, you damned little black slug? Go down to the kitchen right now and get one of those bloody lazy good-for-nothings to come up here immediately. My fire has gone out overnight. Am I to freeze to death?’

Silence. No hurried young footsteps approaching her bedroom door. Nothing.

It took her a minute or two to sit up and prepare to slide her feet and legs down onto the floor. Waiting for her swimming head to settle, she spat out a few filthy words. ‘Where are you?’ she yelled again. ‘I want you in here. Right now! Do you want more of what you got yesterday?’

She smiled, reliving how the boy had been tormented. Seeing again how they had forced him to watch his friend being flogged. All done on her orders. The Smart boy was a runaway from the Eastfield coal mine. He’d got no more than he’d deserved.

Pulling on her wrapper, she stumbled along the corridor to Joshua’s bedroom, shrieking for her lady’s maid as she went. She stood for a moment blinking at the pallet on the floor which was the boy’s bed before the young woman came up behind her. Whirling round, Charlotte slapped her hard across the face. ‘Where is he?’ she demanded. ‘Where has he gone?’

‘How should I ken?’ the girl asked. ‘Were we no’ all blootered last night?’

That earned her another slap. ‘Ow!’ she yelped, rubbing her cheek and casting Charlotte a baleful look.

‘Stop whining! Go and get everyone out of their beds! I want this house searched from top to bottom!’

 

Once the search had established Joshua was indeed gone, Charlotte stood at the open front door of Eastfield House and shrieked some more.

‘Bloody hell, Charlotte,’ drawled Cosmo, ‘give it a rest. My head aches enough as it is.’

‘Mine too,’ said his friend Arthur Menzies of Edmonstone. In their nightshirts and banyans, both men lay stretched out on two luxurious red velvet sofas. Trimmed with gilded wood, those were set at right angles to each other in the grand entrance lobby of the house. The two men had taken no part in the search for Joshua, leaving that to the servants.

Charlotte had sent one of the footmen to order the chief overseer of the mine to check the outbuilding where the Smart brat had been thrown yesterday afternoon after he’d been flogged. Both men were walking back to the house now. Behind them stood the pithead and the two rows of miners’ cottages which faced each other across it. The footman slid off towards the side of the house, heading for the kitchen door. The overseer stopped at the foot of the wide front steps.

‘Gone,’ he said. ‘Nae sign o’ him. Ah dinna think he could have got away on his own. He was gey puggled after he was flogged.’

‘Of course he didn’t get away on his own!’ snapped Charlotte. ‘The little black slug must have helped him. Go and look for them!’

‘Where?’ the overseer demanded. Powerfully built, he folded his beefy arms across his chest and gave Charlotte back look for look. Hostile. Challenging. Knowing. Having the impertinence to come to the front door. All of which led Edmonstone to an inescapable conclusion. She must have coupled with the brute, which surprised him not at all. She had the morals of a farm cat.

She had chosen this man to administer the flogging yesterday. He’d organized the young black’s punishment too, stripping the boy naked before bucket after bucket of freezing cold water was flung over him until he was shivering, trembling and distraught. Not that Edmonstone cared. Some were born to suffer.

‘They’re no’ here. So where should I look, mistress?’

‘Wherever they’ve gone, you dolt! Follow their trail! Ask people if they saw them.’ She laughed. An unpleasant sound. ‘Hard not to notice Joshua.’

Arthur Menzies came upright, swinging his legs over the front of the sofa. ‘Charlotte…’

She ignored him, narrowing her eyes. Good God, she must be trying some thinking. Not her strong suit. ’Twas as though an idea was hovering but her claret and brandy clouded brain was struggling to bring it into focus. Didn’t stop her from rattling out an order. ‘Find out if they went through Musselburgh. You’d better take a horse from the stables.’

Another leer from the man standing at the foot of the front steps. The stables. That must be where he and Charlotte met. Edmonstone could imagine them there, rutting like animals on top of a horse blanket laid on a pile of straw. Rutting like an animal was always Charlotte’s preferred style.

Her intimacy with this man clearly entitled him to damn all in her eyes. Certainly not to look at or speak to her the way he was doing now. Only her rage at the dual escape could have prompted her to offer the use of one of the horses to pursue the runaways. An idea Arthur Menzies had to nip in the bud right now. The overseer pre-empted him.

‘It was dark when they left. Wha would hae seen them in Musselburgh? How dae ye ken they went there?’

‘Don’t answer me back! Or I’ll have you flogged too!’

The leer gave way to scornful disbelief. It would be a brave man who would agree to flog this man. Or a very foolish one. Everyone at Eastfield feared him: and his vicious fists and feet.

‘Charlotte,’ Arthur Menzies said again. ‘Have you forgotten that we are confined to the house till further notice by the orders of Captain Catto? With no one else allowed to leave the estate? While I’m at it, I believe you were supposed to go to Lady Bruce’s house at Leith yesterday. Also on his orders, which you chose to disobey.’

She whirled round to him. ‘Disobey?’ she repeated, her voice shrill with disbelief. ‘His orders? Pray tell, Arthur, from where does the bloody man derive his authority? Who exactly is Captain Robert Catto to command the Liddells?’ she demanded, pronouncing each part of that name with vicious sarcasm. Her venom towards the man who bore it was palpable. Clearly Catto had not been tempted by Charlotte’s charms. No doubt doubly galling when she’d probably had a wee fancy for him. Anyone in breeches.

He has the authority. From two sources. A confusing idea in many ways. Edmonstone too was struggling to focus his thoughts. Especially about that conundrum. It didn’t help that Charlotte was still screaming her head off. Damn the bloody bitch. She was hard work.

‘Charlotte,’ he said, ‘think about this. How would we know where to look for them?’

‘Yes, Charlotte,’ Cosmo asked. He sat up, looking pleased with himself, ‘how would we know that?’ He seldom had an original thought in his primped and pampered head but he was quick to parrot someone else’s.

Struggling to hold on to his temper, Arthur Menzies walked over to her. ‘Why don’t we close this door and go through and have some breakfast?’ He swung the door shut, paying no heed to the man standing at the foot of the steps. ‘Cosmo?’

‘Yes. That’s the thing to do. Nothing else we can do. Have to bide here for the time being.’ He stood up, snapping his fingers at the waiting footman. ‘Breakfast. See to it.’

Charlotte’s contemptuous gaze washed over her brother and her lover. One of her many lovers, Arthur thought sourly.

‘So we should drink coffee and eat eggs and meekly accept that our property has been stolen from us?’ She pointed towards herself. ‘Some of which property I took it upon myself to reclaim before I was forced to leave Edinburgh. Wrote to Charles Paterson, our damn fool of a lawyer. Told him Robert Catto had been harbouring the Smart girl and her brother. Making him not a fit and proper person to command the Town Guard.’

Arthur Menzies sucked in a breath. ‘You did what?’

She hadn’t heard him. Instead, she repeated a few of the words she had just uttered. ‘The Smart girl and her brother.’ The most unpleasant of smiles spread across her face. ‘Of course. Where else would they have gone?’

‘Charlotte—’

She ignored him. ‘I’ll have even more to tell Provost Coutts now.’

‘What do you mean – more to tell him?’

‘I wrote to him too,’ she said, her face glowing with triumph. ‘About Robert Catto. Requiring the bloody man to be immediately dismissed from his post. He ought to be cashiered. Turned out onto the street without a penny.’

On the point of firing back an angry rebuke, Edmonstone stopped short. The stupid little bitch had no idea what was really going on here. Yet somehow her words had struck a chord, made him think twice. About several things.

He had taken Robert Catto at his own valuation after the disaster of Daft Friday when the man had arrested him, Cosmo and the Jacobite agent in the private supper room at the Assembly Rooms in Edinburgh. Moments before, he had watched in disbelief as it instantly became clear the agent and Robert Catto were father and son. Long and bitterly estranged on Catto’s side, that too had been crystal clear.

So why had he had taken Catto’s word for it that he had subsequently allowed the Jacobite agent to escape, along with Jamie Buchan? That their hostile encounter at the Assembly Rooms had been mere play-acting? Dragging himself out of the alcohol-induced fog in which he’d spent the last few days, Arthur Menzies saw now how that didn’t make sense.

Something else made no bloody sense either. For God’s sake, Jamie Buchan had picked up a cushion and told Edmonstone and Cosmo to help him smother Catto, squeeze the last breath out of the man. It had been the Jacobite agent who had stopped them, aided by the surgeon-apothecary’s daughter. After which Robert Catto had ordered his brute of a sergeant to give him and Cosmo a kicking, in the place where it hurt most. Even the memory of it brought tears to Edmonstone’s eyes.

Why the fuck would Robert Catto then offer him an alliance, as long as he and Cosmo laid low at Eastfield for a while? Had the Town Guard captain played him for a fool? Smarting at the thought – by God, had he not endured enough humiliation on Daft Friday? – he followed Charlotte and Cosmo through to take breakfast.

Shutting out their inane bickering, he made a silent resolution. Stuck though he was here at Eastfield, somehow he would find out where Robert Catto’s loyalties truly lay.

 

‘Are you sure, Geordie?’ Her arms folded, Christian looked down at him. ‘There’s no problem about you staying here in the library.’

‘I’m sure, Miss Kirsty.’ The boy was very pale but she could not miss the look of determination on his face. With Joshua’s help, she’d managed to get him into one of the armchairs, two soft pillows behind his back. Joshua had previously helped him into the old nightshirt, also discreetly, behind the screen. Geordie had eaten his porridge, although he’d refused a second helping.

Sitting perched on the edge of the other armchair, Joshua looked anxiously at his friend. ‘I’m thinking you should let yourself be advised by Miss Rankeillor, Geordie.’

Geordie closed his eyes for a moment. ‘I want to go upstairs.’

Christian and Joshua exchanged a look. However slowly they took the stairs, this was going to hurt. Perhaps she’d made a mistake in telling him there was a hurly bed in the room where his sister Alice was still sleeping. Her plan had been to fetch her down to the library to be reunited with her wee brother and for Geordie to move up to the hurly bed tomorrow or the next day.

‘I want to go upstairs,’ he said again. He opened his eyes and looked at her where she stood gazing down at him. ‘Please, miss.’

Christian unfolded her arms. ‘Well, I suppose we’d better get you up there then. Joshua?’