‘Are these all right for you, Father?’
Christian and Patrick were in the library. He was sitting at the spectacularly untidy dining table which served as his desk and she was standing beside him. He’d been looking through her latest anatomical drawings. She had made larger scale copies of earlier sketches she had drawn after two dissections carried out in November and early December.
‘Much more than all right,’ he assured her. ‘Excellent as your drawings always are.’ He used them as an aid to teaching his students at the Old College. That she was the anatomical artist was a well-kept secret. The ladies who set the rules by which society in Edinburgh was governed would he horrified to learn a young unmarried girl drew the naked cadavers of both men and women. Or they would pretend to be.
‘Excellent,’ Patrick said again, holding the drawings in his two hands. ‘Now, where shall we put these until they’re needed?’ He grimaced. ‘If I havena been clapped in irons afore classes start again.’
‘Of course they’ll be needed!’ To her own ears her supposed confidence sounded as flat as a cracked bell. Smiling up at her, wigless as he usually was at home, his own fair hair cut short, Patrick seemed to be taking strength from it.
She was feeling anything but strong this morning, worn out after a restless night. Tossing and turning. Thinking and worrying. Falling into a fitful sleep only to wake up from a succession of terrible nightmares. Nightmares whose details evaporated as soon as she woke up but left her with the fear. Her heart pounding and her mouth dry. Knowing she’d been dreaming about dreadful things happening to everyone she loved and cared about.
Her father. Betty, Mary and Tibby. Alice, Geordie and Joshua. Her friends. Robert Catto.
‘Are you all right, lass? You’re looking a wee bittie tired.’
She blinked, bringing herself back to the here and now, and took the drawings from him. ‘I’ll keep these safe in a folio until your classes start up again. After I’ve put them away I’m going through to the shop to check we have enough physic. You know how people save their ailments up over the Daft Days.’ She was already heading towards her own smaller and infinitely tidier desk and the cabinet which sat beside it.
‘Indeed,’ Patrick said, ‘only tae present themselves in a steady stream o’ misery in the first few days o’ the New Year. Shall I come through and help you, my dear?’
‘Och no, it won’t take me long. Besides, you said you had some other papers to go through before we eat.’
She was glad she had her back to him. For in the midst of her troubled night an idea had come to her. She knew where she and Robert Catto could meet in private.
Once she had cleaned and put away the pestle and mortar and the little brass scales, she replaced the last two newly filled blue and white pottery apothecary’s jars on the wooden shelves behind the counter. Those were painted apple-green. ‘Blue and green should never be seen,’ she muttered to herself. ‘And you’re havering, Kirsty Rankeillor. Get on with it. He’ll be here soon.’
She was not thinking of her father. As she had not really needed to check their stocks of physic. Always well prepared, she had done so a week ago, so there had been very little to do. What she had wanted was to be in the shop on her own, knowing her father was busy behind the closed double doors which led from the shop into the library while Betty and everyone else was either in the kitchen or upstairs.
Nobody could see her from the street, either. The shop door was closed, a blind of stiff cream-coloured paper drawn down over the window in the top of it. The window shutters were also closed, although the breaks between the panels of wood which formed them allowed plenty of light to spill into the shop. It looked like it was a really sunny day out there now.
Leaning back against the solid wood of the shop counter, she tapped her thumb nail against her teeth. He’ll be here soon. Her eyes fluttered shut. In her mind’s eye she could see Robert Catto striding towards her through the streets of Edinburgh. Or leaping over the garden walls which lay between the guard-house and Infirmary Street, the skirts of his long leather coat flying out as he walked. As eager to reach her as she was for him to arrive.
She wanted him so much, with a physical desire she had never before experienced. She longed to feel his kiss again, longed to feel his arms about her. Holding her close. Caressing her. One hand rising to cup her breast. She lowered her own hand, spreading her fingers out over her clothes to still the flutters inside her stomach.
Her eyes snapped open. How could she even be contemplating lying with Robert Catto? How could she? This thought too had troubled her throughout the night. He was the enemy, hostile to everything she held dear. Implacably opposed to the Stuart Cause, a danger to her father, their friends and herself. Determined to do his duty to German Geordie and the House of Hanover. Fooling those friends he shared their Jacobite loyalties with the sole aim of enticing them ever further into the trap he had been laying since he had arrived in Edinburgh.
She should have told Agnes Moncur and Murdo Robertson Robert Catto was not what he seemed. Instead, on Christmas Eve, she had timed the delivery of her last batch of physic to the hospital knowing both would be busy on the ward round. She could still have given them a warning, tucked a wee note inside one of the two wicker baskets which held the physic.
He is not on our side. That was all she would have needed to write.
Only she hadn’t. Because she had fallen in love with him. Because she feared the consequences to him if he was unmasked. She had chosen Robert Catto over the Cause. Flooded with guilt, she bent forward and buried her face in her hands.
Behind her, one of the double doors from the lobby into the shop creaked open. Head snapping up, Christian whirled round. ‘B-Betty?’ she stuttered.
With a little trill, Lucy the cat, more white than black, leapt in one lithe movement up onto the shop counter, calling forth a fierce whisper of reproach from her mistress, using the cat’s full Sunday name. ‘Och, Lucrezia Borgia, what a fright you gave me!’
Only once her heartbeat had begun to slow down to its normal rate did she address the cat again, speaking this time in a soft murmur. ‘That was a guilty conscience talking, was it not? You’re not supposed to be up here, puss,’ she added, though she made no move to lift the cat down onto the floor.
Instead, she watched as Lucy set about washing herself, tiny pink tongue darting in and out of her mouth. The frantic activity stopped as abruptly as it had started. ‘That was a quick wash. A lick and promise, is it? Och, dinna look at me like that!’ she implored, as the cat surveyed her out of bright and all-knowing eyes.
She tickled the top of the furry head with her fingers, murmuring soft words, hardly knowing what she was saying. ‘He likes you, you know. Appropriate for a man called Catto, don’t you think?’
The voice of the man called Catto rang round her head. No turning back. Agreed?
Yesterday morning he’d asked her to cup her hands, wrapped his own around them, told her he was placing his heart there for safe-keeping, told her his home would be in her hands. She had promised she would keep his heart safe. As he had promised he would do his best for her father and their friends.
Still she stood there, tormented by indecision. Even if she took this next step, how would it be possible for them to meet? What if they did manage to and Betty and her father found out? He would be so disappointed in her. Betty would be distraught.
No turning back. Agreed?
She had agreed, made him a promise. Because when she’d been waiting for him to return after rescuing Geordie and Joshua from Eastfield she had thought how it would be if he didn’t come back. How she would spend the rest of her life longing for the touch of his hand and the sound of his voice. How she would spend the rest of her life wishing they had made love to each other.
Christian lifted her chin. Feeling she was stepping over an invisible line taking her from safety into danger, she selected one of the household keys which hung on a steel ring and chain at her waist. It opened a locked cupboard in the row which ran along the wall behind the counter. There were a few keys inside there too, seldom used but kept safe for whenever they might be needed. She lifted two sturdy ones off their hooks.
Locking the cupboard again, she stood up straight and took a breath, deep enough to slacken her grip. The keys slipped out of her fingers and fell with a clatter onto the wooden floor. Sinking into a crouch, she covered them with one hand to stop the noise, her heart once again racing. Springing to her feet, she slipped the keys into the quilted pocket she wore under her gown, tied around her waist by a narrow linen tape.
Left ajar by Lucy, one of the doors out into the lobby creaked again.