Catto left The White Horse and walked up the Canongate. Crossing over the causeway, he headed off through a close which would lead him to the Cowgate Port. Even though he was approaching Infirmary Street from a different direction than usual, it seemed a good idea to also take a less than direct route. He’d made it his business as soon as he’d arrived in Edinburgh back in November to explore as many shortcuts and alternative ways of getting from one place to another as he could find.
He'd grown to like this one, taking him as it did past one of the town’s bowling greens and between two long narrow vegetable gardens, where the tall tenements stretching back from the Canongate gave way to more open views. He could feel a greater freshness in the air, his nose telling him these gardens had not received a delivery in the early hours of this morning of what were sarcastically termed the flowers o’ Edinburgh.
If you were lucky, the citizens of the Scottish capital waited a decent interval after the town gates were shut at 10 o’clock at night before shouting ‘Gardyloo!’, sticking their arms out of the windows of their tenement lands and upending their chamber pots onto the street below. However many storeys down that might be. The night soil scavengers had the unenviable overnight task of collecting the mixture of human waste, ashes and vegetable peelings and putting it all in carts to be taken away to nourish nursery gardens and farmers’ fields.
Pausing for a moment, Catto raised his face to drink in the cleaner air and the expanded vista. Above the rooftops of the Palace of Holyroodhouse, the old residence of the Stuart kings and queens, the sloping ridge of Salisbury Crags rose up into the winter blue sky. Soaring behind and above was the rugged mountain they called Arthur’s Seat. A volcano in ancient times, so he’d been told. Countless thousands of years ago, he supposed, when the world was young. Much farther back even than the legendary King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.
The world was old now, and tired. Human beings kept making the same mistakes, over and over again. Kept hurting their fellow men and women, over and over again. As he and Kirsty Rankeillor seemed destined to hurt each other. In the situation in which they found themselves, how could it be otherwise?
Last night as he had vaulted his way over the walls on his way back from Infirmary Street and dared to dream, the idea he had already tentatively mentioned to her had taken full shape. Why should he not resign his commission in Guise’s and become permanent Captain of the Edinburgh Town Guard?
He was more than capable of filling the position, knew exactly how he would go about it. He would continue knocking the men into shape, make this part-time militia a force to be reckoned with. He would consult with Professor MacLaurin at Edinburgh University over the parlous state of Edinburgh’s city walls and other defences.
Catto had met MacLaurin earlier in December. The good professor feared it would be all too easy for a Jacobite army to breach those defences. Catto agreed with him. Repair and strengthening ought to be undertaken as a matter of urgency. Before a Jacobite army simply scrambled over those crumbling stones and took control of the city. Catto’s mouth tightened. Which might – God Almighty – be sooner rather than later.
To be sure, Edinburgh’s Lord Provost John Coutts likely wouldn’t be happy about any repairs and strengthening of the walls. Duncan Forbes of Culloden suspected Coutts had connived at their decline into their current sorry state, believing the man to be a covert Jacobite, secretly sympathetic to the Stuart Cause. Like Duncan Forbes, Coutts had yet to return to Edinburgh after a prolonged Christmas visit elsewhere.
Once Lord President Forbes came back to Edinburgh, the pretence that Catto too was a covert Jacobite would end. It would have to. The intelligence he had gathered, the dispatch from Glasgow adding to the evidence of a very real threat of armed rebellion, meant action had to be taken. Arthur Menzies of Edmonstone, Cosmo Liddell and the other inept Jacobite plotters Catto had fooled were in for a very rude awakening.
Catto suspected Culloden would strike hard bargains with all of them, discreetly of course. Not only because that was the Lord President’s preferred way of going about things but also in the hope of flushing out yet more Stuart sympathisers. The chances were high he would tell them – make that order them – to go about their lives as normal. Which meant they would be out and about in the world again. Where they would be baying for Robert Catto’s blood.
Hideous unease seized him as he stood there. Arthur Menzies and Cosmo Liddell now knew the secret of who his father was. Loathing the deception, he’d been forced to use it as a way of convincing them he was indeed sympathetic to the Stuart Cause.
Despite the threats Culloden would be holding over their heads, they would still be free to move around, talk to others, drip poison in their ears. Couple Catto’s parentage with the inevitable realization he had been working for the Lord President all along and Edinburgh’s Jacobites could paint him as not to be trusted by either side. That wouldn’t do his chances of advancement much good, either in Guise’s or as permanent Captain of the Town Guard.
On top of all this, how could he expect Christian Rankeillor to forgive him for gathering information against her father and their friends? In Meg Wood’s brother, he now had confirmation another of those friends should be added to the tally. How could he expect her to allow him to make love to her, far less want to spend the rest of her life with him? He was back in Cloud Cuckoo Land.
’Twas worse even than that. Much, much worse. A few days ago he had seen another of her closest friends onto the boat for Banff. He had persuaded Anna Gordon, against her own better judgement, that she could best help Christian Rankeillor by leaving Edinburgh before Christmas. He knew very well that she too was a committed Jacobite, might well have been involved in the plot to smuggle the Jacobite agent out of the city. But, God forgive him, it had suited him to leave Kirsty Rankeillor isolated.
He had stayed there on The Shore at Leith for a while, watching as the vessel glided out through Leith Roads to the wider Firth of Forth and the open sea beyond. Until Anna Gordon, standing on the deck looking back at him, had grown smaller and smaller and he could no longer see the worried expression on her face. It had come to him then what part the uncaring fates had assigned to him in this developing drama. He was the angel of death and the destroyer of worlds.
He could destroy Christian Rankeillor’s world. He was already on the way to doing so. Whichever way you looked at it. If her Jacobite friends found out about her and him, she would be tainted forever in their eyes. His blood ran cold at the thought of what might happen to her if – despite all the odds against it - a rising in favour of the Stuarts met with success.
His dream of yesterday had not stood up to the clear, cruel light of day. All that was left to him was duty. He started walking again. One foot in front of the other.
Emerging a few strides below where St Mary’s Wynd became the Pleasance, he called in at the Cowgate Port to exchange a few words with the guards there.
‘Anything to report?’
‘Been a quiet day so far. That’s the way we like it, young Captain Catto, eh?’
He went on through the High School Yards and up to the Rankeillor house. Despite his despair, he remained aware of a flicker of hope. As though he had lost his footing on Salisbury Crags and slid over the edge of the ridge but was up there holding on for dear life, clinging on by his fingertips.