Chapter 21

 

He walked up the High Street with a spring in his step, relishing the feel of the big solid keys against his chest. There was a tune running through his head, one he remembered hearing played on the fiddle, fast, lively and rumbustious. If the name came to him, he would ask the fiddler at what had become a favourite howff here in Edinburgh to play it for him.

’Twas the sort of tune that set your feet tapping and made you want to leap up and grab a girl by the waist and dance her round the room. Not any girl. Not any more. Only one special girl from now on. Pity you couldn’t take women into taverns. Not respectable young ladies anyway.

He had danced with Christian Rankeillor at the Daft Friday Ball at the Assembly Rooms, farther up the High Street. That had been a stately measure, stylized and slow, with very little contact between the dancers other than a sedate touch of the hand, the merest meeting of palms and fingertips. He longed to dance with her to a Highland air, a strathspey or a reel.

He knew his outward persona could be stern, even dour. He had cultivated that. Armour against the world. Defence against being hurt again as he had been before. Now, here in Edinburgh, despite all the plotting swirling around them both, despite his concern for her, despite how low his mood had been earlier today, he had discovered he was capable of being happier than he had ever imagined he would be again. Nor was he ready to surrender his dream of the future quite yet. Or at all. There had to be a way.

He looked across the High Street at the milliner’s shop behind and above where a quite different trade was carried on. Lizzie Gibson wouldn’t be back from Leith yet. When she was he would go and see her, thank her again for the warning she’d given him. Would he tell her why he would not be visiting her again? Aye, he would. Would he tell her the name of the girl who had changed him, found the part of himself which had got lost? Probably. Knowing Kirsty Rankeillor was looking after Alice Smart, Lizzie might well have guessed anyway.

Catto drew level with the guard-house, raising a hand in greeting to the man on duty at its door. He walked farther up the High Street, heading for the luckenbooths clustered together in a ramshackle building on Parliament Square in the lea of the soaring High Kirk of St Giles. The compact little wooden shops and booths housed a variety of craftsmen. His first call was to a locksmith.

The man promised the copies of the keys Catto handed him would be ready around noon the following day. He’d asked him to make three copies of each. She could put the originals back in their usual place and keep a pair for herself. Less chance of them being discovered that way. Bidding the locksmith farewell, Catto stood for a moment on the cobblestones of Parliament Square, thinking about those keys.

The keys to her heart. The keys to their mutual pleasure. He did not underestimate her decision to lie with him. It was a huge step for a girl like her to take and an irrevocable one. He did not underestimate the risk she would be running that her father or her housekeeper might somehow find out. Yet she was ready and willing. She must be nervous about the actual act, though. Her first time.

For a moment he stood there, balancing on a knife-edge of tenderness and desire. When she’d told him she wanted to lie with him, he’d told her she had given him a gift. He ought to give her a gift in return. His eyes had been fixed, unseeing, on the row of luckenbooths. Now he focussed in on one of them, where he had previously observed a silversmith practiced his trade.

 

Charlotte Liddell was as vocal in bed as everywhere else, loudly and coarsely expressing her pleasure, demanding more of what she wanted, batting away any touch which didn’t please her. The rougher he was with her, the more she liked it. Which was fine by Arthur Menzies of Edmonstone. He liked it rough too. When the chit was unwilling, so much the better.

Charlotte was only too willing. When she was in the mood. There was no tenderness in her and Edmonstone’s relationship. If you could dignify their coupling by calling it that. Nor did they like each other very much. Not at all, really. But he had to keep her and her brother sweet. The Cause needed their money. Or would do, when the time came.

Sitting up, Arthur Menzies swung his legs over the side of the bed. They’d spent the afternoon there and now he was ready to get up, get dressed, go downstairs and meet up with Cosmo to start on the claret and have some masculine company before dinner. Even if Charlotte's brother barely had the brainpower or concentration to discuss anything of importance. Not that Arthur shared much with him anyway. Especially when it came to political matters.

‘Stay,’ Charlotte commanded, grabbing his bare arm. ‘I want you to tell me what the three of you did to the little Smart trollop.’

He half turned to look at her where she lay back against a mountain of fine linen pillows, her fair hair spreading out across them. ‘I’ve told you that already, Charlotte.’

‘Tell me again.’ A gloating look slid across her face. ‘I like to hear how she cried and screamed and begged you all to stop. I like to hear exactly what you did to her.’

‘You really are a vicious bitch,’ he observed, followed by a yell of pain when she pinched his arm hard before releasing it. Opening her eyes wide, she stretched out, her breasts bouncing in response. ‘You enjoyed telling me, Arthur. You know you did. Go on,’ she wheedled, ‘tell me again.’

‘No,’ he said, all at once sick of her. She was as stupid as her brother. ‘I’m going. I’ll see you at dinner.’

Charlotte came up onto her elbow, her hair flowing over her arm. ‘When we get them back – the Smart girl and her brother and Joshua – you could do it all again.’ Her eyes gleamed. ‘Maybe I could watch.’

He stared at her, in distaste and incomprehension. The pleasure with an unwilling and untouched girl was in the spoiling, the forcing, the destruction of innocence. The idea of joining with such soiled goods for a second time was disgusting. Like getting up in the morning and pulling on the crumpled and sweaty shirt you’d dropped on the floor the night before.

Charlotte was still plotting her revenge, asking Edmonstone if he too had been aware of a sexual frisson as they had watched knotted leather lacerating the pale skin of the Smart boy’s back. Only she put the question in much coarser terms, laughing wildly without waiting for an answer.

‘When we get him back, we’ll flog him again,’ she said, eyes gleaming and lips parted. ‘It’ll hurt so much more now the skin is broken.’

Retrieving his nightshirt and banyan from the arm of the chair where he had laid them, Edmonstone turned and spoke. ‘His skin will have healed by the time you get him back, Charlotte. If you get him back.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Arthur,’ she snapped, sitting up and glaring at him. ‘Of course we’ll get him back. The other two as well. All three of them are ours by right, mine and Cosmo’s. Our useless lawyer had better be doing something about that right now!’

Edmonstone pulled his nightshirt over his head. He would change into his evening clothes in the bedchamber he thought of as his own here at Eastfield before he went downstairs. ‘It might not be so easy.’

Charlotte launched into a stream of invective, cursing him, Charles Paterson, Robert Catto and that superior little bitch Kirsty Rankeillor. ‘Who’ she demanded, ‘does she think she is to look down her nose at me? The daughter of a sawbones? You should have seen how she smirked when she saw my painting of the Prince. Everyone else thought it was beautiful!’

No, Charlotte, everyone else lied. Arthur Menzies had seen the painting too. Charlotte continued to rant. He stepped back to the bed, seizing her flailing arms, trying to calm her down. Bloody hell, she really was hard work. ‘You cannot know for certain she has taken them in.’

‘Oh, I know all right. She’s going to regret it. I can promise her that. I’ll see her in the gutter.’ The angry movements of her arms had stopped, as her voice had grown softer: laced through with venom.

‘What idea has crept into that head of yours, Charlotte? I can see from your face it’s not a pleasant one.’

‘How do you fancy teaching Kirsty Rankeillor a lesson, Arthur? One she’ll never forget. One she’ll never recover from. She won’t be acting all superior with anyone after that! She really will be in the gutter!’ She laughed wildly. ‘All three of you together, like you did with the Smart girl.’

A vicious bitch and a stupid one too. You didn’t force a woman of your own class. You might want to but you couldn’t take the risk. A girl like Kirsty Rankeillor was protected by her position, her father and their many friends. Edmonstone didn’t deny he might fancy a taste of the prim and proper surgeon-apothecary’s daughter. Whenever he’d encountered her at a social gathering he’d always had the feeling she was looking down her nose at him too.

She’d also witnessed his humiliation at the Assembly Rooms, when Catto had ordered him and Cosmo to be subjected to that kicking in the balls. Revenge would be sweet – but he didn’t want to end up in the Tolbooth. Much though he disliked it, there was another consideration too.

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Charlotte,’ he snapped. ‘She’s one of us. She and her father. Strong in the Cause.’

The expression on Charlotte’s face changed. Cunning. That’s how she looked now. He felt the stirrings of unease.

‘You sure of that, Arthur? That she and her father are strong in the Cause?’

‘What do you know?’ he demanded, gripping both of her wrists. ‘Tell me. Tell me now!’

Her eyes fluttered shut and she shifted on the bed, raising her shoulders and thrusting out her breasts. ‘Squeeze as hard as you like, Arthur. You know I like a firm hand.’

He released her wrists and spoke through gritted teeth. ‘Tell me what you know!’

‘I know she has a fancy for the Town Guard captain. I know he has a fancy for her. I’ve seen them together. He’s not strong in the Cause, is he now?’

Wrong, Charlotte. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Yet in that very moment, Edmonstone’s doubts about Robert Catto coalesced.

 

Fifteen hundred miles to the south, on a mild winter’s afternoon in faraway Italy, a young man leant forward over his writing desk, studying the document lying there. It had been drawn up and signed at the Jacobite court-in-exile here in Rome a few days before Christmas. It was an official declaration from his father James, appointing his elder son Regent of Scotland.

Charles Edward Stuart straightened up. Unable to contain his elation, he punched one hand into the cupped palm of the other. It was happening at last, oh, sweet Jesu, at long, long last. He squeezed his eyes tightly shut, his emotions threatening to overwhelm him. He would be the man who would win back not only Scotland but all his father’s kingdoms for the House of Stuart. Prove himself to his father and the whole wide world.

He opened his eyes again, commanding himself to be calm. He was 23 years old. Often he felt as though he’d lived double those years, spent a lifetime waiting for this chance to fulfil his destiny. He’d been born for this. Now his father had passed the standard to him and he would live up to what was expected of him. Meet and embrace his destiny.

In Rome and in Edinburgh, man planned and God laughed.