Fall From Grace (33 page)

‘How does that occur?’

Jean caught sight of herself in the dressing table mirror. She had waited up all night by Hannah’s bedside, and at least managed to change her clothes and underthings, but the plain grey gown she had thrown on made her appear to be a mortuary attendant.

She had also scrubbed her face, put nothing back on and my God, to her unblinking eyes, she looked her years and many more this November morning.

‘It must have been her,’ she muttered. ‘Rachel. Before she left. All my jewels, my beautiful pearls. Robbed.’

One thing a woman will rarely lie about is the state of her missing jewellery.

McLevy came to the conclusion that Jean might well be innocent of the conspiracy, though it was still possible that she had taken a part and then been double dealt when the plan fell to pieces.

So he fished further in deep waters.

‘All this took place under your nose, eh?’

‘Right under the very nostril,’ was her grim reply.

‘How was that possible?’

Was there cruel pleasure in this pursuit? Jealousy getting its own back for a scene in a lighted window?

‘That’s not like you Jean, the mistress of the Just Land twisted and turned like a fool.’

‘I was in love.’

This flat statement silenced the inspector for a moment and Jean, who had spoken to herself as much as to him, chewed a bitter cud, her thoughts lining up to torture their creator.

All this under her nose right enough, betrayed by her own paramour, the two of them laughing at her, ardent lovers themselves no doubt, sporting in the bed, laughing at her.

The older woman.

Twisted and turned. Humiliated.

She became aware of other laughter, the source of which was James McLevy.

‘Oh dear,’ he spluttered. ‘Oh dearie me. Oh dearie, dearie me.’

Now truth to tell, though there may have been an element of malicious enjoyment in this reaction, it was also the product of contradictory emotions. Something had been stirred by these four simple words.

I was in love
.

All his life McLevy had defended himself against madness and was not the passion of love a version of that?

Or madness an offshoot of love?

Whatever. In common with most men when faced with feelings that conflict like two boxers in the ring, he took refuge in laughter.

The splutter became a guffaw.

‘But you’re a bawdy-hoose keeper, love is what you buy and sell. That’s your stock in trade!’

‘
Lust
is my stock in trade,’ she answered, angered and rubbed raw by his apparent hilarity.

‘What’s the difference?’

‘Nothing you could recognise,’ she replied scathingly. ‘The only love you possess is for yourself and justice.’

McLevy’s eyes glistened with merriment; it was an aggravating sight.

‘Aye, you might well be correct there. Oh, dearie me.’

Of course incidental to all this was the fact that the inspector had now accepted that Jean was not part of the blackmailing plot.

But she did not feel in the least grateful at this deliverance and came at him savagely, claws unsheathed.

‘What woman would want you anyway? She’d have to be desperate and half blind.’

‘Only half?’

This caustic observation came from neither but the voice was unmistakable.

Hannah Semple stood in the doorway, hands clasped around the knob to steady her. She was arrayed in one of Jean’s nightgowns; big Annie Drummond and the mistress having eased her out of the previous night’s damp and dirty clothes into something less soiled.

Hannah also caught sight of herself in the mirror; the nightgown was perhaps more suited for Sleeping Beauty rather than her stocky frame.

‘My God,’ she said. ‘Mutton dressed as lamb.’

‘Hannah,’ said Jean, all anger forgotten as relief flooded through her very being. ‘You’ve come to life.’

‘You two would waken the dead,’ replied the old woman with spirit, but then her hand slipped from the doorknob and she fell towards them to be caught up in both their arms.

It was a considerable weight borne mostly by the inspector who was scrabbling for purchase on the smooth slippery material of the nightgown.

‘Keep your hands tae yourself, McLevy,’ she informed him hoarsely. ‘I’m a clean-living girl.’

Jean laughed and she hugged the old woman fiercely to her in spite of Hannah’s squawks of protest.

McLevy somehow got caught up in all this and wondered how he always ended up in these straits.

Like three drunks on a Saturday night, they staggered back into the other room and laid the old woman to rest once more upon the bed.

Other than the one jaundiced glance towards McLevy, Hannah’s attention had been completely fixed upon Jean who was busy pulling up the sheets to cover the old woman.

‘I let ye down, mistress,’ she murmured.

Jean shook her head.

‘More like the other way round,’ she replied softly.

‘It was the fault of both,’ McLevy butted in, anxious to get on with establishing facts. ‘What happened, Hannah?’

Pausing for breath every so often Hannah Semple told the story, as far she knew it, lips twisting wryly towards the conclusion.

‘I should have cut her throat the first time she was hanging out the washing. That was my mistake.’

‘We’ll make it up to you,’ remarked Jean sweetly.

‘The sleekit bitch. I had her in front of me, but I didnae look behind.’

McLevy and Jean exchanged glances: there could be no doubt as to the hidden assailant’s identity.

‘Not very gentlemanly,’ said the inspector.

‘If I get to him before you,’ Jean responded with a cold light in her green eyes, ‘Oliver Garvie will be a shadow of his former self.’

‘He will come to the arms of justice,’ said McLevy.

The previous animosity between them began to bubble to the surface and Hannah’s eyes glazed over.

‘Whit’s the matter wi’ you two now?’ she mumbled. ‘Worse than a pair of weans.’

Jean quietened the old woman down, tucked her in and promised to tell her the whole story in all its sordid detail at a later opportunity. As she and McLevy made for the door, and he about to open it for her in a parody of politesse, Hannah called from the bed.

‘I’ve been having some gey queer dreams, mistress.’

‘That would be the opium,’ Jean replied.

‘Opium?’ came the muffled retort. ‘I’ve aye fancied that stuff. Whit a way tae get there though.’

As the door closed, Hannah was cackling softly under the covers.

‘Opium … Well, well. Fancy that now.’

And drifted off into a dream where the Just Land was invaded by white unicorns crashing their hooves upon the stairs and sticking their heads out from every window.

Beyond the door McLevy and Jean witnessed big Annie Drummond bidding an affectionate goodbye below to her wee shepherd, the man’s fiddle tucked neatly under his arm, blue eyes agleam with post-coital delight.

Annie was accustomed to her vast form as a barrier to acts of passion but the wee fellow had leapt all over it like a mountain goat.

For a good part of the night. A giddy goat.

The Jew’s harp man had long since departed, his owner calling him to heel like a farm dog but the shepherd’s master was a kind soul and had left his man with these wise words.

‘Enjoy yerself Douglas. It’s a lang winter wi’ naethin but the sheep for solace.’

It had been, unlike the fate of many others that night, the best time of the shepherd’s life.

He closed the door after one tender kiss from Annie, her plump hands framing his face, and as he marched away up the gravel path towards the iron gates, he unslung his fiddle and played a jaunty air; the notes winging their way up into the sky above to give the larks some competition.

Annie Drummond crossed back and disappeared into the main salon where a pile of cream cakes was waiting.

Love’s appetite.

James McLevy sang words to the faint tune from the vanishing shepherd.

‘And wasna he a roguie, a roguie, a roguie.

And wasna he a roguie, the piper o’ Dundee.’

Jean Brash looked at him and said nothing.

‘It’s a Jacobite air,’ he remarked.

‘I know what it is,’ she replied, her eyes steady on his face.

He jerked his head in the direction of the departed fiddler.

‘You’re taking in all sorts these days.’

Again she said nothing.

The relationship that existed between them was one that dare not speak its name in case it got arrested, but the ground had shifted underneath their feet and now there was enough unsaid between them to fill a literary volume.

‘I don’t suppose a modicum of coffee is at hand?’

This remark, aimed at getting back to safe terrain, met with a curt rejoinder.

‘This is a bawdy-hoose, not a coffee shop.’

That was that, then.

McLevy nodded acceptance and walked off down the winding staircase but halfway down turned back to address her.

‘How did you come across him anyway? Oliver Garvie. Was he a frequenter of your wee nymphs?’

‘I met him at a garden exhibition.’

‘Oh aye. Ye like flowers.’

He could have departed there and then. She could have remained silent. But neither could leave it be.

‘Was it daffodils?’ he asked.

‘Roses,’ she answered.

‘And was he an expert?’

Jean’s mind flashed back to the moment in the garden when she had been inhaling the delicate fragrance of a yellow rose when Garvie had appeared beside her.

She had been struck at first by his absolute confidence in the physical self; he had made no attempt to engage her by the usual channels of flirtation or impress her with his importance or wealth, merely talked about the flowers with knowledge and appreciation.

She responded like a lady of quality but all the time she was aware of how easily he lived in his skin. Like an animal.

Almost diffidently he had suggested tea in the pavilion and it had all led on from there.

Of course he had been primed by Rachel Bryden to know her tastes and predilections and she had been seduced like a fool. Played like a fish. A foolish stupid fish.

And she should have remembered that the yellow rose is a symbol of infidelity.

Yes, he was an expert. An expert in many things.

Jean became aware that the inspector was waiting for an audible response, a strange, oddly vulnerable look upon his face.

‘He appeared to be,’ she said finally.

For a moment McLevy blinked like a disappointed child and opened his mouth as if to say something, but then he sniffed as if something had become lodged in one of his nasal passages, hauled out a large white handkerchief and blew noisily upon the unsuspecting square of cloth.

Jean closed her eyes; she recognised signs of the man going into one of his uncouth phases.

The inspector peered into the hankie with some interest, glanced up as if suddenly remembering that she was still present and adopted pompous delivery.

‘If by any lucky accident that web of informers and street keelies that you have in your employ for matters nefarious, happen to chance upon Oliver Garvie and Rachel Bryden before the forces of law and order, you will deliver these miscreants into my hands.’

‘I will do what I see fit,’ was the retort.

This stung McLevy into further raising his voice like Moses on the mountain.

‘You will do what I tell you Jean Brash, the law is above all things.’

‘Then the law can find them.’

‘Forget your foolish pride, you’re not the first woman to make an idiot of herself over a younger man.’

If Jean had possessed something close to hand she would have hurled it into his great pudding of a face.

‘Well if I ever take another lover, I hope not to find you keeking in through the curtains!’

This remark, so below the belt in implication and inaccuracy, brought a gasp of indignation from the target.

‘You flatter yourself that I give a damn about what you do with a body nurtured on the common wages of sin!’

‘A lot of words for such a lack of interest.’

McLevy jammed the bowler on his head and clattered down the stairs, hurling a backward stricture over his shoulder.

‘If you interfere in the due process of justice then I will bring the law down on you like the Hand of God!’

Such was his impetus off the bottom of the stairs that he skidded on the polished floorboards of the hall, almost crashing into Francine the Frenchwoman as she emerged from the cellar steps to find out the cause of this commotion. Her sinewy arm shot out, fingers splayed like talons to catch him before he fell.

‘Careful M’sieu Inspecteur,’ she said quietly, her face serious and intent. ‘At your time of life, pain is to be avoided unless paid for and supervised.’

McLevy drew himself up with dignity, marched to the door and turned round to deliver a final caution to Jean who stood at the top of the stairs glaring down at him.

‘I warn you Jean Brash, cross me in this affair and I will close your bawdy-hoose down.’

‘Ye havenae got the power,’ Jean asserted, ‘half the city council take their pleasure here.’

The door slammed in answer and he was gone.

Francine shrugged up at her mistress and disappeared back down into the cellar. The General Synod was due to gather in the city soon, so she and Lily, now restored in harmony, were due a busy time of it. Churchmen, unlike farmers, enjoyed the scourge of sin and punishment.

Jean found herself alone, an isolated figure in a plain grey gown.

For a moment she felt once more the sharp knife of humiliation twisting in her gut.

Oliver Garvie and Rachel Bryden.

They had robbed and deceived her, struck Hannah Semple to the ground. They had taken her beautiful black pearls that she loved above all things.

If she got to them first, they’d never see the light of day.

33

Full fathom five thy father lies;