Chapter Sixteen

Rory

Edinburgh— Thursday 9th August 1877

W e walked back along Commercial Street, Marianne keeping a steady pace with her head down, me beside her keeping a look out just in case, though my mind was on other matters. The woman herself, specifically.

She was prickly as a hedgehog one minute, blurting out stuff she clearly didn't mean to tell me the next, and what she did tell me was making me feel like I'd been put through a wringer.

You can't miss what you don't know.

It made my guts twist, thinking of everything those words implied, and I'd come bloody close to blurting out that stupid question.

Do you ever wonder who your parents were?

Despite her avowal that she didn't care because they had given her away, I found it difficult to believe she hadn't wondered. But what was the point in stirring it up right now, when I was honour bound not to tell her what I knew, and anyway, their names weren't the point. It wasn't who her parents were that would matter to her, but why they didn't keep her. A dead mother was only one side of it.

What had her father been playing at? I could understand him getting someone else to care for his motherless child, but to have nothing more to do with her—that I didn't get. It didn't matter to me, I told myself for what seemed like the hundredth time, or rather it shouldn't matter. If the Marquess tasked me with the telling of the tale, I would be the bearer of facts, hopefully of good financial tidings, that was all.

Aye, right. I was getting in deep. Not too deep, not so deep I couldn't extricate myself when the time came, and I'd have to. I was committed to keeping an eye on her for the Marquess—which admittedly, I could do from more of a distance. But I'd committed to letting Marianne help me with this old case, and if I changed my mind it would look odd. What's more, I didn't want to change my mind.

Two weeks, that's all we had. I could almost hear the clock ticking, and I told myself that I was glad of it. There wasn't time, in just two weeks, for me to get myself in any deeper that I already was. Even if every moment I spent with her made me want more. Even if what I felt for her had a strength and a depth I hadn't felt before for any woman.

Two weeks wasn't going to be nearly enough with her, I felt it in my bones, but it would have to be. At the end of two weeks I'd lose her—literally. Marianne would become Lady Mary Anne. Titled, connected, rich and well above my station. I'd do well to remember all of that. And I would, I decided. Starting right there and then.

‘You would never know that the docks are so close, would you, or that the Firth of Forth was out there?' I said, pushing all of that to the back of my mind.

‘I was thinking the same,' Marianne told me, smiling. ‘Buildings on both sides, and the walls so high, I can't even see the masts of the ships over them.'

‘You'll get a bit of a view back from Newhaven. Have you ever been there?'

She shook her head. ‘I've never had cause. The families that employ me go to Portobello or North Berwick when they want to take the sea air.'

‘I was at Portobello on Monday. I was thinking of you, watching all the weans with their nannies and governesses.'

‘It is where Mrs Oliphant's children are now, taking a holiday with their aunt. She has her own nanny, which is why I am not required.'

‘And you'll have another bairn in your charge, will you, when you go back to Queen Street in two weeks?'

‘She will be in the care of a wet nurse for now, poor little thing. Her mother wanted a boy,' Marianne explained, ‘for Mr Oliphant considers he already has a surfeit of daughters.'

The commercial buildings and warehouses had given way to a mixture of tenements and small shops. ‘You don't like him, do you?'

‘I make better work of disguising my feelings when I am with the family,' Marianne said, with one of her wry smiles. ‘It's nothing personal, I have very little to do with him. I dislike the way he takes his wife for granted, and I heartily dislike the contempt in which he holds his daughters, at least two of whom are considerably brighter than his precious son, who will have the education they deserve.'

‘They have you, though.'

‘Only until their own governess returns, and when they are old enough, they'll be sent off to a school to learn how to be young ladies. I am not qualified to teach them those skills.' She pushed her hood back, smoothing her hair as she gazed around her. ‘Ordinary families going about their business, though some of these children should surely be in school.'

‘That would be a real challenge, if you were up for it,' I said. ‘Getting them there and keeping them, I mean.'

‘Oh, I would certainly be up for it, if what you mean is, would I relish it. It wouldn't only be a question of making the lessons interesting and challenging enough that they would want to stay, it would also be a case of persuading the parents that it was worth their while sending them there in the first place. In many cases, they would be giving up the few pennies the child could bring from doing other work.'

‘You've thought about this.'

‘A great deal. It's one of the ways I have of passing the time when I don't sleep. I could make such a difference to so many lives, given the chance. You probably think that arrogant of me.'

Don't sleep, I noted. What kept her awake? Memories? Fear of the dreams she might have? Or had she lost the habit of sleep in that place? Most likely all of it. ‘I don't think you arrogant at all,' I said. ‘I think it's admirable and pretty unusual that you have considered it. You've no knowledge of places like these, people like these. Don't take this the wrong way, but people raised as you were, in a respectable family, not the working type of family—families like these—people like you don't...' I bit my tongue, realising I was getting into a total fankle, and in danger of being offensive.

But she didn't take offence at all. ‘Unlike people like you? You're right,' she said. ‘And if I had stayed on at the school with Miss Lomond, I would have remained oblivious. I wouldn't have come across the women who opened my eyes. Women forced to earn a living doing the most appalling work.'

Her words gave me goosebumps, for I thought immediately of what Nurse Crawford had confided in me of the work she and women like her did to keep the institutions that employed them going. While those in charge played at god, these women swabbed down, mopped up, slopped out, fed, soothed and restrained the inmates. How they could endure it, hear the cries, witness the suffering, sometimes assist in inflicting it, and then go home to their own families with any peace of mind at all, I had no idea. No wonder some of them lost their humanity. And as for Marianne! That she had come through it all, and had brought a dream with her, put me in awe of her. And if the Marquess got his way, she could have her dream realised.

Don't worry. You'll have the money. You can make that dream and every other you've had come true.

The words were on the tip of my tongue. For the first time the sheer scale of possibilities that would be open to her took my breath away, putting all the other difficulties and emotional upheaval into the background. She'd come through so much, she could come through this and out the other side. She deserved this.

‘What is it? What are you smiling at, Rory?'

‘You're quite a woman,' I said, ‘and if you look over there, you'll see the fishing harbour at Newhaven.'