Chapter Twenty-Two

Rory

Glasgow— Monday 13th August 1877

W hen I saw Marianne walking towards me, my heart lifted, and that worried me, but then she smiled, and I forgot to worry, and hurried towards her, smiling back.

‘Do you have good news?' she asked me. ‘Could Mr Munro help?'

‘I'll tell you in a moment. Are you feeling better now?'

To my surprise, she slipped her arm through mine. ‘It's odd, isn't it, being in a very different city together. You don't have to worry about being seen by the wrong person in the wrong place, and I—oh, I think it is time that I stopped worrying and began to enjoy my freedom.'

Freedom. I waited, wondering if she'd even noticed the slip, but she didn't. ‘Go on then,' she said, ‘tell me what you have found out, it's why we're here after all.'

‘Is there anywhere we can...?'

‘Sit and be private? Yes.'

She led the way to a stone bench on the back wall, in full sun. I took off my hat and gloves and handed her the slice of fruit cake I'd brought her, wrapped in paper. ‘I thought you might be hungry. You can eat it while I talk.'

‘Thank you! I didn't think I was hungry, but now you mention it.' She took her gloves off, crumbled a bit and popped it in her mouth. ‘Delicious.'

She crumbled another bit and held it out to me. I don't like fruit cake, I've always found it claggy, but I took it, surprising us both by guiding the cake and the tips of her fingers into my mouth. Her eyes widened. She withdrew them slowly, letting my lips linger. I turned her hand over to kiss her wrist, feeling the flutter of her pulse on my lips, feeling my own heart thump, and her fingers ruffling through my hair.

There were birds singing somewhere. There wasn't a breath of breeze. The sun baked down on us through the grey-blue sky. I looked up to find her eyes fixed on me. Her lips were parted. I think it was she who moved towards me, but I wouldn't swear to it. Then we kissed. Sweetened by fruit cake, warmed by the sun, it was a delicate kiss, though not careful. I knew how much she wanted me, from that kiss. I ached with wanting her. Which was why I ended it, though slowly, mind. Very slowly.

We stared at each other. Entranced, mesmerised, I don't know what it was. I didn't want to break the spell. I wanted to kiss her again. If she'd made a move, just the tiniest move—but she didn't. So I took a long overdue breath, and I sat back, but it was Marianne who spoke.

‘We've not got long left,' she said.

‘I know.'

‘Ah know.' She smiled, one of her real smiles. ‘You feel it too, don't you, just as strongly as I do. The clock ticking. The need to—to...'

‘Make the most of it. How could you doubt it?'

Her smile faltered for a moment, but then she rallied. ‘I don't. I wish...' She reached for me, taking my hand and placing it against her cheek. ‘Oh, Rory, I wish that we could stay here for just a little longer. In this city, I mean, away from Edinburgh. Where we are safe.' She kissed the palm of my hand, and I should have been glad that she let it go then, but what I wanted—well, it's obvious what I wanted. ‘We've become distracted again,' she said.

‘It's too easy done. I've never had that problem before. Let me think.' I moved away from her to do so. Then I recounted what Gordon Munro had told me. ‘The problem is,' I said, ‘the family he thinks are Lillian's have been on holiday doon the watter. On the Clyde Coast, that is. They're not due home until tomorrow morning, so we'll have to come back another day.'

Marianne was silent for a moment, biting her lip—which I had to stop watching for what it was making me want to do. ‘We don't have long,' she said. ‘Going back to Edinburgh, then coming back here again, it seems such a waste of time.'

‘What are you thinking?'

She was blushing faintly—though that might have been the sun. ‘I'm thinking that fate might have taken a hand. We could stay here in Glasgow.' She was definitely blushing. ‘If you thought it was a good idea.'

I thought it was a terrible idea—or that's what I told myself I was thinking. My body, on the other hand, leapt at it, in every embarrassing way. And was it such a terrible idea after all? We would save ourselves a journey. We could take separate rooms in a hotel. We could take separate rooms in a separate hotel—that would be safer. Then I remembered that Marianne had been a bit overwhelmed when we arrived, that Glasgow was completely new to her, and it not being new to me made me wary of leaving her in another hotel, no matter how respectable it might be. So the same hotels, but different rooms, then?

‘What do you think, Rory?'

‘The Queen's Hotel,' I said, my mouth running way ahead of my mind. That's the one on George Square, right beside the train station. It has a good name.'

‘Is it expensive?'

‘This is my case, so I'll take care of it. And I won't have you arguing. Think about it, Marianne, you're more or less working without a fee. Unless Mrs Oliphant is paying you for your holiday...'

‘She is very generous, but it wouldn't even occur to her to do so, and even if it did, I doubt Mr Oliphant would agree.'

‘Forget about him, and everything else. I'll take care of any expenses while we're here, and that isn't up for discussion.'

‘Can you afford it?'

‘Easily,' I said, ridiculously touched. ‘I'm not rich, but I'm very comfortable. I do well for myself.'

‘And there is only you,' she said, with an odd smile.

Only me. I'd always relished that before. Only me, without Marianne—was I kidding myself, staying overnight here with her? In separate rooms, I reminded myself. And I might be comfortably off, but compared to the wealth that was hopefully coming her way, I was a pauper.

If anything happened between us, would she think I was making a play for her money? It hadn't occurred to me until then, but now it did—like that man she told me about, the bigamist who had tried to marry her friend. But then I had no intentions of asking her to marry me. The very idea of it made me laugh. Or would, if I thought about it. Which I wasn't going to do.

I got up, holding out my hand to help her. She took it, and she slid her hand into my arm, as if she'd been doing that for weeks. We hadn't even known each other for two weeks. No one could fall in love in two weeks. I had never been in love. I was forty years old. If I'd been going to do it, I'd have done it by now.

‘Do you fancy coming with me on a wee trip down memory lane?' I asked her.

She gave a skip, beaming up at me. ‘You read my mind. That is exactly what I would like to do.'

Glasgow was changing under our very noses, was how it felt to me. My eyes were out on stalks on the journey to Partick, I couldn't get over the number of big new tenements that were popping up, at the way the streets had broadened and bustled even more. We got off the tram at Partick Cross, and I stood for a moment, Marianne on my arm, looking about me in amazement. More tenements, a mix of red and blond sandstone, with shops under them, their awnings out, goods stacked outside, all the way along Dumbarton Road.

We walked along, dodging the multitude of people going about their business, and I filled Marianne in on the changes. She was like me, her eyes darting from one place to another, wide with interest, and every now and then she'd look up at me, check up on me, then nod to herself, as if I'd passed some sort of test.

‘I'm fine,' I said to her, catching her out, just as we turned into Keith Street, and then I was brought up short.

‘Is this it?'

‘It is, and it isn't.' I began to walk slowly down the street. ‘That flat there, on the second floor, was ours.' It looked shabbier than I recalled, against the newer buildings that had gone up since. ‘And here,' I said, standing in front of the next block, ‘this used to be a wine merchants, and there was a dairy further down.' The old buildings, thatched cottages and two-storey houses were falling down, their roofs sagging, their windows boarded up. The church was still there, and the old Quakers Graveyard, but all around it the buildings were falling down or being pulled down.

‘Your father isn't buried there, is he?' Marianne asked, looking at the tumble of ancient graves.

‘No, that's not been used for about twenty years,' I said. ‘He's over in Govan with my ma. Across the other side of the Clyde.'

‘Do you want to pay your respects?'

‘I'd rather recall happier times. We were happy here, you know.'

‘Yes.' She smiled, pressing my arm, which she hadn't let go the whole time we'd been walking. ‘Show me more.'

So I did. The big police station on Anderson Street where my father was stationed for a while when he was with the Partick Burgh force. The school I went to. The grocer shop where my ma used to send me for bread and milk in the mornings. The cricket ground at Hamilton Crescent. ‘Though that wasn't there when I was a wean. We played out in the back courts, along the banks of the Kelvin, and what is now the West End Park.'

I didn't want to go further along to Thornhill, where my da had moved when my ma died. Instead, we retraced our steps to walk into the park, over the old Snow Bridge, with the massive edifice of Glasgow University rising up in front of us. The day had turned sultry, but the weather had still brought out the Weegies in force.

We passed couples like ourselves, who nodded a greeting as they passed. Men doffed their hats. Weans screamed and shouted on the banks of the Kelvin, just as they always had. The river was too low for the mills to be running. Further in, at the pond, there were nannies and governesses from the posher bit of the West End, and on the steep banks of the grass rising up to the terraces that were being built there, younger people sitting taking in the sun from all walks of life.

The view from the top of the hill was as breathtaking as ever, with the sweep of Park Circus behind us, the West End Park spread below us, and over on the other side, the University. ‘My goodness,' Marianne said, ‘it is quite beautiful. And so grand.'

‘Here, it is. If you look over there, you'll see the Clyde, and the shipyards I was telling you about. That's what all the new tenements in Partick are for, to house the ship builders.'

‘It's quite a contrast, isn't it.' She was looking at Park Circus, the elegant town houses, the imposing porticoes. ‘This is like Edinburgh's New Town. And the park there, acts as the border, like Princes Street Gardens, save that people here seem to mix more than they do in Edinburgh. I like it here. I mean this city. I don't know why, but I feel comfortable here in a way that I don't in Edinburgh.'

‘Glasgow's a friendlier city, but you weren't at all comfortable this morning.'

‘I was overwhelmed.' She walked away, over to the edge of the hill where we were standing, and leaned on the railings, looking out over the west of the city. ‘Don't you miss it, Rory?'

I hadn't, until she asked me. Joining her at the railings, I focused on the ribbon of the Clyde, where the cranes for the engineering works were spread out, more of them than I remembered, bigger than I recalled. ‘I left for Edinburgh to join the force twenty years ago. I've never worked here, never made my own life here, never thought to either.'

‘Is there a demand for your sort of work here?'

‘Funnily enough, my da's friend from the force said there was good business to be had, for the right man.'

‘And are you the right man?'

Glasgow was only two hours from Edinburgh by train. Two hours from Marianne. But why would Marianne remain in Edinburgh, if she had the funds to go wherever she chose? And why would I imagine Marianne's whereabouts would be of any interest to me, after she'd found out...

‘Rory.'

She tugged at my sleeve, raising her eyebrow at me. Just the one. And I lost my train of thought. ‘Have you any notion what that does to me?'

‘I don't know what you mean.'

‘This.' I traced her brow with my finger. Then I let my fingers flutter down her cheek. Then I leaned over, and I kissed her. Her lips were warm. Sun-kissed, I thought hazily, the thought rousing me even more. She lifted her hand to my cheek. Smoothing it down, the palm of her glove cupping my chin.

I whispered her name. I didn't know it was a question. I hadn't meant it as a question, but she answered me all the same. ‘Yes,' she whispered. ‘Oh, yes.'