‘He had no clue where she was going, or who the note was from?’
‘None.’
‘And he did not try to dissuade her?’
Louis voice was tinged with disgust. ‘He said it was not his business to be my sister’s keeper. Dear God, I knew he
took little enough interest in the lives of others, but to let her go out like that alone …’
He put his head in his hands and was wracked with sobs. George put an arm around him. ‘Come now, Louis. If she has indeed gone away with Guillaume, it is not the worst, for he is a good man, and would treat her kindly, you know that.’
The French master nodded and rallied himself to continue. ‘I know he would – if she is with him. He never went back to my house last night, and St Clair says as far as he can tell what Guillaume has of belongings are still there.’
‘And St Clair thought nothing strange that he did not come back? That he was not there in the morning?’
Louis shook his head. ‘He simply shrugs and says Guillaume goes his own way and he his. He has not seen or heard anything of either my sister or Charpentier since and he is completely unperturbed.’
‘And yet,’ said William, ‘he seems certain that they have not gone away together. Why is that?’
Louis shook his head hopelessly. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Well let us find out,’ said William. With a look on his face usually reserved for appearances in court, he went across to St Clair and barked something at him in French – a language that it had never occurred to me he could speak. St Clair stood up instantly, like a man used to the voice of authority. William asked him a question slowly, and very clearly. Unlike George and Louis, I had no idea what he
had just said, but it was clear from his tone that an answer would be given before either he or St Clair ever left this workshed. The Frenchman opened his mouth to speak, closed it, and then laughed in derision as he made his reply.
‘What? What is it?’ I said.
Louis turned to me. ‘He said that if we truly think Guillaume Charpentier has the slightest interest in my sister, then we know nothing about him at all.’
Just then, we heard voices coming down the path towards the workshed and opened the door to be met by Baillie Lumsden and four men of his search party.
Louis was at them first. ‘Is there any news? Have they been found?’
‘No.’ said Lumsden. ‘George, we need to search this garden.’
‘Of course,’ said George. ‘Let me show you the plans.’ Within two minutes they had a plan and instructions set out for a thorough search of the gardens, beginning at the maze in one corner and the small wooded area between Jamesone’s back wall and the Blackfriars’ gate on the other. The parties were to work their way in opposite directions up and down the garden and meet again at the centre, where George’s summer pavilion was to be.
We wanted Louis to wait in the warmth but he would not, and so George, William and I took him out with us. We also made St Clair come with us. Nothing in what he had said had convinced the others that he did not know a lot more, or indeed that what he was telling us was
anything near the truth. As for me, all I could think of were the fears Christiane had expressed to me about Seoras, and I believed every word the unsettling little man had said.
Our party went first to the area of George’s planned herb garden, where already stones of granite had been laid out in the form of a wheel. George tried to cheer Louis a little by talking of his sister as if she might just have slipped away on an errand. ‘This is Christiane’s favourite spot, you know. The planning has been nearly all hers. The centre-piece, Alexander and his blessed session permitting, is to be a small statue of the goddess Ceres, surrounded by lavender, to match your sister’s pretty eyes.’
Louis attempted a smile, but his mind was too distracted to give much attention to what George was saying. Mine too was distracted, by the mention of a statue. One of several statues George had planned for the ornamentation of the garden, but most were to be elsewhere. His nymphaeum.
‘They will not have met here,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘Christiane and Charpentier. If they met, it would have not have been here,’ and I started to run across and down towards the north-west corner of the garden, and the pond.
Images flashed through my head as I ran. Memories of images. Isabella Irvine and some unknown man disappearing through the trees in the darkness. Isabella Irvine
coming upon me as I sat, alone, on the stone bench on the far side of the frozen pond. Isabella Irvine and Guillaume Charpentier sitting, only a short while later, on that same bench.
The frost in the air burned my throat as I ran and hurt my lungs so that my chest felt it might split open, but despite the shouts of those behind me to wait for them, I could not stop until I got there. I knew well enough now the best way through the trees in the tangle surrounding the pond and hardly had to look down to avoid roots and boulders that had found me out before. But then, as I pushed my way between the last of the branches into the clearing around the frozen water, I did stop, as if a wall of glass had appeared between me and what was in front of me. For there, suspended in the air like a jewelled doll above the ice, her hair and lips frosted, her head limp and the skin on her arms and her bared neck blue, was Christiane Rolland, more dead than any other thing in this wintered place.
I forced myself to take control of my thoughts. And turned, arms outstretched, to stop whoever might be coming behind me, to stop Louis, from coming upon what I had just seen. I opened my mouth to shout at the others to stop him, but I was too slow, I was too late. The sound that filled the air was not my voice, but his. It was not a shout but a howl. I watched as William and then George tried to pull him back, but he wrestled them away. And then he was pushing past me, shouting her name.
I caught him just as he was about to go out on to the ice. He sank to his knees and I did also, putting my arms around him and turning slightly so that his head was pulled against my chest and his eyes averted from the dead form of his young sister.
William and George came to a halt behind us. ‘Oh, God. No.’ Our shouts had brought Lumsden’s search parties running in our direction and the baillie and two of his men were very soon with us.
‘Cut her down, for God’s sake,’ said Lumsden to the man next to him. Only then, when I looked up, did I see that standing a little behind him, her hand covering her mouth in horror, was Isabella Irvine.
*
Half an hour later, I was sitting opposite Isabella in the parlour of Baillie Lumsden’s house. George had sent for a physician to see to Louis Rolland and had gone back to the French master’s house to wait with him there. William had gone with Lumsden to his chambers off the Castlegate to further question Jean St Clair about the events of the previous night, and whether he knew of any relationship between Christiane Rolland and Guillaume Charpentier. I would have to officially report Christiane’s suicide to the kirk session, although the news must already have been in the mouths and ears of half the town. For now, though, all my interest was in the woman who sat, shivering and hunched in upon herself, three feet away from me. Neither of us had spoken a word on the way up from Jamesone’s garden.
My first words jolted her out of her distraction. ‘Did you never imagine she might take her own life?’
‘What?’ she said, as if I could not actually have asked what she thought I had just asked.
I was in no mood to further humour this woman, and repeated my question.
‘You and Charpentier. When he played on her affections and you betrayed her friendship. She was a fragile young girl, whose state of mind had already been thrown in to disarray by the disappearance of another man who had courted her. It never occurred to you that her cruel treatment by two whom she thought her friends might drive her beyond what she could withstand?’
Isabella looked confused, desperately seeking to understand what I was saying and to find an answer for it. She seemed to stumble over her words.
‘But he – Guillaume – he never played on her affections. He never encouraged her feelings. And there is nothing – nothing, you must believe me – between him and me.’
‘You would have me believe that you never betrayed her friendship?’
She did not answer me, but worked at her bottom lip. I had never before seen Isabella Irvine so vulnerable, but I was too horror-struck by what I had seen in the garden to be put off. ‘For one of your station, Madame, you have made yourself very familiar with a gardener.’
‘You do not understand,’ she said, as if any fight had gone out of her.
‘Oh? Do I not? After all the years of spite – deserved,
I’ll grant you – you have harboured for me, do you not think I know a tryst when I see it?’
This had been truly unexpected. ‘A tryst?’
I had not the patience to humour her. ‘Dear Lord, Isabella, did you think no one would observe you going into George’s garden? Heavens, you have rarely been out of it. Who were you to meet there today? Guillaume Charpentier – a common gardener? William Ormiston, whose touch seems so to thrill you – and oh, I saw that touch. Or is it someone else?’
It was only when I said the words aloud that it came to me. ‘Archie Hay.’
Below her pallor, her face became paler yet. I knew it then.
‘Archie? Is it Archie you hoped to find there? Archie Hay, come back from the dead? How long have you known, Isabella? Have you always known?’
The eyes that had looked on me in times past with such disdain, were brimming now, pleading. ‘I did not know, Alexander. I swear to God, I did not know.’
The sight of this woman, scared, sorry before me, shocked me out of my anger. My voice became hoarse. ‘But you know now, do you not?’
She nodded once, then lowered her head, a scarcely audible ‘yes’ escaping her lips.
Into our silence came the sound of footsteps on the stairs. Not of Lumsden, still busied with his duties at the tolbooth, nor yet Lady Rothiemay, who on hearing of Christiane’s
disappearance that morning had taken herself to the old town, thinking to find news of the girl there. It was some relief to me to see George Jamesone shown into the parlour by the young servant.
He enquired briefly after Isabella, but it was soon clear that it was me he had come to see.
‘I am on my way up to the Castlegate with this for Lumsden. Louis found it in Christiane’s chamber when we returned to his house.’ He held towards me a small piece of paper, neatly folded in half. I opened it out to find a short message of some sort, neatly written in words I assumed to be French. But what was clear enough in any language was that the note was addressed to Christiane Rolland and purported to be from Guillaume Charpentier. I looked at it and turned to George.
‘This is his handwriting? His signature?’
He nodded.
‘Then some at least of what St Clair claims is true. He did send her a note.’
I rang for the housemaid and asked her to stay with Mistress Irvine until Lady Rothiemay should return, then George and I went quickly across Broadgate in the direction of the Castlegate and William’s chambers.
‘I cannot understand it,’ said George as we turned in to the end of Huxter Row. ‘Guillaume was with me until well after seven last night, and yet this note from him, asking Christiane to meet him at the pond, arrived at Louis’ house before seven, delivered by a boy who had just been
given it, according to St Clair. I swear to you, Alexander, I never saw him write it nor hand anything to any message boy.’
‘It is definitely his hand?’
‘I could show it to you. It tallies exactly with that on his labelling on my plans.’
I had noted Charpentier’s neat careful hand before, marvelled at his very exact Latin. It had not seemed quite right to me even then, to find a gardener so well lettered. ‘And does he express himself well?’
‘It is just a brief note, Alexander, and my French none the best, but it looks well enough to me.’
Lumsden was still with William and St Clair when we arrived at William’s chambers.
The baillie was flustered on being shown the note. ‘So where is the fellow?’ he demanded, after having it explained to him. ‘Four hours now we have searched, and not the hint of a sight of him. Perhaps he never went there to meet her at all.’
It was a possibility we considered amongst ourselves for a good while after Lumsden had gone to the tolbooth to check on the progress of the search.
‘He must have gone there,’ said William. ‘Why would she have taken her own life if he had not thoroughly rejected her? Hardly a reason, even that, but I do not know what goes on in a young woman’s mind.’
George also was at a loss. ‘But it was an attraction, an infatuation such as we have all been prone to from time to
time. I never saw Guillaume give the slightest sign of returning it. Only kindness and perhaps a degree of affection. Christiane was a sensible girl – surely she cannot have read it as anything more?’
‘But why would Charpentier flee? He would hardly have allowed her to hang herself in front of him?’
‘Unless he went back to the spot later and found her and panicked …’
William and George were going further and further down a road that led nowhere, trying to work out an order of events that never happened. But I was scarcely listening to them for I was thinking of her dress, her pristine blue dress, unmarked save for a little mud around the hem. I looked at St Clair, silent in the corner of the room.
‘She would hardly have taken a rope. Ask him, William, ask him if she had a rope.’
‘What?’ said William.
‘Ask Jean St Clair if Christiane took with her a rope when she left Louis’ house last night.’
The Frenchman had looked up at the mention of his name and seemed to be thinking before William even spoke to him.
No. She had no rope. What young girl would walk through the streets of the town in her prettiest dress with a rope over her arm?
‘It was not dirty.’
Now it was for George to look utterly lost. ‘Alexander, what are you talking about?’
‘You keep ropes somewhere in the garden?’
‘Yes, for hauling cut trees and the like. They are in a store near the workshed.’