Free Lady of Fortune by Graham Masterton Page A

pocket’s so bulging.’
    As they walked together over the sliddery cobbles, Effie noticed that their family brougham was no longer there. Russell had presumably taken it off to somewhere discreet, where it wouldn’t be noticed by anyone who might recognise it. She felt Jamie’s hand clasping her wrist; and the strangeness of being held by this strange man, her mother’s secret companion, made her breathless and mysteriously excited. If her mother could have found herself a secret companion, then anything and everything was possible!
    They turned off the High Street into the warren of tall crumbling tenements which clustered around the foot of the castle, and along the length of the Royal Mile. These tenements, the Lands, had been built in the days when Edinburgh was still bounded by the Flodden Wall – the protective rampart which the Scots had put up in a panic after their defeat by the English in 1513. Scarcely anybody had ventured to build outside the Wall until the eighteenth century, and so for 250 years, Edinburgh’s houses had risen upwards – six, seven, sometimes more than a dozen storeys high – one of the strangest and tallest of European cities.
    In the courts and wynds and closes into which Jamie now led them, the rich had once jostled alongside the poor; the honest with the corrupt; the lady with the whore. Now the well-to-do had moved to the New Town, to the spacious houses of Queen Street and Heriot Row; leaving behind in the Lands the destitute and the ignorant and the brutal.
    â€˜I met your mother, you see, at a meeting of the Edinburgh Charity Workers’ Association,’ remarked Jamie. ‘She was the chairman, as you know; and I was the secretary, on account of knowing my law. I don’t think it was our intention to become such close friends; but when you’ve been into some of these tenements, and seen the conditions, your heart goes out, and you show yourself for what manner of person you are. What I saw in your mother was a lady both kind and unusual.’
    Effie said, ‘Mother mentioned your name once, I think.’
    â€˜Well, I hope she did. But, as you must see, I mustn’t mention her name to anybody.’
    They came at last to High School Yards Wynd, a narrow and crooked thoroughfare between two narrow rows of tenements. The stone and mortar with which the tenements had been built had taken on a flaking and scabrous appearance, and they were stained with the sulfurous coal-smoke which gave Edinburgh its nickname of Auld Reekie. Washing hung in the snow from lines strung across the street: threadbare sarks and tattered britches; cotton dresses which had long forgotten their colour.
    A fellow in a rusty coat and a Derby hat raised his clay pipe from a doorstep opposite and called, ‘Good afternoon, Mr McFarlane! It’s a fell day to be abroad!’
    â€˜Hallo, John,’ said Jamie. ‘Aye, it’s cold enough. I’m just up to see Doris McFee with a pound of sugar, that’s all.’
    â€˜There’s two bonny lasses you’ve got there, you run-deil.’
    â€˜Away with you,’ smiled Jamie.
    He led them at last to a narrow stone doorway, and up a tilted flight of stone steps, until they reached a dark and filthy landing, cluttered with rubbish and stinking of urine. Effie began to cough with the mustiness of it; but her mother grasped her hand tight, and said, ‘When you work for the charity, my dearie, you’ll experience much worse than this.’
    Jamie clambered over a half-dismantled bed until he reached a decrepit doorway. The green paint was peeling off the damp wood in jagged flakes, and the frame was long since rotten. He banged twice, with his fist, and called ‘Doris! It’s me! Jamie McFarlane!’
    It was almost five minutes before the door was opened, just a crack. There, against the misty afternoon light, her shoulders wrapped in a grey and loose-woven shawl, stood an