Page 9 of Disturbing the Dead
As always, McCreadie is dressed like he stepped out of a Victorian advertisement. Gray might be nattily attired—in a single-breasted mid-thigh silk jacket with a high starched collar and cravat—but next to McCreadie, he looks like he rolled out of bed and pulled on whatever was at hand. It’s not that McCreadie is dressed any differently. Men’s black-tie wear here is as limited as it is in my time. McCreadie’s attire just somehow always manages to be a little better, in the cut and fit and the fabric.
The least fashionably dressed person in our entourage is the one who can best afford it. Annis is in deep mourning, and even coming to such an event could be scandalous. She must wear head-to-toe black, and it can’t even be a fashionable black gown. It must be as shapeless as possible, and so on her buxom figure, it looks like she’s wearing sackcloth, as if she’s being punished for having outlived her husband.
The coach stays in the New Town, naturally. There is a definite “right side of the tracks” in Edinburgh, and it’s the New Town. The coach takes us from Robert Street toward grander homes, and it stops at one that I’d mistake for two town houses if it weren’t for its single entrance.
Or I think it’s only a single entrance. It’s hard to tell from our vantage point, at the end of a queue of coaches.
I try not to plaster myself against the window. I haven’t been on this street. Gray’s town house is stately and beautifully appointed inside, but the exterior could best be described as austere, rather like its current owner. These town houses are fancier Georgian architecture, complete with decorated embedded columns and wide, central front steps.
“Is there some problem ahead?” Annis grumbles. “At this rate, we shall miss the unwrapping altogether.”
“We could get out and walk,” Gray says. “It is but a few hundred feet.”
“It is November, Duncan. November. There is…” She nods her chin at the sidewalk and says “snow” with the same expression one might give a pile of horse dung.
“It’s only a sprinkle,” I say. “It looks lovely.”
I gaze out the window. With the darkness and the party, the house is so well lit that it twinkles. The coach is cold enough for me to see my breath, and with the fur muff warming my hands, I feel as if I’m heading off to a Yuletide party instead.
Gray leans toward me and whispers, “Would you like to walk?”
I glance toward Annis, expecting some comment, but she is too busy rapping on the roof for the driver to move.
The line inches forward, and I look through the window again. I would like to get out. It’s both too cold and too warm in here. Too cold on my face and too warm where I’m bundled in layers. We usually do walk wherever we can, but winter fancy-dress parties here are like ones in my time, where you expect to be dropped at the door to avoid needing to bundle up over your party best.
When the coach stops again, I lean to whisper, “Would it be unseemly to walk?”
“Does it matter?” Gray says, his eyes dancing.
I’m supposed to say it doesn’t. That’s what he expects and what he wants—the Mallory who flouts convention and lets him do the same. I know how much both Gray and Isla enjoy pushing against the constraints they’ve battled all their lives, and when it comes to that, I’m a terrible enabler.
Gray and Isla exist in a bubble where no one expects them to conform to all social conventions. Coming from a notably eccentric family gives them latitude, as does the fact that they are merely middle class. But bubbles are fragile things, and they must still live and work within this world.
It may seem as if I’m overthinking this. It’s just walking a couple of hundred feet to a party. But if walking calls attention to us, and if it invites whispers and sneers and mockery, then that could damage an evening Isla is very much looking forward to.
The coach thankfully rolls forward again. When it stops, McCreadie is the one pushing open the door to look out. He’s frowning, as if he heard something, and when I catch it, I kick myself.
I might not be a cop in this world, but for me, a career in law enforcement was more than something that paid the bills. I chose policing because underneath my sarcasm, I’m an idealist and a humanist. McCreadie is the same—a public servant who understands the meaning of the word, committed to being a torchbearer through the shadows. He’s heard something concerning outside, and I was too engrossed in my own minor drama to notice.
Now I pick up the sound of angry voices, and when McCreadie steps out of the coach, I start to rise. Naturally, Gray is already moving past me. In his case, it’s not so much bearing a torch through the shadows as wondering whether those shadows hide anything interesting.
Annis huffs when I go to follow, but she doesn’t stop me, only saying, “Leave your muff in the coach, Mallory. One cannot trust servants, as I am certain you know from experience.”
I’m ready to hop out of the coach when I see McCreadie there, hand raised to help me down. Right. Formal event.
“Here, let me help you, Miss Mallory,” McCreadie says, loud enough that I know the words are a reproach to his friend, already making his way along the sidewalk, oblivious to everything but the siren’s call of adventure.
This particular siren’s call seems to be the rather shrill voice of a young woman. She’s following two guests up the steps into the town house, haranguing them about something I can’t quite catch.
Two footmen slide behind the guests like closing doors. The young woman glares at them and strides back to await new victims. The next coach pulls up, and she is right there, waiting for the guests to descend. When they do not—likely trying to figure out how to avoid her—she spots our party walking along the sidewalk.
Once I’m out of the coach, I realize why Annis and Isla stay behind, other than propriety. I’m wearing thin soled slippers, walking on an ice-cold, snow-dusted sidewalk. Luckily, we don’t have far to go.
Gray has slowed enough to notice me and offer his arm, though the gesture seems more reflexive than genuine. I still take it. It’s awkward enough walking into a party where I know I don’t belong, and I will fully admit that I would rather do it on the arm of a dashing gentleman.
Speaking of gentlemen and dashing, McCreadie dashes in front of us, cutting Gray off from reaching the young woman first. The young woman turns, and I get a glimpse of her. She’s maybe in her midtwenties, with dark hair swept back in what looks like an intentionally severe style and spectacles poised on her nose. Her outfit is drab and her boots are scuffed and…
Will I sound terrible if I say she looks like a stereotypical bluestocking? There is a type. There has always been a type, and it originated before this time period, and continues to be used in memes right up to the modern day.
