“Aye, the lass on Anderley’s left actually forgot to keep makin’ coo eyes at him whenever the actor playin’ Bonnie Brock was on stage,” Bree drawled sarcastically.
His lips compressed slightly, letting me know this wasn’t the first time she’d mentioned the girl and her cow eyes, and I wondered if this was the source of contention I’d sensed between them when they entered the room.
“They did stress how he has his ain code o’ honor,” Bree added, returning her attention to me. “So it was verra clear why he was ruthless when he deemed he had cause to be.” She tilted her head in thought. “And considerin’ how cruel and unforgivin’ life, and even the law, can be to those who havena been born wi’ all the advantages, I suppose his code o’ honor is better than none. At least wi’ him they ken where they’re at and call that fair.”
Bree made a valid point. A point she and Anderley were both familiar with. After all, Bree had entered my father’s service as a kitchen maid, where she had been abused by the cook, nearly being crippled during her worst beating. At the discovery, my father had fired the cook and hired a surgeon to attend to Bree, but the damage was done, and to this day she still limped when the weather was cold or rainy. Whereas Anderley had been born into an impoverished family in Italy and sold to a padrone, who had promised his parents he would teach him a trade. But rather than an apprenticeship, Anderley had found himself essentially a slave, one of the hundreds if not thousands of Italian Boys haunting the streets of London and other cities in Europe, performing and hawking wares for their padrone masters. That he had run away from his padrone and saved Gage from a trio of ruffians, and then Gage had taken him into his service, had been part providence and part courageous perseverance.
Neither Bree nor Anderley had been responsible for the terrible situations they’d found themselves in. Servants were to mind their superiors and suffer whatever “reasonable” correction they meted out—a term which gave room for considerable latitude, sometimes with tragic consequences. That no one had recognized sooner how beyond “reasonable” the cook’s punishment of Bree had become was horrifying and sadly all too common, while officials often ignored the existence of the Italian Boys—as they ignored the existence of many of the country’s poor except to throw them into the workhouse for vagrancy—or accepted bribes from the padrones to look the other way. They had no one to champion them, particularly as they were foreigners, and so they were left to fend for themselves the best they could.
The world was filled with far too many people like Bree and Anderley, tumbled into terrible circumstances not of their own making. But by another twist of fate, Bree might have ended up dismissed from her job as a cripple, left to beg on the street, and Anderley could have found himself scraping an existence from whatever meager employment he could find, or worse, turned into a hard-hearted padrone himself.
It was a fact I had found myself wrestling with more and more often of late, especially after the stark injustice of the class divide illustrated by our last case. And because I was about to bring a child into this unfair world. Gage and I spent so much of our time and effort in the pursuit of truth and justice, and yet, at times, all it seemed to do was reveal how dubious and unjust the world truly was.
We had all fallen silent, lost in our own quiet contemplation until Gage spoke. “Anything else?” At some point his gaze had dipped to my rounded belly, perhaps also considering the world our child was being born into. His eyes lifted to meet mine, and his lips curled faintly upward at the corners, offering me a brief but bolstering smile.
“The vaults,” Anderley replied. “Where Bonnie Brock supposedly stores his contraband whisky.”
“Yes? What about them?” Gage asked.
“They look nothing like the author describes them in the book.”
“Aye,” Bree agreed. “I hadna’ thought o’ it before, but the way the author speaks aboot them in the book doesna make much sense, does it? ’Specially no’ after I’ve seen more o’ what they actually look like onstage.”
“I wondered about that when I was reading it,” I admitted. “The vaults are mostly enclosed underground, aren’t they? A dark, dank, rat-infested labyrinth of chambers.”
“Aye. No’ the place you’d choose to hang aboot longer than necessary.”
And yet, in the book, Bonnie Brock and his men had often plotted and caroused in the vaults when Brock owned multiple buildings throughout Edinburgh, each far more suitable to such activities.
The vaults had been created when the South Bridge had been built over the gorge of Cowgate to connect High Street with the University of Edinburgh in the 1780s. All of the arches of the bridge except for the one under which the street of Cowgate traveled had gradually been enclosed when tenements had been allowed to be built abutting the viaduct. The shops along the length of the bridge above and the buildings adjacent had then built extra floors within the arches, further dividing the space into storage rooms for their buildings.
However, the construction of the bridge had been rushed, and the surface never sealed, leading to flooding in the vaults. Soon after, legitimate businesses had abandoned its use, and it was taken over by less savory enterprises, as well as the most desperate residents of Cowgate. One could only imagine how appalling conditions must be in that damp, sunless world and what desperation those forced to dwell there must feel.
“It’s clear the author has never actually been down there,” Anderley surmised.
“No, he hasn’t.”
I turned to look at Gage, alerted by something in the tone of his voice. The almost derisiveness of its certainty. I glanced at Anderley, realizing he hadn’t compared the author’s words to the scene in the play. Bree had been the one to do that. Anderley had stated it as if he had firsthand knowledge. Which more than likely meant Gage also did.
A sharp lance of horrified fear streaked through me. “When have you been down in the vaults?”
He blinked rapidly, and I could tell he was considering lying to me. I narrowed my eyes letting him know I was not going to be fobbed off.
“Last year,” he admitted. “Actually, that’s one of the places Sergeant Maclean took us to search for Kincaid.”
On that fateful night of my first encounter with Bonnie Brock, when he had appropriated Philip’s carriage outside the Theatre Royal with me inside. I frowned in remembrance of that event, and the fact it had been missing from both the book and the Theatre Royal play. I couldn’t help but wonder what that meant, if anything.
However, Gage evidently thought my glower indicated anger. “Darling, we never went deeper than a few rooms. Which was more than enough, I assure you.” He took hold of my hand. “We were purely there to ascertain Kincaid’s whereabouts.”
I nodded distractedly. “Of course.”