Trick of the Light

through the thin nightgown and Samuel’s mind, never a strong, fixed point at the best of times, wandered.

But a lustful lunge might be misinterpreted as a cavalier attitude and there was no telling where this conversation might lead.

‘As I told you, I suspected Andrew had kept the money hidden for a reason.’

‘Some things are best paid for in cash.’

‘Such as?’ she asked sharply.

Whores for one, came into his mind but he kept his expression bland and open; it had served him well with many women to act the child in man.

They suffered the flinty exactitudes of matrimony and flowered like cherry blossom at a friendly face and joyful rumpling of the bed sheets.

Muriel was such a woman.

Cherry blossom. But not at the moment. At the moment she regarded him with a wary questioning stare.

‘I showed you where that money was kept.’

‘You did, my dear.’

‘And now it’s gone.’

‘It has. For certain sure.’

‘As if the thieves knew exactly where to find it.’

He nodded as if she had made an irrefutably wise assertion but cursed his big mouth because putting two and two in summation, a boastful whisky speech in the Foul Anchor tavern to a certain Seth Moxey might yet come back to haunt him.

Samuel had a round, pleasant face with a little goatee beard and radiated a kind of damaged innocence, as if life’s tribulations had left a mark but the spirit was undaunted.

He was known to his acquaintances as Silver Sam both because of his hair, which had prematurely attained this hue and gave him a gravitas far beyond his actual age, and the fact that he enjoyed personal artefacts of the precious metal. Watch and chain, silver ring, tiepin, take your pick.

He enjoyed the glitter; however, this was not the time for outward show.

Muriel was not directly accusing but harboured suspicions that she longed to be disproved because women, despite their innate mistrust of men, always hope to meet an improved specimen somewhere along the line.

Yet Samuel knew that protesting innocence too loudly might imply a feeling of guilt. A man’s excuses never quite ring true.

‘I will make enquiries,’ he said.

‘So will Inspector McLevy,’ she replied.

Samuel winced internally. That was not a name he wished to hear. No-one of the fraternity wanted that bugger on his trail.

‘Yet he is a policeman, my love. Certain doors may be closed against him.’

‘Unlike my own, which seems to be open to all comers.’

A bitter riposte. They trembled on the edge of their very first quarrel.

We all begin with such high hopes, do we not?

She knew that he was a dabbler on the fringes of respectable society, a buyer and seller of this and that, as he was wont to say, and it added to her relish of cocking a snoot at accepted custom.

But witnessing that unlicensed, licentious freedom was the grim effigy of her husband who looked down from the various portraits in the house that she dared not remove for fear of adverse comment.

Perhaps Andrew was correct. She was cheap. Besmirched. This was no better than she deserved.

A deep breath then out with it.

‘Give me your word,’ she said.

‘For what, Moumou?’

His pet name for her brought no softening to her face.

‘Swear that you are not compromised by this theft.’

He placed his hand solemnly over the heart area, or as near as he could, given that his pocketbook resided there.

‘I swear upon my mother’s grave.’

The mother that had thrown him out as a young boy to make his living on the streets of Leith by whatever his wits might conjure up. Samuel had pimped, lied, stolen, been abused and defiled many times one way or the other but had somehow managed to haul himself out of the mire.

And he was never going back.

Not if he could help it.

Muriel looked into his eyes. They did not flinch. He had learned this at an early stage. Steadfast mendacity.

‘Upon her grave,’ he repeated.

A long silence where he noticed that there were some thin lines from the sides of her eyes as if a crow had walked past in the snow. Age withers us all.

‘I believe you,’ she finally declared.

He bowed his head to hide a relieved smile.

‘And I shall strain every nerve to find your jewels,’ he murmured.

Later in the bouncy bed, having tested the springs with vigorous consummation, they lay side by side.

She was snoring. Lightly. Ladylike. But snoring.

He watched her with some fondness but not enough to alter the train of his thought.

Seth Moxey was a dirty dog. And he, Samuel Grant, was a bletherskite.

A liar and a buffoon. But still alive.

What a bugger that McLevy was involved.

Muriel came awake with a jolt and looked down at an admittedly naked breast, the nipple of which was like a sentry at attention under his absent-minded caress.

‘Jezebel,’ she announced to the ceiling.

‘Who might that be?’ he asked cautiously.

‘A wicked woman who was trampled by horses and eaten by dogs. In the Bible.’

Samuel blinked. His knowledge of scripture was not vast but it sounded like one of those punishments from on high. He was not a follower of that sort of retribution, in fact religion struck him as attracting stiff-necked folk who then dished out God’s will to make up for what they lacked.

He was more for live and let live.

‘She must have been wicked, right enough,’ he offered, transferring his thumb to the other nipple in the interests of equality.

‘Andrew was forever talking about evil women in the Bible. It seemed to fascinate him.’

Muriel shook her head, troubled by pleasure’s close connection to guilt, for instance in the case of papillary stimulation and worried memories.

‘I was called by such a name tonight.’

‘By whom?’ he demanded with indignation. ‘I’ll punch their nose aside!’

Muriel thought of trying to explain that the nose in question might not be materialised, finding its physical expression through a sensitive’s visage behind a veil, but decided to leave things be.

Yet the timbre of the spirit voice had sounded weirdly like her dead husband and Jezebel had been his crushing verdict on any woman who wore trace of cosmetic covering or flaunted an improvement upon what nature had provided.

What if he’d been watching them all this time?

What if he were watching them now?

Muriel was not someone who liked to delve into the dark crevices of the mind and regretted most bitterly that she had agreed to accompany Mary Doyle and her son to the Spiritualist Society, but Mary was an old friend, Muriel had welcomed the distraction, and Arthur was…well, shameful to admit such, but in her new-found sense of fragrant release, she was attracted to his courtly manners and massive frame.