The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [53]
“He is somewhat reclusive these days. A friend of the artist, apparently, so he makes an exception tonight.”
Quire looked round to find Alexander Macdonald at his elbow, the curator’s eyes gleaming with barely restrained delight as he watched the renowned writer hold forth.
“Very fortunate for you,” Quire murmured. Even he, to whom such things hardly mattered, was not wholly unimpressed by the presence of this most famous of all Scots, but his feelings hardly approached Macdonald’s devotional awe. He was not a great reader of historical romances.
“Fortunate indeed,” Macdonald said. “Quite the gathering altogether, don’t you think? Did you see Mr. Audubon? The American Woodsman, they call him. Extraordinary paintings, quite extraordinary.”
“They’re very fine,” Quire agreed.
Already his attention was elsewhere. He could see, beyond the intervening shrubbery of heads, John Ruthven.
“Excuse me,” he said to Macdonald, and moved away, weaving through the throng, letting the hum of genteel conversation wash over and around him.
He drew a number of curious, sometimes disapproving, stares as he went. That did not surprise or concern him. He was hardly dressed or prettified appropriately for the occasion, after all. A mongrel intruding upon a pedigree herd.
Ruthven stood with a glass folded into the crook of his elbow, and a snuff box in his hand. Between thumb and forefinger he pinched up some of the brown, dusty powder and raised it to his nose, the other three fingers delicately fanned. He sucked it into the nostril with a single sharp sniff. The snuff box was not, Quire noted, the silver one Shake Carstairs had liberated from Carlyle’s corpse.
Durand stood at Ruthven’s side, his air that of a man craving anonymity. Nothing like the robust, insistent presence of Isabel Ruthven, who was drinking deeply from her own glass and scouring the room at the same time with a lively gaze. She wore a red gown with a great cascading bustle at its back like a crimson waterfall sculpted in cloth. Her hair was coiled up atop her head, and pinned there with an ivory comb.
She was the first to see Quire as he approached, and she lowered her glass slowly from lips already easing into an anticipatory smile. Ruthven followed her gaze, and his response was of an entirely different sort.
“Can I be free of this irritant nowhere?”
“Do try not to cause a scene, dear,” his wife murmured before Quire could reply. “I am sure the sergeant has no wish to spoil the evening for everybody.”
Her voice had the liquid ease and looseness of one who had already greatly enjoyed the Institution’s hospitality.
“And I am equally sure he is not here to speak with you, my dear,” Ruthven said. “I would not have thought you a patron of the arts, Mr. Quire.”
“Sergeant,” Quire corrected. “And you’re right. I’m not here for the paintings.”
“No, indeed,” smiled Ruthven. “Your dress evidences that rather clearly. Come, your face is thunderous, man, but surely you should be in good humour? I’d have thought you in the mood for celebration, as a former foot soldier in the Duke’s army, now that he’s risen to the highest office in the land.”
Quire looked away. The Duke of Wellington, victor of the Peninsular War and of Waterloo, had become prime minister just a week or two before, but whether that should count as advancement, or cause for celebration, was not obvious to him. He did not have the highest opinion of politics, or its practitioners, since it seemed an underhanded art to him. Still, it interested him that Ruthven knew of his army past; the man had evidently been making enquiries.
“Your Mr. Blegg is not with you tonight?” Quire asked.
“Of course he is not. This is hardly the sort of occasion…”
“No. Perhaps he has other business to be about once night has fallen?”
“I’m not sure I follow your…”
“Other matters to attend to,” Quire said. “Did he mention that he and I met the other night? He must have done, I suppose.