I could not help but step in to defend the dead man’s honor. “How is that important? Walter Browne could hardly choose his form of birth, and being born a foundling surely does not make him an invalid witness to the marriage?”
Gilroy granted it did not. “But there is something larger here that I may have uncovered. In the register of births, there were four foundlings baptized in the space of four years, all lads, all sponsored by this same Archibald Browne. The clerk of session could not tell me anything about them, since these records dated from the time before the revolution, when the church was still Episcopalian, so I bid him good day and went to have a conversation with the stabler in the Kirkgate.”
I was unprepared for that. “The stabler?”
“Aye. He is an old man with a keen, observant eye.”
“And how did you gain his acquaintance?”
Gilroy drank long, and studied me above his cup as though deciding how much of himself to open to my scrutiny. “My father kept the stables of a rich man who would enter every year a horse or two to run at Leith. I came each spring to help my father and to watch the races, as a lad. It gained me many such acquaintances.” With that established, he went on, “The stabler did remember when those foundling lads were given to the notary to raise. He also said the minister at South Leith church in those days was the Reverend Mr. Cant. You may remember him.”
“The Mr. Cant that Mrs. Graeme told us of? The one who bought her kitten?”
“Aye, the very same. They transferred him from Leith up here to Trinity when she was still a bairn, but I do doubt she would have known that. She’d have still been at Inchbrakie then.”
He slid the paper to me with the dates and names, on which I saw the last of the four foundling lads, named Henry Browne, was baptized thirty years ago.
“There were only four,” he said. “The stabler said that Mr. Cant would let no more bairns go to Browne beyond that, and when Mr. Cant was transferred out, he did warn the new minister to watch over the lads who were already in Browne’s house and see they went to church each Sabbath. I was told that Mr. Cant, who was a kindly man, had started having doubts about the morals of the notary.”
I did not ask what sort of doubts, because I knew he’d tell me, and he did.
“There was a woman in the house. That’s why Browne was allowed to take the foundlings in the first place, because he did have a wife who was respectable, but I’m told by the stabler that she was in truth a high-class whore for men who knew the proper door to knock upon and who had coin to pay.” He raised his cup and looked at me with steady eyes. “Her name was Barbara Malcolm.”
I considered this in silence for a moment.
Gilroy said, “Do not you find it odd that both of Mrs. Graeme’s witnesses should be from the same house, and that a house of ill repute, and she should not see fit to mention this?”
“We only have the stabler’s word it was a house of ill repute,” I pointed out.
“I trust the stabler.”
I could hear the undertone within his voice, and take its meaning. “And you don’t trust Mrs. Graeme.”
Gilroy was, if nothing else, the sort of man who did not meet you sideways, but straight on. “Greed does peculiar things to people. Since the advertisement was first posted for the heirs of those who perished in the service of the Company of Scotland to come forward and claim their share of their loved ones’ wages out of the Equivalent, there have been some who have stepped forward falsely, to claim money that does not belong to them.”
My blood rose sharply in reply to that smooth insult but I kept my voice calm as I told him, “She does stand to gain a little more than fifteen pounds, which is no fortune. And we have established that she is who she does claim to be. She did not lie to us about her friendships with the Morays and the Graemes.”
“Fraud is fraud. And being truthful in some things does not make someone altogether trustworthy.” He took his papers up, although he had not yet shared all their contents, and refolded them into his pocket. “I find it suggestive that she did not tell us Walter’s brother, Henry Browne, still lives in Leith. I think that you and I should go and visit him tomorrow morning. See what he can tell us about Mrs. Graeme and her…marriage.”
Gilroy’s gaze was challenging.
I told him, “Fine.”
We’d nearly reached the bottom of our jug of claret. As I tipped more out into my cup, I noticed Gilroy looking at the new-bought blade beside me.