“If youdowant Christmas...” Gray says.
“Nah, I just like the trappings,” I say. “The decorations, the parties, the gift giving. I can get that with Hogmanay.” I pause. “You guys do celebrate that, right?”
“We most certainly do. And on that note...” He glances at his sister. “Isla? Would you reach into the top left drawer there? I believe you’ll find an early holiday gift for you and Mallory.”
She finds an envelope bearing Gray’s impeccable script and holds it out to me. “Would you like to do the honors?”
I wave for her to go ahead. She opens it and gasps as she takes out what looks like calling cards. Then she peers at her brother.
“Please tell me this is not a joke.”
His brows shoot up. “I never joke.”
“You just told poor Mallory that she could be hanged for mentioning Christmas.”
“Perhaps she could be. The ban may no longer be well enforced, but if they wanted to make an example of someone, Mallory would be a fine choice.”
I toss my hair. “They’d never hang me. I’m a pretty girl with blond curls and big blue eyes.” I bat those eyes at him. “The public would rise up in howls of outrage.”
“Not if they knew you were also a thief.”
“Former thief. Reformed. And that wasn’t even me. It was Catriona.”
“Ah, right. You can explain that to them. Tell them that you are actually from the twenty-first century, and they won’t hang you for mentioning Christmas. They’ll hang you as a witch.” He glances at me. “We still do that here.”
“Scotland has not hanged witches in a hundred years,” Isla says hotly.
“They would make an exception for Mallory.”
Isla glares at him and waves the tickets. “So thesearea prank then?”
Gray sobers and meets her gaze. “Would I honestly do that to you, Isla?”
She inhales sharply. “They’re real?”
“Very real.”
She stares at him, speechless. I hurry to the desk, read the tickets and let out a squeal of glee.
ChapterTwo
Iam going to see Charles Dickens. Right now. I am walking along crowded George Street, heading to the Assembly Rooms music hall to seetheCharles Dickens. When I was in elementary school, my parents snagged tickets to see the Spice Girls, and as happy as I’d been then, I think I’m even more excited now.
My dad is an English prof. I grew up on Dickens. Landing in an era where he’s still alive and writing? I’d hardly been able to fathom it.
Many of my favorite classic novelists are still alive in this time. George Eliot. Wilkie Collins. Mary Elizabeth Braddon. I won’t have much chance of seeing them—they’re busy doing writerly things—but Charles Dickens tours. Or he did. He’s now on his farewell circuit. He’d been due to stop in Edinburgh in February, but by the time Isla heard of it, she wasn’t able to get tickets. That stop had to be rescheduled, though, because he injured his foot, which had caused such an outcry that the newspaper had to print his doctor’s note to prove it.
The stop was rescheduled for late December, and that’s how Gray obtained tickets for the last performance. Because, while Christmas might not be celebrated in Scotland, some of the wealthy travel to England for the festivities, and he snagged four tickets from an acquaintance who could no longer attend.
Isla and I get two of those tickets. Gray is accompanying us, along with his best friend, Detective Hugh McCreadie.
The music hall is only about a quarter mile from Gray’s Robert Street town house, so we are walking. To be honest, we walk most places. I won’t say that Victorian Edinburgh is a particularly pleasant place to stroll, given the amount of excrement, not all of it from horses. Add in the amount of precipitation, and you can’t even avoid that excrement, because it melts into every puddle. But boots come clean, and these days, I don’t even need to scrub them myself. Coach travel might be cleaner, but we can usually get where we want to go faster on foot. Also, being late December, the precipitation is all snow, which blankets the soot-covered city in white and also freezes the puddles, bodily waste and all.
The music hall, like Gray’s town house, is in the New Town. Initially, that’s where the wealthy moved to escape the poverty of the Old Town. These days, it’s home to both the upper class and the upper-middle, like the Gray family.
We are dressed for a night on the town. Gray wears a silk top hat and a long coat over a black wool three-piece suit with a starched white shirt and silk cravat. McCreadie is, as always, more stylish, with his checked jacket slightly shorter and more fitted, as is the incoming style. Isla has moved far enough from mourning that she’s able to wear lilac, and her dress is divine, with silver buttons and silver-gray pinstriping plus wider strips of silver-gray along the bottom of the sleeves and skirts. My own dress is the same one I wore to a party last month: turquoise silk with rust-brown embroidery and beadwork, and rust-brown lace trim.
To accommodate the narrow walking path, McCreadie and Isla are ahead of us. Isla has only to slip, one boot barely sliding, before McCreadie has his elbow out for her to take. It’s chivalrous, but also an excuse to have Isla on his arm, one she happily accepts. Just as I happily accept Gray’s arm when he notices them and puts out his arm for me. It’s an old-fashioned way of walking, the man with his elbow extended, the woman holding it. Very Victorian. Also, a welcome bit of human contact in a world where that is just not done.
