A Judgment of Vampires by Maggie MacKeever

Author:Maggie MacKeever [MacKeever, Maggie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Regency Romance with Vampires
Publisher: Belgrave House
Published: 2015-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-four

A gossip’s mouth is the devil’s postbag.

(Romanian proverb)

Chloe walked with Cezar along the crowded High Street, one of several avenues that made up the Royal Mile, which ran along the ridge of an extinct volcano. Tall tenements towered overhead, many with overhanging wooden upper stories and crowstepped gables and twisted chimneystacks. Winding paths and closes led to different parts of the Old Town, many of the pathways so precipitous that pedestrians were required to pay strict attention to their feet.

Chloe shivered, despite the warmth of her pelisse. The air was damp and chill, pungent with the smoke and soot of countless coal fires.

The High Street, Cezar informed her, had once been referred to as Via Regis, which meant ‘The Way of the King’. Chloe was interested to hear of the fairly catholic history of St Giles’ Cathedral and equally intrigued by the Royal Exchange, which had been built on the steeply sloping site of several old closes with the result that it was a mere four storeys high around the quadrangle which faced the High Street, while its north wall rose like a great grey cliff to the height of twelve.

Cezar unlatched a gate that led into a close, stepped aside for her to pass, fastened the gate behind them. He led Chloe down a narrow alleyway, through a locked door, into a small enclosed space at the top of a dark stair.

He paused to light a lantern. “Are you certain you care to go on? Say the word and we’ll turn back.”

Cowhearted though it might be in her, Chloe was tempted to cry craven. Cezar was very much the Stapan of Edinburgh today.

She had been surprised when he sent a footman to ask if she cared to accompany him on an outing. Grateful for an opportunity to hold a private conversation, she had hastily tidied her hair, donned her bonnet and pelisse.

Cezar had been waiting for her in the hallway, a pair of round dark spectacles resting on his aristocratic nose. Chloe was aware that some vampires could venture into sunlight, but had never witnessed one doing so before.

Impossible to see his eyes behind the dark spectacles. Better not to see his eyes, Chloe reminded herself. And best not to dwell on the fact that she was embarked on an adventure with a predator who was very, very old. “You have piqued my curiosity. Lead on,” she said, and followed him down the stair.

Most of the Edinburgh of early times, Cezar explained, existed beneath the streets of the Old Town. As the population had increased, geographical limitations, combined with the reluctance of the inhabitants to build outside the defensive walls, had imposed such space restrictions that they had no choice but to build upward. As structures in the Old Town climbed higher, their foundations had sunk deeper into the soft sandstone. Here, buried down around the cellars of the Royal Exchange, were abandoned streets and buildings, suspended in time since the 17th century.

Derelict tenements and shops flanked the broken pavement.

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