The Sign of the Black Dagger Read Online Free

stands the hill that we call Arthur’s Seat. I was thinking that debtors who cannot pay for lodging may have to lodge out in the open park. The thought made me shiver.
    We stopped at the Abbey Strand so that our father could point out the three brass letters SSS spaced across the roadway. They mark the boundary of the abbey precincts and of the sanctuary.
    “So the count will have to get his feet over this line before midnight on Sundays. Otherwise he might be pursued by his creditors down the High Street until the last second, hoping that he might trip and fall!”
    We thought it amusing, then.
    We crossed the road, skirted the Girth Cross, and were in the burgh of Canongate, which adjoins the High Street, where we live, opposite St Giles Cathedral, in Advocate’s Close. I hadto stop to tighten the laces of my right boot. I gave William my muff to hold while I did so. As I was putting one hand against the wall to steady myself I felt some deep cuts in the stone. When I had finished with my boot I examined the wall.
    “What is it?” asked William.
    “Someone’s been cutting something into the stone.” I bent to examine it more closely. “It looks like a symbol. It looks rather like a dagger.”
    William shrugged and we carried on up the Canongate, which boasts several fine mansions. William and I went ahead, for our mother’s steps were slowing and it was beginning to spit with rain. I kept my hands tucked deep into my fur muff now. It was a Christmas present from Papa and I loved the warmth of it.
    Once we left the Canongate behind and were in the High Street, which is lined with high stone tenements, there were more people to be seen. Ragged, barefoot children were scuttling around in spite of the cold. Rich and poor live cheek-by-jowl here, as our father puts it; the poor living, as would be expected, in lesser dwellings, often no more than hovels. Many houses are divided into smaller parts. We are fortunate ourselves to live in a whole one since our father inherited it from his father, who inherited it from his father.
    One tiny girl came running up to us, cupping her mottled, purple hands and holding them out to us, beseeching us with the look in her eyes, for she did not speak. Green snot ran from her nostrils. I desperately wished that I could lend her my muff, even for a few minutes, so that she could warm those hands, but I only had one and there was a number of children. Once I had given my scarf to a girl and started a riot. In the end the scarf was tugged to pieces so Papa said it would not be advisable to do that again. He and our mother were kind to the children, though. They did not give them money for they saidthat the children’s parents would take it and spend it on gin, but they always told Bessie to give them hot soup or a bannock whenever they came to the door.
    We hoped Bessie would have the kettle boiling now, with scones still warm from the griddle. My mouth began to water at the thought of them. The long walk had made us ravenous.
    The girl was keeping pace with us. I searched in my pocket and found a sweet, a clove ball. I put it into her hand, and also my lace-edged handkerchief, one of a number sent to me by my grandmother in France. She put the clove ball into her mouth quickly before another child could snatch it. The sweet bulged in the side of her cheek. But she did not wipe her nose. She ran off with the handkerchief, waving it over her head like a trophy.
    We turned into our close and stopped dead at the top of the steps. The alley drops steeply downward. The tenements on either side are tall with jutting timber projections, which means that the light is poor, especially on a winter day. We were just able to discern two men outside our door. The way they were standing there suggested trouble. As we went slowly down the steps to meet them we saw that one of them was dressed in greenish-black clothes, while the other wore livery bearing the royal coat of arms.
    “This your house?”