Chapter Four
Hamish strode up the damp, stone staircase out of the Princes Street Gardens, taking the steps two at a time. He had to keep moving—he always thought better on his feet, with the wind in his face and an idea between his teeth. It might take him all day to climb to the top of Calton Hill, or even Arthur’s Seat, but by the time he arrived at the top, he was sure to have thought of a solution to his rather dire dilemma.
“Hamish Cathcart?” A woman’s voice penetrated the fog wreathing his brain. “Why, you’re just the young man I need to see. Where are you off to in such an all-fired rush?”
Hamish turned to find Lady Augusta Ivers at the bottom of the stairs, and retraced his steps. “My dear Lady Ivers.” He bowed over the hand the elegantly-clad widow offered him. “Delighted, as always, to see you, my lady.”
Lady Augusta Ivers was a well-known fixture in Edinburgh’s society, as admired as she was universally liked. She could always be counted upon to have some fresh and interesting intelligence about Edinburgh and the world—her circle of friends and correspondents extended to the continent and beyond.
“Well enough,” she answered in her usual polished, self-possessed way. “But enough social palaver. You are just the man I was hoping to see. I have been meaning to speak to you about a proposition I think might suit both of us equally.”
Hamish was instantly leery—in his eight and twenty years he had entertained any number of “propositions” from widowed ladies. But he had never thought Lady Ivers the type—although younger than her late husband, she had been entirely devoted to Admiral Ivers. “How may I be of service to you, my lady?”
“A business proposition, Hamish, my lad. Not that I’m not flattered.” Lady Ivers flashed him a knowing but kind smile. “Have you an office where we might speak privately?”
He did not. At present, Hamish conducted his business in a corner chair at Smyth’s Coffee House off the Grass Market, but such an establishment was hardly the place for a lady, even one as unflappable as Augusta Ivers.
“Never mind.” The lady was already waving him off, impatient to get to her point. “Walk with me, where we might not be overheard.” She took his arm, and led him back the way he had come, into the privacy of the garden paths. “It has recently come to my attention that the publishing house of Prufrock & Company is in some financial difficulty. This distresses me, as they were the publisher of my late brother’s entirely scandalous, but entirely popular novel.”
“Aye, my lady?” Hamish was familiar with the work. Indeed, any lad who had been to university in Scotland was familiar with the tale of Fanny Bahoochie—and there was a particularly apt name for the protagonist of A Memoir of a Game Girl. Sweet, game Fanny Bahoochie had been the stuff of schoolboy fantasy.
But how this might matter to him now, Hamish knew not.
Lady Ivers was keen to inform him. “I have been thinking of commissioning a new version of my late brother’s work to bring to publication. A considerably less scandalous version, retaining all of the charm, but a great deal less of the salacious content of the original.”
As far as Hamish was concerned, the charm of the original had been in the salacious content—at least it had been for the young gentleman readers at Saint Andrew’s University.
“If the book were in the right hands,” the lady continued to explain, “Prufrock—who still holds the rights to publish, you see—could make a fortune. As could others who stand to benefit. The work is notorious enough to still be well known—it would sell itself if Prufrock had enough talent and vision to create a version that would pass the censors. But Prufrock lacks both imagination and, to be frank, ready money.”
Ye gods.
A marvelous sort of sensation started at the back of his brain—the sort of tingling sensation that could not be ignored. The sort of sensation that had made—and lost— him several fortunes.
This time, he was determined to be prudent. “How much money?”
Lady Ivers gifted him with a pleased, knowing smile. “I like you, Hamish. You’re clever and quick. You understand.”
Aye, he understood. He could practically taste the possibility—sharp and potent like good Scots whisky.
She named a goodly sum. “Have you the blunt?”
He didn’t. Not all of it. But most.
Because Augusta Ivers was as sharp as they came—her acumen and head for investments were well known amongst her set. And Hamish was already acquainted with Prufrock & Company, Publisher and Fine Press, suppliers of high quality volumes of poetry—he had purchased a collection a time or two. The company was comprised of one Abel Prufrock, ancient but well-respected publisher, one articled clerk to mind the books, one pressman to mind the printing, and two gawking apprentices to mind the pressman—already a lean, if not presently profitable enterprise. It occupied a small but efficient premises at the end of Fowl’s Close, which curved like a short, lower rib off the long spine of the High Street, down the back of the city.
“You see it, don’t you?” Lady Ivers pressed. “How their fortunes might be reversed with an infusion of cash which would allow them to print the new version of Fanny’s story? How the right man might reshape that novel into something more palatable and acceptable to the general public, not to mention the censors?”
He did see. He also saw the flaw in such a seemingly simple plan—finding the right man to tame the more erotic episodes of the story into something merely racy, and pep up the mundane bits to something livelier. He had no idea if he could be that man. But still, the idea had merit. And potential. But he would also need to speak with Abel Prufrock personally, and look at the books, and see if it really would take as much blunt as Lady Ivers estimated.
It was as if she could read his mind. “My information is impeccable, but Prufrock may be willing to negotiate. If you think you can do it, I stand ready and willing to provide any additional capital—for a commensurate share of future profits, of course, as well as the increased sales income from the book—that might be needed. But I need a man like you to be Prufrock’s partner, to see that things are done right, as they should be. That the book is revised well enough to make the fortune it ought.”
A man like him.
And there it was—that fire in his belly that spread to his brain. That hunger for a new endeavor that had all the potential he might have hoped for. And he hadn’t even had to climb all the way up to the top of Arthur’s Seat—opportunity had come knocking at his own door.
But this was the first time opportunity had ever worn lavender silk.