The Man Who Was Jekyll and Hyde (7 page)

This he slipped quietly into the door’s heavy lock and – as he glanced briefly about him to check no candles were suddenly flickering – it turned easily. Inside, all was familiar to him as a one-time work site and, while he helped himself to a raffia-tied bundle of cheroots, he even knew where Mr Thomson’s money would be held. But alas! As he started forcing the relevant mahogany drawer open, while admiring the strength of his own handiwork, he heard the cry ‘Who’s there?’ and wheeled round to see the night-gowned Thomson descending the stone stairs from his home to his shop, with a candle under his chin casting scary facial shadows. ‘Thief!’ Thompson cried.

Brodie instinctively went for his pistol but thought better of it and, as he quickly decided to avoid confrontation and promptly take his leave, he defaulted instead for the ironically polite response that was to become something of a Brodie farewell trademark. He bowed, doffed his hat and said ‘Guid nicht to ye, Mr Thomson.’

Trembling with rage and shock, the tobacconist watched without following the dark little figure vanishing into the night, and when a member of the city guard finally answered his repeated calls of ‘Thief!’ and asked if he had recognised the robber, Mr Thomson held his tongue. But he knew there was something oddly familiar about the figure and voice of the arrogant masked man who had so nearly robbed him and damn near even shot him.

Brodie had got away with it again. And suitably impressed by his own talent for escaping firm identification and therefore justice, he reckoned – as he anticipated times getting tougher – that he would be getting down to this sort of thing in a much more serious and concentrated fashion in the not too distant future.

The sawdusty workshop in Brodie’s Close attacked the senses and brought a smile to his fox-like face. It smelled of fresh wood, boiling fishy glue, resin and lacquer, and it sounded like a busy place: saws ripping, hammers banging, planes sighing, man-to-man shouting. And when he chose to honour it with his well-dressed presence and proffer expert advice over the craftsmen’s apron-holding shoulders, the son of the house was companionable and professional enough to be seen as reasonable boss material. Not that he was near that point yet, but young William was getting into practice and, metaphorically at least, he was rubbing his hands in anticipation with plenty to smile about.

The birth of Edinburgh’s New Town in 1767, when he was a tender 26, meant a new surge of business. For anyone skilled in the creation of furniture, what was to be a century-long development of classical homes on Edinburgh’s northern fields marked a golden age of enviable prosperity. He was already feeling the benefits by sharing in his father Francis’s growing workload when the old man died at 74 in 1782 – just as young James Craig’s winning cityscape scheme, designed to transform reekie old Edinburgh into the Athens of the North, was getting into its elegant stride.

Waves of public and private money were being invested into the grand initiative of Provost George Drummond (little of which he would live to see realised) to attract not just the city’s own professionals and aristocracy out of the overcrowded Old Town but expatriates ‘of rank’ who now saw, set against the claustrophobia of London, a breathable future amid the wide avenues and Doric, Ionic and Corinthian pillars of their own grand capital. Wealthy Scots riding a sudden wave of industrial enterprise in building, iron works, land ownership, law, banking, sugar and tobacco importation, brewing, publishing and commerce generally were gathering here to seek out new lives, new homes … and new furniture.

It meant that, on his father’s death, William Brodie’s legacy was multi-faceted: the means through inherited ownership of the family business and property to exploit that great tide of money-making opportunity; the aforementioned £10,000; and – perhaps most significant of all – his father’s spotless reputation as an upstanding citizen and town councillor.

Some people sensed that differently, of course: for one, the old lady who had been visited by him and relieved of her money, politely, in the night; William Creech, the councillor and publisher whose High Street bookselling business was near enough the Brodie homestead to know him very well (of which more later); and William’s own sisters, Jacobina and Jean, who knew him even better but had at least expected him to show up at his father’s deathbed.

Yet the son who did not quite make it to the old widower’s departure – who had been too busy sleeping off ‘the night before’ at a mistress’s house – also received the benefit of any doubt. With his weaknesses and indiscretions hardly believed or recognised by wider society, he was seen as a chip off the old master craftsman and gentleman, who had been Deacon of the Incorporation of Wrights, cabinet-maker extraordinary and Mason of Lodge Kilwinning, Canongate. Surely William would be another safe pair of Brodie hands? And so, as night follows day, within a year the bereaved son was filling the father’s shoes as a Deacon Councillor of the City, a position that gave him primary access to lucrative council projects in his field.

It seemed William Brodie had been left holding a whole handful of life’s trump cards, which must have felt like quite a triumph for one so keen on gambling …

So how would he play it? The safest bet would be to feign a furrowed brow of grief and hold all these cards close to his chest while relaxing into his perceived respectability and watching his potential customer base grow organically. But if the truth were known, his wayward soul was not enamoured of safety or respectability. He was cunning enough to present that face to the world for as long as possible, but under the shadow of his three-cornered hat there was a mischievous if calculating brain that sought the darker side of life, that ached for illegitimate adventure. He would, of course, try to keep it well hidden while he enjoyed the fruits of his inheritance, but he no doubt sensed that that would be finite – as indeed it proved to be.

Though he enjoyed the fruits of the New Town’s demands, one thing he wouldn’t do with his new-found fortune was join the gentry’s exodus to the north. His life was intensely centred around the Old Town and he sensed that it would survive and even thrive. For even before the coming of the New Town, the city had been gaining post-Culloden confidence. New banks had appeared to service government and the landed gentry and support burgeoning industries such as engineering and shipbuilding, coal, iron and cotton. But to put the icing on the cake, rising alongside the elegantly ordered New Town, with its royal street-name tributes and King George III’s personal endorsement, was the city’s new international reputation as ‘a hotbed of genius’, home to the leaders of a new wave of ideas known as the Scottish Enlightenment. The city’s intellectual buzz was encapsulated in this memorable comment attributed to the King’s Chemist, Englishman John Amyatt, talking in the mid-1700s: ‘Here I stand, at what is called the Cross of Edinburgh, and can, in a few minutes, take fifty men of genius and learning by the hand.’

The Cross? He meant the fourteenth-century Mercat Cross, part of which still stands in Parliament Square within an elaborate Victorian base built in 1885, the landmark where royal proclamations and other official announcements were read out, where merchants and citizens – and enlightened figures – gathered to talk and exchange ideas. As such, the area of the Cross was still the city’s hub, focus of most of that new cultural consciousness – despite the developing New Town. For while Craig’s architectural masterpiece (now a World Heritage site) created the kind of living space that the Old Town had lacked, forced as it had been to expand ever upwards with unhealthy, packed-out, reach-for-the-sky tenements, the new scheme had taken on the nature of a social experiment – successful in many respects but with the socially divisive effect of separating rich and poor as never before. Its exclusivity was threatening to create sealed-off lifestyles that would erode inter-class relationships.

The privileged professionals in the newly gentrified north could not be totally isolated, however, as there was a conspicuous shortage of commercial premises and caterings for basic human needs in this well-gardened residential plan: then, as now to some extent, it had relatively few shops, taverns, workshops, hotels or clubs and minimal general social buzz. So with little in the way of fine goods, furnishings and social contact immediately to hand in their still-growing community, this higher society began to regard the Old Town – before Princes Street emerged with luxury shops and products to satisfy their new expectations – as a place to revisit. Not just for shopping and snuff but for the intellectual stimulation of the Enlightenment magnet personified by people like the philosopher David Hume, the economist Adam Smith and, of course, the most intriguing draw of them all, Ayrshire’s ploughman poet Robert Burns, lured to ‘Edina’ in 1786 to be celebrated as ‘Caledonia’s Bard’ for his revised edition of
Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect
.

Grand personages invited the handsome bard-in-buckskin-breeches to their homes for him to be regarded with wonder – especially by much-impressed ladies. In reciprocal tribute, and thinking for a moment that he ought to be posh in the manner of his well-born admirers, he briefly abandoned his Ayrshire roughage to write a less-than-successful ‘English’ tribute to the capital whose eight verses began with:

Edina! Scotia’s darling seat!

All hail thy palaces and tow’rs;

Where once, beneath a Monarch’s feet,

Sat Legislation’s sovereign pow’rs:

From marking wildly-scatt’red flow’rs,

As on the banks of Ayr I stray’d,

And singing, lone, the ling’ring hours,

I shelter in thy honour’d shade.

As it happened, Burns’s lodging in Scotia’s darling seat was in Baxter’s Close (near today’s Writers’ Museum in Lady Stair’s Close), almost immediately opposite Deacon Brodie’s premises in the cobbled Lawnmarket. And while the star visitor was making a raft of illustrious local contacts like the Earl of Glencairn, distinguished lawyer Henry Erskine and
Encyclopaedia Britannica
editor William Smellie, not to mention the celebrated painters Nasmyth and Raeburn, it is said that the two near-neighbours became acquainted and that Brodie even attended the party at which Burns met, and was smitten by, Clarinda, his unfulfilled love and poetic inspiration.

The men certainly shared at least one drinking den: Johnnie Dowie’s, a dark but convivial alcove of a tavern in Libberton’s Wynd (the now-demolished address of Brodie’s mistress Jean Watt, roughly locatable today as the east pavement of George IV Bridge), where in a long narrow backroom affectionately dubbed The Coffin the poet would hold court on matters political and romantic among his admirers.

These included a mutual acquaintance, William Creech, the staunchly moralistic bookseller-publisher of Burns’s Edinburgh edition who, as a fellow town councillor and another near neighbour, was always wary of Brodie. Creech was to have his suspicions confirmed when he served on the jury at the famous burglar’s trial, and he then published his own musings on the event, printed just days later. He was also a co-founder of Edinburgh’s Speculative Society, a debating club whose members included various great figures such as Francis Horner and Sir Walter Scott.

So the Old Town remained the city’s beating heart, despite its continuing squalor in places, and could not be written off by the gradual coming to life of James Craig’s great vision. Not only was the city’s ancient centre a stage for ‘all human life is there’ day-to-day theatre, it had, along its fishlike High Street backbone with closes shooting off like ribs on either side, thriving retail premises and offices, clubs and tobacconists, booksellers and busy workshops, such as that of the Brodies. With the great lowering castle at its top end and the delicately handsome French-style Palace of Holyroodhouse at the lower end, the Royal Mile also had close proximity to other important buildings, such as the university and law courts, and – one that figures fatefully in this tale – the General Excise Office for Scotland in Chessel’s Court off the Canongate.

None of these cultural developments, prestigious buildings or changing circumstances would have been missed by the calculating 41-year-old Brodie, who now began to weigh up his future prospects in the light of his new-found fortunes.

He might have survived into his forties as an apparently reputable and prosperous man of some standing in the community, but he knew his place in that scheme of things and had no aspiration to join the gentry’s exodus over the relatively new North Bridge now spanning the drained gulf that had been the Nor’ Loch, the stinking near-sewer under the castle that would later become the fragrant Princes Street Gardens; no, he was a fixture in the familiar Old Town, where he would live out his life to the bitter end – literally, as it turned out. Not just because of the intrusive nature of his work, he knew who and what lay down every close and behind every door and would only occasionally step outside of its familiar mile-long stream of humanity.

For what? He was easily tempted by betting opportunities, so, as a breeder and owner of fighting cocks, he could often be found at Henderson’s Stables in the Grassmarket cheering on his own feathered champions. He also loved tavern card and dice games and, while often losing, would go to extraordinary lengths to win, yielding to the temptation to cheat – and not just against the chimney sweep who formally accused him of foul play. Losing did not sit well with Brodie, and his resulting fits of depression would drive him straight to his favourite antidote therefor: alcohol.

Relax into his respectability? After the reading of his father’s will, it initially seemed to him that his dissolute nightlife might slip into the past, but his other darker half sensed that this was self-delusion; that there could only be one eventual consequence of his good fortune. With immediate financial concerns lifted from his shoulders he succumbed to the weaker side of his character and the recreational enjoyments of spending unwisely. He slowly began to realise, however, that ‘recreational’ has a way of getting serious …