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Authors: Rick Wilson
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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.
3
THE BIRTH OF
HIS CRIMINAL HALF
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
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.
3
THE BIRTH OF
HIS CRIMINAL HALF
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
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