The Edinburgh Dead (29 page)

Agnes raised her eyebrows at that, and scratched her chin.

“Might need a pipe for this,” she muttered, and went to a chest on the window ledge. From it, she dug out a long-stemmed clay pipe and a leather pouch of tobacco. The baby began to whimper and splutter. Agnes glanced at Quire as she packed the brown, pungent fibres into the bowl of the pipe.

“Give her a finger to suck on. That’ll quiet her for a bit.”

“Me?” Quire asked stupidly.

“Aye, you. Who else?”

Quire rose and went to lean over the unsettled infant, looking down into her pink face. This was not an area in which he possessed any great expertise. He closed his fingers into a soft fist and extended a thumb towards the babe’s mouth.

“Your wee finger, man,” Agnes grunted, “not a thumb. You wanting to choke the poor wee thing? Give her something she can get her lips around. She’ll not bite it off. Anyone’d think you’d never seen a baby before.”

“I’ve never nursed one with a finger, if that’s what you mean,” Quire said, bristling just a touch at the accusation of inadequacy. Not that he could dispute it.

Agnes squatted down by the hearth, and lit a taper from the ashy, gleaming coals there. She puffed away at the pipe to get it going, watching Quire out of the corner of her eye. The baby had set her delicate lips about the tip of his finger, and was once more content.

“That’ll do, that’ll do,” Agnes told him as she returned to her stool.

Wisps of smoke coiled up from her pipe. Quire went back to his place on the bed, relieved to have successfully discharged at least that one small responsibility.

“Let’s have it, then,” Agnes said.

“I’ve seen things lately I can’t explain. Not easily. The kind of
things… I don’t know, but maybe the kind of things you would know about.”

“Is that right? What manner of things are we talking about?”

“I’ve met men who feel no pain, and don’t mind broken bones nor a musket ball in their chest, and can go down under ice and come up through it again. They don’t utter a word, and you don’t see much of anything when you look in their eyes. And with strange writing, like tattoos or something, all over their hands. Dogs, just the same.”

He said it all at once, in a rush, as if by doing so he might make it sound less implausible to his own ears. What Agnes might make of it, he had no idea, whether he spoke it quick or slow. She said nothing, chewing thoughtfully at the stem of her pipe. Quire shifted uneasily on the bed.

“I’m no great believer in anything but flesh and blood,” he said with a shrug, “but there’s something here. God knows, I need help from somewhere. What these men are doing… there’s grave robbing a part of it, and murder a part of it, and I’m sure as I can be there’s something unnatural a part of it, too.

“And because I know all that, they’ll come for me now. As soon as I’m cut loose from the police. It’s what I’d do. They can’t leave someone who’s seen what I have wandering about free.”

“Aye,” Agnes said around her pipe, “you’ve the look of a man who thinks he needs help, right enough. And it’s not much odds whether you’re a believer or not. There’s more things in the world that are old and deep than these men of philosophy and science we’re infested with these days can admit of. Forgotten, maybe, by most; not the same as being gone.”

She exhaled a great cloud of bluish smoke.

“Not sure what you think I can do for you, though,” she said. “I’m more in the way of gentle wee charms these days, son. Easing a hard birth, softening a laddie’s heart for a lass who’s after him. Ridding a bairn of a fever. That sort of thing.”

“I’ve had a feathered star of twigs nailed to my door,” Quire said. “Is that some sort of gentle wee charm?”

“Oh, that’s interesting. What sort of feathers?”

“Black. A crow, maybe. Does it matter?”

“Might do. Might not. Who are these folk you think are doing such things?”

“John Ruthven, for one.”

“Aye, I ken him,” she said, much to Quire’s surprise. “Never did meet him, though.” She gave a pleased little laugh. “He came down this way, a few years back, wanting to talk to me. Ask me some questions. How he heard of me, I’ve no idea, but there he was, waiting on the quayside, poking around in his fancy trousers and his pretty wee necktie. I watched him for a while, but I didn’t like the look of him, so he never did lay eyes on me.”

The baby was softly smacking her lips in her sleep, as if to savour the spicy scent of her grandmother’s pipe smoke.

“Do you know what he was wanting from you?” Quire asked quietly, careful not to disturb the babe’s slumber.

“No. Can guess, if you like. Ruthven’s an old name. Lots of history in it. Plenty of folk as have worn it down the years thought themselves seekers of lost arts. Most of them just dabblers, playing around with things they’d not understand. That’s the worst sort, the most dangerous sort: them as want to make themselves important and clever. I’m guessing he thought I could tell him something or other would help in whatever dabbling of his own he had in mind.”

“There’s another man, called Blegg. Or Weir, perhaps, or something else. His name’s not a fixed thing, I’ve been told. Works for Ruthven.”

“Never heard of a Blegg. Weir, I ken. So do you.”

“Weir?”

“Major Weir. Do you not ken your history, son?”

Quire frowned. A connection he had not made before, struggling to be born in his mind: Macdonald, the antiquary, had said that Ruthven had taken items found in Major Weir’s house from their collections.

“Well? You’re sitting there like a glaikit sheep,” Agnes prompted.

“The name’s familiar, aye. Major Weir. Burned at the stake. Might be Ruthven’s interested in him too, from what I hear.”

Quire was remembering old stories. Silly little tales, told around drinking tables, or to frighten children; tales he had not thought of for so long that they had lain buried, all but forgotten, in his mind.

“Hundred and fifty years ago,” Agnes mused. “Weir was strangled and burned at the stake at the Gallowlee. They’re building their fine houses over it, on the road between here and their nice New Town. That’s the way of things now, isn’t it? They build over the past, think that makes it gone.

“His sister hanged in the Grassmarket. There was hundreds burned, and hardly a one of them deserving the fate, but Weir maybe did. There was something fierce in him, no doubting it. Something dark.”

She rose slowly from her stool, and crouched by the fire, taking one piece of coal at a time in her hand and tossing each on to the dwindling embers. The place was hardly needing more warmth, Quire thought, but her movements had the absent-minded sloth of habit, a soothing exercise to keep the thoughts moving in her mind.

“These are old names you’re tossing about,” she mused. “They’ve got a long reach, back to before all this gas and steam and bright new world folk are making. Back to different times. Inscriptions upon a man’s skin, that might be binding work, or a protective endowment.

“A feathered cross nailed to your door: now that might be just a thing meant to frighten, but it’s the shape of old workings. Divination, or curse, or both. Bring down misfortune on a man’s head, that could, if done right. Mark him for death.”

“I’ve not been overburdened with good fortune, the last month or two,” Quire grunted. “I’m of a mind to share around some of the misery now.”

“Is that right?” Agnes was distracted, hardly listening to him. “Weir. Not a good name to be talking about, not if there’s dark business being done. I’ll be damned if it’s not an ill omen. His house is still there, you know. Empty, for a century and a half.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Been a long time since those who think themselves sensible worried about such things. But it’s still there. I’d thought it’d been forgotten, and good riddance to the memory, but if there’s folk using his name, thinking on him… maybe not.”

She tapped the bowl of her pipe gently against the edge of the table, spilling a tiny drift of spent ash.

“Can you show me?” Quire asked her.

“Might be I could. Might be worth a wee look, now you’ve brung up the old times. I’d a mind to come up to the big town anyway, get myself some cloth for the making of a skirt. Are you paying, though, son?”

“I could put a shilling or two your way,” Quire said.

And Agnes nodded at that, and took a hard enough suck through her pipe to set the tobacco glowing in the bowl.

“It’s a grim-looking place,” Quire observed.

The courtyard he and Agnes McLaine peered into was narrow, gloomy. Desolate. A low-browed, vaulted passageway had brought them in beneath the soaring tenements of the West Bow to this hidden square, buried like an abscess in the very heart of the Old Town. They could hear the thud and grind of the building works on the new bridge; they could hear, less clearly, the rattle of carts over the West Bow’s cobbles and the cries of hawkers in the Grassmarket. But all of that was as the sound of another world, for the courtyard felt abandoned and lifeless.

There was a crust of grime on the ground, and heaps of debris scattered around: rotting pieces of wood, piles of cloth or clothes so filthy it was impossible to say what colour they might once have been. The dusty smell of mould was in the air. A rat ran along the foot of one of the walls, its head bobbing up and down. When it realised it was no longer alone in its foraging, it vanished into a narrow crevice in the stonework.

Yet the place was not abandoned; there were clearly some folk calling it home. There were doors around the yard, and dark stairways leading up into the surrounding tenements like burrows cut by maggots. Some of the higher windows, Quire saw as he cast his gaze upwards towards the distant square of sky, were open. A white
sheet hung from one of them, though there was no breeze to dry it in this tight little space.

“A few in here who’ll not be happy to have a sergeant of the police poking about, I’d guess,” Agnes mused.

“I’m not with the police,” Quire said. “Not any more.”

And that was true. He was cut loose from the foundations he had tried to set under his life in the last few years, his name struck from the books of the Edinburgh police.

It had been unceremonious, abrupt. No opportunity to defend himself, or to face his accusers. Just a courier at his door, presenting letters signed by Baird himself, in ostentatious style, that informed Quire he was dismissed, on grounds of misconduct. No pension would be paid, no appeal heard.

Reading those formal, impersonal lines of text, Quire could imagine quite clearly the satisfaction with which Baird must have signed his name beneath them. Seldom would a man have been so pleased to be the conveyor of bad tidings.

“That’s where we’re bound,” Agnes said, nodding towards a door at the far end of the courtyard.

She had come with her head and shoulders wrapped in a woollen shawl, though the weather was clement enough.

They crossed the square side by side, Quire going cautiously and with a certain trepidation, Agnes advancing in her heavy leather shoes with an almost eager tread. The door they approached was black with rot, its wood drilled through by worms and decay. There were gaps between it and its frame. When Quire put his eye to one, he felt a cool touch on his skin, the dank apartments beyond breathing out over him.

“It’s dark in there. Should have brought a lantern.”

“There’ll be light enough,” Agnes said.

Dismissal should have dismayed Quire more than it did, perhaps, but he was numb, and unsurprised. He had already resigned himself to this outcome. His life was being shaken apart, like a fox cub clasped in the jaws of a hunting dog, and he had come to expect little better. His mind had set itself to other purposes, though, and
was too bent upon them to admit of mourning for his losses. He meant to do some shaking of his own now, of Ruthven and the rest. He needed only to find the right grip upon them.

Agnes gave the door an exploratory rattle, curling her fingers around its edge where rot had eaten back the wood. Little flakes and splinters fell from it, even beneath such slight assault.

“Should open up all right,” she said, but instead of testing that assumption, she took a step back and groped around in a pouch looped over the waistband of her heavy skirt. She brought forth a finger length of brown wood, unworked and unpolished. Just a section cut from a thin branch, with a hole in one end through which cord was threaded. She fastened that cord about her left arm so that the little piece of wood hung there, a pendant at her wrist.

“Rowan, cut at Samhain,” she told Quire. “A ward against spirits, against evil.”

Quire regarded the crude bracelet with a faint sense of puzzlement. He could still hear the shouts of the workers struggling to raise that huge new bridge over the Cowgate. He was standing in the midst of a city famed throughout Europe for its fostering of rational, secular thought; a city, it was said, that had lately held more learned men in each square foot than any other the country had ever seen. Yet he was looking at a witch’s charm, something out of a folk tale, and believing it might work; a wise precaution, perhaps.

“Have you got another one of them?” he asked Agnes, and she smiled.