The Edinburgh Dead (37 page)

Blegg was gone, leaving only a filthy, black, oily smear on the ground where he had fallen.

All Hallows’ Eve was a night of rude celebration in Edinburgh’s Old Town. The poor and unwashed folk of the city fashioned from that fell night, when the lore of their forefathers told them that the Devil and his spirits stalked the darkness, an excuse for light and merriment and drinking.

In every tenement, no matter how squalid, how impoverished, there would somewhere be dancing and noise late into the night, as if by that commotion the evils lurking without might be held at bay. The Old Town seldom slept deeply, or for long, but on this night more than any other it shrugged off the darkness and busied itself deep into the wee small hours. The whisky shops, strewn in dense profusion along almost every street and wynd, stayed open late, lighting their windows with lamps and drawing in a constant stream of drunken customers, seeking to replenish their dwindling supplies. They brought empty bottles, and the whisky sellers filled them up from tapped barrels and sent them on their way; then, an hour or two later, the same folk would stagger in off the street, with the same bottle, empty once more, to be filled.

There were scuffles in the street, the whisky-fed frustrations and rivalries of the Old Town boiling up. It was in the nature of the place that with the release of celebration came too the release of its darker side, for the one could not be set free without the other.
Small violences were done amidst the songs and the jigs; hard words said amidst the laughter. Everywhere, voices were loud, whether in argument or frenzied pleasure.

Some there were who tried to sleep amidst the tumult. They could not escape it, though, not in this layered, crowded place where folk lived as dense as bees in their hives.

Mrs. Conway, in her room in the West Port, tossed and turned uncomfortably in her bed. Her husband slumbered deeply, leadenly, at her side, as he always did. She, whose need for sleep was the more acute, since she must be up at four to make him his breakfast and it was already close on midnight, was kept from it by the Old Town’s restless convulsions. The witching hour drew near, and could be nothing other than restless on All Hallows’ Eve.

With every passing sleepless moment, Mrs. Conway grew more anxious and bitterly resentful of those drunken celebrants robbing her of her rest. Rough sounds added themselves to the mix, grating upon her weary senses. Scuffling, shouting, angry curses. Coming from the Burke house just next door. That was no great strangeness in itself, for it was a turbulent and drunken house on any night, let alone this wild one, but there was a harsh extremity to the clatter and thumps and voices leaking through the wall. Mrs. Conway could hear William Burke’s voice chief amongst those raised in anger, and the noise of it seemed to go on and on. Until at last it faded, and a quiet settled. Mrs. Conway whispered a small thanks to God, and slowly, slowly drifted off to sleep.

Hugh Alston had a grocer’s shop on the West Port, and lived with his wife in the flat above it. The two of them made their way, only a little the worse for drink, towards their stair as the witching hour turned. It had been a long day. They were tired but happy, for trade had been good of late.

The racket that greeted them was out of tune with their contentment. There were men shouting indistinctly at one another, a violent quarrel. Tables or chairs being overturned.

“It’s coming from Burke’s house,” Mrs. Alston said, as they stood together on the street, listening in dismay to the cacophony.

Then, sharp, cutting through the male voices, quite clear, a woman crying out: “For God’s sake, get the police. There’s murder here.”

The Alstons looked at one another in consternation.

“Get yourself upstairs,” Hugh said to his wife, “and lock the door behind you.”

Once sure his wife was safely climbing the stair to their apartment, he ran up the West Port to the watch-house there, and beat upon its door. But the nightwatchmen of the Old Town had many calls upon their attention that night, of all nights, and there was no answer. Its windows were dark, its lock secure.

Troubled, Alston went cautiously back down to his shop and home. All was silence now. Not a whisper escaped the house of William Burke. He sighed, and shook his head, and followed after his wife.

They slept uneasily through what remained of the night. And as they slept, that night turned and the city’s frenzy spent itself, and All Hallows’ Eve became All Saints’ Day.

The morning came in bleak and cold and cloudy. Sergeant John Fisher was on duty in the entrance of the police house at Old Stamp Office Close, and looked out through the open doors upon a High Street rousing itself more sluggishly into life than was its wont. The excesses of the night before weighed heavily upon the Old Town, and it had woken with bleary eyes and sore limbs and aching heads.

A man—agitated, fidgety—came in off the street.

“I’ve seen a body in a house on the West Port,” he said without preamble or introduction. “A poor woman, murdered.”

Fisher went with the man—Gray, his name turned out to be—up along the quiet High Street, and down the arc of West Bow on to the Grassmarket. Bottles and rubbish were strewn about there. They walked its length to the West Port, and Gray showed Fisher the house of William Burke.

A dark passage led back into a tenement. At its end, a narrow stair descended into gloom. Gray let Fisher precede him down the
stair, and thus it was Fisher who came face to face with another man, climbing up.

“That’s him,” Gray said in alarm. “That’s Burke.”

“Would you let me into your house please, Mr. Burke,” said Fisher, ignoring the ferocious glare Burke was fixing upon Gray.

The room to which Gray guided them was a picture of wretched squalor. Rags and straw were scattered all over the bare floor, and every corner was piled high with disordered heaps of tattered and half-made shoes, and with the tools of the cobbler’s trade. A pot of boiled potatoes stood by the cold ashes of last night’s fire. There was not a single piece of furniture save a crude, low bed stretched out against one wall. It was the humblest of things, a few planks and sticks roughly nailed together. There was no mattress on it save a tightly packed mat of straw and old cloths. A faded, striped nightgown lay on the bed.

“There’s no body here,” Sergeant Fisher observed.

“A body you’re after, is it?” Burke muttered, his Irish brogue made harsh by his anger and contempt. “You’ll not find one here, whatever you’ve been told.”

“It was there, on the bed,” Gray insisted. The fear was plain in his voice.

“He’s saying it from spite,” Burke scoffed. “I turned him and his wife out last night, since I needed the bed for someone else.”

Fisher raised his eyebrows and looked questioningly at Gray, who did not deny it, but rather nodded.

“That’s right, that’s right. Mary Docherty, her name was. He turned us out to give her the room, but we came back this morning since we’d lost our boy’s stockings and thought them left here. And she were there, in the straw. Dead.”

Fisher went closer to the bed. He was reluctant to reach into it, or lift the nightgown, for fear of bugs or lice. But he needed to do no more than lean down and look closely to see the bloodstains smeared on its frame and dried on the stalks of straw.

He turned about and regarded William Burke thoughtfully.

The ward to which Wilson Dunbar was consigned in the Royal Infirmary was long, and high, and flooded with light from the tall fretted windows that lined it. It had the faintly echoing, marmoreal quiet of a church, to Quire’s ear. Even the nurses, in their uniforms and aprons, walking on soft feet between the rows of beds, put him in mind of nuns. There was something faintly reverent in their considered, careful movement.

It was not a restful place, though, as a church might be. Too many connotations of suffering, and of loss. The scent on the still air was not of incense or candles, but soap and sickness. And if the residents or visitors offered any prayers, they would be only for the abatement of suffering, the abeyance of death.

Quire hated it, though he knew better than most how much worse it could have been. It was, if nothing else, clean. It was ordered, and bright. Not like the madness of the vast crowds of wounded that had been crammed into makeshift hospitals in Brussels after Waterloo. Hundreds of soldiers, broken in service of their country, wailing and dying on pallets and stretchers as the surgeons rushed from one to another, hunting out those they might yet save by swift application of their amputation knives and saws. Dirt everywhere, and blood, for there had been neither time nor space for the niceties of cleaning.

Quire had lain there for days, fevered, agonised by the burns upon his arm, thinking himself, in his darker moments at least, on the verge of death. Knox had dug out from his flesh all that did not belong there, but no one could do anything for the pain. There was not enough laudanum to spare it for any save those sent near mad with their suffering.

That was what Dunbar’s ward made Quire think of. He walked, still limping heavily from his sprained ankle, with his head down, averting his eyes from those filling the beds.

Agnes McLaine was already there, sitting at the bedside on a stool, her hand resting upon Dunbar’s chest. She could have been an attentive mother, just one amongst the many come to this place to stand watch over their afflicted kin. But Quire knew better. He saw the charm clasped to her breast, smelled the herbal scent soaking out from the little bag that was beneath her palm on Dunbar’s chest. He saw that her lips moved, shaping tiny, near silent invocations, even as she looked up and nodded to acknowledge his arrival.

“He’s no better, then,” Quire murmured.

Sound carried far and clear in this chamber of high ceilings and bare, hard walls. Each stirring of protest or mew of discomfort went rippling along from bed to bed, making itself known, revealing itself. Quire did not want any secrets of his own doing the same.

“No better, no worse,” whispered Agnes, gently folding both her hands into her lap. “That’s no bad thing. Means he’s got strength in him still.”

Dunbar made for a dismaying sight, stretched out there beneath the starched white sheets. A motley congregation of bruises about his jaw and cheeks. A gash in his brow. Much of his body was the same, Quire knew. Battered and beaten and wounded. No one wound in itself that could threaten his life, but in their accumulation, a cruel assault. Not enough to explain his deathly slumber, the doctors had said, puzzlement etched upon their faces. Quire cared little for the opinions of the medical profession now. He had
learned there were other ways of reading whatever signs the world saw fit to offer its observer.

Dunbar had likely been given a noxious draught of some sort, Agnes had said when first she set eyes upon him. Perhaps laid under a malevolent charm. He would wake, in time, or he would not. That was the sum of her predictions. But she willingly came here, at Quire’s request, and offered the oblivious victim of Blegg’s abuse whatever small help she might be able.

“You’ve become a nurse to ailing men,” Quire said. “I never meant to make you such, but I did.”

Agnes smiled.

“Durand, you mean? Aye, he’s still safely locked away, abed. Abed when I’m not there, at least; sleeps on the floor when I’m needing the bed myself. He’s not dying fast, if he’s dying at all. The totem used against him, or the man who was using it—one or other’s been destroyed, I’d say.”

“The place was burned out, top to bottom. Everything in the house went to ash or smoke. As for Blegg—I don’t know. Maybe he crawled away and died in a ditch or out on the hills. I couldn’t easily go looking for him”—he gave his injured leg a careful shake by way of demonstration—“and there was none of those with me in a state, or of a mind, to do it either. I was lucky enough they didn’t kill me.”

He had thought they might, for a time, in their anguish and shock and fury, with Spune dying there in the farmyard and the conflagration of the farmhouse roaring at them. But they were in the grip of dread, Merry Andrew and Mowdiewarp, and bewildered by what they had seen. Their confusion had saved him, Quire suspected, for they wanted nothing but to get away from that place, and forget its horrors. There had been a clear message at their parting, though, that Merrilees would be inclined to slip a knife under Quire’s ribs should they meet again, just on the general principle of stilling those who brought down such infernal misfortune upon others.

In service of that same principle, they had refused him a seat on
their cart, and left him there. Alone and half-hobbled, it had taken him a cruelly long time to reach the road, and to find a conveyance back to Edinburgh.

“I can’t pay you for any of this,” Quire said quietly to Agnes. “Not for Durand, not for Wilson. I’ve hardly two pennies left to rub together.”

“I ken that well enough, son,” Agnes grunted. “It’s writ plain and clear all over you.”

She looked Quire up and down meaningfully. He made for a sorry figure, he knew. Unshaven, barely washed for days now, and standing in clothes he had been wearing for just as long. He had not dared to return to his home, for fear of what might await him there, and so lodged still with Cath in the Holy Land.