The Edinburgh Dead (40 page)

It was a desperate last hope on Ruthven’s part, for strong as he was, he was no match to Quire’s solid bulk and breadth. Quire cracked his pistol against the side of Ruthven’s head, opening up a messy gash across his temple. He raked a heel down the man’s shin and as he wailed, Quire shrugged, lifted and turned him about. He hit him again in the head, and Ruthven’s hands came loose. Quire threw him off, and back into the arms of the naked brute that came rushing up to catch him.

Quire backed up, sword at the ready, thinking for a moment that he would now face the two of them, and no doubt die. But the dead man was not saving Ruthven. It seized him by his upper arms, and held him up high as it advanced, and shook him. Terribly, like a furious child punishing a rag doll. Ruthven’s head flailed about. He screamed. He was swung against the wall, once, twice.

The naked monster, its back still afire here and there, the stink of its skin and flesh burning filling the air, looked at Quire and advanced on him. It still held Ruthven with one hand, holding him up as easily as if he were weightless. Ruthven hung limp and unmoving in that grip, his feet dragging over the floorboards. But his eyes were open, and alive, and Quire saw the horror and terror in them.

Quire edged himself backwards along the landing. He had never in his life used a rapier, such as that he now held, but he had seen
others wave them around in practice or show. Never in anger. The thing came quickly at him, hauling Ruthven along, reaching out for Quire with its free hand. He lunged forward and planted the tip of the sword into the breast, right beside the hole the pistol had already put there. Something in the way he did it was clumsy, for his weight did not pass through the blade as he had hoped; but it hardly mattered, for the movement and mass of the body into which it sank did the work for him.

The dead man shuddered, and swayed, and stumbled to one side. Quire whipped the sword back out of its flesh. He might have hit the heart, he thought; he was not sure. Ruthven was whimpering, or moaning; blood bubbled at his lips.

Quire heard the wooden railings along the landing groan as the huge figure fell against them. Its torso bent back for a moment, over the balustrade. Quire darted in again and stabbed the long blade upwards, into the exposed chin. It went up through the jaw and mouth and lodged somewhere in the bone of the skull. The creature spasmed, and it arched over the handrail into the deep space of the stairwell. The handrail cracked and split, the balusters splayed apart, and the creature fell backwards, pulling the sword from Quire’s hand and taking it down, jutting from its chin. Quire had one last glimpse of Ruthven’s rolling, anguished eyes, and then the man was snatched away and went plunging after his creation, his arm still locked in its iron grip.

By the time Quire reached the foot of the stairs, flames were already licking around the bodies. The hall carpet was alight, and the wallpaper on the walls nearest the cellar stairs was burning, coming away in black cindery sheets that swirled about and rose to be consumed in the roiling fire spreading itself across the ceiling.

The heat was too ferocious for Quire to get near the two twisted corpses, but he was not minded to do so anyway. Neither looked likely to rise again.

He ran to the front door and hauled it open, and rushed out into Melville Street, and away into the quiet Edinburgh night.

Mathieu Durand looked to Quire to be on the very brink of death. Both the Frenchman himself and Agnes McLaine insisted otherwise. Durand’s version was that he was indeed fatally ill, but that his final decline was further off than he had expected; Agnes’ was that Durand was a morose, fatalistic fool whose mortal dread of Blegg was doing as much to drag him down as any magics that might have been laid upon him, and if he could but shake himself free of it, he might well recover. Despite their differences, they seemed to Quire to have developed a certain rough affection—or respect, at least—for one another during their enforced cohabitation.

For all Quire knew, Durand deserved to die; perhaps that he had broken with Ruthven and Blegg did not excuse his earlier part in their transgressions. Quire chose not to judge that.

“What man would not prefer to die with the soil of his homeland under his feet?” Durand said as the three of them worked their slow way along the Leith seafront.

Quire had his hand under Durand’s arm to give him some support, and Agnes had found him a dusty, battered old walking stick from somewhere that he leaned heavily on. He was much reduced, even from the comparatively delicate figure he had cut when Quire first saw him, what felt an age ago in the drawing room of Ruthven’s house.

“Do you know,” Quire said, “the first time I met you, I guessed you might be quiet because you could not speak more than a word or two of English. Couldn’t have been much more wrong about that, could I?”

There was a broad expanse of dark, muddy sand laid out before them. The tide had retreated so far that the little breakers were mere flecks of white. Almost in those waves, at the very border between land and sea, a horse went pounding along the beach in full gallop. Its rider was crouched over its neck, tiny. The great horse stretched its long legs, and its mane and tail streamed out on the wind. The sand made fountains at its heels.

Quire and Durand and Agnes all stopped to watch it. For Quire at least there was something uplifting in the sight of that powerful creature running through the edge of the ocean, making for the horizon, putting its every effort into the simple act of the gallop.

The truth of it was rather more mundane, and mercenary, he knew. Every summer, a goodly portion of Edinburgh’s entire population could be found down here, on the Leith sands and all along the seafront at the back of them, for the day of the races. Whole squadrons of horses swept up and down the sands on that day, and whole fortunes swept back and forth through the hands of the bookmakers and the touts and the thieves. Some of the horse trainers liked to run their charges on the beach all year round, for the sake of familiarity and the endless flat softness of the place.

“Perhaps that is my boat, is it?” Durand said quietly.

Quire looked beyond the horse, and the beach, out across the restless sea lying between them and the shores of Fife. A steamer was there, looking frail and delicate at this distance, laying behind it a long trail of smoke that paled and frayed as it fell behind the vessel’s stacks, dissipating on the wind.

“It could be,” Quire said.

“Driving a boat with fire,” Agnes McLaine mused. “It’s an age of miracles we live in, right enough.”

It was Durand’s intent, within the hour, to take ship down the east coast, to England, and thence across the Channel back to France.
To die there, as he would have it, and be buried. Quire could understand that. Even an exile might want, at the end, to go back into the earth of the land that birthed him. Better than dying, and staying, on foreign fields, as so many of the men he had known had done.

If Durand died at all, of course. Quire did not know whether the Frenchman or Agnes was right in judging his fate. Agnes thought the cruel spirit that had animated Blegg’s form was likely gone, unhomed and thinned, and thus unable to exert any malign influence upon the Frenchman; Durand could not bring himself to believe that, as far as Quire could tell.

“It was Hare you said was the name of the man bringing bodies to Blegg, wasn’t it?” Quire asked Durand absently.

The Frenchman nodded, and shrugged his cloak more tightly about him. It was a bright day, but the wind coming in off the Forth had sharpness to it.

“Same one they’ve used to try this man Burke?”

“I do not know,” Durand said. “But how many men of one name would you have in your city who sell the dead?”

Quire grunted. Burke’s trial was a grisly sensation. Its substance had overspilled the bounds of the court, too awful and ghoulish to be contained. It filled every newssheet, and was the talk of every tavern and coffee shop; it had roused the folk of the Old Town to a state of fevered outrage and fury unlike anything seen in years. Not a little of their anger was directed upwards, towards Edinburgh’s lofty masters, for the outcome of the prosecution was not what the instincts of the mob demanded.

Sixteen murders, by most reckoning. Sixteen innocent men and women cruelly slain, all smothered and consigned to the dissecting table of Dr. Robert Knox. And from out of all that horror, there was but one man set to answer for it. William Burke would hang. Knox was spared any legal assault at all, and Hare—Hare it was who sent Burke to the hangman, for he had turned King’s evidence. The lawyers had bought his testimony with the promise of freedom. And that, the people of Edinburgh had clearly concluded, was obscene travesty.

“He’s to go free, they say,” Agnes said. “Hare.”

“He is.” Quire nodded. “He’s under the King’s protection now, still locked up, but he’ll be turned loose soon enough. And then he’ll be back to Ireland, I should say, since he’d be torn to pieces if he’s recognised around here. And anything he knows about Blegg or Ruthven’ll go across the sea with him. The papers have said nothing about that. Only the business him and Burke did with Knox. There’s no mention of any corpses going Ruthven’s way.”

“You should leave it be,” Agnes said quickly.

“I don’t know if I can,” Quire said, watching the steamboat plough its way through the waves, closing on the harbour.

“They decided it was a gas explosion,” Quire told Wilson Dunbar. “I read it in the
Evening Courant
, a few days after. Tragic loss of one of Melville Street’s finest houses, and the three poor dead souls found inside. Burned beyond recognition. The gas works was having none of it, of course, but what else would they say?”

“Christ.” Dunbar puffed out his cheeks. “You’re a lucky bastard, I’ll give you that. It was me they called Impervious, but the name’s not fitting me any more, so I’m thinking you’d best have it.”

Dunbar indeed seemed anything but impervious now. He had been reduced, for a time at least, by his suffering. He was thinner than Quire had ever known him, and his shoulders stooped a little. He walked with the aid of a stick.

He would surely have died, there in the hospital, but for the water the nurses and his wife had trickled into his mouth, and the food paste they fed him as if tending to a babe. Perhaps he would have died but for the ministrations of Agnes McLaine. Quire did not know. All he knew was that Dunbar lived, and grew stronger every day, and for that he was intensely, unquestioningly grateful.

They walked on the flat ground by the palace, where children flew kites in the shadow of Arthur’s Seat. Flat ground was the kind Dunbar liked best, for the moment, since he tired quickly. There was low cloud down, hiding the top of the hill in mists, and a fine drizzle on the air.

“Is it done, then?” Dunbar asked. “The whole business, I mean. You’ve burned the man’s house down, and he’s cooked to a cinder. Not much more to concern yourself with, at a guess.”

Quire regarded his feet as they trudged along through the damp grass. He had shared nothing more than the barest outline of all that had happened, for he knew that was all Dunbar really wanted. He remembered nothing of the night in the Princes Street gardens beyond rushing away from Quire and Durand, and hearing Blegg coming up behind him. Quire had seen in his eyes, when he talked of it, the haunted look, quickly dismissed but there, quite plain. He would do nothing to add to the man’s burdens.

“It’s done,” he said, as lightly as he could. “Let’s leave it to rest, should we?”

“Aye, if you like.”

Quire was walking slowly, to match his pace to Dunbar’s. The subtle rain was soaking into his coat and his hair.

“I know you’re liking your fresh air these days,” he said, “but maybe we’d best be getting back. It’s a bit dreich out here.”

Dunbar grunted and looked up at the cloud-cloaked heights of Arthur’s Seat, as if noticing for the first time the inclemency of the day.

“If you like. Ellen’ll have porridge she wants to get down my neck, anyway. She’s of the belief that there’s no better fodder for the healing body. Spoons it down me every hour of the day or night.”

“Can she speak of me yet without cursing?” Quire asked.

“Let’s just say she’d as soon not be seeing you.”

“Can’t fault her for that. If I was her, I’d probably come after me with a kitchen knife.”

“Aye, well, the thought maybe crossed her mind, but I dissuaded her, so that’s one more thing you owe me.”

“Fair enough.”

They walked in silence for a little way, then Dunbar gave a chuckle as if at some funny thought.

“How’s your own woman?” he asked Quire.

“Cath? She’s fine. There’s a discussion to be had whether she’s to come out of the Holy Land and take up lodgings with me, but for now, it’s fine.”

Quire had removed himself from the Holy Land, with a whole medley of conflicting feelings about doing so, and taken up residence once again in his own quarters. He did not feel entirely safe or restful there, and might never again, but nor was the Holy Land a place he would ever be inclined to call home. Cath would follow after him, he thought, if he asked; he had not done so, but was thinking it might be the wisest thing to do. Perhaps the wisest thing he had ever done.

“And work? What about that?”

“Oh, I’ve not thought of it. Had other things on my mind of late.”