The Edinburgh Dead

The Antiquaries

The great hollow of land—once marshy, now neatly gardened—between the long rising ridge of the Old Town and the sweeping grace of the New was crossed by a construction of inglorious name but remarkable scale: the Mound. A huge descending ramp, it carried much of the constant traffic between the two Edinburghs.

From its summit, an observer might look out northwards across the geometric splendour of the New Town, and beyond its spires and chimney stacks glimpse the white-capped waters of the Firth of Forth, with the rolling farmlands of Fife as distant backdrop. That same observer, descending the Mound, might look back and be amazed by the chaotic drama of the Old Town: the gargantuan angular mass of the castle atop its rock and the dark crags of the tenements trailing away to the east of it, like a host of giants petrified in the act of clambering one over the other as they reached for the cloud-heavy sky.

Just there, at the foot of the Mound, stood the Royal Institution. A low slab of a building, with a veritable thicket of massive columns forming a huge portico and a panoply of cornices and carving and stone flourishes all around the edges of its roof. It squatted upon the land in splendid isolation, with Princes Street, the expansive boulevard that marked the beginning of the New Town, running along before it.

As Quire approached the steps that led up amongst those serried ranks of pillars, the wind was rumbling its way down the full exposed length of Princes Street, and his long coat snapped about his legs like a heavy flag caught up on a fence. The hessian sack he carried loosely in one hand bucked against his grip. There were few pedestrians about. Those who had to move were doing so on wheels: hackneys and broughams and plain old wagons rattled and trundled along Princes Street.

Quire pushed through the massive, solid oak doors and entered the Institution. Instantly, the rough and raucous weather was only a memory. A restful quiet prevailed within, almost churchly in its stillness. In the lobby, a soberly dressed and mannered doorman directed Quire towards the cloakroom, and seemed decidedly perturbed when he declined.

A broad spiral staircase of polished stone took Quire up to the offices rented by the Society of Antiquaries. Papers were piled upon tables, with little evident order to them. Shelves of leather-bound books ran around the walls, many so worn and frayed that they looked as though they might fall apart in whatever hand lifted them. The place had a smell that Quire was unaccustomed to: that of parchment and dust and learning. He did not find it unpleasant.

A small, bespectacled man sat behind a desk so laden with documents and books that its surface could hardly be seen. He pulled his eyeglasses a little further down his nose with one finger, and peered at Quire over the top of them. Satisfied, he returned them to their former position.

“Can I be of some assistance?” he asked, scribbling a few last notes in the margin of a heavy tome open before him.

“I’m hoping so, if you know anything of the Society’s members and its past. I’m a sergeant of police. Quire.”

“William Anderson, secretary to the Society,” the man said, rising and extending his hand.

Quire shook it. The secretary’s hand felt small in his.

“John Ruthven,” Quire said. “That’s who I’m interested in.”

“I know the name, but his involvement with the Society ceased some time before my appointment, I’m afraid. I am not long in post, you know.”

“I understand. Nevertheless, he told me that he left in unfortunate circumstances. Ill humour on all sides, as he had it. Might be the sort of thing that’s remembered? Talked about?”

Anderson pursed his lips.

“I regret it is not something I would be able to assist you with, Sergeant. I pay little heed to gossip and hearsay, when it comes to matters that pre-date my responsibilities.”

“An admirable trait, I suppose,” said Quire. Improbably incurious, he might have added. “Perhaps you could suggest someone more talkative for me to go and pester?”

Anderson looked doubtful, and gave the bridge of his nose a thoughtful pinch, bobbing his glasses up and down.

“Mr. Macdonald is here,” he said with an air of reluctance. “Alexander Macdonald, assistant curator for the collection. He is in the store rooms, cataloguing. There is always cataloguing to be done.”

“Let’s hope he lacks your scruples when it comes to loose tongues.”

Quire found Alexander Macdonald in a long, gloomy chamber filled with rows of free-standing shelves, upon which resided a chaotic host of boxes and crates and grimy glass cases. Even as he advanced between the tight-packed stacks, Quire could feel his nose tingling and tickling beneath the assault of dust.

The assistant curator was standing on a low stool, reaching perilously upwards to feel about in a crate that rested on the uppermost shelf. Flakes and strands of straw packing drifted down as his apparently fruitless search grew more vigorous. He glanced down at the sound of Quire’s cautious approach. Quire was moving with a good deal more care than was his habit, for fear of dislodging some priceless artefact from its place. The shelving had evidently not been arranged with men of his size in mind.

“Ah, a visitor,” Macdonald exclaimed; redundant, but at least a touch more enthusiastic than Quire’s reception by Anderson.

Before Quire could explain himself, the curator gave a grunt of satisfaction and produced a short, flat length of enormously corroded metal from the crate. It was pitted and fractured, in places as thin as paper, and quite black.

“Gladius,” Macdonald said, as if that explained everything. “A Roman sword. So we think, at least. A precious token of our deep history. There was some concern that the thing might have gone missing, but I suspected… well, never mind. Is there something I can do for you?”

He slipped the rotted blade back into the crate and stepped down from the stool.

“Sergeant Adam Quire. I’ve one or two questions in want of an answer.”

“Oh?” Macdonald’s raised eyebrows suggested a lively interest. “A criminal enquiry, is it? How exciting.”

“A few years back, there was some trouble between your Society and John Ruthven. Your secretary told me you’d be the one to shed some light on the matter for me.”

“Oh,” Macdonald said again, a little deflated this time. “Yes, I suppose Mr. Anderson would not wish to involve himself in such matters. He’s most protective of the Society’s reputation, you know. Wouldn’t want it to come out that he’d reported matters that put the Society in an unflattering light.”

“You needn’t worry about that. It’s just that I’m wanting to know more of Ruthven. Something of his nature, his activities. You follow me?”

“Would you care to sit down, Sergeant?”

Macdonald led Quire to the far end of the storage rooms, where, in a cramped corner, two rickety-looking chairs flanked a little round table. Quire had to move a box of papers bound up with ribbons before he could occupy the one to which he was directed. He carefully laid the hessian sack down flat on the table before him.

“It was a small unpleasantness in our history, the Ruthven business,” Macdonald said with an air of world-weary regret as he took his own seat. “Nothing more than that by all accounts. You must understand, many of our members are men of considerable reputation, and intellect, and… let us say they are men of robust character and strong opinion, often on the most arcane and obscure of topics. There is always some dispute grumbling away to enliven our proceedings.”

“Must have been of some consequence, if Ruthven resigned from the Society over it.”

“Resigned… well, in a manner of speaking.” Macdonald fluttered a hand in the musty air. “Difficult to be precise about meanings. You might say, though, that Mr. Ruthven chose to leave our ranks rather than face the ignominy of expulsion. He had fallen out with a number of the other senior members over some considerable period of time. You’ve met him, you say?”

Quire nodded, but chose not to expand upon that simple confirmation.

“You’ll have formed your own opinion, no doubt,” Macdonald went on, recovering some of his initial animation. “He has—or had then, at least—some rather eccentric views on various historical and philosophical subjects, and a somewhat rough manner with those who did not share them. Matters came to a head… well, I believe some questions were raised over a number of items that went missing from the Society’s collections.”

“He stole them?”

Macdonald was alarmed. He raised a splayed hand to fend off the very words.

“I did not say that, Sergeant. I very purposely did not say that. Questions were raised and no satisfactory answers could be agreed upon, so he and the Society parted ways. That is all.”

“What items went missing?” Quire asked.

“Oh, nothing of especial significance or value, either monetary or historical, as far as I know. Some pieces from Major Weir’s house, a lock of hair reputed to have been cut from the head of a witch before she burned. A set of keys once owned by Deacon Brodie. That sort of thing. Minor relics of the darkest corners of Edinburgh’s past, if you like. Interesting to a local historian of macabre bent, but not central to our collections.”

Quire could not keep the look of disappointment from his face. A few inconsequential trinkets gone missing years ago were no kind of lever with which to prise open Ruthven’s—or Blegg’s—secrets. That disappointment went entirely unnoticed by Macdonald, who was carried along by his own more recondite lines of thought.

“All of a piece, really, with his interests and descent,” the curator mused. “You may not know, Sergeant, but Mr. Ruthven is distantly descended from a notable family of dabblers in the arcane. So he liked to imply, in any case. Men who, in less enlightened times than our own, were drawn to alchemy, and much darker arts. Delusional mystics, would be the current judgement, fortunate to have avoided the stake and the fires of witch-hunters.

“There was a namesake of his, a John Ruthven of the sixteenth century, who habitually carried about his person a bag filled with magical wards inscribed upon plaques of wood in Latin and Hebrew. To guard against evil spirits, or some such. He was executed as a conspirator against the Crown, so you may judge for yourself the merit of such precautions.”

There was a twinkle of amusement in Macdonald’s eye.

“And that John’s brother—a certain Patrick, Lord Ruthven no less—was reputedly an even more active dabbler in the black arts. Curses and charms, that sort of thing.”

“Ruthven lives in some comfort,” Quire observed. “He must come from money of some sort.”

“If you say so. I’ve not had the privilege of calling on him at home, and I am certainly not privy to his financial dealings. He did display some generosity towards the Society in happier times, mind, so he undoubtedly had funds at his disposal. I have a vague recollection that he has some modest landholdings. Farms or some such. Perhaps there are rents…”

The suggestion faded away with a rising, questioning tone and another flutter of his hand.

Quire regarded the shelves of boxes and crates glumly. This talk of the black arts put a sour twist into his gut. His fingers, of their own accord, tapped at the sack laid on the table. He turned his head, and looked down at them, as if they belonged to someone else entirely.

“I did wonder…” he murmured. “Another matter I thought someone here might be…”

He was hesitant, straying into areas that he neither understood nor gave any credence to. Ever since he had been called to look upon Carlyle’s body, though, he had felt himself moving slowly but surely on to unfamiliar ground of one sort or another. It was too late to turn about now.

He pushed the sack across the table. Macdonald regarded it with surprise.

“Perhaps you could take a look at that, sir?” Quire asked. “Tell me what you make of it.”

Macdonald reached in, his brow alive with curiosity. He withdrew the fragile, crude star of twigs that had been left affixed to Quire’s door. The curator held it on his spread hands and frowned at it. With the delicate precision appropriate to his vocation, he turned it over. The little black feathers brushed softly over the twigs. Tiny fragments of bark came loose.

“I thought it might be old, at first, but it’s not, is it?” Macdonald said.

He sounded neither alarmed, nor overly interested. That went some small way towards easing the tension that had crept into Quire’s arms. He thought himself foolish, to be so unnerved by a silly decoration some child might have put together, but it was one thing too many amongst several he could not quite explain. And he had, when he first held it, felt something strange. Still, Macdonald evidently felt nothing untoward.

“If it had some age to it, it might have been interesting. From an antiquarian point of view, I mean. It does bear a passing resemblance to one or two illustrations I have seen. In books relating to witchcraft, I believe. Not something one would think to see in our times, now that our path is illuminated by the power of rational intellect, eh? Might I ask how you came by it?”

“Not important,” grunted Quire. “You’ve no thought on its purpose, then?”

“I really could not speak to its significance or intent. Not my field, you know: the intricacies of these particular extinct beliefs. I’m afraid there are no practising witches in these parts nowadays, to the best of my knowledge, otherwise I might have referred you to an expert.”

Macdonald said that last with a twinkle of humour, in which Quire could not share.

“Does look a little ill-omened, though, wouldn’t you say?” the curator observed. “Even to the untrained eye. One suspects that it might be a warning, or threat, or curse, or fell invocation. Back when people took such things seriously, of course.”

“Of course. You keep it, sir. I’ve no further need for the thing.”

Macdonald frowned down at the object.

“Not something we would particularly wish to add to our collections, I think.”

“Dispose of it, then,” Quire said, a little too sharply.

He wanted to be rid of it now. He was not a superstitious man, but he hated and mistrusted the way his eyes were drawn to that frail construction of sticks and feathers, and the way it made him feel. It was not fear precisely that pinched at him; sharp unease, perhaps. Or trepidation. Its presence seemed even to lend the long store room in which he sat an oppressive, dark atmosphere.

“Ruthven seems to make a habit of parting with folk on poor terms,” Quire muttered as he folded away the sacking and pushed it into the pocket of his long coat. “An assistant of his—Carlyle—fell out with him recently. I don’t suppose you know the man?”

Macdonald shrugged apologetically, and then shook his head for good measure.

“What about Blegg? Do you know that name?”

“Blegg, Blegg.” Macdonald frowned and gazed up towards the ceiling, in pursuit of an errant memory. “Yes, I think he’s been attached to Mr. Ruthven for a considerable number of years. I have some vague recollection of him. Quite the shy fellow. Obsequious, to be honest.”

“That’s not entirely my experience of him.”

“No? Well, I don’t know the man, of course. Only ever saw him fawning at Ruthven’s elbow, but it has been a good few years. Perhaps he has changed. Many of us do, with the passage of time.”

Quire grunted. Men changed less often than most thought, in his experience, and seldom in the deeper fibre of their character.

“A Frenchman by the name of Durand?” he asked without great expectation, and was surprised to see Macdonald’s expression brighten considerably.

“Oh, yes indeed.” The curator nodded. “Him, I have met. A fascinating man. Do you know him, then?”

“We were introduced, that’s all. Nothing more. I had the impression he was not much given to conversation. Not in English, at least.”

“Oh, he is exceptionally fluent in our language, Sergeant. A fellow of the Institute of Sciences in Paris, with—so it seemed to me, in any case—a quite profound knowledge of the antiquities of the Levant, and Egypt. He was a member of that expedition which accompanied Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, you know. A dreadful business, no doubt, but they obtained a remarkable amount of…”

“He’s lodging with Ruthven,” Quire interrupted. He had no desire for an education in Napoleon’s achievements in the East.

Macdonald blinked, whether in surprise at the information or at Quire’s curtness it was difficult to say.

“Is he? I did not know that. I met him perhaps eighteen months ago, when he was only recently arrived here. I had the pleasure of showing him around some parts of the collection.”

“What’s his business here? In Edinburgh, I mean?” Quire asked.

“I took him to be a simple traveller with a thirst for knowledge, seeking out those of like mind. And I envied him that, I must admit. The freedom to wander at will amongst the world’s great centres of learning…”

Quire watched the curator drift into a reverie of itinerant scholarship. Then he sneezed, which returned Macdonald to more immediate concerns.

“If you want to renew your acquaintance with Durand, you would likely have the chance tomorrow,” the curator suggested. “There’s to be an exhibition. You must have seen the preparations for it downstairs. No? An American artist showing his wares. Ruthven invariably attends such events, I believe, and the exhibition is entirely unconnected to the Society, so he will undoubtedly have received an invitation. I’m attending myself, as it happens. Most exciting. I should imagine Durand would accompany Ruthven, if he is indeed his house guest. The French are great ones for painting, you know.”