The Edinburgh Dead

Old Acquaintance

There was no older tavern in Edinburgh than the White Hart on the Grassmarket. Lined by inns and low houses and shops purveying every kind of provision, dominated by the castle and the craggy cliffs atop which it stood just to the north, the Grassmarket had been a place of commerce and execution, revelry and riot for centuries. Through a great many of those years, the White Hart had stood there and been witness to countless dramas played out before its windows. For generations, every scandal and oddity and delight of the Old Town had been chewed over by its patrons. The idle talk of choice now was diverse, little of it distinguishing between the real and the imagined: tales of plague skeletons uncovered in the course of the works for the new bridge over the Cowgate; the bakery boy attacked by a wild mob of rats at the West Port one dawn; the girl at the tannery along the way growing fat with child, and her all unmarried but a friend to half the soldiers in the castle barracks.

Amidst this hubbub of speculation, one man sat alone and quiet, nursing a mug of ale that he never drank from. His eyes did not stray from the foamy head of his beer, and his hands—still in their black gloves though the little room was warm—remained clasped around it. If the great crowd of drinkers packed into the White Hart found his solitary, silent presence odd, they gave no sign of it. None paid him any more heed than a brief glance.

Two men entered, though, whose roving eyes picked him out at once, and they shuffled and elbowed their way to the little table he occupied.

“Is it Blegg?” the taller one asked curtly, his voice rich with the tones of his Irish homeland, and at that Blegg did lift his gaze, and fix it upon these newcomers with still clarity.

“Sit,” he said, and they ferreted out stools from amongst the forest of legs and bodies.

“Are you buying us drinks?” one asked as he slapped his backside down.

“You pay your own way until we’ve taken the measure of one another, don’t you think?”

The two Irishmen looked at each other, in silent consultation, until one grunted and rose with evident annoyance.

“I’ll get them in, then,” he grumbled, and began to push his way unceremoniously towards the bar.

Blegg watched him sink into the crowd, and then turned slowly back to the other.

“So. You’ve my name. What should I call you?”

“Oh, I like to keep my name close, like a sweetheart, until I know a man a little better.”

“You’ve a pretty turn of phrase, for an Irishman.”

“Is that so? You’ve a cocky tongue, for a Scotsman.”

“Hah.” It was an entirely cold and humourless little laugh. “Nice. And what’s your trade?”

“What’s it to you? I could mend your shoes if you’ve a need for a cobbler, but that’s not what we came to talk about, is it? I’m not looking for employment.”

“I like to know what manner of men I’m dealing with. And maybe you are looking for employment, of a sort. That’s what I heard, in any case.”

“Did you.”

It was a curt, sharp utterance. The Irishman glared at Blegg, the look thick with the spontaneous animosity that might easily arise when two men scented difference of temperament or type between them. Blegg was unmoved, and stared passively back, contemptuous amusement tugging at the corners of his lips. It was the other who looked away, watching his countryman barge his way back towards them, bearing his precious cargo.

“I’ve lost my thirst,” the seated man muttered as he was passed a cup.

“Why’s that?”

“Don’t like his manner.” He flicked his chin at Blegg. “Thinks he’s clever, this one. Cleverer than us, anyway.”

“I’m not caring who’s clever and who’s not. Clever’s fine, if it comes with money. Knox’s doorkeep said it’d be worth our while meeting with you, that’s all. Fifteen pounds’ worth, he said.”

“Ah, now you’re a forward kind of man,” Blegg said approvingly. “Not like your fellow here. What’s your name, friend?”

“The two of us share one name—William—and part thereafter: he is Burke, I am Hare.”

“Now what did you go and tell him that for?” Burke snapped.

Hare shrugged.

“There’s half a dozen folk in here know my name, and yours as well. If he wants to know, he can find it easy enough.”

Burke was unappeased.

“This cocky bastard wants to know who he’s dealing with; I say we do too. I’ve no more than a name for him, and I’d want more.”

“Would you?” Blegg murmured. “It’d not profit you to have it. Look at Mr. Hare, here. He’s not caring what more there might be. Just the price, eh? And it’s fifteen pounds, right enough.”

Burke drained his mug in a single long series of gulps, and smacked it down on to the table with a touch more force than was needed.

“Don’t care if it’s a hundred pound.” He leaned closer to Hare. “I’ll not bargain on things such as this with a man I don’t trust. And I don’t trust this bastard. Nor like him.”

Blegg looked away, evincing disinterest.

“Come away,” Burke urged his companion. “We’re not needing him. We’ve got all the arrangement we need with others.”

Hare looked doubtful, and Blegg abruptly turned back, and stared at him. When he spoke, it was to Burke, though his eyes remained fixed upon Hare.

“You’d best be away, right enough. I’m not needing you, that’s sure. But your friend here I’ll buy as much drink as he likes.”

“I’ll stay a bit,” Hare said softly.

“On your head be it, then,” Burke growled, angry. “He’s the stink of trouble, and I’ll not be sharing it with you.”

He pushed himself up from the table so firmly that the little stool toppled over backwards. He kicked it aside as he made for the door. Blegg looked after him with a sour expression.

“Have you cold hands or something, then?” Hare asked, eyeing the black gloves with which Blegg held his still full mug of flattening beer.

“Something,” Blegg grunted. “Listen, our mutual acquaintance, Mr. Paterson in Surgeon’s Square, tells me you’re the very man I need to talk to on the matter of… well, shall we call them certain goods that are not easily obtained? I pay him well enough to put some faith in his advice. Is he right?”

“Maybe so, maybe not.”

“Come, don’t be coy. I’ve no wish to intrude upon whatever trade you’re plying with Knox. My needs are modest, and you’ll be well recompensed if you can meet them.”

Hare eyed his new drinking companion, a touch reserved.

“Is it an anatomist you’re working for, then?” he asked. “Something like that?”

“Something like that. Something like that.”

Hare wrinkled his nose.

“It’s courting ill luck,” he said, “to be talking of such things in the very place they’ve hanged men for less.”

“Oh, they’ve not had gallows in the Grassmarket for a time now, William.” Blegg smiled. “They build them elsewhere these days. And it’s more fitting a place than you might think. Do you not know the meaning of the sign under which we meet?”

“The White Hart?”

“Herne the Hunter,” said Blegg. “The white hart is his beast. His totem. It was a white hart that wounded him, when he was a mortal man, wounded him unto death. But he was returned to life by a maker of magics, who bound the hart’s antlers to his head. Thus was he restored.”

“I’ve no interest in your folk tales,” Hare grunted.

“No? As you like. Let us talk of more practical matters, shall we?”

Quire still ached. His body was taking its time in forgetting his misadventure at Cold Burn Farm. It did not seem too great a burden, though, for he was warm, and well rested, and for now at least content.

He rolled and draped an arm across Cath Heron’s naked shoulder. The bedding was rough, and the mattress lumpy, but her skin was soft and her hair where it lay across the pillow between them put the scent of her in his nose. She stirred at his touch, almost awake, but not quite.

It was unaccustomedly quiet. Too early for the inhabitants of the Holy Land to be up and about, certainly, but too early as well for the rest of the Old Town to have come but a little way out of the night. The scavengers would be finishing their rounds, wheeling their barrows full of Edinburgh’s scraps off the streets. The forges and breweries down in the Canongate would be beginning to wake, but they were far enough distant that he could not hear the flexing of their iron and coal muscles. Seagulls, he could hear; always seagulls, called up from the coast by the riches of the city.

It had been many years since Quire had been easily able to sleep late. Wakefulness came, whether he wanted it or not. This night, at least, had been dreamless, the horrors of his past and present banished, for once, from his sleeping mind. His slumber had been deep, and sated, and restorative. The drink had helped, no doubt, but so had Cath. So had his yielding to desires long denied.

He blew gently upon her cheek, and her eyes trembled. A thin hand came sluggishly to fend him off. He wanted to share these still, quiet moments. There were few enough such in his life these days, and in Cath’s, he imagined; they seemed a gift, not to be lightly squandered.

She blinked at him, rolled towards him just enough to fold herself into his arms.

“Sergeant Quire,” she said, pressing her face into the crook of his neck. “I thought you might be gone when I woke.”

“Not yet,” he murmured.

They were alone in the rooms. Cath had sent Emma on her way as soon as they came in, a little unsteady on their feet, and the older woman had gone willingly enough, favouring Quire with a knowing smile as she went. A woman in want of a bed would have no trouble finding one in the Holy Land at night.

Quire ran his hand down Cath’s flank beneath the bedding, slipping it over her buttock and on to her thigh. There was comfort even in that simple motion, and the memory it carried of their congress. It called up once more the cleansing, emptying heat of their union; its capacity to banish, for a time, all thought and all self, and free Quire of his troubles and his fears. Fears. That was right enough, and having let the notion of it into his head, he lost hold of his tranquillity. He withdrew his hand, and swung his legs out to sit on the edge of the bed.

“God, it’s early,” Cath moaned, reading by long experience the soft fall of light through the window. “Can we not sleep a bit longer?”

She ran a fingernail down his spine. That made shivers race through the skin of his back. He stood, naked, and stretched his arms. He had never been troubled to hide the scars on his arm from Cath. From the first time she had seen them, her ease at the sight of them had made itself his own. Today, it was his other marks that drew her attention. A great bruise as many-hued as a summer thundercloud was just beginning to fade, spread over his hip and flank where Davey Muir had thrown him into a tree.

Cath reached out to touch it, tracing its yellow-black shape.

“Look at you, Adam. Look at you.”

Her voice was laden with sympathy, with sorrow. That had been, in part, what he had needed last night, Quire supposed: the simple comfort of caring company. He had been drunk, so it was not easy to recall exactly how his mind had been working, but he knew it had been a whole web of longings. All his old affection for her, only sharpened by his long resistance to its call; his selfish need to be taken out of himself for a time, to have another set aside his dark thoughts for him, since he could not seem to do it himself.

There had been no restraining sense of consequence, for he was already accused, and half-convicted, of that which he now did. It had felt the most natural thing in all the world to turn for comfort and companionship to Cath. And she had been welcoming, forgiving. As if he had never wronged her.

Her hand was easing itself around his thigh, straying towards his crotch, and he felt his desire stirring in anticipation of her touch. But he slipped beyond her reach, and began to collect his clothes from the floor.

“Already?” she asked.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and meant it. “I’ll be back, Cath. I promise you that.”

As he pulled his trousers on, his gaze fell upon an open box sitting by the window. Curled up in it were the amber bead amulets that the Widow’s girls sold as protective charms to their customers. That put a sour twist to the moment, reminding Quire of how many others had shared Cath’s bed, but more immediate preoccupations chased the thought away quickly enough.

“So do you think these things work, then?” he asked, holding up one of the trinkets.

It was not a question he would once have asked, but if he had learned nothing else of late, it was that there were mysteries to the working of the world he had never imagined.

“The folk who buy them do, that’s what matters,” Cath grunted, rolling away from the sight, shrugging the sheets back up over her shoulders.

She did not like to be reminded, any more than Quire did, of her trade. Not in this moment. Quire realised then, in his sluggish way, that he was not the only one who had tried to make a kind of release and escape for themselves last night. He was ashamed to have so crudely drained the morning of its gentleness. But still he held the charm, and squinted at it.

“Where do they come from?” he asked. “Does the Widow make them herself, or are there folk still doing little magics like these?”

“Aye, there’s folk like that,” Cath said into the bedding. “There’s always been folk like that. You’ve just got to ken where to look.”

Later, as afternoon turned to evening, tired but still lighter of heart than his situation and his fears warranted, Quire met Wilson Dunbar outside St. Giles’ Cathedral on the High Street. It was a long-standing and regular arrangement, that had made more sense when Quire had actually been employed at the police house, just over the street.

The cathedral—a great crouching mass surmounted by a grandiose stone crown—always put Quire in mind of a titanic black beetle squatted down and bearing carbuncles on its back. He found Dunbar waiting for him on its steps, and together they walked down through the crowds towards Calder’s.

Dunbar was working as a builder these days. Some kind of combination of quartermaster, labourer and gang master, as far as Quire could tell, happily engaged in the construction of the grand new High School on Calton Hill. He smelled of stone dust and mortar. He examined Quire with critical eyes as they wove through the evening crowds.

“You look in a better mood than I’ve seen you of late,” he opined.

“Do I?”

“Aye, you do. It’s unsettling, I’ll tell you. Like the sun coming out at midnight.”

“Might be I spent some time with Cath last night,” Quire said.

“Ha!” Dunbar clapped his hands together loudly enough to startle a boy carrying a basket of oysters past. “First smart thing you’ve done in a wee while. Last I heard, you had a fair few reasons you couldn’t be doing that. What happened to them?”

“The Police Board happened to them. I’ve already been suspended from duty. They’re working themselves up to turning me out on the street.”

Dunbar stopped in the midst of the street, his mood abruptly overturned. Quire walked on a few paces, then stopped and turned back.

“What happened?” Dunbar asked.

“Got myself on the wrong side of the wrong folk. Come on, don’t stand there like a fool. Calder’s is waiting on us.”

He led the way on down towards the Canongate.

“They’re the fools, to be thinking they’re not needing your services,” muttered Dunbar darkly.

“Maybe. World’s full of fools. Might be I’m one of them. I had my chances to leave things be.”

“And why didn’t you?”

“Because there were dead men needing answers. One of them got his head broken in with a spade in front of his son. Because I can’t abide anyone thinking they can be party to that and never have to pay the price. Because they came after me. Thought they could frighten me off; or kill me. Because I’m a stubborn bastard. Take your choice of those.”

“Reasons enough,” Dunbar said.

“There’s more. The men who’ve got the blood on their hands… there’s strange things happening. Not like anything I’ve seen before. Not like anything you’d give credence to, without seeing it yourself. It’s dark as it gets, at the heart of this, I reckon.”

Quire was pleased, and not a little surprised, to find his mood surviving even this gloomy talk. He could feel the sinking sun still warm on his back. They passed the head of Leith Wynd, and he smiled to himself at the memory of Cath.

“Can you not let someone else do the stopping?” Dunbar asked despondently, his tone betraying his foreknowledge of the answer.

“I’d be a long time waiting for that to happen. Best I can tell, I’ve got fewer friends in the police house, and certainly on the board, than the bloody murderers themselves. If I thought he was smart enough for it, I’d even wonder if Baird—Superintendent Baird—wasn’t in their pay, the way he’s gone after me.”

“Or maybe he just doesn’t like you,” Dunbar suggested. “He’d not be the first.”

“True enough. But anyway, would you be sitting by your fire twiddling your thumbs, if your work and your livelihood were taken from you, and you had folk coming to your house at night to try to kill you?”

Dunbar grunted.

“Ah,” said Quire, slapping his friend on the arm. “I’m not wanting to talk of it tonight. It’s a bit of drink and forgetting I’m looking for. I thought you’d be the very man for that task. Was I wrong?”

“Not wrong, no,” Dunbar said.

There was renewed levity in his voice. Quire thought it a touch forced, but perhaps not entirely so.

They arrived at Calder’s to find their hopes and expectations abruptly curtailed. Workmen were milling about within, setting up a great clattering and banging. Lengths of coppery pipes were being passed in through the open door from a wheeled trolley parked up in the close.

“That’s a blow,” Dunbar said despondently.

Quire was inclined to agree. The two of them stood, peering in through the windows, at a loss how to proceed now that their den of choice was denied them.

Mrs. Calder herself appeared on the threshold. She smiled apologetically in answer to their silent appeals for guidance.

“There’s to be gas laid up the close,” she said, “so we’re getting all the fittings. Lamps and such like.”

“Gas?” moaned Dunbar. “Place’ll never be the same.”

“No,” Mrs. Calder agreed, “it’ll be better. You should get used to change, young Wilson, since it’ll come whether you like it or not. Do you boys want some feeding, then? I’ve a beef stew with tatties.”

“Aye, all right,” said Dunbar, brightening considerably, though Quire knew the invitation was mainly meant for him.

They passed a fine evening in the Calder kitchen, devouring the hot thick stew and slabs of hard bread, and Mrs. Calder found a mug or two of beer for them to wash it down with. They talked, in the easy, lazy way of old friends, for a long time: about Dunbar’s family; about Cath, and whether or not Quire was good enough for her; about whether there would be money enough to finish that school Dunbar was so proud to be building.

When the plates were empty, and Mrs. Calder chased them out with all the good humour of one satisfied by her evening’s work, Dunbar went contentedly on his way, humming to himself as he disappeared off down the Canongate. Quire climbed the stairs to his rooms in similar buoyant temper. He smiled still, his lips shaping themselves thus without his bidding.

It had been a good day, for all his bodily aches, and for all the intransigence of the problems confronting him. A day of renewed affections, and of hearty eating. Better than most he had known, in his former life, upon the eve of battle.