The Edinburgh Dead

The Witch of Leith

The harbour at Leith was not large, but it seethed with activity. Boats of every kind were tied up along the curving quay that lined the Water of Leith’s mouth. A naval cutter big and brash amongst a little flotilla of fishing smacks; a coastal barge discharging a cargo of baled cloth beside a snub-nosed ferry waiting for its passengers. The masts and rigging made a thin forest stretching along the sea’s edge, all swaying and rocking in time with the chop of the water. Crew and dock hands clambered about and over the boats like so many busy, noisy ants.

The quayside itself was no less lively. The last few boxes and trays of fish from the morning’s haul were still being sold, drawing a busy crowd of those late from their beds, or hoping for scraps disregarded by richer, earlier buyers. This was Edinburgh’s port, separate but bound to the city by the long, straight run of Leith Walk, and all manner of city folk came here to buy the sea’s produce and the cargoes it bore upon its back.

Quire sat a short way from that crowd, balanced somewhat precariously upon an iron bollard. He had been told to wait there, and did so with more than his usual degree of patience. It was no great chore, with the Forth’s bright air blowing in and ruffling his hair, and wheeling, screeching seagulls swirling above him.

The rhythmic creaking of the ships lining the quay had a comforting solidity to it, as if it knew what an ancient, unchanging sound it was and through how many scenes just like this it had threaded itself over the centuries. There were a handful of steamships in these waters now, Quire knew, but today the harbour was all rigging and furled sails and festoons of rope.

Quire was absorbed in his ruminations, and thus did not notice the woman approach him until she was right in front of him, blocking off his view of the fishermen and their customers.

She was old enough to be a little creased, a little worn, but not so old as to be diminished or hampered by the years on her back. Beyond forty, not yet fifty, Quire guessed. Her face had the faintly sallow, pinched look a hard-working life bestowed, but there was nothing frail about her. She was holding a swaddled baby in the crook of her arm. The infant was blinking and mewing softly to itself, apparently content.

“My granddaughter,” the woman said. “Mother’s gone work-hunting down the shore, hasn’t she, beautiful?”

She tapped with a crooked finger at the baby’s lips, and the tiny girl duly tried to suck at it.

“You’re Quire?” the woman asked, still looking down with affection at the infant, still tickling at it with her finger.

“I am. And you’re Agnes McLaine?”

“Who else would I be? Do you get that many women coming up to you with your name on the Leith harbour that you can’t keep them straight in your head?”

“No.”

“Come away with me, then. We’ll get ourselves into a wee bit of privacy.”

She led him away from the docks, into the back streets. While the alleyways of Edinburgh’s Old Town had order of a sort to them, most cutting straight away from the High Street, those of Leith had tangled themselves up in an impenetrable intestinal knot over the years. For all that it was a small place, it was a crowded maze of a place too. The narrow streets and closes coiled and crossed and folded upon one another in a density bewildering to one unfamiliar with their pattern. Quire was one such, and followed after Agnes like the novice he was, trying and failing to memorise their course.

The whole warren smelled of fish and ale and waste. Washing hung from the tenement windows. Every open door seemed to have a fishwife or a child or a sullen seaman loitering in it. There were dogs, too, little mangy things on the whole, sniffing through piles of rubbish industriously. The raucous seagulls mingled their cries with those of the equally raucous inhabitants. The sun sent the birds’ shadows racing across the upper reaches of the tenements.

“The Widow said you might be able to help me,” Quire said as they walked. “Mary Coulter.”

“I ken who the Widow is, son. Have done for half her life or more. And her husband too, miserable bloody bastard of a man that he was.”

“Can’t have been that bad, since she’s mourning him still,” Quire observed, stepping carefully over a pile of oily rags in the midst of the alley.

“Shows how much you ken,” Agnes said with a gleam of amusement in her eye. “Not so keen on him when he was breathing, Mary wasn’t. Not so keen at all. Better a widow than a beaten wife, eh?”

She broke off to nod a greeting to a much older, tiny woman who sat on a stool in the doorway of a tobacco shop. Somewhere inside, a child was bawling. The sound of it put a little frown of consternation on the face of Agnes’ granddaughter.

“That’s saying enough of that, though, I reckon,” Agnes said briskly as they moved on. “Widow’d not like us trading gossip about her name.”

“If she’s not in mourning, though, why…”

“Hush, man. Are you daft or something? Did I not just say that was enough of that? You’ll make me wish I’d left you there at the dock if you’re not careful.”

She turned aside without warning and led him up a stair into the body of a tenement. It was dark, and smelled dank. Agnes had her home on the first floor, and it was a good deal less grim than its approaches would suggest. A thin blanket hung across the window to shield a broken pane of glass, that was true, but as for its contents, Quire had seen far less salubrious quarters countless times in Edinburgh’s Old Town, Cath’s rooms amongst them. The low bed had neat sheets and a thick woollen rug laid across it. Three candles in pewter holders stood on a shelf. The hearth at the back of the room held a low heap of glowing embers. It had plentiful kindling and coal in a bucket beside it, a good iron poker hanging from a hook and clean copper cooking pots piled up, nested one into the next.

There was a long, narrow basket sitting on a table, and Agnes settled the baby into that with a few murmurs of comfort.

“Will you have a drink?” she asked as she tidied the girl’s swaddling clothes. “I’ve nothing strong, mind. Just tea, or I think I’ve a bottle or two of ale somewhere. Won’t have liquor in the house. It’s the Devil’s nectar, that stuff. In a manner of speaking, of course.”

She said that last with a quick, knowing smile. Quire was not entirely sure how amusing he should find it.

“I don’t need anything to drink,” he said. “Thank you.”

“Sit yourself down, then. On the bed, if you like.”

Agnes pulled a stool out from under the table while Quire settled himself.

“I trust Mary’s sense in most things,” Agnes said. “Not always in the judging of men, mind, but I’ll give you a hearing. Though what a sergeant of the city police has got to say to me, I’ve no idea.”

“I’m not sure I’m still a sergeant of police. And it’s not strictly their business I’m here on, either. Not to hear them tell it.”

“Oh.” Agnes, oddly, looked a touch disappointed, as if deprived of some small piece of her expected entertainment. “Well, might be you’ve still something interesting to say. Stranger things have happened.”

“I’m needing help in understanding things I’ve seen,” Quire said. “That I’m still alive now is more luck than judgement, I’m inclined to think. I don’t know what it is I’m fighting, not really, nor how to fight it.”

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.