The Edinburgh Dead

A Witch at His Bedside

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.

“The police came by to have a look at him,” said Agnes, nodding down at Dunbar. “So the nurses said. Wanting to know how a man might get himself in such a state. His wife couldn’t help them with that, I don’t suppose.”

He might have been undone, had Ellen Dunbar told the police that Adam Quire was the man to speak to if they wanted to know what had happened to her husband. But she had not done so, and he thought it more likely to be out of loyalty to Dunbar’s friendship with him than any affection of her own.

“No, I don’t suppose she could,” he murmured.

“And you’ll not be telling them, or her?”

Quire shook his head.

“Not yet. I’m not done yet. When I am, then maybe a wee bit of the truth’ll come out, but the police aren’t what’s needed to mend all this. Ruthven’d shake them off, or slip away and disappear soon as they came sniffing round. Either way, they’ll not get him to answer to anything.”

“But you will?”

“I’m the one lifted up this rock, and set the worms to seething. I’m the one put Wilson in this bed. I’m the one’ll end it, once my leg’s fit to take my weight again.” He smiled grimly. “I’ve nothing else to do with myself these days.”

Quire’s ankle twinged. The burns on his hand and arms stung. They were not bad, those burns, but they were far worse, to his way of thinking, than any turned ankle. He dreamed of nothing but fire now, every night. If he closed his eyes while awake, even, he could see flames.

“I only stopped in to check on him,” he said.

He began to turn away, but paused when he saw the gas fittings up on the wall. They were there high above every bed: copper pipes and embrasures and nozzles. Silent and lifeless now, on a bright winter’s morning.

“He’s no great liker of gaslights, is Dunbar,” he said sadly.

“He’ll like them fine, when he wakes to see them,” Agnes told him.

Quire was bound up with his own thoughts as he limped along the tiled corridor of the hospital, so much so that he almost collided with a man hurrying in the other direction, equally distracted.

Quire held up an apologetic hand, staggering slightly as he tried to adjust his balance. It took him a moment to recognise the man he faced.

“Sergeant Quire,” Robert Christison said. “Ah, except it’s no longer Sergeant, is it? Forgive me. Force of habit.”

“Professor,” Quire nodded, wincing a little at the throbbing of his ankle.

He lifted his foot a fraction from the floor, to take the weight off the aching joint. Christison glanced down, his expert eyes narrowing.

“Are you injured? Getting treatment, perhaps?”

“It’s just a turned ankle, sir. Taking its time about healing, but it’s on the mend. I’m sorry to have got in your way there, but the ankle makes me a bit less nimble than I was.”

“Oh, don’t worry, don’t worry. I was paying less attention than I should myself. Rather distracted, I confess.”

The professor gave a sharp, sad shake of his head.

“A dreadful business, Quire. You’ll not have heard, I suppose, being no longer… well, anyway, word has not yet started to spread, though I fear it surely will.”

He glanced about suddenly, apparently to ensure there was no one else within earshot.

“I’ve a woman awaiting me on a slab downstairs, found in the cellar of Robert Knox’s theatre. Another day or two and she would have been under his knife, for the edification of his students.

“The police went looking for her there because they’ve got two Irishmen in custody and it seems—hard to credit, but evidently there’s some sort of confession already—it seems they’ve been supplying his cadavers by way of murder. Burke and Hare. Unthinkable.”

“Hare, you say?” said Quire.

“Indeed. William Hare. And Burke’s a William too, come to that. It’s incredible, quite incredible. That men should murder for profit, and not just this once, by any means. If the rumour’s true, it’s a dozen or more. Can you believe it?”

“William Hare,” murmured Quire.

“As I said. I’m to interview Knox myself, at the request of the Lord Advocate. By God, Quire, if this gets out, if it’s proved he had knowledge of how these cadavers were being procured, the scandal will be extraordinary.”

“I never had the impression you were too close a friend of Knox’s, sir.”

“I can’t stand him,” Christison admitted without hesitation. “He’s an insufferable prig, and oafishly arrogant. Takes the most unseemly pleasure in slandering the entire medical staff of the university, in the main because the Town Council did not see fit to appoint him to the chair he wanted. But the consequences if he is shown to have knowingly paid over money for the victims of murder…”

Christison shook his head once more, dismayed by the implications of his own words.

“Well, the entire undertaking of medical education in this city could be profoundly damaged. Irreparably.”

Quire could not summon up the vigour to pretend any great concern over the reputation of the medical establishment. Nor was he greatly engaged by the question of Knox’s complicity or otherwise in whatever crimes had been committed. What did capture his interest, though, and leave him wondering about it all the way back to the Holy Land, was that name: William Hare.