‘That’s just where the gibbet used to be,’ she told him.
He was unfamiliar with the word. ‘Gibbet?’
‘Where they used to hang people,’ she explained. ‘You know, bad people. Thieves, murderers, that sort of thing.’
‘What? They used to hang them in public?’ he cried.
Cat gave him a disbelieving look. ‘They still do it in public,’ she said. ‘Only they moved the gibbet to the Lawnmarket because the crowds got so big.’ She shot an annoyed look at her mother. ‘Of course, me and Fraser are never allowed to go to the hangings. Some people think it’s bad for us.’
‘I happen to believe it’s something that no youngster should ever have to watch,’ said Mary. ‘For my money, such deeds really ought to be carried out in private. Or better still, done away with altogether.’
Cat laughed. ‘That will never happen,’ she said. She looked at Tom. ‘They must have public hangings in Manchester?’ she reasoned.
Tom shook his head. ‘No. Now we have something called The X Factor,’ he told her and left it at that. They moved on into the market and Tom looked around in amazement. It seemed that anything and everything was on sale today. He saw stalls piled high with vegetables; great muddy heaps of potatoes, cabbages and turnips. A little further on was a stall strewn with the bloody carcasses of animals. A man was chopping great hunks of meat into steaks with a cleaver, his striped apron caked with gore while above him hung an array of produce – rabbits with their fur still on, richly feathered pheasants and hanging centrally, the great leering head of a pig, its mouth open, its tongue lolling, a halo of flies buzzing urgently around it.
They walked on some more and came to a large circle of people Peering over the heads in front of him, Tom could see men parading horses before a crowd of appreciative onlookers who stood, drinking tankards of ale and smoking clay pipes, while an auctioneer on a raised wooden stage shouted the bids for each animal. Tom and Cat turned aside and entered another section of the market where crates of live birds were stacked, one on top of the other. Chickens, ducks and geese set up a frantic noise as Tom and his companions moved past and they came to other stalls selling household items – chairs and tables, cups and saucers, brooms and garden tools.
Beggars moved amongst the crowd asking for coins and gangs of feral-looking children roamed around, seeking an opportunity to grab something of value and make a run for it. A street musician wandered by, playing a strange jangling instrument, operated by a lever which he turned with one hand while the fingers of the other framed chords. He was singing something about a ‘lad and a lass and a merry frolic all among the hay.’ On his shoulder a monkey wearing a pillbox hat and a red military style jacket shrieked and whooped along with him, as though attempting to join in.
Mary approached a vegetable stall and started to poke energetically around amongst the produce, looking for the best offerings. Cat took Tom’s hand and pulled him onwards into the crowd.
‘Don’t go too far!’ Mary called after them. ‘Tom, mind you keep an eye on Catriona!’ Cat waved a hand and flashed Tom a mischievous grin. ‘This way,’ she urged him. They took a couple of turns between the stalls. Cat clearly knew exactly where she was going. In a matter of moments they were in front of the stall she had mentioned, one festooned with colourful lengths of ribbon, velvet bows and bright shiny buttons. Cat gazed up at the treasures, wide-eyed. ‘I love this stall,’ she told Tom excitedly. ‘I could spend the whole day just standing here, looking.’
A wizened old lady in a frilly white bonnet stood behind the counter, a clay pipe clamped in her mouth. She removed the pipe and smiled a toothless smile at them. ‘Something caught your eye, my pretty?’ she purred.
‘All of it,’ said Cat, gleefully.
‘What’s your favourite?’ asked Tom. He slid a hand into his pocket and was about to pull out some money when something caught his eye, a figure in the midst of the crowd on the far side of the stall; a cloaked figure gliding like a ghost through the frantic press of people. Tom felt a chill settle over him as he saw it was a man dressed in a long brown leather cloak. A man with a familiar face. Even as Tom stared in dismay, the figure was turning to look in his direction. William McSweeny’s lips curved into a cold, mirthless smile.
Tom reached out instinctively and grabbed Cat’s hand. ‘Come on,’ he said and pulling her along behind him, he headed deeper into the crowd.
‘Wh . . . what’s the matter?’ protested Cat. ‘I’d only just started looking!’
Tom glanced over his shoulder to see McSweeny following them, weaving effortlessly in and out of the throng. Tom angled sharp left between two stalls and doubled back on himself.
‘Where are we going?’ protested Cat.
Tom’s mind was racing as he tried to understand what was happening. First McSweeny had been in modern-day Edinburgh and that had been tricky enough. Now he was here. How was he managing to cross the centuries as though they had no meaning? And where was Tom supposed to hide to escape him?
Tom headed back the way they had come and saw Mary, still bartering with the man at the vegetable stall, arguing about the merits of a large turnip she was holding. Tom grabbed Cat and virtually thrust her up against her mother. ‘Stay here,’ he said. ‘Don’t try and follow me.’
‘But Tom, what−?’
He darted away again, hoping against hope that McSweeny hadn’t noticed Cat, reminding himself horribly, shockingly, what had happened to Morag in a similar situation to this. She’d tried to defend Tom from McSweeny and had paid for it with her life. He couldn’t allow that to happen to Cat. He plunged in where the crowd was thickest, glancing back as he did so. At first he couldn’t see McSweeny, and the dread certainty came to him that the man had homed in on Cat and Mary – but then he saw him, still following, craning his head this way and that as he barged his way through the people around him. Tom cursed and tried moving to his left, passing in through a narrow opening between two stalls and pushing his way through the tightly-packed wall of humanity beyond. He emerged from the crush and found himself in the front row of the horse auction. A man was holding a huge shire horse on a halter directly ahead of him and, looking quickly around, Tom could see that the onlookers were packed so tightly there was no avenue of escape. The huge horse barred his path, arching its powerful neck, flaring its nostrils and stamping its heavy feet. The auctioneer gazed sternly across the heads of the assembled crowd and tapped his gavel on a wooden block.
‘Who’ll bid me ten guineas for this fine creature?’ he cried.
‘I will!’ growled a voice.
‘I have ten. Who’ll bid me eleven? Come on now, he’s a beauty.’
Tom looked frantically over his shoulder to see McSweeny still closing on him, shouldering a path through the crush with no thought for anyone who got in his way. He was grinning confidently now, his teeth bared, and he was reaching under his cloak for something. Tom had a good idea what it was and panic shuddered through him. He looked frantically this way and that, knowing that he only had seconds to come up with a plan of escape.
‘Eleven guineas!’ he yelled, raising an arm. Every head in the crowd turned to look at him. McSweeny stopped in his tracks, his smile faltering. The auctioneer pointed his gavel at Tom. ‘Eleven guineas from the bold young lad down the front there!’ he roared. ‘Do I hear twelve?’
‘Twelve,’ said another voice, just to Tom’s left; a portly man in a tailcoat and a brocade waistcoat. He was glaring at Tom as though he couldn’t believe anybody would have the nerve to challenge him for the horse and Tom edged instinctively closer to him, telling himself that surely McSweeny would do nothing in front of so many witnesses.
‘Thirteen guineas,’ he yelled and a murmur rose up from the crowd as they sensed some sport. People jostled nearer, wanting to be close to the action and Tom kept edging to his left, closer and closer to the stout man. He glared at Tom, his pudgy cheeks and bulbous nose veined with red.
‘Fourteen!’ he bellowed, a
nd now Tom could smell the body odour coming off him in waves, but he wasn’t going to let that deter him. He got himself shoulder-to-shoulder with the man and glanced quickly around. He couldn’t see McSweeny anymore. He became aware that the crowd was silent and realised that everyone was staring at him, waiting to see if he’d bid again.
‘Going once,’ said the auctioneer. ‘Going twice . . .’
‘Fifteen guineas,’ shouted Tom and there was a gasp of excitement from all around him. Just then Tom became aware of a dark shape moving directly behind him. It felt like the sun going behind a cloud. He sensed rather than saw the knife coming out from under McSweeny’s cloak and he reacted instinctively. He launched himself forward, straight at the Shire horse, aware as he did so that the dark leather-cloaked shape was lunging in pursuit. Tom ducked his head and went under the horse’s belly, clearing it by inches. The horse was startled by the sudden movement. It snorted and reared up, then came down hard on whatever was trying to follow Tom. The great hooves pounded the dark shape and flattened it. Tom twisted around with a gasp of triumph, only to see that the horse’s feet were trampling nothing more substantial than an empty leather cloak. Tom looked around, licking his dry lips, but there was no longer any sign of McSweeny. He had vanished.
‘Going once,’ yelled the auctioneer, pointing the gavel at Tom. ‘Going twice . . .’ Tom stared back at the auctioneer apprehensively, wondering how he was going to explain his way out of this one.
‘Sixteen guineas,’ bellowed the stout man. ‘And not a penny more!’
Tom gazed at him for a moment. For an instant, he even considered putting in another bid, just for the hell of it. But then he asked himself what he would do if he actually won the damn thing. Offer them twenty pounds of a currency that didn’t even exist yet? So he shrugged his shoulders and turned away, registering the sighs of disappointment from the crowd who had clearly wanted him to win the auction.
Tom made his way back around the circle, keeping his eyes peeled, but there was no sign of McSweeny and something told him that, for the time being at least, he was in the clear. But this latest visitation worried him. If McSweeny could follow him through time, then surely, Tom wasn’t going to be safe anywhere. He retraced his steps and eventually found Cat and Mary still hanging around the vegetable stalls. Mary had concluded her business and Cat just looked annoyed.
‘What was all that about?’ she demanded as Tom wandered sheepishly up to her.
‘I . . . er . . . I thought I saw somebody I knew,’ said Tom. ‘In the crowd.’
‘And you didn’t want to be seen with me?’ Cat looked offended.
‘Er . . . no, it wasn’t that. I just . . . he’s somebody I
. . .’ He frowned. ‘Do you want to go back to the ribbon stall?’ he asked.
‘No thank you,’ she told him, curtly.
Mary eyed them doubtfully. ‘What’s going on?’ she asked them. ‘Have you two fallen out?’
‘Tom dumped me,’ said Cat, indignantly. ‘He just pushed me into you and ran away.’
‘I noticed that much.’ Mary looked at Tom for an explanation. ‘Why would you do such a thing?’ she asked him. ‘It wasn’t very gentlemanly.’
‘I’m sorry. It’s . . . kind of complicated.’
‘We’re listening,’ Cat told him, and he could see that she was determined to know everything.
Tom considered making up another lie, but he was tired of doing that. He sighed as he realised he was going to have to come clean. ‘The man in the crowd,’ he said. ‘The reason I ran away from him. He . . . he’s trying to kill me.’
Mary looked horrified. ‘Tom, if that’s the case, we need to go and see the constables, at once.’
Tom shook his head. ‘It’s not as straightforward, as you think. The man I saw . . . he’s called William McSweeny. And he’s from the past.’
‘The past?’ Cat looked puzzled. ‘What do you mean, the past?’
‘He’s from around two hundred years ago. And, me, I’m . . .’
‘Yes?’ murmured Mary.
Tom swallowed. ‘Well, I’m from the future.’
There was a long silence. Mary and Cat stood there staring at him, their mouths open. He might as well have been talking in Chinese.
Then Cat spoke. ‘Tom. You realise how that sounds?’
‘I know how it sounds,’ he assured her. ‘I didn’t want to have to tell you any of this. But now I guess there’s nothing else I can do.’ He took a deep breath. ‘It all started in Mary King’s Close,’ he said.
He started talking and he kept on talking until he’d told them everything that had happened to him. And they listened. He could hardly believe it, but they listened to every word he had to say. And when he got to the end of his story, he looked at them and spread his hands and said, ‘Well, that’s pretty much everything. What do you think?’
Eleven
It was another lively night at Laird’s lodging house and the main room was packed with customers. The fiddle player was scraping out one of his awful tunes up on the makeshift stage. Billy, Nell and Will were in their usual places at the big pine table and the drink, as usual, was flowing freely. Tom sat at the table with the others, nursing a tankard of the foul ale that Margaret served, the flavour of which never seemed to improve, no matter how much he sampled it. He kept glancing at the old grandfather clock in one corner of the room as the hour crept steadily towards midnight and he thought about what he had told Cat and Mary, earlier that day at the Grassmarket. Fair play to them, they hadn’t told him that he was a raving lunatic, for which he supposed he should be grateful. But neither had they said that they believed him either. In their place, he thought, he’d most likely have some pretty strong doubts himself.
When he’d parted company with them the atmosphere had been strained to say the least – but Cat had given him a polite peck on the cheek and smiled at him, assuring him they they’d see him soon, once they’d had a chance to discuss what he’d told them. He’d walked away wishing that he’d just made up another lie to explain his behaviour at the market.
‘A penny for your thoughts?’
Tom looked up and saw Nell smiling at him.
‘Oh, just thinking about this job I’m doing later,’ he told her. He liked Nell a lot. Despite her fondness for whisky, she was by far the nicest of the crowd here at Laird’s and since that first night he’d always had the distinct impression that she was looking out for him in some way. Perhaps Billy had been right when he’d said that Tom ‘brought out the mother in her’.
Billy too was extremely likable, always ready with a joke or a funny observation, but in many ways he was a complete mystery. He never seemed to do a day’s work and yet, for all that, he was always coming in with a new jacket or hat or a fancy pocket watch. Tom suspected that Nell supported him from whatever kind of work she did. She often disappeared for hours at a time and Tom had occasionally seen her slipping Billy a few coins on the rare occasions when he actually paid for a drink.
Margaret was just Margaret – sour, grumpy, never happy with anything that occurred around the place. If Tom had hoped that she’d warm to him after a while, he was sorely disappointed. She made no pretence of liking him and most of the time was just downright nasty. She delighted in finding more and more menial chores for him to do.
Will was the hardest to fathom of all. He always had that insincere smile on his face, but it never extended to his eyes which were cold and dark and seemed to have the ability to look right through you. Will shared in the profits made at Laird’s – though it seemed he spent most of his spare time trying to drink the place into debt, something that Margaret clearly disapproved of. Of course, he and Billy also had their little side line – supplying dodgy meat to various customers around the city, though their main customers always appeared to be the people at Surgeons’ Hall. Billy had explained that to Tom.
‘Sure, it’s all those young medical students. They’re ravenous after a hard day’s study and ready for s
ome decent grub. That’s where we come in. We keep ‘em well supplied with our choice cuts and of course, with all them rich parents backing them, they don’t mind paying over the odds for it.’
This reminded him that Mary had complained earlier that day about the price of meat at the Grassmarket and he remembered his plan to see if he could get her added to the list of favoured customers.
‘Nell,’ he said, leaning closer. ‘This delivery I’m making later on . . .’
‘What about it?’ she murmured warily.
‘I was wondering if I could get some meat for my friends, the McCallums?’
Nell stole a quick glance at Billy who was busy chatting to Will and then returned her gaze to Tom. She looked suddenly very stern. ‘Tom, trust me on this,’ she whispered. ‘The McCallums wouldn’t want what’s in those deliveries.’
‘Oh, but Mary was saying–’
‘Wheesht, Tom! They’re honest folk. They wouldn’t want to be associated with something that’s not one hundred percent legal. This meat that Billy gets, it’s – well, let’s just say a few corners have been cut. Least said, soonest mended.’
‘Er . . . ok.’ Tom frowned. ‘I’m not sure what that means, exactly.’
‘It means the less you know about it, the better.’ She looked troubled. ‘I didn’t really want you involved in the business, but as usual, Billy talked me round. Just do what they tell you and don’t ask questions. There’s a good lad.’ She reached out a hand and patted him on the shoulder.
Tom realised that Will was looking at him now. ‘You ready?’ he muttered, motioning to the clock which Tom could see was now just a whisker away from midnight. He nodded. Will got up from his chair and motioned for Tom to follow him. As he got up, Nell gave him a worried smile. ‘Remember,’ she hissed. ‘Just do what they tell you.’
He nodded and followed Will up to the top of the room and along the hall to the back door. They stepped out into darkness and Tom was momentarily surprised to see that a thick fog had descended, floating over the yard like a spectre. Will seemed delighted.
Seventeen Coffins Page 8
