by Hall, Ian
"He called here a few days after my release from imprisonment," said Eliza, with a slight blush; "but I did not choose to see him. I love solitude—I prefer retirement."
"And my visit has most disagreeably intruded upon your privacy," observed Stephens.
"I could have wished to have seen you in a more prosperous state, for your own sake," answered Eliza; "but as I observed just now, I would rather remember the kindnesses I have received at your hands, than the miseries which have resulted from your guilty deception. If with my modest and limited means I can assist you, speak! What do you propose to do?"
"My object is to proceed to America, where I might be enabled to obtain an honest livelihood by my mercantile experience and knowledge. Every moment that I prolong my stay in England is fraught with increased peril to my safety; for were I captured, I should be sent back to that far-off clime where so many of my fellow-countrymen endure inconceivable miseries, and where my lot would become terrible indeed."
"I will assist you in your object," said Eliza. "Mr. Pakenham, who acts as my banker, has a hundred pounds of mine in his hands: to-morrow I will draw that amount; and if it will be of any service towards the accomplishment of your plans——"
"Oh, Eliza! how can I sufficiently express my gratitude?" interrupted Stephens, joy and hope animating his care-worn countenance and firing his sunken eyes.
"Do not thank me," said Eliza. "I shall be happy if I can efface one wrinkle from the brow of a fellow-creature. For your present necessities take this,"—and she handed him her purse. "To-morrow evening I shall expect you to call again; and I will then provide you with the means to seek your fortune in another quarter of the world."
Stephens shed tears as he received the purse from the fair hand of that noble-hearted woman.
He then took his departure with a heart far more light than when he had knocked humbly and timidly at the door of that villa an hour before.
After I finished his work, I strove to complete the next chapter of Burke and Hare, knowing that its own date loomed. For a while I railed against the time I now had to spend actually working, but then I reasoned that to investigate my partner’s weekend jaunts would take some considerable cash, so set to work with a will.
BURKE AND HARE; MURDER MOST GRUESOME
(AN EDINBURGH TALE OF DEPRAVITY AND INHUMANITY)
By Alexander Mair MacNeill
Chapter 3
Working Alone
There is a maxim that money runs through the fingers of the greedy like dry sand, and indeed it seemed to be the case in the matter of William Hare. The monies from the last poor dear were hardly in his hands one day, and gone the next. His friend of many years now berthed a few streets away, and he missed his nightly companionship, but of course Burke’s absence gave the Hare’s another room to fill, and the pair set to their new task with vigour.
As Hare coursed Edinburgh’s cobbled streets, his last pennies finding their way to numerous innkeepers, he scoured vennels and closes for drunken strangers. He came near on a few occasions, but it seemed that each potential victim wriggled free at the most inopportune times.
On that particular spring evening, with midnight already well past, he scoured the emptying taverns with equal ill fortune. Dejected, with his hands deep in his coat pockets, he made his way back to Tanner’s Close.
“William, is that you?”
“Aye,” he tossed his coat into a corner, and stepped into the kitchen to find Margaret, his wife, sitting with another woman. He looked at her in profile against the fire, her distended belly now showing the growth of the child within. He gave her a warm smile.
“William, this is my old friend Kathie Largo, she knew me from my times with Logue.”
In his semi-drunken state, it took Hare some moments to notice the cups in the women’s hands. “Where did you get money for whisky?” he wondered, trying his best to give a friendly smile.
“Maybe I should get going?” Kathie offered, quickly supping the dregs of the drink.
“Nonsense!” Margaret Hare countered, lifting the large earthenware bottle to re-fill her friend’s cup. She arched her back in pain, showing her growing belly. “We’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”
Hare was flummoxed by his wife’s actions, but eager to get some of the whisky. He lifted a cup from the sink, wiped it with his shirt-tail and sat down. He almost protested the meagre amount of the liquid his wife dealt him, but a shake of the head silenced him. Then she winked.
“Here you go, Kathie, you drink up, hen.” She encouraged, tipping Kathie’s cup nearer her mouth.
It was in that moment that Hare fastened onto his wife’s silent plan.
He sat back, and listened to their mindless chatter of old times, her previous husband, Logue, their nights of drunkenness, childhood. As he sat, he sized the newcomer. She was about thirty, the same age as his wife, thin, yet not frail.
“Perhaps we should invite Burke and Helen?” Hare offered. “Make a party, eh?” He hoped for a little assistance in the impending dispatch.
“No,” his wife patted his hand quietly. “We have little enough whisky as it is.” She chinked cups with her friend. “All the more for us, eh Kathie?”
“Aye,” As the woman leaned forward, Hare could see she was already quite drunk, and did not press his need for help. There would be plenty of time to call on Burke’s help when the woman was comatose with drink.
“Besides,” Margaret continued. “What they don’t know about, won’t hurt them.”
He gave his wife a stern look. Could she be talking about keeping all the money from Kathie’s cadaver?
“You’ll stay the night, won’t you dearie?” she pressed, filling her friend’s cup once more.
Hare could hardly contain himself, the drink from the Grass Market taverns had begun to wear off, and he found himself looking forward to beating the breath out of the carousing woman. He took a large sip of his neglected whisky, running the leftovers thoughtfully round the bottom of the cup.
It took most of the whisky to encourage Kathie onto the bed, but in less than a minute she was fast asleep, snoring loudly. As Hare looked down at her, he felt certain he could hear his own heart beating, his blood pumping noisily through his veins.
As Margaret climbed onto the bed, straddling her friend’s legs, Hare pushed the pillow onto her face. To his surprise there was no struggle, little movement from her; she just twitched a few times, then died slowly under the pressure from the couple.
Leaving the body on the bed, the Hares returned to the kitchen. “What do we do now?” Hare asked his wife. “I need help to get her to Surgeon’s Hall.”
“We’ll work it out.”
“Maybe I should go get Burke.” Hare said, his face becoming determined.
“And give him half the money?” Margaret snapped. “He’s done nothing to deserve it.”
Half an hour later found Hare knocking on the door that led to Fraser Hughes bedroom. When the young man answered Hare’s rousing, he was less than happy with the arrangement. “That means I’m implicated.” He said as he sleepily dressed. “I don’t like it.”
With Hare’s assistance they pulled the handcart from the stable and began their way down into the Grass Market. Hare attempted to encourage his new accomplice. “Doctor Knox will be pleased with a new cadaver in the morning, aye?”
Hughes nodded sullenly. He had been roused unceremoniously from a wonderful dream, and felt particularly irritable. “He’ll be a happier man for it.” He admitted. Hughes earned four pounds for each corpse delivered and prepared, and the Doctor had a busy schedule. Tomorrow he planned to showcase a new procedure to 200 eager students.
As the majority of Edinburgh slept, Hughes and the Irishman pulled the cart across the dew-covered cobbles to the lodging house.
“She still has clothes!” Hughes hissed at the Hare couple as they stood proudly at the bottom of the bed.
“You can’t get rid of them?” Margaret whispered, looking to the
door. There were six other lodgers in the house, and it was now past three in the morning.
Hughes straightened himself. “Madam, if we are accosted in the streets with a body in clothes, we’ll be thrown in jail no matter what our excuse.” He almost left there and then, but the lure of that extra four pounds kept him rooted. “Get her stripped.” He walked out of the room, leaving the Hare’s alone with Kathie’s body.
It is to be said of Kathie’s constitution that the cart felt little heavier on its return journey. By the time the clock at the Tron chimed the hour of four o’clock, William Hare was ten pounds better off, and he did not have to share the spoils with his erstwhile partner.
Hare slept late the next morning, lazily listening to his wife dish out plates of porridge for the guests still alive. By noon, he was in his favorite spot in the world, a corner of the White Hart Inn, a foaming beer to his front, and a glass of single malt beside it.
He hardly missed a breath when Burke walked in. “I thought you were skint?” he said, looking at the drinks on the table.
“I got credit,” Hare could not help but smile as he motioned to the bar. “He knows I’m good for it.”
“My arse,” Burke exclaimed. “He wouldn’t give you credit if his life depended on it.” He looked hard at his friend, then quickly slid onto a seat at the table. “You did it, didn’t you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But the smirk remained.
“You did one on your own, you bounder!”
Hare could hardly contain himself. “Aye,” he giggled, “Just last night.”
And he told the tale in all its deathly glory.
~ ~ ~
“The Hare’s have only gone and done one by themselves,” Burke announced to Helen MacDougal later that day.
“The swines,” she spat. “I’ll bet it was Margaret that started the idea. She’s a nasty piece of work, to be sure.”
“That means they’ll not be needing cash any time soon.” Burke said. “Our wedge is disappearing fast.”
“An’ we’ve got rent at the end of the week.”
So from the action of one Irishman, another began to view the Edinburgh public as dead meat.
It did not take long before the perfect victim crossed his path.
Peter Potts was an English merchant from Cheshire who traded with the quartermaster of the castle. It took one small slip of the tongue for a death sentence to be passed upon him.
“I’m off home tomorrow,” he announced to Burke as the two men sat in the sitting room of Brogan’s boarding house. “All my business completed.”
“Home tomorrow, is it?” Burke leaned closer. “I wouldn’t go talking it up like that. Some folks might get the idea you’re loaded.”
Potts laughed. “Oh, no, not me; I have but a few pounds to my name. My treasure has already preceded me,”
“What do you mean?”
“My cargo and paperwork are all in a cart, slowly making its way south.”
Helen MacDougal stepped into the room, walking to Pott’s armchair, where she stood behind him. As Burke spoke, she pointed at Potts’ head, and made a cutting motion across her throat.
“Will ye have a whisky with me, Peter,” Burke’s Irish lilt had smoothed somewhat. “To celebrate your good fortune, so to say.”
“I will,” Potts replied.
Life is cheap in the streets of a bustling city, and that night proved no different. Peter Potts struggled against the attentions of Burke and MacDougal for many minutes, but the pair won out in the end.
Burke got the obligatory ten pounds for his evening’s work, and Fraser Hughes got his commission from Doctor Knox.
But a Rubicon had been passed. The pair had both operated singly, and now had committed the crime to elevate them to the giddy heights of ‘serial killers’.
In the streets of the Grass Market, under the shadow of Edinburgh Castle Rock, life carried on as normal, but people still talked. The taverns were the boiling pits of gossip, and with the addition of their stock and trade, the rumors circled like storm clouds.
As Doctor Knox lifted the sheet from the body of Kathie Largo and exposed her body to the eager onlookers on the many balconies, one man gasped.
Richard McLennan held his hand close to his mouth and hid not exhale for many moments. On the table just feet below lay a person he actually knew. He struggled for a moment on her name, then came up sadly lacking. But he knew her. She had served him in some capacity, he could picture her face giving him something, and he’d given her pennies; he could remember them chinking into her small hand.
As Doctor Knox began to cut into her white form, Richard knew he would never forget her.
As he drank that night, his fellow students around him, he finally realized where he’d seen her; the market, selling flowers, just two days before.
A few days later, he attended one of Knox’s lectures at the Surgeon’s Hall; The Physiology of Tendons.
As he filed into the lecture theatre, he spotted the professor’s assistant, standing near the lectern, fiddling with papers, pencils. “Excuse me,” he coughed unnecessarily. “I have a question.”
“And you are?” Hughes asked, looking down his nose at the diminutive figure before him.
“Richard McLennan from Partick.” He felt nervous already, but Hughes’ imperious attitude had not helped. “I have a question of cadavers.”
“Yes?”
“Well,” now there seemed to be a thousand reasons why he should not ask the question on his lips for many days. “There was one, just a day or so ago, a woman.”
“Yes?” Hughes asked roughly. He did not like the direction of this fellow’s questions.
That did it. Richard muttered an apology and retreated from Hughes in complete surrender. As he took his seat in the auditorium he thought of his place in the university, how the College of Surgeons meant so much to his career. He determined to close his mouth and tread a straight line to passing the class.
His hands shook that morning as he took notes, but his drawings were far better than the chalked outlines on the blackboard.
~ ~ ~
As I finished the chapter, I counted the words, then mentally counted the money I’d be getting for the story. I needed so much for my journey into the country; I could hardly believe what I had chosen to do.
A note from George arrived the next day.
Here is a good place to start. Abbeyfield Stables is on the south side of Southwark Park. Ask for Stanley. Tell him you’re a friend of Charlie Swann’s.
My plan was beginning to coalesce, but there was no sign from Thackeray that Uncle James intended going to the country this weekend. With my work schedule from Monday to Thursday looming, I decided to set my preparations into full swing that weekend. I took my manuscript to the publishers, then set about finding the first part of my accoutrements. “Where will I get a sword, Reggie?”
He rubbed his chin in thought. “Do you want a cheap one, or a fancy one or for dressing up with?” he asked.
I definitely wanted to keep my spending to a minimum. “Cheap one, nothing fancy.”
“Follow me,” Reggie set off with a grin. I soon followed my little guardian to a store on Ludgate Hill, a continuation of Fleet Street.
Hougemont; Finest Steel
I opened the door, and a loud bell rang above it, announcing my entry.
I found myself in a world of swords in shiny glass display cases. As I looked around I was immediately approached by the shopkeeper. “How can I help you, sir?” he wrung his hands in front of his chest, perhaps a nervous tick.
“I’m looking for a sword, for my own protection, nothing too fancy.” The words all seemed to come out too fast.
“Are you military, sir?”
That caught me by surprise. “Ah, no.”
He cocked his head as if listening to someone’s voice. “Sword or sabre, sir?”
“I care not.” I tried to look half knowledgeable, although I felt intimidated
by my strange surroundings. “Nothing too large, it is not intended to be a showpiece. In fact I’d rather attention were not drawn to it.”
“Oh,” he smiled. “A concealed weapon, then?”
I had not considered the prospect, yet it immediately appealed to me. “Yes, concealed might be the best option.” Considering I had said the words, I had no idea what to expect.
The shopkeeper walked to a display of walking-sticks, some blackened, some in polished wood. “Here we have the latest in fashion.” He picked up a shiny black walking-stick, and gave its ivory head a twist. With a sound of steel sliding on steel, he drew a blade from the stick frame, perhaps two feet long.
I gasped in fright. “Good grief man!”
“And that, sir, is the reaction you will get if accosted.” He gave a wide grin. “Steel shaft, self-sharpening sheath, ebony enclosure, silver detailed.”
I immediately saw his point, it was perfect for the job. I could carry it anywhere. “And how much will this set me back?”
“This ebony model with ivory handle is ten guineas, brass handles bring the price down. Stepping down from ebony, walnut starts around five guineas. If you don’t need silver, we do a steel version for just under four.” He walked behind the display, and I looked down at the selection. Small hard-to-read hand-written labels announced the price of every model. Most were around the five guinea mark, but to my consternation, I could not decide. Each had different shapes and configurations of handles. Some of the models were so intricate I tried hard to imagine wielding them with any degree of success. “I also have some second-hand models, sir.”
He slipped his hand behind the counter and produced a walking stick that looked duller than the new ones. The black wood showed through to a deep brown in places.
“This is ebony, sir, with sterling silver detail.” He held it between us. “A quarter twist, and the blade comes free.” He demonstrated the mechanism, then handed the two parts to me. “English steel blade, made by James Wilkinson & Son. They make officer’s swords for the army, sir.”
