At Hougoumont, the French came, again and again. They flooded up to the walls and the gates, lapping at them, clawing at them. Quire fell into the calm emptiness of battle. The inner silence in which thought gave way to ritual. Fire, reload, fire. Over and over, over and over. Breathing always the smoke and grit and dust.
Musket balls and splinters of stone blasted off the wall, filling the air like hornets. Ducking down, reloading, Quire listened to them chattering above his head. Many of the others were firing blind, raising only their guns above their protective bulwark and loosing off shots wildly. That served little purpose. It needed a man to lift his head up there, into the place where the shot was whining and the stone chips flying and the smoke boiling. Some would not do it, and Quire did not begrudge them that.
He did not begrudge Jamie Boswell his fearful paralysis, either. The youth stayed hunkered down, murmuring to himself, wincing now and again. He could never have seen anything like this before, and it seemed only sense to Quire that a man caught up for the first time in such a tempest should choose not to die on behalf of distant folk in their parliaments and palaces.
Not all those present agreed, though. Sergeant Walker was striding along the line of the wall, all bile and bellows. He was a bastard of a man, in Quire’s judgement, but then he had come to feel that way about almost all save the common mass of the soldiery.
“Get up, that man,” Walker howled at Jamie as he went by. “Piss yourself later, boy. King doesn’t pay you to hide.”
“Oh, Christ,” muttered Jamie, and started to rise, but Quire laid a hand on his arm and pushed him down.
Walker had passed on, turning his vitriol upon some other victim.
“You stay put, if that’s what you fancy,” Quire told Jamie. “Sergeant doesn’t get to decide whether the King pays you enough to die for him. You do that for yourself, lad.”
He surged up, got an elbow set on the parapet. He was looking out over a great mass of men, pressed up right to the base of the wall. Hundreds of them, all pushing forwards; some climbing already on the backs of their comrades, or hoisted up by the strength of their arms, scrabbling for handholds to haul themselves over into the gardens.
Quire took measured aim at the nearest of them and fired. Scraps of the man’s uniform were blown off his shoulder and he fell back amongst the throng. Quire spun his musket about in his hands and used the butt to batter at another Frenchman as he tried to get astride the wall.
It was instants from then: snatched moments of consciousness, of awareness, pulled from the frenzy of carnage; offered to Quire as all that would be left of the long, bloody day by way of memory. The few minutes of ethereal quiet that came upon them now and again, unexpectedly. Wilson Dunbar running along the line of defenders, a heavy bucket full of paper cartridges packed with ball and powder in each hand, shouting: “Get your cartridges while you can, boys! Plenty for all!”
And Jamie twisting and shouting at the stocky little soldier’s disappearing back: “Impervious Dunbar! Stay here, stay with us. Give us a bit of your luck.”
The French coming again, more fiercely than ever. Sounds of chaos rising up from the farm buildings, so that everyone thought for a time they were fallen. But no; the struggle there receded, that around the gardens thickened. Quire stabbing a man in the face with his bayonet.
The gardens themselves, ruined, churned to bare earth and debris. The little low hedges, cut in straight lines, trampled by the soldiers running back and forth. The wounded lying there, on what had been flower beds, crying or wailing or dying silently while they waited for someone to take them to the barn where the surgeons were.
Sergeant Walker returning, standing there and screaming at Jamie Boswell, stabbing a rigid, accusing finger at him.
“You will get on your feet, boy, and kill some fucking Frenchmen, or I’ll see you flogged. You mark my words, I will.”
Quire would have turned about and told Walker where to go, but a Frenchman had reached up and had hold of the barrel of his musket, trying to pull it out of his grasp. Quire struggled to twist it into line with the man’s chest.
Jamie Boswell rose at his side, then, and clumsily thrust his own gun over the top of the wall. He fired, punching a ball harmlessly into the earth at the foot of the wall. The surprise and noise of it was enough to loosen the Frenchman’s grip on Quire’s musket. He pulled it free, and shot the retreating figure in the back.
“Reload,” he shouted at Jamie.
Then half of Jamie’s head was suddenly gone, flicked away like a leaf in the wind, leaving Quire a glimpse of bone and brain. Gore splattered his face. Jamie fell in the heavy, limp way a dead man did. For a moment Quire could taste him on his lips, but he wiped his mouth and his eyes clean. He stared down at the young man’s ruined visage. And vomited, heaving up a thin gruel. Something he had never done before, even when faced with worse horrors.
The insistent rhythm of the slaughter carried him numbly on. Scores of corpses piled up outside the walls, flotsam strewn along a shore after a storm. Quire drifted through it now, his mind detached from his body, which mechanically followed the habits the years had taught it. He saw both the seething mass of the French advancing once more, in futile, dogged determination, and Sergeant Walker, retracing his steps, his ire cutting through the raging cacophony.
Quire lifted his musket and set it to his shoulder, and was distantly surprised to find himself hesitating, the barrel of the gun turning away from the disordered ranks of the host assailing Hougoumont, turning towards Walker. He was puzzled by that, and wondered what he meant to do.
A ball hit his musket, close by his face, blowing it apart in his hands. He felt a punch in his left arm as the ricochet went in. A spray of hot powder, wood splinters, across his face like stinging sparks.
Quire staggered back off the firing platform, falling on the lawn. He got to his feet, grasped at the men closest to him, going from one to the next, shouting, “I need a gun, I need a gun.”
They all pushed him away, caught up in their own struggles, their own dance with death, until one looked down at him and grimaced.
“Good Christ, Quire, your arm. Look at your arm!”
Quire looked, and saw the way it was limply trembling, the blood all over the sleeve of his red tunic.
“Get to the barn, Quire. Get that seen to.”
The barn: an island of suffering, yet more peaceful than the storm raging outside its thick walls. The injured lying all about on pallets. The few men there to attend upon them running from one to another, fraught exhaustion and strain engraved upon their faces, the blood of others staining their shirts. Quire fell back on to a straw-leaking mattress, and stared up into the roof beams, listening to the thunder that came deep and low through the stone.
And last, later and last amongst all the frail memories left to him of that day: Quire came to his senses, not knowing for how long he had drifted. He woke to fire. Fire in the roof of the barn, racing along the struts, dropping in great gouts of embers on to the men below. Smoke, not the grey powder stuff of battle, but thick, heavy, choking black smoke, filled the place, curling down the walls and writhing over the wailing injured.
“Get them out!” someone was shouting.
Men were running about at the fringes of Quire’s vision, and all the time he was lying there, staring up into the inferno above him, and feeling that it was he who floated, up above, looking down upon some terrible fire raging in the hull of a boat.
There was a sudden crashing descent: parts of the roof structure collapsing, falling down towards him in a roaring mass of flame and smoke. A huge blow struck the left side of his body, bringing searing heat that made him try to roll away. A burning roof beam pinned him, crushing his injured arm beneath its orange-hot weight. Screaming. Quire screaming, though it took him a moment or two to realise it was him.
Someone pulled at him. He did not know who. He could see nothing any more. Could feel nothing but the white, stultifying agony of his arm.
Dancing with the Uncle
Edinburgh, 1828
The sky came in brutish on Edinburgh, bearing rain and sleet on its turbulent wings. Hard weather always came out of the west, breaking across the castle on its rocky promontory like waves beating at the prow of a rising ship, spilling over and around its walls and tumbling on down across the Old Town. At such times, those city folk who could not avoid venturing forth encased themselves in high-collared coats and capes and low, tight hats, leaned into the sky’s blustering force and went on about their business with dogged resignation.
Dogged resignation was as good a description as any of Quire’s demeanour as he trudged up the High Street. The weather, though, weighed less heavily upon him than did his own thoughts. He was preoccupied by the image of Edward Carlyle’s ravaged body. That was unfinished business, and it nagged at him. Once or twice, it had even dislodged memories of Hougoumont, of Jamie Boswell and of fire from their dominion over his dreams. Visions of teeth had come to him in his sleep, and set Quire himself fleeing through an endless maze of closes with a pack of spittle-spewing wolves upon his trail.
As he strode towards the police house, head down into the wind, eyes narrowed against the flecks of sleet riding the gusts, one figure amongst the few braving the foul elemental mood caught Quire’s attention. The sight drew him to a halt, and turned him about to observe: a slightly stooped man hunched up beneath a rain cape, wearing black gloves. Blegg. Ruthven’s man. Hurrying along with an air of intent, so focused upon whatever his mission might be that he passed within two dozen paces of Quire without noticing him.
Quire watched the man disappear into the narrow maw of Toddrick’s Wynd, a straight, steep close running down towards the Cowgate. Not a place of obvious and natural interest to the household of a man like Ruthven. He followed to the head of the wynd and peered down its gloomy length. Blegg hastened between the tenements, and met a dishevelled, rangy youth waiting in a very particular doorway. The two of them conferred briefly, and Quire shrank out of sight behind the corner as they looked about them. When he ventured to peer down the wynd once more, they were gone. Which was of great interest to Quire, given what—and who—lay behind that door.
He waited, buffeted by the ill-tempered sky, feeling slugs of melting sleet slip from his hair and inside his collar. It did not take long to tire of that. He sought refuge in Mallinder’s dairy, a dingy little shop opposite the entrance to the wynd.
“You don’t look like a man after milk,” Mrs. Mallinder observed despondently as Quire took up station just inside the threshold.
“No,” Quire admitted without looking at her. “Just a bit of shelter.”
She went back to folding paper around the slabs of butter on her counter.
“Well, fine,” she muttered. “Don’t you worry. You make whatever use you like of my roof. It’s there anyway. Costs me nothing, of course, to keep a shop for the service of them as don’t like a bit of rain or wind. My wee ones eat air and wear sackcloth, so it’s nothing to me if I never see the King’s head in my hand all day. Which I’ll probably not, unless this dreich weather softens up a bit.”
Quire backed up and spilled a few tiny silvery pennies on to the counter.
“There you are. Feast your eyes on good King George all you like.”
Mrs. Mallinder grunted.
“Fine man, no doubt, but he’s no treat for the eye. Here.”
She slapped a wrapped block of butter into Quire’s palm before he could withdraw his hand. He glanced down at it.
“I’m not wanting butter,” he said a touch plaintively.
“That’s as may be, but you’ve bought it fair and square. I may not be running a charitable shelter here, but I’m not after the charity of others either. You take it; that way I’ll not have to take offence.”
Bemused, and rather disappointed with the way the exchange had turned out, Quire slipped his purchase into the pocket of his greatcoat and resumed his position at the open door.
“Could you not shut the weather out?” Mrs. Mallinder enquired.
“No,” Quire replied, and that was the end of that.
It was perhaps a quarter of an hour or so before Blegg reappeared, striding out of the close, turning into the teeth of the wind and making his determined way off up the High Street. Quire watched him go, and rubbed his bristly chin thoughtfully for a moment or two. He was curious about what the rest of Blegg’s itinerary for the day might be, since it had had such an interesting start, but he was more curious still about what his business had been in Toddrick’s Wynd, and that trail might go cold all too quickly.
He crossed the High Street smartly and ducked into the close. The door to which he went was nondescript, a little broader and more solid than most of those lining the looming tenements, but unremarkable. Inside, though, was different.
A short, cramped passageway opened out into a wide hall with a low ceiling, the beams of which had turned almost black from long exposure to smoke and other fumes. The floorboards creaked beneath Quire’s feet. They were cracked and worn and scratched. There were benches around the edges of the hall. On one of them a woman of indeterminate age was asleep, bundled up in threadbare, moth-shot blankets. On another, a creased old man was sitting, blowing out a reedy, sharp tune on a wooden whistle. His crooked fingers jerked up and down as they tapped away at the holes. Before him, eyes closed, a girl of perhaps sixteen or seventeen was dancing alone, jigging about wearily as if long spent but driven by the melody to continue. Not that her movements, so far as Quire could see, bore any relation to the old man’s tune. Other than that, the Dancing School was deserted.
He had hoped to find the youth Blegg had met still here, but the thicket of tables and chairs at the far end of the hall was unoccupied, save for a scattering of empty bottles and cups, and a sheen of broken glass strewn across the floor beneath them. He picked out a path between the tables, the brittle debris crunching and crackling beneath his feet.
The door to the kitchen was of the sort a farm cottage might have, top and bottom halves separate, and individually hinged. The lower section was locked, but the upper swung easily back when he pushed on it. He leaned over and peered around.
“Only whisky,” said the portly man bent over the sink without looking round. “Not a drop of ale left, if that’s what you’re after.”
“I’m not a man for the early drinking, Donald. Glad to see you washing your own dishes, though.”
The man turned about and rolled his eyes.
“Quire. Just the face I want to see at the start of a day.”
Donald MacQuarrie was not the owner of the Dancing School—that distinction belonged to a clutch of men a good deal more reclusive than him—but he had run the place for as long as Quire had been in the police service, and that he had not yet found himself jailed for it was a bitter miracle built out of wit and corruption and the playing of dangerous games. Nobody—or not many, Quire might grudgingly concede if pressed—came to the school to learn to dance.
“Where’s your kitchen lad, then?” Quire asked as MacQuarrie shook dishwater from his hands and dried them on the breast of his shirt.
“The Infirmary. Had an accident wi’ some glass last night. Fell on it.”
“Fell on it?” Quire snorted. “Come out here, Donald. I’ve a question or two for you.”
“Get away, Quire. There’s a lot of good money gets paid over so your kind’ll no be coming round here asking questions.”
“Aye, but it’s not paid to me, so keep me in a good humour and come out here. There’s none to see but these three folk, and there’s not one of them looks likely to remember a thing about this morning.”
The dancing girl stumbled a little as MacQuarrie reluctantly emerged to join Quire at one of the rickety tables, but the shrill song of the whistle did not falter, and caught her up again and set her turning in another unsteady reel.
Quire swept the table clear of the night’s detritus with the back of hi
s arm, and tipped a chair up to drain some of the stale beer from it before he sat down. MacQuarrie’s weight set his own chair to groaning, but it stood up to the task.
“None of the other uncles about?” Quire asked innocently.
The school had three trades, once the pretence of teaching dance was discounted: the unlicensed selling of untaxed drink, whoring, and the pawning of stolen goods. Every night, a handful of the so-called uncles could be found at these very tables, waiting for their broking services to be called upon by the city’s thieves. MacQuarrie himself, Quire knew but could not have proved in law, was one of those uncles.
“Don’t waste my time with questions you ken fine I’ll no answer, Quire. Thanks to that wee fuck of a lad getting himself cut up, I’ve work to be doing this morning.”
“Two men just in here,” Quire said. “And don’t tell me you didn’t see them, since there’s nothing else here to look at.”
MacQuarrie maintained a glowering silence. He was not one to be easily cowed by a mere officer of the police.
“One of them not much more than a boy, the other a weasel of a man in black gloves,” Quire persisted.
“What of it?”
“I want to know their business.”
MacQuarrie shrugged and turned his attention to the dancer and her musician. He watched with flat indifference for a moment or two and then suddenly shouted, “Can you no shut that whining up, Stevenson?”
The old man with the whistle did not pause, or miss a beat. He whined on, oblivious. MacQuarrie grunted, and spat on to the floor.
“All right,” said Quire. “Give me a name, then. I know the one, but not the other. Who’s the young one? Where does he stay? How does he keep himself busy?”
“Can’t help you,” frowned MacQuarrie. “Not with either of them.”
Quire caught the whiff of the lie in the quickness of the response, and the shuffle of MacQuarrie’s eyes.
The Edinburgh Dead Page 5
