“The nights do come in fast this time of year,” he observed.
Quire walked close at Munro’s side as they covered the short distance from the Sheep Heid to the gates of the kirk. Before leaving the inn, he had set a light to his lantern, and now angled its shutters to lay out a guiding beam before them. He was concerned for the other man’s safety, since the roadway was snowbound and Munro’s stride a touch unsteady. His concern proved unfounded, though. The man was sure-footed, perhaps aided by the ballast of a girth that placed considerable demands upon the belt and waistcoat tasked with its containment.
A feast of stars was strewn above them, food for the eye, and the crescent moon like a knife of polished ivory.
“Quire, eh?” Munro said as they drew near to the watchtower. His good humour had survived his removal from the inn thoroughly intact. “That’s a name with a fine religious tone to it. A churchgoing family, perhaps?”
“No,” Quire said, glad that he had not shared his forename as well. “A farming family. Until I left the land, at least.”
“Ah. Ah.”
Munro sounded a little disappointed, but shrugged it off easily enough.
“Well, a believer in the sanctity of life, at least, and that of the righteous dead, or you’d not be troubling yourself with our business tonight. Am I right?”
“More or less.”
Munro pounded on the door of the tower.
“Open up, lad. We’ve an officer of the law come calling, to share our heavy duty.”
Duncan the younger gave them admittance to a cramped little chamber which a crackling fire had packed with so much heat that Quire felt dizzy. The son eyed his father cautiously as the older man sank into a low wooden chair with a contented sigh, while Quire’s attention was taken by the gun resting across pegs above the hearth.
It was properly known as a Land Pattern flintlock musket, but Quire, and everyone else with any soldiering in them, knew it as the Brown Bess; a soft, almost companionable name, he always thought, for something that had spat such storms of smoke and fire and lead and spilled such torrents of blood the world over these last hundred years. This lady had been midwife and nursemaid in the savage birth and nurturing of Britain’s empire.
“What is it you’re here for?” the youth asked him.
“He thinks there’s those who mean to rob our grave tonight,” his father said before Quire could answer.
The older man’s eyes were already closed, and his clasped hands rested comfortably upon his stomach.
“I’ve explained that we’ve had no trouble like that here in years, and not likely to have when there’re lights in the windows of this tower, and smoke from our chimney.”
He opened one eye and cast an investigate glance towards the window that looked out over the graveyard.
“Lights in the windows,” he said again, pointedly. “Man can talk as much sense as he likes, and profit by it not at all if nobody’s listening.”
His son hastened to find a candle in the drawer of a long table that stood against one wall. He lit it with a taper from the fire and set it on the window ledge, its fluttering flame a precautionary beacon against whatever men of ill will might lurk in the outer darkness.
“Ground’s frozen, anyway,” Munro said. “Who’d be so set upon transgression that they’d try to dig through that?”
“They’d need to be determined upon their course, right enough,” Quire agreed.
“Or most fiercely in thrall to greed. They say the anatomists pay ten pounds for a body.”
It was a good deal more than Quire could earn in a month.
“How long do you keep watch after a burial?” he asked.
“A week or so,” grunted Munro, closing his eye once more and sniffing. “They come early, if they’re going to come at all. After that, the corruption of the body… well, nobody would want it then. And only when the one we’ve buried was taken in the prime of life, and sound in wind and limb. As this lad was.”
A sorrowful weight settled over his words.
“Drowned in a ditch. The worse for the drink, they say, but I don’t know. Anyway, the Resurrection Men don’t much want the old ones, or the sick ones. So people say, in any case.”
“It’s true,” Quire acknowledged.
“Is it true they put cages about the graves in the city yards?” the younger Munro asked hesitantly, perhaps embarrassed by his morbid curiosity.
“Sometimes,” Quire said, seating himself far enough from the fire to avoid its fiercest heat. “If the family can afford it. Mort safes, they call them. Great iron things.”
Munro grunted, in a heavy, languid way that suggested sleep could not be long delayed.
“Hellish times we live in, that the dead should be disturbed in their sleep by pagans and atheists. Pagans and atheists, the lot of them: the diggers and these so-called medical men alike. Lapdogs of Satan. No grave should be opened, unless it’s at the end of days.”
And with that judgement issued, the elder of the church lapsed into lugubrious slumber. He snored, softly and gently, and it was a soothing sound. Rather like the contemplative rumbling of waves upon a pebble beach.
The sleeper’s son perched himself on the window ledge, beside the trembling candle, and began to read a Bible so old and well-used that its leather binding had softened to the flimsiness of cloth. His lips moved as he read, though Quire was not sure whether it was unconscious habit or deliberate recitation.
“You spend a lot of nights in this little castle, lad?” he asked the boy quietly.
The young Duncan, sitting there with the holy book open on his lap, lifted a stiff finger to his lips, pointed at his torpid father, and returned to his study of the text. Quire could not help but smile at the impertinence, loyalty and faintly submissive obedience that were all bundled up together in the scene.
The heat, and the lullaby of Munro’s snoring, worked their soporific magics upon Quire, and he found his thoughts drifting aimlessly. His gaze rested upon the gun lodged above the fire, and he wandered into a remembrance of past times that was as much dream as memory.
He had carried a Brown Bess of his own all across Portugal and Spain, and into France. She had done as much as—more than, perhaps—any other woman to make him who he was. Taught him, certainly, more memorable lessons than the few teachers he had known in his brief schooling.
What sound it was that interrupted his hazy reverie, and how much time had passed, Quire could not say. But there was something; some dissonant shard of the outside world that jarred in his ear and was gone before he was wakeful enough to take hold of it.
He jerked upright in his chair, scraping its feet on the flagstone floor. The fire was still crackling, though it had sunk a little lower in the hearth; Munro still snored, though it was a feeble, whistling kind of snore now. But the son, perched upon the ledge of the dark window, was the embodiment of tension, staring out into the night. The soft Bible in his hands was forgotten, on the verge of slipping from his grasp.
“What is it?” Quire asked.
“I don’t know,” the youth said uneasily. “Something.”
And then it came again: a scrape of metal on stone, so faint as to be barely distinguishable from nervous imagination. But distinguishable—and real—it was. Quire surged to his feet.
“Get away from the window,” he snapped. “You’ll not be able to see anything anyway. Snuff that candle.”
As Munro the younger did as he was told, Quire kicked his father’s outstretched foot. Even that was only enough to bring the man haltingly and blearily back to wakefulness.
“What’s happening?” he asked, rubbing at his eye.
“That’s what we’re going to find out. Do either of you know how to load that gun?”
“What?”
Father directed a fearsome enquiring glare towards son, who shrank beneath its force and said, apologetically: “There’s someone out there.”
“Is there?” The doubt was evident in Munro’s voice,
but so was a fragment of alarm. “It’ll be nothing. No need for the gun.”
“And if it’s not nothing?” Quire demanded. “There’s many kinds of resurrectionists, Munro. Not all of them are students, not all of them are gentle. Arm yourself. It might put some handy fear into them, if nothing else.”
It was evident at once that the man had not handled a gun in a long time, if ever. He fumbled even as he was digging a cartridge out from a pouch. He held the musket too low, and it swayed and rocked in his grasp. He was afraid of the gun, Quire knew, for he had seen it in others before. Afraid of the gun and of what it signified.
Quire took it out of Munro’s hands and, for the first time in many years, found himself loading a Brown Bess. Tearing at the paper cartridge with his teeth, catching the smell of the powder and thinking it a touch stale. Spit out the scraps, prime the pan. Stand the gun on its heel and pour the rest of the powder down the barrel. Turn the cartridge, feeling the weight of the ball in his hand; press it into the barrel with a fingertip. Tight enough. Slip the ramrod out from its seat under the barrel, punch down with it, pack ball and paper wadding and powder down firm. Replace the ramrod.
Quire looked up. Both Munros were regarding him with unease.
“There’s a man who knows his way about a musket,” the elder said quietly. Sadly.
But Quire knew he had been slow and imprecise. At his best, at Waterloo, he had been amongst the fastest in the company. Four shots in a minute. Not any more. Not nearly. It was not a skill he wished to rediscover, any more than was the killing of men. He offered the gun to Munro, who regarded it with distaste.
“I’ll take it,” said the man’s son.
Quire heard a hint of enthusiasm in the proposal that he did not entirely trust, but the older Munro nodded.
“He’s used one before, true enough.” But he fixed his son with a beady glare as Quire handed the weapon over. “Don’t you go firing that thing off, though, lad. Just for show.”
“Where’s the body?” Quire asked. “The fresh burial?”
“Far side of the kirk,” Munro told him. “The loch side.”
They went out into the graveyard, a still and strange place on a night such as this, with an icy tang to the air, rumpled snow blanketing the graves. The beam of Quire’s lantern flung the stark shadows of headstones across that white canvas and up on to the walls of the little church. There was a silence, of a depth only winter could provide, and the crunch of their footsteps fell into it like stones into a deep pond.
They went around the south side of the church. A gnarled apple tree, leafless and fruitless and sleeping, leaned over the cemetery wall. The lantern light bounced and tumbled through its branches. Quire meant to lead the way, but Munro—perhaps from protective fatherly concern, or just in the belief that the authority and responsibility here were his—moved quickly past him, striding over the snow without regard to caution or concealment. It occurred to Quire, belatedly, that the role of the men who watched over the graveyards of Edinburgh was not to capture body snatchers, but to deter them. To frighten them off. His own desires and expectations might not entirely jibe with those of his companions.
He glanced back, to where young Duncan was tramping along behind them, bringing the lantern round to light the boy up with its yellow glare.
“Get your finger off the trigger,” Quire hissed.
Duncan came to an ungainly halt and blinked at Quire uncomprehendingly. Quire pointed at the Brown Bess.
“Don’t walk with your finger on the trigger,” he muttered, “not on ground like this. You’ll blow someone’s head off if you stumble.”
“You there,” Quire heard the boy’s father suddenly saying, and he spun back to see what was happening.
The lantern’s light swept up and around, washing over the church, picking out for a moment the rough surface of the stone blocks, flashing from icicles hanging from the edge of the roof, rushing on and down. It fell across Munro’s shoulders and spilled around him, conjuring up out of the darkness ahead a strange tableau.
One man was already partway out over the graveyard wall. He dropped down out of sight even as Quire drew breath to shout, leaving only the image—a mere fragment of a moment, glimpsed at the light’s edge, and then gone—of a black-gloved hand clinging to the top of the wall.
That left one bulky figure inside the graveyard’s bounds, turning back towards them even as Munro drew near. There was a shovel hanging slack in one of the man’s big hands.
“Wait,” shouted Quire, trying to rush forwards but hampered by the snow that gave and slipped beneath his boots.
He glimpsed the disturbed grave: the sod slightly lifted, some black soil exposed. The body snatchers had hardly begun their work before being interrupted.
“Have you no shame, man?” Munro was shouting, entirely overcome by outrage.
“Wait,” Quire cried again.
He was staring at the grave robber’s face, though he could not see it well, for Munro’s head kept casting it into shadow or blocking his view as the church elder continued his querulous advance. But what little he could see worried him. The object of Munro’s ire was impassive, looking at them with a blank indifference entirely unsuited to the moment. His unblinking eyes seemed to encompass the whole dark scene without comprehension, as if he were unable, or disinclined, to distinguish living man from inanimate stone and snow.
“You’re desecrating…” Munro began.
The grave robber took one long stride forward, his leading foot stamping down into the snow. His arm came up smooth and fast, sweeping the shovel through the night air as if it were weightless. Its metal blade hit Munro’s head edge on, crunching in just above the crest of his cheekbone.
The terrible blow turned Munro about. He spun, and toppled, falling face first. He did not raise his arms to break the fall.
Everything after that happened quickly. Munro’s attacker made for the wall. Quire dropped the lantern and went to his knees beside Munro. The fallen man’s son slumped down as well, taking his father’s hand in his own.
“Father, Father,” he said, over and over again.
Quire tried gently to turn Munro on to his back. He knew, at once. He could tell, in the leaden weight of the shoulder at which he tugged; the utter motionless of the form. The side of Munro’s face was smashed in, bone visible in the crevice the shovel had opened up. His left eye was displaced. Shallow, flighty breaths rushed in and out of him, but Quire knew they would soon cease. It would be only minutes. The man was dead; his body just had not yet conceded the fact.
Quire looked over his shoulder. The second grave robber—the murderer—was atop the wall, swinging his lagging leg over. Not hurrying, not looking back. The bloodied shovel scraped against the stone.
“Father,” Duncan Munro whimpered.
“Stay with him,” Quire said. “Give me the gun.”
He made that last demand with reluctance—loading the thing had been reminder enough for one night of times past—but he was not about to test his skill with the baton against a shovel. The young man did not hear him. He was entirely possessed by the awful sight of his father, whose last breaths were pluming out between already pale lips, frail nets of steam cast into the winter night.
Carefully, Quire reached for the Brown Bess, dropped and forgotten in the snow. His heart ached; he had some sense of the inexpressible, appalling holes being torn in the younger Duncan Munro at this moment.
The fallen lantern lay on its side, flame still fluttering, throwing unsteady sheets of illumination across the graves. Quire left it where it was. Duncan might need it, and Quire surely did not. It would rob him of his night eyes, and you could not shoot into darkness without eyes accustomed to it. He had learned that quickly enough in Spain.
The wall was a head higher than Quire. He threw himself at it, got both elbows hooked over, and dragged himself up.
Rough ground sloped away from the foot of the wall. Humps and hollows, their underlying nature disguised
by the snow, made an undulating descent towards the banks of Duddingston Loch. Two figures were fleeing across that narrow expanse. The first was already disappearing into the dense, obscuring vegetation at the edge of the ice; the second, bigger, slower, shovel still held loosely in one hand, was closer.
A fatter, brighter moon would have helped a good deal, for the world was indistinct. Imprecise. All shapes and shadows and shades of grey. But Quire knew—everybody knew—that the Resurrection Men did not come on the nights of a full moon. They liked the dark. So be it.
He dropped down from the wall far more carefully than his surging anger would have wished. He did not want a turned or broken ankle ending his hunt before it was properly begun. The snow cushioned his landing, and he sprang forward. Down across the field he ran, leaping from high point to high point, snow making clouds about his pounding feet. He carried the musket in one hand, hip-high, barrel to the fore, pointing the way ahead.
The first of the grave robbers—Blegg, a silent voice insisted over and over again within him; Blegg—was out of sight, vanished into the willow trees and reed beds, swallowed up by the enveloping darkness. But the second, Quire knew he could catch. The man had a long stride, but he ran with a strange lack of urgency. He was only now crashing noisily through the tangled bushes that marked the transition from land to water. Land to ice.
The slope levelled out beneath Quire’s feet. He found himself, surreally, running through a thick stand of tall reeds and bulrushes. Running on ice. He slowed, and that very caution, the change in his stride, sent his leading foot skidding out from under him. He fell heavily on his side, trapping the musket beneath his body and grinding the knuckles of the hand that held it into the ice. For one moment he was looking up through the forest of reeds, seeing them swaying above him, and beyond them the starry sky, black as ink.
Then he rolled on to his hands and knees, pushed himself up, and ran out on to the ice. A flat, open field of snow, stretching almost to the limits of his vision, though he knew that by day this did not seem a great body of water. Ghostly, almost, in its featureless perfection. Not silent. Quire could hear three things: his own increasingly heavy, increasingly strained breathing; the hollow, crunching thud of his feet beating on the hard skin of the loch; and another set of feet, out of time with his own, up ahead.
The Edinburgh Dead Page 7
