“The White Hart?”
“Herne the Hunter,” said Blegg. “The white hart is his beast. His totem. It was a white hart that wounded him, when he was a mortal man, wounded him unto death. But he was returned to life by a maker of magics, who bound the hart’s antlers to his head. Thus was he restored.”
“I’ve no interest in your folk tales,” Hare grunted.
“No? As you like. Let us talk of more practical matters, shall we?”
Quire still ached. His body was taking its time in forgetting his misadventure at Cold Burn Farm. It did not seem too great a burden, though, for he was warm, and well rested, and for now at least content.
He rolled and draped an arm across Cath Heron’s naked shoulder. The bedding was rough, and the mattress lumpy, but her skin was soft and her hair where it lay across the pillow between them put the scent of her in his nose. She stirred at his touch, almost awake, but not quite.
It was unaccustomedly quiet. Too early for the inhabitants of the Holy Land to be up and about, certainly, but too early as well for the rest of the Old Town to have come but a little way out of the night. The scavengers would be finishing their rounds, wheeling their barrows full of Edinburgh’s scraps off the streets. The forges and breweries down in the Canongate would be beginning to wake, but they were far enough distant that he could not hear the flexing of their iron and coal muscles. Seagulls, he could hear; always seagulls, called up from the coast by the riches of the city.
It had been many years since Quire had been easily able to sleep late. Wakefulness came, whether he wanted it or not. This night, at least, had been dreamless, the horrors of his past and present banished, for once, from his sleeping mind. His slumber had been deep, and sated, and restorative. The drink had helped, no doubt, but so had Cath. So had his yielding to desires long denied.
He blew gently upon her cheek, and her eyes trembled. A thin hand came sluggishly to fend him off. He wanted to share these still, quiet moments. There were few enough such in his life these days, and in Cath’s, he imagined; they seemed a gift, not to be lightly squandered.
She blinked at him, rolled towards him just enough to fold herself into his arms.
“Sergeant Quire,” she said, pressing her face into the crook of his neck. “I thought you might be gone when I woke.”
“Not yet,” he murmured.
They were alone in the rooms. Cath had sent Emma on her way as soon as they came in, a little unsteady on their feet, and the older woman had gone willingly enough, favouring Quire with a knowing smile as she went. A woman in want of a bed would have no trouble finding one in the Holy Land at night.
Quire ran his hand down Cath’s flank beneath the bedding, slipping it over her buttock and on to her thigh. There was comfort even in that simple motion, and the memory it carried of their congress. It called up once more the cleansing, emptying heat of their union; its capacity to banish, for a time, all thought and all self, and free Quire of his troubles and his fears. Fears. That was right enough, and having let the notion of it into his head, he lost hold of his tranquillity. He withdrew his hand, and swung his legs out to sit on the edge of the bed.
“God, it’s early,” Cath moaned, reading by long experience the soft fall of light through the window. “Can we not sleep a bit longer?”
She ran a fingernail down his spine. That made shivers race through the skin of his back. He stood, naked, and stretched his arms. He had never been troubled to hide the scars on his arm from Cath. From the first time she had seen them, her ease at the sight of them had made itself his own. Today, it was his other marks that drew her attention. A great bruise as many-hued as a summer thundercloud was just beginning to fade, spread over his hip and flank where Davey Muir had thrown him into a tree.
Cath reached out to touch it, tracing its yellow-black shape.
“Look at you, Adam. Look at you.”
Her voice was laden with sympathy, with sorrow. That had been, in part, what he had needed last night, Quire supposed: the simple comfort of caring company. He had been drunk, so it was not easy to recall exactly how his mind had been working, but he knew it had been a whole web of longings. All his old affection for her, only sharpened by his long resistance to its call; his selfish need to be taken out of himself for a time, to have another set aside his dark thoughts for him, since he could not seem to do it himself.
There had been no restraining sense of consequence, for he was already accused, and half-convicted, of that which he now did. It had felt the most natural thing in all the world to turn for comfort and companionship to Cath. And she had been welcoming, forgiving. As if he had never wronged her.
Her hand was easing itself around his thigh, straying towards his crotch, and he felt his desire stirring in anticipation of her touch. But he slipped beyond her reach, and began to collect his clothes from the floor.
“Already?” she asked.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and meant it. “I’ll be back, Cath. I promise you that.”
As he pulled his trousers on, his gaze fell upon an open box sitting by the window. Curled up in it were the amber bead amulets that the Widow’s girls sold as protective charms to their customers. That put a sour twist to the moment, reminding Quire of how many others had shared Cath’s bed, but more immediate preoccupations chased the thought away quickly enough.
“So do you think these things work, then?” he asked, holding up one of the trinkets.
It was not a question he would once have asked, but if he had learned nothing else of late, it was that there were mysteries to the working of the world he had never imagined.
“The folk who buy them do, that’s what matters,” Cath grunted, rolling away from the sight, shrugging the sheets back up over her shoulders.
She did not like to be reminded, any more than Quire did, of her trade. Not in this moment. Quire realised then, in his sluggish way, that he was not the only one who had tried to make a kind of release and escape for themselves last night. He was ashamed to have so crudely drained the morning of its gentleness. But still he held the charm, and squinted at it.
“Where do they come from?” he asked. “Does the Widow make them herself, or are there folk still doing little magics like these?”
“Aye, there’s folk like that,” Cath said into the bedding. “There’s always been folk like that. You’ve just got to ken where to look.”
Later, as afternoon turned to evening, tired but still lighter of heart than his situation and his fears warranted, Quire met Wilson Dunbar outside St. Giles’ Cathedral on the High Street. It was a long-standing and regular arrangement, that had made more sense when Quire had actually been employed at the police house, just over the street.
The cathedral—a great crouching mass surmounted by a grandiose stone crown—always put Quire in mind of a titanic black beetle squatted down and bearing carbuncles on its back. He found Dunbar waiting for him on its steps, and together they walked down through the crowds towards Calder’s.
Dunbar was working as a builder these days. Some kind of combination of quartermaster, labourer and gang master, as far as Quire could tell, happily engaged in the construction of the grand new High School on Calton Hill. He smelled of stone dust and mortar. He examined Quire with critical eyes as they wove through the evening crowds.
“You look in a better mood than I’ve seen you of late,” he opined.
“Do I?”
“Aye, you do. It’s unsettling, I’ll tell you. Like the sun coming out at midnight.”
“Might be I spent some time with Cath last night,” Quire said.
“Ha!” Dunbar clapped his hands together loudly enough to startle a boy carrying a basket of oysters past. “First smart thing you’ve done in a wee while. Last I heard, you had a fair few reasons you couldn’t be doing that. What happened to them?”
“The Police Board happened to them. I’ve already been suspended from duty. They’re working themselves up to turning me out on the street.”
&n
bsp; Dunbar stopped in the midst of the street, his mood abruptly overturned. Quire walked on a few paces, then stopped and turned back.
“What happened?” Dunbar asked.
“Got myself on the wrong side of the wrong folk. Come on, don’t stand there like a fool. Calder’s is waiting on us.”
He led the way on down towards the Canongate.
“They’re the fools, to be thinking they’re not needing your services,” muttered Dunbar darkly.
“Maybe. World’s full of fools. Might be I’m one of them. I had my chances to leave things be.”
“And why didn’t you?”
“Because there were dead men needing answers. One of them got his head broken in with a spade in front of his son. Because I can’t abide anyone thinking they can be party to that and never have to pay the price. Because they came after me. Thought they could frighten me off; or kill me. Because I’m a stubborn bastard. Take your choice of those.”
“Reasons enough,” Dunbar said.
“There’s more. The men who’ve got the blood on their hands… there’s strange things happening. Not like anything I’ve seen before. Not like anything you’d give credence to, without seeing it yourself. It’s dark as it gets, at the heart of this, I reckon.”
Quire was pleased, and not a little surprised, to find his mood surviving even this gloomy talk. He could feel the sinking sun still warm on his back. They passed the head of Leith Wynd, and he smiled to himself at the memory of Cath.
“Can you not let someone else do the stopping?” Dunbar asked despondently, his tone betraying his foreknowledge of the answer.
“I’d be a long time waiting for that to happen. Best I can tell, I’ve got fewer friends in the police house, and certainly on the board, than the bloody murderers themselves. If I thought he was smart enough for it, I’d even wonder if Baird—Superintendent Baird—wasn’t in their pay, the way he’s gone after me.”
“Or maybe he just doesn’t like you,” Dunbar suggested. “He’d not be the first.”
“True enough. But anyway, would you be sitting by your fire twiddling your thumbs, if your work and your livelihood were taken from you, and you had folk coming to your house at night to try to kill you?”
Dunbar grunted.
“Ah,” said Quire, slapping his friend on the arm. “I’m not wanting to talk of it tonight. It’s a bit of drink and forgetting I’m looking for. I thought you’d be the very man for that task. Was I wrong?”
“Not wrong, no,” Dunbar said.
There was renewed levity in his voice. Quire thought it a touch forced, but perhaps not entirely so.
They arrived at Calder’s to find their hopes and expectations abruptly curtailed. Workmen were milling about within, setting up a great clattering and banging. Lengths of coppery pipes were being passed in through the open door from a wheeled trolley parked up in the close.
“That’s a blow,” Dunbar said despondently.
Quire was inclined to agree. The two of them stood, peering in through the windows, at a loss how to proceed now that their den of choice was denied them.
Mrs. Calder herself appeared on the threshold. She smiled apologetically in answer to their silent appeals for guidance.
“There’s to be gas laid up the close,” she said, “so we’re getting all the fittings. Lamps and such like.”
“Gas?” moaned Dunbar. “Place’ll never be the same.”
“No,” Mrs. Calder agreed, “it’ll be better. You should get used to change, young Wilson, since it’ll come whether you like it or not. Do you boys want some feeding, then? I’ve a beef stew with tatties.”
“Aye, all right,” said Dunbar, brightening considerably, though Quire knew the invitation was mainly meant for him.
They passed a fine evening in the Calder kitchen, devouring the hot thick stew and slabs of hard bread, and Mrs. Calder found a mug or two of beer for them to wash it down with. They talked, in the easy, lazy way of old friends, for a long time: about Dunbar’s family; about Cath, and whether or not Quire was good enough for her; about whether there would be money enough to finish that school Dunbar was so proud to be building.
When the plates were empty, and Mrs. Calder chased them out with all the good humour of one satisfied by her evening’s work, Dunbar went contentedly on his way, humming to himself as he disappeared off down the Canongate. Quire climbed the stairs to his rooms in similar buoyant temper. He smiled still, his lips shaping themselves thus without his bidding.
It had been a good day, for all his bodily aches, and for all the intransigence of the problems confronting him. A day of renewed affections, and of hearty eating. Better than most he had known, in his former life, upon the eve of battle.
XX
The Widow
A closed black carriage processed slowly along the road skirting the southern edge of Hope Park. Most folk called it by the simpler title of the Meadows now, this long stretch of open grass, edged and crossed by stately paths that ran between avenues of trees, but Hope Park suited its grace a little better.
It pleased a certain type of Edinburgh resident to promenade there, when the weather was compliant. Many strolled, at a pace fit for contemplation and for the certainty of being observed, along the tree-lined walkways. Couples arm in arm, soft with love; groups of ladies, parasols bobbing like clumps of flowers; men of business or of learning, deep in conversation as often as not. Others took to their carriages and rolled along behind horses groomed to their highest state of beauty.
Most of these carriages went with hoods folded down, their occupants sitting tall, displaying themselves. Not so the black one easing its way round the Meadows. It went along like a great dark molluscan shell mounted on wheels, heavy curtains drawn, secrecy preserved. A more suitable home for it would have been in the midst of a funeral cortège, but there it nevertheless was, in all its brazen sobriety, taking its place amongst the jaunty barouches and fancy phaetons that paraded their equally gaudy passengers for all to see. Even the horses hauling this austere interloper were funereal: black and sedate.
Quire was waiting at the foot of a lime tree, one in a tremendous line of them stretching the whole length of the Meadows and laying their shadows out across the grass like the sketches of fallen pillars. Or, he supposed, the bars of a cell. He leaned against the tree, idly chewing on a long, twitching stem of grass he had plucked from its base. The sap that bled out between his teeth was watery but very faintly sweet.
He watched the to and fro of promenaders with an uninflected detachment. A disconnection had settled upon him since he had embarked upon his present course, a shard of distance put between him and the city and its people. He observed them, and felt that some flaw had entered into his understanding of them and of the lives they led. The change was not in the place, or its inhabitants, but in him.
He was, in many ways, now the Quire of old. Of Hougoumont. He had settled himself back into that former self, like a man pulling on a long-neglected coat. It still fitted him. He felt, as he had so often all those years ago, a strange kind of yearning for the struggle to commence. There would be no more manoeuvring, no more bluff or restraint. Only resolution. He felt coldly calm at the prospect. Intent.
The black carriage pulled up in front of him. The driver, perched on a high seat like that of a mail coach, looked down meaningfully at Quire, who returned the gaze impassively. Even that driver was a part of the display. He wore a tall, stiff black hat, and dark suit and waistcoat. He looked a sour man, Quire thought, and that too seemed fitting.
The two of them regarded one another in silence as the prettier folk passed by. Eventually, the near door of the carriage swung open.
“Don’t be a tiresome arse, Quire,” a light, feminine voice called out. “Get in.”
“I was just waiting for the invitation,” Quire grunted as he climbed aboard.
The door closed behind him, sealing him into a warm, humid softness of worked leather and quilted cushions, and those pendulous curt
ains shutting out much of the sunlight. Everything was coloured from the same sombre palette: black and dark browns, muted burgundy. Even the woman who sat opposite Quire, watching him with sharply intelligent eyes.
She wore a black skirt and bodice, both of them trimmed with black lace, and had her hair tied up in a bun with a black silk ribbon. She possessed a certain rather dry and studied beauty, Quire had always thought, but there was little about her that could be called warm. She gently tapped the shell of the carriage behind her head with a knuckle, and they jerked forwards before settling back into the slow and steady pace of before.
“Could we not let a little light in?” Quire wondered, toying with the edge of the nearest curtain.
“No, we could not.”
“You’re not in the best of moods this morning, then.”
“And you’ve been drinking,” she said, with a faint and entirely inappropriate hint of accusation in her voice.
“Not this morning,” Quire said, affronted.
“No, but last night. I can smell it on you.”
“Well if you’d just open the curtains, maybe we could let a wee bit of air in along with the light.”
“Leave them be. I am in mourning.”
“I know you are, Mary. I know you are.”
Mary Coulter. The Widow. Landlady and unchallenged ruler of the Holy Land; part-owner, it was said, of the Just and Happy Lands too. Queen, in other words, of the worst nests of vipers and vice the city had to offer. So she had been ever since her husband, the king of that same territory, died eight years ago. And ever since, she had been in perpetual mourning.
In truth, Quire would have welcomed a little of the air a tweaking of the curtain might admit. It was stuffy in that sealed box, with the full weight of the sun beating down on its black skin. He did not particularly want this interview to be a long-drawn-out affair.
The Edinburgh Dead Page 20
