She kept her voice calm and subdued, but Quire could hear the cords of anger, of worry, tight within it. She hid it well. When the boys glanced back from their games with the sky, they saw only their mother in easy conversation with the man they knew as a friend of their father’s.
“So not here, not with you,” Ellen said. “Where is he, then? I don’t know what games the two of you were playing last night, Adam, but I’ll be needing my husband back.”
“I will find him,” Quire said, his guilt souring in his gut. “I promise you that.”
“Be sure you do. Be sure you do.”
Quire stood there, at her shoulder, watching the kites. His gaze drifted up towards the rough, rising swell of Arthur’s Seat. Jackdaws and ravens were cavorting on the boisterous air, up above the high ground, like scrappy black kites launched by the great hill itself. But not tethered, those wilder flags; riding the wind freely, ever on the border between being its master and being mastered by it. Revelling in their nature.
“Get along, please, Adam,” Ellen said. “I don’t want the boys thinking something’s wrong. I don’t want them talking to you.”
Quire approached the Holy Land cautiously, discreetly, in expectation of trouble. It had already proved itself a less anonymous hiding place than he had—perhaps foolishly—hoped. He might not have gone there at all, but for his desire to arm himself. His one remaining pistol and his French sabre resided there, under Cath’s bed.
He found nothing untoward as he turned into Leith Wynd. All was quiet, as only a Sunday could make the Old Town quiet. Those out on the streets were, most of them, in their best church attire, and though some of the shops were open and some stalls doing a sluggish trade, it was not a day for toil.
Quire would not permit himself to relax into the general mood of calm, though. He climbed the stair of the Holy Land quietly, alert to any hint of danger. There was nothing but the usual stale stink of the place, and the light breezes ebbing and flowing through the window apertures.
For all his caution, he was taken entirely unawares by what awaited him within the room he shared with Cath. Isabel Ruthven was seated on the bed.
Cath was kneeling at the fire grate, blowing to put some life into the embers there. She looked up as Quire entered, and smiled broadly at him.
“Ah, Mr. Quire,” Isabel said, before either he or Cath could speak. “I was assured you would appear here sooner or later, and I’m glad it was not too much later. There’s just starting to be a little chill on the air, don’t you think?”
She wore a short, light coat, the bell of her skirts blooming out from under it. Her hands, neatly folded in her lap, were clad in very soft, tan-coloured gloves.
“Here I am,” he said flatly. “Cath, could you leave us alone for a bit?”
Cath’s expression faltered. She caught the leaden tone in Quire’s voice.
“Leave the fire be,” he said, and she rose to her feet, and brushed her hands off on her skirt.
“I’ll see if Emma’s about,” she said, moving carefully past Quire towards the door.
She paused at his shoulder, and whispered to him.
“Did I not do right, letting her in, Adam? Only she said she knew you, and needed to see you quite urgent.”
“It’s all right,” Quire said.
He had not taken his eyes from Isabel Ruthven since entering the room, and did not do so now, as the door scraped shut behind Cath and he edged backwards to set his heel firmly against the base of it. He did not want anyone bursting in behind him.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“Oh, dear. I hoped we might attempt, at least, a little civility.”
“That would depend on why you’re here, wouldn’t it?”
“I suppose it might. I fear I am about to disappoint you, then. I have a message for you, Mr. Quire.”
Quire curled his lip in distaste. It had not occurred to him to count Isabel Ruthven amongst the ranks of his enemies. But little about that household had been as it seemed, so he supposed he should not be entirely surprised.
“Ruthven’s got you running foul little errands for him now, has he? Like some scullery maid?”
“Oh, don’t be so wearisome. I’d not run errands for John if my life depended upon it. He’s been no husband to me for years.”
“Blegg, then?”
“Blegg, as you so rudely put it. An entirely different proposition. Really rather intoxicating, when one develops a taste for men possessed of real power. Do you think me dreadful?”
She tossed the question out on to the air like a diaphanous handkerchief, without the slightest interest in what he truly thought. He told her anyway.
“Dreadful. Aye, that might be one word for it.”
She smiled once more, wholly unperturbed by his rasping hostility. She tugged at her delicate calfskin gloves, tightening them over her hands.
“It is rather sad, to see a man such as yourself so overmatched. So out of his depth.”
“Might want to wait a wee while yet, before coming to that opinion.”
“How exciting,” she said drily. “You really don’t understand, do you, you poor man? Still you do not grasp who you are dealing with. My husband is quite untouchable, Mr. Quire. Quite untouchable. He counts as a friend everyone whose influence can help to keep him safe. I should know, for I’ve watched every penny we once had to our name flow out through the door in the service of that very aim.”
“Best give me your message, before I run short on patience.”
“Ah. Very well. I’m told that your friend is at my husband’s farm, and if you would be so good as to bring Mathieu Durand there, an exchange of some sort will be transacted.”
“Cold Burn Farm.”
“Indeed. Do you know it?”
Quire could not tell if her placid innocence was feigned or genuine, and did not greatly care. She was no fool, and could not be unaware how crude and cruel was the business she transacted.
“In any case,” Isabel said, “you have until nightfall tomorrow, I understand, to complete the rendezvous. That’s what Durand’s people would call it, I think? I’m told he is probably gravely ill by now, and will likely expire if you delay beyond that, which would be unfortunate for all concerned. I know I would regret it, myself; I always rather liked the man, for all his somewhat feeble, miserable manner. I do hope it won’t come to that.”
Quire regarded her coldly for a moment or two, staring into her bright eyes, wondering at the poison beneath that fair exterior. Slowly, deliberately, he hawked up a gobbet of spittle into his mouth and spat at her feet.
She looked down at the unsightly, muculent smear on the floorboards, then at Quire. She arched her eyebrows, and rose from the bed.
“And what if I made a prisoner out of you?” Quire said. “Would that not put your menfolk at something of a disadvantage?”
She laughed.
“Oh, I’m not nearly so precious to either of them as Mathieu is. My husband would be inconvenienced by my disappearance only until he concocted some explanation for it that satisfied the gossips of the New Town. And as for Mr. Blegg… I am not so foolish as to think it would trouble him overmuch either.”
Quire moved aside from the door and pulled it open. Isabel Ruthven gave him a buoyant nod as she drifted past him and out on to the stair. He slammed the door behind her, hard enough to shake its feeble hinges.
XXVI
Cold Burn Farm II
Merry Andrew’s cart was a rackety old contraption, too shabby and brittle for carrying much in the way of anything. The last time Quire had been aboard it, he had been the cargo, bouncing along over the Water of Leith bridge with Merry Andrew’s grave-robbing tools for company; now, he drove it. It had been a fair few years since he was called upon to steer a horse in harness, but he had done it often enough as a child on his father’s farm, and sometimes when he had been at war, for no army moved much of anywhere without a mighty train of wagons in its wake.
Nor
did Quire, this time, ride alongside spade and crowbar and sacks for the bagging of bodies. His one French pistol rested on the seat beside him, rocking gently as the wagon progressed up the lumpy track. It was loaded and primed. The hammer could be cocked in a moment. Quire found it difficult to imagine any outcome that would not involve its firing. It was a day waiting for the shedding of blood. Whose it would be—that he would learn soon enough.
Beyond the pistol, hunched down under an oversized cloak—entirely buried by it, in fact, the better to obscure his features—was Spune. Flat on the bed of the cart, beneath a light canvas, lay Merry Andrew and the third of his grave-robbing triumvirate: Mowdiewarp. Which was a nickname Quire might have thought funny, had he not been entirely preoccupied with other concerns. Mowdiewarp was an old country name for a mole. A digger.
Merry Andrew was complaining, rather indistinctly due to the concealing canvas, as he had been for a considerable length of time.
“Have you never driven a wagon before?” he hissed. “I’ve got a bruise on every bone, the way you keep finding out the ruts, you daft fuck.”
Quire ignored him. He could imagine that Merrilees’ elongated, bony form made for a hard ride over these rough tracks, but it could not be helped. Merry Andrew could never have passed for Durand, no matter how bundled up in cloak or cape. The two were far too dissimilar in form and carriage. It was not possible to make a heron look like a grouse, whatever the size of the bag you put over its head. So Merry Andrew stayed hidden in the back, and Spune—the only one of them, in fact, of even passingly similar stature to the Frenchman—sat glumly up front, pretending to be sick and keeping his face well hidden.
Arrowheads of geese were ploughing the sky, honking as they went. A buzzard was mewing, off over the slopes of the Pentlands, quartering the heather and grassland with lazy glides. The wagon pitched and yawed and grumbled. And through it all, Quire could still hear Merry Andrew’s whining complaints.
“I’ll have your guts for fiddle strings if this doesn’t play out right after all this bloody misery, you police bastard.”
Quire had made a neat little confection of lies and truth for Merry Andrew and his boys; close enough to the latter to let him say it with an air of conviction, enough of the former to make his proposal tempting to them.
It had taken him longer to find them than he would have liked. A few hours of rummaging around in Edinburgh’s darker corners, and the distribution of coins he could not really afford to part with, not if he was ever to eat again. From the distillery where Spune was—occasionally—employed, he had been sent to an inn in the basement of a half-ruinous tenement near the canal basin at Port Hopetoun. The place was bursting with bargees and canal workers, for all that it was early in the morning, and the air so thick with tobacco he could have chewed it. He had, though, missed both Spune and Merry Andrew by an hour or more. Look for him at the Flesh Market, Quire was told, once he paid over a thrupenny piece.
The Flesh Market was down on the low ground between Old Town and New, in the shadow of the North Bridge. It was a mazy place packed with barrows and stalls and little shops. It was a stinking place too, and a raucous one, with meat traders and butchers and provisioners all competing to get themselves heard one above the other.
Quire found the butcher he had been sent to and was told that Merry Andrew had been there but minutes before, settling a debt. After that, an ironmonger’s shop in Blair Street, run by a man who was an uncle to the city’s thieves, and plied a secret trade in a great deal more than ironwork. But Merrilees was not to be found there either, and the ironmonger was at first unwilling to offer any alternative suggestion. He read some fell and fixed determination in Quire’s face, though, and the passage of a few more coins was enough to loosen his tongue.
Finally, wearily, Quire found Merry Andrew getting himself shaved at a barber’s beside the Royal Exchange. He waited outside, watching the razor sweep its way back and forth over the soapy skin. Andrew Merrilees looked to be entirely at his ease, his lanky frame stretched out in the barber’s chair, his head tilted back. Anyone not knowing him might have thought him a man of some means, a righteous member of the city’s merchant class, perhaps, tidying himself up in anticipation of a meeting to discuss business proposals with fellow traders.
Quire approached Merry Andrew when he emerged, fresh-faced and neat. The man seemed hungry for what Quire disingenuously offered: the chance to settle accounts with those rivals who had caused him such trouble last winter, and broken up one of his cronies; to rid himself of competitors in advance of the next body-snatching season.
“I know where they are,” Quire had murmured, “and I’m not meaning to arrest them, not now. There’s only one or two of them, and none at all after I’m done. That’s my plan. Anything you can find on them or about them is yours. I’m not caring about the law these days.”
And Merry Andrew had smiled, in his brutish, gawky way.
So the four of them rode the cart up the track towards Cold Burn Farm. Spune, it turned out, was even more enthusiastic about the enterprise than Merry Andrew, for it was his cousin had been beaten half to death when they met Blegg in the grounds of Greyfriars Kirk. The boy was still half-crippled, Spune told Quire bitterly, and would never walk right again.
They were not the kind of allies Quire would once have chosen for himself, but he lived by different rules now, and for the work at hand he could think of few better. He had made the mistake once of coming to Cold Burn Farm alone; it was only fools who failed to learn the lesson of their follies.
Quire was equipped for savagery if—when—it came to that. Not just the pistols, but the sabre sheathed at his waist. Though he had never been much of a swordsman, he knew the rudiments of its use. Gently curved, with a broad, single-edged blade and a simple but solid bar for a hand guard, it was very much a thing of purpose, not decoration.
Merry Andrew had a pocket pistol, Quire knew; a tiny little snub-nosed thing, but it would be damaging if he was close to his target. He had seen Spune and Mowdiewarp loading their pockets and belts with knives and—in Spune’s case—a short iron truncheon that looked brutally heavy. It was a fearsome enough armament, though whether it would meet the needs of the day, Quire was not certain. It would probably depend, as such things usually did, not on the weapons themselves, but on the conviction of the men who wielded them. All three of his companions seemed to Quire to be pleasingly set upon doing violence.
Though fire was a thing Quire loathed, and feared, he had come ready for that, too, as Durand had recommended it. There were lit lanterns in the bed of the cart, beside Merrilees and Mowdiewarp, and bottles of lamp oil. He had done what he could to prepare himself, and now wanted only to get done what needed doing.
The gate partway up the track stood open. It was impossible to say whether it was invitation or negligence. Quire let the horse take its own pace through the gate and on towards the copse of trees, which he remembered all too well from his encounter with Davey Muir. It was agonising, to now grind slowly along with the dense thickets on either side, expecting at any moment to be suddenly assailed. But they came safely through, and trundled up towards the farm steading.
“Get yourselves ready, lads,” Quire said under his breath. “Not until I tell you, though, right?”
A discontented grunt from Merry Andrew was the only response.
Quire could see at once that things had changed at the farm. The barns and house looked just as dilapidated and neglected as before, but the low cowshed at the far end of the yard, where Quire had inadvertently disturbed Davey, was now in considerably worse condition. It had, from the look of it, been gutted by fire. Part of its roof was fallen in, and there were ugly black streaks over some of its stonework, where smoke had leaked out through cracks and crevices. The doors were hanging from their hinges, one of them blackened and much reduced by flames.
Quire shot a glance up to the chimney of the farmhouse. No smoke. There would be someone here somewhere, though. He was su
re of that. If it was Blegg or Ruthven, all he needed was to draw them close enough with the temptation of the false Durand at his side, and he would put a ball in their head. There would be no petty talk, no hesitation. If Dunbar was even still alive, Quire was all but he certain he would not have long remained so—none of them would—had the real Durand been handed over. This way, at least there was a chance. But only if he got the first kill in.
The cart creaked to a halt in the centre of the farmyard. A flock of pigeons that had been roosting on the roof of the barn burst into the air at the sound, clattering their way into the cloudy sky with flailing wings. They carried Quire’s gaze with them for a moment. He watched them coalesce into a flock and go sweeping down behind the building. And because he did that, he did not see the hounds straight away.
“God damn, Quire,” Spune said with feeling. “You never said anything about dogs.”
Quire snapped his head back. They were loping across the yard from the open door of the cowshed. Two of them, closing quickly. As filthy as he remembered, and with those same dead and lightless eyes.
“What’s happening?” Merry Andrew shouted, stirring beneath the canvas.
The horse reared in alarm, violently enough to shake the front end of the cart, but its harness dragged it back down. The leading dog came bounding up and sprang at the horse’s head. It seized hold of the animal’s nose and lips with its teeth, and tore away a strip of skin and flesh as the horse screamed and twisted and tried to raise its head.
“Jesus Christ,” Spune said, rising to his feet, sloughing the great cloak from his shoulders and whipping out his iron cudgel.
Quire dropped the reins and reached for the pistol to prevent it from sliding away as the cart slewed round, dragged by the distraught horse. The first dog was under the horse’s neck, snapping at it, tearing at it. The second lunged up at the side of the cart, close by Spune, trying to get a hold on his ankle. Spune leaned down and hit it hard on the side of the head with his truncheon. The beast fell back, rolled, and recovered its feet in an instant, coming bounding back towards the cart.
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