“Just because it might be very important to me,” said Quire, his mind working quickly, trying to tease sense out of the tangle of his thoughts. “It might be nothing, but it might not.”
He could see the hesitation in Maclellan’s face. So he gambled.
“And because I’ll put ten pounds your way if they come and I know of it within the hour.”
XXXI
Burke’s Last Day
A bloodlust had hold of Edinburgh such as it had not felt in centuries. Perhaps ever. It was in ferment, so bloated with outrage and accusation that it trembled upon the brink of riot. There was but one thing that might stay the mob’s fury, for a while at least, and that very thing was about to be delivered unto them.
It had rained prodigiously in the early hours of the morning, cataracts spilling from the countless jostling rooftops of the Old Town. The rainwater had run in a myriad little rivers down the length of the High Street, gushing down the closes, sending even the rats scurrying for shelter and making the scavengers retreat with their barrows to the watch-houses to wait out the storm.
The rain did pass, but it left every eave dripping, every crease and crevice in the cobbled streets a pool. None of which did anything to deter the assembly of the greatest crowd the city had ever seen. They filled the Lawn Market, that highest part of the High Street, at which it approached the last narrow run up to the castle. Thousands upon thousands of them, standing shoulder to shoulder, all waiting; and all manoeuvring, as best they could in such a close-pressed throng, for a better sight of the gallows.
The most fortunate ones were those leaning from every window in every high tenement around the place of execution. They hung dangerously far out over the ledges, jeering at those confined to the street below. Some, unable to force a place at a window, or dissatisfied with the view thence, had taken leave of their senses and climbed up on to the very rooftops themselves. They perched there upon the ridges, or clung to the chimney stacks, slipping and slithering on the wet tiles, promising at any moment to go sliding down and pitch themselves into the heaving, swaying mass of their fellow townsfolk on the street below. Such was the hunger to see William Burke die.
Only St. Giles’ Cathedral, brooding in all its sombre stateliness just a short way from the gallows, was spared the indignity of having onlookers scattered about amongst its spires and buttresses. It would, in truth, have offered some of the very finest views, but there were none willing to trespass upon its holy territory.
For all the fervent anticipation attendant upon his death, when they brought Burke out from the lock-up in Libberton’s Wynd where he had spent his last night it was not only his name the crowd roared, nor only his blood it bayed for.
“Where’s Knox?” some cried, and others: “Bring us Hare!”
The guards surrounding the gallows struggled to hold back the enlivened crowd. Such was the tumult that arose as he emerged on to the street that Burke quailed at it, and hesitated, and then seemed overcome with a longing for all of this to be over, and went quickly to the foot of the steps. Some in the mob tried to reach him as he passed them, but the guards pushed them back.
Burke went up the steps on to the platform so hurriedly that he almost stumbled. Abuse teemed around him, coming from every quarter, raining down upon him like a storm of stones.
There was no ceremony to it, little by way of preamble. Burke stood there, staring fixedly ahead, as the executioner prepared him for the moment to come, adjusting his collar, turning his neckerchief, so that the rope would fit about his neck clean and snug.
And the noose was settled over his head. For a breath or two a hush descended, broken only by the distant screech of seagulls circling far overhead. The executioner pulled the lever, the trapdoor sprang and Burke dropped down and passed beyond any mortal concerns. His feet gave two sharp, vigorous twitches, and he was gone.
The twenty thousand or more who had come to see it done erupted in fierce joy, so violent their cries that the windows shook and the walls rang and rang with the echoes of them. And many of them did not depart, unwilling to concede that the momentous event was over, merely because its principal player was dead. They waited, and milled about in the High Street. For so long as Burke hung there, they waited.
It was not for another hour that they finally took his body down, and nailed it into a coffin and carried it off. Then began the scramble for pieces of the gallows, and sections of the hangman’s rope. As the workers who had built it moved in to dismantle the lethal contraption, so a host of the most stubborn spectators closed about them, and fought and argued over who might salvage what little scrap by way of memento for this extraordinary day.
Adam Quire and Catherine Heron did not watch William Burke’s execution. They climbed up, instead, to the crest of Salisbury Crags, and walked along the top of those long, curving cliffs, looking over the city laid out beneath them.
They walked hand in hand much of the way, and had the hill to themselves. The grass was wet and slippery, the air still damp from the downpour that had come before dawn; half the population of the Old Town was gathered about a single gallows. It all made for a near-deserted hill, and an eerie calm to the place.
They heard, though, when the time came, the great tumult rising from the Old Town, muted a little by distance, but unmistakable. The crying out of thousands of voices, all at once. The collective yearning of a city. They could tell, from the sound, the moment when Burke died.
They were at the highest point of the Crags by then, and stood in silence, holding one another’s hand, while the single voice of the city rolled around them.
William Burke might be dead, but he was not yet done as the centre of the city’s attention. The sentence passed upon him did not end with his execution.
The day after the hanging, the coffin into which his corpse had been nailed was taken to the University of Edinburgh’s huge college, close by the Royal Infirmary and Surgeon’s Square. It was the largest building in the city by some way, unless the whole complicated castle was accounted a single structure. It contained within it a broad quadrangle, surrounded by balustraded terraces. The four sides of the huge rectangular edifice that enclosed that quadrangle held, amongst many other riches, the university’s Medical School.
It was to there that Burke’s body was conveyed; specifically, to the largest of its lecture theatres. In that great bowl of an arena, the lid of the coffin was prised up and Burke’s corpse removed. His clothes were taken from him and he was laid out upon the slab at the heart of the amphitheatre. Shortly after noon, Professor Alexander Monro, the incumbent of the university’s Chair of Anatomy, applied a saw to the late William Burke’s cranium, cutting in a neat ring around the whole circumference of the head. With a little difficulty, he then removed the entire top of his skull, and in a great gush of thick and foul blood exposed his brain to the huge crowd of students and other curious spectators assembled in the theatre.
It took close to two hours for Monro to complete his dissection of William Burke, for the edification of those who had succeeded in obtaining a ticket for the much-anticipated event. Those who had been unsuccessful rioted in the quadrangle of the college, so aggrieved were they at their exclusion from the drama. They broke windows and tore up paving stones, and fought off the gang of baton-wielding police that was dispatched from Old Stamp Office Close.
The disorder did not end until Professor Christison brokered an agreement with the ringleaders of the mob whereby Burke’s corpse, returned to something approaching its natural state, would be put on public display for two days.
So the people of Edinburgh, in their thousands, filed past the corpse of the wretch whose vile deeds had fouled their city and comforted themselves with the knowledge that, upon this one man at least, the most perfect justice had been done.
And with the execution of that justice, the need to hold William Hare a prisoner in Calton Jail came to an end.
XXXII
Two Sergeants
In the d
ull twilight, a small carriage turned in to the entrance of Calton Jail, and rumbled under the arch of the gatehouse. Lamps burned on either side of the driver’s seat. It drew up on the yard, in the shadow of the great prison, where a small group of men awaited it. The governor, Captain Maclellan of the guards, a handful of his officers. And William Hare, in a heavy, high-collared coat that hid much of his face.
The police sergeant who drove the cart dropped down on to the yard’s cobblestones. Maclellan came forward to meet him.
“Jack Rutherford,” Maclellan said. “It’s a miserable duty you’ve got yourself tonight. Someone at the police house got a grudge against you?”
“Volunteered,” Sergeant Rutherford said, and when he saw Maclellan’s surprise, he shrugged. “Somebody’s got to do it. The man’s under the Crown’s protection, after all. Got to see him safe out of the city. Let them lynch him somewhere else if they like, just so long as it’s outside the city bounds.”
Maclellan shook his head in amazement.
“Still. A devil like him, it’s a damn shame.”
“I don’t mind. Nobody else wanted to do it, and like I say, it needs doing.”
The governor murmured a few words to Hare, but the Irishman—no longer a prisoner, no longer under any obligation to feign civility or gratitude—paid him no heed, and climbed into the carriage with a sour grin upon his face.
It was done with no more ceremony than that. The worst killer any of the men present had ever encountered—none of them were in any doubt of that—walked free of Calton Jail. Rutherford jumped back up on to the driver’s seat, clicked his tongue at the horse, and gave it a touch of the switch to bring it around, and the carriage rolled slowly out through the gatehouse and into Regent Road.
The men drifted off, back to their duties, none happy with the one they had just discharged. Maclellan lingered, though, a moment or two longer than the rest, staring after the disappeared carriage. He came to a decision, and called one of his men back to his side.
“Get me one of the lads can run a message down to the Canongate, would you?” Maclellan said. “Quick as you like.”
The carriage made its way slowly down towards Princes Street. It did not travel far, though, for outside the grand theatre on the corner of North Bridge it came to a halt, close in to the pavement so that it should not obstruct the other coaches and hackneys moving along behind it.
Isabel Ruthven walked smartly forward from where she had been waiting beside a street lamp. She reached up and pressed a banknote into Rutherford’s hand. He said nothing, but tucked it quickly away into a pocket. Isabel climbed into the carriage and settled in beside Hare. Who leered at her, baring his teeth.
“Wasn’t expecting to see you tonight,” he said, “but I’ll be damned if you’re not a sweet sight for a man’s been in a jail cell longer than he needed.”
“A charming compliment, Mr. Hare.” Isabel smiled.
The carriage lurched into motion once more. As it eased away from the kerb, the doors of the theatre opened, and the departing audience began to flow out on to the pavement, all abuzz at the splendour of the opera they had witnessed.
“Mr. Blegg wanted me to convey his appreciation for your silence on the matter of his dealings with you,” Isabel said, looking out at those gorgeous, glittering opera-goers crowding out.
Hare grunted.
“Never much of a worry. The lawyers gave me immunity for everything I done with Burke. Nothing else. They’d have hung me alongside him if the other stuff came out.”
He looked sharply at Isabel.
“Still, you said I’d be paid for it, the time you came to see me. Twenty pounds, you said.”
“Indeed. We’ll get you your money this very night, shall we? But here, I brought you something to toast your freedom with.”
She produced a hip flask, bound in worked leather, and offered it to him. Hare sniffed it, and grinned at the smell.
“Whisky,” Isabel confirmed. “A very fine variety, I’m told, though I’m no drinker of it myself.”
Hare took a long drink from the flask, tipping his head back. The carriage jolted over cobbles, and he spilled a little of the amber fluid across his lips. It ran over his chin as he reached out a hand and laid it on Isabel’s knee.
“I could do with some other kind of celebrating,” he rasped at her.
She guided his hand away, not roughly, but firmly.
“No, Mr. Hare. Not tonight. Not if you want that twenty pounds.”
The carriage rolled on, up to the High Street, and there it turned west. Hare leaned across in front of Isabel to peer out into the street.
“I’m supposed to go to the southern mail. Get out of this damned city.”
He was slurring his words. They came sluggishly off his clumsy tongue.
“Don’t you worry,” Isabel said, pushing him back into his seat.
By the time the carriage was rattling down West Bow, and slowing to a halt at the foot of it, Hare was quite asleep. Rutherford dismounted and looked in.
“You’ll have to help me with him,” Isabel said casually. “Just to get him inside, then you can wait with the carriage. Hold on to this for me, would you?” She handed him the whisky flask that she had lifted from Hare’s limp hand. “Don’t drink from it, though. We’ll be needing you awake.”
The two of them worked Hare out of the carriage, and held him up between them, each getting themselves under one of his arms. It was not the kind of scene entirely unfamiliar to the inhabitants of West Bow or Grassmarket, and not many folk paid them much heed.
“Give me one of those lights,” Isabel said.
Rutherford unhooked one of the oil lamps hanging from the end of the driver’s seat and handed it her.
“In here,” Isabel told him.
They went through a low, dark passageway into the foul-smelling, rubbish-strewn courtyard beyond. Isabel showed the way with the light of the lamp, and the two of them bore Hare into Major Weir’s house.
The dreadful oppression of the place made Rutherford ever more agitated as they moved through its ruins. He started at every flicker of flame light across the crumbling, slumping walls.
“All right,” Isabel said. “This will do.”
Rutherford let Hare fall.
“You can go back to the carriage,” Isabel told him.
“Thank you,” Rutherford breathed with heartfelt relief, and made to retrace their steps through the grime and debris.
“Wait a moment.”
The voice came from the impenetrable darkness of the back room. It was an ugly sound, uneven and rattling. Thick.
“Just listen,” the voice came again. “We’ll send Hare out to you shortly. When he comes, you take him on where he needs to go. We’ll not be joining you.”
“Aye, all right,” Rutherford said. “You’re paying, so whatever you say.”
He went quickly away. Isabel looked into the darkness.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “Are we not to leave together?”
“I’ll explain, but let’s get done what needs doing first. It’s not easy for me to talk. I need Hare.”
Isabel set the lamp down on a rotting length of timber, and went to the corner. She lifted a rag and began to bring out the items it had concealed. As she worked, Blegg crawled yard by effortful yard out into the lamp’s light.
His skin was crusted and blackened, burned back to the bone where it had been thinnest, over his scalp. His eyelids were gone, and the great white orbs of his eyeballs shone in the light. Much of his lips was gone too, scorched away. Across the whole upper half of his torso, scraps of charred clothing were merged into what remained of his flesh. Both hands were hooked into stiff, raw claws, the fingers bent inwards and flayed by heat.
Isabel laid a pair of gloves side by side on the floor. Next a shallow wooden bowl, into which she poured black ink from a small bottle. Last a stylus made of reed.
“I can lie across him,” Blegg said, “but my hands aren’t up t
o the rest of it. Just close up his mouth and nose. That’s all.”
Blegg hauled himself across Hare’s chest and lay there, a dead weight. Isabel knelt down and did as she had been told, pressing one hand over Hare’s mouth, pinching shut his nose with the other.
“He won’t wake,” Blegg hissed.
And he was right. William Hare died in his sleep. Suffocated.
Afterwards Blegg had Isabel wedge the stylus into his crippled hand, for he could not pick it up himself. He dipped it into the ink she had stolen from her husband’s stores, and began to write over the back of Hare’s hands.
“One thing I learned from Ruthven and that French bastard,” he grunted. “This does help with keeping a hold on the body.”
After that, he said nothing more that Isabel could understand for quite a time. He coughed out streams of Latin phrases from his ravaged form as he worked, his voice faltering and dwindling all the time. His body shook, collapsing beneath the strain of its exertions. Isabel sat close by the lamp, her hands folded in her lap, waiting quietly. It did not take all that long for Blegg to sink down, slumping incrementally on to Hare’s corpse, and for his rasping voice to fade away to nothing. He lay there, perfectly still. Perfectly empty.
It remained thus for a time. The woman sitting silently, staring at the two corpses lying amongst the detritus of decades. The lamp’s glow fluttering around the walls. A steady, slow drip, somewhere out in the shadows, of rainwater that had leached its way down through the seams of the vast building above and fell now into this ruinous hollow at its base.
And at last, Hare shuddered. Isabel rose, her hands clasped, watching with gleaming eyes. Hare stirred, and shook, and rolled his head. He heaved, and pushed Blegg’s ghastly charred corpse off him and away. He did not even look at it as he rose to his feet, and stood there swaying and blinking.
“Is it you?” Isabel asked, hope and fear and anticipation all layered in the words.
The Edinburgh Dead Page 31
