The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [11]
“It’s none of it legitimate, to my way of thinking. Any man would hope for a bit more dignity in his ending,” Quire muttered, and at once regretted his gruff candour.
“Ah,” said Christison, pressing his box of instruments a little more firmly into the crook of his arm. “Well, we can agree upon the distastefulness of the enterprise, if not on the question of its necessity. We live in enlightened times, with the inquisitive intellect as our guide. That its discoveries come at a price is undeniable. Neither the city fathers nor my anatomical colleagues are quite so sentimental, however. To learn the secrets of the human body—and our city’s fine reputation was built in part upon the excavation of such secrets, let us not forget—a man must have a body in which to delve; anatomy can be taught without a cadaver, but it cannot be taught well. If we relied solely upon the produce of the gallows, our students would have the most meagre of fare, for all the sterling efforts of you and your fellow officers.”
Quire held his tongue. He liked Christison well enough and had no desire to dispute the practicalities of medical education with him. And there was, in any case, substance to what the man said: an understanding existed—never directly expressed, but present in the air like a flavour—that the police did not enquire too deeply into the means by which the dead reached Edinburgh’s famed, and lucrative, medical schools.
Whatever those means, Quire reflected silently, it was never the wealthy, or the powerful, who found themselves, after departing this life, displayed and dismembered for the edification of the students. Dignity in death was, like all else, unequally shared.
New Town
The New Town was another place, another world; not wholly separate from the Old, connected to it by threads both tangible and intangible, but as unlike to it as an ordered farm of cultivated fields was to the wilderness that preceded it.
The Old Town had taken centuries to form itself, a haphazard growth thickening along the High Street, knotting itself into ever tighter and more crowded patterns. The New was the product of a singular and potent vision, and had sprung up in barely fifty years. It had been laid out in stern grids and graceful curves across the slopes and open fields to the north of the Old, beyond what had once been a thin, marshy loch and was now elegant gardens that divided the two Edinburghs one from the other.
For all its grandeur there were places in the New Town, Quire knew, where life’s cruder urgencies held sway, but today it presented its most gracious face to him. The broad streets were flanked by wide pavements. Some were lined with gaslights, standing to attention like an honour guard of thin, stiff soldiers. The terraces of noble houses ran on and on, most of them fronted by iron railings, all studded with great doorways. Fashionably dressed folk moved to and fro—the women in their capacious skirts, the men in their tall hats and high collars—with calm, refined purpose.
The frontage of Ruthven’s house in Melville Street was not so much pleasing as stern. A few steps led up to the imposing door. A boot scraper was set into the flagstones, and Quire regarded it for a moment or two, debating whether to yield to his instinct to use the thing, merely because it was there. He sniffed and instead gave the door knocker, a heavy ring of solid brass, a few firm raps.
As he stood there waiting upon the threshold, two ladies of evident means strolled by, arm in arm. They watched him as they went, and he had the uncomfortable sense that they thought him as out of place as he felt. He smiled and nodded, and they smiled demurely back before looking away and murmuring to one another.
The great door swung open, and Quire found himself greeted not by some servant as he had expected but by a strikingly attractive woman of middle age, to whom the adjective demure could hardly have been less applicable.