The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [120]
“There’s no body here,” Sergeant Fisher observed.
“A body you’re after, is it?” Burke muttered, his Irish brogue made harsh by his anger and contempt. “You’ll not find one here, whatever you’ve been told.”
“It was there, on the bed,” Gray insisted. The fear was plain in his voice.
“He’s saying it from spite,” Burke scoffed. “I turned him and his wife out last night, since I needed the bed for someone else.”
Fisher raised his eyebrows and looked questioningly at Gray, who did not deny it, but rather nodded.
“That’s right, that’s right. Mary Docherty, her name was. He turned us out to give her the room, but we came back this morning since we’d lost our boy’s stockings and thought them left here. And she were there, in the straw. Dead.”
Fisher went closer to the bed. He was reluctant to reach into it, or lift the nightgown, for fear of bugs or lice. But he needed to do no more than lean down and look closely to see the bloodstains smeared on its frame and dried on the stalks of straw.
He turned about and regarded William Burke thoughtfully.
XXVIII
A Witch at His Bedside
The ward to which Wilson Dunbar was consigned in the Royal Infirmary was long, and high, and flooded with light from the tall fretted windows that lined it. It had the faintly echoing, marmoreal quiet of a church, to Quire’s ear. Even the nurses, in their uniforms and aprons, walking on soft feet between the rows of beds, put him in mind of nuns. There was something faintly reverent in their considered, careful movement.
It was not a restful place, though, as a church might be. Too many connotations of suffering, and of loss. The scent on the still air was not of incense or candles, but soap and sickness. And if the residents or visitors offered any prayers, they would be only for the abatement of suffering, the abeyance of death.
Quire hated it, though he knew better than most how much worse it could have been. It was, if nothing else, clean. It was ordered, and bright. Not like the madness of the vast crowds of wounded that had been crammed into makeshift hospitals in Brussels after Waterloo. Hundreds of soldiers, broken in service of their country, wailing and dying on pallets and stretchers as the surgeons rushed from one to another, hunting out those they might yet save by swift application of their amputation knives and saws. Dirt everywhere, and blood, for there had been neither time nor space for the niceties of cleaning.
Quire had lain there for days, fevered, agonised by the burns upon his arm, thinking himself, in his darker moments at least, on the verge of death. Knox had dug out from his flesh all that did not belong there, but no one could do anything for the pain. There was not enough laudanum to spare it for any save those sent near mad with their suffering.
That was what Dunbar’s ward made Quire think of. He walked, still limping heavily from his sprained ankle, with his head down, averting his eyes from those filling the beds.
Agnes McLaine was already there, sitting at the bedside on a stool, her hand resting upon Dunbar’s chest. She could have been an attentive mother, just one amongst the many come to this place to stand watch over their afflicted kin. But Quire knew better. He saw the charm clasped to her breast, smelled the herbal scent soaking out from the little bag that was beneath her palm on Dunbar’s chest. He saw that her lips moved, shaping tiny, near silent invocations, even as she looked up and nodded to acknowledge his arrival.
“He’s no better, then,” Quire murmured.
Sound carried far and clear in this chamber of high