The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [121]
“No better, no worse,” whispered Agnes, gently folding both her hands into her lap. “That’s no bad thing. Means he’s got strength in him still.”
Dunbar made for a dismaying sight, stretched out there beneath the starched white sheets. A motley congregation of bruises about his jaw and cheeks. A gash in his brow. Much of his body was the same, Quire knew. Battered and beaten and wounded. No one wound in itself that could threaten his life, but in their accumulation, a cruel assault. Not enough to explain his deathly slumber, the doctors had said, puzzlement etched upon their faces. Quire cared little for the opinions of the medical profession now. He had learned there were other ways of reading whatever signs the world saw fit to offer its observer.
Dunbar had likely been given a noxious draught of some sort, Agnes had said when first she set eyes upon him. Perhaps laid under a malevolent charm. He would wake, in time, or he would not. That was the sum of her predictions. But she willingly came here, at Quire’s request, and offered the oblivious victim of Blegg’s abuse whatever small help she might be able.
“You’ve become a nurse to ailing men,” Quire said. “I never meant to make you such, but I did.”
Agnes smiled.
“Durand, you mean? Aye, he’s still safely locked away, abed. Abed when I’m not there, at least; sleeps on the floor when I’m needing the bed myself. He’s not dying fast, if he’s dying at all. The totem used against him, or the man who was using it—one or other’s been destroyed, I’d say.”
“The place was burned out, top to bottom. Everything in the house went to ash or smoke. As for Blegg—I don’t know. Maybe he crawled away and died in a ditch or out on the hills. I couldn’t easily go looking for him”—he gave his injured leg a careful shake by way of demonstration—“and there was none of those with me in a state, or of a mind, to do it either. I was lucky enough they didn’t kill me.”
He had thought they might, for a time, in their anguish and shock and fury, with Spune dying there in the farmyard and the conflagration of the farmhouse roaring at them. But they were in the grip of dread, Merry Andrew and Mowdiewarp, and bewildered by what they had seen. Their confusion had saved him, Quire suspected, for they wanted nothing but to get away from that place, and forget its horrors. There had been a clear message at their parting, though, that Merrilees would be inclined to slip a knife under Quire’s ribs should they meet again, just on the general principle of stilling those who brought down such infernal misfortune upon others.
In service of that same principle, they had refused him a seat on their cart, and left him there. Alone and half-hobbled, it had taken him a cruelly long time to reach the road, and to find a conveyance back to Edinburgh.
“I can’t pay you for any of this,” Quire said quietly to Agnes. “Not for Durand, not for Wilson. I’ve hardly two pennies left to rub together.”
“I ken that well enough, son,” Agnes grunted. “It’s writ plain and clear all over you.”
She looked Quire up and down meaningfully. He made for a sorry figure, he knew. Unshaven, barely washed for days now, and standing in clothes he had been wearing for just as long. He had not dared to return to his home, for fear of what might await him there, and so lodged still with Cath in the Holy Land.
“The police came by to have a look at him,” said Agnes, nodding down at Dunbar. “So the nurses said. Wanting to know how a man might get himself in such a state. His wife couldn’t help them with that, I don’t suppose.”
He might have been undone, had Ellen Dunbar told the police that Adam Quire was the man to speak to if they wanted to know what had happened to her husband. But she had not done so, and he thought it more likely to be out of loyalty to Dunbar’s friendship with him than any affection of her own.
“No, I don’t suppose