The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [123]
“Well, the entire undertaking of medical education in this city could be profoundly damaged. Irreparably.”
Quire could not summon up the vigour to pretend any great concern over the reputation of the medical establishment. Nor was he greatly engaged by the question of Knox’s complicity or otherwise in whatever crimes had been committed. What did capture his interest, though, and leave him wondering about it all the way back to the Holy Land, was that name: William Hare.
XXIX
Melville Street
John Ruthven stalked the empty, cold corridors and rooms of his great house like a caged, waning beast in some vastly inhospitable menagerie. It was a ruin, in many ways; all ways that mattered, save its fabric. Or a graveyard. That, perhaps, was the more apt description. So much had turned to dust within these walls. The fortune come down to him, dwindled now to a meagre rump. His marriage, though that had never been a thing of great consequence to him, for he had seen the cracks running through it before the ardours of the wedding bed had even run their course. The dreams and possibilities that had seemed close enough to touch as he delved ever deeper into the secret truths none before him had uncovered.
He went from darkened room to darkened room on the uppermost floor of the house. He carried no light, for the darkness suited him. He stared at the empty walls, the innumerable absences.
In the room Durand had until recently occupied he kicked half-heartedly at the box of unread, and now unreadable, clay tablets. What secrets might they hold that could have moved him on, taken him further? He would never know, without the Frenchman to stand as intermediary between him and the ancient priests and magicians whose explorations they recorded.
He left Durand’s room and stood at the top of stairs, staring up at the stars that glimmered through the wide skylight. A thousand eyes, watching him. Waiting for him to uncover the truth of the fires that lit them, and all things.
A tremor of sound, from deep down in the house beneath him. Ruthven held his breath, tilted his head a fraction. It did not come again, but he was sure his ears had not deceived him. Glass breaking perhaps, or something brittle falling. He stood there, prey now to irritation and trepidation. It was not Isabel returning home, of that he was sure. It had not been that kind of brash sound. Shy, rather. Unmeant.
He could not tell where the sound had come from, but the inspirited corpse that remained locked in the cellar had become restive these last few days. Since Blegg’s disappearance, in fact. It might be that the bonds between the meat and the force it carried were weakening, as they always did over time; or it might be that without Blegg, whose incantations played their part in calling the corpses into movement, something was going awry. In either case, it made Ruthven uneasy. He was unsure of his ability to calm or control the thing, should the need arise.
It was foolish even to keep it in the house, of course, but without aid—ideally from Blegg—he was not at all certain that he could destroy it. And there was Wallace’s corpse down there too, preserved in a barrel. Intended for the next experiment, which now might never take place. Blegg had killed the man, once they had abandoned Cold Burn Farm. It was distasteful, but the soundest course; they had no further need of his services, and he had seen far too much to be left to his own devices.
Ruthven went to the room he slept in. There was no bed, just a mattress laid on the floor, with heavy woollen blankets rumpled carelessly across it. A wardrobe, though, one of the last elegant reminders of how the whole house had once been furnished, and a few fine clothes within it. And a single tall mirror, standing on shapely carved legs.
In that glass, illuminated by cold moonlight, Ruthven glimpsed his own form and face; saw, in the sag of his shoulders and the limp brow, an unfamiliar despondency. The eyes looking back at him carried a doubt, the hint of folly grudgingly