The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [125]
He went to the top of the dark stairway that led down into the cellars. It had come from down there, that whisper. The door to the store room in which all his secrets were stowed was locked. The walking corpse within should not have been able to escape it; yet they were strong, those things, and unpredictable.
Heart sinking at what he might find, Ruthven went down. The darkness fled before him, swirling away into the corners and edges. He stepped out from the stair, and found himself looking down the muzzle of the pistol Adam Quire was pointing at his chest.
Three weeks, Quire had waited, until his ankle was strong again. All of it under Cath’s attentive care.
He had come to loathe the Holy Land: the stink of it, and the noise, and the secret delinquencies practised behind its every door. But he had few choices, and Cath was there. Emma Slight had grown ever less happy at her extended eviction to make room, and peace, for Quire, but the Widow made sure her frustrations went no further than bitter looks, should she and Quire happen to pass on the stair. Mary Coulter gave Quire her protection, and that did not sit well with him, but he needed it and took it. She found it amusing, he suspected, to have him there, dependent upon her goodwill.
He and Cath had barely a penny between them, for he had no wage and she, to his unbounded relief, would not work while he was sharing her rooms. They ate sparsely, and drank hardly at all, which was for neither of them an entirely easy abstinence.
Yet it was a strangely happy time. Quire found a certain contentment within him, that was invulnerable to the vicissitudes of each day. It was a still, quiet thing settled into his breast founded upon the sense that he could not choose how this fragment of his life would end, and thus simply let it carry him along and took from it what comfort it offered. He was upon an island, having come out of the stormy sea, and would shortly descend once more into the chaos of rough waters, but for now he was ashore, and not alone.
He could have brought in a decent bit of funds by selling his French pistol and sabre, but those he would not part with, for he knew he would likely have a use for them yet.
“I’ve not treated you well,” Quire murmured, laying a soft kiss on Cath’s brow one night in the bed. “You’d no need to take me in here. I’ve not earned it.”
“No, but I’m a saint,” Cath whispered.
She stroked his neck.
“You’re a rare breed, then.” Quire smiled.
“We all are, aren’t we? There’s not a one of us so alike to another to be called the same. Not when you look proper close.”
“Maybe that’s true.”
Quire rolled, and stretched out an arm to snuff the candle by the bed. The flame vanished between his blunt fingertips, and he felt only the faintest sting of its heat as it departed. The room fell into darkness, so that he could not see her eyes or her hair any more, only feel her skin against his.
“One more thing I’ve got to do,” he said quietly, “and then, with luck, I’m a free man.”
“You’re a free man now.”
“Not quite. I’ve not settled with all those need the settling, not yet. And I’ll have no peace until that’s done. Not from them, not from myself. Once a thing like this is begun, you have to see it through to the finish, or someone else will, and that’s when a man dies. When he lets someone else do the finishing.”
“Hush,” Cath whispered. “Hush.”
And she dispelled the future with just that word, and made it unreal. She chose the present, for both of them, and tied him into it. She closed his lips with a kiss.
So Quire went to Melville Street, to finish it. He had come without knowing precisely what would happen, and that did not trouble him greatly. War had taught him that the world, and whatever fates governed it, did not treat lightly those who thought they knew what was to come. He went because he knew that if he did not, someone would come for him, or no one would; and that latter chance was little better than the first, for if nothing changed he would live for ever in the company of fearful expectation.
He went in through the