The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [130]
The truth of it was rather more mundane, and mercenary, he knew. Every summer, a goodly portion of Edinburgh’s entire population could be found down here, on the Leith sands and all along the seafront at the back of them, for the day of the races. Whole squadrons of horses swept up and down the sands on that day, and whole fortunes swept back and forth through the hands of the bookmakers and the touts and the thieves. Some of the horse trainers liked to run their charges on the beach all year round, for the sake of familiarity and the endless flat softness of the place.
“Perhaps that is my boat, is it?” Durand said quietly.
Quire looked beyond the horse, and the beach, out across the restless sea lying between them and the shores of Fife. A steamer was there, looking frail and delicate at this distance, laying behind it a long trail of smoke that paled and frayed as it fell behind the vessel’s stacks, dissipating on the wind.
“It could be,” Quire said.
“Driving a boat with fire,” Agnes McLaine mused. “It’s an age of miracles we live in, right enough.”
It was Durand’s intent, within the hour, to take ship down the east coast, to England, and thence across the Channel back to France. To die there, as he would have it, and be buried. Quire could understand that. Even an exile might want, at the end, to go back into the earth of the land that birthed him. Better than dying, and staying, on foreign fields, as so many of the men he had known had done.
If Durand died at all, of course. Quire did not know whether the Frenchman or Agnes was right in judging his fate. Agnes thought the cruel spirit that had animated Blegg’s form was likely gone, unhomed and thinned, and thus unable to exert any malign influence upon the Frenchman; Durand could not bring himself to believe that, as far as Quire could tell.
“It was Hare you said was the name of the man bringing bodies to Blegg, wasn’t it?” Quire asked Durand absently.
The Frenchman nodded, and shrugged his cloak more tightly about him. It was a bright day, but the wind coming in off the Forth had sharpness to it.
“Same one they’ve used to try this man Burke?”
“I do not know,” Durand said. “But how many men of one name would you have in your city who sell the dead?”
Quire grunted. Burke’s trial was a grisly sensation. Its substance had overspilled the bounds of the court, too awful and ghoulish to be contained. It filled every newssheet, and was the talk of every tavern and coffee shop; it had roused the folk of the Old Town to a state of fevered outrage and fury unlike anything seen in years. Not a little of their anger was directed upwards, towards Edinburgh’s lofty masters, for the outcome of the prosecution was not what the instincts of the mob demanded.
Sixteen murders, by most reckoning. Sixteen innocent men and women cruelly slain, all smothered and consigned to the dissecting table of Dr. Robert Knox. And from out of all that horror, there was but one man set to answer for it. William Burke would hang. Knox was spared any legal assault at all, and Hare—Hare it was who sent Burke to the hangman, for he had turned King’s evidence. The lawyers had bought his testimony with the promise of freedom. And that, the people of Edinburgh had clearly concluded, was obscene travesty.
“He’s to go free, they say,” Agnes said. “Hare.”
“He is.” Quire nodded. “He’s under the King’s protection now, still locked up, but he’ll be turned loose soon enough. And then he’ll be back to Ireland, I should say, since he’d be torn to pieces if he’s recognised around here. And anything he knows about Blegg or Ruthven’ll go across the sea with him. The papers have said nothing about that. Only the business him and Burke did with Knox. There’s no mention of any corpses going Ruthven’s way.”
“You should leave it be,” Agnes said quickly.
“I