The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [134]
Only St. Giles’ Cathedral, brooding in all its sombre stateliness just a short way from the gallows, was spared the indignity of having onlookers scattered about amongst its spires and buttresses. It would, in truth, have offered some of the very finest views, but there were none willing to trespass upon its holy territory.
For all the fervent anticipation attendant upon his death, when they brought Burke out from the lock-up in Libberton’s Wynd where he had spent his last night it was not only his name the crowd roared, nor only his blood it bayed for.
“Where’s Knox?” some cried, and others: “Bring us Hare!”
The guards surrounding the gallows struggled to hold back the enlivened crowd. Such was the tumult that arose as he emerged on to the street that Burke quailed at it, and hesitated, and then seemed overcome with a longing for all of this to be over, and went quickly to the foot of the steps. Some in the mob tried to reach him as he passed them, but the guards pushed them back.
Burke went up the steps on to the platform so hurriedly that he almost stumbled. Abuse teemed around him, coming from every quarter, raining down upon him like a storm of stones.
There was no ceremony to it, little by way of preamble. Burke stood there, staring fixedly ahead, as the executioner prepared him for the moment to come, adjusting his collar, turning his neckerchief, so that the rope would fit about his neck clean and snug.
And the noose was settled over his head. For a breath or two a hush descended, broken only by the distant screech of seagulls circling far overhead. The executioner pulled the lever, the trapdoor sprang and Burke dropped down and passed beyond any mortal concerns. His feet gave two sharp, vigorous twitches, and he was gone.
The twenty thousand or more who had come to see it done erupted in fierce joy, so violent their cries that the windows shook and the walls rang and rang with the echoes of them. And many of them did not depart, unwilling to concede that the momentous event was over, merely because its principal player was dead. They waited, and milled about in the High Street. For so long as Burke hung there, they waited.
It was not for another hour that they finally took his body down, and nailed it into a coffin and carried it off. Then began the scramble for pieces of the gallows, and sections of the hangman’s rope. As the workers who had built it moved in to dismantle the lethal contraption, so a host of the most stubborn spectators closed about them, and fought and argued over who might salvage what little scrap by way of memento for this extraordinary day.
Adam Quire and Catherine Heron did not watch William Burke’s execution. They climbed up, instead, to the crest of Salisbury Crags, and walked along the top of those long, curving cliffs, looking over the city laid out beneath them.
They walked hand in hand much of the way, and had the hill to themselves. The grass was wet and slippery, the air still damp from the downpour that had come before dawn; half the population of the Old Town was gathered about a single gallows. It all made for a near-deserted hill, and an eerie calm to the place.
They heard, though, when the time came, the great tumult rising from the Old Town, muted a little by distance, but unmistakable. The crying out of thousands of voices, all at once. The collective yearning of a city. They could tell, from the sound, the moment when Burke died.
They were at the highest point of the Crags by then, and stood in silence, holding one another