The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [142]
Quire pulled the big, heavy bundle off the seat of the coach. It was wrapped in many layers of sacking, and was cumbersome enough to test even Quire’s considerable strength.
“You’d best wait for me back at that coach inn,” Quire said to the driver who had brought him south in such haste.
Fleck, the Widow had told Quire his name was, and the very sole of discretion. So much so that he had hardly uttered a word to Quire in all the journey, and his expression never varied from one of sour repose. But he knew his way about a coach and horse, Quire had to concede that.
Fleck now turned the black coach about in the road and went trundling off. Quire gave his attention to the great mass of irate townsfolk that blocked off a long stretch of the high street. It was as febrile a mob as he had seen in a long time, and a big one for a town the size of Dumfries. Whatever had brought so many furious folk here, it had brought them from far afield.
A hundred or more local militiamen were arrayed across the front of the judicial building, armed with canes and staves and batons. They watched the surging crowd with uneasy, tense expressions, many of them turning their weapons in their hands, or tapping them upon the ground. Quire had an idea of how these things worked. If men were sent out with guns, as often as not they were for show, meant to cow the mob into order; if men were sent out with batons, as often as not they were meant to be used, and they usually were. The chaotic scene before him had the clear feel, in his estimation, of impending violence.
He needed to find out what was happening before that storm broke. Shouldering his ungainly bundle, balancing it there with one arm, he managed to separate a man, more composed than most of his fellows, from the fringes of the throng. He was composed, true enough, but he had paving cobbles in his hands that he had torn up from the street. Quire ignored that, and played the ignorant visitor.
“What’s the cause of all this?”
“They’ve got Hare in there,” the man said, a little breathless, a little ruddy-cheeked. It was an invigorating business, riot. “The Edinburgh murderer,” he continued. “The one who killed all they folk and got away with it.”
“You sure it’s him?” Quire asked, looking towards the jailhouse.
Those militiamen were pushing back against the encroaching, bellowing mob. They laid about them with their sticks, and there were yelps of pain mixed in with the shapeless rumble of anger the crowd gave out.
“Aye, sure.” The man was watching events at the front of the crowd as closely as Quire, as if anxious not to miss out on anything. “He was recognised on the mail coach. One of the other passengers knew him, from the trial. A lawyer. There’s some ill luck for the evil bastard, eh? Getting put on a coach with a man who chanced to know his face.”
“Nobody ever did deserve more in the way of ill luck.”
He was not sure what he himself had done to deserve such good luck, either, but he would gladly take it.
“Right,” the Dumfries man said. “That’s right. So the coach arrives, word gets about, and folk start thinking maybe we should hang the bastard ourselves, since the Crown didn’t see fit to do it. We almost got him, at the King’s Arms, but the police snuck him out a back window. Now he’s in there.”
As he spoke, the line of militiamen suddenly plunged into the front edge of the crowd, their batons rising and falling with an entirely more vicious and emphatic speed than they had previously done. Panic sped through the mob like a thought in a mind, communicating itself to the furthest reaches in mere moments. People began to run. Others began to turn their missiles upon the militiamen, rather than the buildings behind them.
Quire moved smartly away, already knowing the outcome. He kept himself well out of sight, down a narrow lane, as the great