The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [15]
“Well,” Ruthven said with an air of brisk finality, clasping his hands, and glancing towards the Frenchman as if to solicit agreement. “Our business is done, I suppose. We are rather busy, as it happens, Sergeant, so you will forgive me if I ask you to leave us to our deliberations. Thank you again for your diligence. I have some acquaintance with one or two members of the Town Council, and I will be sure to convey to them my appreciation of our police force’s efficiency.”
“No need,” said Quire.
He allowed himself to be escorted out, back into the long hallway. His business here felt unfinished, but he could summon up no plausible reason to outstay his welcome, which for all Ruthven’s restored mask of geniality had very clearly expired.
“Your Mr. Blegg,” Quire said as Ruthven accompanied him to the door. “Is he unwell? There’s a pallor to his face and demeanour, and the gloves…”
“Oh no, Sergeant.”
Ruthven took Quire’s coat down from its hook and held it open for him. Another oddity, thought Quire, as he slipped his arms into the sleeves. Where were the servants, other than Blegg? For a man with such a house to be helping his guests into their coats himself… Quire was no expert in the manners of New Town society, but that seemed unusual.
“I’d not expend any concern on Blegg’s account, if I were you,” Ruthven went on. “An illness a year or two ago left him somewhat diminished, but he is well enough in himself these days. And the gloves… an affectation, that is all. He has his little peculiarities, as do we all.”
With the door closed behind the police officer, John Ruthven stood for a few moments in his hallway, looking down at the silver snuff box in his hand, turning it slowly over and over. He grunted, and closed his fingers so tight about the box that his knuckles whitened. Anger put an arch into his tight lips. He spun on his expensively shod heel and strode down the hall.
Quire walked slowly along Melville Street, head down, dissatisfied. He disliked being lied to, having things kept from him, particularly by those who thought themselves his better. And though he could not say precisely how, or when, he had little doubt that he had been mocked, or deceived, or in some way gulled by the performance he had just witnessed.
He was, too, unsettled by the presence of the Frenchman Durand. It had called forth memories—seldom far from the surface, often in his dreams—that made his left arm ache, and his mood darken still further. He remembered, despite all his efforts to put it from his mind, Hougoumont.
Hougoumont
Nr Waterloo, Belgium, 1815
A rattle of shots greeted the dawn. It had rained heavily in the night, and they wanted to be sure that their powder had not been spoiled. Doubts dispelled, each man reloaded his gun and settled in to wait for the day’s bloody business to begin.
Adam Quire was twenty-five years old, and had known two things in his life: the farm in the Scottish Borders where he grew up, and war. A war that had been fought and won once already. Uncounted thousands had died on the battlefields of Europe to curb the imperial ambitions of Napoleon Bonaparte, but now the Corsican who would be emperor was returned, escaped from his imprisonment and leading his doting soldiers into battle again. So the men who had thought their task done—and Quire had spent the better part of six years fighting his way through the Iberian peninsula to earn his small claim upon that victory—were summoned once more to give of their flesh and their blood. To make another offering to the ravenous martial gods of the age.
These times, on the cusp of battle, had always seemed distinctively strange to Adam Quire. The certainty that horrors were shortly to be released should have engendered fear, but he often felt a kind of morbid eagerness. An awful storm awaited, just over the horizon of the next minute or the next hour, and until it broke there was no way to see beyond it. The sooner it broke, therefore, the better.
Today, though, there was fear as well,