The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [19]
A ball hit his musket, close by his face, blowing it apart in his hands. He felt a punch in his left arm as the ricochet went in. A spray of hot powder, wood splinters, across his face like stinging sparks.
Quire staggered back off the firing platform, falling on the lawn. He got to his feet, grasped at the men closest to him, going from one to the next, shouting, “I need a gun, I need a gun.”
They all pushed him away, caught up in their own struggles, their own dance with death, until one looked down at him and grimaced.
“Good Christ, Quire, your arm. Look at your arm!”
Quire looked, and saw the way it was limply trembling, the blood all over the sleeve of his red tunic.
“Get to the barn, Quire. Get that seen to.”
The barn: an island of suffering, yet more peaceful than the storm raging outside its thick walls. The injured lying all about on pallets. The few men there to attend upon them running from one to another, fraught exhaustion and strain engraved upon their faces, the blood of others staining their shirts. Quire fell back on to a straw-leaking mattress, and stared up into the roof beams, listening to the thunder that came deep and low through the stone.
And last, later and last amongst all the frail memories left to him of that day: Quire came to his senses, not knowing for how long he had drifted. He woke to fire. Fire in the roof of the barn, racing along the struts, dropping in great gouts of embers on to the men below. Smoke, not the grey powder stuff of battle, but thick, heavy, choking black smoke, filled the place, curling down the walls and writhing over the wailing injured.
“Get them out!” someone was shouting.
Men were running about at the fringes of Quire’s vision, and all the time he was lying there, staring up into the inferno above him, and feeling that it was he who floated, up above, looking down upon some terrible fire raging in the hull of a boat.
There was a sudden crashing descent: parts of the roof structure collapsing, falling down towards him in a roaring mass of flame and smoke. A huge blow struck the left side of his body, bringing searing heat that made him try to roll away. A burning roof beam pinned him, crushing his injured arm beneath its orange-hot weight. Screaming. Quire screaming, though it took him a moment or two to realise it was him.
Someone pulled at him. He did not know who. He could see nothing any more. Could feel nothing but the white, stultifying agony of his arm.
Dancing with the Uncle
Edinburgh, 1828
The sky came in brutish on Edinburgh, bearing rain and sleet on its turbulent wings. Hard weather always came out of the west, breaking across the castle on its rocky promontory like waves beating at the prow of a rising ship, spilling over and around its walls and tumbling on down across the Old Town. At such times, those city folk who could not avoid venturing forth encased themselves in high-collared coats and capes and low, tight hats, leaned into the sky’s blustering force and went on about their business with dogged resignation.
Dogged resignation was as good a description as any of Quire’s demeanour as he trudged up the High Street. The weather, though, weighed less heavily upon him than did his own thoughts. He was preoccupied by the image of Edward Carlyle’s ravaged body. That was unfinished business, and it nagged at him. Once or twice, it had even dislodged memories of Hougoumont, of Jamie Boswell and of fire from their dominion over his dreams. Visions of teeth had come to him in his sleep, and set Quire himself fleeing through an endless maze of closes with a pack of spittle-spewing wolves upon his trail.
As he strode towards the police house, head down into the wind, eyes narrowed against the flecks of sleet riding the gusts, one figure amongst the few braving the foul elemental mood caught