The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [27]
“What is it you’re here for?” the youth asked him.
“He thinks there’s those who mean to rob our grave tonight,” his father said before Quire could answer.
The older man’s eyes were already closed, and his clasped hands rested comfortably upon his stomach.
“I’ve explained that we’ve had no trouble like that here in years, and not likely to have when there’re lights in the windows of this tower, and smoke from our chimney.”
He opened one eye and cast an investigate glance towards the window that looked out over the graveyard.
“Lights in the windows,” he said again, pointedly. “Man can talk as much sense as he likes, and profit by it not at all if nobody’s listening.”
His son hastened to find a candle in the drawer of a long table that stood against one wall. He lit it with a taper from the fire and set it on the window ledge, its fluttering flame a precautionary beacon against whatever men of ill will might lurk in the outer darkness.
“Ground’s frozen, anyway,” Munro said. “Who’d be so set upon transgression that they’d try to dig through that?”
“They’d need to be determined upon their course, right enough,” Quire agreed.
“Or most fiercely in thrall to greed. They say the anatomists pay ten pounds for a body.”
It was a good deal more than Quire could earn in a month.
“How long do you keep watch after a burial?” he asked.
“A week or so,” grunted Munro, closing his eye once more and sniffing. “They come early, if they’re going to come at all. After that, the corruption of the body… well, nobody would want it then. And only when the one we’ve buried was taken in the prime of life, and sound in wind and limb. As this lad was.”
A sorrowful weight settled over his words.
“Drowned in a ditch. The worse for the drink, they say, but I don’t know. Anyway, the Resurrection Men don’t much want the old ones, or the sick ones. So people say, in any case.”
“It’s true,” Quire acknowledged.
“Is it true they put cages about the graves in the city yards?” the younger Munro asked hesitantly, perhaps embarrassed by his morbid curiosity.
“Sometimes,” Quire said, seating himself far enough from the fire to avoid its fiercest heat. “If the family can afford it. Mort safes, they call them. Great iron things.”
Munro grunted, in a heavy, languid way that suggested sleep could not be long delayed.
“Hellish times we live in, that the dead should be disturbed in their sleep by pagans and atheists. Pagans and atheists, the lot of them: the diggers and these so-called medical men alike. Lapdogs of Satan. No grave should be opened, unless it’s at the end of days.”
And with that judgement issued, the elder of the church lapsed into lugubrious slumber. He snored, softly and gently, and it was a soothing sound. Rather like the contemplative rumbling of waves upon a pebble beach.
The sleeper’s son perched himself on the window ledge, beside the trembling candle, and began to read a Bible so old and well-used that its leather binding had softened to the flimsiness of cloth. His lips moved as he read, though Quire was not sure whether it was unconscious habit or deliberate recitation.
“You spend a lot of nights in this little castle, lad?” he asked the boy quietly.
The young Duncan, sitting there with the holy book open on his lap, lifted a stiff finger to his lips, pointed at his torpid father, and returned to his study of the text. Quire could not help but smile at the impertinence, loyalty and faintly submissive obedience that were all bundled up together in the scene.
The heat, and the lullaby of Munro’s snoring, worked their soporific magics upon Quire, and he found his thoughts drifting aimlessly. His gaze rested upon the gun lodged above the fire, and he wandered into a remembrance of past times that was as