The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [55]
He chased a lad who stole a loaf of bread from a baker’s window right before his eyes; chased him all the way from the well at the east end of the Grassmarket, up Candlemaker Row and through the works for the new George IV Bridge over the Cowgate. And then gave up, for his legs were sore and the boy looked like he needed a good feed in any case.
He spent the better part of an hour trying to persuade a drunk youth to come down from halfway up the cliffs beneath the castle walls, fighting to get himself heard above the cheerful throng gathered to see what happened. Eventually, the boy fell asleep up there, sitting on a narrow ledge, bathed in sunlight. It looked, Quire conceded, a rather pleasant perch, but he sent some men to bring the sleeper down in any case.
A day spent in such a way seemed almost restful to Quire, in comparison to his recent experiences. It left him, if not exactly contented, certainly restored to a kind of calm.
He stopped, on his way down towards the Canongate, to buy an apple from a stall. As he walked on, crunching through the hard, sour flesh, he watched the evening sun light up the roofs of the tenements on either side. The High Street was in shadow, but up there every chimney, every roof tile, was washed with a sheen of gold, as if each dour building had been crowned.
He stopped in at Calder’s before climbing the stair to his apartment. A pint of ale and a thick slab of bread were enough to carry him through to the fall of night. He found a not unpleasant weariness settling over him, a gentle weight in his limbs and a stillness into his thoughts.
As he sat on his bed, pulling his stiff boots from his feet and setting them side by side on the floor, his mind, of its own accord, settled upon the notion that he would have done better to leave Ruthven to enjoy the paintings in peace, but that if no harm came of it, he need not condemn himself too harshly.
The South Bridge carried, on its vaulting arches, the city’s life and traffic over the shadows of the Cowgate. The huge new bridge being built on a parallel course a little to the west would do the same, but for now it was barely begun. Its gigantic stone legs were sprouting from amongst the teeming tenements that they would in time merge with, or bury, or accommodate.
In the deepest part of the night, down there in the darkness of the lower city, a stillness reigned. There were no gas lamps here, as had sprouted on the streets of the New Town, nothing to blunt the severity of night’s grip. The last of the drinkers and the indigents had found shelter, and left the shuttered shops and dark doorways to the explorations of rats. The wynds were empty of sound, save some occasional cry or cough or curse emanating from within the towering tenements.
But the city had stiller, and darker, places yet. Up and ever up the buildings had soared, built one atop the other. Layers of rooms, of cellars, and of tunnels had been all but entombed. Dank and silent corners, nestled into the deep fabric of the city like ossified voids, had been consigned to the past by a populace that no longer needed them, and chose to forget them. Some could yet find a use for them, though.
In that deserted night, a lone figure came softly beneath an archway and into a tight, grimy quadrangle enclosed by tenements. The man turned to an old and scarred door that had been little enough used to allow dirt and straw and the droppings of rats to accumulate at its foot.
There was no handle or lock apparent on the door. The man pushed at it gently. It creaked back to give admittance to the bowels of the city.
The air within was fetid and heavy, hardly disturbed for years and grown old just as the crumbling walls that enclosed it had done. There was no light, not the slightest sliver. The man closed the door behind him, and advanced into the gloom.
Only the sound of his feet on dirt and stone dust gave some hint of the smallness of