The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [66]
By such small, insistent statements, the world demanded his attention. The hallucinations of his sleeping mind retreated. In their wake they left only a dull fretwork of pain deep in his left forearm: a stubborn memento of his thrashing about. He dispelled it by making a fist, then flexing his fingers, grinding the thumb of his stronger right hand into the palm of his left.
Still wrapped in a thick, heavy woollen blanket, he sat on the edge of the bed and hooked out the pisspot from beneath it with his foot. While he urinated, his gaze drifted over the loaded French pistol he now kept at the side of his bed, and to the heavy bar he had fixed rather crudely across the door to his apartment. A man who felt in need of such fortifications in his own home could hardly be expected to sleep well, he supposed.
He listened to the clatter of the foundries rousing themselves from their own slumber. Down here in the Canongate, where once the wealthy had congregated, industry now colonised every space. Most of the rich and the titled had emigrated to the New Town, leaving their former haunts to men of a meaner sort. Amongst whose number Quire was quite content to count himself.
The sky and the city, and the light that served as go-between, carrying intimate and subtle messages to and fro, were in constant discourse. That morning, the heavens spoke in sharp and bright phrases, flinging gusts of wind down from amongst the scudding clouds to bluster over the roofs of the tenements and bundle their way down the length of the High Street. It was the kind of day Quire liked: sunlight illuminating the eastern face of every building, making even the ramshackle seem crisp, and wind enough to keep the Canongate from gathering an industrial fug over itself. A clean day.
He began the long ascent from the threshold of Holyrood Palace up towards the High Street and the distant castle. He had Mrs. Calder’s hot, heavy porridge in his stomach like a cannonball, which was both fortification and slight handicap. He could only be grateful for it, though: without his landlady’s solicitous attention, he would likely leave his rooms each morning unfed.
At the foot of the Canongate, wagons and horses bearing goods to and from the manufactories were already getting themselves tangled up in great logjams outside the very walls of the palace. As Quire left that maelstrom behind, he glanced back over his shoulder and saw the vast rumpled mass of Arthur’s Seat rising behind the palace, its folds and furrows and hummocks as familiar to him and every Edinburgh resident as was the patina of their own face seen in a mirror. Most striking of all its features was the long rising curve of Salisbury Crags, a battlement of cliffs standing atop a steep rampart of scree and short grass, sweeping around that part of the hill closest to the city like a defensive bulwark against human encroachment upon the wild, high ground. Quire was fond of that view; or had been, for now sight of the hill put him in mind of Duddingston, hidden behind its great bulk, and of what had happened there.
The further up into the Old Town Quire walked, the higher the buildings rose, the more crowded became the herds of chimneys atop them, the more tumultuous the ebb and flow of rude humanity that moved in their shadows. At the head of Leith Wynd, where Canongate became High Street, Quire encountered one member of that crowd he had not expected to see.
Catherine Heron was emerging from a whisky shop, clutching a wrapped bottle to her breast. The ragged hem of her wide skirts brushed the ground. She looked dishevelled, a little bleary-eyed, but there was a blushing tint to her cheeks—a token of resistant health.
Quire met her eyes, and an acknowledging half-smile escaped him before he could restrain it. He would have left things there, but Catherine hastened to