The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [79]
“Wallace, did you get deaf as well as drunk and stupid last night?” Blegg snapped.
“No. No.”
“Then go back to the farm and get a fire started. Same place as we did the one got shot at Duddingston. I’ll bring this.”
Wallace turned and began to trudge away, sluggish. Blood still crusted his hair where his head had been cracked against the farmhouse wall. As he walked, he favoured his left side, protective of the aching bruises put there by a couple of good punches.
“When we’re done, you’ll need to start loading the wagon up,” Blegg called after him. “Everything. This place isn’t safe any more. Not after this. Ruthven’s equipment’ll be needing another home.”
Blegg bent down over Davey and pulled the stick from his eye. Fragments of skin and eyeball adhered to it. Blegg threw it casually away. He regarded the sluggishly moving figure for a moment or two, then turned to shout at Wallace’s receding back.
“Have you a knife?”
Wallace paused and looked back.
“Not on me.”
“Get one from the kitchen, then. I may have a use for a part of this thing yet.”
Blegg picked Davey up, slung him without difficulty over his shoulder and began to walk after Wallace.
“Quire,” he murmured, with a strange mixture of loathing and relish.
XVIII
Quire’s Last Day
Dr. Robert Knox paused, his blade poised above the cadaver, and looked up. A whole gallery of attentive faces gazed down upon him from the seats of his teaching theatre. Two hundred or more young men waited for the incision and what it would reveal. The fractious whine of the gas lights was the only sound, as if every breath in the great chamber was held.
Knox slowly set down the scalpel and clasped his hands.
“You are privileged, gentlemen,” he said, taking a pace to interpose himself between the corpse and its audience. “Privileged to have been born into an age of comprehension. A transformative age. By your presence here, you accept an invitation to join a brotherhood of sorts.”
He looked up, and addressed himself to the highest corner, where wall met ceiling. His voice swelled with passion the better to fill the space. And though this was not what his students had expected, they listened with rapt concentration.
“It is a brotherhood that holds reason, and its fearless application, to be the holiest of sacraments. It is a fraternity built upon the achievements of men who laboured long and hard to uncover secrets, and render unto all of humanity the fruits of their labours.
“Yet I was reminded, not so long ago, that there are those who would set obstacles in the path of reason. Those who would forbid us to follow where it leads, because they find our discoveries, or our conclusions, or our methods—particularly our methods—distasteful. They care nothing for the benefits mankind may derive from the rational, clear-headed pursuit of knowledge. They are prisoners of their superstitions, and their fear, and would have us be the same.”
Knox returned to the side of the dissecting slab at his theatre’s heart. He looked down at the naked form lying there: a middle-aged woman. Blotched skin, shorn hair. Nameless and empty.
“A great enterprise is under way,” he called out, so sharply as to set a few of the assembled students jumping on their hard benches. “A noble enterprise, and you are all a part of it, though it was begun before a single man of you was born. It will change our world entirely. It is the substitution, gentlemen, of superstition and mysticism with a spirit of rational enquiry that promises to make possible wonders of every kind.”
He pointed with a thick, long finger at one of the gas jets burning so brightly on the wall.
“It is by the light of just such a wonder that you see me at this moment. There have been boats out upon the Forth this very day driven not by the wind or the strength of men but by engines. We shall, undoubtedly, have the railway in Edinburgh before this decade is out, and then we all shall make our journeys not by stagecoach but by steam carriage. Wonders, gentlemen!”
Knox carefully reached