“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 much dream as memory.
He had carried a Brown Bess of his own all across Portugal and Spain, and into France. She had done as much as—more than, perhaps—any other woman to make him who he was. Taught him, certainly, more memorable lessons than the few teachers he had known in his brief schooling.
What sound it was that interrupted his hazy reverie, and how much time had passed, Quire could not say. But there was something; some dissonant shard of the outside world that jarred in his ear and was gone before he was wakeful enough to take hold of it.
He jerked upright in his chair, scraping its feet on the flagstone floor. The fire was still crackling, though it had sunk a little lower in the hearth; Munro still snored, though it was a feeble, whistling kind of snore now. But the son, perched upon the ledge of the dark window, was the embodiment of tension, staring out into the night. The soft Bible in his hands was forgotten, on the verge of slipping from his grasp.
“What is it?” Quire asked.
“I don’t know,” the youth said uneasily. “Something.”
And then it came again: a scrape of metal on stone, so faint as to be barely distinguishable from nervous imagination. But distinguishable—and real—it was. Quire surged to his feet.
“Get away from the window,” he snapped. “You’ll not be able to see anything anyway. Snuff that candle.”
As Munro the younger did as he was told, Quire kicked his father’s outstretched foot. Even that was only enough to bring the man haltingly and blearily back to wakefulness.
“What’s happening?” he asked, rubbing at his eye.
“That’s what we’re going to find out. Do either of you know how to load that gun?”
“What?”
Father directed a fearsome enquiring glare towards son, who shrank beneath its force and said, apologetically: “There’s someone out there.”
“Is there?” The doubt was evident in Munro’s voice, but so was a fragment of alarm. “It’ll be nothing. No need for the gun.”
“And if it’s not nothing?” Quire demanded. “There’s many kinds of resurrectionists, Munro. Not all of them are students, not all of them are gentle. Arm yourself. It might put some handy fear into them, if nothing else.”
It was evident at once that the man had not handled a gun in a long time, if ever. He fumbled even as he was digging a cartridge out from a pouch. He held the musket too low, and it swayed and rocked in his grasp. He was afraid of the gun, Quire knew, for he had seen it in others before. Afraid of the gun and of what it signified.
Quire took it out of Munro’s hands and, for the first time in many years, found himself loading a Brown Bess. Tearing at the paper cartridge with his teeth, catching the smell of the powder and thinking it a touch stale. Spit out the scraps, prime the pan. Stand the gun on its heel and pour the rest of the powder down the barrel. Turn the cartridge, feeling the weight of the ball in his hand; press it into the barrel with a fingertip. Tight enough. Slip the ramrod out from its seat under the barrel, punch down with it, pack ball and paper wadding and powder down firm. Replace the ramrod.
Quire looked up. Both Munros were regarding him with unease.
“There’s a man who knows his way about a musket,” the elder said quietly. Sadly.
But Quire knew he had been slow and imprecise. At his best, at Waterloo, he had been amongst the fastest in the company. Four shots in a minute. Not any more. Not nearly. It was not a skill he wished to rediscover, any more than was the killing of men. He offered the gun to Munro, who regarded it with distaste.
“I’ll take it,” said the man’s son.
Quire heard a hint of enthusiasm in the proposal that he did not entirely trust, but the older Munro nodded.
“He’s used one before, true enough.” But he fixed his son with a beady glare as Quire handed the weapon over. “Don’t you go firing that thing off, though, lad. Just for show.”
“Where’s the body?” Quire asked. “The fresh burial?”
“Far side of the kirk,” Munro told him. “The loch side.”
They went out into the graveyard, a still and strange place on a night such as this, with an icy tang to the air, rumpled snow blanketing the graves. The beam of Quire’s lantern flung the stark shadows of headstones across that white canvas and up on to the walls of the little church. There was a silence, of a depth only winter could provide, and the crunch of their footsteps fell into it like stones into a deep pond.
They went around the south side of the church. A gnarled apple tree, leafless and fruitless and sleeping, leaned over the cemetery wall. The lantern light bounced and tumbled through its branches. Quire meant to lead the way, but Munro—perhaps from protective fatherly concern, or just in the belief that the authority and responsibility here were his—moved quickly past him, striding over the snow without regard to caution or concealment. It occurred to Quire, belatedly, that the role of the men who watched over the graveyards of Edinburgh was not to capture body snatchers, but to deter them. To frighten them off. His own desires and expectations might not entirely jibe with those of his companions.
He glanced back, to where young Duncan was tramping along behind them, bringing the lantern round to light the boy up with its yellow glare.
