with Mr. Durand, then, if you’re not feeling talkative?” Quire suggested, switching his gaze to the Frenchman, in whose eyes he saw quite plainly the alarm the very notion awoke.
“Leave my guest out of this,” snarled Ruthven.
Quire drew considerable satisfaction from the fury boiling up through Ruthven’s veneer of restraint. He would goad the man to the point of eruption, if he could. If that was what it took to let a little light in on the secrets Quire could smell hidden away in there.
“Do keep your voice down,” Isabel Ruthven said, never losing her grip upon the elegant smile she wore like paint.
“If I need advice on comportment, I will find it elsewhere, beloved,” Ruthven hissed at her.
But he did take a couple of breaths to compose himself, and smooth the anger away from his features. Quire was more interested for now in Durand, who was, with the utmost discretion, edging behind and away from Ruthven. Removing himself from the fray.
“You should be aware, Quire, that I will take it as the most grave personal insult if you persist in your harassment,” Ruthven said.
“Well, that’s what it would be, right enough,” Quire said, watching Durand sink into the throng. He knew a man desperate to escape a trap when he saw one.
“Ah, there’s the Sheriff Depute,” Ruthven said, suddenly bright and loud. “Do you know him? Shall I introduce you? He might be glad to discuss the proper conduct of police affairs with you.”
That, Quire recognised very clearly as the cue for withdrawal. His sense of caution was not so entirely withered as to blind him to the dangers of sparring with those whose reach he could not match.
“Not leaving already, are you?” Mrs. Ruthven said, evidently reading some preparatory shift in his posture. He was at a loss to know how she layered such simple words with so many flavours: regret, protestation, suggestion. Appeal, perhaps.
“There’ll be another occasion, I’m sure,” he told her, and took one sharp step closer to Ruthven, dropping his voice to a rasping whisper.
“You’ve picked the wrong man for a fight, Ruthven. I thought you should know that. If you think you can tangle me up in enough knots to keep me away, you’ve misjudged me, much to your disadvantage.”
Ruthven gave him a chill smile, and his eyes carried an animosity that Quire found surprisingly steady and calm.
“I promise you, Mr. Quire, that the error in selection of opponent lies entirely with you. I have a great deal more weapons in my armoury than you would imagine, and after tonight’s performance, I think I can promise you an education in the matter of disadvantage that you will not soon forget. Now go. I do not think we will meet again, and for that I am entirely glad.”
XIII
The Hounds of the Old Town
Quire did not know whether or not he should regret his actions at the exhibition of the American Woodsman’s paintings. He knew what Robinson’s judgement on the matter would be, if news of the encounter between Quire and Ruthven at the Royal Institution found its way back to him, but that could not be helped. What was done was done, whether it was ill done or not. He spent the better part of two days expecting repercussions. There were none. Perhaps on this occasion that anger he had brought home from the wars, and which it had taken him so long to set reins upon, had not done his cause too much harm.
He sought to lose himself, for a few hours, in more normal and less contentious duties. It seemed wise to avoid the main police house, so he went round half a dozen watch-houses—the generally grubby, rather gloomy little posts the men of the day and night watches used for shelter and sustenance and storage—checking that there was nothing needing his attention.
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 the passageway, and even those feeble echoes were dulled by the sodden air. He went carefully but without hesitation, unhindered by the utter darkness.
After a few paces he turned aside and ducked his head, avoiding the invisible lintel of an aperture that opened into a side chamber. And there, a new sound arose in response to his arrival. A shifting, a movement, a
