Hare eyed his new drinking companion, a touch reserved.
“Is it an anatomist you’re working for, then?” he asked. “Something like that?”
“Something like that. Something like that.”
Hare wrinkled his nose.
“It’s courting ill luck,” he said, “to be talking of such things in the very place they’ve hanged men for less.”
“Oh, they’ve not had gallows in the Grassmarket for a time now, William.” Blegg smiled. “They build them elsewhere these days. And it’s more fitting a place than you might think. Do you not know the meaning of the sign under which we meet?”
“The White Hart?”
“Herne the Hunter,” said Blegg. “The white hart is his beast. His totem. It was a white hart that wounded him, when he was a mortal man, wounded him unto death. But he was returned to life by a maker of magics, who bound the hart’s antlers to his head. Thus was he restored.”
“I’ve no interest in your folk tales,” Hare grunted.
“No? As you like. Let us talk of more practical matters, shall we?”
Quire still ached. His body was taking its time in forgetting his misadventure at Cold Burn Farm. It did not seem too great a burden, though, for he was warm, and well rested, and for now at least content.
He rolled and draped an arm across Cath Heron’s naked shoulder. The bedding was rough, and the mattress lumpy, but her skin was soft and her hair where it lay across the pillow between them put the scent of her in his nose. She stirred at his touch, almost awake, but not quite.
It was unaccustomedly quiet. Too early for the inhabitants of the Holy Land to be up and about, certainly, but too early as well for the rest of the Old Town to have come but a little way out of the night. The scavengers would be finishing their rounds, wheeling their barrows full of Edinburgh’s scraps off the streets. The forges and breweries down in the Canongate would be beginning to wake, but they were far enough distant that he could not hear the flexing of their iron and coal muscles. Seagulls, he could hear; always seagulls, called up from the coast by the riches of the city.
It had been many years since Quire had been easily able to sleep late. Wakefulness came, whether he wanted it or not. This night, at least, had been dreamless, the horrors of his past and present banished, for once, from his sleeping mind. His slumber had been deep, and sated, and restorative. The drink had helped, no doubt, but so had Cath. So had his yielding to desires long denied.
He blew gently upon her cheek, and her eyes trembled. A thin hand came sluggishly to fend him off. He wanted to share these still, quiet moments. There were few enough such in his life these days, and in Cath’s, he imagined; they seemed a gift, not to be lightly squandered.
She blinked at him, rolled towards him just enough to fold herself into his arms.
“Sergeant Quire,” she said, pressing her face into the crook of his neck. “I thought you might be gone when I woke.”
“Not yet,” he murmured.
They were alone in the rooms. Cath had sent Emma on her way as soon as they came in, a little unsteady on their feet, and the older woman had gone willingly enough, favouring Quire with a knowing smile as she went. A woman in want of a bed would have no trouble finding one in the Holy Land at night.
Quire ran his hand down Cath’s flank beneath the bedding, slipping it over her buttock and on to her thigh. There was comfort even in that simple motion, and the memory it carried of their congress. It called up once more the cleansing, emptying heat of their union; its capacity to banish, for a time, all thought and all self, and free Quire of his troubles and his fears. Fears. That was right enough, and having let the notion of it into his head, he lost hold of his tranquillity. He withdrew his hand, and swung his legs out to sit on the edge of the bed.
“God, it’s early,” Cath moaned, reading by long experience the soft fall of light through the window. “Can we not sleep a bit longer?”
She ran a fingernail down his spine. That made shivers race through the skin of his back. He stood, naked, and stretched his arms. He had never been troubled to hide the scars on his arm from Cath. From the first time she had seen them, her ease at the sight of them had made itself his own. Today, it was his other marks that drew her attention. A great bruise as many-hued as a summer thundercloud was just beginning to fade, spread over his hip and flank where Davey Muir had thrown him into a tree.
Cath reached out to touch it, tracing its yellow-black shape.
“Look at you, Adam. Look at you.”
Her voice was laden with sympathy, with sorrow. That had been, in part, what he had needed last night, Quire supposed: the simple comfort of caring company. He had been drunk, so it was not easy to recall exactly how his mind had been working, but he knew it had been a whole web of longings. All his old affection for her, only sharpened by his long resistance to its call; his selfish need to be taken out of himself for a time, to have another set aside his dark thoughts for him, since he could not seem to do it himself.
There had been no restraining sense of consequence, for he was already accused, and half-convicted, of that which he now did. It had felt the most natural thing in all the world to turn for comfort and companionship to Cath. And she had been welcoming, forgiving. As if he had never wronged her.
Her hand was easing itself around his thigh, straying towards his crotch, and he felt his desire stirring in anticipation of her touch. But he slipped beyond her reach, and began to collect his clothes from the floor.
“Already?” she asked.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and meant it. “I’ll be back, Cath. I promise you that.”
As he pulled his trousers on, his gaze fell upon an open box sitting by the window. Curled up in it were the amber bead amulets that the Widow’s girls sold as protective charms to their customers. That put a sour twist to the moment, reminding Quire of how many others had shared Cath’s bed, but more immediate preoccupations chased the thought away quickly enough.
“So do you think these things work, then?” he asked, holding up one of the trinkets.
It was not a question he would once have asked, but if he had learned nothing else of late, it was that there were mysteries to the working of the world he had never imagined.
“The folk who buy them do, that’s what matters,” Cath grunted, rolling away from the sight, shrugging the sheets back up over her shoulders.
She did not like to be reminded, any more than Quire did, of her trade. Not in this moment. Quire realised then, in his sluggish way, that he was not the only one who had tried to make a kind of release and escape for themselves last night. He was ashamed to have so crudely drained the morning of its gentleness. But still he held the charm, and squinted at it.
“Where do they come from?” he asked. “Does the Widow make them herself, or are there folk still doing little magics like these?”
“Aye, there’s folk like that,” Cath said into the bedding. “There’s always been folk like that. You’ve just got to ken where to look.”
Later, as afternoon turned to evening, tired but still lighter of heart than his situation and his fears warranted, Quire met Wilson Dunbar outside St. Giles’ Cathedral on the High Street. It was a long-standing and regular arrangement, that had made more sense when Quire had actually been employed at the police house, just over the street.
The cathedral—a great crouching mass surmounted by a grandiose stone crown—always put Quire in mind of a titanic black beetle squatted down and bearing carbuncles on its back. He found Dunbar waiting for him on its steps, and together they walked down through the crowds towards Calder’s.
Dunbar was working as a builder these days. Some kind of combination of quartermaster, labourer and gang master, as far as Quire could tell, happily engaged in the construction of the grand new High School on Calton Hill. He smelled of stone dust and mortar. He examined Quire with critical eyes as they wove through the evening crowds.
“You look in a better mood than I’ve seen you of late,” he opined.
“Do I?”
“Aye, you do. It’s unsettling, I’ll tell you. Like the sun coming out at midnight.”
