Quire edged himself backwards along the landing. He had never in his life used a rapier, such as that he now held, but he had seen others wave them around in practice or show. Never in anger. The thing came quickly at him, hauling Ruthven along, reaching out for Quire with its free hand. He lunged forward and planted the tip of the sword into the breast, right beside the hole the pistol had already put there. Something in the way he did it was clumsy, for his weight did not pass through the blade as he had hoped; but it hardly mattered, for the movement and mass of the body into which it sank did the work for him.
The dead man shuddered, and swayed, and stumbled to one side. Quire whipped the sword back out of its flesh. He might have hit the heart, he thought; he was not sure. Ruthven was whimpering, or moaning; blood bubbled at his lips.
Quire heard the wooden railings along the landing groan as the huge figure fell against them. Its torso bent back for a moment, over the balustrade. Quire darted in again and stabbed the long blade upwards, into the exposed chin. It went up through the jaw and mouth and lodged somewhere in the bone of the skull. The creature spasmed, and it arched over the handrail into the deep space of the stairwell. The handrail cracked and split, the balusters splayed apart, and the creature fell backwards, pulling the sword from Quire’s hand and taking it down, jutting from its chin. Quire had one last glimpse of Ruthven’s rolling, anguished eyes, and then the man was snatched away and went plunging after his creation, his arm still locked in its iron grip.
By the time Quire reached the foot of the stairs, flames were already licking around the bodies. The hall carpet was alight, and the wallpaper on the walls nearest the cellar stairs was burning, coming away in black cindery sheets that swirled about and rose to be consumed in the roiling fire spreading itself across the ceiling.
The heat was too ferocious for Quire to get near the two twisted corpses, but he was not minded to do so anyway. Neither looked likely to rise again.
He ran to the front door and hauled it open, and rushed out into Melville Street, and away into the quiet Edinburgh night.
Nobody Sees William Hare
Mathieu Durand looked to Quire to be on the very brink of death. Both the Frenchman himself and Agnes McLaine insisted otherwise. Durand’s version was that he was indeed fatally ill, but that his final decline was further off than he had expected; Agnes’ was that Durand was a morose, fatalistic fool whose mortal dread of Blegg was doing as much to drag him down as any magics that might have been laid upon him, and if he could but shake himself free of it, he might well recover. Despite their differences, they seemed to Quire to have developed a certain rough affection—or respect, at least—for one another during their enforced cohabitation.
For all Quire knew, Durand deserved to die; perhaps that he had broken with Ruthven and Blegg did not excuse his earlier part in their transgressions. Quire chose not to judge that.
“What man would not prefer to die with the soil of his homeland under his feet?” Durand said as the three of them worked their slow way along the Leith seafront.
Quire had his hand under Durand’s arm to give him some support, and Agnes had found him a dusty, battered old walking stick from somewhere that he leaned heavily on. He was much reduced, even from the comparatively delicate figure he had cut when Quire first saw him, what felt an age ago in the drawing room of Ruthven’s house.
“Do you know,” Quire said, “the first time I met you, I guessed you might be quiet because you could not speak more than a word or two of English. Couldn’t have been much more wrong about that, could I?”
There was a broad expanse of dark, muddy sand laid out before them. The tide had retreated so far that the little breakers were mere flecks of white. Almost in those waves, at the very border between land and sea, a horse went pounding along the beach in full gallop. Its rider was crouched over its neck, tiny. The great horse stretched its long legs, and its mane and tail streamed out on the wind. The sand made fountains at its heels.
Quire and Durand and Agnes all stopped to watch it. For Quire at least there was something uplifting in the sight of that powerful creature running through the edge of the ocean, making for the horizon, putting its every effort into the simple act of the gallop.
The truth of it was rather more mundane, and mercenary, he knew. Every summer, a goodly portion of Edinburgh’s entire population could be found down here, on the Leith sands and all along the seafront at the back of them, for the day of the races. Whole squadrons of horses swept up and down the sands on that day, and whole fortunes swept back and forth through the hands of the bookmakers and the touts and the thieves. Some of the horse trainers liked to run their charges on the beach all year round, for the sake of familiarity and the endless flat softness of the place.
“Perhaps that is my boat, is it?” Durand said quietly.
Quire looked beyond the horse, and the beach, out across the restless sea lying between them and the shores of Fife. A steamer was there, looking frail and delicate at this distance, laying behind it a long trail of smoke that paled and frayed as it fell behind the vessel’s stacks, dissipating on the wind.
“It could be,” Quire said.
“Driving a boat with fire,” Agnes McLaine mused. “It’s an age of miracles we live in, right enough.”
It was Durand’s intent, within the hour, to take ship down the east coast, to England, and thence across the Channel back to France. To die there, as he would have it, and be buried. Quire could understand that. Even an exile might want, at the end, to go back into the earth of the land that birthed him. Better than dying, and staying, on foreign fields, as so many of the men he had known had done.
If Durand died at all, of course. Quire did not know whether the Frenchman or Agnes was right in judging his fate. Agnes thought the cruel spirit that had animated Blegg’s form was likely gone, unhomed and thinned, and thus unable to exert any malign influence upon the Frenchman; Durand could not bring himself to believe that, as far as Quire could tell.
“It was Hare you said was the name of the man bringing bodies to Blegg, wasn’t it?” Quire asked Durand absently.
The Frenchman nodded, and shrugged his cloak more tightly about him. It was a bright day, but the wind coming in off the Forth had sharpness to it.
“Same one they’ve used to try this man Burke?”
“I do not know,” Durand said. “But how many men of one name would you have in your city who sell the dead?”
Quire grunted. Burke’s trial was a grisly sensation. Its substance had overspilled the bounds of the court, too awful and ghoulish to be contained. It filled every newssheet, and was the talk of every tavern and coffee shop; it had roused the folk of the Old Town to a state of fevered outrage and fury unlike anything seen in years. Not a little of their anger was directed upwards, towards Edinburgh’s lofty masters, for the outcome of the prosecution was not what the instincts of the mob demanded.
Sixteen murders, by most reckoning. Sixteen innocent men and women cruelly slain, all smothered and consigned to the dissecting table of Dr. Robert Knox. And from out of all that horror, there was but one man set to answer for it. William Burke would hang. Knox was spared any legal assault at all, and Hare—Hare it was who sent Burke to the hangman, for he had turned King’s evidence. The lawyers had bought his testimony with the promise of freedom. And that, the people of Edinburgh had clearly concluded, was obscene travesty.
“He’s to go free, they say,” Agnes said. “Hare.”
“He is.” Quire nodded. “He’s under the King’s protection now, still locked up, but he’ll be turned loose soon enough. And then he’ll be back to Ireland, I should say, since he’d be torn to pieces if he’s recognised around here. And anything he knows about Blegg or Ruthven’ll go across the sea with him. The papers have said nothing about that. Only the business him and Burke did with Knox. There’s no mention of any corpses going Ruthven’s way.”
“You should leave it be,” Agnes said quickly.
“I don’t know if I can,” Quire said, watching the steamboat plough its way through the waves, closing on the harbour.
“They decided it was a gas explosion,” Quire told Wilson Dunbar. “I read it in the
