The two of them worked Hare out of the carriage, and held him up between them, each getting themselves under one of his arms. It was not the kind of scene entirely unfamiliar to the inhabitants of West Bow or Grassmarket, and not many folk paid them much heed.
“Give me one of those lights,” Isabel said.
Rutherford unhooked one of the oil lamps hanging from the end of the driver’s seat and handed it her.
“In here,” Isabel told him.
They went through a low, dark passageway into the foul-smelling, rubbish-strewn courtyard beyond. Isabel showed the way with the light of the lamp, and the two of them bore Hare into Major Weir’s house.
The dreadful oppression of the place made Rutherford ever more agitated as they moved through its ruins. He started at every flicker of flame light across the crumbling, slumping walls.
“All right,” Isabel said. “This will do.”
Rutherford let Hare fall.
“You can go back to the carriage,” Isabel told him.
“Thank you,” Rutherford breathed with heartfelt relief, and made to retrace their steps through the grime and debris.
“Wait a moment.”
The voice came from the impenetrable darkness of the back room. It was an ugly sound, uneven and rattling. Thick.
“Just listen,” the voice came again. “We’ll send Hare out to you shortly. When he comes, you take him on where he needs to go. We’ll not be joining you.”
“Aye, all right,” Rutherford said. “You’re paying, so whatever you say.”
He went quickly away. Isabel looked into the darkness.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “Are we not to leave together?”
“I’ll explain, but let’s get done what needs doing first. It’s not easy for me to talk. I need Hare.”
Isabel set the lamp down on a rotting length of timber, and went to the corner. She lifted a rag and began to bring out the items it had concealed. As she worked, Blegg crawled yard by effortful yard out into the lamp’s light.
His skin was crusted and blackened, burned back to the bone where it had been thinnest, over his scalp. His eyelids were gone, and the great white orbs of his eyeballs shone in the light. Much of his lips was gone too, scorched away. Across the whole upper half of his torso, scraps of charred clothing were merged into what remained of his flesh. Both hands were hooked into stiff, raw claws, the fingers bent inwards and flayed by heat.
Isabel laid a pair of gloves side by side on the floor. Next a shallow wooden bowl, into which she poured black ink from a small bottle. Last a stylus made of reed.
“I can lie across him,” Blegg said, “but my hands aren’t up to the rest of it. Just close up his mouth and nose. That’s all.”
Blegg hauled himself across Hare’s chest and lay there, a dead weight. Isabel knelt down and did as she had been told, pressing one hand over Hare’s mouth, pinching shut his nose with the other.
“He won’t wake,” Blegg hissed.
And he was right. William Hare died in his sleep. Suffocated.
Afterwards Blegg had Isabel wedge the stylus into his crippled hand, for he could not pick it up himself. He dipped it into the ink she had stolen from her husband’s stores, and began to write over the back of Hare’s hands.
“One thing I learned from Ruthven and that French bastard,” he grunted. “This does help with keeping a hold on the body.”
After that, he said nothing more that Isabel could understand for quite a time. He coughed out streams of Latin phrases from his ravaged form as he worked, his voice faltering and dwindling all the time. His body shook, collapsing beneath the strain of its exertions. Isabel sat close by the lamp, her hands folded in her lap, waiting quietly. It did not take all that long for Blegg to sink down, slumping incrementally on to Hare’s corpse, and for his rasping voice to fade away to nothing. He lay there, perfectly still. Perfectly empty.
It remained thus for a time. The woman sitting silently, staring at the two corpses lying amongst the detritus of decades. The lamp’s glow fluttering around the walls. A steady, slow drip, somewhere out in the shadows, of rainwater that had leached its way down through the seams of the vast building above and fell now into this ruinous hollow at its base.
And at last, Hare shuddered. Isabel rose, her hands clasped, watching with gleaming eyes. Hare stirred, and shook, and rolled his head. He heaved, and pushed Blegg’s ghastly charred corpse off him and away. He did not even look at it as he rose to his feet, and stood there swaying and blinking.
“Is it you?” Isabel asked, hope and fear and anticipation all layered in the words.
Hare looked at her.
“Always me,” he said with a wolfish grin. “Always me.”
He held up his hands and splayed them, examining the inscriptions straggling across the back of them.
“It will have to do,” he said. “Needed more time, more tools to really make it hold and work, but this will do, for a while. Give me those gloves.”
Isabel brought them to him and he pulled them over his hands.
“I hardly dared to believe,” she said, almost breathless with excitement.
“You should have,” Hare scolded her lightly. “I told you I was not done yet. You should have believed me. Just needed the right place to do it—a place that remembered me well—and the right kind of man to host me, the right blackness of heart to open up the way as he departed. I knew Hare would be what we needed. I like to think I played my small part in making him what he was, so it seems only fair I should be repaid with the use of him.”
She embraced him, and he held her for a moment or two before easing her away.
“What now?” she asked. “You won’t leave me here, surely, whatever you said to Rutherford? I came to find you, didn’t I? Out at the farm. You couldn’t ask more of me than that.”
Hare ignored her.
“Is there any sign?” he asked, turning his face this way and that to show her his cheeks. “Any bruising, or scarring?”
“No, no.” She shook her head. “But listen, what comes now?”
“Turn that lamp down. No point taking even the smallest risk of discovery, now that the hard part’s done.”
She groaned in frustration, but bent down to quench the flame and return Weir’s house to its natural state of gloom. She straightened, and turned, and found Hare right in front of her, very close. He put his gloved hands about her throat, and pushed her roughly back against the wall.
“All good things come to an end, Isabel,” he whispered as his fingers tightened. “This city’s done for me now. I’ve known that for a long time now, even if your husband could never see it. So I’m away, I don’t know where. But I do know I’ll be going alone, and I’ll not be leaving behind anyone who knows what face I’m wearing.”
He held her there for long minutes, squeezing ever more tightly, until she breathed no more, and hung limp in his grip.
Hare strode out on to the West Bow with a confident gait, tugging the black gloves tight on his hands. Rutherford, taken somewhat unawares by his abrupt reappearance, hurriedly tapped out the pipe he had been smoking on the heel of his boot. He frowned at Hare.
“Did they not give you the lamp to bring back?” he asked irritably. “It’s police property, this carriage. I’ll have to answer if it doesn’t go back just as it came out.”
“You got paid, didn’t you?” Hare snapped.
“Indeed I did, Mr. Hare. Just like you did, I’d imagine, so have a care with that tongue of yours.”
“Don’t call me Hare. That’s a dangerous name these days.”
“Oh, aye? What would you have me call you?”
“It doesn’t much matter to me. Why not Mr. Black? That’s simple enough for you to remember, I should think.”
Rutherford curled his lip in loathing. He might have pursued the discussion, and pushed on into argument
