The shaded lantern threw a somber yellow light that reflected off puddles and saturated earth, created wild, leaping shadows that crept along the desolate ivy faces and wrought-iron doors of burial vaults.
A draft horse and buckboard waited in the downpour on the winding dirt road beyond. The horse—Old Clem—shook his flanks. All around, Clow could hear the scratching and stirrings of the big rats that haunted the cemetery.
“Think I’ve hit something in me digging,” Kierney said, his shovel thudding against wood. He rapped it a few times, scraped mud away from what he had revealed. “What do you suppose could be down here, Samuel Clow? I’m thinking I don’t like this, not at all.”
Clow hung his frock coat from a tall, chipped mortuary urn and pulled Kierney up out of the grave. Donning his apron, he jumped down himself, brushing mud aside until he felt the rough-hewn surface of the pine box beneath his hands.
“Aye, you’ve found something, all right,” he said, pawing dirt away from the top. “Me thinks it be the Devil’s work, so pass down them hooks and bring Old Clem yonder.”
They had opened the grave only enough to expose the upper third of the coffin. This would be enough for what they had to do. Two iron hooks were lowered on ropes to Clow, and he inserted their tips under the upper lip of the lid. He arranged sacking over the coffin so the sound of the rent wood would be muffled. Then he crawled up out of the hole, wind-driven rain drenching all the spots it had missed before. The draft horse was unharnessed and led through the forest of headstones, the ends of the ropes attached to his collar and bit.
“All right, let’s do it, then,” Clow said.
Clem was led forward, the ropes snapped taut, hooks digging in for purchase. Moving forward at a casual walk, Clem put his back into it and there was a muted cracking as the lid was snapped free.
As Kierney hooked Clem back up to trace and lines, Clow said, “I blame me poor upbringing for all this. Me father was a drunk and me mother a whore. The old man would beat us awake at cockcrow each day and me six brothers and sisters would warm ourselves over a lump of lukewarm coal. We breakfasted on dry leaves and rainwater, then a good beating we received and off to work we’d go.”
“Is no wonder you turned out so poorly,” Kierney said. “But did he beat you with his hands?”
“Aye, he did.”
“Well, that explains why you’re so soft, then. Me old man used an iron bar. Beat us bloody with it, buggered us, then made us chew a mouthful of raw gravel. Was a wonderful childhood I had.”
It was a good lark going on like that, but Clow didn’t care to think of his childhood. It had been dark and dreary and awful, as was the childhood of any that grew up in the Edinburgh slums of Old Town. His story was no worse than any other. He grew up in a cramped, two-room flat at the very top of a rotting, rat-infested tenement with six brothers and sisters. Every winter, dozens of people died from outbreaks of typhus or cholera. By the time he was eight, four of his siblings were numbered among them. Dogs and pigs and goats lived in the same dirty straw as their owners. The heat and stink were unbearable at high summer, as were the flies and mites and lice. By the time he was ten, his father had run out or been killed—take your pick—and his sisters were selling flowers and he was selling salt door-to-door from sunup to sundown. And, of course, by that time his mother was whoring, dead drunk most of the time. The flat wasn’t much before, but after that it was a vermin-infested cesspool. What clothes and bedding they had were never washed and the chamber pot was no longer carried downstairs and tipped into the communal midden, it was simply dumped out the window onto whomever was fool enough to be lounging on the walks five stories below.
It was about that time that Clow turned to crime as his sisters turned to prostitution. Yet, disgusted by it all as he was, he didn’t leave until just after his twelfth birthday, when he woke in the dead of night to discover rats eating his baby sister. She’d come down with fever and was fed gin by his mother and by the time the rats set upon the poor child, she was too drunk and diseased to care.
Yes, a lovely childhood, Clow often thought.
Then there were petty crime and workhouses and finally prison and now grave robbing. It seemed a natural progression, and Clow was so desensitized by his grim existence, he didn’t see the error in any of it. Things were as they were. For when you have nothing better to compare it to, even a sewer and a rat’s existence seem acceptable.
Clow laughed under his breath at the folly of his life, then went back to the grave.
He went down, his apron filthy black with mud now. He peeled aside the shroud and uncovered the body. It was a woman. Her eyes were wide and blanched, lips pulled back from white teeth. Rainwater beaded on her discolored, blotchy face. A beetle crawled out of her mouth and Clow flicked it aside. He wrinkled his nose at the rank odor coming off her as he handled her greasy, mucid flesh and slid the ropes under her armpits. Out of the grave, jerking and yanking, Clow and Kierney dragged the body up and laid it in the muddy grass. Diligently, they stripped it of grave clothes and threw those back into the breached casket.
“You’ve been on the sweets, haven’t you, dear?” Clow said to the cadaver. “Bit round in the middle, eh? Now, that’s no way to go through life, darling, and you such a pretty thing, too.”
“Oi, quit trying to get into her skirts and lend a hand here,” Kierney said.
But Clow hesitated. Carefully, he pulled back her graying lips farther to get a good look at her teeth. White and strong. Lovely, is what he was thinking. Dentists were paying ten or eleven shillings for good pearlies. Just a wee bit of work with the pliers and the coins would be in his pocket.
Clow caressed the corpse’s face. “Fear not, duck, I’ll be gentle.”
“You going to kiss her, then?” Kierney wanted to know.
“Aye, did already, and a fine romance we had.”
They wrapped her in a tarp and loaded her into the wagon with the others and filled in the grave, taking care so that it would appear undisturbed come morning. Donning their coats, they climbed up into the buckboard and Clem trotted off into the city.
“It’s a fine night we had,” Kierney said, working the reins.
Clow nodded, shaking water from his lavender hat. “It is. Through grace and providence we’ve had a merry run of it. I feel no guilt at the robbing of the graves. We are fishermen and our hooks and nets have been cast, our bounty hauled in to be shared with all.”
Kierney laughed. “Aye, it is God’s own work we do, I would say. Bless us one and all.”
Off to the city they went, to deliver their stock.
It was at the Sign of the Boar, over steak-and-kidney pie washed down the gullet by ale and gin, that Clow and Kierney managed to dry out before the fire. The damp steamed from them in coils of smoke. Bellies filled and pence laid, they began the night’s drinking.
“Oi, fill every flagon in the house with cold gin,” Clow said, holding up his mug before the hearth. “Let them wallow in spirits, one and all.”
A resounding cheer rang up as the barmaids made to fill mug after mug. Clow stood there, his eyes dark and his grin sharp as a guillotine blade, emoting warmth and comradeship… or his version of it. Standing there, high and proud and randy in his double-breasted cobalt frock coat worn to fringe about the sleeves and flaps and smudged with grave soil, he thought himself a lord among men. His John Bull hat was cocked to a rakish angle on his head, the crown steaming, the brim snapped tight.
The Boar was a dirty, greasy place filled with dirty, greasy people. Whores and drunks, beggars and sailors, laborers and thieves. They gathered in clusters, flashing yellow teeth and gripping shiny coins in grubby hands. The air was redolent with woodsmoke, fried fish, and unwashed flesh.