By eight a.m., a raw stink of fish, manure, and discharge from the slaughteryards began to blow in, commingling with the ever-present stench of the surrounding slums themselves—filth and sewage and crowded humanity. A light rain began to fall and the sky was overcast, the color of gunpowder. But none of it deterred those that had come by the hundreds to watch Leaky Baker marry the rope-maker’s daughter. At the east end of the market was the traditional gibbet stone, which was fashioned from solid sandstone. It had a quadrangular hole in the middle that was used as a gallow’s socket. But today, it was ignored, for already the scaffold had been erected at the huge black hanging tree in the center.
“Lookee there, Sammy Clow, it be the gallows tree of Grassmarket,” Kierney said. “Enough to make yer blood run cold. Me mother used to say to us that it had stood long before there was a city here. That it was the last remnant of a black and leathery forest that covered the country in days of yore when no people walked here.”
“Yer mother was right,” Clow said. “Gives me the fucking shivers, it does.”
Nobody knew exactly what sort of tree it was, only that it was black and spidery and grotesque, rising up like a clutching hand. There was something evil and barren about it. Four men fingertip to fingertip could not encircle its trunk with their arms. Its bole was twisted and corded, the bark seamed and plated, the limbs long and stout and curiously jagged. Even in the greenest summers, it bore no leaf or sprout. Dead it was and dead it had been for longer than any could remember, as if maybe it wasn’t a tree at all but the mummified exoskeleton of some gigantic insect.
“I think I’d rather languish in the Salt Box at Newgate Prison wearing the Devil’s Claws than to be married to that tree,” Kierney said.
The crowd was pressing in, more coming all the time. Leaky Baker was already in attendance. He’d been whipped through the streets from the Tolbooth in the High Street and was surrounded by a police watch so the drunken mob didn’t get their hands on him.
Already there had been outbreaks of violence… people beaten and trampled, several women assaulted, and a couple tradesmen stabbed during arguments. But it was no surprise, for executions were wild and woolly affairs, street carnivals where tin pails of whiskey punch and ale made the rounds. Vendors sold baked potatoes, roasted pork sandwiches, and fried fish. Here were respectable moneyed ladies in hoop skirts and gentlemen in high hats rubbing shoulders with beggars and sweepers. Boot-blackers and mud-larkers stood shoulder to shoulder with sailors and whores and black-faced chimney sweeps. Pickpockets and gamblers worked the crowds, prostitutes flashing their wares and street children crawling about on their hands and knees, stealing anything that was dropped.
Near to Clow and Kierney, a rowdy gang of coal-heavers was passing bottles of rum, leaning up against one another so they wouldn’t fall on their faces. They cursed and pissed themselves, kicked dogs, and insulted passing ladies, having a high time of it all around. But mostly they sang the same tune again and again:
It had been a popular tune ever since William Burke swung at the Grassmarket, and each time a grave robber was put to the rope, the little ditty surged in popularity. The song was passed through the crowd, sung loud by dirty, grinning mouths.
It was a morning of wild, raucous splendor for all in attendance and much money was changed hands, lost, and stolen. Men passed out. Dogs were kicked to death. Children crushed by the mob. And more than one woman was with child when it was all over with. Entertainment was always lacking in the industrial ghettos of Edinburgh, and a good hanging was always better than bull-baiting, cockfights, or the usual bare-fisted brawls.
“Listen to that song, would ye?” Clow said. “I’m thinking these fine folk and sweet-stepping gentry have a lack of respect for our chosen profession, Mickey.”
“It would seem so, Sammy. It would seem so.” Kierney stuck a plug of tobacco in his mouth and spit brown juice into the eyes of a growling mongrel. “But the hour grows near and soon Leaky Baker, fine man that he was, will be no more.”
“A shame it is, a shame.”
Clow shook his head. “And don’t ye be believing those filthy lies told of poor Leaky. Why, just the other day the boys were saying how Leaky kidnapped that trio of dwarf children from the circus and Burked them in a lonely warehouse, putting his hand over their small mouths and pinching their noses shut.”
“They said that? Why, the bastards!”
“Aye, they did. Burked the three of ’em, they said, and stuffed them in flour sacks, selling their earthly remains to the anatomists at Surgeon’s Hall. But Leaky was a fine, fine man and he wouldn’t have done such. I’m sure the little angels went to their god by natural causes.”
“Certainly,” Kierney said. “Leaky a common murderer? Ah, is rubbish, it is.”
“Must be. For I swear by me mother’s virtue that Leaky Baker was a fine, upstanding Christian and the church poor box will be sadly lacking without the likes of him.”
“Charitable and tireless was he.”
Clow packed his pipe and eyed the crowd. “Why, I recall the favor Leaky did me when I was but a lad of sixteen and two. Worked me ass off in the mills all week for a few dirty shillings, and Leaky and his Christian friends beat me down and took me money. Ah, I near starved! Not a scrap of food I had for nigh on a week… but it was a fine and worthy thing he did for me. Otherwise, I would have spent that money on drink and debauchery, as my kind always do.”
Kierney wiped his eyes. “Aye, these are true tears I cry for such a story. God bless him for saving you from yerself. What a fine man, a fine man. Why, it brings to mind another tale of Leaky’s kindness and god-fearing ways. This one will squeeze yer heart dry, I say. But you surely remember when he raped his own daughter?”
“A fine act that was, may God bless and keep him for that,” Clow said. “For Leaky did it out of the goodness of his heart.”
“He did at that. Why, it was for the girl’s own good that he took her the way he did. After that, why, the child would know rape when she saw it.”
“Aye, it saddens me, these heartwarming tales. There is no depth to a father’s love. And to think they’re going to hang that fine, randy bastard… why, it’s a sin.”
“A Christian martyr, he is.”
A drunken man came staggering over to them, elbowing sailors and cartmen out of the way. He wore a ragged frock coat decorated with vomit down the lapel. His breath stank of the dried fish he’d been chewing. “Are ye two drunk? For ye must be to talk of that gamy bastard Leaky Baker in such a manner. He weren’t nothing but a fucking shit in search of a hole.”
The man was Ian Slade, a snatcher both men had long known. The sleeves of his dirty coat were speckled with fish scales, the result of stuffing corpses into herring barrels for easy transport, as was his way.