“Aye, a fine man he was, Ian,” Clow said.
“Yer drunk? Yer both fucking drunk!”
Kierney spit tobacco juice at his feet. “Aye, drunk we are, Ian Slade. And hungry.” He was studying the vomit down the front of Slade’s coat and the various undigested bits in it. “Is that fried scupper I see there, Ian? Oh, but it makes me belly hollow, just the smell of it.”
Slade grimaced. “Cheeky, smart prick, ain’t ye?”
He made to jump on Kierney, but Clow slid a knife from the sleeve of his coat and pressed the blade to Slade’s round belly. Held it there, so it could get a smell of the meat it would soon carve.
“Off with you, Ian, let us remember our friend in our way,” Clow said.
Slade eyed Clow like he wanted to tear his throat out and take his time about it. But then he smiled and backed away. “Good day to ye, Samuel Clow.”
Then he was gone, melting into the ground, drowning in that sea of dirty, drunken humanity.
“Wee bit of a nasty temper to that one,” Clow said.
“ ’Tis a shame, a shame.”
A hush fell through the crowds as the clock of St. Giles tolled the death knell of eight, the appointed time for Leaky Baker to meet his maker. A scaffold had been erected at the gallows tree, some twelve feet up in the air, a double ladder placed against it. Williams, the hangman, led Baker up the steps. Baker did not hesitate nor tremble visibly. He climbed the steps with a great calm and concentration. When he was in place—standing there in his bloody shirt, staring out over the crowd with his beady rodent’s eyes—he managed a thin little smile. He worked up a juicy ball of phlegm and spit it out at those that had gathered, right over the shoulder of the police watch that encircled the scaffold. Immediately the crowd came to life, swearing and cursing and shouting.
“BURKE HIM!” someone cried. “BURKE THAT CORPSE-THIEVING MURDERING BASTARD!”
“AYE, BURKE THE BASTARD! GIVE ’EM WHAT HE GAVE THEM OTHERS, LYING, FILTHY FUCK!”
The police visibly tensed. They were all that stood between Baker and a particularly gruesome episode of vigilante justice. They had their clubs at the ready. But had the crowd decided to storm the gallows, they would have been swallowed alive in seconds, trampled underfoot and mashed to pulp in the grass. More police pressed in on horseback, calling out for the crowd to settle down or they’d be turned away.
Leaky Baker was enjoying it.
He’d been a predator all his life, gaining his greatest thrills from the pain and discomfort of others, and here he was with an amassed flock gathered, one he could toy with and humiliate and anger. And he loved it. Loved the crowd he worked with his bare hands, that sea of faces that had come for him and him alone.
“I’ve sold the corpses of yer mothers and sisters and fat fetching daughters to the surgeon’s knife!” he called out at them. “And what a merry lark it was! So much beef were them whores! I pissed on their graves out of respect, just as I piss on the lot of you buggering cocksuckers!”
You could almost hear something snap out in the crowd. Like maybe some restraint of self-control, and civilization had finally reached the breaking point and burst, setting free the bloody-hungering beast within. Eyes were wide and hating; mouths scowling, teeth gnashing, drool wiped from lips with grubby fists. From the high buildings opposite, people screamed from windows, a few nearly falling out from four and five stories up. The guards up on the scaffold stepped back momentarily, feeling the raw and smoldering rage of the crowd like a wind blown from a smelting oven. Then, wiping sweat from their faces and maybe thinking of their meaningless and violent deaths at the hands of the crowd, they took hold of Baker. But he was a pleasant sort right to the end. Although his hands were tied behind his back, his legs were free and he kicked one of the watchmen. The other locked an arm around his throat while the hangman slipped the white hood over his head. Through it all, the attendant minister, pale as flour now, kept reading verses from the Book of Common Prayer… though you could hardly hear him over the bellowing crowd.
A woman atop a man’s square shoulders tossed her greasy hair back and pulled from a bottle of gin. “HEY, GRAVE ROBBER! WE’RE GOING TO TAN YOUR HIDE AND CUT YOUR BALLS OFF!”
“AYE,” said a man in front. “YANK OUT HIS BOWELS AND FEED HIS STOMACH TO THE RATS, I SAY!”
“BURN HIM! BURN THE FOOKING BASTARD!”
Clow was not caring for this much. He could smell the sour, boozy stink of the crowd, and it was an acrid odor like something black and vile simmering away in a witch’s cauldron. If they didn’t hang Baker and soon, those gathered would not be able to hold themselves back. And what scared him most was at that moment when everything in the Grassmarket was balanced precariously in a deadly neutrality, it wouldn’t have taken much to incite the mob. A single finger pointing and the cried accusation of grave robber would bring death. There were plenty of snatchers in the crowd and plenty of people who knew who they were. A simple accusation and both he and Kierney would be dismembered, disemboweled, and strung up for a public stoning or burning.
The police on watch were looking very frightened.
You could feel the electricity surging through the crowd, arcing from body to body to body in an unbroken circuit, amping up and revving itself to full bore. An awful hot stink wafted from them.
Something was about to happen.
The crowd, still shouting and screaming and crying out for blood, began to inch toward the scaffold. They were a single thrumming machine of intolerance. A machine with a million legs and a million scratching fingers, a million bunching muscles and chattering teeth and fixed eyes, all lorded over by a single insane mind. The machine would not back down. It was roaring, gone kinetic with a burning stink now that critical mass had been reached. Gears were grinding and wheels spinning, sparks flying and smoke rising. Nothing could stand in the way of the machine. It would crush any and all…
And at the last possible moment, the order was given by the sergeant of the guard, and the trap was sprung beneath Leaky Baker. His body jerked and his neck snapped with the sound of a dry twig. His legs kicked for a moment or two and that was it. He swung from side to side, slowly revolving.
You could hear the almost orgasmic cry of the crowd. Death hunger and death lust had been satisfied, and they relaxed, sighed with the sound of a thousand balloons deflating. They began to shrink and pull away from one another, no longer wanting the press of sweaty flesh against their own. A few groups still raged for more, but most began to break away, looking almost embarrassed.
The police knew how to deal with the scattered bands of rowdies and they began to corral them in on horseback. Clow and Kierney were nearly exhausted by it all themselves and they leaned against each other.
“That was a bit of a scrape,” Clow said.
“Aye, for just the one moment there, I saw the angelic face of me whoring mother welcoming me beyond the pearly gates.” Kierney sighed. “Is not an experience I’ll be wanting again soon.”
As the police kept the unruly elements at bay and the others began fading away to the drab hopelessness of their crowded, close lives, the body of Leaky Baker was cut down. After the attendant police surgeon was satisfied that his neck was quite broken and his life was quite gone, the body was dragged from the scaffold and dumped into an enclosed mortuary wagon. From there it would be brought to Surgeon’s Hall for dissection by the anatomists.
Kierney took off his hat and pressed it to his chest. “And so we bid ye a fond and final farewell, Leaky… ye ripe, thievin’ fuck.”
Clow grinned. “Aye, to the silence and worms and sighing vaults, Leaky, ye great bloody gob.”