Baker had delivered the corpse of a young, attractive woman to the Royal Infirmary of Glasgow, never knowing she’d been carrying typhus. The entire staff had been infected. Baker was duly incarcerated in the death cell at Calton Jail, whereupon the lord provost threw together an unimpeachable case against him…helped along by Baker’s assistant, of course, who turned King’s evidence. There was no honor among thieves and less among body-snatchers. They robbed and cheated each other on a regular basis, but Leaky Baker had made a career of it. He had been stabbed three times as a result, surviving each time to brag of his exploits, but there would be no surviving the noose.
“Aye, but it could happen,” Clow said, enjoying the vibrant carnival atmosphere of Canongate and the High Street. “You heard tell of Maggie, haven’t ye? The old haybag survived the rope. Certain, she did.”
“True, it is,” Kierney admitted.
They were speaking of old “Half-Hang-It Maggie,” who’d been given the short drop back in 1728 in the Grassmarket. The old girl was cut down and coffined, placed in a cart, and drawn away to a country cemetery. Some nine miles outside Edinburgh, she came back to life and went on to live a very productive life, having several children in the process.
They waded through the streets, passing crowded stalls selling fish and oysters, silk and dyed ostrich feathers, perfume and flowers. They stepped around the fish offal dumped to the slimy cobbles, cod heads and smashed herrings.
A young boy pushing a bakery barrow smiled up at them with a dirty face and missing teeth. He bowed to them and lifted the cover, his steaming goods on display: barley cakes and bannocks, iced gingerbreads and pastries drizzled with treacle, bridies, and loaves of hot wheat bread.
“Would ye gents be hungry, governor?” he asked, ever the charming little salesman.
“Oi, I would be,” Kierney said, buying some frosted pastries. “Can’t bear a hanging on an empty stomach, I can’t.”
From the High Street, Clow and Kierney were swept along by the mob into the Grassmarket, a winding open field that sat below the high crags of Edinburgh Castle. The Grassmarket was used as the city’s weekly market when it wasn’t busy with sheep and cattle fairs. But it was also the traditional spot of execution. Above was Castle Rock with its assorted crown buildings and the circular battery rising high into the sky, all of them seeming to lean out as if they would fall to earth. Opposite were the high, grimy medieval houses of Old Town, which rose up six and seven stories, their stacked chimneys seeming to scrape the clouds themselves. From ground floor to attic, the poor lived in tiers in those great and crumbling structures and today, every shutter was flung open, people crowding to watch the execution of Leaky Baker. Every tree, every rooftop was crowded with gawkers and onlookers.
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:
“Up the close and down the stair,
But and ben wi’ Burke and Hare,
Burke’s the butcher, Hare’s the thief,
Knox the boy that buys the beef.”
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.
“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 hung
er 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.”
9
That evening, as a light mist dappled the cobblestones and pushed a chill into the air, Clow and Kierney pulled their dog cart up a steep street, nodding to those they passed. They turned onto Infirmary Street, sighting the hospital and tree-lined Surgeon’s Square just beyond. It lay out of reach of those dirty, rotting streets and was like a world unto itself. The buildings were tall and clean, set with carvings and high windows. No beggars and trash and filth to be found here. The gaslights flickered evenly. Boys meticulously swept the cobbles free of dirt. Over to the right was Surgeon’s Hall and to the left was a tall, narrow building with hooded windows.
Dark Screams, Volume 6 Page 12