The Edinburgh Dead by Brian Ruckley Page A

to the knife once they were dead and gone? Or their dead father or mother or brother? You did not. Explain me that.
    “No, don’t waste your time, I’ll do it for you: it’s the poor and the nameless get opened up for those precious little students to leer at, just like it’s the poor and the nameless get to bleed when there’s a battle to be fought. The French had it right, for a while at least: give us nameless folk a few guillotines and a wee revolution, see what a difference that’d make. Let others do the bleeding for a bit.”
    None of which Quire would dispute, but tonight he could not share in Dunbar’s fervour. He watched Mrs. Calder pushing her way through the throng of customers. She was not only proprietor of his preferred drinking den, but his landlady, and a solicitous one at that. She and her serving girls saw to the cleaning of his rooms a few floors above, the washing of his clothes, and now and again to his feeding. He had earned her kind regard, along with a handsome reduction in his rent, some time ago, when he dissuaded—forcefully—some disreputable fellows from taking her husband’s debts out of his hide. Mr. Calder had been carried off by a fever not long after, but his widow’s affection for Quire persisted, undimmed.
    “You never bled yourself, as I recall,” Quire muttered to Dunbar. “Impervious Dunbar, come through all the wars with nary a scratch.”
    “Thank Christ. Though I doubt he was watching.”
    “I shot the man who killed him,” mused Quire. “Put a ball in his chest from no more than twenty paces.” He tapped hard at his own sternum for emphasis. “Didn’t much bother him. How does that happen? When did you ever see a man take a shot from a Bess in the chest and not blink at it?”
    “Well, not ever,” conceded Dunbar. “But I’ve seen men lose their arm to a cannon shot and not know it was gone till I told them. And there was that Spaniard you gutted at Talavera…”
    Quire winced.
    “Aye, but that was then. It’s a different life I’m supposed to be living now. I’m a different man.”
    “Trying to be a different man, maybe, but you’ve always had arare talent for the violence, and it a rare longing for you. The two of you’ve never been long parted.”
    Quire cracked his mug down on the table, splashing a little of the beer out over the rim. He licked it from the back of his hand as he glared at Dunbar.
    “Do you not think a friend might try to offer some comfort?” he growled. “And if you say that’s what you’re doing, I’ll say you don’t know comfort from your arse.”
    “Truth’s a better remedy for any ill than comfort,” Dunbar said with a flutter of pomposity.
    “That’s a whole stream of piss, wherever you heard it.”
    “Aye, I suppose it is right enough. But this different man you’re trying to be still keeps guns and a sword under his bed, doesn’t he? You’ve no more left the past than it’s left you.”
    “Are you saying you’ve no loot from Spain hidden away somewhere? They’re worth a fair few shillings, those guns. And that sword’s a good one. Might need the money one day.”
    “Aye, right. Listen, a man needs ballast in his life, Adam, if he’s to hold a true course. Not trophies from old battles; not beer even, though it pains me to say it. Ballast. Bit of weight in the hold to keep from turning over, and that you’ll only get from others, not yourself. Family, friends, children. God knows, there’s nothing like children when it comes to ballast, take it from me. Children and a wife.”
    “Christ, Dunbar,” Quire muttered.
    “Aye,” Dunbar said, suddenly quiet. Suddenly knowing he had strayed into territory where truth walked hand in hand with hurt. “Aye, well.”
    They lapsed into silence, each communing with his own thoughts. Quire’s spiralled in tight, beer-guided circles, seeming to be revelatory from moment to moment, yet somehow yielding nothing by way of lasting insight or conclusion.
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