Brian Freeman - Dark Screams - Volume Six

“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.

“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.