Anatomy: A Love Story(61)
When she wasn’t in the laboratory examining a new patient or on the first floor of Hawthornden Castle going cot to cot, Hazel found herself lingering in the entrance hall, hoping for Beecham’s reply. When she heard a knock at the castle’s front door, her stomach tightened into a knot. Outside the window, she could see Jack on the south lawn behind the castle, teaching Charles the basics of sword fighting.
“No, no,” she called to Iona. “I’ll get the door.” Smoothing her skirts, she opened the door to find something even more unexpected than a letter.
“Greetings, miss,” said the boy, sinking into a deep bow. His face and hair were streaked with soot. He offered her a grin with several missing teeth as he rose. “I ’eard Jack Currer’s been hanging around these parts. Tell ’im Munro is back from the dead.”
Dumbfounded, Hazel ushered the boy inside and helped to remove his coat. One of his sleeves flopped loose and empty. This boy, the missing Munro, had returned to the land of the living with only one arm.
28
MUNRO DRANK TWO POTS OF TEA and ate a full tray of biscuits before he reclined on the couch, slapped his belly, and smiled out at Hazel and Jack, who had been staring at him with fascination ever since he arrived at Hawthornden Castle.
Munro smacked his lips. “Now, those were some fine biscuits, if I can say, miss. Fine biscuits indeed.”
“Thank you,” Hazel said.
“Munro,” Jack said, unable to help himself any longer. “Where have you been? And how did you lose your arm!”
Munro exhaled with a heaving sigh, fluttering his top lip. “Shame, isn’t it?” he said, lifting the empty left sleeve of his shirt. “Still, thank the good Lord it’s not my shooting hand, eh? I reckon you get a pistol in my right hand, and I still take out half a dozen grouse before the master of the house knows I’m on his land at all.” He turned and gave a saucy wink to Iona, who had been tending to the fire in the grate while pretending she wasn’t listening intently to what they were all saying. “I cook up a mean grouse, roasted over a fire with some chestnuts in its belly if I can find ’em. Finest Christmas I ever had was a stolen grouse and chestnuts, back in the old squat in Fleshmarket Close. Remember that place, Jack-boy? The roof half caved in and the floors bit by termites, but still not a bad place far as those things go.”
“Munro,” Jack said again. “Your arm. You’ve been missing. For weeks.”
“Right, right. The story. ’Fore I start, just supposing it were possible to get more of these biscuits? Oh, thank ye, love, you’re an angel, really. From heaven above.
“Before I start, I should tell ye now, I don’t remember it all. It comes and goes, like the fog. Like I’m seeing it all through the smoke of some’un’s burning dinner. But I at least know where it started, that part is easy enough: I was on a dig in Greyfriars, trying to get the body of a poor bird who died with her baby still in her belly. Killed herself, they said. Boyfriend didn’t love her no more. Arsenic, I heard. But o’ course the family wouldn’t admit it, so they just said it was the Roman sickness. Convenient excuse, having a plague running around the city, that’s all I’ll say.
“So I went round midnight to the kirkyard by my lonesome. Usually, would have been nice to have a partner in this sort of thing, but you know Bristlwhistle left for Calais and Milstone died last month—tragic thing, tragic—and who else of the crooks am I supposed to trust? Specially when I was looking to make a fortune with that poor pregnant girl. I’ve been working this game long enough that I don’t like to split the profits if I don’t have to. When you’ve been poor as long as I have, greed don’t quite seem so bad of a sin, I think.
“So, yeah, I set out alone to Greyfriars in the night—didn’t even bother to bring a torch, seein’ how I know the grounds there so well. Could walk it blindfolded and not trip on a single stone, I’m telling ye. Not a single rock nor anthill in that place I couldn’t sniff out on a moonless night and with both my eyes closed.
“The gate was unlocked. That was the first strange thing I remember. I hopped it out of habit, just in case, but I remember that very clearly. It was closed, mind you, but not locked. So course I assume someone else beat me to it, someone else is going to take my prize pig, so I race over to the grave and no one’s there. Dirt tilled from the burial, but no one’s dug it up. No one’s in the kirkyard at all. No wind either. It was like even the ghosts stopped moving. It was so still I could hear my own heartbeat in my ears. I do remember that part. I don’t ken if it’s important, or if it means anything at all, but God’s honest truth: that last night that I remember the night was as still as I had ever heard her. The lights were even out at George Heriot’s. Not even a candle in the window.
“I get to digging, but before I get more’n a few inches into the ground, a man is suddenly standing right in front of me. That’s the only way I can explain it, he just appears right before my nose. Didn’t even hear him coming, couldn’t even hear him breathing. He’s wearing a hat that blocks his face, and in the dark I can’t tell what sort of face is under it at all. But I still have my spade, mind you, and I hold it up at his face and tell him not to come a step closer. This is my body, I says, I found her, and what’s more, I was here first. Any resurrection man worth his salt knows not to steal a body from someone who’s already stealing it.