The Way of All Flesh Read online

  Dedication

  For Natalie

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  Forty-Eight

  Forty-Nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-One

  Fifty-Two

  Fifty-Three

  Fifty-Four

  Fifty-Five

  Fifty-Six

  Fifty-Seven

  Fifty-Eight

  Fifty-Nine

  Sixty

  Sixty-One

  Sixty-Two

  Sixty-Three

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  One

  No decent story ought to begin with a dead prostitute, and for that, apologies, for it is not something upon which respectable persons would desire to dwell. However, it was the very assumption that the gentle folk of Edinburgh would shy from such a thing that set Will Raven upon his fateful path during the winter of 1847. Raven would not have wished anyone to consider the discovery of poor Evie Lawson as the beginning of his own story, but what truly motivated him was the determination that neither would it be the end of hers.

  He found her four flights up on the Canongate, in a cold and crooked wee garret. The place was reeking of drink and sweat, barely tempered by a merciful note of something more perfumed: a womanly musk to be sure, if cheap and redolent only of a woman who sold herself. With these scents in his nostrils, if he closed his eyes he could imagine she was still there, about to haul herself down to the street for maybe the third or fourth time in as many hours. But his eyes were open, and he didn’t have to feel for the absence of a pulse to know otherwise.

  Raven had seen enough death to understand that her passing from this life into the next had not been an easy one. The sheets on the bed were swirled up around her, testament to more writhing than she ever feigned in her counterfeit passion, and he feared it lasted longer than any of her customers ever did. Her body, far from lying in repose, was in a state of contortion, as though the pain that had carried her off was still with her and there had been no release in death. Her brows remained contracted, her lips drawn apart. There were collections of froth at the corners of her mouth.

  Raven laid a hand on her arm and quickly withdrew it. The cold was a shock, though it shouldn’t have been. He was no stranger to handling a corpse, but seldom one whose touch he had known when warm. In this moment of contact, something ancient in him was moved by how she had gone from a person to a thing.

  Many before him had seen her transformed in this room: from the sum of their desires to a wretched vessel for their unwanted seed, adored and then despised in the moment they spilled it.

  Not him, though. Whenever they had lain together, the only transformation he contemplated was the desire to elevate her above this. He was not merely another customer. They were friends. Weren’t they? That was why she shared with him her hopes that she might find a position as a maid in a respectable house, and why he had promised to make enquiries on her behalf, once he began to move in the right circles.

  That was why she came to him for help.

  She wouldn’t tell him what the money was for, only that it was urgent. Raven guessed she owed somebody, but it was pointless trying to prevail upon her to reveal who. Evie was too practised a deceiver for that. She had seemed mightily relieved and tearfully grateful that he had got it, though. He didn’t tell her from where, concealing a concern that he might have put himself in hock to the self-same money-lender, effectively transferring Evie’s debt to him.

  It was two guineas, as much as he might expect to live on for several weeks, and thus a sum he had no immediate means of paying back. He hadn’t cared, though. He wanted to help. Raven knew there were those who would scoff at the notion, but if Evie believed she could reinvent herself as a housemaid, then he had been prepared to believe it twice as hard on her behalf.

  The money had not saved her, however, and now there would be no escape.

  He looked around the room. The stumps of two candles were guttering in the necks of gin bottles, a third long ago melted down to nothing. In the tiny grate, the embers were barely glowing in a fire she would otherwise have sparingly replenished hours ago from the coals in a nearby scuttle. By the bed was a shallow basin of water, wet rags draped over its rim and a ewer alongside. It was what she used to clean herself afterwards. Close by it on the floor lay an upended gin bottle, a modest puddle testifying to there being little left inside when it tumbled.

  There was no label on the bottle, its provenance unknown and therefore suspect. It would not be the first time some back-alley gut-rot distiller had inadvertently brewed up a lethal draught. Complicating this thesis was the sight of a bottle of brandy on the windowsill, still half full. It must have been a client who brought it.

  Raven wondered if the same individual witnessed Evie’s throes and left it behind in his hurry to escape the aftermath. If so, why didn’t he call for help? Possibly because to some, being found with a sick hoor was no better than being found with a dead one, so why draw attention to yourself? That was Edinburgh for you: public decorum and private sin, city of a thousand secret selves.

  Aye. Sometimes they didn’t even need to spill their seed for the vessel to be transformed.

  He looked once more upon the glassy hollowness in her eyes, the contorted mask that was a mockery of her face. He had to swallow back the lump in his throat. Raven had first set eyes upon her four years ago when he was but a schoolboy, boarding at George Heriot’s. He recalled the whispers behind hands of the older boys who knew the truth of what they were looking at when they spied her walking along the Cowgate. They were full of that curious mix of lustful fascination and fearful scorn, wary of what their own instincts were making them feel. They wanted her as they hated her, even then. Nothing changed.

  At that age, the future seemed unattainable even as he was hurtling towards it. To Raven, she appeared an emissary of a world he was not yet permitted to inhabit. For that reason, he regarded her as someone above him, even after he discovered that the future was unavoidably here, and learned how easily certain things were attainable.

  She seemed so much older, so much more worldly, until he came to understand that she had seen only a small, grim part of the world, and far more of that than any woman should. Woman? Girl. He later learned that she was younger than him by almost a year. She must have been fourteen when he saw her on the Cowgate. How she had grown in his mind between that moment and the first time he
had her: a promise of true womanhood and all he dreamed it had to offer.

  Her world had been small and squalid. She deserved to see a wider one, a better one. That was why he gave her the money. Now it was gone and so was she, and Raven was none the wiser as to what his debt had paid for.

  For a moment he felt as though tears were about to come, but a vigilant instinct cautioned him that he must get out of this place before he was seen.

  He left the room on quiet feet, closing the door softly. He felt like a thief and a coward as he crept down the stairs, abandoning her to preserve his own reputation. From elsewhere in the close he could hear the sounds of copulation, the exaggerated cries of a young woman feigning her ecstasy to hasten the end.

  Raven wondered who would find Evie now. Her landlady most likely: the redoubtably sleekit Effie Peake. Though she preferred to pretend ignorance when it suited her, she missed little that went on under her roof unless she had already succumbed to the gin for the night. Raven felt sure the hour was yet too early for that, hence the softness of his tread.

  He left out the back way and through the middens, emerging from an alleyway onto the Canongate a good forty yards west of Evie’s close. Beneath the black sky, the air felt cold but far from fresh. The smells of ordure were inescapable around here, so many lives piled one upon the other in the foetid labyrinth that was the Old Town, like Bruegel’s Tower of Babel or Botticelli’s Map of Hell.

  Raven knew he should repair to his cold and joyless wee room in Bakehouse Close for one last night. He had a whole new beginning ahead of him the next day, and he ought to rest himself ahead of it. But he also knew sleep was unlikely to come after what he had just witnessed. It was not a night for solitude, or for sobriety.

  The only antidote to being confronted with death was the hearty embrace of life, even if that embrace was smelly, sweaty and rough.

  Two

  Aitken’s tavern was a morass of bodies, a thunderous noise of male voices ever rising to be heard over each other, and all enveloped in a thick fog of pipe smoke. Raven did not partake of it himself but enjoyed its sweetness in his nose, all the more in an establishment such as this for what it covered up.

  He stood at the gantry sipping ale, talking to nobody in particular, alone but not lonely. It was a warm place to lose oneself, the greater cacophony better than silence as a backdrop for his thoughts, but he also enjoyed the diversions afforded by homing in on individual conversations, as if each of them were tiny vignettes playing out for his entertainment. There was talk of the new Caledonian Railway Station being built at the end of Princes Street, fears expressed about the possibility of hordes of starving Irishmen finding their way along the track from Glasgow.

  Any time he turned his head he saw faces he recognised, some from long before he was permitted inside an establishment such as this. The Old Town teemed with thousands of people, glimpsed upon the street and never seen again, and yet at the same time it could feel like a village. There were always familiar faces anywhere you looked – and always familiar eyes upon you.

  He noticed a man in a tattered and ancient hat glance his way more than once. Raven didn’t recognise him, but he seemed to recognise Raven, and there was little affection in his gaze. Someone he had gotten into a brawl with, no doubt, though the same draught that precipitated the fight had also blurred the memory. From the sour look on his face, Tattered-hat must have taken second prize.

  In truth, mere drink might not have been the cause, on Raven’s part at least. There was a dark want in him sometimes, one he was learning to be wary of, though not enough to be the master of it. He felt a stirring of it tonight inside that gloomy garret, and could not in honesty say whether he had come here to drown it or to feed it.

  He met Tattered-hat’s gaze once more, whereupon the man scurried towards the door. He moved more purposefully than most men might exit a tavern, casting a final glance Raven’s way before disappearing into the night.

  Raven returned to his ale and put him from his mind.

  As he raised the tankard again, he felt a slap on his back, the hand remaining to grip his shoulder. Instinctively he pivoted on a heel, fist formed tight and his elbow drawn back to strike.

  ‘Hold, Raven. That’s no way to treat a colleague. At least not one who still has coins in his pocket to match his drouth.’

  It was his friend Henry, whom he must have missed in the throng.

  ‘My apologies,’ he replied. ‘One cannot be too careful in Aitken’s these days, for standards have slipped and I’m told they’re even letting surgeons in.’

  ‘I didn’t think to see a man of your prospects still patronising an Old Town hostelry. Aren’t you moving on to fresh pastures? It won’t make for the perfect start should you present yourself to your new employer having had a bellyful of ale the night before.’

  Raven knew Henry wasn’t serious, but it was nonetheless a timely reminder not to push things too far. One or two would be adequate to help him sleep, but now that he had company, one or two was unlikely to be the whole of it.

  ‘And what of you?’ Raven batted back. ‘Have you not duties of your own in the morning?’

  ‘Indeed, but as I expected my old friend Will Raven to be indisposed, I sought the ministrations of another associate, Mr John Barleycorn, to soothe the woes cast by my duties today.’

  Henry handed over some coins and their tankards were refreshed. Raven thanked him and watched Henry take a long pull at the beer.

  ‘A taxing shift, was it?’ Raven asked.

  ‘Bashed-in heads, broken bones and another death from peritonitis. Another young woman, poor thing. Nothing we could do for her. Professor Syme could not discern the cause, which drove him to a state of high dudgeon, and which of course was everyone else’s fault.’

  ‘There’ll be a post-mortem, then.’

  ‘Yes. A pity you are not free to attend. I’m sure you could offer greater insight than our current pathologist. Half the time he’s as pickled as the specimens in his laboratory.’

  ‘A young woman, you say?’ Raven asked, thinking of the one he just left. Evie would be afforded no such attention once she was found.

  ‘Yes, why?’

  ‘No reason.’

  Henry took a long swallow and eyed Raven thoughtfully. He knew he was under exacting scrutiny. Henry was quite the diagnostician, and not merely of what ailed the body.

  ‘Are you well enough, Raven?’ he asked, his tone sincere.

  ‘I’ll be better once I’ve got this down me,’ he replied, making an effort to sound cheerier. Henry was not so easily fooled, though.

  ‘It’s just that . . . you have a look about you, of which I have long since learned to be wary. I don’t share your perverse appetite for mayhem and nor do I wish to find myself treating your wounds when I ought to be resting.’

  Raven knew he had no grounds for protest. All charges were true, including the glimmer of that dark want he feared was in him tonight. Fortunately, given Henry’s company, on this occasion he felt sure the ale would quench it.

  You’ve the devil in you, his mother used to tell him when he was a child. Sometimes it was meant in humour, but sometimes it was not.

  ‘I am a man of prospects now, Henry,’ he assured him, proffering payment and gesturing for two refills, ‘and have no wish to jeopardise them.’

  ‘A man of prospects indeed,’ Henry replied. ‘Though why the esteemed Professor of Midwifery should award such a coveted position to a reprobate such as yourself remains a mystery to me.’

  Reluctant as he was to admit it, it was a question that gave Raven pause too. He had worked hard to win the professor’s approval, but there had been several equally diligent and committed candidates for the apprenticeship. He had no solid notion of why he had been given the nod ahead of the rest, and did not like to dwell upon the precariousness of such caprice.

  ‘The professor hails from humble stock,’ was as much as he could offer, an answer unlikely to satisfy Henry any more than it
satisfied Raven. ‘Perhaps he believes that such opportunities should not be the sole preserve of the high-born.’

  ‘Or perhaps he lost a wager, and you are the forfeit.’

  The drink flowed, and with it old tales. It helped. The image of Evie flickered in and out of his vision like the guttering candles in her room. But listening to Henry, Raven was reminded of the world Evie did not get to see, reminded of the opportunity waiting for him across the North Bridge. A little of his love for this place and for the Old Town in general had died tonight. It was time to leave it all behind, and if anyone was a believer in new beginnings, it was Will Raven. He had reinvented himself once before and was about to do so again.

  Several tankards later they stood outside Aitken’s watching their breath turn to steam in the chill of the night air.

  ‘It’s been good to see you,’ Henry said. ‘But I’d best be getting my head down. Syme’s operating tomorrow, and he’s all the pricklier when he can smell last night’s tobacco and beer on his assistants.’

  ‘Aye, “prickly” is the word for Syme,’ Raven replied. ‘With emphasis on the first part. Meanwhile I’m back to Mrs Cherry’s for one last night.’

  ‘Bet you’ll miss her and her lumpy porridge,’ Henry called out as he turned onto South Bridge in the direction of the Infirmary. ‘Not to mention her effervescent personality.’

  ‘For sure, she and Syme would make a fine match,’ Raven called back, crossing the road and heading east in the direction of his lodgings.

  Raven knew there were elements of his time here that he might one day regard with nostalgic fondness or regret, but his accommodations were not among them. Ma Cherry was a cantankerous old crone who resembled her name only in that she was round and reddened, for there was certainly nothing sweet about her. She was as sour as earwax and as desiccated as a corpse in the desert, but she kept a lodging house that was among the cheapest in the town; just above the workhouse in terms of comfort and cleanliness.

  A smir of cold rain blew about him as he headed down the High Street towards Netherbow. Clouds had gathered and the moon-light disappeared since he made his way to Aitken’s. He noticed that some of the street lights remained unlit, making it almost impossible to avoid the piles of muck on the pavement. He inwardly cursed the lamplighter who had failed to do what Raven considered to be a straightforward job. If he himself was as incompetent, lives would be lost.