ONE
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