The Way of All Flesh. Ambrose Parry

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. Out here 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

      itken’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