Chapter 38
The wet reek of sewage assaulted James the moment he entered the Tolbooth.
The wailing of men’s voices echoed inside like the cries of feral animals.
It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the sudden dark pressing in on him.
Raw stone gradually came into clarity, as did the handful of doors studding a hallway that disappeared from shadow into blackness.
A turnkey appeared, his hair pulled raggedly into a limp ponytail hanging down his back. He emanated the sour stench of sweat and vomit, as if he were the foulness of the place made manifest.
“The devil take you.” One of the Campbell men thrust James toward the prison guard. "You’ll soon rot with the MacDonalds.”
James quickly righted himself. “And I’ll see that the devil holds your place,” he replied coolly.
Straightening his shoulders, James mustered what dignity he could with his hands bound behind him.
The turnkey grasped for his arm, and he flinched away.
“I’ve no fight with you,” James told him, and allowed the man to lead him to his cell.
Little light permeated the bowels of the prison.
Torches sputtered along the walls, casting the two men in intermittent halos as they made their way, wending along corridors that seemed to branch ever outward like a labyrinth.
The mad howling of men reverberated more loudly the deeper they went, and James wondered that perhaps he was off to see the devil, and that hell lay within the very walls around him.
The guard heaved open a door and they walked in among the prisoners.
The acrid tang of urine was sharp in the dead air, making James’s eyes momentarily tear.
Cells crafted of brick and mortar lined the heavy stone walls like a honeycomb.
Four iron doors loomed at the end of the passageway, each bearing a black slit proclaiming its occupant imprisoned in total darkness.
Men, and what seemed the ghosts of men, were all around him.
Some stared wild-eyed, ranting and grabbing for them through the bars of their cages, while others lay still, with their backs to the world as if willing death to claim them.
“Aye, here.” The turnkey’s voice was a startling rasp at his side.
They’d reached an empty cell, and James was grateful to see he had bars instead of a door to hold him.
Something skittered from out of the cell and the guard kicked suddenly and violently, just missing a large rat that raced into the shadows.
“You’re to catch those,” a voice scolded from behind. James turned to the prisoner inhabiting the cell across from his own. The man bowed his head. “The rats. You must catch them,” he repeated. James noted the tight swell at the belly of the man’s waistcoat.
Clicking a large square padlock into place, the guard locked him in. Though he’d girded himself, James couldn’t help but feel his stomach turn at the sound.
Tamping down a spike of disbelief, James studied the small cubicle that was his cell. He inhaled deeply in an attempt to gather himself, realizing that his last days might very well be spent with nothing but his wits and a single bucket to rely on.
“The name is Ainslie,” he heard behind him.
“I am James Graham,” he said, meeting the other prisoner’s eyes. "Marquis of— ”
“We’ve no need for surnames here,” Ainslie interrupted. “A title will earn you naught but death.”
“Indeed?” James assessed the man. His bulging eyes and yellowed skin belied the gentlemanly clothing that now hung loose on his sinewy body.
“Well, I am still pleased to make your acquaintance. ” He imagined Ainslie was once a young man of promise, and wondered what he could have done to suffer such a hideous fate.
“May I ask . . .”
“You may,” Ainslie said at once. “Taxes.”
“Pardon me?” James thought for a moment that the man had misunderstood his question.
“What did I do to find myself in the Tolbooth?” Ainslie brushed at a spot on his sleeve as if picking off a bit of dust in the midst of a drawing room conversation, rather than the filth of prison.
“That was your question, yes? Well, sir, my crime is that I found myself unable to pay my taxes. An ill-conceived trust, one perjurious solicitor, and two purloined accounts, and here I stand before you, moldering like last week’s bread. ”
“But what of escape?” James leaned against the bars of his cell. “Have you a mind for it? You seem at worst a wronged man, not a criminal.”
“Escape?” Ainslie laughed. “Where to? Out the door, and I’d be mobbed and ransomed the moment my lungs met fresh air. Venture down and I’d be manna for rats.”
“Down?” James asked in earnest, gripping the iron bars.
“They say another city lies tunneled beneath us.” Ainslie spoke slowly, clearly savoring the sudden attention.
“But I have my doubts as to whether a man could find his way out from there, and a death in the vaults beneath the Tolbooth is a death all the same, is it not?” He combed his fingers through the mass of his long beard, clearly hoping to appear civilized at all costs.
“No, my poor, dear man. None has ever escaped the tyranny of the Tolbooth.” Ainslie considered for a moment, then added as an afterthought, “Though there is half-hangit Maggie.”
“Who?” James asked, startled by this absurdity.
“You’ve not heard of Maggie Dickson?” Ainslie smiled.
“Aye, she too found herself imprisoned in Edinburgh’s Tolbooth.
The lass had been with child, and as the bairn’s father was not her husband, she’d hid the truth.
But truth, like a bad tooth, must come out, and come out it did.
She was hanged for her offense. But”—he adopted a dramatic tone, and James wondered if Ainslie wasn’t the perjurious solicitor he’d spoken of—“as her family was bringing her to be buried, they heard a banging on the coffin. They opened it, of course, and there lay Maggie. Angry and sore, aye, but alive, and live she did for another forty years.”
James raised his brows in question, and Ainslie elaborated, “Her sentence was hanging, and hang her they did. You can be hanged but once for a single misdeed.”
“Perhaps we’ll be so lucky, aye?”
“As Maggie?” Ainslie asked. “No, friend, luck like that is a rare stroke indeed.”
“Do you need to practice it one more time?”
“No, I certainly do not,” Tom told Magda, no longer hiding his impatience.
He examined himself once more in the looking glass, ensuring that he truly looked the part he played.
It had been easy to find himself a priest’s cassock.
A few coins slipped to a St. Giles washerwoman and he was as good as ordained.
Suitable clothing for Magda, however, had been harder to come by.
In the end, they’d settled for the simplest possible disguise.
She’d pose as his impoverished attendant, requiring only that she skulk silently at Tom’s side.
James had been in the Tolbooth two days now. Tom assured her that James’s enemies would crave a very public hanging, and though Magda knew that bought them time, she couldn’t help but dread that she might be on the verge of witnessing history as it had really happened.
Magda was amazed at how easily they could enter the Tolbooth with a few coins to grease the way. They’d sacrificed the last of their coin to the turnkey, insisting they give a condemned man his last rites.
“We’ve come to administer the viaticum, sir,” Tom informed him in his most austere voice. “The last Holy Communion,” he added when faced with the guard’s dumb stare, “for a man on the brink of his death.”
“Ach,” the turnkey spat, “he was too long with the papists. And good riddance, says I.”
“You too shall be forgiven,” Tom intoned ominously as he glided into the cell, and James was forced to turn his back to hide the look on his face.
“Nomini spiritus sanctu . . .” Tom knelt at the door to the cell and began to pray in a loud, atonal voice, and the turnkey quickly cleared from the cellblock as if exposed to a contagion.
Magda had a strong suspicion that Tom wasn’t getting the words right, but she had to assume that the only people nearby who’d recognize the Latin mass would likely be behind bars.
“James,” she gasped his name, instantly at his side.
“You’re a sight, hen.” A smile warmed his face, but she noticed the lines etched at the corners of his eyes and the tightness around his mouth, visible even through the week-long growth of his beard, many shades darker than the light brown of his hair.
“We don’t have much time,” she whispered, frantic.
She dug clumsily in the pouch tied at her waist and pulled out a small stoppered vial.
“Take this.” She shoved it into his hand.
“A witch, Gormshuil, gave it to me. It’s henbane.
It’ll act like a poison. She said three sips will make a person appear dead. Sort of like Romeo and Juliet, right?”
“I think not, love.” James gingerly placed the bottle back in her hands. “You forget, poison is what got me here, and I fear one poisoning is enough in this lifetime.”
“Dammit, James,” she hissed. “This lifetime is about to come to an end. Now take it,” she commanded, slapping the vial back into his hand. “I don’t know what you’ll do when you wake up, or where you’ll wake up, but . . . I can’t think of anything else to do.”
“I see it’s unwise to cross you,” he said, smiling at her verve. “Henbane, aye?” He rolled the vial in his palm. “I knew I’d gotten to the heart of it with my name for you.”
The scrape of wood on stone rumbled down the passageway as a guard opened the door to their wing.
James leaned down to take her mouth with his, and she clawed at the front of his coat, pulling him wildly to her.
She poured her whole self, her whole focus into the knowing of him.
The stubble of his beard, just long enough to be soft on her face.
His lips dry on her mouth. The long press of his body, solid against her.
Tears rolled down her cheeks, and she thought that, if he couldn’t escape, this would be their last kiss, the one most seared into her, the one she’d be left with to kiss over and over again in her memory.
The dull clack of boot heels sounded on stone, and James pulled away. “You’ve not seen the last of me,” he whispered, and he dashed the tears from her cheeks.
After the guard escorted Tom and Magda away, Ainslie’s voice came from across the darkened corridor. “If ever I find my way free of this place, it seems I must convert.”
James’s response was uncharacteristically grave. “Faith is a powerful thing,” he said, feeling the cool of the glass vial in his palm.
“Guard!” Other prisoners joined Ainslie’s chant. Many men in the Tolbooth may have longed for their own deaths, but it didn’t mean they felt comfortable living among it. Having a dead body in the cellblock aroused feelings ranging from mild superstition to all-out hysteria.
“Bloody hell,” the guard muttered, realizing his poor luck at being the one to discover a body.
Clapping a hand over his mouth and nose, he kicked at James, who lay cold and motionless on the slab floor of his cell.
The henbane brought with it a terrible stench, a foulness easily mistaken for the stink of death.
“How is he?” Ainslie asked. He’d grown increasingly agitated since James’s collapse. They’d been chatting amiably when his speech began to slur heavily, and James lost consciousness soon thereafter.
“How is he?” the guard mimicked. “He’s dead as a rail.” Cursing, he laid James out flat, arms at his sides. “And that Campbell will be angrier than a wet cat too. Dead as a rail,” he muttered, quickly rifling through James’s pockets.
“What will you do with him then?” Ainslie spoke rapidly, his voice holding a note of alarm.
He rubbed the near-empty vial where it hid in his coat pocket.
James had tossed it to him, with a warning not to drink it.
Ainslie fretted, not knowing if it was a soporific, or worse, he had in his possession.
“What we do with all you corpses. Aye,” he said with a wink, “that’s what you are to me.
A corpse, or about to be one. Some get sold to the barber surgeons at Dickson’s Close, for cutting.
” The guard grinned at this last bit, seeing Ainslie’s obvious chagrin.
“But first,” he said with one last kick to James’s side, “it’s down to the vaults. ”