The Sins of the Wolf

“The fall of the Bastille?” Hester was confused.

Mary did not look at her, but kept her gaze on the sudden memory that was apparently woken so sharply. “The revolution in France, Louis the Sixteenth, Marie Antoinette, Robespierre…”

“Oh! Oh, of course.”

But Mary was still lost in her own thoughts. “Those were such times. The Emperor had all Europe under his heel.” Her voice sank in awe so it was barely audible above the rattle of the wheels over the ties. “He was twenty miles away across the cha

Hester said nothing. England had been secure all her lifetime. She could imagine what it might have been like to fear foreign soldiers trampling through the streets, burning the houses, laying waste the fields and farms, but it was only imagination, it could never touch the reality. Even in the very worst days in the Crimea when the allied armies were losing, she had always known England itself was peaceful, impregnable, and except in small, private bereavements, untouched.

“The newspapers used to print terrible cartoons of him.” Mary’s smile broadened for a moment, then vanished suddenly, and she shivered, looking directly at Hester. “Mothers used to terrify their naughty children by threatening that ‘Bony’ would get them. They used to say that he ate little children, and there were pictures of him with a great gaping mouth, and a knife and fork in his hands, and Europe on his plate.”

The train slowed almost to walking speed as it climbed a steep gradient. A man’s voice shouted something indistinguishable. A whistle blew.

“And then when I had my own children in Edinburgh,” Mary went on, “people used to frighten the disobedient with stories of Burke and Hare. Odd, isn’t it, how much more sinister that seems now? Two Irishmen who started selling corpses to a doctor so he could teach his students anatomy, then progressing to robbing graves, and finally to murder.”

The train began to pick up speed again. She looked at Hester curiously.

“Why does murder to dissect the corpses chill the blood in a way murder to rob never can? After it all came out in 1829, and Burke was hanged-Hare never was, you know! For all I can say, he’s still alive now!” She shivered. “But afterwards, I remember we had a maid who left without giving notice. We never knew where she went-off with some man, in all probability-but of course all the other servants said Burke and Hare had got her, and she was cut up in pieces somewhere!”

She wrapped her shawl tighter around her, although the carriage was no colder than it had been before, and their feet were on the footwarmer and snugly wrapped in a blanket.

“Alastair was about twelve then.” She bit her lip. “And Oonagh was seven, old enough to have heard the stories and understood the terror they woke. One night, it was late in the winter and there was a fearful storm, I heard the thunder and got up to see if everything was all right. I found the two of them together in Oonagh’s room, sitting up in bed, huddled under the blanket with the candle lit. I knew what had happened. Alastair had had a nightmare. He had them sometimes. And he had gone into her room, ostensibly to see if she was all right, but really because he wanted the comfort of being with her himself. She was frightened too; I can still see her face in my mind, white-ski

Hester could picture it. Two children sitting together, each pretending to assure the other, and whispering in hushed voices of the horrors of body snatchers, resurrectionists, secret murder in dark alleys, and the dissector’s bloody table. Such memory runs deep, perhaps below the surface of consciousness, but those things shared forge a trust which excludes other, later, comers. She had no such moments with her elder brother, Charles. He had always been a little on his dignity, even from the earliest times she could recall. It had been James with whom she had had adventures and secrets. But James had been killed in the Crimea.

“I’m sorry,” Mary said quietly, her voice cutting across Hester’s thoughts. “I have said something that distressed you.” It was not a question but an observation.

Hester was startled. She had not thought Mary was more than peripherally aware of her, certainly not enough to notice her feelings.

“Perhaps resurrectionists were not the most sensitive of subjects to raise,” Mary said ruefully.

“Not at all,” Hester assured her. “I was thinking of the two children together, and remembering my younger brother. My elder brother was always a little pompous, but James was fun.”

“You speak of him in the past. Is he-gone?” Mary’s voice was suddenly gentle, as if she knew bereavement only too well.

“Yes, in the Crimea,” Hester replied.

“I’m so sorry. To say I know how you feel would be ridiculous, but I have some idea. I had a brother killed at Waterloo.” She said the word carefully, rolling it off her tongue as if it held some mystic quality. To many of Hester’s age that would have been incomprehensible, but she had heard too many soldiers speak of it for it not to give her a shiver through the flesh. It had been the greatest land battle in Europe, the end of an empire, the ruin of dreams, the begi

She looked up and smiled at Mary, so she would know Hester understood at least something of its immensity.

“I was in Brussels then,” Mary said with a wry turn of her lips. “My husband was in the army, a major in the Royal Scots Greys…”

Hester did not hear the rest of what she said. The clanking of the train wheels over the tracks drowned out a word here and there, and her mind was filled with a picture of the man in the portrait, with his fair sweep of hair and the face which at once had such emotion and ambiguous power and vulnerability. It was easy to imagine him, tall, straight-backed, wildly elegant in uniform, dancing the night away in some Brussels ballroom, knowing all the while that in the morning he would ride out to a battle to decide the rise or fall of nations and from which thousands would not return and more thousands would come home blind or maimed. And then she thought of the painting she had seen of the charge of the Royal Scots Greys at Waterloo, the light on the white horses plunging through the heat of battle, manes flying, scarlet riders bent forward, the dust and gun smoke clouding the rest, darkening the scene behind them.

“He must have been a very fine man,” she said impulsively.

Mary looked surprised. “Hamish?” She sighed gently. “Oh yes, yes he was. It seems like another world, so very long ago, Waterloo. I hadn’t thought of it in years.”

“He came through the battle all right?” Hester was not afraid to ask because she knew he had died only eight years before, and Waterloo was forty-two years in the past.