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.”Agnes raised her eyebrows at that, and scratched her chin.“Might need a pipe for this,” she muttered, and went to a chest on the window ledge.From it, she dug out a long-stemmed clay pipe and a leather pouch of tobacco.The baby began to whimper and splutter.Agnes glanced at Quire as she packed the brown, pungent fibres into the bowl of the pipe.“Give her a finger to suck on.That’ll quiet her for a bit.”“Me?” Quire asked stupidly.“Aye, you.Who else?”Quire rose and went to lean over the unsettled infant, looking down into her pink face.This was not an area in which he possessed any great expertise.He closed his fingers into a soft fist and extended a thumb towards the babe’s mouth.“Your wee finger, man,” Agnes grunted, “not a thumb.You wanting to choke the poor wee thing? Give her something she can get her lips around.She’ll not bite it off.Anyone’d think you’d never seen a baby before.”“I’ve never nursed one with a finger, if that’s what you mean,” Quire said, bristling just a touch at the accusation of inadequacy.Not that he could dispute it.Agnes squatted down by the hearth, and lit a taper from the ashy, gleaming coals there.She puffed away at the pipe to get it going, watching Quire out of the corner of her eye.The baby had set her delicate lips about the tip of his finger, and was once more content.“That’ll do, that’ll do,” Agnes told him as she returned to her stool.Wisps of smoke coiled up from her pipe.Quire went back to his place on the bed, relieved to have successfully discharged at least that one small responsibility.“Let’s have it, then,” Agnes said.“I’ve seen things lately I can’t explain.Not easily.The kind of things… I don’t know, but maybe the kind of things you would know about.”“Is that right? What manner of things are we talking about?”“I’ve met men who feel no pain, and don’t mind broken bones nor a musket ball in their chest, and can go down under ice and come up through it again.They don’t utter a word, and you don’t see much of anything when you look in their eyes.And with strange writing, like tattoos or something, all over their hands.Dogs, just the same.”He said it all at once, in a rush, as if by doing so he might make it sound less implausible to his own ears.What Agnes might make of it, he had no idea, whether he spoke it quick or slow.She said nothing, chewing thoughtfully at the stem of her pipe.Quire shifted uneasily on the bed.“I’m no great believer in anything but flesh and blood,” he said with a shrug, “but there’s something here.God knows, I need help from somewhere.What these men are doing… there’s grave robbing a part of it, and murder a part of it, and I’m sure as I can be there’s something unnatural a part of it, too.“And because I know all that, they’ll come for me now.As soon as I’m cut loose from the police.It’s what I’d do.They can’t leave someone who’s seen what I have wandering about free.”“Aye,” Agnes said around her pipe, “you’ve the look of a man who thinks he needs help, right enough.And it’s not much odds whether you’re a believer or not.There’s more things in the world that are old and deep than these men of philosophy and science we’re infested with these days can admit of.Forgotten, maybe, by most; not the same as being gone.”She exhaled a great cloud of bluish smoke.“Not sure what you think I can do for you, though,” she said.“I’m more in the way of gentle wee charms these days, son.Easing a hard birth, softening a laddie’s heart for a lass who’s after him.Ridding a bairn of a fever.That sort of thing.”“I’ve had a feathered star of twigs nailed to my door,” Quire said.“Is that some sort of gentle wee charm?”“Oh, that’s interesting.What sort of feathers?”“Black.A crow, maybe.Does it matter?”“Might do.Might not.Who are these folk you think are doing such things?”“John Ruthven, for one.”“Aye, I ken him,” she said, much to Quire’s surprise.“Never did meet him, though.” She gave a pleased little laugh.“He came down this way, a few years back, wanting to talk to me.Ask me some questions.How he heard of me, I’ve no idea, but there he was, waiting on the quayside, poking around in his fancy trousers and his pretty wee necktie.I watched him for a while, but I didn’t like the look of him, so he never did lay eyes on me [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]