The Court of Cacus; Or, The Story of Burke and Hare

by Alexander Leighton

The man whom, in our first chapter, we described as a neophyte, left the students with his bashfulness, if we can so call it, supplied by confidence. The power which we have already seen making such havoc among feelings and affections deemed all but ineradicable, had produced the first thrill in a heart long since dead to the pulses of pity. We may say so much, that his life, prior to this day—when there opened to him a vista through which he could see, amidst moving furies, the illuminated figure of mammon, with the means of getting money without hard labour—had been little else all through than a wrestle with poverty, often degenerating into squalid misery; and we may thus estimate the state of his mind, under the new-born hope of what, to such a man, might have the appearance of a small fortune.

But even with the view which the information given him by the students opened up of a new means of making money, we are not entitled to suppose that, as he that night directed his steps to the Cowgate with the intention of reaching the lodgings which he occupied in the West Port, he had any prevision of the extent to which this new pursuit would lead him. His expectations could only, as yet, be limited to the acquisition in some way of those objects required in the halls of the Square, and the value of which had previously come to his ears through the medium of that under-current of whispers to which the exploits of Merrylees, and the others then in the full progress of their career, had given impulse and meaning. Sure it was, at any rate, that he was utterly unconscious that he was permitted to be an agent, selected after due care by the devil, to push and force those passions by which a Christian country, with a name renowned throughout the world for virtue, had been scourged and scathed to a climax. Far less could he foresee the means—to our obscure vision of the ways of Providence—so out of proportion to the evils (already set forth by us) which they remedied, if not put an end to. So it has been said. But by what right do we make out that want of proportion? We know pretty nearly the amount of evil subsequently perpetrated by William Burke,—name of fear, and which even yet only passes in a whisper,—but we do not know (for all we have said is only an inkling,) and never will know, the amount of that other evil which his deeds were to be the means of bringing to an end. The cry had for years gone up to the great white throne of the outraged feelings of a Christian nation. There was only the exception of those who appealed to the pride of science, and man’s natural love of life and a sound living body. Meanwhile, those in power, to whom Heaven had accorded the means of reconciliation, looked on with apathy, at least without interest,—an observation which may lead us to the thought that there was less of profanity than is generally supposed in the suggestion which some have ventured, and some have approved, that this man had a mission, yea, that the devil was permitted to tempt him to commit deeds which would rouse the country to seek a remedy sufficient to stop the violation of natural feelings, and at the same time provide for the claims of science.

So, with the sordid thoughts suited to his mission, he trudged along, looking about for some one he expected to see; and by and by there came from behind, and joined him, an individual, in the shape of a spare wretch, gruesome and goulish, of moderate height, with a cadaverous face, in which were set, in the most whimsical manner, two gray eyes, so far apart that it did not seem possible for him to look at you with both at the same time. There was in these oblique orbs, too, a leer which seemed to be the normal and unchangeable expression of a mind which not only disregarded the humanities and rights of his species, but mocked and laughed at them. Most creatures, even the wickedest, are at times surprised into moments of bonhommie. Nature seems to demand this as a kind of rest to the spirit, as if evil were a disturbance, which, to be sure, it generally is; but the malignity of this wonderful being was so thorough-going, smooth, and natural, that even what he might intend for a bastard kind of love or friendship was only a modification of his diabolism, so that his smile was merely a relaxation of his congenital enmity towards all that was good and beautiful in nature. This man was William Hare,—a name which, not less than that of William Burke, will ever be as an apparition to the retina of the ear of mankind.

The forgathering of these men was followed instantly, but secretly, as if they feared the chances of a whisper having a collateral fall, by the reciprocation of confidences, in which, as a matter of course, was included the success of the visitor to the Square, and over the face of the listener there came merely a stronger phase of the ordinary expression of the malign pleasure which less or more always played in those divergent eyes. But these conferences cannot be understood without a knowledge of what had taken place in the latter’s house in Tanners’ Close, to which they were loungingly directing their steps, and where the former lodged. And many others lodged there too, for it was one of those low caravanseries or lodging-houses which are as well the refuge of trampers, who would pass there a night, as of more permanent residenters, who, deprived of a home by vagabondism, earned a desultory livelihood as chance carriers or troggan-mongers, fish-hawkers, or peripatetic dealers in small wares. Sometimes a lodger a little above these classes would find his account in the cheap refuge, and three days before that night a tall man, a pensioner, who ordinarily went by the name of Donald, had died, a short time only before his pension became due. To that pension the master of the establishment had looked forward as the means of being reimbursed for several months’ rent and advances, amounting to somewhere about £4. This loss rankled in the mind of Hare, for though Donald was not without some poor friends who would see him decently buried, they were without the means, as well perhaps the will, to pay a debt for the justice of which the bad character of the creditor could be no guarantee.

And here we have the best evidence, that even on that day when Donald died, and up to the morning of the funeral, and eight or ten hours previous to this forgathering in the Cowgate, no thought had crossed the mind of either of these men of taking the debt out of the body of the pensioner. Allowing for all discrepancies as to the time when the tongue of one of them gave expression to the dark purpose, it is clear that the communication would not, on the supposition of the thought having been slumbering in the mind, have been delayed till the morning of the funeral, nor even to the hour of bringing in the coffin. No doubt they had been both aware that such things had been done, and were being done, in Edinburgh at that time, and the temptation had crossed them, not without being accepted by their sordidness. The intention and the thought sprang up together, and, by all accounts, it was the mind of Hare that produced the birth; but the exclusiveness of the credit was just so much the less in proportion to the readiness by which it was on the instant adopted and cherished by his friend. You may here mark an analogy, which it might be of pregnant interest for all men, and women too, to ponder, as a little sermon, and not the less that this entire history is a big one:—The tiny seed will lie in the ground for years, and though the soil may be known to be congenial in the wealth of rottenness, it will not spring to the expectation of the gardener. It may be tossed over and over, and hither and thither for years, and appear above ground, shooting resolutely its stem, when not only not looked for, but against all expectation. So it is with the mind and its germs. The small shoot of an invention takes its start from an agreement of circumstances unknown to us, and grows and grows into branching horrors; nay, every branch, and leaflet, and poisonous calyx has its secondary origin in a germ as mysteriously stimulated as the one that lay so long perhaps in the earth. And what then? Why, just this—that our practical philosophy is ever vexing itself by tugging at the cords of Calvinism. Why and how did this thought arise in the mind of Hare? Because he was a wicked man. And why was he a wicked man? The old story of the scroll, whereon were marked in fire the names of the reprobates. But reject it, and say that he made himself a wicked man. Try that process upon yourself, if you happen to be a good one, or the opposite, if you happen to be bad, and see how you will succeed by such decree of your own.

The proposition was thus made that the body of the stalwart Donald should be sold to the doctors, and at once agreed to by the listener, only with the scruple that there was no time between the period of their conversation and the funeral to get all matters arranged—a sorry objection from such a man, and so accordingly made small account of by either. And so they straightway set about getting the bag of tanner’s bark—a circumstance which shews us that the practices of Merry-Andrew and his brethren had reached their ears. Nor are we to have the smallest hesitation in assuming that Helen M‘Dougal, with whom Burke lived in concubinage, and Hare’s wife—the two females in the house—joined to form that quatern destined to the orgies of the Court of Cacus. The bag of bark was speedily procured, the body of Donald hauled out of the coffin and deposited on a bed, the bark was put in, the lid screwed down, and all made decent and fair for the bearers. When the vice has fructified into an act, how easy is the tribute paid to virtue! And so these men, according to the normal course, joined with long faces the train of the mourners, among whom—though some of them who loved the jolly old pensioner had tears in their eyes—they could hold up, or rather down, their faces as mournfully as the best.

The interlude of this play of the forenoon, and the melodrama of the night, consisted in the appearance of Burke in the hall in Surgeons’ Square, and having forgathered in the Cowgate in the manner we have set forth, the two friends, bound together by prior confidences, of which no man ever knew the extent or nature, pursued their way to Tanners’ Close, where they were welcomed by the women with the remainder of the whisky got for the funeral. The offering was to nerve them for the work in which they were merely apprentices; nor was the offering given and participated in less cheerfully by the women themselves, that they had both applied the soft hand of feminine attentions to the gallant pensioner,—even hung over his squalid couch tenderly, and wet his dry lips, and all the more, surely, that he had been a soldier, had seen and mixed in battles in his day, and therefore deserved something better than a bag for a winding sheet, and the knife of the anatomist coming after, at so long a distance, the bayonet of the enemy. Such gilt, which shews itself everywhere as society gets more civilised, is easily rubbed off; and with the knowledge of these tender nurses, the two men proceeded to their work, which, coarse as it was, was easily executed. The bag was filled and hoisted on the shoulders of Burke, who carried it in the dark as far as Bristo Port, where Hare, as a relay, took up the burden. So well known along the Grassmarket and Cowgate, where their figures might have excited attention, they took then the round-about way of College Street, and, getting to the Square, they felt some of that hesitation—shall we call it bashfulness?—which Burke had betrayed at his prior visit. They accordingly placed their load at the door of a cellar in the lower part of the buildings, and mounting to the room where one of them had been before, encountered the same three young assistants still engaged in their ardent work.

“Bring it up,” was the reply of more than one, when they had heard the words of the merchants, as they hung fire in their mouths and tongues. Up soon it was, and drawn out and laid upon the table in the winding-sheet. Yes, a piece of delicacy that which was soon to be dispensed with as extravagant and unnecessary. And the covering partially drawn off, there is that rapid and curious, yet never perfectly composed, scanning of the eyes of even old students, but with no recoil on the part of the sellers, who had sat and drank with the old soldier, and heard his stories of Peninsular battles, and laughed at his jokes. Not the less racy these, that he thought his companions kind and jolly souls—how far away from the intention of selling his body for gold he never imagined, for the idea could not have entered the mind of Suspicion herself, if there be any such goddess in the mythology of poets. But all such reminiscences, if they threatened to force an entry into the minds of these men, were quickly sent back to the limbo of obliviousness by the obdurate mammon.

By and by, and after the exit of one of the students, there came in the monoculus himself, Knox, and the covering was altogether withdrawn. It seemed to him a fair mercantable commodity. That is, it was not too old for any of the valuable tissues,—in the midst of which lay the secrets these students were so anxious to reveal, not for the purpose of filling their pockets in after-times, but for the benefit of mankind,—to have been dissolved or injured. Seven pounds ten shillings is pronounced as the price of the body of the veteran. A shadow passed over the faces of the sellers; the sum did not come up to the hopes inspired by the reports which had oozed out of the earnings of the Merry-Andrews and the “Spunes.” Yet the sum, to these wretched earners of pennies for vagrants’ beds and cobbled shoes, was a coup of mammon sufficient to have made their hardened hearts clatter upon their ribs, and scare away the last trace of humanity inspired by the lips of a mother, kept otherwise, and up to this time, unscathed by the temptations of the devil. But they could not refuse the sum,—that is, they had not yet hardihood to chaffer; and, the money being paid, they were on the eve of departing, when they were told that they would be made welcome again, if they came with an equally good recommendation. And as they went, they did not forget the shirt.

So, with the first spoil in his pocket—for Burke was the foremost man, and got the money—he and his friend betook themselves to Tanners’ Close, keeping, no doubt, in remembrance, the words of the students, that they would be welcome again. Nor can we have any doubt that when they arrived at home, after a day of such novel and ingenious, and, we may surely add, triumphant performance, they would celebrate, with the women, in an orgie debauch of hours, this great event of a new birth of hope, the realisation of which would elevate them even to an upper caste among the humble inhabitants of Portsburgh. But even they themselves did not know what progeny would come of this cockatrice’s egg, laid in the dark corner of the habitation of sin. Our story would not have carried that moral, which is the eternal burden of all histories of crime, if the thought of murder had come to them without that prelusive conciliation, under the condition of which the devil is permitted to arrive at his greatest achievements.