Only the Thunder Knows_East End Girls by Rena Mason Gord Rollo Read Free Book Online Page B

right. He’d been buying everyone in sight a pint and a dram
for a while there. “Well, good thing we know how to make more, right?”
    “Right
you are, Billy Boy. Right you are.”

 
     
     
     
     
    Chapter
    7
     
     
     
     True to their
word, Burke and Hare knew how to make more money and although neither of their
unfortunate women would agree, they were more than capable of doing hard manual
labor if they wanted to. Over the next four weeks they really put their backs
into their new job, digging up enough old graves to keep Mr. Black happy while
he sculpted his statue, as well as keeping Dr. Knox well stocked in fresh
cadavers for his anatomical dissection course. No, their biggest problem wasn’t
working hard.
    It
was having restraint.
    Ambrosious
Black had warned William that digging too many fresh graves would attract
unwanted attention but they hadn’t listened. The pound notes offered by the
surgeon were far more tempting than the sculptor’s coins. But whereas no one really
cared who rooted around in the ancient cemetery grounds, everyone in
Edinburgh wanted to know the identity of the ghouls who were unearthing the
recent dead.  Within days, Burke and Hare had angered some of the local
residents, furious their dearly departed had gone missing from their holes, and
from there the cemetery authorities had taken a keen interest in their
nocturnal visits as well. By the time mid-November rolled around, the powers that
be had started to set up on-duty guards to prowl the property at night and had also
gone to the police for help.
    In
due time, many other enterprising men and women would eventually take to grave
robbing to earn their unsavory livings, and it would become so much of a
problem the cemeteries of this fine city (and many others) would have to have
walls and fences built around them to protect the newly interred. Medical
research and surgical training schools would eventually become thriving
businesses in Scotland and England, and the underground purchasing of fresh
cadavers would become such an issue history would soon remember this strange
period as the “Resurrectionist” time. For now though, there was only Burke and
Hare, two crude uneducated men slightly ahead of the other lawbreakers of their
day.
    Fate,
more so than the police, was catching up to them though.
    William
and Billy were oblivious to all of these behind‐the‐scenes security happenings,
of course, caught up in the joy and freedom their newfound wealth offered them.
Never in their entire pitiful lives had they drank and whored and feasted and
partied and lived everything to excess the way they were doing, and the sad
part was that neither one of the men thought the gravy train would ever end. They
were wrong, but the police and cemetery guards weren’t the only people they
needed to worry about.
    There
were far more dangerous individuals starting to pay attention to their
dastardly deeds.

 
     
     
     
     
    Chapter
    8
     
     
     
    Stuart
Tattersall felt like his heart might burst out of his frilly shirt with
unabashed joy as he watched the stunning raven-haired beauty rehearse on his
stage. The tall, skeletal-thin director at the newly reopened Ripley Theatre
was, like everyone else who saw Magenta Da Vine perform, instantly in love with
his leading lady. Simply put, Da Vine was Lady Macbeth – no other woman
could possibly do justice to the role. Simultaneously graceful, sophisticated,
and charming, delivering her lines in a powerful yet passionately feminine way
that would have stirred Stuart’s masculine side if he’d had one. Instead he
just stood offstage in awe and giggled like a schoolgirl as Magenta finished practicing
an important scene from Act 3.
    “ Nought's
had, all's spent,
    where
our desire is got without content;
    'Tis
safer to be that which we destroy,
    than
by destruction dwell in doubtful joy. ”
    There
was a brief moment of silence, and then Stuart hollered, “Wonderful!”
    The
small gathering of