It was a boy!
He must have been no more than nine or ten years with scraggly long hair that hung about his shoulders from beneath a worn cap. A layer of filth disguised most of his features, except for dark eyes with a serious, determined look. My rescuer was a boy!
“Ye, reckless little bampot!” I told him. “Ye might have been hurt!”
That serious expression turned to one of curiosity.
“I never heard no lady speak like that!” he exclaimed. “Nor seen one carry a blade. Who might ye be and wot are ye doin’ here?”
An amazing observation for one so young, I thought. Or perhaps not, by the clothes he wore that hung mostly in tatters on his too-thin body. And those boots, several sizes too large and anchored about his ankles with pieces of rope. One of Edinburgh’s lost children who wandered the streets, though few of those survived.
I had some experience with that. But this one, with his self-confidence and brash demeanour in spite of his clothes, stared back at me almost defiantly.
“I have business here,” I explained, but said nothing further, fully expecting him to disappear as suddenly as he had appeared.
“Business? In the Fleshmarket? A lady?” he laughed. “There is only one kind of business for a woman here!”
“Nevertheless,” I replied, determined to question the matron of the building where Dory had once lived. “Be on yer way.”
He fell into step beside me as I climbed the alleyway toward that tenement.
“Savin’ yer life should be worth somethin’.”
Saving my life? If not for my intervention, he might have ended up lyin’ bloodied on the cobbles. Still a coin might provide a meal. I pulled a coin from my pocket and handed it to him.
“Now be on yer way.”
I might as well have shouted into the wind.
He took the coin, bit it to make certain it was real, then pocketed it.
“A lady as fine as yerself needs protection in a place like this.”
Protection? A bit of a child that could have weighed no more than four stone. Still, he had managed quite handily with bluster to make up for the rest of it.
“My business is here,” I informed him as I reached the entrance to the tenement.”
“With old Meggy? Be sure to hold onto yer purse with that one, and watch yer back.”
This from a street thief.
“Wot might yer business be? Are ye lookin’ fer a room? Best look elsewhere. A tenant got her throat cut two days ago.” That dark gaze narrowed.
“Might ye be the one the police found bendin’ over her? I heard she was a lady, fit yer description.”
I refused to respond to that.
“Goodbye.” I told him.
“I best come along,” he announced, much to my disagreement. “Fer yer protection.”
It was like trying to shake off a bothersome insect that kept buzzing about.
“Good day,” I insisted as I climbed the steps to the tenement and opened the door at the entrance. That should be the end of it, I thought.
The smell of the place was the same that I’d experienced in a dozen other such places in the past. That mixture of pig fat from cooking, rancid food, clothes in bad need of soap, and bodies as well. All of it crowded into the tenement amid the noise of an argument somewhere in the building and the persistent wail of an infant.
The door to the flat occupied by the woman I now knew to be called Meggy stood open. There was no response as I knocked on the frame about the door. It did appear the disagreeable woman was not about.
