The Court of Cacus; Or, The Story of Burke and Hare. Alexander Leighton
there have been many slaughtering kings, there never was but one William Burke.
Intercalary.
The ardour of the study of anatomy was in the youth, and it was there from sympathy; yea, for years before, the Square and the College had been under the fervour of competition. Nor was this fervour limited to the Scottish metropolis, from which the fame of the successive Monroes had gone forth over the world. There had arisen Barclay, who, as an extra-academical lecturer, had the faculty of inspiring his students with all the zeal which he himself possessed, and to his class in the Square there had come students from England and Ireland, as well as foreign parts. Even in prior times, when the teaching was almost limited to the college, the reputation of the professors had so accumulated élèves that Scotland groaned, and groaned ineffectually, under the invasion of her sacred graveyards. The country teemed with stories, in which there figured the midnight adventures of those strange men who gained a living by supplying, at all hazards, what was so peremptorily required in the scientific hall and its adjacent rooms.[1] Anxious mourners visited by the light of the moon the places where their dear relatives lay entombed, as if they could thereby satisfy themselves that the beloved bodies still rested there in peace, though it was certain that the artists became in a short time so proficient in their work that they could leave a grave apparently as entire as it was at the time when the mourners deposited their burden. That these adventures should have taken strange and sometimes grimly-ludicrous turns might have been expected, and yet it is more true that they transcended belief.
There was one long current in Leven in Fife of a character more like fiction than truth. A middle-aged man of the name of Henderson had died of an acute fever, and was buried in due time. He left a widow and daughter, and we need not speak, even to those who have not experienced such privation, of the deep valley of grief through which it takes so long a time for the light of a living hope to penetrate, if, in some instances, it ever penetrates at all. Yet people must live, and the widow was to keep the small public-house in the skirts of the town which her husband had conducted. Six days had passed since the funeral, when one night, at a late hour, two men asked and got admittance for the purpose of refreshment, one of them, according to their statement, having been taken ill. They were introduced through a dark lobby into a room, where there was one of those close beds so common in Scotland, and left there with the drink they had ordered. By and by a loud knock came to the door, and the voice of an officer demanded to know if some thieves who had broken into a neighbouring house had there taken refuge. The noise and the impending search had reached the ears of the two men who had entered shortly before, and having had some good reason for being afraid of justice, they took advantage of a window and got out, but they had made so much noise in their flight, that the officers were directed to a pursuit, in which, however, they ultimately failed. On their return they thought of examining the room, with a view to ascertain whether the supposed thieves had left in their hurry any of the booty; but all that they found was an empty bag, which they took away with them for the purpose of an expected identification. The confusion having ceased, the widow, in the depth of her grief for her departed husband, went into the room to betake herself to bed. She approached it for the purpose of folding it down, and in an instant was transfixed; before her on the bed lay the dead body of her husband in those very grave-clothes made by her own hands, and in which, six days before, he had been buried. The explanation of the mystery was not difficult. The two men belonged to the College staff of body-snatchers; they had succeeded so far in their enterprise, and would with their burden have avoided all houses, if one of them had not been taken ill, and the other had not also wanted to participate in a restorative after their night’s work. It is supposed that, thinking themselves secure in the quiet house, they had taken the body out of the sack for some purpose only known to themselves, and thinking, when the noise got up, that the pursuit was after them, they had flung it into the close bed and flown.
Once upon a track of such grim romance, so rich in specimens of a bypast phase of society, it is not easy to get rid of it, nor is it any more wrong to pursue it so far, to shew our social ameliorations, than it is to search for underlying strata in the physical world, which tell us of a rudeness in Nature’s workings from which she progresses to more perfect organisms. Another of these stories is scarcely less interesting. A young student of the name of Burns saw one day on the big centre-table of the College practical hall what he considered to be the body of his mother. Rendered wild by the conviction, he flew out of the room, took a ticket for Dumfries, and, on arriving there, told his father (who, half-dead in grief, was confined to bed,) his terrible story. It was night, and the snow had been falling during the day, so that the graveyard was covered nearly a foot in depth, and one might have thought that the father would have put off the execution of a resolution, to which he came on the instant, of examining the grave, till the following day; but without saying a word, he rose deliberately, as if some new energy had seized him and restored him to the active duties of life, and betaking himself, accompanied by his son, to the place of sepulture, roused the sexton to the work of investigation. The lantern and the spade were put in requisition, and with the father and son as mute spectators, the green sod was removed and the mould shovelled out till the coffin was laid bare. Then the lid was unscrewed and taken off, and there lay, exposed to the eyes of the husband and the son, the body of the endeared one—the centre once of so many loves, and the source of so many domestic joys—calm in the stillness of death.
We have even a little poetry in some of these almost innumerable stories of a state of social polity that will never return again. One was a favourite of the students about 1818. One, George Duncan, from Angus, lodged in the Potterow with another of the name of Ferguson from a shire further north. They were both in love with a Miss Wilson, who resided somewhere about Bruntsfield Links; and so embittered were they by this feeling of rivalship, that they slept together, and ate their meals together, and walked and talked together, without ever the name of the girl being mentioned by either. There seemed to be a tacit admission that each knew that the other was in love with the same individual, and that each supposed the other the favourite, and that each hated the other with all the virulence of an unsuccessful competitor. In this strange state of things between two who had once been loving friends, Ferguson died of a disease the nature of which baffled the acuteness of the best surgeons, and in the course of a few days Duncan’s rival was consigned to a grave in the Buccleuch burying-ground. And now comes a far more singular part of the story. Duncan, in league with a noted snatcher at that time, called the “Screw,” from the adroit way in which he managed the extracting instrument, repaired, on the second night after the funeral, to the cemetery where poor Ferguson had been deposited, with a view to lifting the body and carrying it to Dr Monro’s room. It was late, and the moon shed more abundantly than the adventurers wished her soft light over the still graves, and especially that of him whose nineteenth summer sun had shown in a succession, with small interval, the smile of beauty and the grin of death. But if this poetry of nature did not affect the rival and the anatomist, something else did; for as the two slouched behind one of the grave-stones to conceal themselves till the glare of the moon should be hidden in a welcome cloud, who should be seen there, wrapped in a night-cloak, and hanging over the grave of Ferguson, but the object of their mutual affection? Nay, so near were they, that they heard her sobs and her ejaculations of “Henry, dear Henry,” and many others of those soft endearments with which the heart of grief is so eloquent. If the iron had entered into Duncan’s soul before, it now burned there in the red fire of his hatred. The sobbing figure rose and vanished, as do the night-visions of these places, so suggestive of flitting images, and within an hour the body of Ferguson was extended on the table within the College. Nor does the story end with this terrible satisfaction, for Duncan more than once afterwards, in the moonlit nights, witnessed from the same hiding-place, and with what satisfaction to his relentless soul may be guessed, the same offerings of the poor girl’s affection over an empty grave.
And so forth, through all the number of such stories as used to be rife at that time, but have now died away amidst narratives of a more living interest. But towards the close of Barclay’s labours, in his class the materials for such were rather on the increase, for the reason that the invasions on consecrated places kept a proportion to the requirements