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Chapter 7 Anonymous Subjects “Effy the Cinder Gatherer,” “Old Woman and Grandson,” “Woman Murdered by Hare” By late spring, the agricultural season had started and the West Port was crowded with immigrants. That meant fewer, rather than more, opportunities for murder, as the house in Tanner’s Close filled with lodgers. Yet Burke and Hare took their opportunities where they could find them, like the cinder gatherer whose name, Burke thought, was Effy. “She was in the habit of selling small pieces of leather to him, as he was a cobbler,” which “she gathered about the coach-works.” That did not keep him from taking her “into Hare’s stable,” and giving her “whisky to drink until she was drunk.” She lay down in the straw and fell asleep, and they “then laid a cloth over her.” They suffocated her “as they did the others,” and brought her to Robert Knox’s dissecting rooms in Surgeon’s Square. Her cadaver sold for £10, slightly higher than usual; perhaps it was in especially good shape, or perhaps Knox had particular need of it. In late June—around midsummer, as Burke remembered—an old woman came from Glasgow with her grandson, “a dumb boy,” about twelve years old, “who seemed to be weak in his mind.” Once lodged at Margaret Hare’s house, the woman “got a dram” of whiskey, and fell asleep, and “he and Hare suffocated her,” removed her clothes, and covered her with the bedding. The boy, in the meantime, “was sitting at the fire in the kitchen,” and Burke carried him inside to the bed under which his grandmother 148 Chapter 7 lay. The room may have been the one shared by Burke and M’Dougal, for Burke speaks of carrying the boy “ben to the room,” meaning from an outer chamber to an inner one; that description would apply much better to the small box bedroom than to the large open area used by regular lodgers . If so, both M’Dougal and Margaret Hare must have known what was going on. The men may have given the boy some whiskey, too, and waited for him to fall asleep; they then “murdered him in the same manner, and laid him alongside of his grandmother.” During the trial, the rumor circulated that Burke had murdered the boy himself, “almost charitably,” by setting him on his knee, and breaking his back. “He describes his murder as the one that lies most heavily upon his heart,” according to West Port Murders, “and says that he is constantly haunted by the recollection of the piteous manner in which the boy looked in his face.” But this is a most unlikely story. Burke was not a large man, and the bones of even a small, undernourished twelve-year-old would have been very hard to break.The vertebrae, as Robert Knox could have told the West Port author, are very strong and flexible, designed and cushioned by muscle to withstand all but the most traumatic injuries. And why should Burke have done any such thing? Why choose an ugly, bloody, painful, protracted, and almost certainly noisy murder, likely to arouse comment when the body was examined, over a quick, quiet, easy one, tried and true in its results? It seems that once again we have a story “of a peculiarly touching description” shaped by the desire to wring the greatest possible pathos out of the murders. Burke maintained in his confession that the boy, like his grandmother, was murdered in the same manner as the others, and his is the most plausible account. The bodies were left undisturbed for an hour, perhaps to be sure that no one raised the alarm. They were then packed into a herring-barrel. Burke was very specific that the barrel was dry, with no brine in it. He and Hare put the barrel in the stable, and the next morning transferred it to Hare’s cart. To their alarm, the horse refused to draw the cart more than a little way through the Grassmarket, so that they had to get a porter with a barrow to transport it the rest of the way. Hare and the porter took the barrel up to Surgeon’s Square, with Burke going on ahead, “as he was afraid something would happen.”They made it to Knox’s dissecting rooms, but rigor had set in, and “the students and them had hard work” to get the cadavers out, they “being so...

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