The Man Who Was Jekyll and Hyde Read Online Free PDF Page A

over the years by quite a few psychics and they all say there is a very cold aura emanating from the mirror – which I don’t think was made by Brodie, who was himself a freemason with Canongate-Kilwinning Lodge No. 2. They say it suggests the presence of someone; and indeed one claimed what they had perceived was the spirit of Bonnie Prince Charlie.’
    When you consider this characterful building and its imaginative café alongside the impressively high-profile pub named after Brodie just across the cobbled Lawnmarket street – with its highly graphic ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Brodie hanging signs – you can’t escape the thought that if the unlikely outlaw’s outlandish activities didn’t do much for his city’s reputation at the time, they left it with quite a romantic folk-tale legacy which it is quite happy to exploit these days.
    But while these colourful establishments fit, in one way, with the general circus that is Edinburgh’s Old Town in the tourist-invaded summer – the ranks of shops selling rain-creased tartan tat as a backdrop to Festival-drawn thespians whose impromptu open-air performances magnetise crowds along the Royal Mile – they are also rather different, sincerely acknowledging in their own way a slice of Edinburgh’s rich history, albeit a less-than-honourable one. It has to be added that there are many fine shops here too, selling cashmere and whisky and international newspapers and fine food. It all adds up to a kaleidoscopic assault on the senses.
    But it was not always so dazzlingly bright around here. The colours in those far-off eighteenth-century days, when the relatively dashing Deacon Brodie walked these cobbles in all his apparent respectability, were much more muted. Especially after darkness fell and the myriad closes between the sky-high tenements or ‘lands’ in all four sections of what is now known as the Royal Mile, running from the castle down to the Palace of Holyroodhouse – Castlehill, the Lawnmarket, the High Street and the Canongate – became shadowy refuges for those who would do you harm, little worried about relieving you of your money or your valuables or your life. A point with which our Mr Brodie was perhaps just a little too familiar.
    The gutters ran ‘as big as burns’, reported a resident of the time. And if you wandered off the beaten track after a night at the club or tavern, it was spooky and dangerous, dark and overpoweringly smelly. This thanks not only to the elevated residents slopping out their human waste to the walkways below at the day’s end – while famously crying out ‘Gardyloo!’ to alert passers-by – but also to horses and the proximity of the Nor’ Loch which, before becoming the fragrant Princes Street Gardens, was a stagnant cesspool for the submergence of every unpleasantness imaginable, including bodies and parts thereof.
    Oh, and of course, there were the fish.
    The fish? Not the kind that might have lived (or more likely, died) in a filthy pond like that, but fish from the cleaner waters around Newhaven and Leith that were buyable at the Fishmarket Close or from wandering, basket-laden fishwives. These fish, after being relieved of much flesh, would be used for a certain degree of illumination along these dreadfully dingy closes. Their scales would be luminescent enough to justify wary residents nailing the skins at intervals along the closes’ lowering walls. They did not exactly light up the scene like sunshine but certainly, on ageing, could pick out a direction of travel, rather like the emergency floor lights in modern aircraft, while adding to the general odour.
    It was understandable that people craved to see where they were going as they made their way through the overcrowded Old Town, down these dark narrow alleys and up the exhaustingly steep climb to their cold, cramped homes – which could be as high as twelve storeys before touching the clouds. In the absence of gas or electric street lighting and given the