Except the Dying
- Автор: Jennings Maureen
- Серия: The Murdoch Mysteries #1
- Год: 1997
- Язык: английский
- Год: McClelland & Stewart
- ISBN: 9780771043208
- Жанр: Полицейские детективы
Электронная книга - «Except the Dying». Краткое содержание книги:
In the cold Toronto winter of 1895, the unclad body of a servant girl is found frozen in a deserted laneway. Detective William Murdoch quickly finds out that more than one person connected with the girl's simple life has something to hide. From the Paperback edition.
“In spite of my best efforts, my mother seemed weaker, more and more frail. Every night when I came home there was a nourishing broth ready, sometimes a hot stew. Oh, not a banquet by rich men’s standards, a paltry meal to them, but prepared with such love I felt as if I was eating ambrosia itself, and I left the table sated. Every night I asked her to join me at the meal but she always said she had already eaten. Child that I was, I took her at her word.” He pressed the handkerchief to his eyes. “Forgive me, boys, I can never say this part of my story without tears … I was fortunate to have such a mother. I know that many of you have never been so blessed … that you have never known the joy of a mother’s smile or the sweet sorrow as her loving tears fall on your cheeks. My dear mother died. You see, what I did not realize was that with the loving self-sacrifice only mothers can show, she was giving all her food to me and she herself was starving.”
He paused, searching the rows in front of him for acknowledgement. He found it on more than one thin face. Some of the boys were crying quietly. One or two put their arms around younger fellows. Murdoch himself felt a lump in his throat. The little boy next to him gave a loud sniff, and he patted his shoulder. The boy smiled up at him gratefully. Canning never moved his gaze from the stage.
“My dear mother passed away. Peacefully and piously, as she had lived. But she left me a gift. After her funeral, overwhelmed by my sorrow, I opened her battered old Bible to pray, and there, tucked inside, was an envelope. Puzzled, I opened it up … and took out…”
He paused, and one bold youth shouted, “Fifty dollars!”
Shepcote smiled good-naturedly. “Exactly. Fifty dollars. She had scrimped and saved and gone without so she could give me this legacy. Not a princely sum by most standards … not enough to start a bank…”
A lot of laughter now, the boys glad to be taken away from their painful thoughts.
“By the greatest of good fortunes, there was a stall for sale on my street, the owner old and tired. When I went to him with my fifty dollars in hand he laughed in my face. ‘Send your father, laddie,’ he said, ‘then we’ll do business.’ It took him a long time to believe I was buying the stall myself.”
According to Shepcote’s narrative, thought Murdoch, he would have been about six years old at this point, but none of the audience was critical and he was never questioned.
“And that’s how it began. I worked hard and honourably. No wasting my money on dice … yes, you know what I’m talking about. I prospered. I bought another stall, and another, and then I bought the newspaper itself.”
He waited while they applauded and whistled.
“Now I have the great honour to represent the good people of our fair city as an alderman. The other day, one of my fellow councillors came to me. I won’t name him because it is to his everlasting shame that he said what he did. ‘Tell me, Mr. Shepcote,’ he said, ‘why do you, a busy man, an alderman whom so many people look up to, why do you waste your valuable time going to speak to a group of rowdy good-for-nothings?’ It’s true, those were the words he used, I regret to say. I looked him in the eye. ‘Why? I’ll tell you why. Because among these so-called rowdy good-for-nothings might be the future leaders of the city. Wait … wait. Among those rowdies are as good men as you will find in your banks and law courts. Among that rough lot are diamonds.’”
The whistles and shouting broke out and he could not continue. Finally he yelled, “All they need is a chance to show what they are made of!”
The boys stamped their feet, awash in the waves of excitement, empty bellies temporarily forgotten. Shepcote knew that the city council was planning to eliminate the grant to the newsboys’ lodge this year, but he was not going to tell them that bad news. They would find out soon enough when the lodge door closed to them and indeed the pavement would become their bed.
He waved and bowed as the cheering and whistling continued. Finally the master of ceremonies returned. He shook Shepcote’s hand and amidst stomping and clapping the alderman left the stage.
Murdoch turned to Canning. “Excellent speech. Was it true?”
The man’s pursed lips relaxed into a small smile. “Some of it.”
Murdoch would have liked to hear more, but with a nod, Canning stood up.
“I’d better see to him,” he said and he left the hall.
Murdoch’s pipe had gone out and he stuffed it back in his pocket, not wanting to arouse the cupidity of his neighbours, who were fast recovering from the mood that Shepcote had engendered. He had to admit to himself that a tear had formed in his own eye at more than one moment. Mr. Shepcote was a persuasive speaker indeed. The master of ceremonies started to call for silence again and Murdoch realized he was up next. He stood up and made his way down the aisle towards the stage. Over on the far side, some boys had started to sing. It could have been “Land of Hope and Glory,” but he wasn’t sure.
In the wings Shepcote mopped his dripping face and neck and took a quick sip from his whiskey flask. Canning approached him, a towel over his arm.
“Well done, sir. I wish I had a story like that to tell.”
Shepcote didn’t miss the irony in his servant’s tone, and he scowled. “I doubt your life could be told anywhere except in a penal colony.”
In fact, a lot of what he had recounted was true. He had been left fatherless at any early age, but the man he generally referred to as his father had been killed in a barroom brawl. His sister had indeed joined the angels at the age of sixteen when she died of venereal disease. It was concerning his mother that there was the most fiction. Destitute, yes, but never for a single moment could she have been termed self-sacrificing. Her last words to him were vile curses because he wouldn’t fetch her more gin. It was true that after her funeral he had found money. Hidden under the mattress. Money she had systematically stolen from his trousers, then forgotten about in her sodden mind. With the money, twenty dollars, he had made a down payment on a newspaper stall, cheating a near-blind old man by pretending to give him more than he did. But what was true was that he had worked and clawed his way out of the gutter, driven by a need to be better, to have the kind of comforts he witnessed in the lives of his customers, as distant from that skinny boy as the stars themselves.
And he had done it. He had a fine carriage and horse. A large house. He had married a woman from a better class; his daughter would marry even higher. But in the mixture of lies and half-truths he had handed out this afternoon, there was one total truth. He never forgot he had been a newsboy. Sometimes he awoke at night in a sweat of fear that everything he had built might be taken from him and once again he would be a pauper.
Beatrice Kitchen was darning her stockings, and she held the needle poised in mid-air as she looked at Murdoch.
“Sounds like an improbable story to me. As if angels would soil their hands selling newspapers. It was more likely some Methodist taking advantage of a hungry child.”
Her husband chuckled. “Now, Mother, let Will get on with his tale.”
It was late by the time Murdoch had got home, but the Kitchens were waiting up for him. Beatrice had made him a salty beef tea and he was sipping it.
“There’s not much more to say, really. Mr. Shepcote struggled up the ladder of success by dint of hard work and good morals. I believed him. He made me weep along with all the others.”
Arthur started to cough and Murdoch waited until he’d got his breath. Beatrice handed her husband a cloth to wipe his mouth.
“Any luck with the boys?” she asked.
“I think so. Of course there must have been at least three dozen of them ready to swear they’d seen Therese Laporte, in case there’s a reward in the offing, but two of them sounded believable. One boy described her exactly. He’d been trying to sell his remaining newspapers at the Somerset Hotel which is at the corner of Church and Carlton. He was turfed out sometime after nine and walked down Church. He says she crossed in front of him at Gerrard Street. She was going east. He said she was, and I quote, ‘a tasty bit of crumpet.’”