The Redemption of Alexander Seaton
- Автор: Маклин Шона Дж.
- Серия: Alexander Seaton #1
- Год: 2009
- Язык: английский
- Год: Quercus
- ISBN: 1847247911
- Жанр: Исторические детективы
Электронная книга - «The Redemption of Alexander Seaton». Краткое содержание книги:
Is the young man merely drunk or does his tottering walk suggest something more sinister?
When he collapses, vomiting, over the two whores who find him on that dark wet night, they guess rightly that he’s been murdered by poisoning.
So begins this gripping tale set in the town of Banff, Scotland in the 1620s. The body of the victim, the provost’s nephew and apothecary’s apprentice, is found in Alexander Seaton’s school house. Seaton is a school master by default, and a persona non-grata in the town – a disgraced would-be minister whose love affair with a local aristocrat’s daughter left him disgraced and deprived of his vocation. He has few friends, so when one of them is accused of the murder, he sets out to solve the crime, embarking on a journey that will uncover witchcraft, cruelty, prejudice and the darkness in men’s souls.
It is also a personal quest that leads Alexander to the rediscovery of his faith in God as well as his belief in himself.
Among her many strengths, Shona MacLean is brilliant at evoking period and place. You feel you are in those cold, dark, northern rooms, eavesdropping on her characters. You are totally involved in the rich, convincing world she has re-created.
I could not help but open the most recent exercise book, though. The baillie had attended the kirk in Banff, mostly, but he had travelled too, all around the presbytery. He had found much to praise, many words of wisdom on which to meditate and to thank the Lord for, but he had found more to censure. Laxity in discipline, ignorance of the true meaning of the scriptures, error in the interpretation of God’s plan. Most of all, though, there was near a fury, fury at the ignorance, incompetence, and hypocrisy of the Reverend Guild. I could disagree with nothing he said of Guild’s preaching. Then a thought struck me. I rifled backwards through the pages and indeed it was there: 22 June, year of God one thousand six hundred and twenty-five. Mr Alexander Seaton, undermaster at Banff Grammar School, expectant for the ministry. At Boyndie Kirk.
Yes: he had been there. As I had taken the pulpit and looked down across my last congregation, I had seen, watching me with a peculiar intensity, Baillie William Buchan. Unaccountably, I felt my breathing come heavier and my hand tremble slightly as my eye scanned the first line and then the second. At first I could not quite comprehend what I read, could not take it in, and I had to go back over the words again until I was certain of what they said. There, in my hand, in the home of a man I had long avoided, maligned and misunderstood, I read a testament to hopes dashed and faith betrayed: William Buchan had given thanks to the Lord for the gifts He had given me, as a preacher and minister to his people, for preserving me where others had been lost, as a blessing to my community and a comfort to my friends. He had thanked God that the promise he had seen in the boy I had been had been fulfilled in the man I had become. My heart was racing and I read on, disbelieving until, out of nowhere, came a most awful hammering noise, fit to wake the dead. I scarcely had time to shut the book and throw it back in the pile at the top of the kist before the baillie came stumbling from his chamber, dishevelled from sleep. He wrenched his cloak from the back of the door and lurched towards the stairs. I hastily shut the lid of the kist and went to stand by Charles, who was also drowsily coming to; I was ready to defend him if I had to.
There was some commotion downstairs as the arrival strove to make himself understood to the crone, and then to get past her to the baillie. I should have relaxed at the voice, but my heart beat faster, for it could not be good news that drove him to this place, now, and in such a manner. There was shouting, insistent shouting, and the baillie trying to assert calmness, authority. At last he made himself understood, and I heard the men ascend the stairs. Charles tried to stand up, but his time in the tolbooth had weakened him greatly and he was far from his usual strength. It was not the baillie who came first through the door but Dr James Jaffray.
‘Alexander,’ he said, not comprehending that I should be there, and then his face changed and his body visibly sank as he saw Charles behind me. He took a pace towards us. ‘Oh, my boy, my dear boy.’ The baillie helped him to a chair and Charles knelt down at his feet, taking his hands. William Buchan, unused as he must have been to such displays of human feeling, stepped back into his chamber and, without fully closing the door, began to tidy himself. I poured some water for the doctor from the pitcher on the table.
‘Drink this, James; it will settle you.’
He rubbed his hand across his eyes and as the heaving of his chest subsided, he took the tumbler from me and drank. When his old friend had recovered himself, Charles allowed himself a smile.
‘Well, doctor, would it be an irate husband or a desperate creditor that chased you to the baillie’s in such a spin?’
The doctor also smiled and put down the tumbler. ‘No, but only two daft lads that are not safe to vague the streets on their own.’ He shook his head in a mock weariness. ‘There is nothing for it but I must find you both a wife to keep an eye on you, for I have work aplenty to keep me busy as it is.’
‘Just the one wife between us?’ asked Charles.
‘Aye, perhaps,’ replied the doctor, ‘and lucky to get that.’
A hacking cough broke into their pleasant banter. ‘Perhaps,’ said the baillie, ‘we should come to the matter in hand.’ Charles stood up and I stood aside to let the baillie pass. ‘The doctor has just told me now what I believe you already know, Mr Seaton. He has told me that by his findings, Marion Arbuthnott was no suicide but died by the same hand that killed Patrick Davidson.’
I nodded. ‘Yes, the doctor told me that this morning.’
‘What you will not have realised,’ continued the baillie, ‘perhaps because you would entertain no idea of his guilt in the first place, is that this proves, in as far as the thing can be proved, the music master innocent of the first crime as well as of the second.’
I looked from the baillie to Jaffray, the realisation only gradually dawning. Neither of us had thought of it, because neither of us had believed for a minute that Charles had murdered Patrick Davidson. It had been alone, in the peace and quiet of his little back room, looking out through the window at his wife’s garden, that the doctor had at last seen it. This was the proof that would, in the sight of others, free Charles from the tolbooth and from the hangman’s noose. Charles sat down again and held his head in his hands.
The doctor spoke again. ‘God forbid that any of us should take pleasure in such a thing. The girl should have been living and breathing and working yet in the apothecary’s shop and the provost’s nursery, but she is gone, and not by her own hand. We are too late now to prevent that injustice, but not another. Surely now, Buchan, the boy can go free?’
The baillie slowly nodded. His face was impassive and I could not guess what his thoughts were. ‘Yes, doctor, he can go free. Or, at least, I will consent to release him into your care. I have the authority, although I will doubtless have much answering for it to do before the council. But mark me well, see that he does not wander alone about the streets, or leave the town. He is less safe now than ever he was in the tolbooth. Heed my counsel, doctor.’
The doctor stood up, fully recovered now. ‘I will,’ and without further address to the baillie he turned to Charles. ‘Come on, boy, we’re going home.’
As we descended the dark stairway, the baillie, from his narrow doorway, spoke to me. ‘And you, Mr Seaton, you also should be careful what you are about.’ I made no reply and was glad soon to be out into the relative light of the vennel.
The homecoming to the doctor’s was a markedly different affair from our departure from the baillie’s. After her initial shock, Ishbel flew about the house making everything ready. The stable boy had been despatched within minutes to collect what was needful from the apothecary’s house; the rest could be got later. There was no notion that Charles would ever return to his attic room there, nor indeed, from the manner of the doctor and his housemaid, that he should ever leave their home. The contentment on the doctor’s face and the mild bemusement on Charles’s were as nothing to the determination of the young girl that the music master should not suffer one more moment’s hunger, thirst, cold or discomfort. That I was an imposition under her feet was made very clear, to my amusement rather than hurt, and to Jaffray’s too. Promising that I would indeed return to take my dinner with them that night, I left them to their moment. I had other business to attend to.
It was a steep climb to the codroche houses, along Low Street and up Back Path with its new-built dwellings – young craftsmen making their mark on the world for all to see, engraving their love on the lintels above the doors of their new households. My father had told me once, as we had passed such a doorway, that he had wanted to do the same when he had first brought my mother home from Ireland, to tell the world that she was his and he hers. But there was no engraving above our door, I said. ‘No boy, your mother thought it not seemly. She did not want to be as the other craftsmen’s wives.’ And that had perhaps been it, the beginning of the crumbling of his dream, when she had started, unwittingly perhaps, to punish him, little by little, for her mistake.