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 did as she said, for want of an option. Once I had done so, she moved past me with scarcely a disturbance of the air. I saw her a little better now. Even without her stoop, she would have been little over five feet tall. Now I saw behind her, by the light of her torch, a steep drop through a crevice in the rock; I had been a few inches from falling to my death. As I struggled to master my tongue, she appraised me more fully. I felt I did not meet entirely with her approval. ‘Like your mother still. I wondered when you would come.’ She turned to her left. ‘Follow in my footsteps – precisely, mind – and do not deviate. This is a bad path you have taken.’ It took twenty minutes, twenty silent minutes apart from the occasional ‘mind your foot there; keep to the right; no, not that stone,’ from the crone before we had made our way safely onto the sand. Once there, she did not stop, nor turn to address or question me; she simply walked on, and I knew that I was to follow. I could hear the sea now, lapping gently onto the shore, but I could not tell how far from me it was.
We walked the length of the beach and at the end of it she started to climb again, up the dunes and towards the far headland. Then it seemed to me that she had disappeared; I followed in the direction she had gone, for a moment seeing nothing but a vague impression of the hillside. Then – though I do not know whether it was a glimpse of flame or the smell of smoking wood that drew me – I at last discerned just ahead of me the opening to a cave in the side of the headland.
‘Well, come in then, and pull over that board behind you, or we will both die of the damp and the cold.’
To my left there was a double lattice screen covered in stretched hide, higher than myself and broader than the cave opening, which was wide enough to let two men pass. I pulled it along on wooden runners and lashed it by leather thongs to bolts of iron hammered into the wall. To my surprise, the cavern was warm and dry. The crone had thrown driftwood onto the fire and it blazed well. The floor was covered in rush matting and knotted rugs, which looked to be made of rags, oddments, knotted and woven together. A table, a chair, a bed and shelving had all been fashioned from what the sea had brought to the shore of Darkwater. Wrecks and rubbish from boats on the firth and further afield had served the woman well. A pulley hung overhead, suspended from huge hooks of iron chiselled into the rock, and from it hung a myriad of drying plants, only some of whose names I knew. She followed the line of my vision and lowered the pulley, taking down some specimens and setting them on the workbench behind her. She spoke almost absent-mindedly to me.
‘Lesser celandine. For the piles,’ she said with a grim smile. ‘Sweet violet – but you, I think, have no trouble with your breathing. Common chickweed – for the skin. You are pasty of face, but healthy enough. Coltsfoot – you will be needing that should you return to Banff in this – you will be in bed with the fever for a week. But this, perhaps, this is what you need.’ She held out the long stems of a plant crowned by clustered heads of small, pale pink flowers. ‘Valerian. It will relieve the insomnia, allow sleep, help with the tensions in your head.’ I knew the plant well. My mother had often taken it in simples and decoctions that I had fetched her from Arbuthnott. I did not want to remember these things.
‘I am not here for your medicines or healing,’ I said. ‘There is something I need you to tell me.’
She put down the flowers and looked at me cautiously. ‘Three times in as many weeks I have had a visitor from Banff who has spoken these words to me. The first is dead, the second also. I have saved your life three times now; I would not have you the third.’
Three times? I thought the old woman wandered in her mind. ‘I would be fodder for the gulls by now had you not steadied me out on the cliffs.’
She looked at me with what might almost have been contempt. ‘Hmph. You would be fodder for nothing. You would not be here at all, nor anywhere else in your life gone by. Time enough for that. But tell me why you have come, what it is you think I can tell you.’ I was not certain that she was speaking of last summer, but she was evidently in no humour to go into our past relationship in greater detail and I had other business in mind, so I left it. She indicated a place behind me, and I sat down on a mattress of sorts, covered by a fleece. A sheep wandering away from the flock, tumbling over the edge of the cliff as I had almost done, would have been a fine treasure trove to the old woman. I scanned what I could of the cavern, but nothing in it was familiar to me. The fruits of land and sea had not been wasted here. I wondered at the struggle some men have to gain riches in a world where God so easily will gift them. By the time I had settled myself, she had taken off the long cloak of sealskin that had protected her from the elements. Shapeless layers of unbleached wool and a tunic of rabbit skins protected her against such elements of cold as found their way into her home. She gathered a mortar and pestle from a niche in the cavern wall and continued with her work, never looking at me. ‘Go on then,’ she said. ‘Tell me your business.’
‘These visitors you had. Were they Patrick Davidson and Marion Arbuthnott?’
She paused in her work, her back still to me. All movement was stopped. ‘Are you here on the baillie’s business?’ she asked.
‘I am here on my own,’ I said. ‘Will you answer my question, for all that?’
She considered. ‘Have you no fear of death too, then?’
It was a question I fought with now almost every night, a question that had stolen from me many hours of sleep. ‘I have fear of the judgement that is to come and of those last waking moments when I cannot deny a wasted life. But they will come at their time, and it is not in my power to say whether that time is today or sixty years from now.’
She recommenced her grinding. ‘That is perhaps for the best. Those who seek to have power over the time of their death waste the days of their living in worrying about it.’
‘And were Patrick Davidson and Marion Arbuthnott amongst them?’
She ladled water from a barrel into a small pot hanging over the fire. She was very precise as to the number of ladles full, and did not answer me until she had finished. ‘They wished for the power over life, and the knowledge of death.’
‘I do not understand you.’
She sighed and at last sat down opposite me, on the other side of the fire, the simmering pot between us. She looked directly into my eyes, did not blink.
‘Alexander Seaton. I knew you before you were born, before you were of this world. I knew you before your father knew you. Your mother came to me as many others have done – it was the doctor’s wife that took her.’
‘Jaffray’s?’ I interrupted.
‘Aye, Jaffray’s. She had been here to me before, Jaffray’s wife. In a desperation that I could save her bairns, give her some compound, some infusion, some charm even, that they should live. But it was beyond my power or knowledge, as it was of her husband’s, to effect such a thing. We fed her carrots to promote conception, had her drink decoctions of salted sage juice to stave off the miscarriage, and gave her savin. She took the wild, stinking arrach to cure her womb. She even slept with an empty cradle at her bedside, although her husband did not like this – he feared it was charming. And still they died, every one, scarce afore they had drawn breath. And then she took your mother here.’
‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Was she too in fear of losing a child?’
She spat to the side and looked at me again. ‘No, she was in fear of having one. You.’
All sound stopped in my ears, and in the middle of its roar, I knew what was coming next. I had no wish to hear it from this hag. I uttered the words myself. ‘She wanted something from you to help her cast me from her womb.’