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.
She nodded slowly, evidently taking little pleasure in the conversation.
‘But what you gave her failed, just as what you gave the doctor’s wife to save her bairns failed.’
‘No,’ she replied, emotionless, ‘it did not, for I gave her nothing. Do not misunderstand me, Mr Seaton. There are many ways to help a woman rid herself of a child – it is not difficult. Many women have come to me in distress with the same request and I have helped them, but not all, and your mother was one whom I refused.’
The crone pulled back the lattice screen a moment, and the fog seeped into her dwelling. Nothing of the outer world could be seen. Inside the cavern, all save the fire and the pot now boiling above it was silent and still. I had returned to the place where the fact of my life had been decided. Jaffray had known what I would learn here, and that was why he had tried to stop me.
‘Why did you refuse her?’
She stopped watching me and returned to her pot. ‘Because I knew she would regret it. She did not truly want it. She wanted her life to be other than what it was and it could not be if she was tied to you. It was your father, or his world, she did not want. She wanted back to her own place, and her own like, but she could not go with you, so she sought to lose you, to dissolve the thing that would bind her here. I did not let her. There are choices that a woman must live with, and your mother had to live with hers. To the end of her days. It was not spite on my part, mind, but I knew she did not really want it. She could have effected the thing herself, if she had truly had her heart in it. There were many things she could have done, many things she could have taken. She could have taken dog’s mercury, or the wild carrot. She could have drunk a strong tincture of tansy, or wallflowers, or juniper berries. She could have used nutmeg; it is known.’
‘My mother would not have known of such things,’ I said.
She smiled a bitter smile. ‘You think not? I think she had such knowledge: she knew of the darkness. The doctor’s wife could not see it though; she had thought your mother wished to be taken here for help with conceiving a child, not losing one. The deceit was great – a great and cruel betrayal. I have not known many women who could have trampled in that way over the heartbreak of a friend. But God has his reasons, although I cannot fathom Him.’
‘His reasons?’ My senses had been obliterated by the shock that my mother had not wanted me to draw breath, and I was not really following the crone now.
‘Aye. His reasons. For blessing the one and torturing the other.’ She looked up at me with keen eyes. ‘For it is a torture, you know, to have the love within you for a child that will not be conceived, or if so, not born living. I have known many women who are mothers in their hearts, in their souls, but who never yet conceived or bore the child they carried within them. I have known women go through life with a broken heart for the loss of a tiny scrap of humanity that was all the world to them. They say Jaffray’s wife, and the provost’s wife too, Helen, the first one, died young because they were worn out with the constant burden of the children they carried and lost. They didn’t: they died of despair.’ She breathed a deep sigh. ‘There is a despair that leads to distraction. The last time I saw Helen Black she was fearful, on the edge of losing her mind through grief, in such desperation for a living child as if she could go on no more without it. And yet there have been many more, like your mother, who came to me that I might cast off the bairn within them. But one woman at the edge of her wits does not see what another suffers.’ She looked into memories in the flames. ‘It was a warm autumn day they came, I remember. But their journey homeward must have been cold as December, your mother full of her resentments and regrets, and the doctor’s wife abandoned to her devastation.’
These were not the women I remembered. ‘You are wrong,’ I said. ‘They were friends. They even brought me here one day, I am sure of it.’
Something nearly approaching a smile crossed the old woman’s lips, and there were images in her eyes. ‘Aye, they did bring you. The coldness between them passed when you were born, for your mother took you to her heart with joy the moment she saw you. She recoiled from the knowledge of what she had almost done. She was filled with remorse. Elizabeth, the doctor’s wife, could not carry hatreds against other of God’s creatures, and so they were reconciled. They brought you here on your sixth birthday, that I might see what I was to be thanked for. That is how I knew you, when I found you last year, stumbling in your delirium on the road from Sandend. You are still all your mother’s son.’
I almost laughed. ‘But that there were twenty years between those times.’
She stirred her pot and looked up at me. ‘Had it been forty I would have known you. You have the same eyes, and the same soul. A man cannot change his soul.’
‘But he can lose it,’ I said.
She narrowed her eyes quizzically. ‘Are you turned papist, then?’
‘No,’ I was emphatic, ‘never that.’
She sniffed, tiring of this line of conversation. I myself did not wish to pursue it: she had been leading me further away from what I wanted to know. ‘What did you mean,’ I began cautiously, ‘when you said Marion Arbuthnott and Patrick Davidson sought the power over life and the knowledge of death?’ I was fearful now, sitting here in this cavern, surrounded by herbs and plants and animal skins. In my head, the cries of the witch-mongers began to sound.
She asked me once more, ‘You are not on the baillie’s business?’
I repeated that I was not.
‘Nor yet the minister’s?’
‘We have no minister now, in Banff.’
‘Indeed?’
‘Since …’ I hesitated, unwilling to speak in this place of witchcraft.
‘Since they burnt that poor girl for a witch,’ she said.
I lowered my head. ‘Yes. Robert Guild will never preach in Banff again.’
She spat again. ‘Well, since you are here for neither Kirk nor council, I will tell you. The girl was with child. The bairn was his – her father’s apprentice. They came to me at first to ask for some compound or practice that might help her carry the bairn a few weeks longer – beyond its term. They wished to marry, but they knew that before they had the banns up her belly would be swelling and their secret known. They did not wish that shame on the bairn’s name, or the humiliation for themselves of sitting before the kirk on the stool for all the hypocrites to rail at. Also, I think the girl did not wish to disappoint her father. She did not say so, but I have seen it many times, and the look was in her eyes that I have seen on many others.’
The horror of it came cold on me. This was what Jaffray had known; this the secret of the dead that he had kept in the face of all my questioning. And he had had to watch, helpless, as the mob had taken her dead body from his house and added barbarity to barbarity. A mother had been murdered and within her her child, and it had been burned in her womb. I did not know how I would face the lykewake Arbuthnott intended for his daughter. The thing had been macabre enough without this.
My voice was hoarse. ‘Were you able to help them?’ I asked.
The crone shook her head. She indicated with a sweep of her hand the shelves of bottles and jars behind her. ‘My skill is in cutting short a woman’s time, or when it comes to it, assisting a living child into the arms of a living mother, when God so grants it. For the prolonging of a pregnancy I can do little, save to tell a woman to eat well and avoid toilsome labours. I explained this to them. She was much downcast, he agitated. I told them there had been many come to me in a worse case than they; that they should take their punishment and know that it would pass. I told them of those who have come to me in desperate straits – even of his own aunt, who had near lost her wits in fear and gone about like a thing haunted by the end of her life over the loss of all her children.’ She stirred her pot thoughtfully. ‘Aye, haunted she was indeed by them.’ She did not linger long in her reverie. ‘And so they left. And then the next thing I knew, the boy was dead by an unknown hand.’ She paused again for thought, before adding very matter-of-fact, ‘It may have been her father.’