Seaton 03 - Crucible of Secrets

by S. G. MacLean

  And well might there have been, had we not between the four of us managed to separate twenty young men revelling in the fights and grievances of their fathers and grandfathers, but not before I had taken an elbow in the eye and an upper cut to the chin from a boy who did not see at whom he had lashed out until the deed was done. Matthew Jack had arrived back from his locking-in and haranguing of the two young gallants from earlier when the fight was at its height and our efforts looking in danger of being overwhelmed. Little affection though I had for him, I could not help but admire the bellow that issued from his throat, and the instant effect it had on those who were subject to his discipline. For a man so mean of frame, his very presence could inspire a great deal of terror. Poor John Innes, on the other hand, could inspire none, and had it not been for the assistance of Andrew Carmichael, their charges from the King’s College might have rampaged long into the night. Eventually the two groups were separated with an effusion of blood and swollen eyes, but fewer broken bones than might otherwise have been the case.

  As the scholars of King’s were led away back towards the Old Town, Matthew Jack had refused my help with our own, and driven them down towards the new burgh, declaring as he went, ‘These wretches will be lucky to set foot outside the college walls again between now and Christmas.’

  I refrained from pointing out that the term would be over in little more than two weeks. I also knew that I, with the rest of the college, would be forced to spend an hour of my time on Monday morning in the college courtyard, watching Matthew Jack administer to these boys the beating of their lives.

  Sarah listened to all this as she tended my eye and chin. The promised steak had been brought by a servant from William’s house and I had been instructed to apply it to draw out the bruising. ‘William was a little dishevelled looking, but he did not look to have been injured,’ she said.

  ‘No. His time in the law courts has kept him a more wary antagonist than I am.’

  ‘And the other two?’ she asked lightly.

  I searched her face for some change in expression, but saw none. ‘Andrew took some blows to the shins, and John was winded, but that was all.’

  She smiled. ‘I cannot imagine poor John in a fight.’

  My saintly friend had been of little use in the fracas. Had it not been for the assistance of Andrew Carmichael his scholars would have trampled him underfoot. I was not disposed to tell this much to my wife.

  ‘And Mr Jack has the boys back in the college?’

  ‘Aye, pity help them, for they will need it.’

  ‘Will they be all right? Tonight? None of them was injured?’

  ‘Some,’ I said, ‘although not greatly I think. I doubt whether Jack will rouse himself to check.’ I got carefully out of my chair. ‘I should go and see to it, and make sure that Dr Dun has my report of what happened down there today. Matthew Jack’s idea of the truth isn’t as other men’s.’

  Sarah put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Not yet, Alexander. You are in no fit state to go anywhere. You need to sit at rest a while and take a little food, to restore some of your strength. Besides,’ she added with a frown, ‘you cannot go to Dr Dun with ripped hose and a head full of sand, to say nothing of the blood on your shirt.’

  ‘I must see to the boys, Sarah.’

  ‘They are near enough grown men, and will come to no harm for your taking half-an-hour’s rest. You staggered in that door; do not tell me it was just the effects of William’s wine that made you do so, although I doubt Dr Dun would think so well of that either. And you do not need Matthew Jack noising it about the town that you are a drunkard.’

  And so, given no option, I did as she bid me. I let her finish bathing me and and took some broth and dozed an hour in my chair. I went nowhere near the college, nor indeed out of my door for an hour or more after I had first intended to. I wish to God that I had done.

  THREE

  The Scents of the Night

  When I did venture out, it was not quite dark yet in the streets of the burgh, the late June light refusing until the last necessary moment to yield to the Sabbath. Nevertheless, lamps and candles were being lit inside homes where the evening light could not reach, up closes and beyond courtyards, through thick stone walls and shuttered windows.

  There were one or two other solitary figures still out – I could not tell in the grimy grey who they were, and we none of us glanced more than a moment in each other’s direction – whatever business a man had out in the town at this hour of the night was his and not that of some passing stranger. It was a time when men took refuge in the shadows. Shadows, the word William had used when, on our way home from the fracas on the Links, he had finally broached the subject I had known would come.

  ‘You have no cause, Alexander, to suspect or mistrust him. He never set out to wrong you. Indeed, he did not wrong you, and you know that.’

  ‘I know it,’ I said, ‘but do not expect me to be at ease in his company: I do not like to see him close to her. Can you not understand? She is my wife!’

  ‘Now, yes, she is your wife. But she was not then, three years ago, when you disappeared into the night, taking ship for Ireland and a family you had scarcely spoken of. She was not your wife, nor your anything, and you had had two years by then – two years, when you might have secured her and did not.’

  ‘You know why – I did not think, I—’

  ‘You. Always you. But what of Sarah? Mother to a bastard child, servant in another man’s house, holding her head high in the face of all she knew was thought and said about her, and about Zander. You left her without having spoken a word to her. You left a scribbled note and went, and we thought you dead. Andrew Carmichael did not swoop down on her like some bird of prey, or fox in the night. He came to my house seeking my counsel on a matter regarding the law. He came a second time, and then a third, at my invitation, and it came as no great surprise when Elizabeth pointed out to me that he was falling in love with Sarah. Sarah did not return his feeling – she was in such a shock at your sudden leaving, such a certainty that you were dead or had gone to another, that she could not, whoever might have spoken to her. But he did speak, and he spoke kindly, and he listened to her and was a friend to her when you had abandoned her. And yes it was because he loved her and it was not done with disinterest, but who amongst us has ever loved with disinterest?’ William’s anger was risen now, and I knew it because he kept his voice so low. ‘And I’ll tell you this, Alexander. Had the day come when she had lifted her eyes to him, reached out a hand to him, been ready to go with him, I am not the one who would have stopped her, nor Elizabeth either.’

  This stopped me in my tracks, for he, my best friend, had never told me this before. ‘But she never did, and he did not press the matter. He let her understand that when she was ready, he would be there, waiting. And that is all he did, and all she did, which was nothing. And from the day you returned, he stepped back into his shadows, and I do not think he ever spoke to her of it again.’

  Yes, Andrew Carmichael was in the shadows, but those shadows were hanging over my life and try as I might I could not shake them off.

  I sought to drive these thoughts from my mind as I crossed from the Guest Row over the Broadgate to the college. The buildings that rose above me, behind the houses and booths that fronted the street, were almost entirely in darkness; one or two lights flickered behind narrow windows on the turnpike stairs, but none from the students’ chambers. Even the gatehouse was in darkness and the porter away from his post. This was unusual, and increased my concern for the boys who had been left in Matthew Jack’s care. I made my way down a side alley that would bring me out by the wall of the college garden. I knew that the gate leading from the garden to the library courtyard was not beyond the ingenuity of a man of my height and years to scale.

  I was surprised to find the gate to the library close ajar and creaking lightly on its hinges. I could not think who amongst the students could have been so careless on this of all nights, when Mat
thew Jack, and evidently the porter also, would be on the prowl along the corridors and stairways. A light from above caught my eye, a tiny flicker through a gap in the library shutters; I remembered having noticed it as I’d passed earlier with William. I had been all for going up to tell Robert to go home for the night, but William had persuaded me that I was in greater need of getting home myself, and so we had left him. I was surprised, all the same, to see that he was still there – he must have fallen asleep. It would not have been the first time, and yet I knew he had to read in the kirk early the next morning, and that it would not do for him to appear before the congregation unwashed and in his workday clothes. I decided to go and rouse him before I went to look for Dr Dun or to check what Matthew Jack had done to the boys.

  The night-time scents of the garden still hung in the air, the honeysuckle and the climbing roses that tumbled over the walls and trellises contending with one another for mastery of the falling dusk, but as I rounded the corner in to the library courtyard another smell, sickly, warm and cloying, rose above all the other usual odours of the place: the smell not of the college close but of the flesher’s yard.

  I almost stumbled on it in the half-light: the shape sprawled across the cobbles a few feet from the library steps, its dead eyes looking up at me in mute appeal, was Robert Sim. Flies were already busy about the blood congealed at his throat.

  FOUR

  The Library

  Dr Dun knelt on the ground, carefully making such examination as he could beneath the lanterns held by the college porter and one of the baillie’s men. The principal lifted Robert’s head gently and I saw that the right side of the librarian’s face, where it had lain on the ground, was caked in dirt and blood. Dr Dun had seen such sights often enough before, but it was a minute before he found his voice.

  ‘There can be no doubt, Alexander. He has been murdered. You see the wound at his throat?’

  I nodded, not wanting to look again at the bloodied mess that had once been my friend. Behind me, I could hear the porter retch.

  ‘And here,’ continued the principal, pointing to the dead man’s palms, ‘you can see the gashes where he sought to defend himself. It looks to have been a small, but very sharp knife.’

  The baillie spoke to me. ‘Have you found any such knife?’

  I shook my head. ‘I have not looked … I ran to get the porter – to fetch Dr Dun and yourselves, then I came back to stay with – Robert.’

  ‘You did right,’ said Dr Dun, brushing dirt from his clothes as he stood up, not noticing, it seemed, the brown smears of blood on his cuffs and the hem of his cloak. ‘This is a bad affair and, and I fear it will reflect badly on us.’

  The baillie was a man of business, with little time to spend on civilities. ‘It is indeed a bad pass.’ He tilted his head. ‘And it is Robert Sim?’ The principal nodded. ‘How long do you think he has lain dead like this?’

  Dr Dun shook his head. ‘I cannot be certain. Not long. The body is not yet stiff and the blood not fully congealed.’

  ‘And do you think he was slain here?’

  The principal indicated the state of Robert Sim’s face, and his fingernails. ‘I think you can see here and here that he made some effort to drag himself along the ground, towards the courtyard. Robert Sim was meticulous in the cleanliness of his hands. He would allow no one with dirty hands to touch the books in his care. He kept a basin of water and a drying rag up by the door there for that express reason. Even I was directed that way more than once. But look at his own fingers – they are caked in dirt and blood. He must have clawed his way along the ground. He did not get very far. Also, the blood has not spread greatly. I would think he died very close to where the assault took place.’

  The baillie nodded. ‘At the bottom of the stairs here.’ Then he turned to the gatekeeper. ‘Mr Sim lived in the town, not in the college, is that not so?’

  The man nodded.

  ‘At what time did he usually leave the library on a Saturday?’

  The man looked troubled. ‘The library is only supposed to be open until noon on a Saturday, but sometimes Mr Sim had work of his own to do and he …’

  ‘So he had no usual time of leaving?’

  ‘It would change from week to week, but he never stayed later than eight in the summer, five in the winter.’

  ‘But he did not leave tonight?’

  The gatekeeper looked from the corpse to the baillie and back to the corpse, as if the town magistrate lacked in something.

  ‘I think what the baillie is asking,’ I said, ‘is did Robert Sim leave earlier in the evening, and then return?’

  ‘I could not say.’

  Dr Dun now interjected. ‘Do you mean you were not at the gate?’

  The man was firm in his own defence. ‘I would have been, but Mr Jack arrived back from the Links with the scholars and he was in very high dudgeon. There had been some fighting and trouble, and he called upon me to see to it that every one of them was locked in their chamber for the night, but only after the rooms of the likeliest had been searched for weapons. He has had me patrolling the corridors and landings half the night.’

  The principal ran a hand over his brow and muttered, ‘He goes too far, always too far.’ And then, barely able to mask his anger, he said to the gatekeeper, ‘So what you are saying is that anyone other than the scholars under guard could have left or entered this college tonight.’

  The man was surly. ‘The gates were locked.’

  But we all knew there were places, not just the gate I had come in by, but breaches in our crumbling walls, sorely in need of repair, where a careful and agile man might pass unseen.

  ‘Would that he had come with us,’ I murmured.

  ‘What?’

  I told the baillie of our invitation to Robert to join us on the Links.

  ‘When was this?’ asked the principal.

  ‘In the afternoon, at around three. I had been working in the library for an hour or so.’

  ‘Who else was there?’

  ‘No one. When I left with William Cargill, Robert was alone.’

  ‘Then I think we had better see what the library has to tell us, do not you, Baillie?’ said the principal. Taking the lantern from the porter he set his foot on the bottom step and led us up the outer stairs.

  The door was unlocked, and there was no sign of the key.

  ‘That is not right,’ said the gatekeeper. ‘He never went out and left the place unlocked, never once. He kept the key on its ring at his belt.’

  ‘Perhaps he had not yet intended to leave for the night,’ said the baillie. ‘Perhaps he had merely gone out for a moment for air, or to meet with someone else in the college.’

  ‘He would still have locked up,’ I said. ‘He would allow no one to remain unsupervised in the library – master or student.’

  The principal concurred. ‘And besides,’ he added, indicating the corpse on the ground, ‘he has with him the satchel that he used to carry work back and forth from here to his lodgings. He was going home.’

  Below us, the constable knelt and undid the buckle on the worn leather satchel. He rooted around in it a moment, and brought out a large, hide-bound ledger, with the symbol of the incorporated trades embossed on the front. ‘There is only this, nothing else.’

  The book was passed up to the principal, who took it in his hand and nodded. ‘The Trades’ Benefaction Book.’

  I had seen it often before – folio, bound in pigskin. ‘It was on his desk in the library this afternoon,’ I said. ‘It was this that he planned to work on tonight.’

  ‘Well, his assailant had no interest in that, it would seem.’

  The constable laid aside the satchel before carefully unclasping and sliding the belt from Robert Sim’s body. There was no ring of keys around it, but the thong from which the ring had hung had been cut.

  ‘Someone has evidently forced the keys from him, dead or alive,’ said the baillie.

  Dr Dun pushed open the door and
led us into the library. I don’t know what I had thought we would find in there – blood, broken glass, splintered wood, torn and flung-about books, signs of a struggle – but as one candle after another was lit in the sconces along the walls, there was very little evidence of any of that. In fact, at first sight, the place did not seem greatly altered from how it had been in the afternoon. Desks and chairs were where they had been, books were on their shelves, not strewn on the floor. Not even the inkpot on the librarian’s desk had been overturned, and yet I had a strong sense that the place had been searched. The door of a press was not quite properly closed; a candle had burned right down to the wick, as if it had never been put out; one or two books had not been pushed right in on their shelves, as Robert Sim would have taken care to do. And on his desk, as it always was, bound in leather and kept in the librarian’s own neat hand was the register of readers. Its companion, the library catalogue, bound in identical style and kept in the same hand, was gone.

  The principal, his hand resting on a lectern Robert had often used, was also looking around him, noticing, I was certain, the same things I myself had noticed. The baillie and his constable found less to interest them, the former soon making his own assessment, and implying in his tone that he looked for no other.

  ‘Well, there is little amiss here. Evidently Robert Sim had left for the night and was assaulted and robbed outside. His assailant, finding nothing of value here, made off into the town unobserved, it would seem.’

  He had begun to walk back towards the door when a shout from the constable below took our attention. He shouted again for the baillie. I was first to the stairhead and saw, in the intermittent light from his swaying lantern, a set of keys and something else that briefly glinted as the light swept over it; it was a knife, small and lethally sharp, picked up a moment earlier from a dank corner beneath the stairs. It was evident to us all that this must be the instrument that killed Robert Sim, but only once I had suggested it and the principal confirmed it did the burgh’s officers realise what it also was: a doctor’s scalpel.