Seaton 03 - Crucible of Secrets

by S. G. MacLean

  The baillie directed the constable to try the keys in the library door, and carefully took the scalpel from him. The blood was brown and dry on the blade, and smeared on the handle. He held it out towards us. ‘You are certain that that is what it is, Dr Dun?’

  ‘There can be no doubt. Every doctor and surgeon in the town will have one.’

  The baillie shook his head. ‘Well, I’ll hazard that there is one doctor or surgeon in this burgh who has one less tonight than he had this morning. The first thing to be done is to draw up a list of all the physicians in this and the Old Town.’

  ‘And the first name on that list will be my own,’ said the principal.

  The baillie made to protest, but Dr Dun held up a hand to stop him. ‘There can be no partiality, no respecting of persons in the search for the perpetrator of this brutal deed. You will find such a list in the third drawer of the tall Dutch chest in the room next to my chamber. I will have one of the students copy it for you.’ He turned then to the gatekeeper. ‘And you will grant the town’s officers access wherever they might wish. If the truth be hidden somewhere in this college, it will be found out. And now, Baillie, you will excuse me, for the hour is late and I must speak with Mr Seaton about how this business is to be managed here, within these walls.’

  The baillie’s mind was on the matter of doctors and their knives now. ‘We will begin our investigations in the town tomorrow. I know the final examinations are almost upon you – we will strive to avoid disruption of the college business. I am greatly obliged for your assistance, Dr Dun.’

  Finally, the principal and I were alone, and I was not greatly surprised to see Dr Dun turn once more towards the library. ‘Now, Alexander, before we find the answers, I think we must first know the questions, don’t you?’

  Again, I was struck by the strange but oddly imperfect tidiness of the library. In a place that was usually silent, the heavy silence of the night, punctuated only by the sounds made by Dr Dun and myself, was like a third presence. The principal placed the Trades’ Benefaction Book on the librarian’s desk. ‘The catalogue is missing,’ he said, as much to himself as to me.

  ‘I had noticed that.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Very little. That is what seems so strange. One or two books do not look quite right on their shelves – I suspect, should we look, we would find that some of them are not in their proper place.’ I cast my eye about me again. ‘That box of mathematical instruments, beneath his desk there, is somewhat askew. One of the press doors has not been shut properly. I think the place has been searched, very carefully, by someone who knew exactly what they were looking for.’

  Dr Dun nodded. ‘I believe you are right. But what was it, and did they find it?’ He sighed deeply and sat down in Robert’s chair. ‘Let us be systematic.’ He pulled towards him the ledger in which Sim recorded the names of those using the library along with a note of what they had consulted. The ribbon marker was still at Saturday’s page, and my own name the last one on it. ‘It was a quiet day,’ said the principal. ‘Three readers in the morning, and only one other than yourself in the afternoon.’ He turned the book towards me and I scanned the short list of names. There was my own, with the Kepler registered beside it, and the scholar who had been slumbering over his Aristotle until I had sent him out into the sunshine. Two other scholars, of the senior class, had been in in the morning, but it was the third name that caught my attention: John Innes, my friend and regent in the King’s College.

  Principal Dun must have caught the look on my face. ‘Is there something the matter, Alexander?’

  ‘No, I, I … it is just, I didn’t expect to find John Innes’s name here.’

  He smiled. ‘Come now, you know we have an arrangement with the King’s College whereby their masters might consult our library and ours theirs. And you know, while he lacks your own depth of insight and sharpness of mind, poor John is the most diligent of all the regents. Although … I suspect Principal Rait will have some harsh words for him over today’s fracas at the Links.’

  ‘I must bear much of the responsibility for that – I should have gone down onto the beach when Matthew Jack left to take the others back to the college earlier on.’

  He looked up at me from under his eyebrows. ‘He had no business leaving them, and you were not the duty regent today. But that is not our concern at the moment. Does this register bear out what you know of yesterday, that there was no one else at work in the library when you were here in the afternoon?’

  ‘No – but wait, yes. Malcolm Urquhart, of the fourth class. He was leaving as I arrived.’

  ‘Hmm. Perhaps he had consulted nothing.’ He closed the book. ‘Well, I would like you to seek out each of the people named here, find out from them exactly when they were here, what and whom they saw. And heard.’

  I nodded, glad that it was I and not one of the baillies who would be interviewing my friend John Innes, but troubled still, not by the fact that he had been in our library, but that in all of our conversation of the librarian and the new benefaction, he had not mentioned his visit once.

  The principal ran his hand along the arm of the librarian’s chair and closed his fingers over the curved end of it, the oak rubbed smooth over the years by the man who had so long sat in it. ‘Robert, Robert.’ It was the first time I had seen Patrick Dun appear dejected, as if the burden of his office had become too great. ‘How was he, when you saw him?’

  I took myself back to earlier in the day. ‘I did not think he was … altogether himself, not quite. He seemed agitated, a little distracted. In fact, there was something he wished to discuss with me. Something he was going to tell me, but William came in and he changed his mind.’ And then I remembered. ‘He said he needed to talk to you first.’

  Dr Dun raised an eyebrow in interest. ‘To me? Did he give you any idea of what it was about?’

  I shook my head. ‘I took it to be something to do with the benefaction. There was something in it, I think, that troubled him. He did not come to see you?’

  ‘I had been out at Belhelvie, and was not back in the town until after eight. I am sorry to say I had very little thought of the college or the library, and went directly to Benholm’s Lodging.’ I knew the thought that was in his mind: the journey from Belhelvie to his town residence at the top of the Netherkirkgate would have taken him within a hundred yards of the college and the library close, where Robert might already have been lying dead. He rubbed his left hand across a weary face. ‘Tell me what you know about this benefaction.’

  ‘It was an acquisition, lately come to the college from the Low Countries – Groningen, in fact. A doctor—’

  Dun interrupted me. ‘Duncan, Gerald Duncan. Of course. I had a letter from Franeker that it was on its way. Gerald was a good friend to me, many years ago, when I first went to study under Dr Liddel at Helmstedt. We corresponded for a good while after I left, but, sad to say, I never saw him again. He made for himself a very creditable career in Germany and then Friesland, but I do not know that he ever returned home.’

  ‘He did once, at least. William Cargill recalls being a boy and meeting him at his uncle’s house.’

  The principal looked surprised, but this was not the time or place for reminiscence on old acquaintance, and he returned to the substance of the matter. ‘So, Sim was cataloguing Gerald Duncan’s benefaction.’

  ‘And the catalogue is gone,’ I said, ‘so we now have no way of knowing what was in it.’ Familiar as I was with this place, without the catalogue I could not have told which of the hundreds of books on open shelves or shut behind the high glass doors of presses might be from Duncan’s collection.

  ‘You despair too quickly, Alexander.’ To my astonishment, he moved a stool to the shelves behind Sim’s desk and, climbing on to it, reached up with his hand to what appeared to be an empty space on the second highest shelf. ‘We are fortunate that Robert Sim was a little shorter than I am myself,’ he said, as he drew from the back of the shelf
a length of string with, on the end of it, a small key. I helped him down and he strode across the room to a chest in a dingy far corner of the library, where only old maps and scientific instruments awaiting repair were kept. He turned the key in the lock of the chest and opened the lid, a broad smile spreading over his face as he did so. ‘I often used to berate Robert, gently, for his excessive caution in his dedication, but I do not do so now.’

  From the chest he lifted out two pieces of paper, which he handed to me. Along the top, in a hand I did not know, was written, List of the Books Mortified to the Marischal College in Aberdeen by Dr Gerald Duncan, Franeker. And beneath the lists were the books.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said.

  Dun smiled. ‘There is no great mystery. It has been a rule of this college for as long as I can remember that any books coming into its library had to be signed for not just by its librarian, but also by its principal. Robert would have resigned his post rather than stray from such a regulation. He may well have finished cataloguing Duncan’s benefaction, but he would not have put a single volume on the shelves until I had countersigned his receipt, which – as you see,’ he said, indicating the space beside Sim’s signature at the bottom of the second page, ‘I have not yet done. If the book – or books – his assailant was looking for was amongst Duncan’s benefaction, he will not have found it. Only Robert and I knew that this old chest was the library’s strong box, or where the key was to be found.’ He handed me Robert’s library key, and that to the strong box. ‘You must examine these lists, Alexander. Look for what it was that Robert saw. If I had the time to do it myself, I would, but I must keep a firm grip on the rudder of this college if I am to steer her through the troubled waters of the next few weeks. For now though, it grows late, and I must give thought to tomorrow.’

  At the top of the stairs, Principal Dun paused, and turned back to me. He spoke quietly. ‘There is one more thing I must ask you to do, for I can think of no other who could do it discreetly and in whom I have greater trust.’ I waited; it was evident the principal took no pleasure in what he now had to say. ‘The baillie and his constables will investigate this matter as the town deems fit, but Robert Sim was one of our number, and deserved well of us. I want you to look into his private life, his life outside these college walls. It may be that it is there, and not here, that the answer to this horror is to be found.’

  FIVE

  The Books

  I watched my wife through the thick glass pane of the window. The glow of one small candle set on the windowsill was all the light to be seen now in the courtyard off Flourmill Lane where our small house jostled for space with five others. Clay pots of thyme and rosemary were bracketed to the wall, and tubs of chives and lavender flowered by the doorstep. Their scents contended in the fallen darkness with the peaty smell of smoke rising from the chimney, drifting out on the night air, away from the animal odours of the backlands, where dogs, pigs and fowl were at rest for the night. She was sitting by the fire, untwisting her hair from under the cap where she had kept it all day. I liked to watch her sometimes still, unobserved, to have again that feeling that had gripped me, attended my every step, my every thought for two years; that I had come upon the one that would make me whole, and that if she was almost, almost, beyond my reach, she was utterly beyond that of others. And then to walk in and to touch her, brush her cheek, her fingertips with mine, was to live again, for a moment, the first time.

  Sarah looked up as I opened the door, only a flicker of a second between seeing me and the smile coming to her face.

  ‘You are so late, Alexander. I had begun to worry that you had fallen amongst more mischief.’

  ‘I had not expected to find you still up. You should not have waited for me.’ I knelt down before her, taking her hands in mine, and told her as gently as I could what had happened.

  She could say nothing coherent for a few moments, half-formed questions dying in disbelief on her lips. Tears filled her eyes and spilled out over the lashes. I wiped them away with my hand.

  ‘Hush, hush.’

  ‘But he was so good – what harm was there ever in Robert? What would he have ever done to anyone, that he should die like that? He did not deserve that.’

  I could summon no words, no platitude, no portion of the scripture to answer her. ‘It is not ours to know.’ I could not say that to my wife, the well-worn admonition to those seeking to understand the mind of God. For I knew that what I had seen in the library close that night had been no work of God.

  ‘Robert shall have some justice in this world, we are determined on that.’

  She looked up at me, instantly suspicious. ‘We?’

  ‘The burgh authorities have begun their investigations, and, God willing, they may find the perpetrator, but the principal has asked that I should assist him in looking into matters in so far as they affect the college.’

  ‘But why you?’

  I shrugged as I stood up. ‘Because I am the oldest of the regents, I suppose. I do not think he altogether trusts Matthew Jack, and the other two have – well, they have not lived in the world as I have.’ And because I knew Death in ways they did not. I had seen Death and tracked its malign pathways in ways they had not.

  I could see my answer had done little to ease the concerns creeping into her mind. ‘What are these matters?’

  I poured myself a beaker of ale from the jug on the sideboard. It was warm and tasted stale. ‘They concern the library, for the main part. I am to interview the students and masters who were in there yesterday – their names are in the register – and I have been examining the books Robert was cataloguing when he died. It seems obvious to Dr Dun and to myself, that whoever killed him took his keys from him and made a careful search of the library. If we can find what he was looking for, it may help us to discover who he is.’

  Sarah’s face paled. ‘Do not tell me you have been in the library until now?’

  I nodded. ‘Well, yes, where else?’

  ‘Are you gone mad, Alexander? You were there, until now, alone?’

  ‘Yes, I …’

  ‘What if he had come back? What if this murderer had come back there and found you? What would have happened …?’

  I went to her and took her by the shoulders. ‘He no longer has the key. The constable found it, dropped beneath the library stairs. And you forget: I am no gentle Robert Sim: I can defend myself.’

  ‘Can you, Alexander?’ She reached up and touched my still-tender eye, and then her eyes went to the silver scar at my throat, made by the knife that had come close to killing me in Ireland, less than three years ago. I could not have hidden it, but I had often cursed the night I had told her of how in Ireland I had come to believe I would not live to see her face again.

  I stroked her hair and kissed it. ‘If God had not meant us to be together, he would have found a thousand ways by now to part us. Do not fear for me.’

  She sniffed then straightened herself. ‘If I do not, who will? You take no care for yourself. Look at that shirt!’

  I looked down at myself and smiled. It had been warm, still, in the library that night, and the books of Duncan’s benefaction very dusty. The sleeves of my best college shirt, assiduously scrubbed by Sarah on a weekly basis and put over my head by her little over three hours ago, had not fared well in my labours, and were now a mottled grey. I pulled the shirt over my head and dropped it in her laundry basket. ‘What would I do without you?’ I said, pulling her to me.

  ‘I do not know. You will just have to see to it that you do not find yourself without me.’

  Later, as she slept, I lay with my hands behind my head, listening to the sounds of the sleeping town. The moon cast its pale blue light through our unshuttered window, illuminating the bare wooden floorboards and the open hatch down to the kitchen below, from where I could hear the even sounds of our children’s breathing in their box bed. I imagined Robert Sim’s silent room, the bed in his lodgings not slept in. The image of his body spr
awled on the cobbles of the library close came to my mind and I sought to chase it away. I took myself back over my last two hours in the library, with the list written in Robert’s own hand, and the chest of Gerald Duncan’s books.

  Robert had been meticulous, and he had already assigned to each book a shelf-mark, lettered for the benefactor and numbered according to subject matter and date of publication. The most recent of the works had taken little of my time – a printed and bound set of graduation theses from the University of Franeker for the year 1622. 1622: I had been immersed in my divinity studies and in the throes of my first experience of love. I wondered how the young graduands of Franeker had fared in those years since their laureation, which paths in life they had taken. The first few paragraphs of their dedication contained the usual fulsome panegyric to the college’s benefactors before descending to reminiscences of friendships formed.

  I remembered my own inaugural disputation, prior to my promotion and graduation as Master of Arts in philosophy. My own parents had not been there, my mother dead and my father not at ease in such gatherings, but my friend Archie’s parents had been there, Lord and Lady Hay, come down from Delgatie with their Katharine. My Katharine. And Jaffray had been there, Dr Jaffray, almost a father to me, come down from Banff to join in the festivities for the boys he had always loved so well. I had made my defence and been greatly lauded as had my fellows, and we had had our laureation and feasted in to the night. A golden day. It was as well we had not known what was to come.

  And what had happened to these boys, with their great hopes, passing out of Franeker into the world? It was not good to dwell on such thoughts; I passed quickly over their dedications to the meat of the matter: the theses proposed by their professor and defended by the graduands themselves.