Crucible (30 page)

‘Dr Dun?’

‘It would not have been me, I’ll tell you. But for all that it was he who dismissed Jack from the college, the
principal still feels a Christian duty towards him that few others could muster.’ William looked uncomfortable.

‘What is it? There is something else?’

He drew a breath. ‘Dr Dun got little thanks and much abuse for his troubles. Jack raved at everyone and everything that came near him. The townspeople who could get into the building, and the guards, thank God, jeered and spent their effort on heaping abuse on him rather than listen. For had he spoken in a clear calm voice, had they listened as I listened, they would have heard, amongst the ravings, what I heard.’

‘What did you hear. William?’

And he told me.

Had it not been so late, had my wife not being lying, insensible, in the room above us, we would have gone then to warn them, but as it was, we could only leave it until the morning.

Richard Middleton’s face was white, whiter even than it was after he had been attacked in the masons’ lodge by Matthew Jack.

It was his wife who spoke. ‘How did you know?’ she asked.

‘Matthew Jack,’ William said. ‘I think you must leave, now, before anyone else takes a moment to listen and understand what he is saying.’

The young doctor looked up at his wife. ‘Rachel, I am so sorry. I never meant to bring you to this. You do not
deserve this. I will go alone. People will accept you for your brother’s good name and your own; they will soon forget about me.’

‘If I have not you, Richard, I have nothing. What is there here for me? I took your name years ago and discarded my own. And when I die, that name will be on my grave. The provost will not detain us, and what belongings we will need are already packed up. We can be gone by tomorrow.’

‘That is good,’ I said, ‘but you may have a little longer before another listens to what he says; it may be that all he says will be discounted as the mad ramblings of a mind lost.’

The young woman looked at me steadily. ‘But you did not discount them so, did you?’

I looked away a moment, ashamed almost. ‘No. I had begun to – to suspect.’

How long ago had I begun to suspect? At the very beginning, I think, when first Robert Sim’s landlady had told me of his night-time wanderings, for in all the time I had known him, Robert Sim had never once sought the company of women for anything other than their domestic aid or their conversation, never once. And for all Sarah and Elizabeth had discoursed on his need for a wife, I had known he would never take one. And when William had repeated to me the words that had tumbled forth from Matthew Jack’s mouth in all the filthy torrent of his invective, I had realised at last what were the unnatural practices of which he had spoken to me that night in the lodge: when Robert
Sim had come alone, in the night, to the Middletons’ house, it had been to spend the hours of darkness not with the young woman, but with her husband.

Dr Dun’s face was grave. ‘You realise, do you not, Alexander, that this must be reported to the session. The crimes of Richard Middleton are an offence against God, and he must answer for them.’

I had rehearsed what I would next say carefully, for it had not been likely that the principal would accede to my request at the first time of asking, and I could not see how the thing was to be done without him. ‘He will answer for them, at the Day of Judgement. But others should not face the discipline of the kirk, and all that you know would follow, for things they have not done.’

‘You talk of his wife? She was complicit.’

I shook my head. ‘I talk of this college.’

Patrick Dun’s face darkened and his nostrils flared as he took in breath. ‘What are you telling me, Alexander? What are you telling me has been going on here under my very eye?’

‘Nothing, I think. I never heard a word, a whisper, about impropriety, or indeed much converse between Robert and the boys, and Richard Middleton was never in this place amongst them.’

‘Then why should anyone here be brought before the kirk?’

‘Because of Matthew Jack,’ I said. ‘He knew Richard
Middleton in Paris, when he was newly qualified and thought to set up in practice as a physician there. Jack thought the coincidence of their shared nationhood would give him access to the circle of his fellow countryman and his friends, but his overtures towards them were rejected. Jack saw to it in time that he was hounded from the city. When Matthew Jack eventually came to our college, and discovered Richard Middleton living in this burgh, he again sought revenge, but his old tales of secret, malign brother-hoods held little favour amongst our burgesses and so he waited, and he watched for something else. For years, Richard gave him nothing, no scrap of scandal that he could fix upon, lived quietly, built his practice and did not much seek the society of others. And then, his curiosity about what he found at the masons’ lodge took him to our library and Robert Sim. Whatever care they took, it was not enough, because Matthew Jack began to suspect the true nature of their association.’

‘That I can believe, but it still does not excuse Richard Middleton or – or Robert Sim,’ he added. ‘And I still fail to see how it threatens others in this college – your fellow teachers or the students under our care.’

‘Do you not remember the threats Jack flung at you, at this place, as he was put from its gates? Did you not hear what William heard last night, as you tended to Jack in his cell?’ In my frustration my voice was rising and I was speaking to the principal as I had never before done.

He started to shake his head slowly. ‘I paid no heed to his ramblings – I was tending his wounds.’

‘He made good on his threats, Patrick, as you set his bones and cleaned his sores. Amongst the garbled filth that poured from his mouth was that the Marischal College was a cesspit of sodomy. He was jeered and shouted down by the rabble down the stairs and outside who could not discern what he said, but if you yourself were to bring Richard Middleton before the session and accuse him of unnatural acts with Robert Sim, who was our own librarian, there are few within these walls who would escape the finger of suspicion, and no decent father would ever put his son here again. Boys who huddle together under a blanket through the winter nights in their chambers would find themselves accused of heinous crimes against nature and against God.’

The principal sat at his desk with his head in his hands. ‘And even should they not be found guilty, their names would be blighted by the rumour of filth. And all under my care.’ I waited, conscious of the sound of my own breath. At last he looked up. ‘All right, Alexander, I will do as you ask.’

Within ten minutes, I was loping down the stone steps from Dr Dun’s chambers to the college courtyard, his letter attesting to the good repute of Richard Middleton and his fitness to practise as a physician grasped firmly in my hand. It was a letter without which the Middletons’ hope of a new life, far from here, would have had little success.

*

‘And do you think they will be all right?’ Sarah squinted a little in the sun that came streaming through the small window of our chamber.

I sat on the edge of the bed, softly stroking her hair. I did not really want to speak of this. ‘I don’t know. Rachel is determined that they will be, and she is a strong woman, very strong. They have enough money to last them a good while, and when Richard’s arm is properly healed and his strength restored, he will be able to begin in practice again. The letters of recommendation from William and Principal Dun will open doors for them with the burgesses of Glasgow, and, in all, it will be a sort of homecoming for them.’

Sarah was silent a moment.

‘What is wrong?’ I said.

‘All these years she has been here, she must have been so lonely, and I never thought to offer her friendship. I thought she kept herself aloof, and all the time it was not for lack of friendliness on her part, but for fear of discovery. I never even considered where she had come from.’

‘It seems she travelled around a good deal with her brother before he settled here.’

‘And all that time Richard was studying, and beginning to practise on the continent. She had sacrificed so much for him, but for what? To wait all those years for your husband’s return and then to discover that it was hardly a marriage, that you could never be a proper wife nor bear children? She has had her good name maligned, been accused
of things she has not done, all for his sake. And now instead of freeing herself from him, she goes with him.’ Her face was almost bitter. ‘I do not understand it.’

‘It is because she loves him.’

‘But how can she love him, after he has so deceived her?’

‘He never deceived her, Sarah.’

She sat upright and regarded me with something approaching contempt. ‘Never deceived her? Alexander, the man is a sodomite.’

‘But he never sought to conceal the truth from her.’

‘He …’ She stopped. ‘What?’

‘Rachel knew it from the start.’

And so I told Sarah what Rachel Middleton had, haltingly, told me, as her husband looked on with a degree of love in his eyes that few men could match. She had first met Richard when a Lanarkshire minister known to her father had brought to their home in Glasgow a beautiful, sullen-looking boy of fourteen. It had been agreed that the boy should lodge under their roof while he studied at the town’s college, the University of Glasgow. Money changed hands and admonitions were given, and the minister departed, leaving the boy at the stonemason’s house. He had stood there, she recalled, like a scared animal with nowhere left to go, and she had sworn in that moment that she would be his sanctuary, she would be his place to go. And so, almost four years later, it had proved, and he had become her sanctuary, too, when her father, noticing that she had attained to womanhood, decided she should become
another man’s burden. The son of a plumber was found, an apprentice, to take the girl off his hands, and both fathers were well-pleased with the arrangement. She had protested that she did not love the plumber’s boy, did not know him, but no one paid her any heed. And then, one night soon afterwards, there had been a great banging on her father’s door, and demands from the college authorities for Richard Middleton to be produced before them, that they might enquire into allegations of lewd and unnatural converse with another scholar. Richard had been brought from his bed and had not known what to say as the regents had accused and her father thundered. But she had known what to say. Richard Middleton had smiled at the memory as he recalled her very words for William and me,

‘“You are poorly informed gentleman, and Richard maligned, for he has promised to marry me.”’ As the men stared and her father blustered, she had looked at Richard and seen in his face that, yes, they would be a sanctuary to each other.

Her father had thrown them from the house, and they had gone back to that parish whence he’d come, and the minister there had married them, persuading himself that what he had suspected of the boy all those years ago could not be true after all. Richard had been permitted to take his final examinations and to graduate, but there was too much rumour, too much insinuation, and they could not stay in the town of Glasgow. And so Richard had gone abroad, to further his studies and become a physician, and
Rachel had taken refuge with her brother, by then a master stonemason on his own account, and waited for her husband to come home. And he had done, when the hounds had found and started to haunt him in Paris, and now they had followed him here.

‘They will not have him,’ she had said defiantly to us that afternoon. ‘I will die before I let them have him.’

TWENTY-FOUR
Laureation

As had become our custom, I joined with my fellow regents and the professors of mathematics and divinity to watch from the casement windows of the principal’s chamber as the courtyard filled up below us. Parents, friends and dignitaries from the town and further afield thronged through the archway to greet or avoid one another, to parade their finery and observe others do likewise. The talk amongst us watching was of plans for the summer vacation, grumbles at the tardiness of the council in paying stipends, and covert hopes that amongst the great and the good beneath us, a generous patron might be found. Nobody mentioned Matthew Jack. The determination not to mention him on this day was thick in the air. As for Robert, our librarian, our friend, I surveyed the men around me and it appeared that by some silent agreement from which I had been excluded, they had truly forgotten him.

‘We have been blessed in the day, Alexander.’ Dr Dun was watching me carefully. I suspected I had not been able to mask my unease.

‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘I pray it will continue so.’

‘You fear it might not?’

I indicated the throng now filling the courtyard. ‘One amongst those, walking freely beneath us, or somewhere out in the streets of this burgh, conceals a murderous heart. And we do not know who he is; we may never know who he is.’

Dr Dun kept his voice low. ‘After all that has happened, you still do not believe Matthew Jack to be guilty of the crimes with which he is charged?’

‘Of the killings, no.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because Matthew would have taken great joy in exposing Robert for what we now know of him. He would have taken great pleasure too in tainting the college with the association.’

‘And the weaver?’

‘The weaver’s death, the concealment of his body, was a careful thing, a thing premeditated, not an act of passion and rage like Matthew’s attack on Richard Middleton or my wife. And Matthew Jack would not have known of Hiram’s grave.’

The principal regarded me carefully. ‘There are many in this college and this burgh who would not be sorry to see Matthew Jack called to account for past misdeeds and malevolence. Of all men, I had not thought he would find a champion in you.’

‘It is Robert, my dead friend, that I champion. May God
forgive me, but you, sir, know I will happily see Matthew dance from the gibbet for all he has done, but I know he did not murder those men.’