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Scottish Books
Amazon
Category:
Historical Fiction
ISBN-10: 1727426029
Type: Fiction
Copyright: 2018
ISBN-13: 9781727426021
Price: $2.99 (eBook)
Kate the undertaker wants to study medicine at the prestigious University of Edinburgh, but women are not allowed to enter its hallowed halls. This historical-fiction story incorporates the real-life struggle for women to gain the right to study.
Kate the undertaker is determined to change the established point of view that only men have the required stamina and intelligence to study medicine. She befriends a woman who has the same ambition, and together they forge ahead in an attempt to make higher education available to women. While Kate is a fictional character, in this story she teams up with real-life women's campaigner Sophia Jex-Blake who is credited with being the first woman to practise medicine in Edinburgh, but it doesn't happen without a struggle. Of course, being Kate, there are plenty of murders to solve, and dead bodies to attend to, and a few twists and turns along the way.
Excerpt
A large crowd had gathered a short distance from Edinburgh’s city centre on Calton Hill, outside the notorious jail whose opulent design and grand outward appearance belied the wretchedness of the conditions of its inmates. The place was full of women who were charged with being drunk and incapable, or engaging in prostitution, and they and their small children were incarcerated in crowded dingy cells if they could not afford to pay a bond. They were forced to mix with hardened criminals, many of whom were awaiting the ultimate and humiliating punishment of public execution by hanging.
Men, women and children stood outside the grim fortress, stared at the wooden gallows and rope noose in anticipation, and pulled their shawls and coats about them to ward off the winter chill. Others leaned out of crowded tenement buildings ten stories high to get a good view. Edinburgh was a town divided by class. The architecturally designed buildings of the New Town, with its wide streets and neat gardens, was in stark contrast to the narrow cobbled alleys running off the main thoroughfare of just over a mile between Edinburgh Castle and Holyrood Palace. The squalid and cramped living conditions in the Old Town offered little in the way of entertainment. The onlookers had swelled to over two thousand people who looked forward to watching the spectacle, and the horrific thrill it gave them. Feelings were running high. A sixteen-year-old girl had been condemned to death for killing elderly hospital patients. She had been the subject of gossip and speculation in the taverns and drawings rooms of Edinburgh ever since her arrest some two months before. Within the carnival atmosphere that accompanied every public hanging at Calton Gaol, there was an uneasy menace about the growing crowd. Anticipation heightened to fever pitch as they waited to take a last look at the convicted serial killer. Maisie MacNab, at such a young age, would normally have been sentenced to transportation in the colonies of Australia, but the court feared her crime was so heinous that there could be no chance of rehabilitation. Her wickedness must be punished by the public taking of her life, to serve as a deterrent to others.
Kate Grainger, just ten years older than the girl, stood quietly to the side of the crowd as all around her - men, women and children - shouted and bayed for blood. She had been running her father’s undertaking business since his death four years before and had had her fair share of difficulty. She was a young, unmarried woman of slender build, with flaming red hair and green eyes, running a business that no so-called respectable woman would entertain. If that wasn’t difficult enough, she was whispered about in some circles for being an amateur sleuth with a foot in the spirit world, which further alienated her from polite society. Despite the condemnation she had received, or perhaps because of it, Kate had grown Grainger Undertakers and gained a steady reputation as a reliable and caring undertaker, particularly among the many women who would not have been seen alive with her. The constant stream of female clients to arrive on her preparation table had left specific instructions with their husbands to be taken to Grainger’s for their final arrangements. She also had a contract with Calton Gaol to remove and prepare bodies for burial, with payment for her services being made either by the dead person’s relatives or, more often than not, by a small fee from the city’s coffers.
The talking and shouting of the crowd turned to jeers, and rotting vegetables and stones were thrown as young Maisie MacNab was led to the waiting gallows. Kate sucked in her breath at the sight of the frail child whose eyes were wide with fright. She was clothed in a ragged, faded ankle-length grey dress with torn sleeves, and her dark hair lay knotted and limp against her shoulders. Her hands were bound in front of her with thick rope, and she wore no shoes. The hangman moved forward as the gaoler relinquished the girl into his hands, and he pushed her along towards the trapdoor and the waiting noose that swayed slightly in the breeze. The man charged with ending Maisie’s life was chosen because he had presented the lowest bid to perform the execution. He placed the noose over the shivering girl’s head as the minister read from the Bible. The crowd fell silent and the signal was given for the trapdoor to be opened, then a collective gasp went up as the girl’s body fell to its death. When the twitching was done, her body was cut down and a dishevelled old physician pronounced her dead.
The crowd, pleased that justice had been done, fell away and Kate signalled to Davey, her coffin maker and driver, to bring the black horse-drawn coach over to the gallows. Davey and his son Amos had been sitting in the coach waiting for the moment when the cheap pine coffin would be needed. The two men lifted the lifeless girl’s body into the coffin, placed the lid on top and loaded it into the coach. Kate climbed up on to the seat with Davey and Amos, and they took a slow trip back to Grainger’s, as the rhythmic clip-clopping of the horses feet beat a familiar path across the cobblestones.
“Watching that wee lass walk to the gallows, I couldnae believe that she was a serial killer,” Davey said as he held the reins in his toilworn hands and gently moved them up and down to direct the horses. “How does one so young become so cold and calculating as to kill people in their sleep?”
Kate shook her head. “Oh Davey, who knows what drives people to do what they do, but there seems to have been no advantage to her to do such a thing. What could be possibly gained from killing elderly hospital patients, except to steal a few cheap trinkets from people who were not much better off than herself. If that young doctor hadnae caught her in the act, she would probably still be suffocating patients and the hospital would be none the wiser, for the victims were all frail and close to death’s door anyway.”
“Aye, ye never know what drives people, but I suspect ye have some thoughts on the matter,” Davey said to Kate. “Do ye really think she was guilty of these crimes?”
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