"It's a fascinating story..."
Reviewed by Auriette Lindsey
Posted August 7, 2015
Mystery Historical
In 18th century England, Coroner Titus Cragg is tasked with
ruling on causes of death in the city of Preston. His friend
and colleague, Doctor Luke Fidelis, helps with medical
diagnoses. When a businessman is found dead in his locked
office, it's up to Cragg and Fidelis to determine if he took
his own life. Their investigation uncovers a web of deceit
and seems connected to other mysterious deaths in Preston.
In THE HIDDEN MAN, author Robin Blake creates a vivid sketch
of life in Preston and its environs during the reign of
George II. Cragg and Fidelis are likeable and dimensional
characters, and he has surrounded them with interesting and
well-drawn witnesses and friends. One of the things I liked
best was how Blake wove real historical events into his
fictional murder mystery -- from the disappearance of a
treasure hundreds of years before to the debate over the
slave trade during the time of the story. Those social and
political details give the novel a richness far beyond the
plot.
The intertwined mysteries that Cragg and Fidelis are trying
to solve are engaging and captivating. It's a fascinating
story that will keep you turning pages to get to the bottom
of the puzzle.
I recommend THE HIDDEN MAN for readers who enjoy historical
fiction and mysteries. This is the third book in a series
featuring Titus Cragg and Luke Fidelis, but I enjoyed it
quite well despite having read neither of the earlier books.
This book was published in the UK under a different title,
THE SCRIVENER.
SUMMARY
Blake continues the series Booklist calls "a solid
winner"
with a darkly rich mystery centered on an apparent
suicide
that leads Cragg and Fidelis down a treacherous path. The year is 1742, and the people of Preston are looking
forward to their ancient once-every-twenty-years festival
of
merriment and excess, the Preston Guild. But the prospect
darkens as the town plunges into a financial crisis
caused
by the death of pawnbroker and would-be banker Philip
Pimbo,
shot behind the locked door of his office. Is it suicide?
Coroner Titus Cragg suspects so, but Dr Luke Fidelis
disagrees. To untangle the truth Cragg must dig out the
secrets of Pimbo's personal life, learn the grim facts of
the African slave trade, search for a missing Civil War
treasure and deal with the machinations of his old enemy
Ephraim Grimshaw, now the town's mayor. Cragg relies once
again on the help and advice of his analytical friend
Fidelis, his astute wife Elizabeth and the contents of a
well-stocked library. As in his previous Cragg and Fidelis stories, Robin Blake
brings a vivid cast of characters to the page in this
third
historical mystery about the dramas that breeds below the
surface of life in a provincial Georgian town.
ExcerptSTANDING IN THE doorway, with medical bag in hand, Luke
Fidelis peered into the shadowed room until its main
features had resolved themselves: the outline of the low
pallet bed; the man’s gaunt, ghostly face looking
steadily upwards; the pale hand resting motionless
outside the covering blanket. The doctor went to the
window and pulled aside its rough curtain to admit more
light but, in doing so, let in a damp gust of air from
off the Moor. Picking up a stool beneath the window he
placed it beside the bed and sat, depositing his bag on
the hard mud floor. The prostrate man’s breath was
shallow but absolutely regular, as if he reposed with not
a single care. Fidelis spoke in a low voice, his mouth
close to his patient’s ear.‘Adam. Adam Thorn. I am Dr Fidelis come from Preston at
your wife’s request to attend you. Do not fret about the
fee – there won’t be one.’ Fidelis touched Adam’s brow and found no fever. He felt
his wrist. The pulse was even, and so was the heart,
which he checked by pressing a silver listening-trumpet
to the chest, and placing his ear on the earpiece at the
narrow end. Next he felt with soft fingers around the
contours of the skull. Finally he drew a candle end and
tinderbox from his bag, lit the wick and leaned across to
peer with the help of its light upon Thorn’s face. His
skin was dry, his lips cracked, his eyes staring in his
head. Fidelis shielded the light from those eyes for a
moment with his hand, then revealed it again, and noted
how the pupils contracted in response. By this he
determined that the automatic processes of the body were
continuing as normal. But was the man conscious? Was he
aware? Standing, he returned to the window and dropped the
curtain again, then crossed back to the door and ducked
his head as he passed into the main room. Here a child of
three sat playing on the ground and a baby grizzled in
its cot, while another sucked at the breast of its mother
who sat on a rough bench beside the cheerless fireplace.
This was the month of June, in the year 1742: far from
cold enough to make a fire essential for warmth, though
this had not been much of a summer in the north country,
and the doctor knew that Dot Lorris, his landlady, would
have a log burning back at his own room in Preston, and
glad he’d be of its comfort when he returned home on this
damp day. ‘You have no fire, Amity,’ he observed. ‘Do you not
cook?’ Amity Thorn unplugged the child from the nipple, and let
it loll back against her shoulder, dreamy with milk. With
her free hand she pulled up her dress to cover the
breast. ‘I’ll cook tomorrow. There’s not the fuel for a fire
every day. I have to learn thrift, with him the way he
is…’ She cocked her head towards the inner room. Fidelis sat down at the worm-eaten table on one of the
room’s two chairs. To learn thrift, you first had to have
something to be thrifty with, he thought, looking around
the bare room. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ve had a look at him, and now I want
to know more about how it happened.’ ‘I wasn’t there. I didn’t see.’ ‘But you found him, didn’t you?’ ‘No, it was John Barton that found him and brought him
home.’ ‘Barton the horse-coper up at Peel Hall Stables?’ ‘That’s him.’ Barton’s yard had been part of a dismantled estate that
centred on Peel Hall, now more or less of a ruin on the
edge of the Town Moor, to the north-east of Preston. ‘Where did John Barton find him, then?’ ‘Out on the Moor, lying on the ground. It were near the
Bale Stone. John Barton saw him and heard him moaning.’ ‘When was this?’ ‘A week ago now.’ ‘A week? Has he been lying like that for a week?’ ‘Yes, except the once, he’s neither moved nor talked,
just sort of twitched sometimes. He gave over the moaning
after we’d got him to bed.’ ‘What about food and drink?’ She nodded to the table where a spoon and porringer lay. ‘He’s been taking soup and milk off the spoon. I have to
pull open his mouth, mind, but he’s been taking it.’ ‘Did you not think to send for me or another doctor
before this?’ ‘I had old Mother Greenshaw in to look at him – the wise
woman. She told me what to do – if he’d take it, give him
the soup and milk and porridge and maybe a beaten egg and
some brandy, and just wait, and he might come round. Was
that all right, what she said?’ ‘It’s not bad advice. My own would not have been very
different. Did you follow it?’ ‘As well as I could, only he’s not come round, has he? He
just lies there staring, staring. It frightens me.’ ‘You said he was like that “except the once”. What do you
mean by that?’ ‘After he’d been in bed a bit, he seemed to revive, like.
He started groaning again, then I could make out some
words. Babbling he was, and I saw he was moving one of
his arms.’ ‘What was he saying? Did he give any indication of what
happened to him out there?’ ‘No, he was only thinking about how he felt. I came to
feed him and he kept on lifting his hand and trying to
bat away the spoon, saying “rich, rich” meaning the food
was too thick for him, or too flavoured, I guessed. The
same way, he couldn’t stand too much light, or noise.’ ‘As if all his senses were heightened? It’s a
possibility.’ ‘Well he were grateful to me. He kept saying I was
precious to him. It were touching.’ ‘So how long was it before he lapsed into the state I
have just seen?’ ‘He went on with his babbling for an hour or more. Then
when I went back in to him he was lying still again, just
breathing quietly. I talked to him but it seemed he never
heard. When the baby screamed, he never flinched and he
made no more fuss about the food I gave him. He’s been
like that since. If he doesn’t come round, what am I to
do? There’s no one here but me and the little ones.’ ‘Have you no family anywhere – someone who can come and
help?’ ‘There’s nobody, only Peg.’ ‘Peg?’ ‘His eleven-year-old niece that he’s had charge of since
her ma’s died.’ ‘Does Peg live here?’ ‘Not now. She’s gone into service as a housemaid. He
thought the world of her, him. But we couldn’t afford
another mouth to feed even before this. Now I don’t know
what I’ll do.’ ‘Can you make any money on your own account?’ ‘There’s the little I get from selling my eggs at market.
We have a few birds. But most of our money came from bits
of work he did, for farmers and gardeners and such. He
got some good pay at harvesting, which we put aside to
help us through winter. But I had to pay the wise woman,
and then there was the brandy to get. So I’ve had to
spend.’ ‘If you’re very short you can go to the parish. You’ll be
allowed something until your husband recovers. I’ll put
in a good word with the church warden. In the meantime,
I’m afraid there is nothing more to be done except to
care for him with warmth, food and drink, as best you
can.’ ‘What is the matter with him, doctor?’ ‘He has suffered a seizure of the brain. There is also an
injury to his skull, a lump from a bang on the head. It’s
difficult to know which came first. The head injury could
have caused the seizure but just as likely he got the
lump by falling down after the seizure. They very often
do happen over their own accord, seizures. They make the
sufferer insensible so that he falls to the ground.’ ‘But Adam will get better? If not, I don’t know what I’ll
do.’ ‘I regret it’s impossible to be sure, Mrs Thorn. He might
come round at any time, or stay the same indefinitely. Or
thirdly, I am sorry to say, he might suddenly be taken
from us, without any warning whatsoever.’ She rose and deposited the child in the cot beside the
baby, and went to a side table. There she took a scoop of
cold gruel from a pot and poured it into the wooden
porringer. After placing this on the table she picked up
the eldest child from the floor and balanced it upon her
knee to feed it. The somewhat battered and dented spoon
carried the gruel inefficiently, but by working fast she
managed to force a high proportion of the thin liquid
into the mouth, though the child pulled faces and
wriggled with dislike of its dinner. ‘It will be terrible to live with such uncertainty – if
we can live at all.’ Suddenly the child on her knee twisted around and one of
its hands grabbed at the spoon. In surprise Amity let go
and it fell, clattering off the edge of the table and
bouncing to the floor. Immediately Fidelis stooped to
retrieve it. Before he returned the implement to her he glanced at it.
Though damaged, pitted and discoloured, it had once been
a fine piece of spoonery – the shank heavy and with the
remains of chasing along its length, and a nobbled end,
as of some figure now unrecognizable. He turned it over:
there were four black pits on the shank, square in shape
and black where dirt had compacted in them. Amity held
out her hand. ‘Give it back, doctor, if you please. I must feed him
quick or he won’t take it at all.’ ‘Of course. Here.’ He gave her back the spoon and, for the time being,
thought no more about it, while they talked of Amity
Thorn’s hard life, and of what she could do to alleviate
it.
‘Remember to go to the church warden as soon as you can,’
he said firmly, thinking at last it was time to leave.
Then his eye caught sight again of the spoon, which lay
in the now empty porringer on the table. ‘And there is one more thing I should mention,’ he said,
pointing at the bowl. ‘That spoon of yours looks silver.
I fancy, if you clean it up, that it will raise a sum of
ready cash in town.’ She picked up the spoon and turned it in her hand. ‘This dirty old thing? Adam brought it back a month ago,
off the Moor. You don’t mean it’s worth something?’ ‘It might be. Where did he get it?’ She shook her head. ‘As I say, I reckoned he must have picked it up off the
Moor, or somewhere about. It were all muddy and stained:
just an old spoon, as I thought, though he did say
different.’ ‘What did he say?’ She gave a short, melancholy laugh. ‘That it was treasure. “Treasure trove, is that,” he
said. He’s done it before – come home with some brass
farthing he’d found on the Moor and said it was treasure
trove. He was bitten with this idea that some old soldier
had buried a big lot of silver up there a hundred year
ago. But he’d got himself killed and the secret died with
him, so the silver was never found. Adam even told me
he’d gone to Preston to talk to the Recorder to prove it
were true.’ ‘The Recorder? Mr Thorneley?’ ‘I don’t know his name. Adam kept on about looking for it
but I just said if poor folk ever do find such things
they get them taken off them, as sure as the Gospel, so
what’s the use? He shut up about it after that but I’ll
give you a warrant that he never gave over looking for
it. That was his way.’ Fidelis looked carefully at the underside of the spoon’s
shaft, and showed it to her. ‘Well, I don’t know about any treasure, but I am saying
that, if these pits on the underside of the handle are
hallmarks, then it really is made of silver – assayed
silver. Maybe that’s what Adam was trying to tell you
when he was saying “rich” and “precious”. He was talking
about the spoon you were feeding him his gruel with.’
Her face fell. She had imagined she was the precious one.
The doctor gave her back the spoon. ‘So you can exchange it for some silver coin. Do it,
Amity. Buy some wholesome food for the little ones, and
for Adam too. Marrowbone broth is always recommendable.’
Fidelis got to his feet and returned for a last look into
the darkness of Adam Thorn’s room. As before nothing
there moved, only two tiny winking sparks of light from
Adam’s eyes, which every few moments were extinguished
and immediately reappeared. Then he returned to where Amity was, bade her good day
and ducked out into the drizzle. He put his hat on his
head, turned up the collar of his coat and strode off
towards town. You, the reader, might very well suppose, in order to
recount all this to you, that I, Titus Cragg, must have
been loitering about under the dripping eaves of the
Thorn house, peering in through chinks in the window
sacking, listening at the door, committing the
conversations I heard to memory. In reality, I was not:
all that afternoon I was in Preston town, more than a
mile distant from the Thorn house, seeing to my practice
as an attorney-at-law and my work, which I hold to be
equally important, as the town Coroner. But how, you must ask, can words describing an event in
the world seem so convincing – so real – when their
author never himself observed the event? It is a question
that often bedevils a law court. It doesn’t matter how
many times witnesses are warned to tell only what they
directly saw and heard, they will run on with the gossip
of chair-carriers, and chambermaids’ tittle-tattle,
taking the jury with their story-telling into the realm
of speculation, and soon into a state of firm belief.
Many poor innocents have gone to the gallows in those
realms and states of fantasy, but their necks were not
the less truly broken for it. Stories and lies are so
knitted together with facts and experience that they can
never easily be disentangled – not in a law court, and
not in life. In a book, then? That, you may suppose, is my aim. The
events I have just described were long ago and nobody’s
neck depends on whether or not you believe my writing.
Nevertheless, let me reassure you: every word of what I
have written about Dr Fidelis’s visit to the Thorns is
true, for I had it on the following evening detail by
detail from the lips of the doctor himself, and
assiduously committed it to my journal before going to
bed. And the reason I set it down here will be clear in due
course.
What do you think about this review?
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