Chapters (90)
- PROLOGUE
- 1849
- ONE
- TWO
- EDINBURGH
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- NINE
- TEN
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- TWENTY
- TWENTY-ONE
- TWENTY-TWO
- TWENTY-THREE
- TWENTY-FOUR
- TWENTY-FIVE
- TWENTY-SIX
- TWENTY-SEVEN
- TWENTY-EIGHT
- TWENTY-NINE
- THIRTY
- THIRTY-ONE
- THIRTY-TWO
- THIRTY-THREE
- THIRTY-FOUR
- THIRTY-FIVE
- THIRTY-SIX
- THIRTY-SEVEN
- THIRTY-EIGHT
- THIRTY-NINE
- FORTY
- FORTY-ONE
- FORTY-TWO
- FORTY-THREE
- FORTY-FOUR
- FORTY-FIVE
- FORTY-SIX
- FORTY-SEVEN
- FORTY-EIGHT
- FORTY-NINE
- FIFTY
- FIFTY-ONE
- FIFTY-TWO
- FIFTY-THREE
- FIFTY-FOUR
- FIFTY-FIVE
- FIFTY-SIX
- FIFTY-SEVEN
- FIFTY-EIGHT
- FIFTY-NINE
- SIXTY
- SIXTY-ONE
- SIXTY-TWO
- SIXTY-THREE
- SIXTY-FOUR
- SIXTY-FIVE
- SIXTY-SIX
- SIXTY-SEVEN
- SIXTY-EIGHT
- SIXTY-NINE
- SEVENTY
- SEVENTY-ONE
- SEVENTY-TWO
- SEVENTY-THREE
- SEVENTY-FOUR
- SEVENTY-FIVE
- SEVENTY-SIX
- SEVENTY-SEVEN
- SEVENTY-EIGHT
- SEVENTY-NINE
- EIGHTY
- EIGHTY-ONE
- EPILOGUE
- HISTORICAL NOTE
- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
- Extract from A Corruption of Blood
- 1850
- ONE
James and Mary Quinton agreed to adopt a child, arranged and paid for by the Simpsons, and James Quinton was appointed as Simpson’s secretary until it became apparent that he was misappropriating funds in an attempt to pay off his debts. According to one account, when his larceny was uncovered, Simpson found him hiding from his creditors in an attic and paid him five pounds to leave Edinburgh.
The villain in the book is based on the mass-murderer Jane Toppan, whose exploits in the late nineteenth century scandalised New England. Toppan was a nurse who poisoned her patients and held them while they died for the sexual gratification that this produced. After her arrest she claimed to have killed thirty-one people using a variety of different poisons, often combining them to obscure their effects and evade detection. She was found to be insane and committed to an asylum for the rest of her life, where she became paranoid about being poisoned herself. Despite this, she lived a long life and died at the age of eighty-four.
Numerous nineteenth-century textbooks were consulted in an attempt to accurately reflect the medical thinking of the time. In trying to justify his decision to perform abdominal surgery on Sarah, Raven quotes from John Parry’s Extra-uterine Pregnancy and from Woman: Her Diseases and Remedies by Charles Meigs.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
nce again, thanks to Sophie Scard, Caroline Dawnay and Charles Walker at United Agents.
Thanks to all the wonderful people at Canongate for their belief in the series and for wanting to know more about Will, Sarah, Simpson, nineteenth-century Edinburgh and chloroform.
Thanks to the National Library of Scotland for digitising the town plans and Post Office directories which played such a crucial part in the research for this book
Extract from A Corruption of Blood
THE NEXT RAVEN AND FISHER MYSTERY
READ ON FOR AN EXTRACT . . .
1850
EDINBURGH
ONE
book is already written before the reader casts an eye upon the page. Its tale creates the illusion of uncertain outcome and myriad possibilities, when in truth all of its events are predetermined, unfolding in an ordered sequence that cannot be altered, only observed. Was this also true of each human life? Were our fates decided even before we were pulled screaming into the world: dictated by provenance and circumstance, by what our forebears could or could not grant us, and by what they were unwittingly forced to pass on?
Such were the thoughts of Dr Will Raven as he ascended a squalid staircase in Leith. His surroundings did not augur well for the child whose birth he had been called to assist. He wondered too what his own blood might harbour – a recurrent preoccupation – and what the implications might be should he ever father a child himself.