with his blood spilled out of the cut and down his belly. I watched him till the light went out in his eyes. Then we gathered all his obsidian clouds and the other papers from his desk and threw them into the fireplace till they were burnt, so that nothing of them remained but ashes.
JUSTICE WEIR:
Have you remorse for your crime?
ISABEL MACBANE:
Only that my brother is now to be hanged because of me. He would not have killed Rev Macbane, for he acted only at my bidding.
The transcription having been read, Justice Alexander Weir declared to the Chief Justice and all those at the Annual Assembly of Justices that after the interview with Isabel Macbane, he thought much about the aptness of her sentence. He believed it was certainly commendable in her that she should have murdered Revon Macbane, her husband, outright by means of force, rather than by the act of poisoning him through stealth. But in Justice Weir’s opinion, illiterate though the woman was, she understood well that exterminating the memory of Revon Macbane by the burning of his books and papers was the same as to kill him twice, and so a double crime. Upon this consideration, Justice Weir argued that in such cases the double penalty of gibbeting, in addition to mere hanging, ought to be restored as in the time before the Act of 1834.
The Chief Justice concurred with these remarks and proposed a motion: “That the new leniency in sentencing in capital cases is most regrettable and should be reconsidered for taking insufficient account of the deterrence effect generations of our predecessors on the Scottish Bench deemed necessary.”
Motion seconded, by Justice Alexander Weir. Motion approved,
nem. con
., by the Assembly of Justices.
3
I had to go over the photocopied pages more than once. I could hardly believe what I’d just read. The language in them was a little old-fashioned and sometimes hard to follow because of the legal terms, but the meaning was clear enough. I was in a state of shock as I returned to Soulis’s letter.
I know you’ll be as delighted as I am at the discovery of this documentary evidence, brief though it may be. Moments such as these are what a researcher lives for.
It had never for a moment entered our heads that “Rev” was an abbreviation of the given name, Revon, and not of “Reverend.” We’d quite naturally assumed the writer was a clergyman. We’ve since discovered that Revon is in fact an old name (Middle Scots for “raven”), and is still used in some families in the Uplands, though infrequently nowadays.
Macbane himself may have actually hoped this confusion with the religious designation would help convince some publisher to take a chance on the manuscript. If so, the ploy was quite understandable. Hard though it may be for us to believe, at that time, even the most insipid books by a clergyman were guaranteed a wide readership.
But if such a ruse was intended by Macbane, it clearly didn’t help him get a publisher. We now know from no less reliable a source than the Scottish Law Reporter that he had to pay out of his own pocket — or, more accurately, out of his wife’s dowry — for the private printing of fifty copies of The Obsidian Cloud in large quarto format by The Old Ayr Press. The firm probably gave him a bargain price; as I suggested to you when we met, they’d have been only too happy to use up the remnants of some old reams of paper. Macbane would have brought the fifty copies home for storage.
Obviously not every single copy was consumed in the fire set by his wife: you, for instance, found one in Mexico — more on that in a moment! — of all places. So perhaps Macbane had already managed to place a few with booksellers, or given some away as gifts. Perhaps he’d even persuaded the local subscription library to take one — after all, he seemed to have had more than the usual lender’s privileges there.
Indeed that rather cynical suspicion led us down another track: looking for the identity of the woman at the library with whom Macbane had the adulterous relationship. We knew there were bound to be documents somewhere about Kilcorran’s subscription library. Even if we could find nothing about the woman, it would be fascinating if we could at least discover what kinds of books Macbane read.
These subscription libraries, by the way, were very common all over Britain. Patrons had to pay a small fee (a “subscription”) for the privilege of borrowing books.
A history of the county of Ayrshire recorded that the Kilcorran branch was in operation for more than a hundred years and only closed in the 1890s when a free public library took its place. The original library had been housed in one of the wings of the old Kilcorran town hall, which was demolished at the turn of the century.
But we were sure the subscription library’s records must be preserved somewhere in the town’s archives, so we kept digging. We haven’t so far found the membership and borrowing records, but we did stumble across a list of the librarians who served there.
Now here’s the exciting part: from 1864 till 1866 the librarian in charge of the Kilcorran subscription library was a woman by the name of Ramona Vasquez — a citizen of Mexico — from the city of La Verdad! We discovered subsequently in the city’s archives that her husband, Alonso Vasquez, was an of ficial representative of the Mexican government’s Ministry of Mining. He was based at Kilcorran for two years, studying mining operations in the Uplands before returning to Mexico. It seems that he brought his wife with him for his two-year appointment in the Uplands. She must have been proficient enough in English to be able to look after the Kilcorran subscription library.
We speculate (remember, this is only speculation) that Señora Vasquez may have met Macbane at the library, encouraged him in more ways than one, and possibly received a copy of The Obsidian Cloud, which she may have taken back to Mexico with her — conceivably this very copy which is now yours. We can’t be certain exactly when the Vasquez family went back to La Verdad: we haven’t been able to find any other reference to them in the Kilcorran archives. But if Macbane was indeed the father of Ramona Vasquez’s child, we have yet one more possibly fruitful research avenue to explore. Vasquez is such a popular name in Mexico, future scholars will certainly be kept busy.
On the other hand, thanks to the Scottish Law Reporter, we do now have definitive, albeit limited, information on The Obsidian Cloud and on the life of Macbane himself: he was educated at a local parish school, he was married, he was murdered, and The Obsidian Cloud, published between 1864 and 1866, seems to have been his only work in print. This latter fact would account in part for the lack of success of our earlier inquiries. The most tragic aspect of the matter, from a researcher’s standpoint, is that since all of Macbane’s other papers were incinerated at the time of his death, his entire reputation may have to rest on this one book.
Regarding Macbane’s wife, Isabel, we were also hopeful of finding more about her on the basis of the trial record, but so far we’ve had no luck. Unlike Macbane, she seems to have been kept too busy on her father’s farm to attend the parish school for a basic education. Illiteracy was the fate of most farm children of the day, especially girls. Sadly, it turned out to be one of the important factors in the murder of her husband.
Now that we know Macbane himself went to the parish school, we’re trying to find some documentation on the one located at Kilcorran. These schools existed in every town in Scotland before government-supported education was introduced, so no doubt a file on the Kilcorran school is tucked away in a dusty corner of the vaults of the Ministry of Education. From it we might learn something more about Macbane’s background and parentage, for example.