The Lamplighter by Anthony O'Neill Read Free Book Online

some dinner, wouldn’t you think?”
    â€œPerhaps the beast was disturbed.”
    â€œOf course. But still I wonder how many savage beasts there are loose on the streets of Edinburgh.”
    â€œThose you would not regard as human, in any case.”
    McKnight smiled. “Were I to include bipedals,” he said, “the field would be too vast to contemplate.”
    The Professor’s unusual humor, to Canavan, was as appreciable as his pace. It was not that McKnight was ever openly morose, or even self-pitying, but after two years of walking together the two men were capable of recognizing in each other the most minor fluctuations. This when ostensibly they had little in common. The Irishman was half the Professor’s age and hewn by hard labor and emotional scarring. He was brawny and tall. He had never stepped inside a university. He was keenly religious and a sentimentalist. He was naturally poor—he had never known anything else—whereas the Professor had lost his inherited wealth through financial mismanagement in the wake of his wife’s death.
    â€œThe search will begin for suspects, then.”
    â€œThe search has already commenced,” McKnight corrected. “At the University this very morning. And I’d be profoundly surprised if I have not already been considered as one of the suspects.”
    â€œYou?” Canavan snorted.
    â€œWhy not?” McKnight said, and made a show of glancing around, as though for pursuing detectives. “Consider the facts. Smeaton was an acknowledged nemesis. He was vocally disapproving of my teachings. He objected to all my proposals and tried to obstruct my funding. I had every reason to hate him.”
    â€œBut not to kill him. You couldn’t.”
    â€œMaybe so, but that doesn’t mean I cannot be a suspect, if a motive is seen to exist.”
    â€œAnd it doesn’t mean you should enjoy the idea, either,” Canavan observed, “because it offers you some sense of urgency.”
    McKnight chuckled guiltily. “Well…” he admitted, accepting that there was little he could hide from his friend.
    Canavan was a night watchman at a crumbling cemetery three miles from central Edinburgh. McKnight lived in a sequestered cottage nearby, not far past Craigmillar Castle on the Old Dalkeith Road. Some years earlier he had first noticed the longhaired Irishman striding home ahead of him as he himself set off for the University. Depending on the season he would frequently see him again on his own way home, the younger man now carrying a small bag of victuals in preparation for the night ahead. But in those days, despite the fact that they moved at a pace so identical they might have been marching in formation, they never spoke, or even acknowledged each other’s proximity. The morning walk, for McKnight, was a precious opportunity to marshal his thoughts, to take solace in the bracing air and stirring bird life, and arrive at the University, if not bursting with enthusiasm, then at least in a mood that was not acrimonious. On his journeys home, feasting vicariously on the waft of savory dinners, he found refuge from the need to orate, to reason and listen: a relief too precious to be invaded by company. He consistently spurned offers of transport from market gardeners and coal carters, even the occasional affluent student in a plush carriage. Besides, as much as he could not afford cabs, he equally could not afford to be seen as one deprived of them. He cultivated the air of one who favored a challenging constitutional, and it quickly became true.
    But there was one week when his debt became so tyrannical that he could barely afford to eat at all. He was not even past Craigmillar Castle Road when a chilly sweat seized him, his vision filled with pinpricks of light, his chest constricted, and his cane slipped from beneath him; the next thing he knew he was on the ground, delirious, his nostrils filled with