Kidnapped

R. L. Stevenson · 1886 CE · Novel · English · Victorian

Orphaned at seventeen, David Balfour walks to the house of Shaws to present a letter to the miserly uncle he has never met, and is sent up an unlit staircase that stops in mid-air over a drop. Sold to a brig bound for the Carolinas, he is thrown together with a Jacobite agent in a fine coat who comes aboard from a sinking boat with a belt full of French gold, and a killing on the Appin shore sends the two of them into the heather with the redcoats out. Stevenson built the flight on the real Appin murder of 1752, and let the courts' verdict stand as the injustice it was.

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