Crucible (22 page)

‘Mr Seaton!’

She was coming around the corner from the lodge, a bunch of marigolds and daisies in her hand. ‘Is it Richard you are looking for? He is sleeping.’

‘I hoped you might have a minute to talk to me.’

‘I have many minutes. Very few seek out my company.’

She sat down on a stone bench by the side of the lodge,
below the north window, and invited me to join her. The garden was very different place from the dark and rainlashed scene of two nights ago. Rather than the stench of blood, the smell that reached me now was of sweet aniseed from the rowan in flower above the bench. Along the south-facing wall of the house were pots of chive, mint, parsley, rosemary and sage, and the pathway from the flagstones at the back door down to the lodge was fringed with lavender. Behind the lodge was a tangle of raspberry bushes. Kale, carrots, peas and onions grew in orderly rows, and in a bed, carefully strewn with straw and covered with netting, strawberries were coming forth from their flowers. The heavy hum of insects was cut through occasionally by the song of blackbird or thrush. Only the sound of the sea in the background, and the occasional caw of a gull spoke of a world outside this garden.

A bee, busy at a yellow rose, held my attention.

‘It is untroubled by the cares of man, is it not?’ she said, also watching it.

‘There is perhaps a lesson there we might profit from. God’s crucible is around us, in the quiet industry of His creatures, working in harmony in the earth He created. What your husband and his friends sought in their studies and experiments in the lodge was to be found not there, but outside, here.’

‘It is not as it seems,’ she said quietly.

I turned to her. ‘How so?’

‘Can you have forgotten? Two feet from where you sit
a murdered man was laid in his grave. Wickedness, evil, has reached into the heart of this garden and made it rotten.’

‘The evil was in the man who came here; it is not here now.’

‘Is it not? Richard, Robert and the others called it here, and I don’t know if it will ever leave. But we will.’

‘You are leaving?’

‘We have no choice. You must have heard what people have begun to say, about me, and about Richard too. There is no safety here for us. Richard has his medical degree. It will take him anywhere. I will go with him, where we are not known, and we will start again.’

‘You will remain together? After everything?’

She regarded me for a moment, weighing something up, it appeared. ‘You know some of what has passed in our life, but that is only a small portion of what you would call “everything” means. We will remain together. Always.’

I was uncomfortable and I think she may have intended to make me so. I turned the conversation back to the question of her husband’s career. ‘Richard’s degree – his medical degree – where was it conferred?’

‘Heidelberg. But he travelled and studied widely after he fled the city in the face of the Imperial forces – up into northern Germany and Poland, then down through the Netherlands to Paris.’

‘Where in the Netherlands?’

‘Groningen, I think. Why?’

‘You do not recall if he ever mentioned meeting a young Scottish weaver?’

She shook her head. ‘He spoke of his friends, his studies, and something of the towns and peoples he came across, but he never mentioned a Scottish weaver. He told you himself: he never met Bernard Cummins, either in the Netherlands or here. He is in no doubt upon that point.’

‘And you?’

‘I?’

‘Did you know Bernard Cummins?’

‘I did not know him, but I knew who he was. I had heard him being spoken about, seen him pointed out – he was the kind of man women noticed. And then I saw him one day – the day before his murder – in David Melville’s shop.’

‘The bookseller’s? What was he doing there?’

‘He was talking about pattern books – there was a Dutch name, I think.’

‘Did he speak to you?’

She shook her head. ‘I do not seek the conversation of men I do not know.’

‘I am sorry,’ I said, and after an awkward moment, ‘Who else was in the shop at the time?’

‘No one. There was no one but me, Bernard Cummins and the bookseller.’ Then she understood what I was asking. ‘Do you think the weaver was followed around town before his death?’

‘All I know is that nine years ago, in Leiden, he met a
Scottish student by the name of Nicholas Black, and that he met him again in the streets of this burgh only days before he was killed.’

‘I know no one of that name.’

‘Nor I. The man denied to Bernard Cummins that he was Nicholas Black or that he had ever seen the weaver before.’

‘And who did he claim to be?’

‘That, I am afraid, I do not know.’

EIGHTEEN
Jaffray’s Dinner

The Sabbath passed without incident and a thorough testing of my classes on the Monday showed them not to have suffered during my latest absence, but left me with no leisure to visit Matthew Jack in the tolbooth.

Sarah was waiting for me when I returned from the college. She had left the children upstairs and come down to change out of her everyday gown in to a finer one of crisp grey cambric that in summer she wore on the Sabbath. With it she wore a simple white tucker and cuffs with the merest run of lace where her sleeves met her bare arms. She was standing before the old looking glass on the wall, her hair pushed to one side as she tied at her neck a black velvet ribbon I had brought her a year ago from Edinburgh, from which hung a small stone of agate, the best that I had been able to afford. I promised myself that one day, somehow, I would see her dressed as other women were.

She did not turn when she heard me come in, but continued to stand with her back to me and began slowly to pull the brush down through her hair.

As I watched her, and I took in her whole form, I saw what I should have noticed days, perhaps weeks ago. I saw what Jaffray had noticed in minutes: a slight broadening of her hips, a swelling below her waist. I went across the room and saw the brush go loose in her hand. She scarcely moved as she waited. I put my arm around her waist and my face into the back of her neck. Her hair was soft against my cheek and I felt the warmth of her, and of that other life, my child, under my hand.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Can you even ask?’

‘Forgive me,’ I said.

‘It is forgiven.’

I turned her around and lifted her face in my two hands. ‘You do not know what there is to forgive. Sarah, I have to tell you …’

She shook her head. ‘No.’

‘In Ireland.’

She threw down the brush in frustration, tears trimming her lashes. ‘Do you think I do not know what happened in Ireland? Do you think I do not know you? When I see you sometimes, caught in one of your dark moments, as if the world you see is not the one I look upon, I know you have gone there in your mind.’

‘You are wrong, Sarah, I seldom think of it, still more seldom of …’ I stopped.

‘Of her?’ she finished for me.

‘Sarah …’

‘Don’t, Alexander! I
know
, I have
always
known, that there was a woman. But that was before, before you ever asked me to be your wife, before I became your wife or bore your child. I can live with that, as I must, but I will not hear you speak her name.’

I took hold of her wrists in my hands. ‘It was not love. I knew it then and I know it now, here. I know love, and it is you. It is you, Sarah. And the fear of losing you to another man has almost driven me to despair, to seek refuge in the worst of myself.’

‘You will never lose me to another man, can you not see that? Please, Alexander, let us leave the names of others unspoken, in their own places, and let us be what we are, here.’

I held her to me, held my child to me, and if I could have done, I would have built a wall around our house, stone upon stone, so high that none could breach it.

We arrived early at William’s house. I left Sarah with Elizabeth and went up to the parlour. The fire there had been lit for cheer as much as warmth, and William and the doctor were seated at either side of it, bent over a gaming board where William’s walrus ivory chessmen were locked in combat with one another. Neither man looked up as I came into the room. ‘Your bishop is in peril, Doctor,’ I said.

‘The bishops will be in more than peril if the king doesn’t stop his meddling,’ retorted the doctor, swiftly capturing William’s rook with an unremarked pawn.

William shook his head, smiling. ‘I am too trusting, but tomorrow night, I will be ready for you, Doctor.’

‘We shall see, we shall see,’ said the older man. Still he did not look directly at me, merely raising an eyebrow in my direction as he ranged his captives. ‘Sarah is here I hope?’

‘She is,’ I said.

‘And I will have no further cause for regret that I did not drown you at birth?’

‘None, James. I give you my word.’ I saw by William’s face that I had been the subject of some earlier conference between the two, and that my appearance at the evening’s gathering had been no certainty in their minds.

‘Take a seat, Alexander, and I’ll help you to a glass.’ William went to the French carved oak cabinet in which the best glassware was kept, and produced a bottle of the finest Venetian glass into which he had already decanted what looked to be a substantial claret. He poured out three glasses, and I noticed that until that point, he and the doctor had been drinking ale from his favourite Bartmann jugs. I squinted at the jug in Jaffray’s hand. ‘You know, Doctor, were it not for the beard, I would say that fellow had been modelled on yourself.’

Jaffray held up the jug to his own face the closer to examine it. ‘You may well be right, Alexander, and a good stout drink he holds too. I will sample your claret all the same, William.’

‘That is very good of you, Doctor.’

William stood against the great sandstone over-mantel
into which his and Elizabeth’s initials, with the year of their marriage, had been intricately chiselled. Jaffray, of course, sat in the master’s chair, high-backed oak with two stout arms. He took a sip of the wine, and savoured it a moment before speaking again.

‘William has been telling me about the terrible things that have been happening here in the town. The news of Robert Sim’s death reached Banff the very next day, and I and others were sorry to hear it: he was a fine man, and knew his books. I know also that you counted him a friend, both of you, and a friend is a loss not easily made up. But William is concerned, and so am I, that Dr Dun asks too much of you in setting you to look for this killer – that is a job for the town, not the college, especially now with this second murder.’

I sought to reassure him. ‘Dr Dun merely asked me to look into Robert’s life, and matters in the library, in so far as they might affect the college.’

‘And that has taken you already to the grave of another man with his throat cut, and away from home, to Crathes, has it not? To look into the life of a murdered man may well bring you into the path of his killer, and this is not what Sarah needs, not now. You have enough on hand at home, boy; can you not content yourself with that and leave the justice of the realm to those who are called to enforce it?’

‘But there are connections that I am beginning to make that others would not see—’

Jaffray broke in, jabbing a practised finger at me. ‘This arrogance is a fault in you, Alexander. “Connections!” That the weaver’s name was written in the Trades’ Benefaction book? So is that of practically every craftsman in the burgh of Aberdeen. Are we to fear they will all be found in shallow graves? And this foolishness of secret fraternities and the masons – I would counsel you strongly not to enmesh yourself with that. Once a man begins to believe he sees secret signs and connections, he will see them in everything.’

‘But Doctor, I have a name for the man I believe murdered Bernard Cummins. If I can find that he also knew or was known to Robert Sim, all I have to do is find him. All I have to do is find Nicholas Black.’

At that moment a sound of familiar laughter reached us from the corridor and the door was opened by our friend, the painter George Jamesone, who was followed by Richard Middleton and his wife.

The doctor greeted Jamesone warmly, and waited to be introduced to those he did not know.

‘This,’ said William, indicating the young woman, ‘is Rachel Middleton, sister to Hugh Wardlaw, the stonemason, some of whose work you will have seen at Craigston Castle.’

‘Indeed, indeed,’ said the doctor. ‘I took my dinner there with Urquhart only last week. The corbelling and ornaments are very fine. Very fine. And so you are a friend to Elizabeth?’

‘We have not known each other well, but she has been kind enough to ask me here tonight …’

‘And then you will be friends, do not doubt it. And this, I will wager, is your husband.’

Richard Middleton nodded his head to the older man. ‘I am very happy to make your acquaintance, Doctor. You are much respected in our profession hereabouts.’

Jaffray laughed. ‘I hear good things of you too, and that the burgh is fortunate to have so well-qualified a young man. You were at Basel for a time, I hear. It would have changed greatly since my day, I’m sure, but tell me, did you ever meet …’ and he had his arm around the younger man and was leading him over to the fireplace, where he had soon placed him in my seat the better to question him about his own old faculty and the town where he himself had been so happy, over thirty years ago now.

‘I fear your husband’s company will be monopolised for the rest of the night.’

Rachel Middleton turned her eyes on me. ‘It will do him good to be out in company, to remember happier times.’

‘And you too, I think,’ I said.

She looked away from me, brushed an unseen speck of dust from her dress. ‘I am stronger than Richard is, and I can play the part required of me better.’ I could not argue with this. The care she had dressed with was evident – a fine cinnamon-coloured satin gown, embroidered in a way that spoke of a degree of wealth that was something above comfort, an intricate silver clasp that held her chestnut hair
in a manner that suggested it might tumble free at any moment, but which I suspected she knew would not, a hint of the scent of roses. Nothing to surprise in a woman of means still young enough to know that she was desirable. But any who looked more carefully, as I did, would see a slight looseness of the dress on a figure that had once been fuller and shadows under fine eyes that had slept too little and wept too much.