The Devil's Recruit (25 page)

He shrugged, affected the grin that he had always believed would get him out of trouble and which rarely had done. ‘Not all of the Jesuit fathers were entirely taken with my temper, or my manner of devotion, but they found me to be,’ he paused, ‘useful, and so our purposes complemented each other, and we were able to tolerate each other for the sake of them.’

I could well imagine how the Jesuits had found my old friend useful, for Matthew had the ear of the Marquis of Huntly, and the Marquis, like his forebears a Papist to the core, had the ear of our king. From the mouth of a priest
in Madrid to the ear of a king in Whitehall was but a matter of three whispers.

‘It cannot be safe for you to show yourself here. I suspect it will do your cousin, and indeed his house guest, Lady Rothiemay, little good were it known that you were lodged under the same roof.’

Matthew shrugged. ‘My cousin knows the risks, and what they are taken for. He is not quite of my politics, but his faith is strong. And as for her Ladyship – she was instrumental in arranging for Father Guillaume a safe means of travel north. By the way, you must not condemn the painter – he knows nothing of Guillaume’s true calling. There are many amongst Lady Rothiemay’s kin and friends who do, in the mountains and the straths, and who thirst for the sacraments. Many who will happily shelter him.’

‘A murderer! I do not think it.’

Matthew smiled again. ‘Alexander, when will you get past this idea that our Mass is a …’

‘I am not talking about the Mass,’ I said, aware that I was raising my voice. I lowered it again. ‘I am talking about the cold-blooded murder of a young girl whose only crime was to fall in love with him.’

Archie’s brow furrowed. ‘What are you talking about, Alexander?’

And so I told them of Christiane’s death, in every detail I knew. ‘And her murderer is harboured in the house of the very man charged with finding him!’

Archie was ashen-faced. ‘This girl – the French master’s sister – has been murdered?’

I was disgusted. ‘Are you going to pretend you didn’t know? It was the night of Ormiston’s dinner.’

Archie leant closer to me. ‘I didn’t know, Alexander, I swear to you, I did not. But,’ his mind was working quickly, tying one piece of knowledge to another, ‘Father Guillaume did not kill her. He cannot have done.’

‘How can you know that?’

‘Firstly, he is a good man – he is truly a man of God, however you may suspect his faith and his order. But more than that – you tell me the girl was seen alive at eight o’clock that night?’

‘Yes.’

‘At eight o’clock that night, Father Guillaume was robed and preparing to say Mass in a private house in the old town, two miles from here. I know, for I was there – I was his escort. If you do not believe me, you may ask Isabella Irvine – she too was at the Mass. While we were there, we had intelligence that a warrant was on its way to Banff for the arrest of Lady Rothiemay. It was decided that it would not be safe for Guillaume to return to the new town by day. His friends urged him to leave for Strathdon there and then, but he insisted he would hear confession and say Mass in the new town, as he had promised Baillie Lumsden. That is the only reason he was still here tonight. I swear to you he cannot have killed that girl. He will grieve for her, I know it, for he had become fond of her.’

‘And St Clair? Am I to believe that he, too, was a priest?’

Archie lip contorted. ‘He was a gardener, nothing more. His presence detracted from any suspicions Guillaume might have aroused on his own. He travelled and worked with Father Guillaume in that respect alone. If I had known his true identity, I would have shot the man myself.’

I laughed. So did Matthew, if a little nervously, but Archie was not fooled.

‘What is it?’

‘Do you know,’ I said, ‘I always liked Katharine Forbes. For all that was ever said of her, for all the havoc she has wrought throughout the countryside, I always admired that woman. I would defend her against her detractors, and now I see they were right – she is a threat to this very nation.’

It was Matthew who replied. ‘No, Alexander, no. You malign her there. She brings in priests that they might minister to the faithful, but my uncle the baillie has warned me well: she is not a woman who would countenance the …’ He seemed lost for the appropriate word.

‘Invasion of our kingdom?’ I suggested.

He made a conciliatory gesture. ‘I was going to say “interference” of external powers. She will happily separate matters of religion from matters of state.’

‘And you?’

‘I don’t see that it can be done,’ he said at last.

He must have gauged the disappointment on my face. ‘Come, old friend, you have known me long enough. Did you really expect to find me altered?’

I took the hand he held out to me. ‘No, never, and it does my heart good to see that you’re not. But you must know I cannot condone your politics, Matthew, nor countenance your religion.’

‘I know it,’ he said, ‘and that’s why I have never spoken of it to you until now, nor ever would have done, were it not for Archie. I’ll be gone from here tomorrow. I ask you for that one night’s grace.’

He was asking me to keep what he thought to be his secret a few hours longer, to let him slip, unnoticed, from the town once more and to go in to the hinterland where the Jesuits found refuge and a base from which to spread their poison, and meet with them there in the houses of our wealthy and high-born recusants, or those who had never made any show of professing the Protestant faith at all. He was asking that I would not hand him over, this very hour, to the authorities, and see him die a traitor’s death, the man I had known since we were boys of fourteen.

‘You will have your twelve hours, Matthew, and longer. It would hardly be news to anyone that agents of the Marquis and those of Spain roam from house to house across Strathbogie and Glenlivet almost with impunity. For me to see you condemned would change nothing of that. But you must tell your uncle to get rid of his priest tonight – if it were known that such abominations were being carried out in his house …’

‘I understand.’ He stood up, readying his hat to go outside
into the mist again. ‘Will you embrace me as a brother, Alexander, and will you tell me that come what may to our land, you will remember me always as a brother?’

‘I will.’

With a curt nod to Archie, Matthew left, to go once more into the spider’s web of the councils of his masters. Archie looked after him, long after he had closed the door behind him, and there was something in his face that told of an alteration between my two old friends. We were alone now, in the near silence of my kitchen, where the gentle hiss of the fire, the even breaths of my sleeping son, and the ticking of the clock on the mantelshelf could not even begin to span the chasm of silence between us.

At last Archie spoke. ‘Will you condemn me for a Mass, Alexander? Is all we have ever been, one to the other, to be lost for the sake of a Mass?’

I could hardly believe he was speaking those words to me. ‘Do you think it means nothing to me?’ I said at length.

He spread out his hands, beginning to relax. ‘Not nothing, of course not nothing. But not so much surely, that you’re lost to me?’

I saw in his face that he truly believed what he had said. ‘Archie, you have known me my whole life, almost. I have loved you my whole life, but you and I, we are nothing, we are dust. Dust and ashes in the hands of God. A man cannot place the love of friends, of family even, before his obedience to God.’

‘And yet you embraced Matthew …’ His certainty was beginning to falter.

I leant towards him. ‘Archie, with Matthew we always
knew
; there was never any attempt to dissemble. His whole life, we knew what Matthew was, and I have prayed daily to know that he might be amongst the saved. But you … you and I, we’ve been different from what Matthew and I ever were, different even from what William and I have become.’ I could see the slightest pain, even now, after all, at the mention of William who, over long, constant years, had begun to fill Archie’s place in my life, as if that one thing, in all that had changed and happened over time, mattered more than the rest to be left unchanged. ‘For all we were ever different, for all your recklessness, you were never reckless in
that
. Your faith was as sure as mine.’

He rubbed at a cord at his neck that I had never noticed there before. I remembered, long ago, in Ireland, a time when I had come in to that habit myself, and I imagined the crucifix that must lie against his chest as it had done then, against my will, on mine. He was only aware of the gesture when he saw that my eyes noted it.

‘When I was young, all I knew of Rome was the catalogue of vanities, blasphemies, idolatries our ministers and teachers warned us against, and I knew that my father had faced exile and the near loss of his patrimony in its name.’ Archie’s father had known disgrace, in the days of King James and the old queen, Elizabeth, in England, for too close an acquaintance with the Spanish plotting of Scottish
Romanist noblemen. He had nearly lost Delgatie over it, and had resolved never to glance at a rosary again. ‘But in the war,’ he continued, ‘I learned a different tale.’

I stared into the fire and said nothing.

‘Will I tell it to you?’

‘Will there be any truth in it?’

‘All of it.’

I was as loath to hear Archie’s truth as I was any more of his lies, but I had not the energy to argue. ‘Go on, then.’

‘I told you how after I recovered from my injuries at Stadtlohn I travelled until I found the Protestant forces under Count Mansfeld, and what a wretched collection of humanity I found there.’

‘I thought,’ I said, my voice strangely dry, ‘that you all went to the wars for honour.’

‘Did you? I do not think so, Alexander. You see enough in this small town, in the country around, when harvests fail or debts are called in, when the only other choice is jail or the House of Correction, why men and boys throw in their last chance with the recruiters. And the men recruited by Mansfeld in ’24 were the absolute worst, the most desperate dregs of humanity you could ever hope to see. Almost a hundred shiploads he brought from England with the thought to relieve Breda from the Spanish, but our French allies withdrew their permission to land on their shores, and so away to the north he sailed. But the Dutch liked the look of his recruits no better than the French had, and they were left a fortnight at anchor at Flushing, to
starve, to die from the cold, from thirst. The bodies of the dead and the nearly dead were thrown overboard. By the time the rump that was finally let ashore reached Breda, the town was beyond help, and when it fell, the Dutch no longer wanted Mansfeld’s ragged mercenaries. And so we marched north and north, and those who should have succoured us would give us none, flooded their own lands that we might find no sustenance, and so we were forced to plunder those we had thought to help. We never did meet up with MacKay’s regiment as had been hoped. They came too late. Wallenstein decimated our forces at Dessau in April of ’26. Over half of our men were taken prisoner, and most of the Scots and Irish amongst them went over to the Catholic side.’

‘And you went with them,’ I said. ‘Your faith could not sustain you through defeat.’

He went over to the sideboard and poured himself a goblet of my wine. I wanted none. ‘My faith, or something, some deadness in me perhaps, sustained me through defeat often enough. It was victory I couldn’t stomach. I wasn’t amongst those taken prisoner at Dessau, I didn’t join the enemy’s forces then. All that I told you up to, and a little beyond that point was true.’

I did not know whether I believed him or not, but he seemed intent on telling out his tale. ‘And beyond which point would the truth not advance?’

He sat down opposite me once again.

‘It was at Weisskirchen.’

‘You already told me of Weisskirchen,’ I said. ‘The horrors you witnessed. They were reported even here. The slaughter of man, woman and child by the forces you had fought with. You told me you ran from it.’

‘And so I did. But it was Weisskirchen that changed my faith.’ He turned the goblet in his hand. ‘No, that is not true: it is what I saw at Weisskirchen that gave me faith.’

‘I don’t understand you.’

‘How would you? You’ve always been so certain. So assured.’

‘Archie, I …’ But he would not be interrupted now, and so I left him with his illusions.

‘I had seen many things, many acts of brutality before we ever came to that town, and whatever had been good or noble, if ever there had been, in the men with whom I had soldiered for a year by then, it had long been destroyed, and the taking of that town gave vent to everything, the most base vileness of humankind, that was left. When I could stomach it no more, when my sword arm was rendered useless by one of my own comrades whom I had tried to turn away from his evil purpose, I turned from that town and I ran. But before I was through the gates, I saw something I had never thought to see in those wars.’

I waited while in his mind he seemed to see it again.

‘I saw a vision of peace. An old woman, gouged by an axe when she had been trying to protect her grandchild, was very close to death. A young priest, somehow unscathed by the venom being unleashed all around him, knelt over
her and spoke to her in Latin. Quietly, in the midst of all the sound and fury, he murmured to her that her sins were forgiven, and he sent her to Paradise with the peace of Christ in her eyes. I was covered in blood and dirt and I went down on my knees before that young priest and asked him to give me absolution too.’

‘It was not his to …’ I began, but he stopped me.

‘Yes, I knew you would say it was not his to give, but I felt the weight of my sins lifted from me as I knelt before him and he told me they were forgiven.’

‘And from that day you have been a Papist.’

‘Yes, Alexander, from that day to this and until my last.’

‘And yet you fight for the Protestant cause?’

He was looking right into me, unblinking, leading me to something I had not been able to see. ‘My God,’ I said at last. ‘Oh, my God.’