The Redemption of Alexander Seaton (34 page)
This was not the place to set my mind to that mystery and I resumed instead my examination of the baillie’s small library. The Psalms. Some tracts and pamphlets against the Catholics, the Jesuits, the government of bishops and the perils of assuming one’s own will, all in the vernacular. All as I would have expected, all save one. For William Buchan too had an edition of Craig’s poetical works, identical to that I had bought for Charles so recently in Aberdeen, yet this copy was well thumbed, well used, evidently oft read. This was not a man whom I thought poetry could have touched. As I wondered at this, my foot struck against another kist, long and low, beneath the shelf. On this one there was no lock. I bent down and opened the lid as quietly as I could. Inside, bound together, were little exercise books such as I would allow the better pupils to keep, like diaries or commonplace books. I carefully unbound the pile nearest the top and took the first book in my hand. On the front was written, in the baillie’s small and steady hand, ‘Sermons, March 1624–June 1625’, and inside there were notes and meditations on every sermon he had heard in those fifteen months. The whole pile of notebooks beneath it went back year upon year, month upon month, week
upon week as far as my own childhood and beyond. A lifetime of the man was in those books, and I would have given much for the freedom to peruse them, but I was too conscious of the low, rasping breathing coming from just the other side of the door.
I could not help but open the most recent exercise book, though. The baillie had attended the kirk in Banff, mostly, but he had travelled too, all around the presbytery. He had found much to praise, many words of wisdom on which to meditate and to thank the Lord for, but he had found more to censure. Laxity in discipline, ignorance of the true meaning of the scriptures, error in the interpretation of God’s plan. Most of all, though, there was near a fury, fury at the ignorance, incompetence, and hypocrisy of the Reverend Guild. I could disagree with nothing he said of Guild’s preaching. Then a thought struck me. I rifled backwards through the pages and indeed it was there:
22 June, year of God one thousand six hundred and twenty-five. Mr Alexander Seaton, undermaster at Banff Grammar School, expectant for the ministry. At Boyndie Kirk
.
Yes: he had been there. As I had taken the pulpit and looked down across my last congregation, I had seen, watching me with a peculiar intensity, Baillie William Buchan. Unaccountably, I felt my breathing come heavier and my hand tremble slightly as my eye scanned the first line and then the second. At first I could not quite comprehend what I read, could not take it in, and I had to go back over the words again until I was certain of what they said. There, in my hand, in the home of a man I had long avoided, maligned and misunderstood, I read a testament to hopes dashed and faith betrayed: William Buchan had given thanks to the Lord
for the gifts He had given me, as a preacher and minister to his people, for preserving me where others had been lost, as a blessing to my community and a comfort to my friends. He had thanked God that the promise he had seen in the boy I had been had been fulfilled in the man I had become. My heart was racing and I read on, disbelieving until, out of nowhere, came a most awful hammering noise, fit to wake the dead. I scarcely had time to shut the book and throw it back in the pile at the top of the kist before the baillie came stumbling from his chamber, dishevelled from sleep. He wrenched his cloak from the back of the door and lurched towards the stairs. I hastily shut the lid of the kist and went to stand by Charles, who was also drowsily coming to; I was ready to defend him if I had to.
There was some commotion downstairs as the arrival strove to make himself understood to the crone, and then to get past her to the baillie. I should have relaxed at the voice, but my heart beat faster, for it could not be good news that drove him to this place, now, and in such a manner. There was shouting, insistent shouting, and the baillie trying to assert calmness, authority. At last he made himself understood, and I heard the men ascend the stairs. Charles tried to stand up, but his time in the tolbooth had weakened him greatly and he was far from his usual strength. It was not the baillie who came first through the door but Dr James Jaffray.
‘Alexander,’ he said, not comprehending that I should be there, and then his face changed and his body visibly sank as he saw Charles behind me. He took a pace towards us. ‘Oh, my boy, my dear boy.’ The baillie helped him to a chair and Charles knelt down at his feet, taking his hands. William Buchan, unused as he must have been to such displays of
human feeling, stepped back into his chamber and, without fully closing the door, began to tidy himself. I poured some water for the doctor from the pitcher on the table.
‘Drink this, James; it will settle you.’
He rubbed his hand across his eyes and as the heaving of his chest subsided, he took the tumbler from me and drank. When his old friend had recovered himself, Charles allowed himself a smile.
‘Well, doctor, would it be an irate husband or a desperate creditor that chased you to the baillie’s in such a spin?’
The doctor also smiled and put down the tumbler. ‘No, but only two daft lads that are not safe to vague the streets on their own.’ He shook his head in a mock weariness. ‘There is nothing for it but I must find you both a wife to keep an eye on you, for I have work aplenty to keep me busy as it is.’
‘Just the one wife between us?’ asked Charles.
‘Aye, perhaps,’ replied the doctor, ‘and lucky to get that.’
A hacking cough broke into their pleasant banter. ‘Perhaps,’ said the baillie, ‘we should come to the matter in hand.’ Charles stood up and I stood aside to let the baillie pass. ‘The doctor has just told me now what I believe you already know, Mr Seaton. He has told me that by his findings, Marion Arbuthnott was no suicide but died by the same hand that killed Patrick Davidson.’
I nodded. ‘Yes, the doctor told me that this morning.’
‘What you will not have realised,’ continued the baillie, ‘perhaps because you would entertain no idea of his guilt in the first place, is that this proves, in as far as the thing can be proved, the music master innocent of the first crime as well as of the second.’
I looked from the baillie to Jaffray, the realisation only
gradually dawning. Neither of us had thought of it, because neither of us had believed for a minute that Charles had murdered Patrick Davidson. It had been alone, in the peace and quiet of his little back room, looking out through the window at his wife’s garden, that the doctor had at last seen it. This was the proof that would, in the sight of others, free Charles from the tolbooth and from the hangman’s noose. Charles sat down again and held his head in his hands.
The doctor spoke again. ‘God forbid that any of us should take pleasure in such a thing. The girl should have been living and breathing and working yet in the apothecary’s shop and the provost’s nursery, but she is gone, and not by her own hand. We are too late now to prevent that injustice, but not another. Surely now, Buchan, the boy can go free?’
The baillie slowly nodded. His face was impassive and I could not guess what his thoughts were. ‘Yes, doctor, he can go free. Or, at least, I will consent to release him into your care. I have the authority, although I will doubtless have much answering for it to do before the council. But mark me well, see that he does not wander alone about the streets, or leave the town. He is less safe now than ever he was in the tolbooth. Heed my counsel, doctor.’
The doctor stood up, fully recovered now. ‘I will,’ and without further address to the baillie he turned to Charles. ‘Come on, boy, we’re going home.’
As we descended the dark stairway, the baillie, from his narrow doorway, spoke to me. ‘And you, Mr Seaton, you also should be careful what you are about.’ I made no reply and was glad soon to be out into the relative light of the vennel.
The homecoming to the doctor’s was a markedly different affair from our departure from the baillie’s. After her initial
shock, Ishbel flew about the house making everything ready. The stable boy had been despatched within minutes to collect what was needful from the apothecary’s house; the rest could be got later. There was no notion that Charles would ever return to his attic room there, nor indeed, from the manner of the doctor and his housemaid, that he should ever leave their home. The contentment on the doctor’s face and the mild bemusement on Charles’s were as nothing to the determination of the young girl that the music master should not suffer one more moment’s hunger, thirst, cold or discomfort. That I was an imposition under her feet was made very clear, to my amusement rather than hurt, and to Jaffray’s too. Promising that I would indeed return to take my dinner with them that night, I left them to their moment. I had other business to attend to.
It was a steep climb to the codroche houses, along Low Street and up Back Path with its new-built dwellings – young craftsmen making their mark on the world for all to see, engraving their love on the lintels above the doors of their new households. My father had told me once, as we had passed such a doorway, that he had wanted to do the same when he had first brought my mother home from Ireland, to tell the world that she was his and he hers. But there was no engraving above our door, I said. ‘No boy, your mother thought it not seemly. She did not want to be as the other craftsmen’s wives.’ And that had perhaps been it, the beginning of the crumbling of his dream, when she had started, unwittingly perhaps, to punish him, little by little, for her mistake.
I turned left where Back Path met High Street, where
some of the grander ones planned their houses away from the bustle of the marketplace and town, and headed up towards the Sandyhill Gate. The wind was not in my face, as it could often be, and it was a pleasant walk. I had no need to rush – Charles was out of the tolbooth, away from the danger of the sheriff’s judgement now, and those I sought would not be abroad until it grew dark. I had the time to rest a moment where the road for Strathbogie skirted the foot of the Gallowhill, and to look upon the town of my birth. At the end of its journey from the mountains of the Cairngorm, past the teeming woods of the Deerpark, the clear waters of the Deveron came straight as an arrow, an arrow of fine silver, at the sea, where it broadened out to meet the world. Under a sky that was endless, the great promontories of Tarlair and Troup Head towered over all that might come from the east, and looked to the north and west, where the long golden stretch of the links invited us to our leisure. And our town nestled there, snug back from the west bank of the river, stretching towards its new harbour works at Guthrie’s Haven. Narrow winding streets, tentacles reaching up towards the castle, Caldhame, the Boyndie road and the Sandyhills, met together at the heart of the town. The kirk and the marketplace, the tolbooth and the laird of Banff’s palace, its long green garden stretching almost to the Greenbanks where the scholars played on this, another unlooked-for holiday. The tall town houses of the merchants jostled with the tenements filled with the poorer folk, the lower craftsmen, the day labourers, the indwellers. A tight, sometimes meandering network of vennels and alleyways, houses, workshops and backyards locked the streets together, a maze that ran through gardens, round wells, into courtyards,
pigsties, stables, kailyards, middens. Such was Banff, a place so blessed by God in harvest of land and sea, gone rotten at the heart. And at that heart, I was. A huge cloud began to pass over the sun and the air instantly cooled. I quickened my pace towards the Sandyhill Gate and the codroche houses.
They were not houses really, but shambling, windowless shacks of wood, turf and thatch of the sort the council was striving to banish from the town for fear of fire. They were set back a good bit from the road, up the hillside where a small burn ran down by the rowans and bramble bushes. No one from the town ventured to the codroche houses. The kirk session and council fulminated often against them and their inhabitants, but they were never levelled, never cleared. Filled with beggars, thieves and whores, the detritus of poverty that gave a name to all the fears of the good townspeople. The provost had told me why he tolerated them: they were weeds – weeds that we knew and could control, weeds that would prevent other, invasive weeds coming in and taking root. Weeds that could be managed. Yes, but I also suspected that up here, out of sight, the codroche houses could be, in the minds of my fellow townsmen, a place in which all the evil that was in their town could repose, a reason for them not to look in their neighbour’s face, in their own heart, and see it there instead.
As I approached the huddle of shacks a trio of mangy, hungry dogs came towards me, snarling quietly. A small, filthy child, a girl perhaps, in thin rags, ran into one of the houses from the hen house where she had been gathering eggs. A young man – it might have been her father – soon emerged, a large stick in his hand. I did not know him. He did not call off the dogs. ‘What do you want?’ he asked.
‘I am here to see Lang Geordie,’ I said.
His suspicion was all the greater.
‘Lang Geordie sees no one. What is your business?’
‘None of yours.’
I kept my face steady but my heart was pounding and the dogs knew it. They crept closer, and at any moment, at a word from the beggar man, they would be at my throat. More figures had emerged from the houses, two or three other young men, little more than boys, a gaggle of dirty children, a young woman holding a baby, another big with child. Perhaps a dozen pairs of eyes fixed me with cold hostility. The closest dog let out a long growl and was about to spring when a low snarl in some tongue, some vagabond’s cant I did not understand, came from the doorway of the main shack. The dog cowered back with a yelp, as if struck, and then slunk away with its companions. The gathering of people at the doorway parted and surveying me, as he supported himself on two crutches, was Lang Geordie.
The man must have been nearly seven feet tall, a giant almost. He had the wild hair and beard of an Old Testament prophet. The brandings on his cheek, marking him out as a ‘sturdy beggar’, repulsed on pain of death from some other town, only served to inspire greater fear in those who came upon him. I stood there, my chest still heaving from the encounter with the dogs, and waited.
