The Redemption of Alexander Seaton (4 page)

‘There can be little doubt.’ It was the baillie who spoke, but the others murmured their assent.

The minister, having kept silent long enough, sought to assert himself. ‘Has Jaffray … ?’ but he did not finish his question. Gilbert Grant shook his head. ‘My good wife sent for the doctor the instant the boy – John Durno – found him. Jaffray was not at home. He was called out to Findlater late last night. My Lady Deskford …’ His voice dropped.
‘It would have made little difference.’ He brushed a little hair back gently from the corpse’s forehead. ‘He was cold. Long cold.’

No, Jaffray could have done nothing. Patrick Davidson had called for help hours earlier as he stumbled in the shadow of death, but the man who could perhaps have saved him had passed by on the other side. I said nothing further, and found myself, for the moment, ignored. Cardno murmured something to the baillie, inaudible to the rest of us, and the baillie nodded once before turning to issue instructions to the town serjeants standing silently by the still-unlit brazier. The session clerk made for the doorway, followed by the serjeants. He addressed Mistress Youngson as he passed, hands already at the keys on his belt. ‘We’re away for the mortcloth, mistress. Have your girl clean him up.’

The old woman looked witheringly at the clerk. ‘That is no work for any girl, James Cardno. If it is beneath you and your men to do the boy this service, I’ll do it myself.’ And with that the schoolmaster’s wife headed slowly towards the back courtyard and the well, more hunched and frail than I had ever seen her.

The minister spoke again. ‘And see that it’s the best cloth, Cardno. It is the provost’s nephew.’

The session clerk looked towards the baillie, and only on gaining the latter’s assent did he continue on his way. Guild’s displeasure was as impotent as it was evident. Since the day and hour he had been appointed to the charge of Banff, Buchan had been his nemesis, a shadow who thwarted him at every turn. I knew Guild to be a man of inferior intellect, formality rather than faith and great worldly ambition. It seemed part of God’s just punishment that such a one should
have been amongst those to sit in judgement upon me, and pronounce me unfit to join the ranks of their ministry. To Buchan’s credit, it was Guild’s lack of fervency in preaching, his lassitude in prosecuting the discipline of the kirk, and his regard for rank that had earned him the enmity and mistrust of the baillie. Buchan’s ascendancy on the council and constancy at the session gave him a degree of influence amongst the townspeople that the minister could never hope to wield. As the door of the schoolroom closed behind Cardno and the town serjeants, the baillie turned to the minister and spoke directly to him. ‘I think there should be little mistake here, Mr Guild, before you claim kin in virtue of your sister. As you well know, it is the nephew of the provost’s first wife, who lies buried in yonder kirkyard and has done these eight years past.’ His point being thus made, he turned his back on us both and said nothing more.

Little more than half an hour later, I joined in the grim little procession that made its way through an unusually sombre gathering of the townsfolk from the schoolhouse up towards the Castlegate and the provost’s house. Though the hour was still early, rumours of what had occurred in the night had already begun to gain currency in the town, and as our cortège emerged into the nascent daylight, we were greeted by the murmurs of the small crowd that had already gathered outside the schoolhouse.

‘A great loss to the provost.’

‘Aye, and Arbuthnott too.’

‘It’s well to be out of it.’

‘A scandal on the town.’

‘God’s will be done.’

The storm of the previous night had completely abated, leaving little trace of itself, other than the sodden streets, which made the pace of the pallbearers necessarily slow. The usual morbid interest occasioned by the sight of the mortcloth was much increased as news spread of the identity of the murdered man. I looked back towards the town: along by Lord Airlie’s lodging amongst the old Carmelite yards, derelict for seventy years now, and the great wall of the laird of Banff’s palace garden, more and more of my fellow townsmen paused in their early morning labours. Many, though, had seen such things too often before, and soon continued on their way to the marketplace and the setting-up of their booths, or to their workshops and backyards. Edward Arbuthnott had joined our procession; I looked for Charles Thom beside him, but Charles was not there.

There was no sign of life as yet at the Market Arms, and little stirred in the kirkyard opposite. Janet and Mary Dawson had little truck with the citizens of Banff in the daylight hours; indeed, they had little truck with the daylight hours at all. I could not believe that it was only last night that I had laughed here with the town whores, while Patrick Davidson staggered in agony towards his death. My sense of discomfort mounted as we progressed up the Water Path, and I was glad of the distraction afforded by the necessity of offering an arm to my elderly colleague. He took it gladly, and nodded his thanks. The force of the previous night’s rain had scoured the gutters clean. No mark remained where I had seen Davidson stumble and fall the night before, stumble again and try to pick himself up. There was an echo, though, of words I hadn’t heard through the
ferocious wind, but which I knew had been spoken. Words I had ignored: ‘Help me.’

Near the top of the Water Path, close by the entrance to the castle grounds, we passed the site of the new manse the minister had finally succeeded in persuading the council to build for him. The land, to the general astonishment of the burgesses, had been granted for the purpose by the provost himself – the toft where his own former house had stood, the house that had been his before his fortune had been made; the house he had shared with Helen. And now he had granted it for a manse for his brother-in-law. His new wife was thought to be the agent of this change. At the head of the cortège, Guild allowed himself a complacent smile while Buchan stared determinedly ahead.

The great oaken doors of the provost’s house stood open, awaiting our arrival. Walter Watt and his wife, Geleis Guild, the minister’s younger sister, stood a little apart at the far end of the great hall of the house, on either side of the unlit hearth. Quality of craftsmanship was evident in every aspect of the room, from the carved oak panels of the ceiling to the tiling of the floor where others would have only flagstones or wood. A great Dutch side table stood against one wall, a cabinet carved by the same hand against another. Candlesticks on the mantelshelf and holders in the wall-sconces and suspended from the ceiling were fine and intricate work, better than our local craftsmen could supply. And yet it was a sombre place; only the necessary draperies, no tapestries, no painted panels to add relief and colour, only one solitary portrait hanging from the wall. Watt came forward gravely to meet the baillie who, like the rest of us, had removed his hat on passing through the doorway. The baillie inclined his
head towards the provost and said something I could not hear. Watt nodded and stepped closer to the pallbearers. At a signal from Buchan, Cardno drew back the top of the mortcloth, far enough to reveal the young man’s waxen, but now mercifully clean face. The provost’s wife gave out a groan and then collapsed into uncontrolled grief. ‘It is him,’ said the provost after a long pause, staying a moment longer to gaze on the dead face before going to comfort his wife. I think I envied him that task. I had known her since we were children; her nature had always been kind, and was not belied by her beauty. She was better loved in the burgh than either her husband or brother.

‘It is God’s will, mistress,’ said the baillie. ‘We must seek out the evil in the hand that accomplished it, but we must not question His will.’

Drawing his young wife a little closer to him, the provost answered, ‘You must forgive my wife, Baillie. She is young and over-tender yet. She welcomed the lad to our home, and loved him well, for my late wife’s sake and for my own. And all in all, it is a bad death. A bad death,’ he repeated, more to himself than to the rest of us gathered there. The baillie held the provost’s gaze for a moment, but said nothing further of God’s will. Geleis Guild gradually extricated herself from her husband’s embrace and searched her pocket for the lace handkerchief with which she wiped her eyes. The provost held her a little away from him and said, ‘Go you to the children now. Do not let them be upset by this. I doubt the girl Arbuthnott will not be here to help you today. Now go.’ Eventually comprehending, she nodded slowly and left the room, without having uttered a word.

The provost turned to face the rest of us, and it was clear
that his tender manner had departed with his wife. A large and imposing man, he was well over six feet tall with thick dark hair down to his shoulders, and eyes set wide in a broad brow. His clothes gave the appearance of being simple, but their cut was good and the plain dark material of high quality; the fine Dutch lace at his cuffs gave some hint of the wealth his strong hands had garnered. I felt the full force of his personality as he again strode the length of the room to where the body had been laid. He pulled back the mortcloth again and touched the cold cheek. I heard him murmur quietly, ‘Oh, Helen, that it has come to this.’

‘May God preserve us all from such a judgement,’ intoned the minister.

‘You would do well to see to your sister, sir,’ responded the provost, not quite mastering an evident contempt for his brother-in-law. The minister left reluctantly, and much to the satisfaction of the baillie. The latter was the next to feel the provost’s ire. ‘And you think it God’s will, do you, William Buchan, that a boy such as this should die choking in the gutter on his own vomit, like any common vagabond?’ As the baillie opened his mouth to reply, Walter Watt raised a prohibiting hand. ‘Spare me your sermon, man; we have ministers enough. As to your proper concerns, tell me what you know. Are the reports I hear correct? He was found in the schoolroom, covered in filth and vomit?’

It was Gilbert Grant who replied. ‘It is true, alas, true. The boy John Durno found him at about a quarter to six, when he came to light the brazier in Mr Seaton’s schoolroom.’

The provost turned a suspicious eye on me. It was seldom nowadays that I found myself worthy of his notice, and of that I was glad.

‘You were with him last night? Drinking? When were you with him?’

‘I was not with him. I never … we never met.’

‘And how did he come to be in your schoolroom, in such a condition and at such an hour? How did it come to be, Mr Seaton?’

‘That I cannot tell.’ The half-lie almost stuck in my throat, for I suspected some involvement of the Dawson sisters, but I was at a loss for any idea of its nature or how it was managed. ‘I returned from the inn a little before the hour had struck ten. I locked the schoolhouse door – the mistress is very particular about that.’ At this Grant murmured his sympathetic agreement; he had heard me harangued loud and long on more than one occasion on the hazards of leaving one’s back door unlocked at night. To Mistress Youngson, it was little less than an invitation to the Devil himself to come take what he would. ‘The house was quiet, and dark. The master and mistress always retire to bed before nine in the winter, and the serving girl rarely much later. There was no one in the schoolroom as I passed.’ And what had made me look in? I wondered. I did not know.

‘And you saw nothing of my nephew in the house at that time? You know not whether he was there then?’

‘He was not there,’ I said, my voice dull.

‘And you had had no dealings with him in the evening?’ The provost seemed determined to have me Davidson’s companion on his last night on this earth.

‘None,’ I answered emphatically. A vague chill began to creep over me as I realised there would be some in the burgh who would suspect me of having a guiding hand in the death of Patrick Davidson. The provost, thank God, pursued
the point no further. He strode again the length of the room and back.

‘And the doctor? Where is he? What does Jaffray say? Was my nephew dead many hours when he was found? What does Jaffray say to the manner of death? Was the boy drunk?’

So again, this time for the provost’s benefit, the story of my lady Deskford and Jaffray’s summons to Findlater was relayed. Arbuthnott had not yet heard it. ‘What? Then Jaffray is a madman, on such a night.’

‘But Jaffray has always been a madman in matters of the child-bed. It is as if by saving one woman or child he will one day expiate the sufferings of his wife.’ The provost spoke only as one who knew and who had endured what Jaffray had endured, could speak. I had seldom glimpsed the private man that lay beneath the veneer, but I thought I glimpsed him now. Cardno and Buchan, however, looked up sharply at this. Such talk, in their ears, lay somewhere in the morass of sin that led from Popery to witchcraft, and I doubted whether it would be long before the provost’s name was raised at the session in the same breath as one or the other of these manifestations of evil.

Gilbert Grant hastened to turn the conversation again to the matter in hand. ‘I would say the boy had been dead a good while before he was found. And,’ and he breathed deeply here, ‘and I believe he died in that schoolroom.’

Arbuthnott nodded. ‘Aye, for the dead do not vomit.’ He looked at me directly. ‘If the lad was found in the state that I have heard it, he died at your desk.’ Of course, it could not have been otherwise. But I would have given much to have been able to believe that Patrick Davidson had not died
his filthy and abandoned death at my desk as I slept only thirty-seven steps above him.

‘Was Davidson at home last night?’ The question was addressed to Arbuthnott. It was understood that the ‘home’ the baillie spoke of referred to the apothecary’s house rather than the provost’s. An apprentice lived in his master’s home, over his master’s workshop, regardless of who or where his own family was.

‘For a while.’ Arbuthnott was running the previous evening through his mind. ‘He took his dinner with us, but ate little. My wife chided him for it. I left them at around seven – I had work in hand in the workshop. The lad would often help me in the evenings, but I had no need of him last night. He did not seem in his usual good humour – for in general he was as pleasant as Charles Thom was gloomy – his company was often a tonic for my wife and daughter on the dark nights while I worked.’ The baillie’s eyes narrowed on Edward Arbuthnott, and again the session clerk’s face registered his malicious satisfaction. The apothecary was not to be cowed. ‘Let the sin be in your mind, James Cardno – for there is no blemish on my daughter’s name.’