The Redemption of Alexander Seaton (7 page)

‘Who can it have been, James?’ I asked.

He shrugged, at a loss. ‘I do not know. A servant? A vagrant paid to perform the task and forget that they had done so? It little matters. The effect has been the same: someone saw to it that I was not here, and the boy is dead.’ He was not to be comforted, but his response would not be to indulge himself. ‘We must seek out this messenger and find out who sent him.’

A watch was being kept night and day at every entrance to the burgh, for fear of the plague that had been rumoured to be in the south. Anyone entering the burgh would have to state their identity, their place of origin and their business. I myself had taken my turn on the watch at the Sandyhills gate the night before last. I promised Jaffray that I would enquire at every port to the town whether there had been a messenger coming in with business for him last night.

I did not go directly to the tolbooth, for the baillie had warned me that no one would be permitted to see Charles until after the council had met, and that would be an hour or more yet. It was now a clear, brisk spring day. The sea rolled determinedly into the shore, but with no sense of the previous night’s vehemence. Everything looked clean and new, a contrast to the formless canker at work in the heart of the town itself. I was filled with a desire to get away from it for a time, to be on my own.

I left my burden at the schoolhouse and set out along the coast, towards the west. I pulled my hat down low and ignored the greetings and enquiries of the burgesses and of
my fellow townsfolk as I strode along Low Shore, beneath the Rose Craig and past the new harbour works at Guthrie’s Haven. I would have stopped a while to watch the cormorants and sand pipers at Meavie Point, holding out to the last moment to their jagged perch until it was claimed at last by the irresistible sea, but I was not yet far enough from the town, and so pressed on. I passed by the fishermen’s huts at the Seatoun. They would not bother me; in fact, they took pains to avoid me. With them at least I knew it was no particular aversion to my person, but to my position, or at least that which I had aspired to. It was as bad luck, they said, for them to meet a minister as it was for them to cross the path of a woman on the way to their boats. The unforgiving sea had claimed too many of their number for their caution to be questioned. I had not become a minister. I had failed at the last hurdle – almost indeed at the last moment – but I had come close enough that the fishermen would avoid my person and avoid my eye on any day when they planned to put out their boats.

As I passed by their row of miserable huts, I cast my gaze upwards, towards the great rocky promontory known from ancient times as the Elf Kirk. It was a place held deeply suspect by the kirk session, and mothers warned their children against going there. Some, no doubt, respected the feeling of the session; others had greater fear of the deep gully and jagged rocks jutting from the swirling waters below. Whatever their reasons, few of the townsfolk would be seen there. It could be a place of great beauty too, as spring gave way to early summer and the rocks were clothed in cascading green velvet with pockets of yellow primroses and soft sea pinks clinging to its folds. There were no flowers today though; it
was something of flowing white, fluttering slightly in the breeze that caught my eye. The folds of a woman’s cloak. Her head was uncovered and her long red hair, usually marshalled in a thick plait, hung loose down her back. Even at this distance I recognised Marion Arbuthnott. I would have called out to her, but she would not have heard me. I stood watching and in time she looked away from the ravine and out towards the sea. I lifted my arm and she saw me, but did not return my greeting. She looked at me for a long moment and then, pulling the hood of her white cloak up about her, she turned back towards the town. She had the air of a creature further from the living than the dead: I had within me a foreboding that she had had it in mind to harm herself, and I was thankful that Providence had allowed me to prevent that at least.

I pressed on, past the Seatoun and along the links to the shore of Boyndie Bay. I had often taken my scholars here, but the place was deserted today. I sat down on a large flat rock beneath a dune and looked out towards the horizon, remembering. I remembered my own schooldays, and the joy when the master had announced at the end of the morning lesson, if we had repeated our lesson to his satisfaction, that we would go to Boyndie Bay. I had not walked then, but run, run the whole way to the beach. We all ran, laughing and shouting, like the wind. And always, at the head of us all, was Archie. Archibald Hay, Master of Delgatie and heir to the castle and lands thereof. Archie, companion of my boyhood, the friend of my life. Closer than a brother and loved beyond measure. I would have given every grain of sand on the shore, every day of life that lay before me, to have Archie sitting beside me now.

The escapades of the Master of Hay were a legend in the North long before his schooldays were over. Our schoolfellows were too far in awe of him to demur at any scheme he might have, but I knew Archie from the depths of his heart, and I – I alone – could talk him out of his wild schemes. His parents knew this, and often enough before me, child that I was, thanked God for our friendship, for Archie was all their hope, the light of their life, and even their Katharine walked in his shadow.

Katharine, Archie’s younger sister, the quiet, watchful little girl, who had grown into a quiet, watchful young woman. She had taken the time to try to understand the world, whereas her brother had simply launched himself upon it. So delicate she was, and slender and pale, like the willow; I do not know when I first realised that I loved her. Sometime, it must have been, between leaving my boyhood games behind me and entering upon the world of men.

Over the years, when Archie and I had studied at the King’s College in Old Aberdeen, his parents had come often to their house in the Castlegate of the New Town, and they always took Katharine with them. At first, in the nature of boys, I paid her little heed, but as time got on and Archie quested after ever-wilder escapades, I began to notice her. There came a time when I began to speak to her of things other than all the commonplaces of our shared childhood, of her brother, of Banff, of Delgatie, of the characters who peopled her sphere and mine. We began to talk of the state of the kingdom, of the confusions in religion, of the world and its beauties and its perils. Her knowledge of languages, philosophy, poetry and history far outstripped her brother’s, and it was not long before I would call at the Hays’ town
house whether Archie were with me or no. Her parents were indulgent, amused even. They gave little thought to Katharine, save to love her. Archie was all their hopes, and Katharine’s life was her own. To learn that Katharine felt for me as I did for her had been the most wondrous moment I had known.

But I had no Katharine now, and there was no Archie beside me, nor ever would be. There would be no storming of the tolbooth, no mockery of the outrage of the dignitaries of burgh and Kirk. I must look to my own reserves to help Charles and hope that I would not be found wanting. I rose from my makeshift seat and began to make back towards the burgh, as the clouds rolled in from the west.

At the schoolhouse I collected the provisions from the back pantry where I had left them. I was not greatly surprised to find the broth warmed and the basket a good deal heavier now. I looked at Mistress Youngson, searching for some new tone of address, because words of kindness were so out of use between us, but they would not come. ‘His mother was a good Christian woman,’ she said. ‘And I was always fond of the boy.’

I did not slow my pace to speak to anyone as I passed by the marketplace and the old place of the Carmelites until I came to the tolbooth at the foot of Strait Path. The guard at the bottom doorway let me pass without comment or enquiry – it would be little mystery to any in the town what business I had there today. I seldom set foot in here unless it was to pay some new tax the crown or burgh had discovered a need for. This not being a day of taxation, the place was near silent, immovable. Another guard, having asked my business, opened for me the small doorway off
to the right, giving onto the wardhouse and the stairway that would take me up to the jail itself. I had been through that door only once before in my life, when the burgh council had seen fit to instruct Gilbert Grant to take his charges on a visit of the tolbooth, that the sight of the fate of wrongdoers might discourage them from any such path in future. We boys from the town were used to all manner of smells, of damp, food, coal, peat, beasts and bodily wastes. We were used to the stink of the tanner’s yard and the soap-maker, of cheap tallow candles and sometimes wax, of yeast and malt brewing, of fish gut, seal blubber and seaweed. But the tolbooth was different: few of my schoolfellows could have known such a stench as greeted us on ascending the stairs to the burgh prison. All the bodily odours we had ever encountered were compressed and magnified within those thick, stone, near-windowless walls. The damp and the cold and the vermin vied for precedence in a stinking cavern of God-forsaken despair. I, and many others, had had nightmares for weeks after about what we had seen there, and I had vowed that I would never again set foot in such a place.

I ascended the narrow and twisting stone stairs warily, for the light was very poor. Two-thirds of the way up, I heard footsteps begin to descend towards me. I stood still a moment and soon, emerging from the near-darkness, was the form of Baillie Buchan. ‘Mr Seaton. I had thought to see you here sooner.’ If the ambiguity of his words pleased him, he gave no sign of it.

‘And I would have been here sooner, had the door not been barred to me. On your instructions.’

‘The prohibition applied to more than yourself, but you
would do well to think further on it. These are not fit matters for you to meddle in.’

‘It is not meddling to give succour to a friend, or to wish to see justice done.’

‘I pray God that you might, Mr Seaton, and that soon. The magistrates have committed the music schoolmaster to an assize before the sheriff, to stand trial for the murder of Mr Patrick Davidson.’

Already. My throat went dry. My words can scarcely have been audible. ‘In the name of God, man.’

‘We all do our work in the name of God.’

I shook my head slowly. ‘This is no work of God you do here. On what grounds do you charge him?’

Buchan eyed me clearly. ‘I do not charge him, Mr Seaton. It is the whole body of magistrates sitting in council that charges him. He is, by common repute – and you will not deny this for you and Jaffray spoke of it only last night – he is by common repute infatuated with the girl Arbuthnott. She, as all the town knows, has wandered like a wanton through half the country after her father’s apprentice. Charles Thom gives no account of his movements last night after he left the inn, none at least that have an ounce of truth in them. His bed was never slept in at the apothecary’s – Edward Arbuthnott’s wife will vouch for that – and do not think I did not mark the question of his praying. Do you think me a hypocrite, that I cannot tell when one is void of faith? Your friend is lost, Mr Seaton, whatever the assize might say of him. Mind that you are not!’ With this he continued down past me, his last words repeating in my head.

The guard on the door at the top of the stair searched
my basket. ‘There are no weapons there.’ He disregarded my words and continued with his search until it was complete. His hand closed on the small package of dried fruit Mistress Youngson had slipped into the basket. ‘Leave it, or the baillie shall hear of it and you’ll be in here yourself soon enough,’ I warned him. He returned the package grudgingly and stood aside for me to stoop through the narrow doorway to the cells.

The place – I will not call it a room – was but very dimly lit, only some glimmer of yellow light coming through the iron grille in the door. As my eyes became more accustomed to the near darkness, I discerned the figure of my friend Charles Thom, sitting with his back against the wall and his head resting over crossed arms on his knees. An iron gad ran the length of the centre of the room, and to this he was bound. He looked up as I stepped closer to him and forgetting his shackles tried to stand up to grasp my arm. The chain by which he was tethered brought him sharply back to the floor, but still he smiled. ‘Alexander, you are here.’

‘I would have been here sooner if they had allowed it. And Jaffray – it was with no little difficulty that they kept our good friend the doctor from storming their walls. He will be with you tomorrow morning at the latest, if his examination of the body keeps him too late.’ I had not wished to talk so soon of the death of Patrick Davidson, but perhaps this was not the place for pleasantries in any case.

‘They tell me he was poisoned.’ Charles’s voice had dropped to a low murmur and he did not look at me.

I cleared some straw out of the way and sat down beside him on the rotting wooden floor. ‘Jaffray will know more by the morning of the nature of the substance itself, and the
manner of its administration. Arbuthnott will assist him. We must pray God they will meet with success.’

He smiled sadly. ‘It is a long time since you exhorted me to prayer, my friend, but I prayed today.’

‘I had heard you were found in the kirk. What brought you there, Charles?’

He shook his head and his shoulders dropped a little lower. He began to speak slowly, unsure of himself. ‘I think I wanted forgiveness.’ I waited, and at length he continued. ‘I did not wish Patrick Davidson well, Alexander. I wished him no harm, but I did not wish him well. I wished him little success in all his endeavours here, and I wished him away from Banff.’

‘Because of Marion?’

‘What else? Only Marion. In fact, there was no other reason why I should have disliked him. He brought to the apothecary’s table and hearth a liveliness, an interest which had been absent before. He brought with him whole new vistas for conversation. He could converse on herbs and simples and compounds as well as Arbuthnott – and I suspect it was only diplomacy on his part that prevented him showing how much more he knew than his master. But he spoke on many things – places and people he had come to know on the continent, our own universities and their varying merits. And he knew something of music, too. He was no expert, but he had a good ear and was more knowledgeable than most of our fellow burgesses. What I would have given to have been where he had been and heard what he had heard.’