Crucible (17 page)

Men, women and children were busy at their labours as I passed the brewhouse and bakehouse, and few paid any heed to me as I went to the front door of the castle, a small, arched entry set into the thick wall. I took Dr Dun’s letter to Thomas Burnett from my satchel and rapped three times on the door. The man who answered was, I saw, well-armed.

‘Yes?’

‘My name is Alexander Seaton. I am here upon the business of the Marischal College of Aberdeen and would seek an audience with Sir Thomas.’

He sniffed, before standing aside to let me through, taking
care to bolt the door again behind me. ‘You and half the country round. Today is court day and you will have to wait your turn. Sir Thomas is in the Long Gallery. Stand a moment.’ I did so, and was not altogether pleased to find myself being searched. The guard indicated the knife at my belt. ‘I’ll have that and you can get it when you leave.’

I covered the handle with my hand. ‘I am a teacher, not an assassin. I bear nothing more threatening to Sir Thomas than letters from Principal Dun.’

The fellow was unimpressed. ‘So you say, and that may indeed be the case, although you do not look altogether like a teacher,’ he said, surveying for a moment the scars on my forehead and at my neck, ‘but that place is full of picklocks, swindlers and drunkards, who might take their chances at flight if they thought they could get their hands on a pistol or a blade. You’ll hand over your weapon or you’ll not take another step inside this house.’

I held up my hands and allowed him to take the knife. He gave me another doubtful look and then told me to go up the stairs in front of him. I ascended the narrow stone turnpike as it twisted for several storeys, passing doorways, all closed, all silent.

At last we reached the top and I was standing in the Long Gallery, and the barony court of Burnett of Leys. The gallery ran the length of the top of the house, and was well lit by tall windows at either end and down the southern side of the room. At the far end, behind a heavy oak table, Sir Thomas Burnett of Leys was in the act of passing
sentence on a small, scrawny man, manacled at the hands. The judgment pronounced, the fellow was shuffled past us, a bitter look on his scabrous face, to spend a night in the castle jail before being transported the next day to the stocks in Banchory. As the stair door closed behind the offender and his guards, Sir Thomas stood up and stretched back his arms, letting out a great sigh. I had seen him before, of course, riding through town, at graduations and assemblies at the King’s College, and from time to time, at divine service in St Nicholas Kirk, but had met him only once. He must have been about fifty years of age but looked, despite his fatigue at this point in a long day, to be a man full of health and vigour. He was soberly dressed, in a fashion even the most vehement of our ministers could not take exception to, but all the same a man completely in place with the grandeur of his surroundings. Sir Thomas Burnett did not need to prove his standing to anyone.

The laird looked up as the door of the gallery closed behind the thief and his attendants. ‘Well, Robert, is this another recalcitrant you have brought to me – I had thought we were finished.’

‘I couldn’t say for myself, sir: he claims to be a teacher in the new college, but you may judge for yourself.’

I stepped out of the shadow of the doorway and a broad grin swept the laird’s face. ‘That’s all right, Robert, you may leave Mr Seaton here with me, I think I’ll be safe enough.’

The guard grumbled and he set off down the stairs again.
‘Aye, well sir, if you’re certain, but I’ll just hold on to his knife.’

The laird gestured to a chair across the broad oak table from where he himself had been sitting. ‘Take a seat, Mr Seaton. I’ll be with you in a minute.’ He checked the entries his secretary had made in the court book and then shook his head. ‘Time and again, the same faces, the same crimes. And yet we must labour, must we not, Mr Seaton?’

It pleased me that he should remember me from the one time we had met at Dr Forbes’s house, in Old Aberdeen.

When he had finished putting his papers in order, and after dismissing his secretary, Sir Thomas turned his attention once more to me. ‘You are here on the business of the college, no doubt?’

‘I am, sir,’ I said, and handed him the letter from Dr Dun. As he scanned the contents, the face that had greeted me in so friendly a manner only a few minutes ago became grave. ‘I see you are not here to bring me any better news from the town than I have already had today.’ He glanced at the clock on the mantel-shelf. ‘I have no doubt that Malcolm Urquhart will have sought refuge with his brother in the schoolhouse at Banchory, but Patrick will be at his duties in the school another four hours yet. If Dr Dun can spare you, you’ll have my hospitality tonight, and I’ll send word for the pair to come here when the school is done with for the day.’

‘Dr Dun will spare me, and I thank you for your kindness,
but I fear Malcolm Urquhart will abscond again if forewarned of my presence here.’

The laird shook his head. ‘Malcolm Urquhart will go nowhere, for he has nowhere left to go.’ He appeared to consider this a moment. ‘But if it makes you more easy I will see to it that my message is delivered to Patrick, and not to his younger brother.’

I thanked him.

‘Now, I have not eaten since I left Dunottar, and I’ll wager you could manage a bite yourself after your journey here. Did you ride, or come on foot?’

‘On foot. It was a fine morning, and I had not the time to arrange for a horse.’

‘Then surely, you are famished! Come down with me and we will get them to feed us.’

Sir Thomas led the way through a different door from that I had come in by, and down another spiralling set of stairs. I remarked upon the silence of the house, and he told me that his wife and children were away. ‘And I am truly glad of your company, Mr Seaton, for I received some dreadful news today.’

The room into which he led me was a room in which a man might make himself comfortable. It was a small hall with a broad flagstone floor and a high arched plasterwork ceiling. The chimney piece was simple, but the fire that burned within it gave off a welcome heat, for little sunlight made its way into the place despite the warmth of the day outside. It was a plain room, I thought, for a house I had
heard of as a delight to the mind and senses, but in the whirl of duties and responsibilities Sir Thomas faced, a plain room perhaps afforded his mind the quiet it required.

He pulled a sash above the fireplace and very quickly a young girl appeared in a doorway. ‘Bring some meat and drink for myself and Mr Seaton, will you, for we are both half-starved.’ She bobbed her head and turned to leave. ‘Oh, and Mary?’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘How is Marjorie Cummins?’

‘The housekeeper has sent her to her bed, Sir Thomas. She is not fit for work today.’

‘No,’ he nodded. ‘She will not be.’

Once the girl had gone, and we had taken our seats at either side of the fire, the laird said to me, ‘The brother of one of my servants, a young man in whose life I took some interest and for whom I had great hopes, was murdered in Aberdeen the night before last.’

‘Bernard Cummins, the weaver,’ I said.

He looked up from the coals he’d begun to rake at. ‘The news did not take long to travel the town.’

‘Such news seldom takes long to travel, but’ – I took a breath, not sure how he should take my role in the thing – ‘I did not need anyone to tell me of this; I was amongst those who discovered his body.’

The laird exhaled slowly as he held me with his gaze. It was a gaze under which I could not have sat comfortable
for long. ‘And this then is why Patrick Dun has sent you to Crathes this day.’

‘Not only this …’

‘Do not try and tell me that with little more than a week until the graduations the Marischal College can spare its most able regent for two days over an absconded student. I suspect it was not really Malcolm Urquhart, but the other matter that brought you here to Crathes.’

‘I fear the one will be shown in time to be entangled with the other.’

At that moment, the girl returned with our food, and only once seated at table did our conversation resume.

‘Tell me what you know, Mr Seaton. I counsel you to search your heart that you leave nothing out.’

And so I told him of the death of Robert Sim and of Malcolm Urquhart’s flight from the college after arguing with him in the library. I told him how my investigation of Robert’s death, coupled with rumours William had heard around the burgh courts, had led me to the Middletons’ house. I told him of Rachel’s frantic call for help in the night, and of Matthew Jack, my disgraced fellow regent’s attack on her husband. And then I told him of the discovery, in the Middletons’ garden, of the body of Bernard Cummins. Finally, I told him of the last entry Robert Sim had made in the Trades’ Benefaction Book, on the day of his death. What I did not tell him, in spite of his injunction, was of the lodge, or the secret fraternity that had met there. Something of the fears of John Innes, and of my
own wife, had begun to take hold in me, and I realised that no more than Sarah did I want my researches into the masons’ lodge in Aberdeen to become widely known.

‘And what, precisely, did the entry in the Trades’ Book say?’

‘It was simply a record of Cummins’s first contribution to the guild benefaction—’

The laird cut me short. ‘I did not ask what it
was
, Mr Seaton. I asked what
precisely
it said. What were the words?’

I thought for a moment, pictured the page from the ledger in my mind’s eye. ‘It said, “From Bernard Cummins, weaver, lately returned from the Low Countries, four shillings and six pennies to the box.” That was it, that was all.’

‘And yet perhaps that was enough,’ said the laird. ‘If I had never called Bernard home …’ He paused.

‘It was you who called him back to Scotland?’

‘Aye, and I who sent him to the Netherlands in the first place. He was a good lad, an able lad, from the time he could walk and talk. His gifts were not of an academic nature, but from an early age he showed himself adept with a bit of yarn or a needle. It was evident to me that he should be apprenticed to a weaver, which he was, here, for a while, and as soon as he was old enough to leave his mother, I had my brother find a place for him in the Netherlands, where he could hone his skills to something finer than can be got here in Scotland.’

‘Your brother, sir?’

‘Aye, my younger brother John is Scottish factor at
Campvere. He found Bernard an apprenticeship with a master weaver near Bruges, and there Bernard perfected his trade.’

‘Why did you want him to return?’

Sir Thomas got up and washed his hands in an earthenware bowl the girl had set on the sideboard and indicated that I should do the same. ‘Let me show you something.’

I did as I was bid before following him back up the stairs towards the Long Gallery. He stopped short of the top and opened the door in to a room I had heard others speak of. He stood aside to let me enter and left me a few moments to slowly walk the length of the room, looking upwards.

‘Well, Mr Seaton?’ he said at last, with a smile.

‘It is … magnificent.’

The room of the nine nobles, it was called. Painted on the plaster ceiling, between the oak beams, were full length images of heroes from all the ages before our own: Hector, Julius Caesar, Alexander, King David, Joshua, Judas Maccabeus, Arthur, Charlemagne, and Godfrey de Bouillon the great crusader, rendered magnificently in blue, black, red, and gold. Each was accompanied by his coat of arms and a banner telling of his heroism and achievements.

‘My father had a great love for the decorative arts. Each figure is a topic on his own, in which many arguments for valour, nobility and honour have their seat. Each image brings to mind the deeds of the man it portrays and the lessons to be learned and moral to be drawn from them.’
Images, topics, seats of arguments: a visual rhetoric. ‘The art of memory,’ I said.

‘If you like, it may be seen in that way, although I believe the true practitioners of the art of memory involve themselves in much greater complexities than these simple decorations.’

‘I have never learned it,’ I said. But others had – Robert Sim, John Innes, Richard Middleton and the others of their fraternity. ‘Such ideas are frowned upon in my college as tending to Hermeticism, to secret knowledge.’

‘Perhaps some of my generation and my father’s have gone too far in probing the possibilities of art. But these are brutal times, and you must forgive us if we indulge ourselves in the search for something finer. You will be wondering what this has to do with Bernard Cummins, though.’

I waited.

‘Bernard was no simple journeyman weaver – he was a master. He had a gift, an eye for colour and design that cannot be taught, and the ability to transfer what he saw in his mind’s eye or in the pages of a pattern book to the threads, the cloth he was working on, and render it something exceptional.’ Sir Thomas lifted his hands towards the plastered wall. ‘I know that arras hangings are not so much to the taste of wealthy men and women in our times as once they were, but to me they give a warmth and a depth and a texture to a tale that a painting cannot match. You are a Banffshire man, are you not, Mr Seaton?’

‘I am,’ I said.

‘Have you ever perhaps been to Lord Deskford’s place, at Cullen House?’

‘Only as a boy, once, when my father was called to the fitting of his lordship’s horses.’

‘Ah. And I do not suppose they let a curious young boy up to see the Long Gallery?’

‘They had better sense, sir. I was kept out in the yard where I could do less harm. But I know of it.’ Archie Hay, wide-eyed with schoolboy excitement, had told me of it many years ago, for he had seen it; painted on the wooden boards of the Long Gallery at Cullen House, where the walls sloped to meet the roof, was the siege of Troy.

Sir Thomas Burnett broke into my memories. ‘It is a magnificent piece. A man can look on it and feel the heat of the battle, hear the clash of the swords. It is that that I wanted Bernard Cummins to do for me, in threads rather than paints, but truer to the tale as Virgil tells it. It was because he was at last ready to begin this great work that I called him home. And now he has paid for my rich man’s vanity.’