Crucible (21 page)

He sat down beside me, avoiding the pool of vomit. ‘Oh, not in so many words. But I know a woman with child when I see one. I had been about to ask her outright when you arrived in the yard.’ He offered me his wetted handkerchief. ‘This is not as you were when you heard that she was carrying Deirdre, or the next one, that she lost. I never saw a man with greater joy or love in his eye than in those days, and I do not see that now.’

I said nothing, but looked at the ground.

‘You cannot think it is another man’s child that she carries.’

His words twisted whatever was left inside me. I tried to speak but my heart was racing and I found I could scarcely breathe.

He gripped my arm again. ‘Hold steady, hold steady, it will pass. Now take a breath with me. Are you listening to me? Good. Take a breath with me.’

When he was satisfied that my crisis had passed, he gave me another drink and then lifted me to my feet.

‘Let us go back into the house,’ he said, and I let him lead me through my own door and sit me in my own chair,
as if I were some sick child or aged soul who could not shift for itself. He drew his own chair close to mine and studied my face. ‘Tell my why you think this terrible thing, boy.’

And so I told him of the scene I had witnessed between Sarah and Carmichael at the Snow Kirk, and what her explanation had been. I told him too of the rumours I had started to hear, a little over a year ago, of Carmichael’s attempted courtship of her before our marriage, when I had been in Ireland, and of the admission by William Cargill and indeed Sarah herself that this had been the case.

‘That is it?’ said the doctor.

I nodded.

‘And when you returned from Ireland, how long was it before she agreed to be your wife?’

I remembered it well. ‘Three minutes,’ I said. ‘Five, perhaps, until she stopped crying and beating me, until her rage, despair, subsided and she finally trusted herself to me.’

‘Three minutes, perhaps five,’ he repeated. ‘And yet you doubt, and still you doubt. Alexander, I begin to wonder if it is Sarah that you doubt.’

I looked up at him. ‘What do you mean?’

‘That you are a man, and a man who cannot trust a wife who has given him no cause to doubt her may have secrets of his own. Is it Katharine Hay? Do you still harbour thoughts of Katharine Hay?’

Katharine. I had scarcely thought of her in all of this.

My dead friend Archie’s sister. The girl I had loved with a love that had changed the course of my life, and hers. The girl I had turned my back on, in a moment of madness that had sent her hundreds of miles, a world, away. ‘No, it is not Katharine Hay. That was a lifetime ago. I would not abandon Sarah for Katharine.’

His words came slowly. ‘No one has spoken of abandoning Sarah. What have you done, Alexander?’

I took a sip from the beaker of water he had given me. ‘I have … it was in Ireland. It was one night, that was all. A girl that should have married my cousin. One night.’

‘I see. Did you love her?’

‘Love her? No, I do not think so. Not the Alexander Seaton that is sitting before you here. But in Ireland – no, I did not love Roisin O’Neill even there, but it was a different place, and I a different man.’

‘And do you hanker for it?’

‘No, but there are times I wish I had never seen it.’ I turned the beaker round in my hands. ‘I saw another life there, James. Another life that had no place for Sarah, for Zander, for the man who lectures in the college and reads in the kirk. I did not want it, I know that, but it is too stark a thing for me to know that while I had a choice, so did she – Sarah. She also might have chosen a different life, with a different man. And to know that he is a good and decent man as William and others never sicken of telling me, a man whose conversation is interesting and company worthwhile, makes it all the worse.’

‘And yet she did not choose him, you know that, don’t you?’

I nodded.

‘Then tell her.’

‘I try. Dear God, I try, but I find I am taken over by a poison that goes from my heart to my mouth, and I can do nothing but accuse her. I will drive her to him. Perhaps – the child – perhaps I already have done.’

He stood up abruptly and took his hat from where it lay on the table. ‘A word more of that and I will pack up her and the children and take them to him myself.’ He shook his head at me in disgust. ‘That girl has looked shame in the face and not been broken by it, she has given you everything a woman has to give – the care of one child, she has borne you another and lost a third, and by God, Alexander, I wept with you then. But I swear to God, I will be His agent in taking from you that which you do not deserve and leading it to one who does, who will cherish and care for her, if ever I hear you speak one word more against your wife.’

In all the time I had known Jaffray, through all my worst days, he had never before raised his voice to me. Before I could muster a reply the door had banged shut behind him.

It was early afternoon that, washed, changed, and in full control of myself, I descended the steps from the principal’s rooms and crossed the courtyard of the Marischal College.

Dr Dun had been called out to Belhelvie, where the laird’s daughter had fallen ill with a fever, and he was not expected back until the evening time. I had left him a note, sealed, detailing what I had learned from Malcolm Urquhart at Crathes, and also what I had learned of his schoolmaster brother. I looked in briefly on my class who were being led out by John Strachan with their bows for an afternoon at the butts. I promised him and my slightly wary looking scholars that I would return to my duties the next morning. I wanted to go to Sarah, but what I had to say to her could not be said in the midst of someone else’s kitchen. No courts sat today, so instead I turned my steps to the Castlegate and sought out William Cargill in his rooms.

His clerk had me wait ten minutes or so while William had a deed and its copy notarised. He looked up when I entered. ‘I hear you were out at Crathes. What called you there?’

‘Perhaps we will talk of Crathes later. I arrived home late this morning to find Jaffray in my house.’

William coloured, but only a little.

‘Your behaviour – I had never seen you like that before, Alexander, but I knew Jaffray had. I was concerned for you, and did not know where else to turn.’

‘I gave you cause to be, and I am sorry for it, but I will give you no such cause again.’

‘And is all well with you now?’

‘It will be. The doctor has addressed himself to my ills quite thoroughly, and shown me the remedy. There is no
other who could so hold a glass up to my face and force me to look. You did well to send for him.’

‘Then we need talk no more about it.’

‘No.’

‘Good. And now,’ he said, reaching for his wine bottle and two glasses, ‘tell me what took you out to Crathes.’

When I had finished my account he was thoughtful. ‘And so Patrick Urquhart was the fourth member of their fraternity. Why did Middleton make such a mystery of it?’

‘Because he was convinced that some harm would befall Urquhart if his identity became known. Hardly surprising, given what has happened to the others. But he has not fallen victim to violence, or begun to slide in to madness.’

‘I am glad of it, but how could he have joined in their fraternity, when they met at the lodge and he was out at Crathes?’

‘The minister there takes the school on alternate Saturday mornings. The children are free to play on a Saturday afternoon. That allowed Patrick to travel into town on a Friday evening and return to Banchory on the Saturday night.’

‘So that is why they held their convocations so late at night. It is little wonder then that Rachel Middleton became the object of the burgh gossips, or that Matthew Jack began to suspect something sinister of these gatherings. Rumours of dark practices at the lodge have begun to circulate the town, and I’ll tell you this, Alexander, the masons do not like it.’

‘The stonemasons?’

‘Aye, the stonemasons. Theirs in an honourable craft, with its secrets, as all crafts have, but they do not like this calling down of attention on themselves by what happened at the Middletons’ lodge, or the interference in their practices of those who have never raised a hammer. There is a feeling building in the burgh against the Middletons, and soon it will not need Matthew Jack to feed it.’

I knew it. Accusations, insinuations, that the physician had dabbled in the darker side of the alchemical arts would not be long in losing him what patients he had, and the rumours that had begun to abound about his wife were not those that a woman such as she could long survive.

‘It does not help that they are strangers here, with no kin and few friends.’

‘I would be their friend,’ I said at last.

‘And I also. And in pursuit of that cause, Elizabeth has invited Richard Middleton and his wife to join with us on Monday night, to meet the doctor. George Jamesone and Isobel are to be there too.’

My painter friend and his wife always made for entertaining company. ‘It will be a night of good cheer, then,’ I said.

‘Yes, that is what I intend. And …’ He seemed unsure as to how to proceed.

‘And?’

‘I have also invited Andrew Carmichael, in the hope that he can bring with him John Innes. John has not been seen
outside the King’s College since he heard the news of Robert Sim’s murder.’ He was watching me carefully. I was not sure that I was ready to face Andrew Carmichael after the thoughts that had rampaged through my head and emptied my stomach only a few hours before, but I knew that if I was truly to excise the canker of suspicion and distrust within me, I must.

‘It will be a good thing if he manages to get John down out of the Old Town.’ I was glad to have managed this, and it seemed to satisfy William, too. That achieved, I was keen to change the course of our conversation. ‘Has any fresh evidence come to light in the burgh in the case of the two murders, any witnesses?’

‘Nothing, nothing at all. The baillie and his men are circling Richard Middleton like vultures round a dying beast. They cannot see beyond the rumours about Robert and Rachel and the killer’s use of a doctor’s scalpel. As to the death of the weaver, much though many would wish to see Matthew Jack found guilty on that charge, no connection can be found between him and Bernard Cummins other than the Middletons’ garden. The weaver was so recently returned to the burgh that his connections here were very few indeed.’

‘I do not think it is here that the connection is to be found. Tell me, William, in your days at Leiden, you never came upon a Scot, a student at Franeker, by the name of Nicholas Black?’

William thought for a moment and then shook his head.
‘It is not a name I recall, although I never went to Franeker, you know. There was little to recommend it for a lawyer, and the climate was more miserable than I had a mind for. Why do you ask?’

‘Because Bernard Cummins did come upon him. One evening, about nine years ago, when in Leiden with his master, he met Nicholas Black at the Fir-Cone inn. And he met him again here, in the street of this burgh, not a week ago, but Nicholas Black denied the fact, denied the name, and claimed never to have met Bernard Cummins before.’

William’s eyes grew wide. ‘But how do you know this?’

‘Bernard Cummins, like Malcolm Urquhart, came from Crathes. His sister told me of it, and I read the weaver’s account of his meeting with Black in a letter almost nine years old in the schoolmaster’s possession. I do not think we will find the killer of these two men until we find Nicholas Black.’

William thought a moment before he spoke. ‘But you know as well as I do, Alexander – there is no scholar in Aberdeen by the name of Nicholas Black, not in either burgh. Surely, after nine years the weaver was mistaken?’

‘His sister said he was not, that he was sure of it. For want of an option, I am determined to find him.’

‘And where do you propose to do that?’

‘I had thought to begin with Matthew Jack.’

He was incredulous. ‘You are not serious? You and I were the last people to have seen Robert Sim alive, and
you it was who found him dead. And then you discovered Bernard Cummins’s body also. How long do you think it will be until it occurs to Matthew Jack to turn his bile on you?’

I could not argue with what he said, for I knew Matthew Jack had no love for me. ‘I have no other option,’ I said.

William was silent a moment. ‘You have another option, you know.’

‘I would be glad to hear it.’

‘The masons.’

I shook my head. ‘That lodge has been out of use for years. Richard Middleton took me over every inch of it on the night we found the weaver’s body. There are no secrets there worth killing a man – two men – for.’

‘I tell you, Alexander, the lodge the masons seek to protect is not a lodge of stone, but of the mind, and it is in that lodge that Robert Sim and his companions had begun to dabble.’

‘And Bernard Cummins?’

‘The laird of Crathes’s father was much in the company of his kinsman, the late Chancellor, who was known to have taken some interest in the practices of the masons. His house at Pinkie was more adorned with emblems and symbols even than Crathes. He made no secret of it, and I never heard a word of the present laird involved in anything sinister, but if Cummins was studying and executing designs for his project in the castle, then …’

‘Then?’

‘Then you should tread warily, Alexander, that is all I am saying.’

‘I will, but I cannot leave the matter as it stands. The faces of those dead men haunt me, and I fear they may not be the last.’ I got out of my chair. ‘I am going to the tolbooth.’

William shook his head. ‘You cannot. There is to be a hanging on Tuesday morning – they will allow no visitors over the door until that is safely done, for fear of an escape. Go home, Alexander, take your rest in the tranquillity of the Sabbath, and leave this for a while.’

I told him I would go home, and had intended to do so, but my footsteps took me instead down past the Guestrow and eventually to the house at the top of Back Wynd that just two nights ago had been a scene of horrors. Not wishing to be seen knocking on the street door, I went down the vennel to the backland of the house. The door to the kitchen was open but there was no sign of Rachel Middleton, and no response from inside when I called out her name. It was only as I was turning to leave that I heard her voice.