Crucible (34 page)

I could not believe what he was saying to me, but could say nothing as he spoke on.

‘In the solitary hours of the night, where reason flees and dreams take hold, I continued to believe I might one day win her from you. All that, little enough to you, no doubt, but everything to me, would have been lost to me
had my secret become known. And so, on that night after the fight on the sands between our students, I slipped down over the King’s Meadows here to the New Town, and through the untended gate to your college. All I had in mind was to find the theses, to discover whether they were those that would give me away, and, if they were, to destroy them if I could, before anyone should see them. I had not expected to find Robert still at work there in the library, and as I was trying to compose my features, to think of my story, I saw from his face that he knew it all already.’

‘And so you killed him.’

‘No,’ he shook his head, somehow desperate that I should understand. ‘I pleaded with him, begged that he would not make my secret known, but he was determined that he should seek guidance from your principal. I knew it was not a thing Dr Dun would keep from the Chancellor, and that all the life I had would be over for me, but Robert would not listen. He gathered up his bag and made for the library door. I tried to hold on to him, but he shook me off and got past me. I made to go after him but stumbled on that box there’ – he gestured here to the medical instruments protruding from beneath Robert’s desk, and I knew what had happened next. ‘By the time I had righted myself I had the knife, the scalpel, in my hand. When I caught hold of Robert a second time and he refused me again …’

‘You plunged the knife into his throat and left him there to die.’

‘I could scarcely believe what I had done. I returned by
the backways to my own college and as darkness finally fell I had almost persuaded myself that I had not done the thing at all. The first few moments of waking in the morning were the last peace I have known; for that brief time I believed I had been the victim of a nightmare while I slept. And then I saw the blood on my boots, Robert’s blood, and I knew what I had done.’

I did not know what I felt as I looked upon the man who had murdered my friend and sought to take my wife from me. It was not hatred, but a sickness somewhere in my stomach, and a simmering anger.

‘Did you really believe you would never be found out?’

‘Sometimes. As I spoke with you and others about Robert’s death it did truly seem to me as if I was talking about something I myself had no more knowledge of than you did, as if it had been another who had perpetrated that deed. And then the behaviour of Matthew Jack and the discovery of the fraternity in which John Innes and others had been involved, the dabbling in the business of the masons – it seemed that each day, each new revelation obscured the truth a little more, and set me further and further along the path of safety.’

‘But then came Bernard Cummins,’ I said. ‘Bernard recognised you in town, did he not?’

He put the theses down on a desk in front of him. ‘It was the one thing about my days at Franeker I had forgotten – the young weaver from Aberdeen. We had spent a pleasant evening together in an inn in Leiden and then I
had gone my way and he his; I had never thought to see him again. And then, one day, as I was down in town on an errand, about to fetch some Greek grammars from Melville’s the bookseller, I saw Bernard Cummins come out of the shop. It took me some time to place him, and by the time I had, it was too late, for he had seen me also. With him there was no hesitation: he knew me straight away. He strode up to me, his hand extended, and greeted me by my name, my own, true name. I could think of no answer but that I was not who he thought me to be, that I did not know him. He insisted upon our having met, and that he was sure I had told him my name was Nicholas Black. I insisted I had not done so, that I had never seen him before in my life, and went hastily on my way back up to the Old Town.’

He swallowed. ‘It was that very day that I received a message from Sarah, urgently wishing to see me. Fool that I was, I thought she had discovered my secret somehow, and wanted to warn me. But when I met her at the Snow Kirk all her conversation was of you, and of the dangers she feared you had placed yourself in by meddling with the business of the masons.’ He raised an eyebrow at me. ‘You should not concern yourself in their affairs – their secrets are not yours to know.’

‘I have no interest in their secrets,’ I said. ‘Go on.’

‘I comforted her and reassured her as well as I could, and sent her home to you, although all I wanted was to beg her to leave this place with me, and go far from it and start,
ourselves, again. Had it not been for your children, I would have done so, and I believe she would have come with me, but for them.’

‘You are wrong, Carmichael,’ I said. ‘My wife loves me and will never leave me for any other man.’

He shrugged. ‘It is your right to believe that. But on that day, for a moment, I felt she was mine.’ He waited. ‘But then she was gone. I had promised to warn you off the masons, but she had also left me knowing all about their lodge, and from my childhood memories of what my father had told me, I knew I would find Hiram’s grave not far from the door. That night I went back down into town. I went into the streets where the weavers and dyers and their like live; keeping my hat down low and my collar up, I looked in the alehouses and taverns where I thought they might be found. Eventually I saw him – Bernard Cummins. I waited; when he left the alehouse I followed after him and watched him to his door. All that night I did not sleep, for I knew that he might at any time expose me. Had it not been for the death of Robert, I could have passed the name of Nicholas Black off as a youthful student prank, indulged in to while away an hour or so in a Leiden inn, but I knew it was too late for that. And so the next evening I went down into town again, as soon as my classes were over. I waited for Bernard Cummins to return to his lodgings and approached him in the street. I apologised for my strange behaviour of the previous day, excusing it by saying I had mistaken him for a passing acquaintance from the past
who had more than once importuned me for money. I invited him to come and take his dinner with me, and talk over old times.’

‘You walked openly with him to the King’s College?’ I could scarcely believe the pair had not been seen.

Carmichael shook his head. ‘No, I could not do that. But there are enough narrow lanes and dark vennels, even at this time of year, between his lodging in Futty Wynd and the Middletons’ house, that I could manage it without attracting undue notice.’

‘You told him the Middletons’ house was yours?’

‘I told him I rented rooms in the lodging in their back-land, but that my landlady was a harridan who would allow of no company, and so we slunk silently down by the shadow of the wall to the lodge. I take some comfort in the knowledge that he never knew he was to die; I had cut his throat from behind within a moment of us rounding the corner to the lodge, and he was in Hiram’s grave not two minutes later. I was sorry for it, because I remembered our evening at the Fir-Cone in Leiden then, and it had been one of good cheer.’

And now between us there was silence; he stood before me, the murderer of two men, the usurper of the name and inheritance of another, the man who might well have taken my wife from me. A good man; a decent man, as any who could get me to listen had told me. But all that was gone. I remembered what he had done to Rachel Middleton in his search for the book he now held in his hand. I did
not know if I was looking at Nicholas Black or at Andrew Carmichael, and I did not know what the man leaning against the window across the room from me would do. I glanced down at the box of medical instruments. His eyes followed mine.

‘I have no weapon. And despite all, I have not the taste for blood.’

‘What will you do?’ I said. ‘Will you come back with me, to the magistrate? Will you give yourself up?’

He shook his head. ‘I have lived two men’s lives. It is my choice how I should end them, how I should prepare myself to meet damnation.’

‘You cannot know—’ I began.

‘Oh, I know. One of the elect would not do as I have done. I am destined for the flames, and it is time that I made myself ready.’

Only then did I notice that he had pulled an unlit candle from a nearby sconce on the wall. He took flint from his pouch, struck it and brought the flame to life.

‘We have no need of light, Andrew,’ I said carefully. ‘The sun is still high in the sky.’

‘And I have no mind to see it set.’ He laid the flickering candle on the ledge beside him, picked up the book of theses and held it open towards the flame.

‘Destroying the book will not destroy the truth, you know,’ I said.

‘Perhaps not, but it will be a long time before another volume such as this finds its way to the Marischal College
library, and by the time it has, I and all who knew me will be long gone.’

‘I will have to tell them, you know, Andrew.’

‘No, you will not.’

‘Andrew …’

‘Do not be frightened, Alexander: no doubt your journey through the flames will be one of earthly torment only, and not the thing of eternity that awaits me.’

I threw back my chair and lunged at the burning book in his hands, but he was too quick for me, and had the flame at the edge of a window drape before I could reach him. The heat of the summer sun had left the thing as dry as tinder, and the whole was engulfed in a moment. I watched in horror as Carmichael swept books from their shelves and set alight as many as he could. The keys to the library door were on the window ledge where he had set them after he had first come in. I tried to reach them but a second drape caught light and barred my path.

‘Andrew, for the love of God, the keys!’ I shouted, as the smoke from the flames began to obscure him from my view.

‘I am sorry,’ he shouted, coughing, ‘her life will be better without you.’ His voice failed and he stumbled into the glass cabinet to his right and sent it crashing to the ground, knocking over another as it did so. I tried to clamber over the shattered fragments, but already the books that had been flung from its doors were taken up in the conflagration and formed between me and the door a barrier of fire.
I tried to shout again, above the noise of splintering glass and roaring flame, but the smoke that stung my eyes scorched my throat and filled my lungs. I could scarcely see, still less speak, and the last thing I did see before the black fumes overtook me entirely was the sight of Andrew Carmichael, or Nicholas Black as I now knew him to be, standing against the window of the Marischal College library, utterly aflame. As I passed into the nothingness he was beckoning me to, I thought the smoke had already begun to warp my mind, for I believed I heard a familiar voice call my name and an unholy cursing as William Cargill crashed through the library door.

Epilogue

The air was the cleanest I had ever breathed. I could feel it course slowly through my body, purifying as it went, reaching to where the very furthest tentacles of smoke had reached and making all clean again.

‘There are those who believe fire to be the most potent of all the elements, the greatest agent of change, but I have long held it inferior to air.’

‘You are better versed in these matters than I, James, and I will not argue with you.’

‘That indeed will be a pleasant alteration between us.’

I allowed him his small note of triumph, for although he had made little enough of it, I knew, had I paid greater attention to him, confided more in him, I would not have been in need of the cleansing mountain air we now breathed.

‘The map over your mantel-shelf will serve as a reminder to me, should I need it, of your greater wisdom, Doctor; I will take care not to dismiss your concerns again.’

‘What you call my greater wisdom is nothing more than
an inclination to pay attention to people, Alexander, to listen. You paid enough attention to Andrew Carmichael – or Nicholas Black, as we must now call him – but it was all of the wrong sort. You looked at him, and try as you might, all you could see was the man whose aim was to take your wife from you. You listened to him, but you had no interest in the half of what he said. Whatever man you thought you looked upon was the creature of your own fears, and those had little to do with Nicholas Black. Had you listened to what he
said
that night at William Cargill’s dinner-table, instead of worrying that he sat too close to Sarah, that burn on your leg might never have been.’

‘It was not so much that, by then,’ I said. ‘The truth is I think I had begun to like him myself. To see him come into his own in company, revel in telling a tale, was something new to me and I believed I was seeing the man he had hidden from me because I had never given him the chance to reveal him to me until then.’

‘And you were probably right. His tale of his eventful night on the island of Texel was indeed amusing, and would have given me no pause for thought other than as something I could later relate myself for the entertainment of others, had he not claimed earlier in the evening for the whole company to hear, that he had never been as far north as Gouda. Now, if there be any short-comings in that map I bought from Melville – and I am minded to invite Straloch to Banff to take a look at it – on one thing it is clear: the island of Texel is well to the north of Gouda.’

‘If you had not bought that map …’ I said.

The doctor swatted away a fly and shook his head. ‘It was not just the map. It was something else he said that I thought little further on until you started rambling about Nicholas Black and Franeker before you took off for the library from Paul Ogston’s graduation dinner.’

‘I had not realised that I had not mentioned him to you,’ I said.

‘You had mentioned the name, but told me nothing else about him.’ The doctor raised a wry eyebrow in my direction. ‘We have of late had other topics of conversation, if you recall. But after you rushed off from the table that day, I did ask William about Nicholas Black, as you had told me to, and he explained to me about the weaver’s letter to his sister and the Scots student of the name studying at Franeker. Well, a month or so ago, it was my misfortune while dining with Lindsay at Edzell to be seated at dinner next to the most boastful fellow, a physician from Angus. No doubt her ladyship thought she was doing me a good turn, in seating me next to one of my own profession with whom I might converse on acquaintances and places in common.’