Crucible (35 page)

‘And this was not the case?’

The doctor snorted. ‘It might have been, had I been able to get a word in edgeways, but the fellow commandeered the whole conversation to himself. There was hardly an open eye around the table by the time the first three courses had been dealt with, I’ll tell you.’ I had to suppress a smile at the image of my old friend thwarted of his own expected
audience. ‘Anyhow, while I was myself still awake and listening to him, he was discoursing on what he imagined to be his linguistic expertise, and shared with the company a shibboleth by which he claimed it was possible to tell a true Frisian from an impostor.’ Jaffray looked at me meaningfully. ‘It concerned the drinking of tea.’

‘Of tea?’ And then I remembered, the curious phrase Carmichael had uttered when the subject of that drink had come up at William Cargill’s table. ‘Butter, bread, tea, spice …’ I began, failing badly.

But Jaffray had it exact. ‘“
Buyter en Brae en t’zijs goe Huwsmanne spijs
.” You see? You do not listen. Franeker is at the heart of the West Frisian lands. When I heard that the Nicholas Black whom you sought had been a student there, Andrew Carmichael came immediately to mind, and when William and I cast around the table in Bella Watson’s yard and saw that he, too, had slipped away we knew we had to find you. Your mumbling to me about the Franeker theses directed us, thank God, to the library.’

And there they had found smoke billowing from the shattered windows and the door locked. William’s lawyerly occupation had deprived him of little of his strength, and the doctor’s determination had taken twenty years from him. Between them, they had managed to batter down the door. In the brief moments they had before the smoke threatened to overcome them, too, they had found my body, all consciousness and almost all life gone from it, and dragged me to the air. The vehemence of the inferno had forced
them back, although William had tried, once, to advance into the flames towards the blazing figure he saw stumble further into the fire.

‘He did not want it,’ they had told me when finally I had come round and been able to make some sound issue from my scorched throat. ‘Andrew Carmichael, Nicholas Black, whatever you will call him, he did not want to be saved. He chose his death, the flames rather than the hangman’s rope.’

Jaffray let me indulge my thoughts a few minutes then brought a small flask from the bundle he carried with him. ‘Here, swallow some of this. It will do you more good than all that sage water Sarah has been pouring down your throat.’

‘She said it would heal the scorching, and indeed, I scarcely feel it now.’

‘No doubt, but it is a foul enough thing for a man to stomach.’ He unstoppered the flask. ‘Drink down some of that instead and then I will take you to the men who make it, the true alchemists who turn water into gold.’

I did as I was bid, and followed my old friend as he led me onwards on the mountain path, through the clean air that he promised would restore my body and strengthen my soul. I promised myself with every step that I would return a different man from him who had left Aberdeen in the doctor’s care; that I would prove Andrew Carmichael wrong, that there would never come a day in my wife’s life when anyone could say she would have been better off without me.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Aberdeen University Special Libraries and Archives and Aberdeen City Archives for allowing me to consult materials in their care. I would like to thank Craig Russell and Dr Jamie Reid Baxter for their advice on matters Frisian, and most particularly to thank Professor Goffe Jensma of the Department of Frisian Language and Culture, University of Groningen, for his help with my queries on the Frisian language in the seventeenth century.

Anyone wishing to read further into the early history of Freemasonry in Scotland should consult Professor David Stevenson’s
The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland’s Century, 1590-1710
(CUP, 1988). The classic account of the Rosicrucian phenomenon is Frances Yates’
The Rosicrucian Enlightenment
(Routledge, 1986). The painted ceilings of Crathes Castle can still be admired in that property, now run by the National Trust for Scotland, their symbolism explained in Michael Bath’s
Renaissance Decorative Painting
in
Scotland
(NMS, 2003).

Keep reading for a taster from S.G. MacLean's next novel,

The Devil's Recruit

Prologue

Aberdeen, early November, 1635

The ship lay behind him, a silent hulk of black against the greying sky. Darkness would fall and he would go out amongst the streets, down the alleyways, in to the inns and the alehouses and find those who had something to run from. They would listen, eyes brightening, as others offered them a dream of something else, tales of something better, the adventure of being a man. They would marvel at the possibility of wealth, titles, land in places they had never seen. Keeping to his shadows, quietly, he could promise them a nightmare beyond their imagining: brutality, starvation, disease, the corrosion of anything good they might once have been, the certainty of death. But they would not listen to him – they did not look at him. Often, they did not even see him.

The recruiting sergeant rarely left the ship unless it be under cover of darkness, and it wanted a little time yet for that, and yet he was drawn, in spite of all he knew to be wise, away from the hidden places of the quayside and up the well-remembered lanes and vennels behind Ship Row and in to the heart of the town.

The college roofs rose up ahead of him, behind the houses that fronted the Broadgate. The scholars that had their lodgings in the town were hastening to them, little sign of being tempted astray to an inn or alehouse and away from their hearth and their landlady’s table – however mean those might be. Gowns were pulled tight, caps held to heads and oaths against the elements uttered. Few remarked upon him. One or two children, late already for their supper, darted across the street and down narrow pends and closes, laughing in strange relief as they disappeared from sight. Women on their own quickened their step. Those in twos or threes cast him swift glances and murmured in low voices to their companions as they hurried on. He stopped in the shadow of a forestair jutting out in to the street. ‘Changed days,’ he thought, ‘that I should stand here unnoticed.’ But the observation was a reassurance to one who sought obscurity. Gradually, the bustle at the college gates grew to nothing, and the doleful ringing of the bell above St Nicholas Kirk told the porter that it was time they were closed against the darkness that had now fallen. Three nights he had waited thus; three nights he had been disappointed. He was on the point of giving the thing up as lost, a lesson from fate, a message from the God with whom he had so long ago parted company, when the billowing form of a solitary man in the gown of a regent of the Marischal College emerged on to the street. The figure called something to someone behind him, and the gates were hastily drawn to against the growing turbulence of the night.

The recruiting sergeant held his breath, scared almost to move. The voice, it was the voice, he knew it, and by a trick of the years it called to something in him that he had thought long dead. At this distance he could discern no grey in the hair, no line on the brow, and as the other crossed the Broadgate and disappeared down the side of the Guest Row, he knew it was the very walk. Even after all these years, there could be no doubt: it was Alexander Seaton.

The stranger pulled his cloak tighter round him and turned back in the direction of the quayside and the ship. It was growing colder, and it had been enough. There was time yet, and he had other business to attend to tonight.

ONE
Downies' Inn

The place was as full as I had seen it in a long while, and worse lit than was its wont, the poor light from cheap tallow candles doing more to mask the dirt ingrained in every bench, every corner, than the landlady’s cleaning rag had ever done. A sudden, noxious warmth hit me, of steam rising from damp clothing mingled with the usual odours of long-spilt ale and burnt mutton. I shouldered my way through a knot of packmen and chandlers to the hatch from which Jessie Downie dispensed only bad ale or sour wine. Just before I reached it, there was a small commotion to my left as four of Peter Williamson’s scholars bolted from a bench in the corner and out of the back door of the inn.

Jessie avoided my eye as she passed a jug of beer out through the hatch. ‘There are none of yours in here tonight, Mr Seaton.

‘Are there not,’ said Peter, having spotted a highland boy from my senior class, Seorais Mackay. ‘You’ve been told before you’re not to serve them.’ He jerked a thumb in the direction of the bench where Jessie’s daughter was giggling and making only half-hearted resistance to Mackay’s advances. He was very drunk. Of his habitual and more generally sober companion, Hugh Gunn, there was no sign.

‘Ach, you, Peter Williamson. You were never out of this place yourself not so many years past. It did you no harm.’

‘I would hardly say that. But I was never here when the recruiting ships were at anchor in the harbour. Have they been in here tonight?’

She pursed her mouth and nodded very briefly towards a darkened neuk in the shadow of the stairs. ‘Over there. And watch yourselves with that fellow; he’s a charmer, but he has a look about him I do not like.’

‘His money’s good, though, eh Jessie?’

‘A damned sight better than yours,’ she muttered, before shouting at her daughter to see to her work or find it out on the street instead.

I had almost reached Seorais Mackay, slumped now on his bench, when he finally noticed me. I saw a look spread over his face that I had seen before and did not bode well for our encounter. He roused himself, holding his beaker up in the air ‘The good Irishman! Bring us whisky, Jessie, that Mr Seaton and I might toast our ancestors together!’

‘You’ll have no more to drink tonight, Seorais.’

‘Ach, Mr Seaton, come now, there are some stories I would tell you, and I’ve heard it’s not so long ago you liked a dram yourself.’

Peter Williamson was there before me. ‘On your feet, Mackay. You’ll be in front of the principal tomorrow morning and see what stories he has for you.’

Seorais Mackay stood up, stumbling slightly and righting himself on the window ledge as he did so. ‘Do you speak to the heir of Mackay like that, Williamson? You who owe your allegiance to my father?’

It was not the first time that Seorais in his drink had thrown his father’s chieftainship over the Williamsons in Peter’s face; the dark-eyed charm of the Highlander was lost on my young colleague, and I thought I would

have to hold him back as his fists clenched and his jaw twitched in real anger.

‘I’ve never set foot in your midge-ridden boglands, Mackay, and I owe your father nothing. Now find Hugh Gunn and get back to the college before I have you thrown another night in the tollbooth.’

The student surveyed Peter Williamson with contempt, before slumping against the wall. ‘I believe you’ll find Uisdean over there,’ he said, using Hugh’s Gaelic name.

I could see nothing at first, through the fug of steam and tobacco, made worse by the sooty smoke from the poorly-swept chimney. ‘It is a wonder this place has not gone up in flames,’ I muttered as we pushed through protesting bodies in the direction Seorais Mackay had indicated. The dregs of the town were here. I noticed as we passed that the bench vacated by Peter’s students had been taken by a large, geniallooking man and his smaller, less friendly-seeming companion. I caught some words I thought to be French between them. If I had known the tongue better I would have told them of places in the town where a stranger might find better entertainment than this.

And then I saw Hugh Gunn. He was in earnest

conversation with someone out of my vision across the table, and was sitting with his back to us. He had a quill pen in his hand and appeared to be preparing to sign the paper in front of him. The man opposite him leaned towards him a little, as if in encouragement, and in doing so moved into the light. I caught his features just a moment before he registered mine. He was slim, and appeared to be of good height. His hair reached below his shoulders in long ebony rings that glinted when caught in the candlelight. He wore no beard or moustache, and a fine silver scar travelled across his lip to the edge of his left cheek. When his grey eyes met mine I instantly understood Jessie Cameron’s apprehension. They took only a moment to form themselves in to a smile and he rose and offered me a gauntleted hand.

‘Mr Alexander Seaton, if I am not mistaken. I had hoped we might meet before now.’

I did not take his hand. ‘You have the advantage of me.’

Letting his hand drop he inclined his head very slightly, his eyes still set on me.

‘Lieutenant William Ormiston of the Scots Brigade in the Service of Her Royal Majesty, Queen Christina of Sweden.’

‘Recruiting for the wars,’ I said coldly.

He raised an eyebrow. ‘I hold a licence from the Privy Council, sanctioned by the king himself. I do nothing illegal here.’