The Devil's Recruit

• Title Page
  
• Copyright Page
  
• Dedication
  
• Introductory Note
  
• Prologue
  
• 1 Downie’s Inn
  
• 2 Tales of the Missing
  
• 3 The Drummer Boy
  
• 4 At Baillie Lumsden’s House
  
• 5 Rumours at the Session
  
• 6 Lord Reay
  
• 7 The Recruiting Sergeant
  
• 8 The Devil’s Recruit
  
• 9 The Schoolmistress Trials
  
• 10 Night Visitor
  
• 11 Encounters
  
• 12 Shipboard
  
• 13 Flights of Fancy
  
• 14 A Killing Frost
  
• 15 ‘Will I Tell You of Your Brother?’
  
• 16 Things Dormant
  
• 17 Host
  
• 18 Nimmo
  
• 19 St Ninian’s Chapel
  
• 20 Delgatie
  
• 21 Katharine
  
• 22 Between Darkness and Dawn
  
• 23 Tempest
  
• 24 ‘Madness, and Blindness, and Astonishment of Heart’
  
• 25 The Spoil of War
  
• Epilogue
  
• Endnote
  
• Footnote
  

First published in Great Britain in 2013 by

Quercus
55 Baker Street
7th Floor, South Block
London W1U 8EW

Copyright © 2013 by S. G. MacLean

The moral right of S. G. MacLean to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

A CIP catalogue reference for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 84916 317 0 (HB)
ISBN 978 1 84916 318 7 (TPB)
ISBN 978 1 84916 968 4 (EBOOK)

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

You can find this and many other great books at:
www.quercusbooks.co.uk

Also by S.G. MacLean

The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

A Game of Sorrows

Crucible
(aka
Crucible of Secrets
)

To Patrick

The Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) was sparked by the acceptance of the Bohemian crown by Frederick V, the Calvinist Elector Palatine, in the face of counter-claims by the Catholic Habsburgs. The war devastated the mainly German lands of the Holy Roman Empire throughout which it was fought, and embroiled virtually all other European nations in a brutal and increasingly complex territorial and religious struggle.

The armies of both sides in this struggle depended to varying degrees on the recruitment of foreign troops. While Scots fought on both sides, they joined the anti-Habsburg forces in quite astonishing numbers. It can be estimated, for instance, that of 62,700 men raised in the British Isles by foreign powers between 1618 and 1648 to fight the Habsburg armies, 52,400 were Scots.
^*

The reasons they followed the recruiters were many: they
went in defence of Frederick’s Stuart queen, Elizabeth, daughter of James VI, or in defence of their Calvinist faith; they went because of lack of opportunity for social or economic progress at home, they went because they were running from something. They went, at times, because they were given no choice.

Some returned to Scotland to answer the call of the Covenanting Wars. Some never returned at all.

Aberdeen, 8 October, 1635

The young woman’s hair lay in perfect waves on her bare shoulders. A carefully chosen pearl, a gift from her mother, adorned her neck. She wore her best dress, although one not well suited to the weather, but that was of little relevance, and she really did not feel the cold. One or two townsfolk might have seen her hurry along Schoolhill to the Blackfriars’ gate by which he had told her to enter the garden, but none had seemed really to notice her. There was plenty else afoot in the town to take their interest tonight. She knew the way to the meeting place very well, although she had been puzzled as to why he had chosen it. There was little chance of course, particularly at that hour, that they would be disturbed: indeed, he must have chosen it for that very purpose for they were not disturbed, and that was a pity because, by the time – many hours later – that another came along the path to the frozen pond, it was too late to cut her down from where she hung, ice frosting her lashes and her dead lips already blue.

Aberdeen, one week earlier

The ship lay behind him, a silent hulk of black against the greying sky. Darkness would fall and he would go out into the streets, down the alleyways, enter the inns and the alehouses and find those who had something to run from. They would listen, eyes brightening, as others offered them tales of something different, a dream 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.
He
, on the other hand, 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.

Unlike the lieutenant, his senior officer, the recruiting sergeant rarely left the ship unless it were 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 into the heart of the town.

The college roofs rose up ahead of him, behind the houses that fronted the Broadgate. The scholars who had their lodgings in the town were hastening home, showing little sign of being tempted astray to an inn or alehouse and away from their hearth and their landlady’s table – however mean
it 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 into 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 faded 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 from 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.

Aberdeen, 1 October 1635

Downie’s Inn 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 Seoras MacKay, a Highland boy from my senior class. ‘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 a 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,’ Jessie responded.

‘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 Seoras 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 that 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, Seoras.’

‘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.’

Seoras 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 Seoras 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.