The Devil's Recruit (16 page)

I had already begun to walk away. ‘I have no interest in your trysting, but I would urge you to be careful how you deal with your good name.’

In my hurry to get away from her, I found within a few minutes that I had taken the wrong path, and was walking through ever boggier ground and denser thicket until I was thoroughly lost. At every turn I was faced with overgrown hawthorn or rose run wild. There was nothing to do but retrace my steps until I found the place where I had made the wrong turn. After much frustration, I came, at last, to a small clearing where two paths crossed. By one I could see my way to the centre of the garden, where Jamesone planned to erect his pavilion high up at the end of an avenue of fruit trees leading to the amphitheatre; by the other, narrower, more overhung with the branches of old and stubborn shrubs, I could see back to the pond. The sky had darkened still further, ponderous with snow, and the place looked bleaker than even I had rendered it. Isabella Irvine was still on the bench where I had left her, but she was no longer alone. A man sat by her, his back turned partly towards me and his head close to hers. They were deep in conversation, and kept their voices low. I could not have told what they said anyway, for the handsome, well-built
man who had his hands over hers was not Lieutenant Ormiston, but Guillaume Charpentier, and they spoke in French.

As quietly as I could, I left them to their conference. I wandered further into the garden. The amphitheatre, overhung at each edge of the semi-circle by two huge horse-chestnuts, seemed still emptier and more silent than it had done the last time I had been here. A dead place. It did not seem possible that people had gathered here once to laugh and wonder and be entertained, or that they ever would again.

I could hear no sounds of activity now from the thickets to my left where Jamesone’s maze was planned and I had no wish to come upon St Clair. The man’s face seemed locked in a sneer, as if he hated every soul he had ever met, and he discomfited me. I was unsure which way to turn. It seemed that even here there was no peace or solitude in which to seek to comprehend what Archie had told me last night: I had another son and he was a refugee with his mother in Spain, dependent on the charity of strangers. My hands and feet were cold almost beyond endurance: the answer to these new troubles would not be found here, or in a day, or indeed on my own. I would seek counsel from God, but I knew I also had to talk of it again with Archie. For now, my body was weary, and I turned for home.

I went up the pathway of the planned orchard, and came out eventually at the clearing George had marked out for
his pavilion, his summerhouse. My quickest route out of the garden would be through a narrow gate in the eastern wall that gave onto a vennel that came out on the Schoolhill. I quickened my pace in that direction, but was brought up short by the sight of the old, recently restored workshop ahead of me. Through the yellow light of its one window, I could see my artist friend there, poring over a large book and talking animatedly to Christiane Rolland. Standing a little apart from them, looking intently where Jamesone pointed on the page, was Jean St Clair. Just at the wrong moment George lifted his head to point to an area of the garden and I was seen. There would be no hurrying on; George gestured largely with his arm, and there was nothing for it but to go into the little stone hut and join them.

A small hearth at one end and the stout, lime-washed walls made the place a haven of warmth in the bleak wilderness surrounding it. It smelled of old iron, musty sacking and fresh earth. Wooden planking that looked to be of recent construction provided deep shelving up one of the walls, the shelves ranged with wooden boxes, many labelled. Heaps of bulbs of differing size and shape had been sorted into separate sections, and a series of smaller, labelled drawers suggested that what gleaning of seeds could take place at this late time of year had already been done.

‘Alexander! You are here more often than I am myself! You are half-frozen, man. Come in to the warmth and tell me what it is that you seek so earnestly in my garden.’

I nodded to Christiane, who looked no better today than she had done the previous afternoon in Baillie Lumsden’s house, and ignored St Clair, which was as he seemed to prefer.

‘Only a place for reflection, George,’ I said, my breath rising in the air in front of me.

‘And in a few months, my friend, you will have it. Look here.’

He beckoned me over to where Christiane Rolland, her fingers red with the cold, was bent over a sheet of foolscap, onto which she was copying notes by the light of a small lamp by her elbow. ‘Christiane has been labelling the areas for planting, according to Guillaume and Jean’s ideas, naming the flowers as you and I would understand them.’

I leaned over, the closer to see the plan. The notes from which she copied and translated were in a different hand which I knew not to be her own. They were in a very precise italic, the Latin perfect, some of the names of the plants familiar to me from notes belonging to William Cargill’s botanist uncle that I had examined years ago. I glanced at St Clair, who was now carefully cleaning some tools at the far end of the workbench, and back to the notes.

‘These are the work of the gardeners?’

‘Of Guillaume, not Jean – I do not think the fellow can read or write, but he knows his business all the same.’

‘Guillaume Charpentier has been very well schooled though, it would seem.’

‘Yes,’ said George, ‘and it makes our job much the easier, does it not, Christiane?’

‘I do not see how we could accomplish it without him,’ she said quietly, without raising her head.

I looked to George, who pulled a face that told me he had not the slightest idea as to what troubled Christiane. Clearly she had not confided her discomfort regarding Seoras MacKay to him.

I sought to cheer her a little, but wished a few moments later that I hadn’t. I pointed to an area of the planting scheme she had already filled in. ‘That will be a very pleasant meadow, come summertime.’

He nodded. ‘It is somewhere where the children might play, and run and laugh and be happy. “Let all things smile and seem to welcome the arrival of your guests.” An injunction from Alberti,’ he said, pointing to the tome at his elbow. ‘I am going to paint it over the
loggia
to my pavilion. I hope we shall have many summers there, we friends, and watch our children grow.’

His words pained me, and he could not know why. ‘It is difficult to believe that the place I have just walked through, so desolate as it is now, so absent of life, could ever become a place so vibrant.’

He put an arm on my shoulder. ‘You spend too long in your classroom with your musty books. The world will be a different place when you learn to distinguish what is merely dormant from what is dead.’

Christiane’s hand stopped moving over the paper and I
regretted that I had ever come in here, for my visit had done neither her nor me any good. St Clair had gone out to lock his tools away in the small storehouse next to the workshop and I was about to take my leave when a servant from Jamesone’s house came running through the door. ‘The Highlanders are in the house,’ the man said, when he could catch his breath, ‘and when they have finished searching they are to make for here. The constable said to fetch you.’

‘You did right, Patrick. Alexander, will you see Christiane here safe home?’

‘Of course,’ I said.

The girl had already covered her inkpot and begun to set aside her work. ‘But what of Guillaume? If they come upon him in the garden … should I not go and find him? If the Highlanders come upon him, they will neither understand the other.’

‘Guillaume is a hearty chap,’ George reassured her, ‘and could break a Highlander in half as easily as he breaks a rowan branch. Besides, it will not come to that. The fellow has a smile that speaks for him in many languages, as I am inclined to suspect you have noticed …’

Christiane flushed under his kindly gaze. My heart sank for her a little at the thought of where he was now, and with whom, for it had become plain to me yesterday that she considered Isabella her friend. I would not have had her find them together.

‘Perhaps we could send St Clair to let him know.’

George was also better pleased with this plan. ‘Will you tell him, Christiane, that some soldiers are coming to search the garden for the missing students, and it would be better if he and Guillaume were in here? Do not worry, I will explain to Lord Reay’s men who they are – no harm will come to them.’

I suspected Christiane had as little concern for the welfare of the taciturn St Clair as I had, but she acquiesced and I went with her, that she might explain to the scrawny Frenchman what was required of him, but when we got outside, he was nowhere to be seen. I was only able to dissuade Christiane from her intention to wander the garden herself in search of Guillaume by pleading my need to get back soon to my own home to be with my wife and children.

Her face was desolate as we left the garden, and I thought again of the legend George planned to have inscribed over the gates: Let all things smile and seem to welcome the arrival of your guests. As I pulled the rotting gate to on the dark and forbidding place he sought to make a sanctuary, I prayed that the winter might be a short one.

Sarah had dosed me with compounds and decoctions from the apothecary from the moment I had arrived home, before sending me to bed, where she had set a fire in the rarely used hearth. Despite the agitation of my mind, I had slept solidly for six hours and not even noticed her get into bed beside me at the end of the day. Sleep came more fitfully in the remaining hours of the night, as my thoughts ranged, in no good order, over everything from fantastic schemes for finding the son I had never met to sober realisation that he was better off where he was, for there was one thing I did understand: if he was with his mother, he could not be with me.

All the next day it was the same. Sarah had sent word to the principal that I was too ill to accompany my scholars to the Sabbath preaching in the kirk. I was desperate to talk again with Archie, but I knew there was no way of getting a message out to the ship without attracting notice and that he could not risk a visit to my home in daylight, or even in the darkness, on the Sabbath. Come Monday
morning, my body, if not my mind, was greatly rested and stronger.

After our early lessons, I did not accompany my class to the common hall for breakfast but went instead up the stairway to the regents’ chambers. I had not seen Hugh Gunn since the day of Lord Reay’s arrival and the boy’s condition had been weighing on my mind. The guards Seoras’s father had set on the door of Hugh’s chamber subjected me to less scrutiny than I had expected, and I was admitted to the room with little difficulty.

The physician, Ossian, looked up from the small table at which he sat writing. He smiled over to the figure sitting up on the bed. ‘You have a visitor, Uisdean.’

Hugh was properly dressed, and although still very pale and thin, with darkened circles beneath his eyes, it was evident that his fever was gone and he was in a much better condition than when last I had seen him.

‘It’s good to see you so much recovered, Hugh,’ I said.

There was no response, just an uneasy awareness from the young man that I was talking to him. I glanced to the physician for explanation.

‘He will not understand you. He still hasn’t regained his facility for the Scots tongue. It’s as if something will not allow him to speak, not permit him to understand.’

I had not noticed the figure sitting in a chair in the corner behind the door. Too large a figure for this small room; too great a figure for this company.

‘Your Lordship, please excuse me. I just wanted to see how Hugh was. I will not disturb you.’

Lord Reay stood up. ‘You do not. Uisdean has spoken of you kindly – he has had little enough to say of others in this town. It may do him some good to see you, but you must talk to him in our tongue, which I see you speak like an Irishman.’

‘My mother was Irish. I learnt my Gaelic in Ulster. It is much out of use with me, but it passes.’

MacKay nodded. ‘It passes well enough.’

I turned to the doctor. ‘Is he well enough for me to speak to him?’

Ossian nodded. ‘The swelling of his tongue is almost gone, but he still has difficulty with some sounds, and you might have to listen closely. In the main though, what ails him is in his mind, and it will not be got out if he will not speak of it.’

Looking first to Lord Reay for permission, I took up the chair beside Hugh Gunn’s bed. I began with some pleasantries about his health and about life in the college, and gradually moved on to the matter that was exercising me.

‘Have you any knowledge yet of what happened that night after you left the inn? Any memory?’

He shook his head. ‘I remember nothing after we decided to get back to the college through the old town gardens. It was Seoras’s suggestion. Normally, I wouldn’t go near the place, but I was cold and angry and just wanted away to my bed as soon as I could get there. I wasn’t sure which
path to take, but Seoras seemed to know where he was going.’

‘He knew the gardens?’

What might have been a smile came onto Hugh’s face. ‘Oh, Seoras knew the gardens. He could not tell you one plant from another, but he knows that place like the back of his hand. He has …’ He glanced at Lord Reay and lowered his voice. ‘He has been there often enough.’

‘You need not scruple for my benefit, Uisdean,’ said Lord Reay. ‘I know my son’s shortcomings well enough, and I daresay Mr Seaton does also. And no doubt he will speak in your favour, if the time should come when you need it.’

The boy looked up and there was a new determination in his face, a light in his eye. ‘And I will need it, will I not? For I know they are saying in the town, and even here in the college that I have killed Seoras, and dumped his body somewhere.’

MacKay stood up. ‘Who has said that to you, boy?’

Hugh was defiant. ‘Is it not so, then?’

The chief’s fist clenched. ‘It is so, but you should not have been told.’ He looked to Ossian. ‘Was it that old crone from the town?’