The Devil's Recruit (2 page)

‘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 tolbooth.’

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’s a wonder this place has not gone up in flames,’ I muttered as we pushed through protesting bodies in the direction Seoras 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, genial-looking 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 into 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.’

‘The boys who signed up with you from the colleges of Edinburgh and St Andrews were not free to do so – they were matriculated students in those places. The parents of the students of Marischal College have placed them in our care. You can have no legitimate business here.’ I plucked the quill pen out of Hugh Gunn’s hand and scored a line through the contract in front of him.

‘Get back to the college, Hugh, and take Seoras MacKay with you – I doubt if he is fit to find his way anywhere by himself tonight. You will present yourselves to the principal in the morning, and if there is any repeat of this incident you’ll scarcely have time to pack your bag before he sends you back up to Strathnaver with nothing more than a flea in your ear and a report of your disgrace to take back to Seoras’s father.’

The boy stood to face me, sullen, his eyes level with my own. ‘Seoras’s father will have me in the wars soon enough anyway, cleaning his son’s boots and paying off his whores. I’ll sign with the lieutenant here and make my own way. You don’t need Latin to wield a pike or raise a musket.’ He bent to put his name to the spoilt paper, but to my surprise, Ormiston stayed his hand.

‘And yet, from the classical authors there is much to be learned about the commanding of armies and the leading
of men,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you should wait a year or two after all – the wars will still be there, I can assure you.’

The boy stared at him a moment in almost furious disbelief, then uttered an oath in Gaelic as he pushed past me. I was tempted to return the compliment. He strode across the room in impotent fury to take his friend roughly by the arm that was not occupied by the serving girl, whom Seoras had accosted again as she was setting bowls of a rancid-looking stew down before the two Frenchmen. ‘Come on, before you take a dose of the pox.’

‘Ach, Uisdean.’

Being appealed to by his Gaelic name had no effect on the more sober of the two Highlanders, and, taller and more strongly built, he had the other up on his feet with another determined haul. ‘Never mind “Uisdean”. Get up that road, and if you vomit this time I’ll leave you where you lie.’

As he was pulled out of the door, Seoras MacKay turned to throw one more jibe at Peter Williamson. ‘You see,
Mister
Williamson, the Gunns know their place. There is much you could learn from your scholars.’ Another threat from Hugh and he was hauled beyond the doorway and into the night.

Peter, now white with rage, said, ‘If I find Seoras MacKay in a place like this again I will sign him up for the Swede myself. There is little wrong with him that a bullet from a Spaniard’s musket would not put right.’

The soldiers at Ormiston’s back moved slightly towards us. This was not the place for that kind of talk. I put a hand on my young colleague’s arm.

‘That’s us finished for tonight, Peter. Get away to your own bed now and get some rest, and for the goodness’ sake, dry yourself off.’ I reached in my pouch and handed him a few pennies. ‘Here, give that to the porter and he’ll bring you something for your fire – I cannot spend another day listening to those squelching boots.’

Peter took a moment to regain his control, managing a ‘thank you’ below his breath. He nodded towards the recruiting officer and his men, and asked me, ‘Will you be all right?’

I looked at Ormiston as I spoke. ‘I doubt I have anything to fear from a law-abiding subject of the king,’ I said.

‘Nothing at all,’ said the lieutenant. ‘I can assure you.’

Peter was unconvinced. ‘Well, mind you don’t sign yourself up – I’m not taking that class of yours as well.’

After he had gone, Ormiston signalled to the two men who lurked about the table, clearly not officers, and they took themselves to the serving hatch where Jessie had tankards and a jug of ale waiting for them. They recommenced their trawl of the inn.

‘So this is your method?’ I said. ‘You get the men so drunk they don’t know what they’re putting their mark to until it’s too late?’

He motioned for me to sit down. ‘A drunk is of no use to me. I need men of discipline, not a soak who will dance after the last man to set a jug of beer in front of him.’

I laughed. ‘Then I have to tell you, your intelligence has failed you tonight. This is the lowest drinking hole in
Aberdeen. You will not find men here whose greatest wish is to defend their distressed brethren overseas against the Papist Habsburgs. There are no men here who dream of dying for the Queen of Bohemia.’ I declined the glass of wine he had pushed towards me. He shrugged and put it to the side.

‘I have those men a-plenty. Younger sons of younger sons, bred as gentlemen, bred to adventure, but scarcely a penny or a scrap of land to their name. They serve foreign kings for their standing and their dignity, and to make their name and their fortune. Their faith, their loyalty to the House of Stuart, have been bred into them since their first breath. Those men, and I am one of them, Mr Seaton, are the finest officers in all of Sweden’s armies.’

‘You will not find them in places like this.’

‘No, but I have come here for something else.’ He pointed to a bench to the left of us, where one of his men was in earnest and, it seemed, sympathetic conversation with a gloomy-looking cooper. ‘I need foot soldiers as well as officers. You see that cooper there? He has been twice before the kirk session over a promise to marry his master’s daughter. The girl is no great enticement, it would seem, and her father and the kirk are running out of humour with his delaying. But the session will allow him out of his promise if he will sign with me to fight the Papists.’

‘I see.’ I knew what he said to be true.

‘And you see that one there?’

‘The man who scratches at his arm?’

‘Scabs, left by manacles,’ said Ormiston. ‘He has been out of the tolbooth three days – a minor offence, but he has lost his employment and the roof over his head. What should he do? Throw himself, able-bodied as he is, upon the charity of the good burgesses of this town? You know how that would end. They will both be aboard my ship by the end of the week.’ He refilled his own glass. ‘I offer a life to those who would run from what they have, or who have nothing at all.’

‘Hugh Gunn is only seventeen years old; his life is hardly behind him.’

‘That is the student we both so offended?’

‘Yes.’

‘You are right, I had not expected to find one like him in here. He is in the other category, a younger son of a younger son, beholden to the good graces of his chieftain. That’s why I wanted him rather than his drink-sodden, whore-mongering friend. He will make a fine soldier, a good officer, one day.’

I suspected he would be proved right, if the boy could learn to master his temper better. ‘And yet you let him go.’

He sat back and smiled and I realised this was what he had been waiting for. ‘I did it as a favour to you, Mr Seaton.’

‘You don’t even know me.’

He watched me a long moment. ‘Do not be so certain about what I know.’ Some movement at the top of the stair seemed to catch his eye. I looked up but could see
nothing in the gloom. The lieutenant shifted slightly in his seat.

‘My past is old news in this burgh, lieutenant,’ I told him. ‘You’ll find there is little capital to be made of it now.’

‘Oh, I very much doubt that, Mr Seaton, but it is late already and I daresay you and I will meet again, and so further our acquaintance. For the meantime, I hope you will rest easy on the matter of Hugh Gunn – I will not be enticing him aboard my ship.’

If he expected my thanks, he was disappointed. I gave him no answer at all, and was glad to get out of the place whose foul air was filling up my throat. The Frenchmen, I noticed, had already abandoned their bowls of inedible stew, and left the place before me.

*

The inn was on the edges of town, beyond Blackfriars where it met the Woolmanhill. It was a fitting night-time haunt for vagrants, criminals, those who did not want to be seen or found. My shortest route home would take me past the back of the fleshers’ yard, and I knew that the gutters there would be overflowing after the torrents of recent days. I had no wish to bring the smell of the charnel house with me to where my family slept, so I elected to take a longer route, one that would bring me past the near end of the loch and up by the old public garden that backed on to George Jamesone’s house.

George had fulminated often against the dilapidation of the walls that allowed all sorts of the burgh’s displaced
humanity to live out their debauches there in the night within hearing, and sometimes sight, of the back windows of his own fine residence. The garden where once plays profane and godly, music and dancing, trysts of love and childhood games had had their moments was now abandoned to tangles of thorns, feral creatures, and those who could find their pleasures in no lawful place. It was not somewhere any God-fearing person would wish to find themselves alone under cover of darkness. A happy Eden once, turned by the fears and prohibition of our Calvinist kirk into a den of ungovernable vice and iniquity.

I had just passed the rusted gate that led from the overgrown gardens out on to the long vennel to Schoolhill when the sounds of a disturbance came to my ears. It was evidently coming from somewhere in the gardens – there were muffled shouts and cries, the sound of blows being exchanged. My first thought was of Hugh Gunn and Seoras MacKay – the place was a favoured short cut for scholars making their way back to the college in the hope of not being seen. I doubted that Peter Williamson, even in his haste to get to the warmth of his bed, would have taken the chance of cutting through here alone. Nevertheless, unsheathing my knife, I doubled back and entered the garden.

I could have wished for a light for the moon was clouded over, and I had to trust to my senses and my memory. Rather than go right out to the middle of the gardens, I judged it safer to keep to the walls surrounding it until I
came upon the old middle path that led to what had once been a stage. Formerly used by mummers and actors in the Mystery plays, the amphitheatre was now the favoured haunt of the sturdy beggars and masterless men who roamed this place by night. I strained to listen for noises that would give me better direction, but the sounds of the scuffle were becoming less frequent, and after two long, low cries they ceased completely. I should have turned for home then, but I was already regretting allowing Hugh to take Seoras back to the college alone – the boy in the state he had been in would be handful enough for two men, let alone one. And so I pressed on. The further into the garden I went, the deeper the darkness became, to the point that I knew to continue would be folly. I began to turn, thinking somehow to retrace my steps, when my foot struck the unseen root of a tree and I found myself tilting headlong towards the ground. I put out a hand to stop myself and felt my flesh tear on a low branch of hawthorn. Before I could wrestle my way out of it, a figure had launched itself at me from above and pressed me to the ground. I attempted to raise my head as surprisingly strong hands bound my wrists behind my back. My head was instantly thrust back towards the ground and I tasted dirt, then blood, from my own lower lip. My assailant told me in no uncertain terms that another such attempt would cost me an ear. For all the shock and discomfort of the moment, my overriding sensation was of incomprehension, for the voice was one I knew very well.

The principal regarded me with utter disbelief. ‘George Jamesone? George Jamesone did this to you?’ he said, circling me closely to inspect the swollen eye and cut lip to which my artist friend had treated me late the previous night. My head ached already, not much helped by a sleepless night occasioned by the discomfort of my injuries and the outraged amusement of my wife. Her words had prefigured Dr Dun’s almost exactly.