The Devil's Recruit (29 page)

Sensing that she might have said what she had intended to say, and was waiting for an answer of some sort to a question she had not asked, I sought some words.

‘I truly do not know what I am to do, what I am to say. I never expected …’

‘No,’ she nodded, ‘I can see that. Well, remember one thing, Alexander Seaton, what happened between you and Katharine Hay is ten years past, and we do not live our
entire lives for one moment that will not come back. You were free once, but you are not free now.’

‘I know it.’ I ate and drank then in silence, for there was nothing else I could say, but I knew she had not finished with me.

‘And the recruits?’ she said at last.

‘The recruits?’

‘Those boys on Ormiston’s ship that think they are going to fight for the honour of Elizabeth Stuart and the Protestant cause. What will you do about that?’

I glanced at Archie and then looked Lady Rothiemay directly in the eye. ‘I cannot let him take them, your Ladyship, were the King himself to command me.’

She smiled, satisfied. ‘Good, for if you did, I would trust no man again.’

This I had not expected, and she saw it.

‘Do not confuse my faith with my loyalties, Mr Seaton. I will be loyal to the House of Stuart until the day I die. I will never see a Spanish standard planted in the soil of Scotland, and there are many, many of my faith who will tell you the same thing. Lieutenant Ormiston is lost – I have told Isabella, and I thank God I have got her away from him – and he will take Archie Hay with him. No one with the scrap of a position to hold on to will take my word on anything, but you get back to Aberdeen tomorrow and denounce the pair of them. Archie has made his choices, and his father has had his moment.’

She got up then, and pausing only to say something
privately to Isabella, she bade the rest of the company a goodnight that none of them heard.

The withdrawal of Lady Rothiemay left me awkwardly alone for a time, and I pretended to eat food I had no appetite for, but then Archie noticed me and called me up to join himself and his father. The knowledge of Katharine just six feet rather than hundreds of miles from me, made me almost insensible of anything else, and yet the other people in the room – Archie, his father, Isabella, the guard – erected by their very presence a barrier as impassable as all those miles would have done.

There were words of kindness to me from Lord Hay. Words of sorrow from me on the passing of his wife. Unspoken words of regret by both of us for all that had passed in those ten years.

We sat an hour, he trying to take me on his side in persuading Archie not to return to the wars, and with all my heart, in spite of everything I knew, I joined him in those efforts, but I knew it would be to no avail. So, eventually, did Lord Hay. He sighed heavily. ‘So I must live till Mark is of age then, and pass Delgatie safely into his hands.’

‘Safer in his than in mine, Sir,’ said Archie with a twinkle, ‘for you know it would go on gambling and women.’

‘Surely,’ said his Lordship, partaking in the game, ‘Alexander would keep you from such snares?’

‘Alexander? He never could. I only ever kept him by me father, that the ladies might see how well I looked in
comparison. He also stopped me once or twice from wagering away my horse.’

But I could not join in their laughter. I could hardly hear it. ‘Who is Mark?’ I asked.

‘What?’ said Archie, refilling his glass and his father’s.

‘Who is Mark?’

Lord Hay’s voice was gentle. ‘Mark is my grandson, Alexander. Katharine’s son. He’s nine years old. When I’m gone, he will be the laird of Delgatie.’

I could not conceal – what? My distress? Shock? Some other emotion that should not have been mine. I tried to put my own glass down on the table, but my hand shook so much that half the wine spilled on to my knee.

Archie, helpless for once, looked at his father. The old laird stood up.

‘Isabella, it has been a long day. I think perhaps you should take Katharine to her chamber.’

All this time, Katharine Hay and I had exchanged not one word, and I found myself getting to my feet, fearful that any chance I had to speak to her would now be lost. At the same time Katharine looked helplessly from me to her father.

‘Please father, I …’

He put an arm round her. ‘Hush, now, lassie. It will be all right. I promise you. You go with Isabella.’

‘Please …’

‘Go now.’

All the while, Archie had me by the arm, but I had not
the strength to pull away from him anyway. I felt my feet would not move and that I might be sick. He guided me back into my chair.

‘A few minutes, Alexander,’ said his father, ‘and then you can go to her. What you must say to one another is between you two alone.’

*

It was perhaps ten minutes later, perhaps two, or an hour, I did not know, that I finally walked from the hall and down the stairs to the chamber that had been Katharine’s all her childhood. It felt as if every step I had taken in the last ten years, no matter how far I had run from the place, had been leading me here. At the accustomed turning, I stepped from the turnpike and down the three stone steps that would take me to the door of her room. I lifted my hand to knock, but drew it back at the last minute. I had not the first idea what I could say to her, what I might do. I pressed my fist to my mouth and muttered, ‘God help me,’ but as I brought it to the door at last I knew God’s work was done with Katharine and me.

The door opened slowly and I found myself looking into the eyes of Isabella Irvine. She was startled and seemed about to close it again.

‘Please,’ I said.

‘Think what you are doing.’

‘I just want to talk to her, Isabella, please. I must see her.’ All my defences were gone, and I did not care who knew it. ‘I beg of you, please.’

Then Katharine’s voice, quiet from the dim candlelight. ‘Isabella? Who is it?’

‘It is no—’

I pushed past her. ‘Katharine, it is me.’

She got up from the footstool by the low fire, and let the rug she had round her shoulders fall.

‘Alexander …!’

Isabella took a step towards her. ‘Katharine, do not …’

But Katharine wasn’t listening. She was looking at me as if she could see no one else.

‘Leave us, please, Isabella.’

‘Katharine, think …’

‘Just go.’ Her voice was quiet, flat almost. ‘Just go, and leave us.’

And so Isabella left, giving me a look I did not wish to understand, a look that spoke of my wife and the hundred other reasons why I should not have come to that room.

And then, we were alone there, alone but for the child who slept on a couch at the bottom of the bed. I did not go to Katharine, but to the couch, and looked down upon the sleeping boy. He was slighter, paler than my Zander, and like all children looked younger than his years in sleep. His hair was neither Katharine’s white gold nor my own ebony, but a muted red that in a horse would have been bay. I guessed that behind the slumbering lids the eyes were as pale a blue as his mother’s. There was much of her in him, nothing of me. I reached out a hand, wanting to stroke the cheek.

‘He is not yours, Alexander.’

I turned my eyes from the boy to his mother. ‘Are you sure of it?’

‘Certain.’ She came and stood beside me. ‘I hoped, you know. I even prayed, but I had my answer soon enough: my wedding night brought on my courses, and my husband was well pleased, thinking it something else. I bled again the next month, and then I knew that there could be no hope. Mark was born a full year after I last saw you.’ She bit her bottom lip and seemed to be gathering strength in herself. ‘When my husband saw me safely delivered of a
son, a brother to all his bastards, he went back to the cook, and the scullery maid and his stableman’s wife, for he said he did not like the embrace of a skinny whore. And so, at last, God showed to me His mercy.’

A tear had fallen from her bottom lash to her cheek. I lifted my hand to brush it away.

‘Katharine, please, I’m so sorry.’

She brushed my hand away. ‘I don’t want your pity.’

My voice was hoarse. ‘It’s not pity. I cannot bear it.’ I sat down on the bed. ‘I cannot bear to think of another man …’

‘You did not want me.’

‘Not want you? Dear God!’ The grief was ripping through me. ‘That you could believe that I ever did not want you.’

She stepped back from me with a look as if she hardly knew me. ‘You cannot have forgotten, can you? That day when I left here and rode for Fordyce, with my mother’s cries in my ears and the eyes of half the country on me, to plead with you?’

‘I haven’t forgotten.’ I did not want to hear it, but she would have her saying of it.

‘I pled with you, in the dirt, on my knees, to have me. I pledged you everything I had, I turned my back on every other soul that loved me, to throw myself on the ground before you.’

I had my eyes closed now, as if that would stop me hearing. ‘I was on the
ground
, Alexander. I was begging
you, but you would have none of me.’ Her voice became quiet and she said, almost to herself, ‘and I have spent every day since being told by my husband what an honour it is for me that he took up a schoolmaster’s leavings.’

The memory was seared into my mind, of how I had thrown away that last chance for us. Forbidden to see me, she had yet defied her parents and come after me, offered herself, body and soul, to me, and I, consumed with bitterness at my public shaming, had rejected her. My head was in my hands, and she supported herself against a post of the bed. For a moment, neither of us could speak, and all the sound in the room was the gentle crackling of the fire and the soft breathing of the sleeping child.

‘I was taken by a madness,’ I said at last, ‘and by the time I came out of it, it was too late.’

She returned to her footstool at the fire and began absentmindedly to rake at the coals. The boy on the couch stirred and she laid the poker back down on the hearth. Whatever she had endured, ten years looked scarcely to have altered her. Her hair was loosed and hung down her back as it had done when she was a girl, and she was slim and delicate still as a young girl. The long, pale fingers had not been roughened by work as my wife’s had. But for the truths I knew, she might still have been the princess in the tower.

I had no good cause to be there, but I could not make myself leave. ‘How long have you known? About Archie?’

She did not turn, but continued to look into the fire. I
thought at first she had not heard me, and so began to repeat my question, but she had heard.

‘Years,’ she said.

‘How many years?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘It matters to me,’ I said, eventually.

‘I did not know on that day on the road from Fordyce, or not many days later, when I became that other man’s wife. How long after that does not matter.’

She was right. There could be no good purpose in her telling me, and yet I could not leave it. ‘How long, Katharine?’

Now, at last, she turned to face me. ‘Seven years. I have known seven years.’

‘What? When?’

‘I told you: seven years.’

‘The month!’

She rounded on me now. ‘Why, Alexander? What would you have done? Would you have told that servant girl with her bastard child that you would not marry her after all, because you had another man’s wife to rescue from an old man’s bed?’

That was what I, in my turmoil, wanted to know – would I have done that, had I known Archie wasn’t dead? Would I still have married Sarah? But Katharine’s anger brought me back to myself. ‘Do not speak of Sarah like that.’

‘Why not? When she has what should have been mine?’ I had never seen her like this, never heard such bitterness
in her voice. ‘Do you really not remember the last time we were in this room together?’

I looked away. ‘Of course I remember.’

‘And do you remember what you promised me that night, in that very bed, over and over again?’

I said nothing.

‘I remember, Alexander, even if you do not. You said that you would be—’

‘Yours, and only yours until the day I died.’ I remembered it. I remembered her face as I’d said it.

‘And how long,’ she asked now, ‘before you forgot those words? Did they fly before dawn? Was it my mother’s discovery that chased them away?’

‘Katharine …’

‘When, Alexander? Was it at Fordyce, when my father denounced you? Was it when I wept before you? Was it the first time you saw Sarah Forbes? The second?’ She was pacing the room, wringing her hands, angry.

‘The child, Katharine.’

‘
My
child. Do not use my child as an excuse – I will have your answer, you owe me that.’

I stood up. ‘Isabella was right. I should not have come here.’ I started to walk to the door.

‘What?’ It was like she had snapped out of that other person, the anger gone from her. ‘No, Alexander, please.’

I shook my head. ‘There’s nothing more that can be said between us, and nothing that can undo what’s done. But you should know this, Katharine: I have never forgotten
what I said to you that night, and in all the days of my life, in all that is to come to me, be it Heaven or Hell, I will never feel for another woman what I have felt for you.’

And I left, having betrayed my wife with the truth I had been struggling ten years to deny.

I should have gone down to the kitchens but, unthinking, I let my feet take me to Archie’s old room. There was no sign of him in it, but the bed was made up and a good fire burned in the hearth. I took off my boots, and without lighting any candle, lay down on the heavy damask cover and stared up at the ceiling I had looked upon so often. Painted figures and mottos, images of fabulous trees and grotesque creatures which had terrified me as a child, exhortations to firm morals and true friendship gazed down on me. I closed my eyes and hoped for a clear vision of something, but could only see a muddle of faces and hear the repetition of words I should not have spoken. I began to pray, but the words left my lips with so little power that they had vanished in the cold air before my sentences were fully formed. In truth, I did not know what I prayed for, for no answer from God could put right now what I had put wrong. I tried to call up to my mind some portions of scripture, but they were dead in my mouth before I spoke them.