The Fanatic (16 page)

I have made havok of the Church,

The Godly I abhor
,

All who mak conscience of their way

To me are ane eye sore.

How many hundredth shyning lights

Are put out by my hand,

Of which might any one have been

A glory to a land.

Of all the blood that hath been shed,

The author I have been,

Of all oppression of the Saints

And ills which they have seen.

All men me hate, none truly love,

I can no man beguile,

My treacherie and my perjury

So notour is and vile.’

As he read, the laughter, uproarious at the first clashing rhyme, died away, and the last two stanzas were heard in silence. Livingstone closed the book and put it away. There was an embarrassed silence. Then John Brown spoke.

‘How cam ye here, Maister Mitchel? Dae ye want siller? We hae a fund for those in distress.’

‘Ma cousin John,’ said Mitchel, ‘that’s a deacon in the kirk here, has me provided for. For ma passage I borrowed siller frae Major Thomas Weir which I hope tae repay in time.’

The name was out before he could stop himself. There were more significant glances around the table. Most of them would have known Weir from his time in the Edinburgh Toun Guard, when he had had charge of Montrose before his execution. Traill, for example, had visited Montrose – or James Graham, as the godly insisted on calling him, since they did not recognise his title – in the Tolbooth, trying to extract contrition from him for his crimes – but to no avail. But what, Mitchel wondered, was Nevay’s connection?

‘How is oor auld acquaintance?’ asked Carstairs.

‘He grieves for the sinfu state of Scotland,’ said Mitchel. ‘He is burdened wi his sister. She is wrang in the heid.’

‘The sinfu state of Scotland,’ said Nevay thoughtfully. ‘Aye.
And did he mention masel? He kens I am here. Did he ask ye tae communicate ony message tae me?’

‘No, sir,’ said Mitchel, grateful that the last question enabled him to answer truthfully. ‘He said naethin anent thon.’

‘Anent
whit
?’ Nevay demanded sharply.

‘I mean, sir, he said naethin. He had nae communication for ye that I ken.’

The subject was not pursued. Shortly after this, Traill signalled to Mitchel that he should leave. Business had to be addressed that he could not be privy to. MacWard produced a sheaf of papers, and the ministers fluttered in around them like moths. Mitchel bowed and made his exit.

Only when he had left the room did he realise that he had not had a chance to talk with MacWard about Samuel Rutherford. But there was something about MacWard that he did not like. He realised that he did not want to be connected to Rutherford by such a man.

He knew that he had been assessed – weighed in the balances – but had he been found wanting? What had Nevay been angling for? And did MacWard think him stupid? Certainly they seemed to understand his insinuations about Sharp. But that would be his act alone, not theirs.

Traill’s son was delivered safely from Scotland a week later. He had slipped across the Forth after the defeat at Pentland, and waited out his time in the fishing villages of Fife where his family had many friends, before deciding to join his father abroad. The old man was on his knees for most of a day and a night giving thanks.

Young Robert and Mitchel had met before. Traill was a year or two the younger, but was already a rising star at conventicles. Like his father, he was open and friendly to Mitchel. They exchanged stories about the rising. Traill was particularly keen to hear the details of McKail’s execution.

‘Did they save the corp frae the gallows?’ he asked.

Mitchel was not sure. He’d heard that a group of men had carried it away for burial before it could be quartered by the soldiers. I think so,’ he said.

Traill breathed out heavily. ‘It’s a terrible thing, tae see a man murdered. But tae butcher the flesh eftir the spirit has
departed frae it, is baith senseless and barbaric.’

‘James Graham’s heid was prickit on the Tolbooth eleven years, and a cross-prick pit in it so his freens couldna steal it awa. That wasna senseless – it was an example and a constant mindin tae the people.’

‘But think whase heid replaced it when it was taen doon – oor ain gracious Marquis, Argyle’s. We canna aye be skewerin flesh, James – we must leave some work for Judgment Day. But that said, I’ll no argue but that it maks for strenth o a kind. Ye’ll hae strenth in yersel for haein witnessed Hew’s end.’

‘Aye, I hae that.’

‘Ma faither’s freen James Guthrie, that suffered at the Restoration, I saw him killt. It niver leaves ye. When I falter, I think on it and it gars me gang on.’

Guthrie had been minister at Stirling in the fifties. His had been a life of signs and signing. On his way to take the Covenant in 1638 he met the public hangman. This unsettled James Guthrie somewhat, and he went aside and walked up and down a little before going on, to think what this meeting might mean. Ah well, he judged it would mean he would pay for his act with his life, but could not think of a better cause to die for, so he signed.

At the Restoration he’d signed the same petition to Charles that had had the elder Traill banished. Guthrie’s case was worse, however. Back in 1651 the General Assembly had passed an act of excommunication against General John Middleton, a man who had been second-in-command of the Covenanter army that defeated Montrose at Selkirk, but who had subsequently switched sides and raised a Royalist army in the north, Highland papists and malignants every one. The rising came to nothing, but the excommunication went ahead anyway, and it fell to Guthrie to deliver the sentence from the pulpit. Middleton never forgave him. When, at the Restoration, he became king’s commissioner to the Scottish Parliament, one of his first acts was to have Guthrie arrested, tried and hanged.

On the last Sabbath before his arrest, Guthrie chose as his text the verses from Hebrews, chapter 11:
And what more shall I say? For time would fail me to tell of the prophets who through
faith subdued kingdoms and stopped the mouths of lions; and others were tortured, not accepting deliverance; that they might obtain a better resurrection; they were stoned, they were sawn asunder, they were tempted, were slain with the sword; they wandered in deserts, and in mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth.
He read out these verses in full, and as soon as he stopped his nose began to bleed, so violently that he was obliged to step down and let another preach for him. It was a terrible portent of what was to follow.

Mitchel had been in Galloway then. The way young Traill told it, the Guthrie execution had been as dramatic as McKail’s. Then afterwards the body was taken down and dismembered. Guthrie’s head and hands were cut off and stuck up on the Netherbow port, with the hands on either side of the dead face as if in prayer. Some weeks after the execution, when the remnants had long dried out, Middleton’s coach was passing through the gate. As it did, a gush of blood fell from Guthrie’s neck onto the coach. When Middleton’s lackeys tried to wash it off, they found it had stained the leather irreversibly. Nothing would remove it. Physicians and scientists were called in to ascertain why the blood should have started to flow so long after death, and at that particular moment. They could give no natural cause. In the end Middleton had to get a complete new set of covers for his coach.

Mitchel knew this story well. It was recounted as a great and fearful marvel among the godly. The weird thing was, he could never quite rid himself of a sneaking sympathy for John Middleton. The man had come from a background as proletarian as his own. He’d been a pikeman in Sir John Hepburn’s Scots Brigade in France before joining the Covenanters in the 1640s. He was brutal and unsophisticated, but he had risen to the highest rank and office. He’d fallen from favour because he did not have the aristocratic blood or political connections of his rival Lauderdale, and had been packed off to govern Tangier. Mitchel imagined him dreaming of wet Scotland, a tall, frustrated man baking in the African sun, drinking himself to death. He was fascinated by the story of the blood Middleton had called down upon himself.

During his time in exile, Mitchel went with his cousin John to Hamburg, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Leyden and Ostend. He made some of these journeys on his own also, accompanying or receiving consignments of cloth, wine and other goods. It was petty, tedious work for which he had no enthusiasm. Months passed. At night he dreamt of Edinburgh, and a gate that dripped blood whenever he approached it.

He knew it was time to be moving. He had saved money from his work – enough to repay Major Weir and have some left over. If he could work his way back to Scotland he might have more. But John was trading entirely within the continent. He got him to write him a letter of recommendation and went looking for a cargo that needed a native Scotsman to supervise its passage.

One night he dreamt of the gate again. It was like the Netherbow but not it. He expected the blood but when he reached the gate it swung open. Jean Weir was beyond it. She beckoned him on, giving him a silly, doited smile as he passed her. Then he was in a darkened room. It was the Major’s house but it was not. It was a prison. A man was sitting under a tiny window, trying to read from a book. The room was full of smoke. Another man was standing by the door, puffing away at a pipe. The first man was coughing from the smoke. The smoker laughed. Mitchel saw his big-nosed profile. It was Weir. There was the sound of a gun going off.

It was happening again. Carlin felt the fire and the sweat coming over him as he strode along the Cowgate ahead of the tour party. It was a mild night, the cloak was heavy and warm. Maybe it was the baldy wig, not allowing his scalp to breathe. He pulled it off and stuffed it into the plastic bag under the cloak. The black staff felt soft and hot in his hand. He had to get past the bridge, where he’d succumbed to the oppressive feeling last time. He pressed on.

He felt like someone else. A voice was going away at him, inside, saying something. He thought it might be MacDonald, who seemed to know just what he, Carlin, was looking for, even though he himself didn’t. He wondered if it was Lauder and his
Secret Book.
It had to be Lauder’s voice, surely, he was hearing? There was one passage he could remember quite clearly.

What is madnes? In France a man tauld us this story, that some gentlemen ware at Paris who on visiting the bedlam there the governour & physicians ware occupiet wt other matters, so they gave them into the hands of a fool to shew them the place. Thus this man pertinentlie gydes them throw the chambers saying heres one that is mad for love, here on other thats mad wt too much study, here a third mad wt drink, one a hypocondriack &c. The gentlemen being much impresst wt the luciditie and sense of their gyde, they come at last to one who, he informs them, thinks him selfe the Apostle Sanct John. But the gyde knew this was not so as he, being Sanct Petir, had nevir opened the door of heaven to him yet. The doctors after tauld them he was once a professor in the college of Sorbonne, but too much learning had reduced him to his present state.

Aye, maybe that was it: Lauder’s voice. Another world coming through those old pages, invading him. But if that was what was happening, how could he tell which voice in his head
was his? The mirror was one thing, but this … He’d be no better than the man who thought he was Peter. Carlin got paid for what he was doing and he wore a kind of fancy-dress but otherwise what was the difference between them? And if he was mad, how would he recognise his madness?

He turned up Stevenlaw’s Close, which, at its foot, was more a narrow road or vennel than a close. The tour route went up the hill a few yards and turned left before the close narrowed, went along another vennel, and emerged into Tron Square at the back of the tenements of the High Street. Gerry would lead his party across the square towards Assembly Close, which opened onto the street, but then shepherd them ahead of him to the right, along a narrow passage that gave onto Covenant and Burnet’s Closes. It was out of one of these that Carlin was supposed to make his final appearance. When Hardie had shown him the set-up the first time he had queried the location.

‘There’s folk stey in these hooses. Dae they no get fed up wi aw the racket?’

‘Never had a complaint yet,’ Hardie had said. ‘I guess that’s just something you accept if you live in the heart of the Old Town. I mean, if you can’t handle us going by, how are you going to cope with the pubs emptying, or all the people hanging around during the Festival? If you don’t like it, don’t live here, that’s what I say.’

Just short of Tron Square there was a patch of broken concrete, dotted with weeds, set deep in shadow in the angle of a brick wall. As Carlin went past it something moved out from the weeds, touched his foot. He jumped back with a cry.

‘Jesus fuckin Christ!’

Something was curled up in there under a blanket. Somebody. It was a leg that had slid out.

‘Sorry,’ said a muffled voice. A moment later it added, ‘Fuckin hell, look at ye. I’m the one that should be gettin the fright.’ It sounded like just a young boy.

‘I’m the one that should be apologisin,’ said Carlin. ‘Did I wake ye?’

‘Ay, kinda. I was jist settlin in. Didna think there’d be anybody much comin by here at this time.’

‘Oh.’ Carlin hunkered down. ‘Well, I’m sorry tae disappoint
ye, but ye’re right in the road o aboot twenty tourists that are headin up here in the next five minutes.’

‘Fuckin hell. This is a guid spot tae. Oot the wey. Nae hassle. Or so I thought.’ The body began wearily to gather itself, as if to move on.

Carlin peered a little closer. ‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘I’m no bein nosy but … are you a lassie?’

‘Mebbe. Could be. How? Whit’s it tae you?’

‘Christ,’ said Carlin. A deep memory and fear welled in him. A lost girl surrounded by strangers. He said stupidly, ‘Some folk dinna think aboot lassies sleepin oot in the street.’

‘Oh, right, I get it. This is when ye feel that sorry for me, ye tell me I can kip at your place, then ye get me hame and there’s only the wan bed. Well, sorry, mister. Been there, done that, as they say.’

‘Na, na, that’s no whit I meant. It’s jist, you lyin oot here like this, and this crowd comin – that’s no on. That’s nae use at aw.’

‘It’s awright, I’m on ma wey. Nae bother, right?’

‘Na, you stay put. Jist stay exactly where ye are. Canna hae aw thae folk trampin through a lassie’s bedroom. Specially when ye’re tryin tae kip.’

‘Whit ye gaun dae aboot it?’

‘Go back tae sleep. They can go anither wey the night.’

‘Eh?’

‘Whit’s yer name?’

‘Karen.’

‘It’s awright, Karen. I’ll take care o it.’

‘How?’

‘It’s ma job.’

He didn’t have long. He ran on through the square, out onto the High Street, then doubled back down New Assembly Close. This came to what seemed a dead end, but it wasn’t quite, he knew that. You went down some steps, along the back of the houses, and you came to a wooden door in the wall, with a snib on the inside. You couldn’t open it from the other side without a Yale key. He put the snib off and went through. He was back at the top of Stevenlaw’s Close, the steep narrow section. He belted down to the corner of the vennel near the foot and waited for the tour party. He could
hear them coming up from the Cowgate, the guide giving them stuff about Sir Walter Scott’s birthplace across the way.

When the first of them, led by Gerry, turned into the vennel, Carlin did the wildest fucking haunt he could muster. In fact he’d never really put any effort into it before that time. The result was spectacular. Pandemonium broke out. The tourists at the front screamed and tried to fight their way back against the press of those behind. Carlin steeled himself for contact, grabbed Gerry by the wrist and indicated with his staff that they should go back and carry on up the close. Gerry stammered a bit, then found his voice.

‘Well, folks, I did warn you to expect the unexpected. It seems that Major Weir in person has arrived to escort us on the final leg of this walk.’ They got ahead of the crowd as Carlin led him up the slope. Under his breath Gerry said, ‘What the hell’s going on?’

Carlin said nothing but glowered at him and kept the haunt going. Total silence, total staring absence of expression, that was the thing. The party were tripping along behind him like weans after a piper. ‘Explain later,’ he said to Gerry, and came to a sudden halt. He let go his arm, swirled his cloak and pointed the staff menacingly, then spun around and flew into the narrow entry ahead. He put on a burst of speed, slipped in through the wooden door, quietly closed and snibbed it. He heard voices expressing astonishment at his disappearance. Then he made his way silently back down past where the girl was, and away.

He didn’t give a fuck about explaining later. Gerry could talk his way out of it. It would make the tourists’ night. He wondered about Karen, if she’d be there the next night, and what he would do if she was. He passed under George IV Bridge and thought of the weight of the library with its rows and rows of books pressing down through the layers of the city. When he reflected on it, the blue carbon-copied pages of the Lauder manuscript seemed unconvincing. Anybody could have put that stuff together, Carlin thought: D. Crosbie, whoever he was; MacDonald himself even, although why he would do such a thing was beyond imagining. And yet … and yet, before, the
Secret Book
had read so true; had pulled Carlin in and got him thinking Lauder’s thoughts, walking in
his doubt-ridden, anxious footsteps. How could that happen?

His mind flicked through Lauder and alighted on a little passage and he laughed out loud.

Ther ware 4 French peasants in a village ance, that fell to talk about the King. They sayd it was a braw thing to be a King. Says the first if I ware King I would lie at ease all the day on that hy stack wt my belly to the sun. The second says, I would sup every day at bacon swimming in its juces. If I ware King (says the 3d) I would feid my swine from upoun ane horse. The 4t, alas, ye have left me nothing to choose; ye have chosen all the best things.

Maybe he was the victim of a complex practical joke. Hugh Hardie, D. Crosbie and MacDonald could all be in it together, Jackie Halkit the lure on which they had reeled him in. The unwitting lure? Or maybe she was in as thick as the rest of them. Conspirators of history.

He found his way back to Anderson’s Close, the Stinking Close of Weir’s time. He was still in the Weir gear: it was strange, you could wander around this part of town in this rig-out and people hardly paid you any attention. A couple of times he’d met another ghost on the street, going to or from his work. Deacon Brodie, or a monk or something. ‘Aye,’ the monk nodded as he passed. ‘Aye,’ said Major Weir. They were from different centuries but they never even blinked.

Carlin emerged at the Cowgatehead and walked the few yards to the Grassmarket. He stood there watching people entering and leaving the pubs; noticed lights coming on and going off in the hostels for derelicts, and in the flats above the shops on the Castle side of the street. Some of those flats were council-owned, others were private, expensively refurbished – this part of town retained that mix of social classes and types that had characterised it for centuries. And yet, Carlin thought, there were not so many people here as there once were. There were more people in Edinburgh, sure, but not here in its heart, where once all the world crammed and jostled together. In the 1660s, thirty thousand souls maybe, and multiplying fast, once the plague no longer thinned them. A paltry figure these days, of course, at the height of summer, during the Festival; and at other times like the big council-promoted
Hogmanay celebrations, when thousands spilled up from Princes Street. But these were exceptions and the crowds were not real crowds; not real people who lived in a real place, but people passing through a moment, for whom the Old Town was the decor for a party, a pasted-up backdrop.

Carlin in the shadows looked further, deeper in. He saw sheep in pens, tethered cows, snapping dogs and flaffing hens, a gridlock of carts and horses. He saw the crowds of filthy ragged people, the barefoot bairns, the hawkers and chapmen, soldiers, fleshers with their packs of dogs to guard the cattle, traders, ministers, merchants’ daughters douce to look at but with tongues that would clip clouts, wifies at the well, women selling and buying food, wool, milk, cloth; he smelt the sweat of their common crushed struggling humanity, the mixture of glaur and blood and rubbish and shite trampled underfoot. He heard the din of bleating, bellowing animals and shouting herds, saw the battlements looming high above on the north side, the inns and drinking shops clustered along the base of the rock, the gaunt scaffold rising above the crowd at the head of the street. On one side, behind him, the mouth of the Cowgate; on the other, the foot of the zig-zagging West Bow down which the condemned would be drummed …

Carlin saw it all. It pressed in upon him like heat from a furnace.

Weir and Mitchel; Mitchel and Weir. Mitchel the vehement, the insecure, the enthusiast, the unconfident, grasping at knowledge with his ignorant fists. Weir, thirty years his senior, a man of reputation – devout, militant, sure in his commitment to the letter and blood of the Covenant. Weir has connections. Mitchel has none. It is 1658 and he is a penniless graduate. He needs a job.

One of those of the kirk party appointed to judge James Graham was Sir George, eighteenth laird of Dundas. As Montrose’s jailer. Weir had come into contact with him. Now he hears that Dundas is looking for a chaplain and tutor for his bairns. Through an intermediary, he secures Mitchel an introduction.

Sir George is impressed by Mitchel’s youth, and by his poverty. He gives him the job, and Mitchel flits from the Cowgate to Dundas’s castle out by Kirkliston. It is a strange,
difficult situation. Though he is adequate at prayer, he is woefully bad at teaching. As Dundas is too busy with political affairs to notice, and his children too spoilt to care, this might not be disastrous; but Mitchel is an outsider. The other servants dislike him. They think him too sanctimonious for his own good, and it does not take them long before they believe they have found out his weakness. There is an auld taigelt gardener with a bored young wife, and it is obvious that the new tutor is susceptible to her charms. Rumour is spread like dung on rosebeds: Maister Mitchel is lustful; Maister Mitchel covets his neighbour’s wife; Maister Mitchel commits adultery in his heart. Best of all, Maister Mitchel, aloof and totally unaware of the slanders circulating about him, is riding for a fall.

His accommodation is simple but secluded, a kind of summerhouse built onto the garden wall. One moon-bright night the gardener’s wife is seen slipping across the lawns. The servants follow, note that the key is on the outside of the summerhouse door, and, when the hapless couple are at their coupling, they gently lock them in and run to fetch the laird. Some minutes later, a dog begins to bark. The woman tries to leave, becomes distracted: if her husband should discover her … Her master, watching the proceedings from a balcony of the castle, already has, and sees Mitchel help her through the window, and begin to lower her, dangling on one end of his shirt, to the ground. But the shirt is not long enough, she is afraid to jump the last few feet. Mitchel has to lean out further and further, clinging with one hand to the window frame, stretched like a lizard naked on the wall, till at last the shirt tears and she falls into some bushes. Oh, the sight of their pale limbs straining in the moonlight. Oh, the dishevelled skirts of the woman fleeing across the grass. Oh, the shame, next morning, of the tutor summoned before Dundas and dishonourably discharged.
O James Mitchel, ever learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth, thou shalt be cast out from thy mistress and from the garden of the laird.