The Redemption of Alexander Seaton (16 page)

The houses rose on either side of me, three and four storeys high. Some were divided into tenements, the apartments on the upper floors being reached by wooden
flights of outside stairs. Other dwellings were grander, the houses of wealthy merchants, professionals and landed men with business in the town. I turned down into the Upperkirkgate. The houses here were not so grand as those of the Gallowgate, the rents cheaper, but here too, many had aspirations, with brightly painted porches giving onto the street. Halfway down I reined in the horse outside a modest two-storey house with the legend
E. P. 1624. W. C
. engraved in fine gold lettering above the lintel. Elizabeth Philip and William Cargill. Tying the beast to a post in the road, I knocked on the door. There seemed to be a great commotion and rustling of skirts inside until at length the door was answered. My friend’s wife stood there in the doorway, her eyes alight and her cheeks glowing, filled,
mirabile dictu
, with happiness to find me there.

‘Alexander, oh, Alexander. How we have missed you.’ She held her hand out towards me and I took a step closer, removing my hat as I did so. She looked again in my face, my eyes. Her arm fell to her side. ‘In the name of God, Alexander, what has befallen you?’

SEVEN

Destination

I awoke the next day to a bright clear Aberdeen morning such as I had known nowhere else. As I lay, hands behind my head, looking up at the curved ceiling, the bell of St Nicholas kirk began to strike the hour: one, two, three … it tolled nine times. Nine o’clock. I could not remember the last time I had slept until this hour. I would have been about my labours in my schoolroom in Banff over two hours by now, ready to send the town boys home for their breakfasts. A pitcher of fresh water had been set by the Delft wash bowl in my room. Someone must have come in with it in the hours since dawn, but I had heard nothing.

My body had been weary after the long ride and its strange meeting, but I had not seen William in nearly a year and there had been an unburdening at my destination, which had left my mind and heart something clearer than they had been for many months. Even as I had entered Aberdeen, with its narrow winding streets of tall houses and its busy lanes of people, dogs and beasts, the stifling feeling that had oppressed me in Banff had begun to lift. And then, once Elizabeth had been finally persuaded that I was not actually ill, and had brought us a fine dinner of roasted capons and
cold ham pie, she had left us to the talk of men and of friends, and I had told William my story.

When I had finished, he hesitated. ‘It is,’ he began, ‘something of what I had imagined, although I could not have guessed it all. And you have heard nothing of Katharine since?’

‘Nothing since that last meeting on the road from Fordyce, though for a time I could scarcely remember even that. Now, though, the words are burned on my very soul, every one of them, hers and mine.’

‘You must not dwell on it, Alexander.’

‘That is what Jaffray says, too, in his many different ways that he thinks so subtle.’

William smiled. ‘The doctor’s heart is on his sleeve, and for all his learning and experience of the world he cannot hide it. And yet I think his counsel is good.’

I shrugged. ‘Oh, it is good, but it is counsel easier to offer than to act upon. I have tried with all my strength not to dwell on it. I have tried to drink it out of my mind, my body. I have, in my worst of days, disgraced myself with other women, but in the end the knowledge of it finds me out again.’

I had told him everything, even the last part, that part without which it might have been easier to face myself.

William had guessed, long before Archie himself had, what were my feelings for Katharine. Archie and I had spoken of it for the first and only time on the eve of his departure for the Bohemian Wars. There had been a great feasting and speech-making that night in the town house of the Hays. The great and the good of Aberdeen to burgh and to land had toasted Archie’s family, his valour, his honour and his health, and then toasted them again. Archie and I
had been party to many such nights together, but on this occasion I noticed that while he smiled and laughed and joined the toasts, in reality he ate little and drank less, and the smile faded as soon as its recipient turned his or her attention elsewhere. I often wonder now whether Archie knew then that he was going to his death, and that he would not see these faces or the sun set on this town again. The noise of the drinking, the laughing and the music rose, and the light of the fire made faces dance in and out of fleeting shadows. As the company was roaring at a lewd tale of an Edinburgh minister and the wife of a rich Leith merchant, I felt Archie’s hand on my shoulder and he leant towards my ear. ‘Come, Alexander, let us away.’ I do not think anyone noticed us slip out, save Katharine, whose eyes kept count of all I did.

We made our way down the servants’ stairs and out through the kitchen to the backland. Light from the upper windows kept our feet from misadventure in the courtyard, and we slipped through a side gate into the vennel leading to the Broadgate, away from the house. I did not need to ask Archie where we were going – we had used this route often, to escape the eyes first of his parents, then his tutor, and occasionally of any of the town’s officers who might have come to look for him. In a few moments we were out on Broadgate and headed towards Guestrow in the direction of Maisie Johnston’s house. Maisie Johnston had brewed ale in the burgh for forty years, and there was but a handful of burgesses on the council or the session who could deny in truth that they had ever been carried home, incapable, from her parlour or spirited, half dressed, out of her back door when the session on its rounds knocked at the front.

The cur in the yard scarcely stirred as Archie knocked on the back door of the house. It knew of old who was permitted to be here and who was not. The mistress herself opened the door to us, and nodding to me, she led the way up the stairs to an apartment I had never been in before. I had not Archie’s taste for whoring, and my previous visits to Maisie’s house had always stopped at the drinking parlour at the foot of the stairs. It was with some relief, then, that I saw the room she opened to us was unoccupied, and that a table had been set with food and drink and two places. Maisie took a coin from Archie, nodded again and left the room without having uttered a word.

Archie sank down on a settle and let out a huge sigh as the door closed behind her. ‘Thank God, some peace at last.’ This was not his usual style of talking.

‘And since when have you sought peace?’ I asked.

He was silent a long moment. ‘I crave – a kind of peace, an end to the hunting and the dancing and the days of no consequence. I crave a peace that comes when a man finds his place, when he …’ He was searching for the words.

‘When he meets his calling?’

‘Yes,’ he said, as if he had only just now realised it. ‘When he meets his calling.’

‘And that is what, in truth, you are sailing to tomorrow? To meet your calling?’

He unbuckled his cloak and let his hat fall to the floor. ‘Well, it is not here that I will meet it. I cannot play the fool all my life. One day I will have to return here, return to Delgatie, take my father’s place, have charge of the lands, the tenants, the family debt. I will have to fight my neighbours as they will me. I will have my honour slighted
and trample on that of others. I will marry me a wife I do not love and father as many bairns on her as she can bring forth into the world. I will die and I will leave my son my debt and my lands and my quarrels, and so it will go on. But, Alexander, do not tell me that is my calling. I cannot believe that God in his heaven does not ask something else of me on this earth.’

I had known always that there was more to my friend, to the foster brother that he had declared himself to be, than the laughing, drinking, dangerous, adored noble son, but it was a part of himself that he took pains not to reveal, even to me. Tonight though, there was to be no dissembling, for either of us. There would be no mysteries, no unanswered questions, no lack of understanding to carry down the years to our deaths, should we never meet again.

‘And do you think, Archie, that in these foreign wars you can do something that you could not do at home? You have no need to prove your honour or your courage here.’

He poured wine into the glasses, finer work they were than I would have thought to find in this house, and handed one to me. ‘What passes for courage here is but a case of me doing what it is known I shall do, what those who went before me did. It will change nothing. But the wars on the continent have greater stakes than our petty doings on these shores. I have a choice. I do not have to go there, but I choose to go; I wish to play in that great game, and to make a difference.’

I was silent for a moment, searching for the right words that he would carry with him. ‘I think you are wrong,’ I said.

‘How so?’

‘I think there is a difference to be made here. Changes
in the world need not always proceed from kings and their causes. A change in one man, howsoever lowly he be in the beginning, can affect many in the end.’

His eyes twinkled and a smile played about his mouth, just as it did when he knew he had a better hand of cards than I, or when I had made a careless move on the chessboard. ‘And there you have it, Zander. I could not have put it better myself. As ever, you give yourself away without knowing that you do.’

‘I do not understand.’

‘It is in your words, Alexander, in your words. You speak of a change
in
one man. That is your calling, not mine. Your mission is to change what men are. Mine is to change what men must face, to put right by force the damage done when those of your vocation have failed. Mine is to seek to alter the destinies of kingdoms from the top, yours from the very smallest component in them. Neither of us will succeed alone, but we may one day come close to one another in our paths.’ He drained his glass and refilled it. ‘Until then, though, there is food, there is drink, and there are women, by God, there are women.’ His face, his mood had reverted to their old selves. His well-accustomed mask was in place; he had told me what he had to and we would not need to touch on the subject again.

‘Archie …’

He looked up briefly from the chicken leg he was gnawing at with some gusto.

‘Archie, there is something I have wanted to tell you, to talk to you about before you leave. I …’

Again the twinkling eyes, the playful smile. ‘You are in love with my little sister.’

I felt the breath go out of me, and could say nothing for a moment.

He shook his head and laughed. ‘Oh, Zander, you think me a dullard after all. How many years now? One, two? Half the pretty girls in Aberdeen and Banff have thrown themselves at your feet, while I have had to make do with the wanton ones, and you have shunned them. Twelve months or more ago, my friend, I realised that you were in love. It did not take a great casting about to find the object of your affections. At first I was bemused, I will confess. The idea that my sister could be seen by any man as other women are seen by me had not occurred to me. And then for a while I reasoned that it was simply that she talked more sense than I that led you to seek out her company, but in the end I could not deny what to others had been long obvious.’

‘To others?’

‘Why, aye. To my mother and to yours.’

This was horrible; I felt I would vomit.

‘Och, Alexander. You have the colour of a dead fish, and much the same expression. Bear up, man. It is not so bad. My mother is a little pleased, your own delighted, and of course your father does not know.’

‘God be thanked. And yours?’

Archie shrugged and reached for a mutton chop. ‘My father knows, but he trusts my mother in these matters, and Katharine can put her heart where it pleases her.’

‘That is your father’s view?’

He nodded. ‘In as far as he takes a view. He knows you are a good man, and the son of the best of men. He loves his daughter and would see her happy. Trust in me, Zander. I will return from these wars covered in glory. I will marry
me that fertile, rich bride of my parents’ choosing. Katharine will be of less consequence than a brood hen. They’ll let her marry whom she wants.’

‘I hope to God you’re right.’

He tossed a mutton bone to his dog, lying between us on the floor. ‘Of course I’m right, Zander. Am I not always right? Besides,’ he sighed as he got up and went to the window, looking out over the blackness that was the burgh at night, ‘my parents love me well, too well. I shall ask them, and she will be yours.’

As ever, he had run on to a thing decided, leaving little space or time for reason. ‘But what of Katharine? Will she have me?’

He looked at me, astonished. ‘You do not know? You have never tried her on it?’

‘I have never … I did not think … No.’

He shook his head in amused exasperation. ‘Well, Alexander, on that score I cannot help you. On that you must shift for yourself. But I think you will find a willing listener to your pleas. And then we would be truly brothers, and there would be nothing dearer to my own heart.’ He smiled at the thought and presently his smile took on a look of mischief. ‘And you shall have the kirk at Turriff, or King Edward or Banff, and thunder from the pulpit at my wicked and wanton ways.’ And thus he tried to make light of our parting, thanking God that he would soon be relieved of my ‘lang dreep’ of a face. ‘If ever there was a minister born it’s you, Zander. You will sermonise the life out of them.’

We laughed, and as the rumble of our laughter receded, we remained in companionable silence a few minutes, he kicking at a log with the toe of his boot, I watching the
candle flicker and splutter in the draught. I wondered when next I would see that loved, arrogant, noble face, hear that roaring laugh. I wondered how war would change him, how living out in the world, away from our charmed college life, would change me, how my practice of the word of God would measure against my knowledge of it.

He broke into my reverie by throwing his unbuckled sword at my feet. ‘Enough of this lovesick nonsense, Mr Seaton. Tonight you will accompany me on my farewells to the “ladies” of Aberdeen. You must not be completely out of practice when you get my poor deluded sister to your bed and I … I must not disappoint the ladies, for tomorrow I sail from our safe harbour, and how they will weep for the Master of Hay!’