The Redemption of Alexander Seaton (35 page)

‘If it is not the Devil’s apprentice,’ he said at length, with a hoarse laugh. His followers also laughed, some of the hostility in their eyes being replaced by a ready mockery, but only some. The young men continued to watch me with a clear and studied intent. ‘What do you want of me? Are you here for the whores? The word on the roads is that you prefer a
higher class of siren in your bed.’ Again a laugh, more real now, from the gathering.

So I had made Katharine the talk of the beggars and the thieves on the roads and hovels of the north. It was little wonder her friend Isabella Irvine despised me. I made no response to the jibe. ‘It is yourself I am here to see.’

All jocularity was gone now from Lang Geordie’s face. He was studying me carefully, weighing me up. I think he had some notion then of what my business was. He uttered something in the cant to his people and they dispersed slowly to the places from which they had come, all but two of the younger men who continued to stand near him, on either side of the only door of the hovel. Lang Geordie gave them some instruction, too and then looked at me again. ‘Then come in, Mr Seaton, come in.’ I went carefully past the dogs and in between the two guards, stooping low, although not as low as Lang Geordie. Once inside, my eyes could scarce make out a thing. The door had been shut behind me and the only light came from the round smokehole in the middle of the roof and from the open fire itself. As my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom I could discern figures, shapes, huddled in various parts of the one long room that constituted the whole dwelling. A young woman stirred a pot of something – some broth of seaweeds – over the fire; an older woman, coughing as she did so, sang in an alien tongue to a baby in dirty swaddling; two small children scrabbled after something in a corner – a mouse or a rat. On a trestle bed at the far end of the room lay another woman, also coughing. The floor was beaten dirt and I knew not what I would find when I set one foot in front of the other. The stench and squalor were beyond my experience: even the tolbooth
jail could scarcely compare with this. Lang Geordie ordered the woman up from the bed – the dwelling’s only furnishing – and as he took his seat there himself I saw that she was not a woman, but little more than a girl – fourteen, perhaps. She was wearing a tattered dress that I knew I had seen before, too large by far around the bosom and the hips. A whore’s dress; Mary Dawson’s dress. The vagabond chief saw me looking at the girl. ‘You can have her for a price – after our business is done,’ he said, very steady, with no insinuation.

‘I do not go with children,’ I said.

‘She is a child no longer,’ said the woman at the pot, bitterly. Geordie spat some reproach at her and she said no more.

The two sentries were inside the hovel now, still keeping guard of the door. I lowered my voice, for I had only business with Geordie himself, and it was business he might not like known amongst his followers. I kept my voice low. ‘I have money,’ I said, ‘not for whores but for information.’ He was sizing me up, waiting to see what the offer was, what the terms. He had played this game before and he would wait as long as he needed to. There was nothing for it but to come straight to the matter. ‘Who paid you last night?’ I asked.

He continued to fix me with his prophet’s eyes. ‘Last night? Now, what might have happened last night?’

‘You roused the rabble, the witch-mongers. You led them to the doctor’s door, to lay hands on the body of that poor murdered girl.’

He continued to watch me in the same manner, a little pleased with himself. ‘I? I did not rouse that rabble, Mr Seaton. Your godly minister and session clerk had that well
in hand; they had no need of a poor beggar man.’ He held his hands out self-deprecatingly, and smiled, almost engagingly, as he said it. I would gladly have knocked the last teeth from his head.

‘You led them,’ I said. ‘It was you who crossed the door of an honest man’s house when it was barred to you, you who knocked the stable boy to the floor. You gave the beast its head. You with your crutches – all the way down into the town. A great exertion it must have been for you. Do you tell me it was not done for profit? For what else would you have done it? Since when have you concerned yourself with witches?’

The amusement, the playfulness departed from his face. The prophet’s look was gone, too. His eyes were of stone, his voice a low rumble. ‘Since I watched my mother burn.’ He was looking into the past somewhere. ‘A hen had stopped laying; a child had grown sick; the water in a burn had gone bad. My mother had called at the house before, twice, desperate for succour to feed her bairns: she was given none.’ He paused and there was near silence in the dwelling. Even the children in the corner seemed to have stopped their playing. ‘It was thirty years ago and I can still hear her screams.’ He pulled himself suddenly to his feet, towering and cold in his anger. ‘So that is my concern with witches, Mr Seaton. They had started to talk of witches in the town – the storm, the fishing boats wrecked, the poisoning. And who do you think they would have turned on first, the good burgesses of Banff? I went for them before they came for us!’ He was taken by a coughing fit and the woman at the hearth brought over to him a ladle of water. She calmed him and got him to sit down on the bed again. The look I caught from her as she
returned to her pot was one of covert fear. His breathing subsided and he let go his crutch, which I had thought he was going to strike me with. ‘And that girl, she was dead. What did it matter? Are we not all dust? It could not hurt her, and it gave them a corpse to work out their passions on, instead of a living man or woman. Now, get out of my house, and never let me see you back here, unless it be to stay,’ he added with menace.

There was little more I could do. I believed him, and I did not. He had known, I was certain, that I had come up here about the business of the murders, but he had not expected me to ask about the witch-hunt. So what had it been? He called something to the two guards. One opened the door and, giving me a look potent with threat, jerked his head towards it. The other came over and stooped down to Lang Geordie, who murmured something in the cant. I caught the last words though – Mary Dawson. The man pulled me up by my collar and pushed me through the darkness towards the doorway.

Outside the dogs were waiting for me, snarling low. I avoided their eye. My elbow was caught as I stepped forward. ‘You were in Aberdeen, Seaton. Is Mary Dawson there?’

‘No,’ I replied with conviction, ‘she is not.’ So that was it; he had thought I had come to question him on the warning off of the Dawson sisters, or that I knew something of what they had known. It was with great relief that I finally reached the road leading back to the town from the Sandyhill Gate. The dogs had shadowed me all the way down from the settlement, stopping twenty yards from the roadway. I could feel them watching me for as long as the road remained in their sight. I did not look back. I was glad to win back to
the schoolhouse, and glad of the few hours to myself to order my thoughts, between now and when I must appear at the doctor’s door.

It was a pleasant walk to Jaffray’s. At last a little warmth was being carried on the air, and the evenings were growing lighter – the sky was a mellow golden rose reaching over the firth to the mountains of Sutherland. The storm of last Monday night and its attendant horrors could almost have been a distant memory, consigned to the last throes of winter, had it not left its bitter legacy everywhere I turned.

The evening was a quieter affair than many we three had spent together. We each of us had much to reflect upon. And there was a contentment in the doctor’s household. I knew the emptiness I had so often left there when I closed the door behind me would be there no more. Charles, so often taciturn, was the quietest of all, but his was a quiet contentment and wonder of a man who has started to see things he never saw before. Ishbel came in and out of the parlour with steaming dishes and plates. Pickled herring and bread still warm, a fine rabbit pie – Charles’s favourite dish – peas, beans, and vegetables of whatever manner her store could provide, a rich gravy owing not a little to the contents of the doctor’s cellar, a sturdy egg custard with apples stewed in all manner of sweet spices. The doctor asserted he would be bankrupt before the week was out if they were to dine like this every night. Ishbel flushed with pride and Charles offered to go sing in the streets to pay his way.

When the food was cleared and the
uisge beatha
brought out, we got up and took our accustomed seats around the fire. Jaffray’s parlour was no longer the cold and empty place
it had seemed on my last few visits: it had the warmth of a home again, and told his story. The Delft tiles of the fireplace, his wedding gift to his wife, had delighted me as a child and delighted me still, with their happy scenes of life in the Dutch countryside. On the walls were the German woodcuts he had so carefully carried back with him from his studies, so many years ago. It was a man’s room, filled with books and the aroma of tobacco, but with echoes of the woman who had once been at its heart, in the tapestries on the wall, the pressed flowers, their colours long faded, an embroidered footstool that had been hers. Charles stretched out his feet to the hearth and looked into the slowly dancing flames. I had brought the book of poetry I had purchased for him, having meant to give it to him as a help to sustain him in his jail, and I gave it to him then. For the next half-hour, as the doctor and I talked of the news from Aberdeen, Charles was lost in the book. His lips moved in silence as we spoke, and he heard nothing of our talk. At length he started to hum some parts of a tune, and asked the doctor for some paper. ‘I will play this, before the week is done; I will play this for you all,’ and he hummed and mused to himself as he scrawled at the paper. The snatches of song that escaped him every so often began to work their way into my mind, until I could almost have sung them too. They reminded me of something. When Ishbel came in carrying a basket of fresh coals for the fire I broke off my talk with the doctor and told her of my meeting with Sarah Forbes and where she was now. She closed her eyes and uttered a prayer in her own tongue. ‘God’s mercy is with her. And his grace with you, Mr Seaton.’ When she left I saw that Jaffray was studying me curiously.

‘Did you know the girl, when she was in the burgh?’ he asked.

I considered the question, and that not for the first time. ‘I cannot say that I never saw her. I knew by name and from some of your talk here that she was a friend of Ishbel’s.’

Jaffray continued to study me, working as he did so at something stuck in his teeth. ‘That was a good thing you did, Alexander. Neither you nor your friend Cargill will have cause to regret it. Sarah will be a good help and companion to her mistress. And,’ he added, ‘a good mother to her own child.’

Charles glanced up from his scrawling. ‘What is this? Are you speaking of women, Alexander? Mistress Youngson will have much to say.’

I laughed. ‘Mistress Youngson has always much to say. I am not convinced Gilbert Grant has not perfect hearing, but only feigns his deafness.’

‘Without question he feigns it,’ rejoined Jaffray.

As Charles returned to his composing, the doctor pressed me further on my trip to Aberdeen: With whom had I met? What gossip had I heard? When I mentioned George Jamesone, his interest quickened. ‘You went to see George Jamesone. Now why was that?’

I told him of my commission to the painter from the provost. And then, with some trepidation, I relayed to him William Cargill’s concerns about my involvement with the painter and the possibility that his time in Antwerp and connection with Rubens might have led him into a relationship with Rubens’ Spanish masters. Jaffray frowned. ‘I remember Jamesone. He came to the burgh, as you know, several years ago, to paint Walter Watt and his wife. He was
a clever man, and good company, too. But I think your friend is being carried away with rumours if he fears Jamesone is a spy.’

Charles had put down his pen and was listening now. ‘Why should a painter be feared, simply because he has travelled? What can it have to do with the trouble in our town?’

Jaffray looked at me, as the one most qualified, albeit reluctantly, to speak on the matter. ‘It is to do with the maps, Charles,’ I said.

‘The maps,’ he said slowly to himself, ‘the baillie’s maps.’ He looked at us, some understanding dawning. ‘When I was in the tolbooth, the baillie was asking me night and day about maps – what did I know of maps? Had Patrick Davidson spoken of maps? Had I seen any maps in our chamber? What had Marion to do with the maps? And yet he would not tell me anything about them. I truly did not know what he was asking me about, though after dwelling on it a while – I had much time for thinking – supposed he must have found some maps amongst Patrick’s belongings.’

‘He did,’ I said. ‘It was not simply that Patrick Davidson possessed maps, but that they were of this part of the land, from the sea coast as far as Strathbogie, with markings for Elgin, Turriff, and Aberdeen. They were in Davidson’s own hand. It is likely that they were drawn, or at least rough sketches drawn, on his gathering expeditions with Marion. Some of the further away ones may have been done – probably were, in fact – before he reached here.’

Charles looked up at me with an air of resignation. ‘So that is why they were away so often and so long. I did not think it was the season for many plants, yet I know so little
of flowers and their seasons I did not question it, for fear of showing my ignorance. For fear of shutting myself further out of their bond.’ He looked away. ‘Then Marion must have known of these maps. Do you think perhaps that is why she too was killed? But why should anyone fear a map, kill for a map?’

Jaffray shook his head. ‘Oh, Charles. You are too innocent. The rest of the country sees invaders on every wave, with their books and their bells and their beads.’

‘Papists?’

‘Aye, papists,’ the doctor answered, ‘if it suits them so to be, as pretext for overrunning our country and overturning our church.’

‘I had not thought you so fervent for religion, doctor.’ There was no sarcasm, no sly humour in Charles’s observation. Just a statement of fact, which was daily evident.