The Devil's Recruit (11 page)

‘You …?’

He sported a huge grin now. ‘Aye, at the top of the stair, in the shadows.’

I laughed, in spite of myself. ‘I knew it, I knew it.’

‘Did you, Alexander?’

I remembered now the movement that had caught my eye, the sense I had had ever since of being watched. And then I remembered what had been happening in the inn. ‘But you recruit for Ormiston all the same, chance or no?’

He shook his head again. ‘I rarely go among the recruits. This is only the second time I have returned to Scotland in fourteen years, the first that I have come here. I am with Ormiston only because I knew he was coming here, and I wanted a passage home. My mother died last year, as you know …’

‘I was sorry for it.’

‘I too, and every day has made me sorrier for the grief I gave her. I cannot do that to my father also, and have determined to see him one more time before he too passes.’

‘But why like this – in secret? No one would expect the Archie Hay who returned from the wars to be the same as he who left for them.’

He raised a sad eyebrow. ‘Wouldn’t they? But you and I would know, just how greatly he was altered, and we would mourn a second time the Archie that was gone. I do not think I could live day to day with that grief and the knowledge of it in your eyes. He will only live, as he was, in our minds if we let him lie in peace in the mud of Stadtlohn.’ He shivered against the cold, and passed me the brandy
bottle. ‘Besides, I will have enemies, enemies to my cause. I’ll be of little use to the world of espionage should my identity be revealed here.’

I could not argue with him about that. The north still crawled with Papists who took heart from the reverses of the Protestant forces in Europe since the death of the great Swedish king, Gustav Adolph, and would not scruple to tell their contacts on the continent of the resurrection of Archie Hay.

‘So what will you do?’

‘I will ride out to Delgatie in a few nights’ time, when the full moon has passed and I can do so in greater darkness. I will spend one night there with the old man, tell him whatever lies it comforts him to hear, and then I will be away with Ormiston when he has finished his recruiting, on the first favourable tide.’

I nodded, not really listening, trying to take in the fact that the friend I had thought lost was not returned for good, but would soon be gone again.

I think he guessed my thoughts, for I felt his arm around me as he continued. ‘But before then, I thought God might grant me a few hours, a few evenings, with the friend I have loved more than any other, and who knew me when I was a better man.’

The brandy flask was long empty by the time I made my way back down in to the town, more than two hours later. If there were rumours at the session of St Fittick’s about demonic goings-on in the kirkyard at Nigg, worse
might have been imagined by any unwary passer-by on the Heading Hill that night. The worst said and left in its proper place, we had moved on to Archie’s eager enquiries for news of old friends, and then, as such things must, to reminiscence of events past. Voices that had been low and measured became louder and more careless, smiles turned to laughter, memories of long-gone nights brought snatches of song. And then we had come to happy silence, and I realised that for all he had asked me about William Cargill and Elizabeth, about John Innes, Dr Jaffray and other old friends from Banff, he had asked not one question about me.

‘Archie,’ I began.

‘Yes?’

‘Two days ago, at the quayside, when the lads from the school were down looking at the ship …’

His eyes softened. ‘I met your son.’

‘He is … his mother, my wife …’ I did not know how to say it.

He put a hand on mine. ‘I know about Katharine. I know what happened to you both. May God forgive me, and I have often prayed that you, and she, might, but I knew, when I decided never to go back to Delgatie, that what we three had dreamed of could not be. You lost my sister, and much else besides, and I knew it would be so, and I sit before you now and tell you that I am sorrier for that than almost anything else I have done.’

He did not ask, directly, my forgiveness. On this hill,
sheltered a little from the wind but not the night’s raw cold, I remembered things, feelings, faces, her face, that I had schooled myself, forced myself, over the years not to think on, to the point where they really had become just memories, nothing else. But tonight, for the first time in years, I felt the cold shock of them once more.

Archie watched me uneasily, waiting for something from me. At length I found what I thought might be the right words. ‘What happened, or did not happen, was God’s will, and what was not His will was my doing, not yours. I – I cannot speak for Katharine …’ I looked at him, but his expression remained the same and he offered me nothing, ‘but in my own life there have been …’

‘Compensations?’ he suggested.

‘No, not compensations.’ The word suggested something inferior, something that might be a palliative, go some way towards making up for what had been lost. ‘New, unforeseen directions. Blessings I could never have looked for.’

Archie nodded. ‘She is a beauty, Alexander, a rare beauty. Do not take offence, now, but if I had been here, I’ll wager I would have given you a run for her affections.’

I laughed. ‘You would have run, all right; Sarah would have seen through your wiles in moments, and what she did not see, Elizabeth Cargill would have lost no time in telling her. What she sees in me, I still do not understand.’

‘Ach, you are not the worst, I suppose.’ He hesitated. ‘And the boy?’

‘He is not mine. Sarah was a servant in the house of Gilbert Burnett in Banff.’

‘The stonemason?’

‘Yes.’

I did not need to explain further. Archie spat. ‘It is a wonder no one has murdered him by now.’

I remembered a night when a friend of ours almost had, but I would tell him of that some other time.

‘He is a fine boy though, and named for you. He will do you credit – I could see that. But your fiery dame – and I think she was near enough coming out at me with a poker tonight, for I know she saw me – has another two that clamour about her skirts, and they have the look of Seatons if ever I saw them.’

I had trouble finding my voice. ‘Will you come to the house, Archie?’

He was up on his feet before the words were fully out of my mouth. ‘Tonight?’

I laughed. ‘Not tonight, they are all abed; all except Sarah, I suspect, and she will need a deal of bringing round and explaining to first – she’s not always wont to listen at a first telling.’

‘In my experience, too many of them listen too much, and hear more than has been said. But yes, another night. I forget, you see, that others do not live as I do, and that night and day are not simply degrees of concealment.’

It was settled between us that he should come to our house at eight o’clock the following night, and then we
went our separate ways, I to my home and my watchful wife, he to his ship.

*

She was waiting, of course she was waiting. When I saw the light glow from our window as I turned in to the close, I could have cursed my stupidity. I should have taken a moment to tell her there was nothing to fear, that I knew who it was. For all I could tell, she might have sent William, or even the watch, after me. At best, she would be in that little house, frightened for my life.

She was there, at the table, and her face slumped in to her hands when she saw me.

‘Thank God.’

I went quietly to her and took her hands. The fire had been long dead in the hearth and she was chilled to the bone. ‘Sarah, I am so sorry. I should have told you.’

‘Told me what?’ she said.

‘That there was no danger. That I knew who he was and that he meant me no harm.’

She straightened herself, fully awake now. ‘The recruiting sergeant? You know him? But how can you know him?’

I took a deep breath. There was no easy way to say it, no lead-up that could prepare her. ‘Sarah, do not be frightened by what I’m about to tell you: it’s Archie.’

Her face blanched and her lips moved, but no words came out. I tightened my grip on her hand but she pulled it away. ‘It cannot be,’ she said at last, her face contorted in incomprehension, ‘It cannot.’

‘He didn’t die, Sarah. It is him, flesh and blood. No impostor. He has been so altered by the war – he chose not to come back.’

She stood up, nearly knocking over the chair on which she had been sitting. ‘No, it cannot be,’ she repeated. ‘Because then you …’ She shook her head at me, horrified almost. ‘You, and I … the children. No. You are lying. It cannot be so.’

I reached out for her but she stepped back from me as if it was I who was the spectre. ‘None of this would be.’

‘Sarah.’ I reached for her, but I did not even know if she was listening to me. ‘What would or would not have been is of no matter. None. It was God’s will and God’s purpose that I did not know. Only what
is
, now, matters.’

She stared at me, and it was a moment before I understood what I had said wrong. ‘To you, perhaps,’ she said quietly, before taking the candle and walking up the stairs.

As I sat in the darkness, in the cold stillness of the house, staring uselessly into the ashes of the dead hearth, it came to me at last what I had done: I had not told her that even had I known, in time, that Archie lived, I would have chosen her anyway. For years now, when I thought of it at all, I had believed that myself. But that was when I had believed Archie dead. Now that I knew he had lived all these years, I knew in my mind and my heart that I could not, in God’s truth, have told her that I would have chosen her.

I had held Sarah through the night, and while she had slept, eventually, I had not. In the morning, we moved uneasily around one another, our conversation stilted until I had, almost out of the blue, told her that Archie was to come to our house that night. After her initial shock and disbelief, she had asked me more questions, and by the time I left for the college she had accepted that there could be no danger in it and was, I thought, almost looking forward to meeting the man of whom I had so often spoken.

After the disruptions and revelations of the night, the last thing I wanted was to be forced to listen, five times over, to the listing of the virtuous living of five young women, to hear proofs of their competency in letters, their frugality – this a particular concern of the burgh fathers – and to examine minutely their dexterity with a needle. Dr Dun, however, would not listen to my pleas that another might be sent in my place to represent the college at the trials for Lady Rothiemay’s schoolmistress.

‘Katharine Forbes specifically requested you, Alexander.
She seems to have conceived a liking for you, and it is not an accolade she bestows lightly, I can assure you. And I, for one, am not the man to cross her.’ He cleared his throat and looked up from the papers he had been arranging on his desk. ‘
If
it was essential that you spent an evening carousing, you would have done better, I think, not to do it on the night before these trials.’

I was astounded, and could not see how he had guessed at my activities of the previous night. Then a thought struck me that chilled me. ‘Were you on the Heading Hill?’

He grimaced before replying. ‘If you think I have been amongst scholars my entire life without being able to tell when a man has spent an evening in drink, you know me very ill. But the Heading Hill?’

I opened my mouth to answer him but he held up a hand. ‘Tell me no more. What I do not know I will not be constrained to lie to the session about, but for God’s sake, Alexander,’ he put down the papers in frustration, ‘you are to be inducted as a minister of the kirk in a few weeks’ time: this is not the time to revert to the behaviour of an undergraduate.’

I bowed my head in embarrassment in the manner of just such a creature. ‘No, Sir.’

He nodded. ‘Good. Now get yourself to Baillie Lumsden’s house. Her Ladyship is not a person who likes to wait upon events – or tardy schoolmen.’

The guards at Lumsden’s door had been warned of my coming and let me pass without any great degree of examination.
The place was a warren of stairs, corridors, and inter-connecting rooms, and I had to descend by one turnpike from a floor I had reached by another before I found a servant who could tell me where to go.

When I was shown in to the Great Hall, I felt my shoulders relax and a great sense of relief spread through me to see that while the master of the house, in this instance representing the council, was already there, neither Lady Rothiemay nor her young companion, Isabella Irvine, were in sight.

Lumsden got to his feet and greeted me cheerfully. ‘So, Mr Seaton, the short straw has fallen to you. And are you an expert on spinning, the sewing of a sampler, the making of a poultice, perhaps?’

‘Her Ladyship appears to be under the impression that I am,’ I said quietly, not sure how far away the two women might be. Indeed, I had an irrational fear that she might be positioned secretly by the ‘laird’s lug’ – the hidden listening place which all the houses of the powerful had, that the master might hear what was said of him by those who paraded themselves as friends.

Lumsden smiled. ‘Never fear – you can speak freely for the minute. Lady Katharine and Isabella have gone to view George Jamesone’s garden plans. Her Ladyship has a notion for improvements at Rothiemay, and was bent on quizzing the gardener. No doubt George has held up proceedings, as he is wont to do.’

Lumsden motioned that I should take the chair opposite
his, by the huge hearth that dominated the room. The tiles were Dutch Delft, and indeed, I would have guessed that much of the furnishing in the room was of the best Dutch, or occasionally, English, craftsmanship. It was a room in which men might be comfortable – solid oak rather than the delicate yews and walnuts of his wife’s parlour across the landing; simple woodsmoke rather than the spiced pomanders that would catch in my throat after not many minutes’ exposure. The east-facing windows, looking down on to all that passed on the Guest Row, afforded very little light, and only two candles in the long room were as yet lit. It was still morning but might have been a late winter’s afternoon. I had been in this room several times before my recent encounter with Lady Rothiemay and Isabella, more often in my student days than recently, when the bailie had summoned his troublesome nephew, my good friend Matthew, and I had been persuaded along to give moral support. Matthew had been wilder, in some ways, even than Archie, although his wildness tended more to matters of religion and politics than to women and wine. There had been times, none the less, when all had come together in a dangerous mix that inevitably resulted in hot words, black eyes and burst lips. Only last night, Archie and I had laughed again at the memory of one of his fights with Matthew in which the senior student who had tried to break them up had come off worst of the three. Neither of us could remember the name of the lady whose questionable virtue had been the occasion for the fight.