The Fanatic (18 page)

Women as well as men are bullied, threatened with banishment to the plantations, and incarcerated because they will not speak. Mistress Janet Crawford, Mistress Margaret Kello and Mistress Anna Duncan – worthy, kenspeckle women of a Whig persuasion, known to have hosted conventicles in the past – are all brought before the Privy Council, a sign that Sharp will not rest until he has the name of the man who tried to kill him. The Chancellor, the Earl of Rothes follows in his wake, angry but also half-amused – he dislikes Sharp and is only outraged that a man should dare to shoot at a Privy Councillor. Mitchel hears how Mistress Duncan is put in fear of her life by these great men of state. When she will not admit to any knowledge of the assassination attempt, nor to any communication with ‘rebels’, they bring the public executioner into her, carrying the torture apparatus of the boots: ‘Ye hae until five o the clock tae mind whit ye hae forgotten.’ In the end, Lord Rothes saves her legs with a jest: ‘My lords, this isna guid politics. Forby, it isna proper for a gentlewoman tae wear boots.’ She is sent instead to the
Tolbooth and not released for more than five months.

And for more than five years Mitchel evades capture. Somebody, somewhere, has talked, and the name of James Mitchel, the Pentland rebel, is attached to the crime. Where does he go in these years? To Holland, some say. Others say, to Ireland, England, France. God has laid him by and does not call upon him. But still he is thirled to James Sharp by that frozen moment in the coach. Neither can forget it. Each believes that they will meet again, and that one will be the executioner of the other. Through all the affairs of kirk and state, the Archbishop nurses a cold place in his heart for the fanatic who would have killed him. In all his secret wanderings, Mitchel still dreams of levelling the pistol one more time at Sharp.

Then, one day early in 1674, Mitchel’s gaunt figure is seen at the funeral of the old minister of Pencaitland, Robert Douglas. Word reaches Sharp that his enemy is back in Edinburgh. Spies are given a close description of him. Before long, one of them comes to the Archbishop with news that such a man now keeps a stall with his wife, in Blackfriars Wynd no less, selling brandy and tobacco. Sharp, not without trepidation, and flanked by servants, finds some pretext to pass by this stall. He lingers, tries a sidelong keek at the tall man’s face, turns away abruptly when he thinks he is about to catch his eye. Five and a half years have gone by. He thought the image of those seconds in the coach was fixed forever. Is this him? He cannot be sure. He risks another glance, and this time, by coincidence, the stallkeeper raises his head at the same time. Sharp, heart pounding, makes himself stare, holding the narrowing stare of the other man, until he is as certain as he ever will be. Yes! He minds the sickening pause before the explosion of the pistol. Yes, this is the man.

He calls on his brother, Sir William Sharp, who organises a party of armed men and descends on Blackfriars Wynd before the fanatic can make his escape. But Mitchel, strangely, has not shifted. It’s as if he believes himself immune from all but the Archbishop. He is seized on 7 February, removed to the Tolbooth, and at last, so long after the event, is brought before a committee of the Council for examination.

‘Time itself,’ says
Naphtali
, ‘a great searcher and discoverer of secrets.’ Down all these years a secret world has turned. And now, James Mitchel, is the moment when you step into the glaring light.

Carlin was shivering. His tee-shirt and jumper were soaked through, the sweat like a layer of ice on his skin. He could hear his mother’s voice: ‘Ye’ll catch yer death.’ He happed the Major’s cloak tight around him, gripped the staff in his wet hand. He didn’t recognise where he was. Some unlit close, not where he had been. What, had he been sleepwalking?

It would not have been the first time. When he was twelve or thirteen, his father had been dying quietly in his parents’ bedroom. His mother, to give him peace, slept on a couch downstairs. Carlin minded waking up standing in total darkness in a room that might have been his own or any room in the house. The first time he stood still and called for help. His mother had turned on the light and he was only a couple of feet from his bed. She didn’t seem to understand his confusion. She told him he had to be quiet and not disturb his father. He was a big laddie now. After that he didn’t call for her. He’d wake on the landing, in the kitchen, on the stairs, and wait for what seemed an eternity until his eyes began to make out dim objects around him. Then he’d move gingerly, hands out in front until he found the wall, and feel his way back to his room. He’d get into bed and lie there wondering what was happening to him.

He felt like calling out now, but nobody would come. He took a single step and nearly lost his balance. He was on a slope. He began to walk down it, waving his stick like a blind man. He had to believe that if he kept going forward he would eventually get to a place he recognised.

‘
Jean, Jean!
’ Someone was calling her. A woman’s voice. Not
him
, then. He’d gone out, she was alone in the house, and the door was bolted. She had learnt to be canny about voices, though. A man could have a woman’s voice, a woman could be not just a woman. Like herself. She was not just a woman. She was all kinds of wonders.

‘
Jean, Jean!
’ There it was again. Like the start of a bairn’s rhyme.
Jean, Jean, fairy queen!
But that could not be right either. There was only one fairy queen and it wasn’t herself.

Herself? Maybe it was her own voice? It wouldn’t be the first time. He’d catch her talking to herself once in a while, and he didn’t like it. It was all right if she just haivered, but sometimes she’d slip in other things among the haivers, and a terrible anger would break on his face. Terrible, and yet feart too. She noticed that, and stored it away.

‘
Jean, Jean!
’ There was work to be done. She’d ignore the insistent calling. If she’d a mirror she could stand in front of it and when the voice came see if her lips moved. Then she’d know whether to be feart. But
he
didn’t allow mirrors. Sinful vanities. Keek in a glass and all ye see is clay,
he
said. Keek in yer soul and ye’ll mebbe see grace.

She moved around the room, a cloth in one hand, a stick in the other. Not
his
stick, with the nasty thrawn face. That was away out with him.
Her
stick was a dry old branch, peeling bark, fit only for the fire. She wiped surfaces with the cloth as she went, the table, a shelf, the arm of his chair. They were thick with stour. Bessie the servant had left and was never coming back. She couldn’t blame her. She should have gone with her herself.

The house was in a state right enough, falling apart, and there was next to no food in it. She wasn’t hungry any more. She couldn’t eat for the thought of
him
coming back.

As she shauchled round, she sang a few notes to herself.
Maybe it was a psalm, maybe it was a pagan song. She didn’t care. And with her stick she chapped the walls; the stonework around the lum, the wooden skifting at floor-level, the floorboards themselves.
Chap!
There a mystery,’ she said.
Chap!
‘There anither.’
Chap!
‘There a secret, Thomas Weir.’
Chap!
‘There a wee thing tae keep tae yersel.’

When she’d been right round the room she threw her stick in the fire. A poor, sulky thing the fire was, the wind must be in the wrong airt. She turned about suddenly, as if she had heard someone at the door, but there was no one. Then she sat down, in
his
chair, and watched as the fire, slowly at first, then greedily and with a pleasing cracking sound, consumed the branch.

Over her shoulder, over the back of the chair, came the voice again. ‘
Jean, Jean!
’ And now she knew it wasn’t her own, for the voice was quite clearly coming from behind her. She gripped the arms of the chair and pretended not to hear it. If she sat there long enough, it might go away.

When you’d no mirror you learnt to see yourself elsewhere. She’d always been good at seeing pictures in the flames. She knew she looked like the crooked stick now, because when she put her hand to her face she felt the wrinkles, the hard knots of bone beneath the broken skin. When she got into bed at night, although she never undressed completely, not now, for it was too painful to see her nakedness, she saw enough of it to know that she was crumbling and brittle.

Had she ever been different? It was hard to think on now, but she believed she had. Not bonnie perhaps, but young and strong. Oh aye, she’d been those. At Wicketshaw, the house of her youth. In those days, she had gone naked. That had been a joy. To strip in the woods at Carluke, to lie in the long grass in meadows, to feel the good earth and the sharp blades of twigs and leaves pricking and tickling your soft flesh. It was a joy, not a sin. Even now she was sure of it. It was
he
who had made it a sin, he who had made their love impure after promising her it was purity itself. As pure as God. As free from censure as God.

The byre, the bedrooms, the hidden corners of the house. She minded these places and the times he had forced himself
on her and she hated them all now. But the times they had had out of doors, they were special. She minded Thomas like a white hind in the trees, coming towards her. His thing like a mushroom on a huge stalk, straining towards her. Later she realised how like some witch rite it had been, those frantic, joyous couplings under the green canopy of birdsong. Like how a witch’s coven was supposed to be. A man with the head of a beast. A woman dancing wildly. At the time, though, it had been nothing to do with witches. It had been to do with saints.

‘
Jean, Jean, come awa noo!
’ The voice was soft, but mocking. It mocked her memories. To do with saints! What was she thinking of? She frowned. In the fire the last of the branch twisted and kinked. She unfrowned, and the branch broke and was lost among the rest of the embers.

She often wondered about things like that. Did she really have power? Did the branch obey her frown? She’d heard so many stories of women who could make spells, who could talk to the invisible world. And she knew which herbs to pick from the forest to make a cure for a child’s sickness, her mother had taught her. But were these things power, and if so what kind of power?

Sometimes when she was alone in the woods she’d think of the naked days of her youth again, and she’d seem to picture more than just herself. Other women – witches – dancing in a clearing, and a muckle black man. If she could think these things, if she had that kind of knowledge, and if she had done what she had done with her brother, ah well then, maybe she could be a witch.

After they came from Carluke to Edinburgh and she kept the school at Dalkeith, had she maybe been a witch by then? She lived alone and that was enough in some folk’s eyes. They tried to trick her. They sent a wee wifie, who pretended she came from the fairy world. ‘
Touch yer heid and taes, Jean, gie him awthin inbetween; hae whit iver thing ye list, iver mair ye shall be his!
’ She saw what their game was. She sent the wifie packing. The Dalkeith folk were jealous of her. Her neat wee schoolhouse. Her skill at spinning. Her fine, upstanding brother, the Major, that could speak so English like and was so favoured by the kirk, the army and
the city. Now that was a different kind of power, was it not?

But the wifie came again, and each time she came Jean’s spirit weakened. For she knew her brother false by then, long before anybody else suspected. Before he suspected himself, even. Because he had turned away from her. She could tell that she repulsed him. Yet he would still come to her, when he could not get what he desired elsewhere.

‘Whit is it ye want?’ she said suddenly, out loud. Her voice was shrill in the empty house. It was proof that she had not spoken before. But now the spell was broken. As soon as she spoke the other voice vanished. If it had ever been there.

Thomas would be home soon. The day was darkening and he would be expecting food. Work to be done and she hadn’t even started. There
were
some scraps of food: a bit of an old sheepshank, some carrots and kail. She could boil it all up with some barley for a broth. He would hate it, greasy and grey with the carrots floating like corpses. If he wanted to eat he’d not have any choice.

It might make him raise his hand to her. He had done it in the past and hurt her. He had had many ways to hurt her but this was the last and weakest. She liked to see him try it these days because now when the arm came up it always fell away again. Feeble, dwindling in strength. She understood why this was. He was drowning in doubt, and the doubt was becoming certainty.

She went to the window and looked out onto the roofs and walls. Their recesses and angles were fading into the gathering dark. She rubbed at the pane and saw herself distorted in its whorl, an old stick being souked down into blackness.

Into blackness, and never come back. She wished that of him. Never come back, Thomas Weir. May ye drap deid in the street. God strike ye doon. Oh she wished it, she wished it. She’d go to Hell for wishing it, if it would just give her a few months, a few weeks even, to be here alone, shut in from the world.

If she had a charm against him she would use it. But she’d none. For a witch she was fushionless. She could not keep him from coming home. But she had seen the fear in his eyes. Doubting Thomas. He was crumbling too. She had all
his secrets numbered in her heart and he could not deny them. That was power of a sort.

‘
Jean, Jean!
’ She held her breath, listened. But now when she wanted the woman’s voice, wanted whatever unknown promises the wee wifie might have for her, her hopes sank. For it was a man’s voice. He was coming up the stair. There was the sound of his heavy tread outside the door, and the dull thump of his staff against it, demanding entry.

Jackie Halkit had a huge room in an enormous flat in Great King Street, in the New Town. It was the kind of place which she could never afford to own, but just to live in it was a pleasure. She shared it with two other women and a man, splitting the exorbitant rent and the astonishingly large heating bills four ways to make the costs just about bearable. Sharing itself was not much of a burden: the flat was too big to feel crowded or oppressive. If she ever got bored of her own room (about twelve feet by ten of bedroom tastefully melting into the same amount of sitting-room, complete with open fireplace) there was the vast and comforting kitchen, the bathroom with its acres of stripped floorboards between bath, sink and toilet, and the long elegant hallway to enjoy. There was a serenity about the flat that normally never failed to relax her.

But tonight was different. She lay on her bed and the room seemed too big and empty. She was thinking of Andrew Carlin. She’d been bothered all week by thoughts of him and it was driving her mad with frustration. He kept creeping up on her … No, that wasn’t it, that was what she
expected
him to do, whereas what happened was he just kept being there. In her head. She’d be working on a manuscript and find she’d drifted away from the text in front of her and was seeing him instead. She’d be walking home and he’d be beside her. She’d wake up in the morning and he was there, in her mind.

It wasn’t sinister or scary. It was like – well, the only thing she could think of made her even more angry with herself – it was like when she’d had a crush on a boy at school. That constant turning over of chance meetings and imaginary conversations. And yet this wasn’t a crush. He wasn’t attractive to her. If she fancied anyone lately it was Hugh Hardie, an uncomplicated lightweight with a bit of money and no
hang-ups. Maybe, just maybe, she fancied Hardie. But Carlin, no, definitely not.

She tried yet again to remember when she’d last seen him, before he walked into Dawson’s. There’d been that time in Sandy Bell’s, six or seven years ago, when he’d walked her and the other girls from the class across the Meadows. He’d left them and headed off westwards. They’d all sighed and giggled relief and gone for a coffee in one of the others’ flats. Then, the next term, had he come back? He must have dropped out around then, she decided.

She didn’t fancy him, she wasn’t afraid of him, not any more. On the tour, she’d been impressed by his performance. It wasn’t like he was acting well, he seemed disdainful of the act. More that he couldn’t help himself. Or he became himself.

He’d dodged out of the end of the tour. She knew that’s what he must have done. No reason why he should have. He must know the route inside out.

He’s lost, Jackie thought. That’s it. That’s what’s on his face. It looks spooky to people because they’re on this tour through all these wynds and closes and they see this figure that’s supposed to scare them and it does scare them because it looks like he’s been wandering around there for centuries trying to find a way out. A dead man in a labyrinth without a skein of thread.

Carlin is lost. Or he’s afraid of being lost.

She sat up on the bed. She thought, I’m going to have to phone Hugh. I’m going to have to do his bloody tour again. I’m going to have to find out where Carlin goes when he gets lost.