The Redemption of Alexander Seaton (18 page)

‘It was a betrayal. And my every memory of my whole life up to that point is coloured now by the knowledge of that betrayal. There is nothing in me that is not rotten.’

William would not allow this. ‘No, I will not have it. You did what other men, worse men have done. You loved the girl and she you. God in his Providence decreed she should
not be your wife. In that at least, you may be wretched, but you are not rotten, for it was no work of yours that killed Archie and took Katharine from you.’

If this had only been so, I might have found myself a more tolerable being. But it was not so. William did not know it; no one knew it, save myself and Katharine. I had had a chance, only a chance, to hold onto the shreds of my life and to make of it something new. But I had rejected it, left it in the gutter. For, on the day of my fall at Fordyce, Katharine too had ridden from Delgatie. She had taken the finest horse left in the stables and she had ridden as no woman before her could have ridden. It availed her nothing. She could not catch her father’s party; she could not overtake him or plead my cause before the brethren as she had sworn to her mother she would do. By the time she arrived at Fordyce the kirk and kirkyard were empty and the brethren gone. She asked all about, but no one could tell her where I was or which way I had gone. Eventually, she came across a pedlar who had seen me on the road to Sandend. It did not take her long to find me then. I was on foot, and my form as well known to her as her own. We had not seen each other since that early morning in her chamber at Delgatie. How often since then I had meditated on the words, taken from the book of Proverbs and painted on the beams of that room’s ceiling: ‘If thou does labour in honesty, the labour goes, the honour bides with thee. If thou does any vice allow, the shame remains when pleasure is ago.’ The shame was burning now into me, burning my eyes so I could scarcely see. And the shame engendered in me a kind of madness, I think. There on the road she slid from her mount and took a step towards me.

‘Stay,’ I said.

‘Alexander …’

‘Come no closer. Do not come near to me.’

‘But Alexander—’

‘You know what has happened. You must know it. It is lost, all lost.’

‘But no, Alexander. No. All that is nothing to me. I love you more than life itself. I would defy God, my father, my mother, and all the legions of Hell to be with you. Alexander, I will not go. I will not marry him. I am yours. I will be yours. Alexander. We can marry and we can live, somehow.’

I was shaking my head at her, stepping back as she took another step forwards. ‘You have lost your mind.’

‘No, Alexander, but I have found my will. I will not leave you.’

She was before me, in all her pale and distracted beauty, and a troop of demons was taking hold of my mind. ‘You must leave me, Katharine, for I will not have you. You say it means nothing to you? Well, it means everything to me, and you have cost me all. All.’ All? What ‘all’ did I think there was without her? What ministry, what life did I think I would have led that did not have her in it? There was none, I knew that now. But I think, truly, in that moment I had been out of my senses, for I had turned from her and strode away, leaving her collapsed and crying in the road, the woman I had sworn to love until the day I died. Sometimes at night, when all the schoolhouse was silent save the noise of the sea at the shore, I would be kept awake by the sound of Katharine Hay’s desperate cries, as she lay weeping where I had left her, lying in the dirt on the road to Sandend. A hundred times on those nights I would have gone back to her, but she was no longer there.

And that I had told last night to William Cargill, the first living soul to hear from my lips how I had rejected the woman who had humbled and dishonoured herself for me. I wanted someone to know me for what I was. The bitterness Jaffray was always counselling me to let go of was at the root of my soul, and my soul knew what I had done.

William had sat silently for a long time after I had finished. He stoked the fire and stared into the flames. Finally he turned to me and said, ‘And yet I know you for a good man, Alexander. And this will pass. All pain will pass.’ We had said nothing further of the matter and had retired to our beds soon after, before the bell of St Nicholas struck midnight. If he could, I knew that William would take the great burden from my shoulder, and tell me I need carry it no longer, and I loved him for it. But William would never understand that should I once put down that rock, the man I had once believed myself to be would be destroyed for ever.

EIGHT

Much Business in Town

And thus I had slept through the early morning bells. I opened the window shutters and looked out. Elizabeth was in the backhand, gathering eggs from her chickens and trying, with little success, to keep the pig from trampling on the vegetable patch. She was much too small and slight for such a task, and soon the old manservant was out in the yard, bidding his mistress leave off such work, before the master should hear of it. She smiled at the chastisement and returned to her eggs.

I washed and dressed quickly, but William was long gone by the time I descended to the warmth of the kitchen. Elizabeth’s eyes were full of kindness – I saw William had told her my story – but she masked it as she could. William was a fortunate man. He had loved Elizabeth from the day he met her. He, a scholar, the son of a schoolmaster, she, a kitchen maid, the daughter of a cooper burgess. They had been promised to each other six years, while he completed his course in philosophy at the Marischal College in New Aberdeen and through all his absence at Leiden in the study of law. Neither had strayed. They had married within three months of his return from the Netherlands and now, as he had told me last night, she was carrying his child.

She regarded me with a mischievous glint in her eye. ‘You slept well, I trust, Mr Seaton. Or is this the accustomed hour of rising for the burgesses of Banff? I had heard of your slovenly ways in those parts, but would scarce have credited them.’

I laughed in return. ‘Mistress, it is the unaccustomed luxury of your linen kist that kept me at my slumbers. We simple fisher folk know but coarse blankets and howling gales in our desolate dwellings. I dreamt I had fallen amongst the luxuries of Babylon, and was loath to extricate myself from their embrace.’

Elizabeth wagged an admonishing finger at me. ‘Mistress Youngson shall know of this loose talk, and then we will see how coarse are the blankets she will find you.’ It had been in the kitchen of the old schoolhouse in Banff that William had first met the girl who would become his wife.

She bade me sit down at the table and ladled steaming porridge into a bowl before me. ‘And then you will have eggs. My hens give the finest eggs in all the town. I sing to them.’

I made to protest that the porridge would do me fine enough, and she had better need of the eggs herself. She would not hear of it. ‘You need restoring. You have got so thin and gaunt, Alexander. Please, let me care for you a little. To see you better will do me more good than all the eggs in Scotland.’

Humbled, I did not know how to respond. The kindness in her was almost more than I could face. She saw my discomfort and made light. ‘Besides, if I consume many more eggs, my child will be born with feathers.’ She chattered on about what a fat wife she would be to William, who made
her eat while she was not lying down and lie down while she did not eat. But I knew how worried he was. She had always been a pale girl, and slight, and while her pregnancy had brought a joy to her eyes, her cheeks were faded and those eyes tired. The weariness of her body, with five months of her burden yet to carry, was already evident. I thought of my friend, who had all of the promises life could afford a man in his hand, and prayed God that, if He still listened to me, He would not take them from him.

With a full stomach and a warmth of heart I had not felt in a long time, I set out on my morning’s business. My first call would be at the bookseller’s. David Melville’s shop on the Castlegate had been to me a place of greater delight than all the taverns of Aberdeen, and light though my purse now was, I set off along the street with the anticipation of a child on a holiday morning. The day was sunny and already warm. I decided to take the shorter route to the Castlegate, and avoid the noxious smells of the crafts already rising from the direction of the Netherkirkgate and Putachieside, where the tanners and dyers had been at their work several hours now. I glanced to my left at St Nicholas kirk. It rose, magnificent, dominating the skyline of the town. I had aspired, in the quiet, honest moments when ambition overtook calling, to a pulpit in that kirk. The building had been sectioned into two to allow a more fitting form of worship, now we had severed ourselves from the blandishments of Rome. But I would never preach in either kirk, East or West, now. I passed by a cobbler’s shop; through the open shutter I could see him working at the last, a fine piece of leather turning and moving in his hands. I coveted that leather – my feet were sore and my shoes almost beyond the power of the
cobblers of Banff to mend again. I had meant to buy new boots, but the money to pay for them and much else was now in the greedy hand of Sarah Forbes’s uncle in King Edward. Perhaps, before I left town, I would try one of the cheaper cobblers who worked beside the tanners near Putachieside, at the Green.

At the Castlegate, I found the door of David Melville’s bookshop open. I could smell the piles of new books and the rows of well-bound older ones before I was fully in the shop. The bookseller had his back to me, a piece of paper in his hand as he checked a row of Latin grammars on the shelf. Affixed to the inside of the shop door were lists of books for the use of the town’s schools, which all clustered around the back of St Nicholas Kirk on the Schoolhill. I ran my eye down the list for the grammar school. Editions of Cicero, Virgil, Ovid, better and newer editions than Gilbert Grant knew of or I could afford. Melville finished counting off his catechisms and turned to greet me with a furrowed brow and then a broad smile. ‘Well, if it is not Mr Seaton. I have been expecting you these last few days. You said you would be here before the end of March.’

I shook his hand. ‘We have been much busied at the grammar school. The presbytery and council make their visitation at the end of April, and Mr Grant is determined that they will have no cause for fault-finding on this occasion.’

The bookseller gave a weary sigh. ‘The presbytery and council will always find fault. That is what they are for. But they will have little cause for complaint over your books. I have here the Cicero you wanted, and the Buchanan, and this Greek grammar.’

Melville tied up my books, then turned a page in his
ledger to check the rest of my order. He went to the back wall of the shop, stacked from floor to ceiling with Bibles, and ran his finger along the shelf until he found what he was looking for. He carefully eased out a book bound in soft red leather, almost twice the size of those near it. ‘Here it is. Your good Master, Mr Gilbert Grant, asked me many months ago to find him a Bible printed large enough for his failing eyesight. And I think I have found it. I scoured the country,’ then he smiled, a little sheepish. ‘Well, at least I sent to Edinburgh, and here it is.’ I looked at the imposing volume he held out to me, the print large enough for my friend to read indeed, although I suspected every word of it was already imprinted on the old man’s heart. The bookseller was proud to have managed what he had been asked, but I was a little discomfited.

‘Mr Grant made no mention—’

Melville held up a conciliatory hand. ‘It was many months ago he asked me. He can send payment down from Banff with another courier, once he has the book in his hand. Now, for Dr Jaffray.’ I looked at the mounting pile of books on the counter and began to pity the horse that would carry me home. The bookseller went to another shelf and selected two medical textbooks which he brought over and untied for my examination. I paid Melville what he was owed for the doctor’s books and my own, and sadly declined to look at the most recent works of theology he had from Antwerp. Similarly, I shook my head to the offer of the latest tracts and pamphlets to have landed in Aberdeen from the Low Countries and the North of England. Arguments over the correct form of worship, of kneeling in kirk, of vestments and prayer books were of little interest to me now, although
I did not judge it wise to confide that to the bookseller. He pointed to the ceiling above him, to where Raban, the burgh printer, plied his trade.

‘Raban is near worn out with the thing. Dr Forbes and Dr Baron and the other ministers do not let their pens lie idle on the matter. And I fear there will be much more of it to be heard yet. Anyhow, if I cannot tempt you to join in the pamphlet war, perhaps there is something more pleasant I can show you, if you do not have it already.’ From a shelf behind him he passed me a slim volume in quarto, printed here by Raban only three years ago.
Poetical recreations of Mr Alexander Craig of Rosecraig
. I thought of Charles Thom in the darkness and squalor of the tolbooth in Banff. What good might it do him to have the volume of Craig in his hand, summoning images of clear rivers, and freedom and love to his mind? The price of the volume was reasonable. My boots could be mended one more time. I arranged with the bookseller for the delivery of my purchases to William Cargill’s house.

It was only midday, and I was not to meet with Principal Dun at the university until tomorrow. I had one more errand to perform and then the day would be mine to fill as I wished until William returned from his business. I had a letter from the provost in my pocket. It was addressed to George Jamesone, artist, New Aberdeen. I did not need to ask for directions to Jamesone’s house. It was on the Schoolhill, not five minutes from Cargill’s place on the Upperkirkgate. I retraced my route of the morning and in a short time was presenting myself at the street door of the artist’s imposing house.

I knocked loudly on the door and waited. A pretty face
appeared in the turret window two floors above me and then disappeared back into the darkness. I was still looking up when the door in front of me was opened inwards and a stern-faced old man asked me my business. He eyed me with some suspicion – I was not dressed in the usual manner of one who had business with his master, and he did not know me. He said he would fetch the mistress, and made to close the door.