The Redemption of Alexander Seaton (36 page)

‘Oh, do not mistake me, boy. I am no zealot; no James Cardno or William Buchan, but I have my faith and I know who will judge me when the Lord sees fit to lift me from my travails here. The Kirk, though, it is more than the ministers and the session and all the fulmination from the pulpits of idiots or sainted men. The Kirk is who we are: it is our freedom, and without it, we are lost.’

I had never heard him talk in this manner before, not of the Kirk. I leaned forward further in my chair. ‘What do you mean, James?’

‘I mean that we are servile to no man. We can look at a king and know he is, like us, only a man in the face of God. Our nation will bow and scrape to no man and to no power so long as the Kirk of Scotland is by law established in this land. And that is why I would fight for it, fight against all
the Spaniards and the French the legions of Rome can send against us, and against Charles Stuart himself if need be, for without it we are not men and we have no nation.’ And then I understood what I had wondered at but never before realised: James Jaffray, who seemed in his mind to live still in the great universities and cities and towns of the Europe of his youth, could only ever have called one place home, and he had been drawn back to it as an eagle to its nest.

Charles spoke quietly, looking directly at no one. ‘Do you think there will be an invasion?’

Jaffray came to himself a little. ‘I do not know. I think it very likely though, and likely too that Walter Watt’s nephew was up to his neck in the plotting of it. What did Straloch say to it, Alexander?’

‘That the work was well done, extremely well done, and would have done very well for a foreign army landing at our shores. But he denied knowledge of any commission to Patrick Davidson or anyone else for such work, and denied any knowledge of any plots of the sort.’

‘Then he is surely cut off from his master,’ said Charles, ‘for since when did the Marquis of Huntly not plot?’

‘Indeed,’ said Jaffray. ‘But Straloch is a good, honest man. Did you not find him so, Alexander?’

It was a more difficult question than I had bargained for, or at least an honest answer was more difficult to find. ‘I think … I do not know, James. I think Huntly has some business afoot. My old friend, Matthew Lumsden, whom I met with in Old Aberdeen, is in Huntly’s retinue. He was to ride that day on business for the marquis, and Matthew is not a man you would use for diplomacy. Straloch himself rode early yesterday for Aberdeen and then Edinburgh on
Huntly’s affairs, yet I heard horsemen leave the place in the night, and I would hazard they were bound for Strathbogie. What need could there have been for night-riding, what sudden urgency but information I had brought myself?’

‘Then we must be vigilant,’ said the doctor. ‘Now though, did you get Cargill’s notebooks? For that is the matter we must attend to here. Charles …’ But Charles Thom had fallen asleep in the chair to the right of the doctor’s fire, his stomach full and his heart something less heavy. Jaffray watched him sleep for a few moments, then quietly got up and signalled me to follow him over to the table, which Ishbel had long since cleared. I laid the book out and the doctor began to examine it, turning each leaf over carefully, and marvelling in a low voice at the quality of the drawings and the insight of the annotations. We had not yet reached the page I was sure the
colchicum
was sketched upon when there came a loud knocking at the doctor’s back door. Charles Thom was startled out of his sleep, and the doctor got to his feet. In a moment Ishbel was at the parlour door; Edward Arbuthnott, the apothecary, close behind her.

‘I am sorry, doctor,’ she said, ‘I—’

‘I am not here for the doctor, but the music master,’ he said, brushing past her with little ceremony. Charles, still not fully wakened, shambled to his feet. I took a step towards him, but Arbuthnott was in front of him before me. ‘Charles Thom, for all that you owe my family, who took you in and gave you food and lodging, and for the love you bore my girl, you will sing for her, you and your scholars, at her lykewake, will you not?’

Charles blinked stupidly, not yet come to. ‘Her lykewake? Aye … aye, of course.’

The look on Jaffray’s face told what was in my mind also. ‘Edward,’ he said, ‘you cannot be thinking of—’

‘Aye, but I am.’ The apothecary was defiant. ‘Why should my girl, my only child, be put to her rest without what others so much less worthy have had? She will have a lykewake and all the town will know what it has lost.’ He turned again to Charles. ‘So you will play at it, and your scholars too?’

‘Aye,’ said Charles, sitting back down now, discomfited. ‘I will.’ The apothecary nodded briskly, satisfied, and bade us goodnight.

As the back door banged again and we heard Ishbel put the bolt up, Jaffray looked at me warily, but I said nothing. Charles looked at me, too. ‘I know you do not like them, Alexander, but it is not for the money, this time, but for Marion herself.’ We had argued often about it, I from the heart and he from the head. The lykewake, the festival of watching over the dead before they should be interred, their body making its final earthly journey as its soul began its own wanderings in the afterlife. A manifestation of how far the people were still steeped in the superstition of Romanism, if not paganism, which the Kirk would have given much to have eradicated from the burgh. But the people clung tenaciously to it. The civic authorities did not like it either, but so far they tolerated it. At the lykewake the master of the song school and his pupils would sing and play – that was where Charles made a good part of his money, and why he was loath to give it up. The council knew that if they banned their music master from performing at such gatherings, they would have to compensate him for his loss, and that they were not inclined to do.

What they did not like, and the session fulminated against
also, was the lavish entertainment laid out by the family of the deceased and the consequent over-indulgence of the mourners in sweetmeats and strong drink and substances that alter men’s minds. As the night wore on – for these celebrations were usually at night – the singing and the music would grow louder and less godly, until, when the song schoolchildren had most of them gone home, it would become utterly profane. Dancing would grow wilder, and lascivious behaviour would increase before the very eyes of the magistrates and the session. Few would be fit for their proper work the next day. Baillie Buchan and others of his ilk had fought long and hard to have the holding of lykewakes forbidden by the town, but to no avail, so far ingrained in the memories of the people were they. I would not argue with Charles about it tonight, though. ‘You must do as you think right, Charles. And I know it will not be for the money.’

‘I think I will go to my bed now,’ he said. ‘It has been a long and strange day.’

‘Take care you do not scald your feet,’ the doctor told him. ‘Ishbel will have put a warming pan in your bed. If not two, indeed, for now that you are here I should not be surprised to learn that mine is in there as well. I will be left to shift as I may without one, and no doubt freeze to death. Ah, the ingratitude of the young.’ The doctor was happy: all was once again as it should be in his life.

Charles looked a little bashful. Taking up his book of Craig’s poetry, he bade us goodnight and made his way towards the kitchen, where Ishbel would not yet have finished her night’s work.

We returned now to the table, and the examination of
James Cargill’s notebook. The script was small and neat, the Latin perfect, but the drawings themselves were of an exquisite nature, beyond perfect. I looked at them in wonder for a few moments, as my older companion silently read. A bright yet distant look was in his eyes. I had seen this look on him before. He was transported to another time, another place. Alpine meadows and the valleys of the Pyrenees. A group of young men, running, climbing with all the sureness of foot of mountain goats, and stopping, every so often, to hang on the words of their teacher, as he told them of every property, pointed out every small and fine detail, of some tiny plant or flower. ‘They were good times for you, James,’ I said.

‘Aye,’ he replied, ‘they were. But it is to the present that we must turn our eyes and our minds. You say you think you have come upon the flower?’

‘I cannot be sure, but it is the name that you told me.’ I took the book from him and then leafed through its pages until I found what I was looking for. I turned the book back towards him. ‘There,’ I said. ‘Is that it?’

He nodded slowly, his eyes keen. ‘Aye,’ he said, ‘it is.’ He traced a finger beneath the outline of the flower, and began to read out the words. ‘“Petals the grey-blue of the northern sky after it has snowed. Calyx of deep purple sepals below, small, pale green bract. Stigma and anthers yellow, the colour of straw in September. The whole forming a large goblet on a slender white stem. Basal leaves, long, dark, glossy green straps, emerging after blooms. One corm will produce 6–8 blooms on 3–5 leaves. Unlike its benign relatives, flowers not in the autumn, but the spring.” Aye, that is it, that is it; it is quite different from the other
colchicum
, you know,’ he said,
growing excited. He read on, using terms and talking of properties I did not understand, until his voice, slow and deliberate, with great emphasis, intoned, ‘“corm has the look of a small, elongated and blackened onion. Utterly and almost instantly lethal if ingested.”’ There was more, about where the plant was to be found, the difficulties of cultivation, the lack of any known beneficial medicinal use. Then words not in Latin, but in Cargill’s own native tongue and ours. ‘The Salome of all flowers: beautiful, and deadly.’ Jaffray gave a short, humourless laugh. ‘Little wonder he never married. Every beautiful woman must have called to mind for him some botanical instrument of death. But this is it, Alexander, this is the flower we seek. Through the vomit, the chicory scent could still be got in their hair.’ ‘And you have never seen it here?’

‘Never. There are perhaps some like it in appearance, in the blue at least, but the purple calyx and stigma, these I have never seen here. Have you?’ He asked the question absent-mindedly, little thinking that there could be any other than one answer. When I did not reply, he looked up from studying the book. ‘Have you seen it, Alexander?’

I hesitated. ‘I … I do not know. I do not think so. That is – I think I may have done.’ There was something, something flitting before my eyes, in my mind. A glimpse, little more, of blue, with purple, falling, falling. I searched harder. I shut my eyes against the warm golden light of the room, for it was another type of light I sought – darker, colder, more still. I tried to clear my mind of the almost inaudible breathing of the fire, the heavier intrusion of my companion, the knowledge of the life and movement in the room and the power of the sea in the darkness outside, but I could not.
The image, the memory of the image was gone, and now all I had was a construction of my own making. I opened my eyes, shaking my head in a slow frustration. ‘I am sorry, James,’ I said. ‘It is gone. Whatever I thought I remembered, it is gone.’

The look of hopefulness faded from his face to be replaced by one of disappointment. ‘Do you think it was in Banff itself, or out in the country somewhere, maybe? Was it wild, or in a garden? Do you think it might even have been in Aberdeen?’ This last suggestion lit some small flicker of possibility in my memory. Had it been in Aberdeen? Somewhere in Aberdeen? There was something that seemed to make it possible, but no. I could reach no further than that into the recesses of my mind, and then the flickering light went out.

‘No, doctor, I am sorry; there is nothing.’

‘Ah, well,’ he said, ‘maybe something will bring it back to you. With these drawings at least, we know what it is that we deal with, and that is something.’ He closed the book and again smoothed his hand over the front cover. ‘You told your friend William Cargill why we wanted these notebooks?’

‘There was no other way to explain my sudden interest in botany, and,’ I added, ‘in the way of friendship, I wanted to talk with him about the business.’

He smiled. ‘I am glad you are allowing your friends to be friends again. And what did William Cargill think of this business here? The murder, I mean, and the imprisonment of Charles.’

I looked at him. ‘He said that I should take great care. He fears for me in all this, that there are signs pointing to me, there for when people are ready to look.’

Jaffray’s eyes were steady. ‘He is right. I have thought it myself and never said it, though perhaps I should have done. And do you fear this, Alexander?’

A few weeks ago I would have said I had no more fear of what man – or, in the blackest of my days, God – could do to me. But that was no longer true. I had been out again in the world of men; I was not a thing damaged beyond use as I had for long believed. I had lost the respect of the world once and, as I saw it, the access to God also. ‘I think I would like to keep what name I have left to me, and what future too.’

‘Then you must take a great care, Alexander, that you do not lay yourself open to further danger. When you were in Aberdeen, did you tell anyone other than William Cargill of our desire to see the notebooks, or of our reason for it?’

‘I told no one.’

‘And you have shown no one the notebooks, until now?’

‘No one,’ I asserted. At Straloch I had kept them well hidden amongst the things I had taken into the house with me, having been careful not to leave them in the stables with my horse and other goods, for fear of fire. ‘Does it matter so much?’

He considered. ‘Perhaps not, but the fewer people who suspect you of drawing closer to the truth of this thing, the safer you will be.’

‘And will you show them to Arbuthnott?’ I asked.

‘It would perhaps be wiser not to. I do not think it will do him good to dwell over-much on the means of Marion’s death. But,’ he continued, ‘it may be that we have no choice, for he would have a better knowledge than either of us of the plants that grow hereabouts, and the drawings might
spark some memory in him. It was Marion though, Marion who would have known more surely than anyone where it is to be found.’