The Redemption of Alexander Seaton (40 page)

‘Did I speak my dreams last night? Did I call out?’ Sometimes lately, I had woken in the night at the sound of my own cry.

‘I know your dreams of old,’ she said, ‘and have banished them before.’

And it was because of some preparation such as this, I guessed, that I remembered nothing of my last stay here, less than one year ago. ‘I have no money,’ I said.

‘I look for none,’ she replied. ‘Take them, and do as I say. May God go with you.’ As I stepped out of the cavern she spoke to me for the last time. It was as if she had been considering whether to tell me or not. ‘The girl, Marion
Arbuthnott, asked me if I knew what the flower looked like, this flower that you seek. As I told you, and her, I have never seen it, but I saw a picture of it once in an old herbal, under poisons. I was able to describe it to her, for she had a good knowledge of plants and their parts, and she pictured it well. She knew it from somewhere; she had seen it. When she left here, I have a mind she was going to seek it out.’

‘She found it,’ I said, ‘and it killed her.’

The old woman nodded. ‘I feared it might, in some fashion. I believe that you too have in mind to find it. Take care that you do not follow her too soon down death’s dark passageway.’ She turned away from me and retreated into the shadows of her dwelling. I left the cavern gladly and set out for home.

It seemed a shorter journey back to Banff than that I had made yesterday. Such was my purpose I scarcely noticed the miles disappear behind me. It was not yet noon when I headed the Gallow Hill and saw set out before me the old burgh. As I descended the road into town I could see before me those blue flowers, just as Marion Arbuthnott had done, falling, falling. I could almost touch them.

FOURTEEN

The Lykewake

The door of my chamber had only just closed behind me when I heard the voice.

‘Hello, Alexander.’ I spun round and saw him sitting there, in the dim light in the corner of the room: Thomas Stewart. ‘You have been gone a long time.’

‘Not so long, really,’ I said, removing my hat but staying standing. ‘I had not expected a visitor.’

Though he smiled, his face was troubled. ‘You will be weary after your journey, but I must speak with you now. It would have been better if I had spoken before.’ There had been a strange silent watchfulness in the town as I had made my way down through it; those whose eye I had caught had not held my look, but had quickly turned away. And now I felt unaccountably frightened to see the notary sitting there in my room. The fire had not been lit for two days and all was coldness and emptiness.

‘Ask me what you will, Thomas,’ I said.

He shifted uneasily in his seat. ‘I am here on a matter of formality, Alexander, and I wish you to understand that it is the office and not the man who sits before you here. It is the only safeguard for friendships that I know.’ I understood,
now. I understood who it was that the messenger had been despatched to by the watch on my return to the burgh by the Boyndie gate less than an hour ago, and I understood that this visit augured nothing good for me. He shifted again on the bench and at length got up and began to pace the room. ‘I have come to ask you questions, yes, but to caution you too.’

‘To caution me?’

‘Yes.’ He stopped pacing and stood halfway down the room, facing me. ‘It is rumoured throughout the town that you went yesterday to Findlater and to Darkwater, and that you passed the night in the dwelling of the wise woman, the crone there. Is there truth in this?”

‘From whose mouth have you had it?’

‘From one that is not to be doubted.’

‘Then you know that it is true,’ I said.

‘I had hoped it might not be,’ he said quietly. And then he turned on me with exasperation. ‘Why must you court controversy, Alexander? Have you any idea of the dangers you expose yourself to?’

‘What? By visiting an old midwife, and sheltering a night in her cave from the fog? Would it have been better for me to have hazarded my life in the haar on the cliff tops?’

‘It would have been better for you not to have gone at all,’ he said with some vehemence.

‘Thomas,’ I said, ‘she is not a witch, but an old woman who tired of this world and its fancies and furies.’

‘Do you think it matters, Alexander, whether she indulges in the black arts or does not? In the minds of some of the townsfolk she is already condemned as a servant of Lucifer, and you by your association with her. Be she utterly without
blemish, once that idea is firmly fixed in the minds of the people there will be nothing to save her, or you. The witchhunt has broken out of the south-west and has spread to Fife. What happened here was not the end of it, only the start.’ He looked at me for a moment, making a decision. ‘Though Jaffray would never say, there are those who believe you spent your,’ he searched for words, ‘your lost days, last year, in the care of the crone.’

‘Then they are right,’ I said, ‘though I remember nothing of it.’

‘And why should that be, Alexander, if not that she cast some charm upon you, to make you forget? How then can you know what you had done, or been, those lost days?’

‘I was a man, Thomas, just a man. Not bound then to God or the Devil, but to my own self, and it is that that she tried to help me forget. Her charm failed me, I think.’

‘Then I am sorry for it. But do nothing further to kindle their suspicions.’

‘Nor their fires?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he replied grimly, ‘nor their fires.’ He was silent for a moment, but I knew he had more to say. He cleared his throat, still more uncomfortable than before. ‘I think, and I hope I may be wrong in this, and that you will forgive me for it, but I think you have it in mind to seek out for yourself the killer in our midst.’

‘You are not wrong.’

‘Can I ask your reasoning?’

I thought of Patrick Davidson, not on that last night of his life, when he had made the desperate appeal to me that I had chosen not to hear, but in all the time before that, all the weeks he had been in Banff before his death. I had never
sought out his company in all that time. I had avoided it, and would have done even had Jaffray not been away in the South. The truth, which I had determinedly turned my face from these last few days and weeks, was that the arrival of Patrick Davidson had discomfited me; for he had been what I should have aspired to be. Neither high nor base born, he had been educated and travelled far afield in pursuit of his education and his passions, proper passions. He had pursued a calling many thought beneath him for his love of it. He had been happy, kindly, well lettered and well loved. In another life, in another world, at another time, like Charles Thom, how gladly I would have called him friend. But that life and time and world had gone long before Patrick Davidson ever returned to the place of his childhood. And so I turned my face from him. To the end, I had turned from him. I was determined to be able to face him now, if not in this life, then in the next. How could I make Thomas Stewart understand this?

I could not, and I did not try. Instead, I told him what had once been a part of the truth. ‘When Charles Thom was charged and imprisoned over this murder, Jaffray and I swore we would not rest until we had him freed. Well, he is freed now, and that is enough for the doctor – he has concerns enough in the world – but I am too far in to come out now.’

The notary did not like what he heard. He began to speak slowly, deliberately. ‘Alexander, I must counsel you to leave off from this task. There are snares everywhere in this business. If you are not caught by cries of witchcraft, you may well be taken as a plotter and a spy.’

‘A spy? How so?’

‘The townsfolk may well hold Marion Arbuthnott to have been a witch, and Patrick Davidson to have been a victim
of her craft, but I think it much more like he was a spy, and she his willing helper, for it is certain if he was not involved in the one it was the other.’

‘You are wrong,’ I said. ‘He did love her.’

He looked at me sceptically, puzzled as to how I had come by such assurance. He evidently did not have the time to waste on such matters. ‘Whether he loved the girl or not is of little moment. What should concern you is that by meddling too far in his affairs you might well find yourself tainted by them.’

‘Is it the office or the man who tells me that?’ I asked.

He replied firmly, quietly. ‘It is both.’

I took flint and lit the tallow candle, for little light reached my chamber at this time of the day. I wanted to see the notary’s face. ‘Thomas, you yourself were amongst those who involved me in the matter of Patrick Davidson’s maps. How else would I have known of their existence, or of fear of plots, other than those which are constantly with us? How can you now accuse me of something that you know was none of my doing?’

‘I accuse you of nothing,’ he said, ‘but some of your encounters on your trip to Aberdeen were ill-advised.’

I could not follow him. ‘In Aberdeen I lodged with an old friend, a respected lawyer, known in this town and in this house, and to you yourself.’

He nodded. ‘William Cargill is a good man.’

I was no longer in the mood for platitudes. ‘I achieved the purposes of my visit as far as the school here is concerned, and I fulfilled the commissions on which I was sent by this town. I cannot see where the fault is to be found in that. And if it is a question of George Jamesone, the artist, then you must refer to the provost, for I—’

He cut me short. ‘It is not of the artist, or Principal Dun or Doctor Forbes or any of those citizens of whom I speak. You will not tell me, I hope, that you met with Matthew Lumsden on the business of this town?’

‘Matthew Lumsden? What is Matthew Lumsden to do with this?’

‘That is what I would have you tell me.’ Here I saw we had reached the point of the interview.

Apprehension grew within me. ‘Matthew Lumsden is my friend,’ I said. ‘He has been so for many years.’

‘Matthew Lumsden is an adherent of the Marquis of Huntly. He has raised his head and spoken too loud and too often on matters he would have been wiser to keep to himself. His opinions are known and his religious adherence guessed at. Circumstanced as you are, he is a man whose company it would be better not to keep.’

I got up and walked over to the door; I opened it. ‘He is a man who has not sold his honour for office. I will choose my own friends, Mr Notary.’

If the notary made any reply as he left, I did not hear it. As the door closed behind him, I felt I had lost a friend I had never properly valued, and I was sorry for it, but my words could not be retracted. My clothes were still damp from the journey back from Darkwater, my head was aching and I was beginning to shiver. I took the stopper from the bottle the crone had given me and drank down a mouthful of the bitter liquid. As I sank onto my bed, I realised, too late now, that Thomas Stewart should not have known my movements in Aberdeen at all.

The voice came to me as from a distant place. It entered
my dreams and called me from them.
For without cause have they hid for me their net in a pit, which without cause they have digged for my soul
. Clear and pure, the voice came closer. It was joined by other voices, many voices, solemn, low, in unison, following the words exactly. The voices were marching on me, chanting. I stumbled from my bed, covered still in the warm damp of my clothes.
But in mine adversity they rejoiced, and gathered themselves together: yea, the abjects gathered themselves together against me, and I knew it not: they did tear me and ceased not
. Closer still came the voices. My eyes not properly opened, I felt my way from my chamber and out onto the top of the stairs. Four steps down, not yet fully out of my slumber, I pressed my face to the small window set deep in the outer turnpike wall. The crowd, for it was indeed a crowd, snaked from its tail, just clearing the kirkyard gate, by way of Low Shore and the western end of the kirk, round to its head at High Shore, where it would soon pass beneath, far beneath, my window. Behind the bier, she downcast and he defiant, walked the apothecary and his wife, and at the very head, as I had known he must be, was Charles Thom. His voice, always a gift from God, stood forth alone, reaching to the Heavens:
Lord, how long wilt thou look on? Rescue my soul from their destructions, my darling from the lions
. Alone, high above them and in a quiet voice, I took up the psalm, word for word, note for note, and joined with all those other voices in the commencement of the lykewake of Marion Arbuthnott.

I had to find another stand of clothes – I could not go out in my nightshirt, yet I could scarcely remain like this. The warmth of my body from the bed had dissipated and the cold of the clothes cloyed at my every inch of skin. My
other vestments, beaten in a tub just yesterday by the maid, hung yet before the kitchen fire, sending steam still to the ceilings and rolling back down the wall. I returned to my room and brought the key down from the mantelshelf where it had lain for nine months, disturbed only by the cleaning hand of Mistress Youngson or her maid. I crouched by the bed and dragged out the kist. The lock was stiff, but gave way at the third twist of the key in my hand. I opened the lid quietly, fearful, foolishly, that I should be discovered in the act. And yet in but half an hour I would stand before many who knew me in that which I now hesitated to move from its tomb. I lifted the papers first – why should I have kept my sermon? And there beneath, pristine, made from love and worn but once, were the night-black drapes of a man of God, the cloak and suit of fine English cloth, with the velvet collar, made up for me by Banff’s finest tailor at the behest of all my kind friends here: Gilbert Grant and his wife, Jaffray, Charles, who had not two ha’pennies to rub together, and the parents of some of my scholars, who often had none. I had stood in my fine new clothing before the brethren at the Presbytery of Fordyce on that June night, and heard the laird of Delgatie pronounce my doom. Had I paid for them myself, the garments would have been long since consigned to the fire, but as I had not they had remained there, locked away in the kist beneath my bed, a hidden symbol of my fall. And tonight, in this town lost to its terror of a darkness it did not understand, gathering in a pagan farewell to a murdered girl and her unborn child, I would wear them again. It was almost fitting. I removed my sickly damp rags and began to dress.