Seaton 03 - Crucible of Secrets

by S. G. MacLean

  On another day I might have gone by the King’s Meadows and out past the Links to Old Aberdeen, but it was no pleasant errand I was on, and I had not the leisure to enjoy the afternoon sun as its rays sparkled like crystal on the waves chasing each other to the shore. Instead, I would take the more direct route between the two burghs, out along the Gallowgate and past Mounthooly, to ascend the Spittal hill and come down the other side on to College Bounds and the Old Town.

  It was not yet three when I crossed the Powis Brig on to the High Street of Old Aberdeen. It was quiet here, so much quieter than the New Town that I had come from. It was not a market day, so what trade there was took place in booths at the fronts of people’s houses, their gables jostling for space around the market cross. I turned off the High Street and through the archway into the King’s College. The gatekeeper hardly lifted an eyebrow to see me pass; he had held his post over twenty years, and remembered me still as a young scholar there myself, struggling to keep the misdemeanours of Archie Hay from the sight and ears of the college authorities.

  ‘A fine day, Mr Seaton.’

  ‘Aye, Geordie, a fine day.’

  I crossed the quad and sat on a bench outside the door to the common school of the college, from where I could see all comings and goings in the students’ and masters’ lodgings. Many of the students had abandoned their chambers to study and dispute with one another on the grass, while others sat talking quietly on benches. It was with some reluctance that I passed through the doorway to the round tower of Dunbar’s building and began to ascend the steps to John Innes’s chamber.

  None amongst the students I passed questioned me; from my frequent visits here, my figure was almost as well known to the scholars of King’s as it was to those of Marischal. I came to the top floor, and knocked lightly on John’s door at the far end of it. There was no reply, and I tried once more, louder this time. I heard a shuffling noise on the flagstones, and the sound of an iron bolt being drawn back. The door opened as far as the chain linking it to the jamb would allow and a voice, John’s, but low and cracked, called, ‘Who is there?’

  ‘It is me, John – Alexander. Will you let me in?’

  The chain was dropped, and the door drawn back further. I stepped carefully over the threshold and into a place more gloomy than the corridor I had just left. John’s chamber faced south, but today its one small window was shuttered fast against the bright mid-afternoon sun, and little light found its way into the room. The air inside was fusty and stale. It was a moment before I could see my friend: he was standing, hiding almost, behind the door. When he saw that it was indeed me, he pulled me further in and shut the door quickly behind me.

  ‘John,’ I said, ‘are you all right? What is the matter, man?’

  ‘Who saw you come here?’

  ‘Who? I don’t know … nobody. Everybody.’

  He sat down on his narrow bed in the far corner of the chamber and ran his hands through his thinning hair. ‘It cannot be long,’ he said. ‘It cannot be long.’

  I drew up a stool in front of him and forced him to look at me. ‘What cannot be long? John, what is this about?’

  He shook his head and continued to mutter.

  ‘John, tell me, what is it? Is it something to do with the rumpus down at the Links between the students on Saturday? Are you being blamed for it?’

  ‘The students? Hah!’ he laughed a moment, as if I were stupid, and continued to shake his head. Something in his look recalled me to the reason I had come here today in the first place. I let go the hands I had taken hold of, and sat back a little. ‘John, has this something to do with Robert Sim?’

  The name seemed to pull him back, instantly, to where we were. He lifted his head and looked directly at me now, his pale blue eyes unflinching. ‘Yes,’ he said slowly, ‘I fear it has everything to do with Robert Sim.’

  This at least cut through the awkward preliminaries. ‘Tell me what you know about Robert’s death.’

  He looked away and drew a hand across his forehead. ‘I know nothing of Robert’s death, save what I have been told: that you found him in the library close on Saturday night, with his throat cut.’

  ‘It was less a cut than a stab in the neck,’ I said, ‘but … the effect was much the same, although Principal Dun thinks he perhaps lived longer after the attack than he might otherwise have done.’

  John was hunched, and seemed to cower a little further in on himself. ‘How long …?’ he began. ‘How long do they think he might have lived?’

  ‘Twenty minutes, perhaps, little more.’

  ‘And no one heard him call out?’

  ‘No one. I doubt it would have made any difference had anyone done so in any case. So great was the loss of blood, Dr Dun thinks nothing could have been done for him.’

  ‘No,’ answered John, not seeming convinced. ‘Has his killer been found?’

  I shook my head. ‘We are scrambling in the dark. Talking of which, can I open these shutters? I can hardly see you.’ It was then, when I pulled back the shutters and let the light flood in from the window, that I saw what a truly dreadful condition John Innes was in. His hair was dishevelled, and his normally clean-shaven chin covered with what looked like two days’ stubble. His eyes, pale and watery under their sandy lashes at the best of times, were pink, from sleeplessness or weeping. The air around us, such as it was, was foul.

  ‘When did you last leave this room?’ I asked eventually.

  ‘Last night, for the Sunday service. Andrew Carmichael took my classes for me today. He told the principal I was ill.’

  ‘And does he – Carmichael – know what it is that is the matter with you?’

  ‘I told him it was grief over Robert Sim, and God knows, he was a friend and I do grieve over him.’

  ‘But there is something else, is there not? Something you are afraid of?’

  He stood up and went to the washbowl on the deal table beneath the window and splashed some water on to his face. ‘It is nothing I can tell you about, Alexander.’

  I almost laughed. ‘John? What has there ever been that you could not tell me? Am I not your friend? Have I not been your friend these seventeen years? What have you ever done in all that time that you could not tell me?’

  He said nothing for a moment, did not turn his gaze from the window.

  ‘My life has not been as yours, Alexander.’

  ‘I know that. Which one of us can say our life is as that of another? We are bound together by something more than what we have become. Surely ours is a brotherhood?’

  He turned at last, and smiled a little. ‘Yes, Alexander.’ He pressed a hand to his heart. ‘Ours is a brotherhood I will value until the last breath leaves my body. You must promise me you will not forget that.’

  ‘Of course, but …’

  ‘No, you must promise me.’

  ‘You have my promise.’

  ‘Good. That is a comfort.’ He lowered his voice. ‘But there are other brotherhoods, and …’

  He hesitated.

  ‘You and Robert Sim were in some form of brotherhood together?’ I had heard of fraternities of men, scholars, divines, in the Netherlands and in Bohemia, Germany, but never in Scotland. ‘Is there some fraternity here? In Aberdeen?’

  He turned away again, shaking his head once more, wringing his hands. ‘Forget that I spoke, Alexander. I should not have spoken.’ He looked at me again, desperation in his eyes. ‘For your own sake, forget that I spoke.’

  I started towards him. ‘No, John. I am …’ But before I understood what he was doing, he had crossed the floor and wrenched open the door.

  ‘Go!’ he shouted. ‘Go!’ He pushed me out in to the corridor and slammed the door shut once again behind me. Before I could gain my senses I heard the key turn in the lock and the bolt shot to.

  I had never seen John, meek and mild John, act in this way, never heard him talk so wildly. I stood there a few minutes, knocking, calling his name, but to no purpose – I did not hear ano
ther word or sound from the room, and in time I had to leave off and turn back towards the stairs, having learned much to alarm me, but nothing of John’s Saturday morning visit to the library and still less to help me understand the killing of Robert Sim.

  Had it been possible, I would have gone then to seek out Dr John Forbes, professor of divinity in the King’s College, and for many years mentor and friend to John and me both, but I knew he was away in Edinburgh, on business for his father, the bishop, and so there was no one here to whom I could take my concerns. I went slowly back through the quad, paying little attention to the scholars around me; so absorbed in my thoughts that I was not looking where I was going, and on turning under the archway that would take me back out to the High Street, walked right into Andrew Carmichael, sending flying the lecture notes he was carrying.

  ‘Alexander …’

  ‘Andrew … here, let me help you with these.’ We bent together to pick up the papers. ‘Geometry,’ I said. ‘Perhaps you would like to come down and give my third-year class a lesson. The finer points of Euclid seem somewhat to have eluded them.’

  He laughed. ‘And me. Were it not for these dictates of my old professors at Herborn and Franeker I fear I would be lost myself.’

  The papers, as I handed them back to him, were now somewhat dusty and in a disorder that would take him some time to sort out.

  ‘Andrew, I am truly sorry. I was not paying proper attention to where I was going.’

  ‘You do seem somewhat distracted.’ He waited, and I almost let the moment pass, so that he began to turn away. I made the decision. ‘Andrew, is there somewhere private that we might talk?’

  ‘There is my chamber, up there.’ He indicated a window in the Dunbar building.

  ‘Near to John Innes?’

  ‘Directly below him.’

  ‘Perhaps that would not be the best place today.’

  I looked back towards the quad and then out to the High Street; where there were not students there were townspeople, going about their business from booth to booth, talking with their neighbours in doorways or across dikes, hanging out linens or watching children play on the greens. There seemed nowhere where two men might talk and their conversation not be remarked and overheard. After a minute or so of us both casting around, Carmichael indicated the garden of the Mediciner’s manse. ‘I am sure Dr Dun would have no objection to our talking there.’

  Patrick Dun, my own college principal was also, through lack of personnel and as a testament to his own great experience and abilities, Mediciner of the King’s College here in Old Aberdeen, and in virtue of his position had a house and garden from the university. I agreed with Carmichael, and we had soon crossed the street and passed through the ornate iron gates in to the gardens of the Mediciner’s manse. It was a place where I had spent many happy visits since my return to Aberdeen from Banff five years ago. Dr Dun had been the very first, after my marriage to Sarah, to invite me to bring my wife and child to dine at his home, and he had made sure too that everyone knew he had done so. He might as well have stood at the market cross and proclaimed that my wife would be accepted by all in the two colleges or they would answer to him.

  Carmichael and I chose a stone bench at the end of the path between orchard and herb garden, far from the street yet far enough from the house that we would not be overheard by any in it. I knew it to be one of the principal’s favourite places, in his rare moments of rest. Roses clambered over trellises and up the wall behind us, to spill out over the bounds of the manse as if seeking their freedom, and the rays of the sun fell upon a granite dial, the craftsmanship and precision of which Dr Dun took great pride in. Carmichael stopped to admire the piece. He ran his hand over its contours, its edges and grooves. He walked around it, admiring and inspecting its various faces, examining it so closely he might have been trying to measure its angles by his eye alone. ‘The complexity is astonishing,’ he said at last, ‘the execution perfect.’

  ‘I have often admired it,’ I said, ‘but in truth, I am a poor judge of its function; I know only that it is a thing of great beauty.’

  ‘Beauty, yes,’ he murmured, ‘but beauty without function is an empty thing. The man who conceived and executed this was a master of his craft.’

  ‘Are you a student of sundials?’ I asked.

  He shook his head. ‘No, but my father was a stonemason. His was workmanship of good quality, but he never produced anything like this. This is the work of a mathematician, a true architect.’

  His words recalled me to the reason I had brought him here in the first place.

  ‘An architect,’ I echoed. ‘Like Vitruvius.’

  He took his eyes from the dial and looked at me, a little puzzled. ‘Vitruvius? Yes, perhaps so.’

  ‘Tell me, Andrew, do you teach the works of Vitruvius here?’

  He breathed out heavily and came to sit beside me. ‘A little; I teach his theories: his concept of the architect, of his place at the apogee of all the crafts, of the skills required of him, but as to the architecture itself …’

  ‘And John Innes? Does he also teach Vitruvius to his students?’

  Carmichael frowned. ‘I do not think so. John has the second class. He is too busy trying to impress upon them some semblance of knowledge of Latin and Greek. Why? What is your interest?’

  I had come this far, it would have done more to prick Andrew Carmichael’s interest should I retreat from the matter now than if I told him all that I knew.

  ‘My interest is in why John should have taken the time, on Saturday morning, to go down to the New Town and consult the works of a long-dead Roman architect in the library of the Marischal College, and never to mention to me having done so. He had been in our library on Saturday morning, but did not say a word about it down at the Links in the afternoon, when we were talking about Robert and the new books that had arrived.’

  Carmichael frowned. ‘You are right, he did not. It is strange – I have never known John Innes to dissemble, nor come anything close to it. But, you know, he is not well just now, Alexander. He has not been right since we heard of the death of Robert Sim.’

  ‘Robert’s death. That is what I need to talk to you about, for it seems to have sent John into a terror, to have driven him half-mad almost. I knew they were friendly enough together, and God knows, Robert’s death is a hellish thing, but I did not know them to be close, or to have particular connections to one another.’ I did not know how to say it. ‘Had Robert – had Robert been visiting John here of late?’

  I saw a wave of stunned comprehension pass over Carmichael’s face, followed by disgust. ‘You are asking me if there was some unnatural relation between them? My God, Alexander, I thought you were John’s friend.’

  I lowered my voice. ‘I am, and that is why I can ask you such a question, for I believe you are too. I must know why John has got himself in such a state.’

  ‘It is not over the murder of a lover, I can assure you of that. The only times I ever saw Robert Sim here it was in our own library, or at graduation feasts and the like when the student was known to him. I do not know that I ever even saw him in private conversation with John.’

  ‘And what of John? Has he behaved differently at all of late, in the last six months perhaps?’

  Carmichael plucked at some lavender from a nearby border and crushed it between his fingers.

  I offered more. ‘Has he spoken to you at all of brotherhoods, fraternities?’

  At this he gave off his crushing of the herb. ‘Yes,’ he said, animated now, ‘yes, he has. Perhaps four months ago.’ He looked again at the sundial. ‘And that would explain the Vitruvius, too.’

  I moved closer to him. ‘Slow down, you begin to lose me.’ He lifted a hand to stay me while he let the thoughts follow their paths and connect.

  ‘About four months ago, on a Friday evening, after all our duties were done and the students safely accounted for, Dr Forbes invited John and myself along with one or two others to take supper and h
ave a hand of cards with him. I was glad to go, for the nights were still long and dark and there is little enough entertainment to be had in the evenings, but John declined, citing prior arrangements. Now, as you know, John is not a man to have “prior arrangements”. I noticed that he did, occasionally, leave the college on a Friday evening and return late, but it was not my place to question him on it. Then, after several weeks, perhaps two months of this, he approached me and asked if we might speak confidentially. We went to his room and he began to talk to me about the Hermetic quest: he had become fixated on the idea that there is some secret knowledge of the ancients that will unlock for us God’s great plan of the universe, that will help us find the essence of that universe deep within ourselves, and that the discovery of this essence, this element, will lead to universal harmony, the key to solving all the problems and contentions of the world.’

  ‘The great quest of the alchemists,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. And he had been studying the works of Paracelsus.’

  ‘Which ones?’ I knew of the Swiss physician, Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, or Paracelsus as he had called himself, from long discussions by the fire of my good friend Dr Jaffray in Banff. Jaffray was a great admirer and follower of Paracelsus’ method in the diagnosis and treatment of the sick, the physical examination of the patient and the application of alchemical knowledge to the diseased element, and he enjoyed recounting tales of the contempt for authority that had seen the Swiss hounded from one university town in Europe to another, but he deplored what he and many others saw as the descent into magic of Paracelsus in his later years.

  Carmichael spread out his hands. ‘I don’t know. I believe he had begun with the medical works, but moved on.’