‘It was what you found in Robert Sim’s room and brought home to this house in your pockets. The Mason Word.’ Her eyes were beseeching me to understand, but still I could not.
She drew some water for herself and continued. ‘Andrew Carmichael mentioned to me once, in that time when you were away in Ireland and he started coming to William’s house, that his father had been a stonemason. It was a passing remark, and in truth I think he wished he had never made it, for he was less inclined to speak of his family than I was of mine.’
Sarah’s own parents had died of a fever when she was no more than five years old, and she had been brought up by her mother’s sister, a poor, weak woman who could not stand up to a cruel and brutish husband. I had more than once thought that everything she did in her determination to make our family the best that it could be was done in an effort to erase the scars her own childhood had left, and to heal the wounds she had suffered when she had become a woman. And this, indeed, was the point to which this conversation was taking her. She had been sent from what passed for her home into service in Banff, in the house of a master stonemason, a drunken and violent man who had taken her against her will and who was Zander’s natural father.
‘When George Burnett was very drunk,’ she went on, ‘sometimes he used to frighten me with tales of what happened in their masons’ lodge, of how apprentices seeking to be made masons would be scared half out of their wits into keeping their secrets. He would describe the horrible trials, the humiliations they would be put through – he would threaten to do the same to me. And once, when I was trying to fight him off, he gripped hold of me – his face was contorted with malice – and he whispered in my ear the Mason Word. And then he told me the punishment for any who revealed it.’ She shook her head. ‘I will not tell you. He thought to control me that way, with fear.’
She came over to me and I could see in her face the pain of remembering things she had fought for five years to forget. ‘When you came home from Robert Sim’s lodgings with the Mason Word in your pocket, after what had happened to him …’ Her voice broke off and she rubbed the heel of her hand over her eye. ‘I was in a terror at what you had begun to meddle in, and at what might happen to you. I could not think where to go for help. I could not go to the stonemasons and reveal what you now knew, for fear of where that might lead, and I could not think where else to turn. But then I remembered what Andrew Carmichael had told me, so long ago, and so I went to him.’
‘But to what purpose, Sarah?’
‘I wanted him to talk you out of continuing down this path, to leave off this search into Robert’s past, and let the baillies find what they might. Robert is beyond your help now, and I do not care a jot for the name of the college – Dr Dun had no right to ask this of you. I wanted him to explain to you the dangers in which you enmesh yourself, for I knew you would not pay any heed to me.’
Sarah was not a woman to let her mind be overrun with groundless fears, and I could not question what she had learned at the hands of George Burnett. And Andrew Carmichael had mentioned his father to me too, as we had admired the sundial in Dr Dun’s garden. But there was one thing yet that none of this could explain.
‘Sarah, I saw him rest his hand on your neck and with the other stroke your face.’
She cast her eyes down to her hands, and then up to me again. ‘I know; he should not have done that. I had been weeping. He put his arm around me to comfort me, to reassure me. And then for a moment, just a moment, he lifted his hand and stroked my face. I knew he should not have done it and so did he.’ She looked away. ‘It will never happen again.’
I sank my head in my hands and she rose and went quietly up the stairs to bed.
*
The grave had not been deep, there had been deeper graves. He had looked into deeper graves and wished with every fibre of himself that he could wrench the shrouded corpse from it and breathe life into it once more. But not this one, not this last grave. There had been no shroud and the blood had been warm and wet on his fingers as he had dragged the stone across it.
The other graves had upon them names. His own name, twice. Twice he had watched and mourned as his own name, chiselled into stone, had been set above the clods of dirt and the cold corpse. The dates, the mason’s marks telling the truth, and the lies, of his life. A hammer, a chisel, a square, a skull. Beneath them the bones of those he had loved. But this last grave, most sacred of all the masons’ graves, bore no marks, and it was empty now. In the whisper of the wind, he thought he could almost hear soft footfalls on the ground as the shades of the dead rose to pursue him to his own earthly tomb.
FIFTEEN
Crathes
The next morning, Dr Dun readily agreed to my absence from the college, and from the town, for the next two days, and furnished me with a letter to present at Crathes Castle, in the expectation that I would gain an audience with Sir Thomas Burnett.
‘You may be right,’ he said. ‘The heart of this thing may lie with the weaver, and not in the town at all. I spoke privately with the sheriff last night, and I do not believe the law will pursue the matter of Cummins’s death to Crathes – the town’s officers are convinced they have the killer here, in the tolbooth or outside of it, but they have no interest in looking further afield than this burgh. They have sent Cummins’s clothing and papers to his sister, but do not intend to seek her out themselves. I have said nothing to anyone outside the college about Malcolm Urquhart.’
It was when the dead weaver’s landlady had been telling me about his childhood home, and the patronage of Sir Thomas Burnett of Leys, laird of Crathes Castle, that I had remembered that Malcolm Urquhart, the student who had fled past me down the library stairs on the day of Robert Sim’s death, also came from Crathes. The boy’s subsequent disappearance from the college would allow me to pursue my investigations there without raising undue notice.
‘I have written to the laird on the matter of young Urquhart, and you can rely on his hospitality and assistance. You will have little difficulty in your dealings with the boy’s older brother: Patrick Urquhart is a quiet-living, honest man whose gifts should have taken him further than a parish schoolroom. He should have had a glittering career abroad, but was called back after only a year to bring up his younger brother after the deaths of their parents. And now see how that younger brother has disgraced him.’ The principal’s voice was bitter; little angered him so much as wasted talent.
It was not yet nine when I set off out of town across the Den burn and down the Hard Ward towards Rubislaw and the road that would take me, in time, to Crathes. I did not want to be away from Sarah just now. I had waited, the previous evening, until I was certain that she was asleep, before finally going upstairs and getting into bed. I had held her to me through the night and slipped quietly from the bed early in the morning, leaving her only a brief note about where I planned to go today.
The walk was pleasing, and aside from the occasional stop by a burn to refresh myself, nothing hindered me on my way. It was early in the afternoon when I came to Crathes. The Burnetts had clung to a boggy island fortress nearby on the Loch of Leys until the need for such places was long past, but in the last century the lairds had built for themselves this stately house, a tall tower of stout walls and few windows built storey upon storey towards the heavens, and capped with towers and turrets there as much for whim and fancy as to defend against the hostility of neighbours. I wondered about the many stonemasons who must have worked on it, men who must have lived in humble lodges such as that we had found at the bottom of the Middletons’ garden, and yet could partake of the vision, comprehend the geometry, make real the designs of the finest of architects, to produce such places as this. Forty years since Crathes had been completed. The masons who had worked on it, like the lairds for whom they had toiled, were probably all dead by now.
Men, women and children were busy at their labours as I passed the brewhouse and bakehouse, and few paid any heed to me as I went to the front door of
the castle, a small, arched entry set into the thick wall. I took Dr Dun’s letter to Thomas Burnett from my satchel and rapped three times on the door. The man who answered was, I saw, well-armed.
‘Yes?’
‘My name is Alexander Seaton. I am here upon the business of the Marischal College of Aberdeen and would seek an audience with Sir Thomas.’
He sniffed, before standing aside to let me through, taking care to bolt the door again behind me. ‘You and half the country round. Today is court day and you will have to wait your turn. Sir Thomas is in the Long Gallery. Stand a moment.’ I did so, and was not altogether pleased to find myself being searched. The guard indicated the knife at my belt. ‘I’ll have that and you can get it when you leave.’
I covered the handle with my hand. ‘I am a teacher, not an assassin. I bear nothing more threatening to Sir Thomas than letters from Principal Dun.’
The fellow was unimpressed. ‘So you say, and that may indeed be the case, although you do not look altogether like a teacher,’ he said, surveying for a moment the scars on my forehead and at my neck, ‘but that place is full of picklocks, swindlers and drunkards, who might take their chances at flight if they thought they could get their hands on a pistol or a blade. You’ll hand over your weapon or you’ll not take another step inside this house.’
I held up my hands and allowed him to take the knife. He gave me another doubtful look and then told me to go up the stairs in front of him. I ascended the narrow stone turnpike as it twisted for several storeys, passing doorways, all closed, all silent.
At last we reached the top and I was standing in the Long Gallery, and the barony court of Burnett of Leys. The gallery ran the length of the top of the house, and was well lit by tall windows at either end and down the southern side of the room. At the far end, behind a heavy oak table, Sir Thomas Burnett of Leys was in the act of passing sentence on a small, scrawny man, manacled at the hands. The judgment pronounced, the fellow was shuffled past us, a bitter look on his scabrous face, to spend a night in the castle jail before being transported the next day to the stocks in Banchory. As the stair door closed behind the offender and his guards, Sir Thomas stood up and stretched back his arms, letting out a great sigh. I had seen him before, of course, riding through town, at graduations and assemblies at the King’s College, and from time to time, at divine service in St Nicholas Kirk, but had met him only once. He must have been about fifty years of age but looked, despite his fatigue at this point in a long day, to be a man full of health and vigour. He was soberly dressed, in a fashion even the most vehement of our ministers could not take exception to, but all the same a man completely in place with the grandeur of his surroundings. Sir Thomas Burnett did not need to prove his standing to anyone.
The laird looked up as the door of the gallery closed behind the thief and his attendants. ‘Well, Robert, is this another recalcitrant you have brought to me – I had thought we were finished.’
‘I couldn’t say for myself, sir: he claims to be a teacher in the new college, but you may judge for yourself.’
I stepped out of the shadow of the doorway and a broad grin swept the laird’s face. ‘That’s all right, Robert, you may leave Mr Seaton here with me, I think I’ll be safe enough.’
The guard grumbled and he set off down the stairs again. ‘Aye, well sir, if you’re certain, but I’ll just hold on to his knife.’
The laird gestured to a chair across the broad oak table from where he himself had been sitting. ‘Take a seat, Mr Seaton. I’ll be with you in a minute.’ He checked the entries his secretary had made in the court book and then shook his head. ‘Time and again, the same faces, the same crimes. And yet we must labour, must we not, Mr Seaton?’
It pleased me that he should remember me from the one time we had met at Dr Forbes’s house, in Old Aberdeen.
When he had finished putting his papers in order, and after dismissing his secretary, Sir Thomas turned his attention once more to me. ‘You are here on the business of the college, no doubt?’
‘I am, sir,’ I said, and handed him the letter from Dr Dun. As he scanned the contents, the face that had greeted me in so friendly a manner only a few minutes ago became grave. ‘I see you are not here to bring me any better news from the town than I have already had today.’ He glanced at the clock on the mantel-shelf. ‘I have no doubt that Malcolm Urquhart will have sought refuge with his brother in the schoolhouse at Banchory, but Patrick will be at his duties in the school another four hours yet. If Dr Dun can spare you, you’ll have my hospitality tonight, and I’ll send word for the pair to come here when the school is done with for the day.’
‘Dr Dun will spare me, and I thank you for your kindness, but I fear Malcolm Urquhart will abscond again if forewarned of my presence here.’
The laird shook his head. ‘Malcolm Urquhart will go nowhere, for he has nowhere left to go.’ He appeared to consider this a moment. ‘But if it makes you more easy I will see to it that my message is delivered to Patrick, and not to his younger brother.’
I thanked him.
‘Now, I have not eaten since I left Dunottar, and I’ll wager you could manage a bite yourself after your journey here. Did you ride, or come on foot?’
‘On foot. It was a fine morning, and I had not the time to arrange for a horse.’
‘Then surely, you are famished! Come down with me and we will get them to feed us.’
Sir Thomas led the way through a different door from that I had come in by, and down another spiralling set of stairs. I remarked upon the silence of the house, and he told me that his wife and children were away. ‘And I am truly glad of your company, Mr Seaton, for I received some dreadful news today.’
The room into which he led me was a room in which a man might make himself comfortable. It was a small hall with a broad flagstone floor and a high arched plasterwork ceiling. The chimney piece was simple, but the fire that burned within it gave off a welcome heat, for little sunlight made its way into the place despite the warmth of the day outside. It was a plain room, I thought, for a house I had heard of as a delight to the mind and senses, but in the whirl of duties and responsibilities Sir Thomas faced, a plain room perhaps afforded his mind the quiet it required.
He pulled a sash above the fireplace and very quickly a young girl appeared in a doorway. ‘Bring some meat and drink for myself and Mr Seaton, will you, for we are both half-starved.’ She bobbed her head and turned to leave. ‘Oh, and Mary?’
‘Yes, sir?’
‘How is Marjorie Cummins?’
‘The housekeeper has sent her to her bed, Sir Thomas. She is not fit for work today.’
‘No,’ he nodded. ‘She will not be.’
Once the girl had gone, and we had taken our seats at either side of the fire, the laird said to me, ‘The brother of one of my servants, a young man in whose life I took some interest and for whom I had great hopes, was murdered in Aberdeen the night before last.’
‘Bernard Cummins, the weaver,’ I said.
He looked up from the coals he’d begun to rake at. ‘The news did not take long to travel the town.’
‘Such news seldom takes long to travel, but’ – I took a breath, not sure how he should take my role in the thing – ‘I did not need anyone to tell me of this; I was amongst those who discovered his body.’
The laird exhaled slowly as he held me with his gaze. It was a gaze under which I could not have sat comfortable for long. ‘And this then is why Patrick Dun has sent you to Crathes this day.’
‘Not only this …’
‘Do not try and tell me that with little more than a week until the graduations the Marischal College can spare its most able regent for two days over an absconded student. I suspect it was not really Malcolm Urquhart, but the other matter that brought you here to Crathes.’
‘I fear the one will be shown in time to be entangled with the other.’
At that moment, the girl returned with our food, and only once seated at table did o
ur conversation resume.
‘Tell me what you know, Mr Seaton. I counsel you to search your heart that you leave nothing out.’
And so I told him of the death of Robert Sim and of Malcolm Urquhart’s flight from the college after arguing with him in the library. I told him how my investigation of Robert’s death, coupled with rumours William had heard around the burgh courts, had led me to the Middletons’ house. I told him of Rachel’s frantic call for help in the night, and of Matthew Jack, my disgraced fellow regent’s attack on her husband. And then I told him of the discovery, in the Middletons’ garden, of the body of Bernard Cummins. Finally, I told him of the last entry Robert Sim had made in the Trades’ Benefaction Book, on the day of his death. What I did not tell him, in spite of his injunction, was of the lodge, or the secret fraternity that had met there. Something of the fears of John Innes, and of my own wife, had begun to take hold in me, and I realised that no more than Sarah did I want my researches into the masons’ lodge in Aberdeen to become widely known.
‘And what, precisely, did the entry in the Trades’ Book say?’
‘It was simply a record of Cummins’s first contribution to the guild benefaction—’
The laird cut me short. ‘I did not ask what it was, Mr Seaton. I asked what precisely it said. What were the words?’
I thought for a moment, pictured the page from the ledger in my mind’s eye. ‘It said, “From Bernard Cummins, weaver, lately returned from the Low Countries, four shillings and six pennies to the box.” That was it, that was all.’
‘And yet perhaps that was enough,’ said the laird. ‘If I had never called Bernard home …’ He paused.
‘It was you who called him back to Scotland?’
‘Aye, and I who sent him to the Netherlands in the first place. He was a good lad, an able lad, from the time he could walk and talk. His gifts were not of an academic nature, but from an early age he showed himself adept with a bit of yarn or a needle. It was evident to me that he should be apprenticed to a weaver, which he was, here, for a while, and as soon as he was old enough to leave his mother, I had my brother find a place for him in the Netherlands, where he could hone his skills to something finer than can be got here in Scotland.’
Seaton 03 - Crucible of Secrets Page 13