Seaton 03 - Crucible of Secrets

by S. G. MacLean

  ‘He was.’

  ‘And now you tell me that Matthew Jack is in the tolbooth, on suspicion of the murder of Bernard Cummins?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Bernard Cummins whose body was found in a grave in a garden belonging to the the man whom Jack has been proclaiming to have been involved in secret societies, alchemy, the pursuit of – what should I call it? – dark magic.’

  Patrick Urquhart groaned. ‘Oh, God.’

  ‘You neglected to tell me, Mr Seaton, that Rachel Middleton was the sister of the stonemason Hugh Wardlaw and that Bernard Cummins’s body was found at the door of the masons’ lodge.’

  I looked across at Patrick Urquhart who now had his head in his hands, and I knew what I should have guessed sooner: the identity of the final member of Robert Sim’s fraternity.

  Within an hour Thomas Burnett had been told more than I knew myself of the Rosicrucian fraternity that had gathered at the lodge in Aberdeen and who had begun trying to unravel the secrets of the masons who had occupied it before them. With greater coherence than either John Innes or Richard Middleton had been able to use, Patrick Urquhart had related for me the role of each of the four in pursuing the ends of their brotherhood. He himself had instructed the others in the intricacies of mathematics, the functions and possibilities of geometry, the dangerous, tantalising assertions of an astronomy that with Kepler, Copernicus and Brahe challenged to the point of annihilation the old certainties of Ptolemy, Aristotle and others. As I knew already, Richard Middleton had pursued the ends of the Swiss physician Paracelsus, in progressing from new methods of diagnosis and treatment of the ill to a deeper study of the alchemy that was medicine; Urquhart confirmed that Middleton had not been greatly interested in travelling further down the road of many other alchemists in seeking that ultimate repository of knowledge, the Philosopher’s Stone. Robert Sim’s special interest had of course been in the books.

  Urquhart had relaxed a little and was warming to his theme. ‘Robert tracked down the books. Occasionally, something of interest would come into the library’s possession through a benefaction, or with money at the college’s disposal, and Robert would bring it to our gatherings and see to it that no notice was taken of its absence from the library. He made it possible for us to purchase books ourselves occasionally – books that might have aroused suspicion had we bought them publicly, as individuals. Few booksellers would question the requests of the librarian of the Marischal College.’

  ‘Had he found anything of interest lately, mentioned anything he was expecting to arrive in the college?’ I wondered.

  Urquhart shook his head. ‘Nothing. Although there was something Richard Middleton had asked him to try to find, but I am certain he had ordered that through Melville, the bookseller – it was not something he had in the library.’

  ‘Can you remember what it was?’

  ‘I wish I had paid more attention. But the book was not something to assist us in our studies; rather it was something Richard thought might help John, cool him a little.’

  The laird interjected. ‘John Innes? Why should he need “cooling”?’

  Urquhart shifted a little uncomfortably. ‘Because he had been taking things too far. His enthusiasms were becoming dangerous for us and for himself, and were in danger of drawing attention upon our studies.’

  I chose my words carefully. ‘He took a special interest in the Cabbala, the guidance of angels, did he not?’

  ‘Yes, and who is to say there is not a place for that? For myself it holds no interest, but John wished to delve further and further into things esoteric. Where Richard, Robert and I sought knowledge, John sought secrets. He believed every word of the Rosicrucian myth, and was becoming more and more obsessed, unsettled, by his pursuit of their “secrets”. Richard had promised to show him that a myth was all it was; there was a work he knew of in the Czech language that he had been trying to obtain, to translate for John.’

  I remembered John the last time I had seen him – distracted, rambling, terrified, mad – and I could feel a real anger rising within me, for there had been no guiding angel in that shuttered rank room from which he’d pushed me, none with him but some handmaid of the Devil that these studies had called forth. I had to push down bile, the anger in my voice, before I could continue.

  ‘And you do not know that Robert had managed to obtain it, this book of which Richard Middleton spoke?’

  ‘I never heard that he did,’ said Urquhart. He was tired now, weary of talking, but the laird had not finished with him yet.

  ‘Tell me this, Patrick, how much of the knowledge, of the secrets of the masons did your brotherhood unravel from what you found in their lodge?’

  ‘Little, very little. We educated ourselves in the art of memory, but I am not interested in their secrets. What I would learn is their knowledge, what ancient knowledge they have of the geometry that frames our world. For that, I would give much.’

  ‘Perhaps Robert Sim did,’ I said.

  ‘Did what?’

  ‘Give much. Perhaps he gave all.’

  SEVENTEEN

  The Talk of the Town

  I had lain, sleepless, thinking of Sarah through the few dark hours of the night at Crathes, filled with anxiety that what I had damaged between us could not be repaired. Being away from her could only make things worse, and I was up at first light and on the road back to Aberdeen before five.

  It was another day of hazy heat, and I was a sorry sight of dust and sweat by the time I tramped in to the courtyard of my own house. I heard my daughter before I saw her, squealing as she chased a butterfly from honeysuckle to rose and failed to catch it. Seeing me, she stretched out her arms and as I bent to lift her I heard a sound that had been absent from our home too long – the sound of Sarah’s laughter. I held the baby to me. ‘Who is it, my pet? Who is in the house?’

  ‘Jaffy,’ she said, wriggling down after the butterfly once more.

  She repeated the name and my heart lifted as I straightened myself to be greeted at the door of my home by my oldest and dearest friend, Dr James Jaffray. In a moment he had me in his ursine embrace before holding me away from him to cast his eyes over me.

  ‘Tell me, Sarah, have you been feeding this fellow at all? He is a more scrawny sack of bones than many I have closed the eyes on. Though you are little better yourself. And tell me, does the sun never shine on this wretched town? I don’t know which of you is the more deathly of pallor. To think that I thought to make a holiday of this jaunt, and now I see I will spend the whole time tending to the sick and sickening.’

  ‘I had not thought to find you here, Doctor,’ I said when at length I managed to get in to the house. ‘The graduations are not until next week, and we had not looked for you until then.’

  He raised an eyebrow. ‘Well, there’s a fine welcome to ease my weary bones. It is fortunate indeed that I am staying with William Cargill, where at least I will be made welcome.’

  ‘You are welcome here, James. You know that. Always.’

  ‘Aye, I know that, but William has the room for me, my boy, and you do not. And you are right: I had not planned to come to town for a week yet, but there has been an outbreak of good health in Banff and I thought I would get out of the place before it came to an end.’

  ‘Then I am glad to see you. When did you arrive?’

  ‘Late last night. I came round here early this morning, hoping to find you at your breakfast, and Sarah has been kind enough to put up with me since then.’

  ‘There is no kindness in it, Doctor,’ she said. ‘We miss your company as no other’s. But I must go to Elizabeth’s now, to help her begin planning for Monday night.’

  ‘What is happening on Monday night?’ I asked.

  Still she didn’t look at me. ‘William is giving a dinner to welcome the doctor back to the burgh. We are invited, and others too.’ She lifted a clean apron from the back of the door and went quickly past me to gather Deirdre from the yard.

  The doct
or was the first to break the silence. ‘And so, Alexander, are you going to tell me what is the matter here, or am I to go out after your wife and ask her in the street?’

  ‘The matter? It is nothing. It is …’ I saw that would not do it. ‘Och, just that I have been away too much on college business, and she does not like the nature of it. It will pass.’

  I turned away from him to look for a clean shirt in the press by the door. When I turned back, he was still watching me. ‘Do you think to fool me with such nonsense? Do you think I have not known you since the day I first skelped your backside and handed you to your poor, exhausted mother? You could never carry off a lie, Alexander Seaton. Do not seek to do it now.’

  I opened my mouth but he held up a finger to silence me. ‘I did not come fifty miles on the back of an old horse to hear the first story to come into your head. I came because William Cargill wrote to me three days ago, saying that you had had a lapse into your old ways and would not be helped, and that Principal Dun himself had fears for your health.’ He laid a clenched fist on the mantelpiece. ‘I will not see you fall again as you did before. You will tell me what is the cause of this concern, and why your wife looks ill near to collapse.’

  ‘Sarah?’

  ‘Who else, man?’

  ‘But she is not ill.’

  ‘Not ill? Did you even look at her?’ His angry frustration became something else, and his voice which had been rising, became softer. ‘No, I know you did not, no more than she did at you. Alexander, what has happened between the pair of you? Is it something to do with the child?’

  ‘The child?’ I looked at him, surprised. ‘Do you mean Zander or Deirdre?’

  ‘I mean the one she is carrying just now,’ he said quietly, his eyes never leaving my face.

  I looked at him, stupefied. And then it was a moment before the roar within my own head subsided enough that I could hear his words, for they had begun to enter my mind before they had left his mouth. I clattered against the table and knocked over a stool as I rushed for the door, just in time, to vomit in the yard. I retched until there was nothing, beyond nothing, left inside, and slumped down the wall, crushing the honeysuckle that grew there. In time, I felt the strong, familiar hand on my shoulder and accepted the ladle of cool water the doctor held to my mouth.

  ‘You did not know,’ he said flatly.

  I shook my head.

  ‘She is near enough four months gone, I would say.’

  ‘She told you?’

  He sat down beside me, avoiding the pool of vomit. ‘Oh, not in so many words. But I know a woman with child when I see one. I had been about to ask her outright when you arrived in the yard.’ He offered me his wetted handkerchief. ‘This is not as you were when you heard that she was carrying Deirdre, or the next one, that she lost. I never saw a man with greater joy or love in his eye than in those days, and I do not see that now.’

  I said nothing, but looked at the ground.

  ‘You cannot think it is another man’s child that she carries.’

  His words twisted whatever was left inside me. I tried to speak but my heart was racing and I found I could scarcely breathe.

  He gripped my arm again. ‘Hold steady, hold steady, it will pass. Now take a breath with me. Are you listening to me? Good. Take a breath with me.’

  When he was satisfied that my crisis had passed, he gave me another drink and then lifted me to my feet.

  ‘Let us go back into the house,’ he said, and I let him lead me through my own door and sit me in my own chair, as if I were some sick child or aged soul who could not shift for itself. He drew his own chair close to mine and studied my face. ‘Tell my why you think this terrible thing, boy.’

  And so I told him of the scene I had witnessed between Sarah and Carmichael at the Snow Kirk, and what her explanation had been. I told him too of the rumours I had started to hear, a little over a year ago, of Carmichael’s attempted courtship of her before our marriage, when I had been in Ireland, and of the admission by William Cargill and indeed Sarah herself that this had been the case.

  ‘That is it?’ said the doctor.

  I nodded.

  ‘And when you returned from Ireland, how long was it before she agreed to be your wife?’

  I remembered it well. ‘Three minutes,’ I said. ‘Five, perhaps, until she stopped crying and beating me, until her rage, despair, subsided and she finally trusted herself to me.’

  ‘Three minutes, perhaps five,’ he repeated. ‘And yet you doubt, and still you doubt. Alexander, I begin to wonder if it is Sarah that you doubt.’

  I looked up at him. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘That you are a man, and a man who cannot trust a wife who has given him no cause to doubt her may have secrets of his own. Is it Katharine Hay? Do you still harbour thoughts of Katharine Hay?’

  Katharine. I had scarcely thought of her in all of this.

  My dead friend Archie’s sister. The girl I had loved with a love that had changed the course of my life, and hers. The girl I had turned my back on, in a moment of madness that had sent her hundreds of miles, a world, away. ‘No, it is not Katharine Hay. That was a lifetime ago. I would not abandon Sarah for Katharine.’

  His words came slowly. ‘No one has spoken of abandoning Sarah. What have you done, Alexander?’

  I took a sip from the beaker of water he had given me. ‘I have … it was in Ireland. It was one night, that was all. A girl that should have married my cousin. One night.’

  ‘I see. Did you love her?’

  ‘Love her? No, I do not think so. Not the Alexander Seaton that is sitting before you here. But in Ireland – no, I did not love Roisin O’Neill even there, but it was a different place, and I a different man.’

  ‘And do you hanker for it?’

  ‘No, but there are times I wish I had never seen it.’ I turned the beaker round in my hands. ‘I saw another life there, James. Another life that had no place for Sarah, for Zander, for the man who lectures in the college and reads in the kirk. I did not want it, I know that, but it is too stark a thing for me to know that while I had a choice, so did she – Sarah. She also might have chosen a different life, with a different man. And to know that he is a good and decent man as William and others never sicken of telling me, a man whose conversation is interesting and company worthwhile, makes it all the worse.’

  ‘And yet she did not choose him, you know that, don’t you?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Then tell her.’

  ‘I try. Dear God, I try, but I find I am taken over by a poison that goes from my heart to my mouth, and I can do nothing but accuse her. I will drive her to him. Perhaps – the child – perhaps I already have done.’

  He stood up abruptly and took his hat from where it lay on the table. ‘A word more of that and I will pack up her and the children and take them to him myself.’ He shook his head at me in disgust. ‘That girl has looked shame in the face and not been broken by it, she has given you everything a woman has to give – the care of one child, she has borne you another and lost a third, and by God, Alexander, I wept with you then. But I swear to God, I will be His agent in taking from you that which you do not deserve and leading it to one who does, who will cherish and care for her, if ever I hear you speak one word more against your wife.’

  In all the time I had known Jaffray, through all my worst days, he had never before raised his voice to me. Before I could muster a reply the door had banged shut behind him.

  It was early afternoon that, washed, changed, and in full control of myself, I descended the steps from the principal’s rooms and crossed the courtyard of the Marischal College.

  Dr Dun had been called out to Belhelvie, where the laird’s daughter had fallen ill with a fever, and he was not expected back until the evening time. I had left him a note, sealed, detailing what I had learned from Malcolm Urquhart at Crathes, and also what I had learned of his schoolmaster brother. I looked in briefly on my class who were being led out by John
Strachan with their bows for an afternoon at the butts. I promised him and my slightly wary looking scholars that I would return to my duties the next morning. I wanted to go to Sarah, but what I had to say to her could not be said in the midst of someone else’s kitchen. No courts sat today, so instead I turned my steps to the Castlegate and sought out William Cargill in his rooms.

  His clerk had me wait ten minutes or so while William had a deed and its copy notarised. He looked up when I entered. ‘I hear you were out at Crathes. What called you there?’

  ‘Perhaps we will talk of Crathes later. I arrived home late this morning to find Jaffray in my house.’

  William coloured, but only a little.

  ‘Your behaviour – I had never seen you like that before, Alexander, but I knew Jaffray had. I was concerned for you, and did not know where else to turn.’

  ‘I gave you cause to be, and I am sorry for it, but I will give you no such cause again.’

  ‘And is all well with you now?’

  ‘It will be. The doctor has addressed himself to my ills quite thoroughly, and shown me the remedy. There is no other who could so hold a glass up to my face and force me to look. You did well to send for him.’

  ‘Then we need talk no more about it.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good. And now,’ he said, reaching for his wine bottle and two glasses, ‘tell me what took you out to Crathes.’

  When I had finished my account he was thoughtful. ‘And so Patrick Urquhart was the fourth member of their fraternity. Why did Middleton make such a mystery of it?’

  ‘Because he was convinced that some harm would befall Urquhart if his identity became known. Hardly surprising, given what has happened to the others. But he has not fallen victim to violence, or begun to slide in to madness.’

  ‘I am glad of it, but how could he have joined in their fraternity, when they met at the lodge and he was out at Crathes?’

  ‘The minister there takes the school on alternate Saturday mornings. The children are free to play on a Saturday afternoon. That allowed Patrick to travel into town on a Friday evening and return to Banchory on the Saturday night.’