There was no noise, no movement in the kitchen, save his own breathing. He went to a drawer in the kitchen table and found a knife. He lit a candle he found from the embers in the hearth and looked around the room. There was nothing in here that might not be found in any kitchen, nothing save a doctor’s bag, and he had seen enough of those. A door near the bottom of the stairs was partially ajar, and he pushed it a little further open. A figure lay in the bed, breathing steadily. He took a step in and lifted the candle a little. It was Richard Middleton, beside him an empty glass. He ran his finger around the inside and tasted: some sort of sleeping draught. Good.
He crept back out of the room and set his foot on the stair. The step gave a light creak under his foot. He stopped and listened: nothing. Another step, and then a third, making noise he knew could not be put down to the light wind rustling the branches of trees in the garden. Upstairs there was the sound of someone stirring, and her voice, tremulous at first and then crying out, louder, ‘Richard? Richard, is that you?’
In a second he had his hood up and was bounding up the stairs, three at a time. Casting aside the candle, he crashed through the door at the top and threw himself at the figure just sitting up in the bed. The woman went down with a scream beneath him, and he flung her over on her face, pushing his knee into her back as he bound her wrists behind her with one of her own stockings. Next, as she struggled and squealed beneath him, he pulled the cover from her pillow and shoved it over her head, tying it at her neck. He felt her pass out beneath him, whether from fright or lack of air he did not care. All the while he said not a word. He found the candle again and struck flint to light it. Aside from the bed in the middle of the floor and the prostrate form of the woman in it, the room was practically bare. His eyes swept over what there was to see. On the table by the window a hairbrush, a bottle of rose-water, a looking glass. Not as much as a jewel-box. But he had no time or interest for jewels in any case. He threw open the doors of the wall-press. Bare, save for one simple grey linen dress hanging there. A shawl lay over the back of a chair, a pair of shoes beneath it.
But then he saw the chest. At the other side of the bed, away from the window. A large oak chest, almost too big to fit through the door, he would have thought. But he had no need of taking it through the door, for what he sought would fit in his pocket. The key was in the lock. She could not know its contents, or she would have taken greater care. He turned the key and opened the lid. Dresses, linens, undergarments, a jewel-box. He flung them aside, sending a locket and rings from the jewel-box skidding across the floor. And there, at the bottom, at last, were the books. A man would have packed them at the top. A man with nothing to hide. He rifled through them – a book of receipts for the preparation of stock, the making of custards, the pickling of fruit and the drying of peas and beans. He tossed it aside in disgust. Something smaller – a woman’s book filled with scrawls on the uses of herbs and the preparation of simples and poultices. That too was discarded in frustration. His hand came to rest on the last thing in the chest, a small, octavo volume. He lifted it carefully, opened the ties on the cover, and there, before he saw the title, his eyes fell upon the name of Robert Sim, and a dedication written in the librarian’s own hand, a commonplace book for his love. His eyes flicked over the notes, the favoured excerpts, the copied verses. It was not here, what he sought, and yet he read on, to the last page.
It is said these words were found amongst the pages of Sir Walter Raleigh’s Bible at his death. My name will not be known, as his is known, I will not be mourned, as he was mourned, but I take comfort in these words, however small and mean my life has been, that my Redeemer shall not treat me differently from him.
And below, the librarian had copied,
Even such is Time, that takes in trust
Our youth, our joys, our all we have,
And pays us but with earth and dust;
Who in the dark and silent grave,
When we have wandered all our ways,
Shuts up the story of our days;
But from this earth, this grave, this dust,
My God shall raise me up, I trust.
What he searched for was not here, amongst these lover’s notes. He had tried to take the place of time, to ‘shut up his story’ in another man’s dark and silent grave, but he knew now that that was not his to do: God was raising that other’s shade from its grave, its dust, and it would be silent no more. He picked up the candle and went down the stairs, without bothering to close the door behind him.
TWENTY-ONE
A Visit to the Booksellers
The next morning, after lecturing them for an hour, I set my class to composition in Greek. ‘A eulogy to our founder and Maecenas, the earl Marischal, father of our current patron.’ The class groaned as I would have expected them too. ‘An exemption from dining-hall duties for a day for him whose composition I judge the best.’
This was met with more enthusiasm. ‘But who shall fill their place?’ from one of the perennial strugglers.
‘He whose composition I judge to be the worst,’ I said, before leaving them and going to seek out the principal.
Dr Dun would generally have given me leave to go out in to the town for half an hour without question, but I knew that he was determined I should not re-embark on my researches, and was not surprised that he questioned me closely as to my intentions in town, and how long I expected to be out of the college.
‘Not half an hour,’ I said. ‘I need to go down to David Melville’s for a book.’
‘Which book?’ he asked, more than a hint of suspicion in his voice.
I had not expected this level of interrogation, and mentioned the first title that came in to my head.
He raised his eyebrows. ‘Scot’s Apparatus Latinae? I would have hoped any regent in this college might have been able to struggle his way through the works of Cicero without that to hand.’
‘There are sometimes points of debate amongst the students … it is useful for settling them. My own copy is so dog-eared now. I thought to get another while they are quietly occupied …’
This seemed to satisfy the principal and he asked me to check on the college orders while I was there. Like a young scholar caught in some minor misdemeanour, it was with some relief that I left his room and descended the stairs into the relative freedom of the courtyard.
Jaffray was waiting for me out on the Broadgate, caught up in conversation with an elderly merchant of his acquaintance. I waited while they finished pronouncing their doom on my backsliding generation, then hurried the doctor along to the Castlegate.
‘Dr Dun only has your well-being at heart, Alexander,’ Jaffray said, when I complained about the principal’s new surveillance of my movements. ‘He much regrets having involved you in this business at all. Had I been here when Robert’s body was discovered, I would have counselled him against it. But I was not, alas, and now he knows for himself.’
‘Knows what?’
‘That you have not the capacity to observe matters affecting your fellow man without involving yourself in them.’
I was stunned. ‘You have spent as many years as I can remember exhorting me not to stand on the edges of the pool of life, but to immerse myself in it. How can you now criticise me for doing exactly what you have so long urged me to do?’
‘I have never said to you that it must be all or nothing. You either shun your fellow man, or entangle yourself entirely in his sufferings and his fears so that they become your own.’ He stopped and threw out his hands in exasperation. ‘For God’s sake, man, you have a wife, and a family that is growing. Your health is no longer your own to jeopardise, nor your life your own to endanger. Patrick Dun is right to pull you away from further involvement in matters that have already set you in the path of madmen and murderers. If William’s dog had not dealt with Matthew Jack as it did, Sarah might now be a widow.’
I opened my mouth to protest, but we had now reached the door of David Melville’s booksellers,
and Jaffray strode in, the unassailable victor.
Melville was just coming down the stairs from the printer’s workshop above his own premises when we entered. He smiled broadly when he saw me, and even more so when he saw Jaffray. ‘Mr Seaton. Doctor! It is a pleasure indeed to see you. You will be here for the graduations?’
‘Indeed I am. I saw Paul Ogston into the world, I will see him walk out into the estate of man with the magistrand’s cap upon his head.’
I had never doubted that Jaffray would be here to see the graduation of the Banff boy who would even now have been working with his father in the chandler’s shop of that burgh had not his natural gifts been matched by the doctor’s generosity.
Melville pointed towards the printer’s workshop. ‘Raban is railing at this new fashion for printed theses that has come across the sea to us, for all that it brings him much business. The students have him near enough run ragged with it; their dedications become ever longer and more ornate, and they will keep changing their minds.’
‘Ach, he should indulge them a while, for so will they mark their youth and their friendships, for all posterity to see.’
‘No doubt you are right, Doctor. Now, what can I do for you gentlemen today? Are you to take over from Mr Sim in library matters, Mr Seaton?’
‘That will be a matter for the council,’ I said, ‘but for the meantime, Dr Dun has asked me to check on the college’s order.’
Jaffray wandered over to a display of prints and wood-cuts, and left me to talk to the bookseller in private. As the doctor had predicted, Melville remembered exactly what both Bernard Cummins and Rachel Middleton had wanted from his shop on the day before the weaver’s death.
‘What Cummins wanted had already been ordered and paid for on his behalf by Sir Thomas Burnett of Leys.’
‘What was the book?’
‘It was not a book as such, but a set of prints in the grotesque style, sixteen of them. Jan Vredeman de Vries was the artist. I remembered them from having supplied a set a few years ago to George Jamesone. Cummins could have got them himself in Antwerp, but he feared they would be damaged should he have had to carry them home himself, so he had arranged for them to be sent here. He checked each print, professed himself satisfied, and paid to have them sent out to Crathes direct.’
‘And Rachel Middleton was in the shop all this time?’
Melville considered. ‘Most of it, and she was certainly still here after he left.’
‘Did she take an interest in what Cummins was doing, what he was looking at?’
‘None that I could see. It is unusual to have a woman in my shop, and she did not seem altogether comfortable. She spent most of her time scanning the German books on that wall there.’ Melville indicated the shelves nearest to the door. ‘She only came over to me after the weaver had left.’
‘Did she ask about him?’
‘Nothing. All she was concerned about was a book Robert Sim had ordered. I took it from that that what was being said about the town concerning her was true – for how else should she know his business with me if he had not told her? She was greatly disappointed that I did not yet have it to hand, and besought me that I would not sell it to anyone else, but send word to let her know when it arrived.’
‘What was the book?’ I asked.
Melville turned to the shelf behind him and brought down a volume, considerably weightier than the Rosicrucian Fama, its title in German. ‘Newly translated from the Czech,’ he said, handing it to me.
I read out, ‘Jan Amos Comenius, The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart.’ I had never heard of it.
‘Has she seen it?’ I asked.
‘It only came in last night, on Walter Anderson’s boat from Rotterdam.’
I glanced over to the doorway, where Jaffray was now standing to examine some of the prints by the light from outside. ‘Will you let me take it to her?’ I asked quietly.
‘She has not paid for it,’ said Melville.
I rooted in my pouch and handed him more than the book could be worth. The bookseller counted out the money he was owed and returned the rest to me.
‘What is the importance of this book, Mr Seaton?’
I had not expected his question, and scrambled in my head for an answer that might satisfy. ‘Robert had advised its purchase for the library. Why it matters to Rachel Middleton, I do not know.’ The easy lie recalled to me the other I had told less than an hour ago, and I was relieved that Melville had a copy of Scot’s Apparatus Latinae to produce on my return to the college, should I find myself questioned by Dr Dun.
‘Are you ready, James?’ I asked when my purchases and enquiries were complete.
‘A moment,’ he said, holding up a finger, ‘a moment. I have a fancy for something new to look at while I contemplate the pleasures of old age.’
‘Not a medical tract then, Doctor?’ said the bookseller. ‘I have here … ’ and he named a pamphlet by an English physician of some repute.
‘Ach, I knew the fellow thirty years ago. I would not trust him to lance a boil. No,’ he said, stroking his chin in thought, ‘I was thinking of something like that.’
My eyes followed those of Melville to the large framed print Jaffray was looking at.
The bookseller went across and lifted it down from its place on the wall. ‘Leo Belgicus. Johannes Doetichum. A magnificent piece of work, Doctor, and as fine a map of those parts as I have seen; it would afford you many rewarding hours of study.’
It was indeed an impressive piece, a curiosity for anyone interested in those flat lands, run through with rivers that held the keys to all the wealth of the world and could ship it to our shores. All the provinces of the Netherlands, north and south, were delineated as a lion, the Belgian lion, three of its huge feet planted firmly in the ground of Northern France and Germany, its head turned eastwards and its tail flourishing over the North Sea. There were illustrations of the royal palace at Brussels, and the palace of the Counts of Holland, and the whole was bordered on two sides by a series of portraits in miniature of the Spanish governors of the Netherlands, and along the bottom with the stadtholders of the Northern provinces, ending with Maurice of Nassau, the Dutch military genius who had ‘come, seen, conquered, restored liberty and governed’. It was a thing of delight, and I knew it would be so to Jaffray. Melville’s offer to arrange for its transportation to Banff with some other unwieldy items being shipped up to the burgh was declined by the doctor, who would not entrust his new purchase to the dangers of a sea journey, and so it was that I left him, ten minutes later on the Broadgate, happily directing the bookseller’s struggling assistant in the carrying of his prize down to William’s house. Not wishing to be found with Rachel Middleton’s book, which I had had the bookseller wrap for me, I asked Jaffray to leave it off in my own house, and to ask Sarah to place it carefully amongst my own small library. Thus happily displaying Scot’s Apparatus Latinae to any who might chance to glance my way, I walked back to the college a little over half-an-hour after I had left it.
TWENTY-TWO
The Labyrinth of the World
It was a beautiful evening as I strolled from the college through the streets to my own home. The sun was slowly dipping, but still sent out its rays over the town and the cold and darkness that were our lot more than half the year were things almost impossible to remember. People sat on benches outside their homes, working at small tasks and calling greetings to one another across lanes and vennels. Young men and women walked in groups together down to Futtie or the Links, from where the sounds of games with ball, bat and club drifted to the town. The warmth of the day seemed to radiate still from the very stones of walls and houses, and even the increased rankness in the air, of decaying food missed by the burgh cleansers, spoke to me of summer. Middens hummed, alive with flies and other beasts, and the gulls down at the quayside cawed endlessly over the trophies left them by the fishermen. It was not yet eight – there would be almost three hours left of daylight, an
d I looked forward to spending some of them with Sarah, reading to her in our backyard as I had done in the early days of our marriage.
I turned down the pend in to our shared close and stopped. Everything was strangely quiet. There seemed to be no movement anywhere, no face at corbelled windows of the house across from us as often there was, no hint of air stirring the herbs ranged in their pots on the forestairs, no rustling or scurrying of insect or animal in the backland and its gardens beyond. I put my hand to the door. It was locked. I could not remember the last time I had returned to find the door locked. Never. I brought out my keys, augmented now by those of Robert Sim which Dr Dun had never asked me to return, and turned the right one in the lock. Sarah was sitting alone at the kitchen table, looking worn out by anxiety. She stood up as soon as I walked in.
I closed the door softly behind me and went over to her, keeping my voice low so I did not wake the children. ‘Sarah? What on earth is wrong? Why is the door locked?’
‘The book,’ she said, her voice scarcely audible.
‘The book?’ I repeated, not understanding.
In exasperation, she went to the mantelpiece and took a packet from it. ‘This!’ she said, brandishing the packet in my face. ‘This book.’
I saw then that it was the package I had asked Jaffray to take home for me from the bookseller’s earlier in the day.
‘Why did the doctor say I should hide it? From whom? What have you brought into this house? After what happened to Rachel Middleton …’
‘Matthew Jack is securely locked in the tolbooth – I have seen him there myself – and Rachel is safe now, Richard too.’
She stared at me. ‘Alexander, does nothing of the real world find its way within those college walls? Have you not heard?’
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