Seaton 03 - Crucible of Secrets

by S. G. MacLean

  ‘What?’

  ‘Rachel Middleton was attacked in her own bed last night.’

  ‘For the love of God. Is she all right?’

  Sarah looked away from me. ‘She was tied up, gagged, near enough suffocated. Her attacker ransacked the room and left her for dead.’

  ‘But she is not? Sarah?’

  ‘No, thank God, but it was long enough before her husband found her.’

  ‘Found her? Had he gone out?’

  ‘No, but he has been sleeping in a room down the stairs since the night he was attacked, that Rachel might not disturb him.’

  ‘Had he been bound too?’

  She shook her head. ‘There had been no need. Rachel had given him a heavy sleeping draught last night, to force him to rest. He did not wake until after ten this morning, and it was then that he found her. She had managed to work the pillowslip off her head but in the darkness she tripped on something and banged her head on the bedstead. She had lain there for hours before Richard found her. Elizabeth and I went to the house as soon as we heard. She is in terror and her husband near in despair, but they have been taken into protection at Paul Menzies’ house on the Castlegate.’

  ‘That is something, at least: no one will reach them at the provost’s house.’ I tried to think. ‘You say the room was ransacked – was anything taken?’

  ‘Nothing. Everything was thrown about but the books.’ She thrust the package from the booksellers on to the table. ‘He was looking for a book, Alexander.’

  My hand closed over hers. ‘I will take it out of here tonight, I promise you. I will get rid of it. Once I have read it, I will hide it out in the backland, in the woodstore, then I will take it to the provost’s house for Rachel tomorrow.’

  I had thought to reassure her, but Sarah’s eyes blazed. ‘You will do no such thing. If it is not out of this house and away from here in the next ten minutes, I will burn the thing to ashes myself.’ I put a hand out to calm her, but she slapped it away. ‘Ten minutes. Nine now. Get rid of it, or I swear before God, Alexander Seaton, I will make this the sorriest day of your life.’

  ‘All right, but please, calm yourself – it cannot be good for you, or the baby.’ I picked up the packet and my hat. ‘I’ll be away two hours, maybe three. Be sure to lock the door.’

  I had hardly reached the pend to the lane before I heard the lock turn and the bolt pulled closed behind me.

  It was a common enough thing, on an evening such as this, to see a man walking with a book in his hand, out to the Links or the Meadows. Few would wish to waste light so much better than could be had within thick walls, up narrow closes, through small windows. I myself occasionally struck out from the confines of the streets and lanes to the open spaces outside the burgh ports to read for simple pleasure. But tonight was not such a night. I did not know yet the nature of the volume I carried, but I could not risk meeting a friend or inquisitive acquaintance who might question me on it. The college library was the last place I was prepared to take this book tonight, and so I turned in the other direction, away from there and the Links and the Meadows, and went instead deeper into the heart of the town. I slipped out of Flourmill Lane on to the Netherkirkgate, and went as casually as I could through the port that straddled it, remarking to the gatekeepers on the fineness of the evening. I avoided St Nicholas Kirk where the session, I knew, was meeting tonight and turned down a lane to my right, from there joining Back Wynd as it descended steeply towards the Green. It struck me that Robert Sim must have taken this route often on his nightly journeys from the library back to his lodgings. I shivered a little, despite the warmth that still hung in the air, and hurried on down Aedie’s Wynd to come out at last at the Green.

  The weekly dairy market had been held that day, and a sour smell of curdled milk and butter gone rancid in the heat rose from the cobbles to mingle with the usual aromas of animal waste and rotting vegetables. People were about, boys playing at football near the Bow Brigg, others walking nearby. There was no private reading place here: I must go still deeper into the town.

  I turned down Fisher Row and eventually found myself in the precincts of the ruined place of the Trinity Friars, desolate for seventy years now, since the Reformation of religion in our land. Here at least, where the women of the street plied their trade amongst the sailors come on shore, I need not fear being approached or overseen by some well-meaning burgess, some respectable acquaintance, some curious friend. Here no decent man would be seen in the evening hours, or the night.

  I stepped through the empty gateway, its iron gate long gone, and picked my way across the rubble of what had once been the friars’ garden. Towards the shore end of the grounds was the remnant of a boatyard, in use after the friars had been hounded from this place, murdered or fled to safer foreign shores. It too had fallen into disuse and decay, its last boat also long ago launched on to the Denburn and thence out to sea. I found a spot against a pillar in a ruined section of the cloister walk, well lit from the west by the slowly dropping sun, but far from view of any passers-by on Putachieside or the Shore Brae.

  And then I began to read, and as I read I remembered who Jan Amos Comenius was, for Jaffray had heard of him from a friend in The Hague, a Bohemian scholar who had suffered greatly following the fall of Prague and the depredations of the early years of the war in his homeland. The Labyrinth of the World was the book of hope of which Middleton had spoken, written by Comenius as he struggled free from his personal and intellectual despair. So I sat and I read, and I followed the story of Pilgrim, as he entered the Labyrinth, not a house of memory but a city, where all the arts and sciences had their own quarters, every human calling and occupation its place. It should have been a Utopia, but Comenius’s pilgrim found himself instead in a city where everything was wrong, where the streets led nowhere and endeavour was pointless. The arrival of the Rosicrucians with their promises of a sharing of knowledge, the way to the Philosopher’s Stone that would cure the ills of the world, proved a cruel and empty boast, leaving their followers at last silent and in despair. I saw the mirror of Richard Middleton’s life in the story. Worse was to follow when Pilgrim journeyed deeper into the city, down into the streets of religious sects, where he witnessed the toppling of a throne followed by brutality, bloodshed and death, from which he only narrowly escaped himself. Again, I saw the young doctor’s life in the lines printed out on the page. Plague, famine, the relentless devastation of hostile armies followed and Pilgrim, distraught at the hopelessness and destruction, fled.

  I held the book in my hands and looked out across the sea, out to the horizon beyond which lay the lands where such horrors had been and were still the lot of scholars and labourers, beggars and kings. I thought of Archie, my dearest friend and companion of my own young hopes, whose earthly time had ended amongst the carnage Come-nius described. The sea was no longer blue, but golden, as the last rays of the sun spread over it from a sky the colour of a withered yellow rose.

  The sun finally gone, I shivered a little in the cooler air, but there was light enough yet to return to my book, wondering what worse there could be to come in the few remaining chapters. At the last, as the depths of despair threatened to take him, Pilgrim was called to return to the ‘House of the Heart’ and there to shut the doors behind him. Answering the call he found himself in the company of the godly who were surrounded, not as he had at first thought by a wall of fire, but by thousands upon thousands of angels, each one a witness to the face of God, and the guardian of the human soul. Here, at last, the mysteries of the world, the mind of God would be revealed to those who sought them and had answered that last call.

  I shut the book. There was in it a reassurance, I supposed, for the likes of John Innes who had hoped for great and impossible things from the Rosicrucian dream and found instead the festering corruption of man, but it told a lesson I had learned long ago, and there was nothing in it that I could see that would bring me closer to Nicholas Black, or he to me.

  The sky
had faded from a hazy grey to a pale blue which was deepening. I had no wish to be still in this place when darkness finally fell. The book had nothing sinister in it that I could see, but I would not break my promise to Sarah. I considered leaving it behind the pillar against which I sat, but the collapsed roof of the cloister left it no protection from the elements or from the rats and other creatures that made their home here. I went up the cloister and into the old friary church, its roof now also almost gone. Inside, the place had been stripped bare of anything that could be removed and used; anything that could not had been defaced or destroyed, and yet, as I walked the length of the nave to the choir, I felt around me something of the presence of those long-dead monks. I shivered and quickened my pace. In the back wall, behind where the altar had stood, was a small recess, the aumbry, its hinges still visible and rusted in their rotten frame. It was here that the priests of the order had kept their blasphemous host. I hesitated, then reminded myself that there was nothing holy in it now and never had been. The book fitted with ease into the space, and after casting around for a moment on the floor I found two stones that would fill the outer opening and hide what lay behind from predator or view. I would return early in the morning to retrieve it so I might deliver it at last to the Middletons at the provost’s house. It would be for them to decide whether to take it up to John Innes. If it somehow reassured John, then so be it – I had found no harm in it.

  There was something unsettling in the gradual creep of the sounds of the night over the burgh. There was a great evil, somewhere in this town, and I could almost feel its presence coming closer, watching me. I cast my eye around the broken walls and crooked graves, the trees bent by the wind into unnatural shapes. I was being foolish – there was no other being here but myself. And yet I felt fear, a strong desire to be away from this place. I made my way carefully out of the haunt of the dead friars and set off up Putachieside, for the safety and comfort of my home.

  *

  He had not even had the time to open it, so brief a moment had there been between Alexander Seaton leaving the place and the old drunken packman stumbling in to rest his head for the night. A tightly knotted thin leather cord held fast the oilcloth Seaton had covered the book with, and his fingers had been shaking too much to work it loose before the tinker had appeared. Now he would have to conceal the thing beneath his doublet and scurry home in the darkness, hoping to escape notice, he who had boldly walked down through the burgh in the light.

  His neck ached and despite the mildness of the night he felt a chill from where he had crouched so long behind the remnants of a smashed grave as Seaton turned the book’s pages. All the while he had watched him, watched his face in the failing light for any sign that he had come upon the thing that he so feared, but he knew, in truth, that the words that would condemn him could not be there, for they would have been right at the beginning. And yet he waited and watched as time passed and Seaton worked his way to the end of the volume. There would be no need, he eventually realised, for the rock he held fast in his hand. When he had set out tonight it had been for the purpose of a friendly visit to that house in Flourmill Lane, and he had had no weapon with him. He had passed the entrance to their pend, once, twice, hesitating, unsure. He had gone out onto the Guestrow and taken up a seat near the water-pump, in the shade of an overhanging apple tree. There had been nothing remarkable in him being out for a stroll away from the concerns of his day on this fine summer’s evening. When he had seen Seaton arrive home, his courage had almost failed him, but at length he had persuaded himself that the thing could be done, and could be begun now. He had hardly risen from his seat when he saw him emerge again from the pend. He would have gone to him still, but then he noticed how Seaton looked about him, and how carefully he carried the package, evidently a book, under his arm. It was then that at last he knew that all his resolutions, his good intentions as he had left Rachel Middleton’s house the night before, could not be.

  Another man might have contrived a visit yet, a conversation, a look in the man’s face that would have told him, in a moment, whether he knew, but all he could do was to slip out of sight and follow. Seaton had not made for the college, but deeper into the town. Just as he had begun to wonder whether he might be making for the docks, or thinking to jettison the book into the Denburn, he saw him turn into the friars’ yards, and there he followed, to hide amongst the rubble and desolation of that once holy place, and watch.

  He scarcely moved, in the near darkness, as the other man, his reading finished and his book hidden, passed within a foot of the grave behind which he sheltered. And then, when it was safe, he too went up the nave to the chancel where it was no great feat to retrieve the book from the aumbry. He too struck out for home, glad of the lanes and vennels, the high walls between backlands, all the secret ways he had come to know that would keep him from the sight of those whose interest it was to find him.

  At last, in the quietness of the room he could call his own, by the light of one small candle, he cut through the leather cord and drew aside the oilcloth. He closed his hand over the book a moment before taking a breath and turning the page to look upon its title. He felt winded for a moment and then laughed. Was this it, then? The Labyrinth of the World? He turned the pages a while. They had been better to follow their talk of alchemy, of art, anything but this nonsense of pilgrims and cities and angels, for the world was not a labyrinth but a crucible: Paracelsus’ crucible, where the dark arts could bring the dead back to life. He was the alchemist and this town his crucible, and if they truly believed this was the book they sought, the book that Robert Sim had found, then he had nothing more to fear.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Secrets

  When I had returned early in the morning to the Trinity Friars’ old kirk in search of Comenius’ book I had found the stones moved from the aumbry and the book gone. I had not puzzled long over this – some sailor or vagrant, adventuring schoolboy perhaps, must have found it and hoped to turn a penny by its sale. It was of little matter – there was nothing in it that could bring harm upon its reader, and little of comfort that the Middletons or indeed John Innes would not find, in time, elsewhere. I reasoned besides that the sooner all involved forgot about their Rosicrucian experiment the better it would be for their well-being and the peaceable life of the burgh.

  And indeed, the town did seem almost to slip into a forgetfulness of the evil that had visited itself upon us for a while, to take comfort in the incarceration, and certain hanging to come, of Matthew Jack. For who could it have been who had cut the throats of these two men but Matthew Jack? It was increasingly said in the town that it was his malice, brought on by his lust for Rachel Middleton, that was at the root of both killings. It was not long before it was declared as fact that he had discovered the librarian’s clandestine night visits to the doctor’s house, and that the unfortunate weaver had simply found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. The weaver had been left for dead in the Middletons’ garden on the very night Jack had purposed to force himself upon her and then had been dragged, knife in hand, from her husband’s very neck. Who would have had greater opportunity for the murder of Robert Sim, widely now declared to have been the lover of the physician’s wife? Little wonder, they said, some other assailant had thought to try his luck on her – she had called such things down upon herself. There was little agreement on the wisdom of the provost in protecting the pair under his own roof, but perhaps it was as well to remove the woman from the temptations of honest men. Alexander Seaton, it was said, had been often at her house, but then his taste for a certain type of woman was known, was it not? Soon she was to be gone; as soon as Dr Dun declared her husband sufficiently recovered, they would both leave our burgh bounds and not return. All would be well, and life would continue as it had done before, the outsiders having played their tragedy before us.

  In the college too, it seemed that all might, indeed, be well. Preparations for the graduations gathered their usual pace, and
the days passed in a busy haze of heat, nerves and excitement. Dr Dun was evidently intent that I should have not a spare moment for further enquiry or search into the matter of the murders of Robert Sim and Bernard Cummins: when I was not taking my classes through the revision of their courses, I was charged with every petty task in the arrangements for the laureation that seemed to enter the principal’s head.

  Every bench in the Grayfriars’ Kirk had to be inspected by me before and after it was cleaned, every corner of the common school of the college swept under my oversight, lest at the disputations or the ceremony after them some petty laird or aged doctor of divinity might find himself inconvenienced by the sighting of a cobweb. The porter and the other college servants were sick of the sight of me, although their disdain could not match that of the head gardener when I appeared in his domain under instruction to oversee the choice of flowers from the gardens that would bedeck courtyard and kirk. A man who had kept the college garden thirty years needed no advice from one who could scarcely tell a marigold from a dandelion, and he was not long in making this plain.

  And so the days passed, and in truth I began to find that the shadow of Nicholas Black fell less and less across my mind. Gone was the jealousy and suspicion of the last weeks and months that had eaten away at all the good things that had come in to my life since I had met Sarah, and I saw clearly now what I had risked losing. The knowledge terrified me. Once Dr Dun or Jaffray or William Cargill had seen me into my own courtyard at night, my world was there and I had no wish to sully it by thoughts of other things.

  ‘I do not know how you have put up with me,’ I said to her one night.

  ‘No more do I,’ she replied, without turning from her inspection of Deirdre’s old baby gowns to look at me.

  I went to her and put my hands around her waist. ‘I am in earnest, Sarah. I could not have lived with the man that I was becoming, I could not have lived with the bitterness, the changes of mood …’