The principal sat at his desk with his head in his hands. ‘And even should they not be found guilty, their names would be blighted by the rumour of filth. And all under my care.’ I waited, conscious of the sound of my own breath. At last he looked up. ‘All right, Alexander, I will do as you ask.’
Within ten minutes, I was loping down the stone steps from Dr Dun’s chambers to the college courtyard, his letter attesting to the good repute of Richard Middleton and his fitness to practise as a physician grasped firmly in my hand. It was a letter without which the Middletons’ hope of a new life, far from here, would have had little success.
*
‘And do you think they will be all right?’ Sarah squinted a little in the sun that came streaming through the small window of our chamber.
I sat on the edge of the bed, softly stroking her hair. I did not really want to speak of this. ‘I don’t know. Rachel is determined that they will be, and she is a strong woman, very strong. They have enough money to last them a good while, and when Richard’s arm is properly healed and his strength restored, he will be able to begin in practice again. The letters of recommendation from William and Principal Dun will open doors for them with the burgesses of Glasgow, and, in all, it will be a sort of homecoming for them.’
Sarah was silent a moment.
‘What is wrong?’ I said.
‘All these years she has been here, she must have been so lonely, and I never thought to offer her friendship. I thought she kept herself aloof, and all the time it was not for lack of friendliness on her part, but for fear of discovery. I never even considered where she had come from.’
‘It seems she travelled around a good deal with her brother before he settled here.’
‘And all that time Richard was studying, and beginning to practise on the continent. She had sacrificed so much for him, but for what? To wait all those years for your husband’s return and then to discover that it was hardly a marriage, that you could never be a proper wife nor bear children? She has had her good name maligned, been accused of things she has not done, all for his sake. And now instead of freeing herself from him, she goes with him.’ Her face was almost bitter. ‘I do not understand it.’
‘It is because she loves him.’
‘But how can she love him, after he has so deceived her?’
‘He never deceived her, Sarah.’
She sat upright and regarded me with something approaching contempt. ‘Never deceived her? Alexander, the man is a sodomite.’
‘But he never sought to conceal the truth from her.’
‘He …’ She stopped. ‘What?’
‘Rachel knew it from the start.’
And so I told Sarah what Rachel Middleton had, haltingly, told me, as her husband looked on with a degree of love in his eyes that few men could match. She had first met Richard when a Lanarkshire minister known to her father had brought to their home in Glasgow a beautiful, sullen-looking boy of fourteen. It had been agreed that the boy should lodge under their roof while he studied at the town’s college, the University of Glasgow. Money changed hands and admonitions were given, and the minister departed, leaving the boy at the stonemason’s house. He had stood there, she recalled, like a scared animal with nowhere left to go, and she had sworn in that moment that she would be his sanctuary, she would be his place to go. And so, almost four years later, it had proved, and he had become her sanctuary, too, when her father, noticing that she had attained to womanhood, decided she should become another man’s burden. The son of a plumber was found, an apprentice, to take the girl off his hands, and both fathers were well-pleased with the arrangement. She had protested that she did not love the plumber’s boy, did not know him, but no one paid her any heed. And then, one night soon afterwards, there had been a great banging on her father’s door, and demands from the college authorities for Richard Middleton to be produced before them, that they might enquire into allegations of lewd and unnatural converse with another scholar. Richard had been brought from his bed and had not known what to say as the regents had accused and her father thundered. But she had known what to say. Richard Middleton had smiled at the memory as he recalled her very words for William and me,
‘“You are poorly informed gentleman, and Richard maligned, for he has promised to marry me.”’ As the men stared and her father blustered, she had looked at Richard and seen in his face that, yes, they would be a sanctuary to each other.
Her father had thrown them from the house, and they had gone back to that parish whence he’d come, and the minister there had married them, persuading himself that what he had suspected of the boy all those years ago could not be true after all. Richard had been permitted to take his final examinations and to graduate, but there was too much rumour, too much insinuation, and they could not stay in the town of Glasgow. And so Richard had gone abroad, to further his studies and become a physician, and Rachel had taken refuge with her brother, by then a master stonemason on his own account, and waited for her husband to come home. And he had done, when the hounds had found and started to haunt him in Paris, and now they had followed him here.
‘They will not have him,’ she had said defiantly to us that afternoon. ‘I will die before I let them have him.’
TWENTY-FOUR
Laureation
As had become our custom, I joined with my fellow regents and the professors of mathematics and divinity to watch from the casement windows of the principal’s chamber as the courtyard filled up below us. Parents, friends and dignitaries from the town and further afield thronged through the archway to greet or avoid one another, to parade their finery and observe others do likewise. The talk amongst us watching was of plans for the summer vacation, grumbles at the tardiness of the council in paying stipends, and covert hopes that amongst the great and the good beneath us, a generous patron might be found. Nobody mentioned Matthew Jack. The determination not to mention him on this day was thick in the air. As for Robert, our librarian, our friend, I surveyed the men around me and it appeared that by some silent agreement from which I had been excluded, they had truly forgotten him.
‘We have been blessed in the day, Alexander.’ Dr Dun was watching me carefully. I suspected I had not been able to mask my unease.
‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘I pray it will continue so.’
‘You fear it might not?’
I indicated the throng now filling the courtyard. ‘One amongst those, walking freely beneath us, or somewhere out in the streets of this burgh, conceals a murderous heart. And we do not know who he is; we may never know who he is.’
Dr Dun kept his voice low. ‘After all that has happened, you still do not believe Matthew Jack to be guilty of the crimes with which he is charged?’
‘Of the killings, no.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because Matthew would have taken great joy in exposing Robert for what we now know of him. He would have taken great pleasure too in tainting the college with the association.’
‘And the weaver?’
‘The weaver’s death, the concealment of his body, was a careful thing, a thing premeditated, not an act of passion and rage like Matthew’s attack on Richard Middleton or my wife. And Matthew Jack would not have known of Hiram’s grave.’
The principal regarded me carefully. ‘There are many in this college and this burgh who would not be sorry to see Matthew Jack called to account for past misdeeds and malevolence. Of all men, I had not thought he would find a champion in you.’
‘It is Robert, my dead friend, that I champion. May God forgive me, but you, sir, know I will happily see Matthew dance from the gibbet for all he has done, but I know he did not murder those men.’
‘How can you know, Alexander? How can you be so certain?’
I turned away from him and looked again down onto the courtyard. ‘Because the name of the man who murdered the librarian of this college and the weaver Bernard Cummins is Nicholas Black, and say what you will, I am determined to find him.’<
br />
The bell of Grayfriars’ Kirk began to toll, calling the principal down to the college gates where he would welcome the Bishop, our chancellor, and the Earl Marischal, son of our founder and benefactor. Goblets were reluctantly set down, gowns and shoes checked one last time for cleanliness, and we filed out after Dr Dun into the light of the July sun.
The kirk was packed, and the crowd hushed only as Bishop Patrick, aged now and infirm in body, was helped to his feet. The well-beloved tones rang through chancel and nave as they had done for so many years now, and I prayed fervently with the bishop for the young men ranged before us, about to make their inaugural disputation and, God willing, take their place in the world. When the bishop regained his seat, the principal rose to give due and accustomed thanks to our patron and benefactor, and to the massed ranks of the Provost, Magistrates, and Town Council of Aberdeen arrayed before us. From my place facing them on the podium, my eyes wandered over the assembled audience, scanning, hopelessly, I knew, for the face of a man I had never seen.
Those for whom there were no seats stood, and at the very back, where the relatives of the poorest scholars jostled for space, I saw Patrick Urquhart. It gave me a jolt to see him there. In all the business of Matthew Jack, and the revelations about Richard Middleton, I had all but forgotten him, but of course he would be here, to see his brother undergo his final examination and, if found worthy, graduate. He was standing, his face like stone, as far apart from the crush as he could, almost in the shadow of the porch of the church. Not many years had passed since he had himself been laureated, summa cum laude, the foremost in his class, a glittering career overseas predicted for him. And now, here he stood, ready to watch his brother, so much less deserving than he, take his place amongst the ranks of the learned and walk on into a world that should have been his. He did not seem to notice me, but something further back in the far recesses of the nave took his attention. A brief, uncertain smile flickered across his face. I lifted my hand to shield my eyes from the sunlight that at that moment streamed through the window above me, blanking out the features of the people before me, and then I saw that, walking slowly and leaning on the arm of Andrew Carmichael, John Innes had entered the kirk.
So taken up was I with my search among the faces of the crowd that the conventional ceremonies and speeches preceding the inaugural disputations were lost to me. I straightened myself in my seat and forced myself to listen. The scholars were obliged to publicly thank their benefactors on this unique occasion, and they did so with fulsome praise in panegyrics of some exaggeration. Jaffray’s eyes shone as Paul Ogston, a poor candlemaker’s son from my home burgh, thanked the good doctor for all he had done for him over so many years. As the poorest and youngest of the twelve boys called to the podium by their regent, it fell to him to read the memorial to two companions of their class whom God had not spared to see this joyful day. One had succumbed to the damp and cold that clung like ivy to our college walls and the other had been drowned at the Links when a boast and an unexpected wave had carried him too far. Candles, snuffed out before the world could see their light.
Later, whether the scholars had acquitted themselves honourably, displaying the requisite learning, intellect and eloquence in defending and opposing the theses of their praeses, I could not have told, for my attention drifted time and again over faces in the crowd. Several could have accorded with the description of Nicholas Black that Matthew Jack had given me from the one time he had seen him, in the factor’s office in Rotterdam, but none looked to be the face of a man who had done murder within these very precincts.
The theses on Logic passed me by and the propositions on Ethics made little impression on me either until, ranging my eyes for the fifth or sixth time across the back of the church, I noticed that someone was standing alongside John Innes and Andrew Carmichael, someone who had not been there before – Richard Middleton. I could scarcely believe he had dared to come to so public a place while the threat of exposure by Matthew Jack hung over him. The principal, too, I noted, had seen him, and was struggling not to betray his unease. But Richard Middleton did not have the look of a man trying to hide himself from the sight of others. His eyes were fixed on the boy on the stage, and his every sense seemed to be locked on what he was saying. I scrambled in my head to listen, to dredge from my mind some recollection of what had already been said. The boy spoke of friendship and the longings of love and, earnestly, of the necessity of bridling our desires. It was written on Richard Middleton’s face that those words were lost to him, for they had come too late.
Patrick Urquhart looked at his most alert and animated, naturally enough, when his brother was opposing the praeses’ mathematical propositions. Malcolm clearly had his brother’s gifts and his display of skill was not lost on the audience. Many watched and listened to him with increasing approval, none more so than Sir Thomas Burnett of Leys, whose pride in the erstwhile errant youth was written on his face.
The ceremony of graduation, bound by formality, proceeded without mishap, and the newly capped masters walked proudly out of Grayfriars’ Kirk and into the sunshine of the street, the acclamation of friends, family, teachers and ministers in their ears.
My ceremonial duties done with for the day, I sought out my own friends in the crowd that had spilled from the kirk into the Broadgate. Jaffray was not difficult to find. I joined him in applauding the group of newly capped masters whom I had come to know well over the last four years. ‘It does my heart good to see this every year, Alexander. It does the town good.’
I looked over at the labourers, servants, craftsmen and merchants who had paused in their work to acclaim the graduands. ‘It is something that never ceases to astonish me,’ I said, ‘that they show no bitterness towards those upon whom Fate has looked more kindly than themselves. These boys have access now to a life of privilege and status, while many of those who applaud them are consigned to endless drudgery and toil.’
‘Does it truly, Alexander? Does it not show you that the human heart is capable of a generosity of spirit that our unbecoming form often serves to mask? You see the washerwoman over there for instance?’ He indicated a woman who might have been anything between thirty and fifty years of age, with red-chapped hands and a huge bundle of linen on her back, who had stopped a moment with her son to watch the parade.
‘What of her?’ I said.
‘Did you not see how brightly she smiled as our proud peacocks swung past? In them she sees what her child might be, if God has gifted him a mind and a spirit for study, and put charity into the hearts of those who see it. Look there at Paul Ogston, son of a Banff chandler, and he walks alongside the heir of Pitsligo – equal today, by virtue of their learning. What happened today will see Paul accepted at the table and in the company of any laird in the land. You yourself would have led quite another life had not the master’s cap been placed upon your head, not so many years ago.’
I held up a hand in defeat. ‘How is it that you are so often right, old friend?’
‘I have had long experience in the study of my fellow man. And that experience tells me that four hours in the Grayfriars’ Kirk are as many as a decent man may stomach without food and drink. Thank the good lord for the convivium – to mark young Paul’s triumph we shall feast like gods.’
And indeed, when we entered Bella Watson’s yard a quarter of an hour later, it had been transformed from being the typical dreary backland of a burgh tavern into the nearest the good widow could approximate to an Elysian grove. Garlands of ivy and honeysuckle hung from the walls, a roast of lamb turned in a corner nearest to the kitchen, and in another a well-known burgh fiddler was readying his bow. Casks of Bella’s best ale stood ready by the back door and flasks of wine alternated with jars of roses, marigolds and daisies to fill the centre of the table that ran the length of the yard.
‘You have outdone yourself this year,’ I said to Jaffray as we surveyed the scene before us.
‘Ach, it is little enough, and the boy deserv
es it.’
I wondered if Sir Thomas Burnett of Leys would have provided a similar convivium for Malcolm Urquhart, or if he would have judged that a little humility would do the boy no harm.
Alongside Paul Ogston’s parents, and those of his friend and fellow poor scholar, Jaffray had, in his usual expansive way, invited a wide range of his acquaintances from the two burghs of Aberdeen. As well as myself, Dr Dun had, of course, also been invited to attend, and would do so, when protocol allowed, for he must sup first with the foremost families. From the King’s College in the Old Town Andrew Carmichael was there, along with John Innes, still weak in body, but with something of the old serenity of spirit about him. Despite his boldness at appearing in the kirk, Richard Middleton, at his wife’s behest I did not wonder, had judged it better not to come to the celebration. It was only for Jaffray’s sake, and the boy’s, that I myself had been persuaded to leave my wife in the care of Elizabeth Cargill an hour or so longer, for although I knew Matthew Jack was secure in the tolbooth, I could not feel for certain that Sarah was safe unless I was watching over her myself.
William greeted me across the table. ‘I am relieved to see you here, Alexander. You will only annoy Sarah, you know, if you are hovering over her every minute. She would not wish you to be miserable – you looked so distracted throughout the disputation and graduation that I half-expected you to have wandered off somewhere else at the end of them.’ He lowered his voice. ‘You are still looking for him, aren’t you?’
William knew me too well.
‘I cannot shake from my mind the certainty that he is still amongst us, that there may still be some danger … and for Robert’s sake.’
Seaton 03 - Crucible of Secrets Page 24