The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

by Shona MacLean

  I never tired of hearing the story as I sat silent in the window seat, watching as my mother kneaded bread and plucked birds and gutted fish; I watched as she rubbed the ointments Jaffray had prescribed from the apothecary into the sore and calloused hands that had been meant for sewing and drawing up household accounts and playing the lute. Or I would sit there working at my Latin and Greek until the light faded or my father found me and called me instead to the smithy, where he and his apprentice toiled before the roaring furnace over axes and hunting spears and swords of every description.

  ‘The girl is exhausted.’ It was Mistress Youngson’s voice that broke into my daydream. ‘Did she ride with you all the way from Banff, or did you meet with her on the road?’

  ‘I saw her on the ferry. She took a good deal of persuading before she would consent to get up on the horse. She had been of a mind to walk.’ A thought crossed my mind as Mistress Youngson’s question repeated itself in my head. ‘The child is not mine,’ I said. ‘I never spoke to her until this day. I—’

  The old woman smiled. ‘Calm yourself, boy. I know whose child it is. The girl should never have been sent to work in that man’s house. My own sister, your master’s wife, told me what manner of man he was, and I warned her uncle and aunt not to put her there.’

  ‘And they did it anyway?’

  She nodded.

  I wondered what sort of home the girl was returning to, what kind of place in this world she was bringing her child into. ‘Will they take her in?’

  ‘Aye, they will. But she’ll have a hard time of it.’ She went wearily over to the hearth and stirred the pot from which the smell of mutton stew drifted over to me. I remembered my commission from her sister, forgotten in all the business of Sarah, and handed her the packages.

  Mistress Youngson’s eyes lit up. She had a child’s delight in receiving a gift. There was hardly a mystery about the first package – four fresh herring, bought before it was light at the shore of Banff. The second package revealed a pot of honey, a gift from the hives in the laird of Banff’s great garden. There was a letter, which the old woman set up high on the mantel, for when she could take her time and read it on her own. Last was a soft, bulky parcel, wrapped in a muslin cloth and tied with hemp. A note was stitched to the cloth. Across the table I could read the words as the minister’s wife unfolded a knitted woollen shawl, the colour of oatmeal, with a tiny silken bow stitched at the corner: for Sarah Forbes’s bairn. How had I ever reached such a pass, to have lost the affection and respect of a woman of so stern demeanour and yet so replete with quiet kindness?

  The minister’s wife insisted I take some of the mutton stew she had made for her husband’s dinner. ‘In any case, Mr MacLennan will have no notion of mutton stew when he catches sight of these herring.’ She ladled me out a huge bowl from her steaming pot and went to the kist for oatmeal to coat the fish in.

  By the time I had finished my meal, Sarah Forbes still slept soundly. There was no reason I could find words or voice for to stay until she woke, yet I was reluctant to leave. Mistress Youngson had assured me that she herself would go with Sarah to her uncle’s house, once she was awake and had taken a good hot meal. She assured me also that she would make it known in very clear terms that she and her husband would keep an eye on how the girl was treated. Yet I could see that she still had fears for Sarah’s welfare and that of her child. I walked out of the manse door and then I turned back to Mistress Youngson with my hand at my pouch. I pressed the coins into her hand. Five pounds Scots – the price of some books I had been going to buy for myself in Aberdeen. ‘Give it to them. Tell them it is from friends in Banff. It is for her food, and she must not be made to work beyond noon. Tell them there will be more when the child comes, if her friends are satisfied that she is not mistreated.’

  She closed her hand over the coins and I could see tears in her eyes. ‘You are a good man, for all … for all else that might have happened.’ Further explanation was unnecessary. I thanked her for her kindness and rode away from King Edward.

  The road became busier over the last few miles to Turriff with country people returning from the morning market in the town. Some of them might have known me, but I kept my hat pulled down low and, avoiding their eyes, kept my gaze fixed directly ahead of me. I did not turn to the left where the road branched off for Delgatie. I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I had reached this crossing and continued directly ahead rather than turning towards that great stronghold. I can have been little more than five years old when I first rode up with my father. Every step of the horse took me further into this strange, unimagined world. And then I had seen the castle. Only an ogre, I thought, a giant such as held sway in my mother’s stories, could live in such a place as that. Try as he might my father could not make me believe that the lord of that castle was the same jovial man who would arrive at the foundry with a great retinue of men, ordering arms for fighting and weapons for the hunt. He would joke with my father about my long slim fingers and my pale boy’s hands, and ask me to show him where were my hammerman’s muscles. I remembered my mother coming out on one such occasion and fixing his lordship with what I knew to be her most dangerous look and saying to him, ‘This child will be no hammerman,’ before taking my arm from his hand and bringing me back into her kitchen. My father was so ashamed it was days before I heard him address a word to her. But the laird of Delgatie never made sport of me again.

  But that was over twenty years ago, that first of many visits, that first time I had met Archie, the laird’s boisterous bear cub of a son, who even at five years old transfixed and overwhelmed me with his intoxicating spirit. And then too I had met Katharine, the serious three-year-old Katharine, who even then watched her brother with a quiet wariness far beyond her years. But now Archie was dead, and Katharine was here no longer, gone far, far away from her home and her family because of me, and their father would have thrown me from the castle’s ramparts rather than welcome me within its walls once more.

  The horse travelled steadily on, and I was soon in Turriff. I had no need to tarry in the town beyond changing my horse and delivering a letter from Jaffray to one of the doctors there. I refused the doctor’s offer of refreshment, and with the wind at my back left Turriff and rode hard towards Aberdeen.

  The first time Archie and I had taken this road together we had been little more than fifteen, boys still, setting out for our studies at the King’s College in Aberdeen. We had ridden from the gates of Delgatie as his mother and sister watched from an upper window, my head full of Latin and Greek and Archie’s full of fighting and women. At the head of us, his lordship himself had ridden.

  My own father no longer rode with Lord Hay. He was a burgess of Banff now, and owed his allegiance first to the town and then to the king. The laird would have given me a horse that almost matched Archie’s, but my father would not allow it, the first time in his life that he had ever spoken against Lord Hay. And the laird, understanding my father better then than I did, had not pressed the point but had had his stable master bring me round a roan cob – a respectable mount for one of my station. My father had by then stopped believing that I would ever be apprenticed to his trade. I was as tall and strong and able as any son he might have wished for, but I had my eye on other prizes and had little regard for the craft at which he excelled. I think he would gladly have burned the books my mother gave me in his hottest furnace, if he had thought she might ever forgive him. She would not have done, and he knew that well enough. But there had been bitter words between them on the eve of my leaving Banff for the college.

  The evening had started well enough. Gilbert Grant was there, and Jaffray had come round too and brought the young Charles Thom with his fiddle to give us some music. In his bag the doctor had also brought a jar of the uisge beatha distilled by the mountain people, the people of Glenlivet to whom he journeyed every year in the summer. It was forbidden and fulminated against from every pulpit, but the doctor cared little
for such fulmination when he was amongst friends. My mother made a small show of protest before going to fetch beakers for the men, and when she had her back turned, my father let the doctor pour a small measure into my own cup. ‘Be sure to sip it, boy. A taste. You will not need to swallow.’ I had never tasted anything like it. It numbed my lips and set fire to my tongue before melting, sweeter and more mellow than the finest of honey, on the roof of my mouth.

  As the evening wore on, I noticed my father become more and more silent. At last he stood up and bade Charles Thom hold off from his playing. He pushed the food and drink away from him and then he addressed himself to me. If any had expected some final parting words of love or advice or paternal pride, they were disappointed. Before my mother and my friends, my father told me to remember that the one and only cause of my going to the King’s College was to serve the Master of Hay. Whatever vanities I might indulge in, whatever foolishness others might fill my head with, I was to remember I owed it all to the family of Delgatie, whose servant I was. Having said his piece, he called the dog from the hearth and strode out of the door. In the sudden silence of the room, I looked at my mother’s face and saw a death in it. For years she had quietly, secretly as she thought, nurtured my mind, brought me books, talked to me of everything she knew of the world, of philosophy and poetry and religion. She had made me into the son she would always have had, wherever Providence might have led her, and in her struggle to do it she had trampled on the man she knew my father to be and rendered him something else. In making me so completely hers, she had taken me from him, and I never saw it until that night. I do not know if my mother ever uttered a word to my father again.

  And yet, my father had been right. My Latin and Greek would have availed me nothing had it not been for my connection to Archie. Of the few bursaries then available for poor scholars at King’s College, I was not eligible for any. All the available resources of the Kirk were focused on helping the divinity bursar of the presbytery survive his studies without starving or freezing. My father was not poor, but by no means could he keep me four years at the college while training up the apprentice he would not otherwise have needed. So, like a handful of other fortunate young men, I would undertake my studies, my fees paid and living full board in the college, as the servant of a nobleman friend. Archie. I had to rouse him twice in the morning, after the bursar had come past with his bell; I had to find ways of getting him past the janitor after the night curfew had fallen and the college gates were shut, holding him as straight as I could to try to mask the extent of his intoxication; more than once I had to travel in the other direction with him, concealing between our two cloaks some pretty girl who should have been at home in bed in her father’s house many hours before; I had to get him to the college kirk in the hours of divine service and do my best to keep him awake while he was there. In all, I did what I could to keep him out of trouble, and most of all, out of fights. It would not matter where a fight was, what it was over or whom it involved; if Archie got the merest whiff of it he would be in the thick of it in minutes, or, often enough, he would start a fight where there had been no fight at all. ‘Mind him well, Alexander,’ Archie’s mother had said as she bade me farewell, ‘and for the love of God, keep him safe.’

  I had kept him safe as long as I could, then he had taken his path and I mine. Now he was dead and I was not. There had been a point in his dying. I rode on. Turriff was soon behind me, and then Old Meldrum. I passed close by Straloch in the mid-afternoon, my hand going instinctively to my saddlebag where the map was hidden. I traversed the barren lands to the north and west of Aberdeen, only the horse sparing me complete isolation. Then I turned the beast’s head towards the Don and followed the river’s course as it made its last few miles towards the sea, until at last I saw the twin spires of St Machar’s Cathedral on their sturdy towers, challenging the godless to approach Aberdeen. Godless or not, my heart warmed to the sight. The Irish saint’s seat, rising above the great river where it curved in the shape of a bishop’s crook, had always been for me the gateway to a place that was home. It was not long before the hooves of my mount were clattering over the cobbles of the Brig o’ Balgownie, and I was nodding to carters and other country people on horseback or foot, making for home after their business in the two towns. The road swept out past the Bishop’s Ward and over the marshland towards the sea, the east coast, looking out towards Norway, Denmark and then the Baltic, unseen, but full of possibilities, and then it turned back towards the town. I passed the port to the Bishop’s Green and the Chaplain’s Court. The Machar kirk was behind me now, to my right, and, for the first time in almost a year, I was back in Old Aberdeen.

  I headed down Don Street towards the Market Cross, where the Chanonry met the High Street. I could not see beyond the frontages, but I knew that behind the houses blossom would be forming on the trees in the orchards and gardens of College Bounds. The market was finished now, and the stallholders had cleared away their booths and gone home. Dogs and gulls occupied themselves with clearing whatever unwanted wares and produce might have fallen to the ground. The pigeons of the bishop’s old dovecote always fed well on market days. As I passed the majestic crown tower of the college chapel, my heart nearly gave within me. I was a part of those stones, a century old and more; I belonged to that place, with all the others who had gone before me and with those still to come. Yet at this moment, this hour and day of my life, I had no place there.

  I passed out of College Bounds and made my way up the Spittal hill, past the ruins of the Snow kirk to my left and then the Spittal kirk to my right. What a desecration of churches there had been these past sixty years, all in the name of God. Further down, as the road descended towards the town of New Aberdeen, I passed the old Leper House. Unwelcome as they were within the burgh, there had been here a place of some compassion where they might rest. A light breeze stirred the arms of the windmill on Windmill Hill, overlooking the cornfields where they bordered the town. It was not long before I reached the Calsey Port, emblazoned with the royal arms to give weight to its authority, and, having answered for my name, place of origin, business in the burgh and lodgings when staying there, was riding down the Gallowgate towards the heart of New Aberdeen.

  The houses rose on either side of me, three and four storeys high. Some were divided into tenements, the apartments on the upper floors being reached by wooden flights of outside stairs. Other dwellings were grander, the houses of wealthy merchants, professionals and landed men with business in the town. I turned down into the Upperkirkgate. The houses here were not so grand as those of the Gallowgate, the rents cheaper, but here too, many had aspirations, with brightly painted porches giving onto the street. Halfway down I reined in the horse outside a modest two-storey house with the legend E. P. 1624. W. C. engraved in fine gold lettering above the lintel. Elizabeth Philip and William Cargill. Tying the beast to a post in the road, I knocked on the door. There seemed to be a great commotion and rustling of skirts inside until at length the door was answered. My friend’s wife stood there in the doorway, her eyes alight and her cheeks glowing, filled, mirabile dictu, with happiness to find me there.

  ‘Alexander, oh, Alexander. How we have missed you.’ She held her hand out towards me and I took a step closer, removing my hat as I did so. She looked again in my face, my eyes. Her arm fell to her side. ‘In the name of God, Alexander, what has befallen you?’

  SEVEN

  Destination

  I awoke the next day to a bright clear Aberdeen morning such as I had known nowhere else. As I lay, hands behind my head, looking up at the curved ceiling, the bell of St Nicholas kirk began to strike the hour: one, two, three … it tolled nine times. Nine o’clock. I could not remember the last time I had slept until this hour. I would have been about my labours in my schoolroom in Banff over two hours by now, ready to send the town boys home for their breakfasts. A pitcher of fresh water had been set by the Delft wash bowl in my room. Someone must have come in with it in the hours sin
ce dawn, but I had heard nothing.

  My body had been weary after the long ride and its strange meeting, but I had not seen William in nearly a year and there had been an unburdening at my destination, which had left my mind and heart something clearer than they had been for many months. Even as I had entered Aberdeen, with its narrow winding streets of tall houses and its busy lanes of people, dogs and beasts, the stifling feeling that had oppressed me in Banff had begun to lift. And then, once Elizabeth had been finally persuaded that I was not actually ill, and had brought us a fine dinner of roasted capons and cold ham pie, she had left us to the talk of men and of friends, and I had told William my story.

  When I had finished, he hesitated. ‘It is,’ he began, ‘something of what I had imagined, although I could not have guessed it all. And you have heard nothing of Katharine since?’

  ‘Nothing since that last meeting on the road from Fordyce, though for a time I could scarcely remember even that. Now, though, the words are burned on my very soul, every one of them, hers and mine.’

  ‘You must not dwell on it, Alexander.’

  ‘That is what Jaffray says, too, in his many different ways that he thinks so subtle.’

  William smiled. ‘The doctor’s heart is on his sleeve, and for all his learning and experience of the world he cannot hide it. And yet I think his counsel is good.’

  I shrugged. ‘Oh, it is good, but it is counsel easier to offer than to act upon. I have tried with all my strength not to dwell on it. I have tried to drink it out of my mind, my body. I have, in my worst of days, disgraced myself with other women, but in the end the knowledge of it finds me out again.’

  I had told him everything, even the last part, that part without which it might have been easier to face myself.