The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

by Shona MacLean

  As for Katharine, Katharine was all but forgotten in those first weeks. She was left, frozen in her own grief, a loved younger child but no compensation for the heir that was lost. So engulfed was I during those early weeks in the maelstrom of grieving at Delgatie that I did not see it at first, but Katharine did. Katharine, the sole heir to Delgatie, must marry now, and marry well. No minister, nor bishop even, but land and family. The heirs of Delgatie would spring not from the son but from his sister, and all my hopes lay with Archie where he had fallen.

  There was no one to speak for us. A relative was found, an old, wealthy, childless relative. Katharine would be despatched to his Borders tower-house to marry him and bear him children and return one day, or send her son, to hold Delgatie for the Hays. She understood; I understood. There was no pleading, no begging not to be sent to the cold bed of a man so old he might have been her father, no protest that one day I would be a man whom their daughter might, with no dishonour, marry. All that was gone.

  Fate, in all her wilful cruelty, or helped along perhaps by Katharine’s now fearful and watchful parents, decreed that the day of my final trials at Fordyce should be the day of Katharine’s departure for her Borders jail. We had four weeks, a month of warning, but in that month I could only see her once. My preparations for the final trial, my work in the school, and Katharine’s farewell progress round the ladies and castles of Banff, Moray and the Garioch gave us but one day, and one night. Wary as she was by now, Archie’s mother could not refuse me that last hospitality. His lordship was away from home, but she watched us; we were scarcely left alone together two minutes in the day.

  And then, in the darkness of the night, I stole to Katharine’s chamber and for the first and only time I took her as my wife, and told her she would always be my wife and mine only. And we slept, naked under the cover, entwined in each other’s arms. I had not meant to fall asleep. I should not have fallen asleep and slumbered with her those long hours till dawn. The light of the early May morning and the singing of the birds gradually began to play upon my eyes and ears. The perfect warmth and comfort of waking with Katharine still in my arms was slowly replaced by a dawning horror that I should not still be here. And as I opened my eyes, Katharine’s head and loosened hair across my bare chest, her pale arm on my shoulder, I was met by the horror of Lady Hay’s face. Her skin was drained of all colour save grey. She moved her mouth but no words would come. Her eyes were filled with the cold disaster of the scene before her. And then she spoke. Slowly, quietly. ‘Get out. You are filth. Get out.’ And then the woman who had loved me as a son staggered from the room and vomited.

  And that had been my parting from Katharine, less than three weeks before my final trial for the ministry. I do not know how I kept my senses. A lie. I know how I kept my senses. I had lost the man who would have called himself my brother; I had lost the woman who should have been my wife. I had betrayed my childhood. Everything of my heart, what I had understood as my kin, was closed to me. Yet I still had my calling; I had always had my calling. Even in my one night with Katharine I had told myself there was no sin, because I had meant her for my wife. I did not acknowledge my wrong. Parted from her, I might have been convulsed with grief. Yet I had my calling and my trials were before me. I threw myself still deeper into my books. In those three weeks, less, I turned the Bible on its head and turned it back again. I composed the sermon of my life. There could be no chance of failure, of rejection. I would live for and through my calling. And this I believed until the words were in the mouth of the Moderator of the Presbytery of Fordyce that would have licensed me to preach as a minister of the Kirk of Scotland. And in that moment all tranquillity, all that I still understood in the world was shattered by the cry of my Lord Hay of Delgatie. His wife had finally broken and told him that very morning what I had done, and he had ridden to Fordyce with all the devils in Hell at his heels. He would die before he would see me a minister. He would throw in my face my betrayal of himself and of his family and every single thing they had done for me through all the years of my life. He laid not a finger on me, but before the brethren I was as a man beaten into a stupor. The moderator, aghast, pleading in his eyes, asked me to defend myself. But I could not utter a word. I had no answer for my accuser, for there was none left to give. My dignity lost, I stumbled from the kirk of Fordyce.

  This much, or the gist of it, William Cargill had known, or guessed. Knowing of old of my feelings for Katharine, he had known what Archie’s death would mean for us. The whole of the North knew of my humbling, my great fall, at Fordyce. But if my humiliation had been public, Katharine’s was worse. What was not known was guessed at, and whispered on the roads, in the inns, in the great halls of castles and at the firesides of hovels. Her name was bartered by those who were not worthy even to look on her face. Many wild theories abounded, until the people had some new scandal to keep their tongues active and their spirits content, but I had destroyed what I most loved, and Katharine, banished to that cold marriage bed, could never come back to Delgatie again.

  William and I had never spoken of it before last night. ‘And for this, for what many men have done, ministers among them indeed, you were cast out from your brethren and they will never let you become a minister? Alexander, it is hypocrisy, and you should not bend to it. Why, Delgatie himself was a notorious adulterer in his younger days.’

  I had heard this argument before, from Charles Thom, who had also guessed aright at the heart of the scandal. Jaffray had not argued in such a way, for he knew me better. ‘No, the hypocrisy has been mine, William. My Lord Hay is the head of a family, a magnate, a soldier, a leader of men. What he does in his bed or any other is of no consequence. Yet I sought to be a minister in God’s Kirk, to lead people from the path of damnation to the blessed assurance of righteousness. I knew what I did was wrong. And such was my arrogance in the face of God that I thought it did not matter because it was I who did it. And …’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘It was a betrayal. And my every memory of my whole life up to that point is coloured now by the knowledge of that betrayal. There is nothing in me that is not rotten.’

  William would not allow this. ‘No, I will not have it. You did what other men, worse men have done. You loved the girl and she you. God in his Providence decreed she should not be your wife. In that at least, you may be wretched, but you are not rotten, for it was no work of yours that killed Archie and took Katharine from you.’

  If this had only been so, I might have found myself a more tolerable being. But it was not so. William did not know it; no one knew it, save myself and Katharine. I had had a chance, only a chance, to hold onto the shreds of my life and to make of it something new. But I had rejected it, left it in the gutter. For, on the day of my fall at Fordyce, Katharine too had ridden from Delgatie. She had taken the finest horse left in the stables and she had ridden as no woman before her could have ridden. It availed her nothing. She could not catch her father’s party; she could not overtake him or plead my cause before the brethren as she had sworn to her mother she would do. By the time she arrived at Fordyce the kirk and kirkyard were empty and the brethren gone. She asked all about, but no one could tell her where I was or which way I had gone. Eventually, she came across a pedlar who had seen me on the road to Sandend. It did not take her long to find me then. I was on foot, and my form as well known to her as her own. We had not seen each other since that early morning in her chamber at Delgatie. How often since then I had meditated on the words, taken from the book of Proverbs and painted on the beams of that room’s ceiling: ‘If thou does labour in honesty, the labour goes, the honour bides with thee. If thou does any vice allow, the shame remains when pleasure is ago.’ The shame was burning now into me, burning my eyes so I could scarcely see. And the shame engendered in me a kind of madness, I think. There on the road she slid from her mount and took a step towards me.

  ‘Stay,’ I said.

  ‘Alexander …’

  ‘Come
no closer. Do not come near to me.’

  ‘But Alexander—’

  ‘You know what has happened. You must know it. It is lost, all lost.’

  ‘But no, Alexander. No. All that is nothing to me. I love you more than life itself. I would defy God, my father, my mother, and all the legions of Hell to be with you. Alexander, I will not go. I will not marry him. I am yours. I will be yours. Alexander. We can marry and we can live, somehow.’

  I was shaking my head at her, stepping back as she took another step forwards. ‘You have lost your mind.’

  ‘No, Alexander, but I have found my will. I will not leave you.’

  She was before me, in all her pale and distracted beauty, and a troop of demons was taking hold of my mind. ‘You must leave me, Katharine, for I will not have you. You say it means nothing to you? Well, it means everything to me, and you have cost me all. All.’ All? What ‘all’ did I think there was without her? What ministry, what life did I think I would have led that did not have her in it? There was none, I knew that now. But I think, truly, in that moment I had been out of my senses, for I had turned from her and strode away, leaving her collapsed and crying in the road, the woman I had sworn to love until the day I died. Sometimes at night, when all the schoolhouse was silent save the noise of the sea at the shore, I would be kept awake by the sound of Katharine Hay’s desperate cries, as she lay weeping where I had left her, lying in the dirt on the road to Sandend. A hundred times on those nights I would have gone back to her, but she was no longer there.

  And that I had told last night to William Cargill, the first living soul to hear from my lips how I had rejected the woman who had humbled and dishonoured herself for me. I wanted someone to know me for what I was. The bitterness Jaffray was always counselling me to let go of was at the root of my soul, and my soul knew what I had done.

  William had sat silently for a long time after I had finished. He stoked the fire and stared into the flames. Finally he turned to me and said, ‘And yet I know you for a good man, Alexander. And this will pass. All pain will pass.’ We had said nothing further of the matter and had retired to our beds soon after, before the bell of St Nicholas struck midnight. If he could, I knew that William would take the great burden from my shoulder, and tell me I need carry it no longer, and I loved him for it. But William would never understand that should I once put down that rock, the man I had once believed myself to be would be destroyed for ever.

  EIGHT

  Much Business in Town

  And thus I had slept through the early morning bells. I opened the window shutters and looked out. Elizabeth was in the backhand, gathering eggs from her chickens and trying, with little success, to keep the pig from trampling on the vegetable patch. She was much too small and slight for such a task, and soon the old manservant was out in the yard, bidding his mistress leave off such work, before the master should hear of it. She smiled at the chastisement and returned to her eggs.

  I washed and dressed quickly, but William was long gone by the time I descended to the warmth of the kitchen. Elizabeth’s eyes were full of kindness – I saw William had told her my story – but she masked it as she could. William was a fortunate man. He had loved Elizabeth from the day he met her. He, a scholar, the son of a schoolmaster, she, a kitchen maid, the daughter of a cooper burgess. They had been promised to each other six years, while he completed his course in philosophy at the Marischal College in New Aberdeen and through all his absence at Leiden in the study of law. Neither had strayed. They had married within three months of his return from the Netherlands and now, as he had told me last night, she was carrying his child.

  She regarded me with a mischievous glint in her eye. ‘You slept well, I trust, Mr Seaton. Or is this the accustomed hour of rising for the burgesses of Banff? I had heard of your slovenly ways in those parts, but would scarce have credited them.’

  I laughed in return. ‘Mistress, it is the unaccustomed luxury of your linen kist that kept me at my slumbers. We simple fisher folk know but coarse blankets and howling gales in our desolate dwellings. I dreamt I had fallen amongst the luxuries of Babylon, and was loath to extricate myself from their embrace.’

  Elizabeth wagged an admonishing finger at me. ‘Mistress Youngson shall know of this loose talk, and then we will see how coarse are the blankets she will find you.’ It had been in the kitchen of the old schoolhouse in Banff that William had first met the girl who would become his wife.

  She bade me sit down at the table and ladled steaming porridge into a bowl before me. ‘And then you will have eggs. My hens give the finest eggs in all the town. I sing to them.’

  I made to protest that the porridge would do me fine enough, and she had better need of the eggs herself. She would not hear of it. ‘You need restoring. You have got so thin and gaunt, Alexander. Please, let me care for you a little. To see you better will do me more good than all the eggs in Scotland.’

  Humbled, I did not know how to respond. The kindness in her was almost more than I could face. She saw my discomfort and made light. ‘Besides, if I consume many more eggs, my child will be born with feathers.’ She chattered on about what a fat wife she would be to William, who made her eat while she was not lying down and lie down while she did not eat. But I knew how worried he was. She had always been a pale girl, and slight, and while her pregnancy had brought a joy to her eyes, her cheeks were faded and those eyes tired. The weariness of her body, with five months of her burden yet to carry, was already evident. I thought of my friend, who had all of the promises life could afford a man in his hand, and prayed God that, if He still listened to me, He would not take them from him.

  With a full stomach and a warmth of heart I had not felt in a long time, I set out on my morning’s business. My first call would be at the bookseller’s. David Melville’s shop on the Castlegate had been to me a place of greater delight than all the taverns of Aberdeen, and light though my purse now was, I set off along the street with the anticipation of a child on a holiday morning. The day was sunny and already warm. I decided to take the shorter route to the Castlegate, and avoid the noxious smells of the crafts already rising from the direction of the Netherkirkgate and Putachieside, where the tanners and dyers had been at their work several hours now. I glanced to my left at St Nicholas kirk. It rose, magnificent, dominating the skyline of the town. I had aspired, in the quiet, honest moments when ambition overtook calling, to a pulpit in that kirk. The building had been sectioned into two to allow a more fitting form of worship, now we had severed ourselves from the blandishments of Rome. But I would never preach in either kirk, East or West, now. I passed by a cobbler’s shop; through the open shutter I could see him working at the last, a fine piece of leather turning and moving in his hands. I coveted that leather – my feet were sore and my shoes almost beyond the power of the cobblers of Banff to mend again. I had meant to buy new boots, but the money to pay for them and much else was now in the greedy hand of Sarah Forbes’s uncle in King Edward. Perhaps, before I left town, I would try one of the cheaper cobblers who worked beside the tanners near Putachieside, at the Green.

  At the Castlegate, I found the door of David Melville’s bookshop open. I could smell the piles of new books and the rows of well-bound older ones before I was fully in the shop. The bookseller had his back to me, a piece of paper in his hand as he checked a row of Latin grammars on the shelf. Affixed to the inside of the shop door were lists of books for the use of the town’s schools, which all clustered around the back of St Nicholas Kirk on the Schoolhill. I ran my eye down the list for the grammar school. Editions of Cicero, Virgil, Ovid, better and newer editions than Gilbert Grant knew of or I could afford. Melville finished counting off his catechisms and turned to greet me with a furrowed brow and then a broad smile. ‘Well, if it is not Mr Seaton. I have been expecting you these last few days. You said you would be here before the end of March.’

  I shook his hand. ‘We have been much busied at the grammar school. The presbytery and council
make their visitation at the end of April, and Mr Grant is determined that they will have no cause for fault-finding on this occasion.’

  The bookseller gave a weary sigh. ‘The presbytery and council will always find fault. That is what they are for. But they will have little cause for complaint over your books. I have here the Cicero you wanted, and the Buchanan, and this Greek grammar.’

  Melville tied up my books, then turned a page in his ledger to check the rest of my order. He went to the back wall of the shop, stacked from floor to ceiling with Bibles, and ran his finger along the shelf until he found what he was looking for. He carefully eased out a book bound in soft red leather, almost twice the size of those near it. ‘Here it is. Your good Master, Mr Gilbert Grant, asked me many months ago to find him a Bible printed large enough for his failing eyesight. And I think I have found it. I scoured the country,’ then he smiled, a little sheepish. ‘Well, at least I sent to Edinburgh, and here it is.’ I looked at the imposing volume he held out to me, the print large enough for my friend to read indeed, although I suspected every word of it was already imprinted on the old man’s heart. The bookseller was proud to have managed what he had been asked, but I was a little discomfited.

  ‘Mr Grant made no mention—’

  Melville held up a conciliatory hand. ‘It was many months ago he asked me. He can send payment down from Banff with another courier, once he has the book in his hand. Now, for Dr Jaffray.’ I looked at the mounting pile of books on the counter and began to pity the horse that would carry me home. The bookseller went to another shelf and selected two medical textbooks which he brought over and untied for my examination. I paid Melville what he was owed for the doctor’s books and my own, and sadly declined to look at the most recent works of theology he had from Antwerp. Similarly, I shook my head to the offer of the latest tracts and pamphlets to have landed in Aberdeen from the Low Countries and the North of England. Arguments over the correct form of worship, of kneeling in kirk, of vestments and prayer books were of little interest to me now, although I did not judge it wise to confide that to the bookseller. He pointed to the ceiling above him, to where Raban, the burgh printer, plied his trade.