The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

by Shona MacLean

  He got up heavily and stood looking out through the window to his garden. ‘No. She was not a witch: she was a young girl with a knowledge of herbs and flowers, who was prettier, and more intelligent than most of the girls of her age, and who did not care to waste her time on mixing with them. She was the companion and friend instead of the wife of the provost, and she took up with a boy who had been here and left to travel to mysterious lands. And that was more than this town would allow.’

  Yet still I could not leave it. ‘But why then did she go to the wise woman of Darkwater? Not only with Patrick Davidson, but alone herself, after he was dead?’ A silence hung where there had never before been silence between us.

  ‘Did you get her to speak to you, James, after his death?’

  ‘Yes,’ he conceded at last. ‘Just the one time, she spoke to me, but there was nothing she said that touched on our business or Charles’s.’

  I had never seen him like this before, and was not convinced that he was not keeping something from me. ‘What did she tell you, James?’

  The doctor did not turn to look at me when he replied. ‘There are things that are no longer of this world – that it is only for the dead to know.’

  It was with heavy steps and a heavier heart that I climbed Strait Path to the Castlegate where the provost’s house was to be found. He had left word at the tolbooth that he could not wait longer on me there and had to go home to his wife. I had little inclination now to waste further time and effort on his errands, and little interest, if truth were told, in the question of his nephew’s maps and papist plots. There were greater dangers, greater evils being made manifest before us as we woke and walked and slept in this very town than anything that threatened from without or in the future. And horrible as the death of Patrick Davidson had seemed to begin with, it was worse now, and perhaps there would be worse to come. What Charles had most feared had come to pass. Marion Arbuthnott was dead and that death was part of the chain that had begun with that of Patrick Davidson.

  The burgh, as far as I could see, was returning to its usual state and rhythm of life, the only sign of last night’s debauch being the whiff of smoked wood the wind carried with it. But perhaps, as Gilbert Grant had hinted, such perversions had always been lurking in the hearts of my fellow townsmen, never far beneath the surface of their neighbourliness and godliness. How easily the good neighbours had taken up the call of Lang Geordie, an idle beggar, a masterless man, usually feared and reviled. How ready they had been to follow the lead of one they would gladly otherwise have seen hounded from the burgh. I banged on the door of the provost’s house, the noise loud and echoing in the empty street.

  Walter Watt himself opened the door to me. He had a dishevelled air and his eyes were shot through with redness from lack of sleep. He also carried with him the smell of smoke from last night. I realised the man had not yet been to his bed, and I felt a little shamefaced.

  ‘I am sorry I did not come to meet with you at the appointed time.’

  He waved away my apology as he left me to shut the door behind myself. ‘I would not have had the leisure to see you much earlier than now anyway. I have been busy with the baillie and the dean of guild most of the morning.’

  ‘The baillie is recovered, then?’ I asked in surprise. I had not thought to ask Jaffray about his patient of last night.

  He eyed me shrewdly. ‘The baillie is a man driven. Where others would have buckled and collapsed, he sustains himself on a determination not of woman born. I would have no fears for the baillie.’

  ‘The dean of guild, last night, I did not notice …’ again my voice trailed away. I did not know which side the leader of all our burgh’s craftsmen had taken.

  The provost took my meaning straight away, though. ‘He was with us, thank God. If he had not been, we would be in a worse case than we are already in.’

  I thought of the quietly industrious burgh I had passed through that morning. ‘You think the commerce of the town will suffer?’ I said.

  He smiled at me, but there was no humour in his eyes. ‘You are a man of learning, Mr Seaton, but a craftsman’s son also. You must know that nothing passes within the burgh that does not in some manner affect trade and good government. And, I would suspect, your mind was much on other matters this morning. Did you, for instance, pass the coopers’ yard?’

  I confessed that I had not.

  ‘How many of the baxters were calling their wares in the marketplace this morning? And were you, by chance, out by the tannery? Can you smell them?’ Sometimes, with the wind blowing from the west, the nauseating smells of the tanners’ work were wafted down to the burgh itself, and could be caught in the air and in the throat. But not today. The provost was watching me and saw that I began to understand.

  ‘Half the tanners are in the tolbooth. With three of the baxters. Master and apprentice alike. Most of the coopers, along with the chandlers and God knows how many of the domestic servants in the burgh, as well as two or three merchants whose names would surprise you, have been parcelled out between the laird of Banff’s strong room and the castle dungeon. Had the moderator and his brethren been half an hour later, the back of the burgh would have broken under the strain. It was curbed with scarcely more minutes to spare.’ He looked at me and spoke with a coldness that sent a shiver through my body. ‘They were at the point of going after the living as well as the dead. Your friend Charles Thom would not have survived the night, had their madness been allowed to grow. And then we would have had more murderers on our hands than all the dungeons in Banff can hold. The town is quiet today, yes, but it is not at rest.’

  ‘And how will you act?’ I asked, for it was plain that no other man in Banff could guide the affairs of the town out of the morass they had fallen into.

  He rubbed a wearied hand across his brow. ‘Oh, the most of them will come before the baillie court in the morning. There will be fines to pay, and reparations to be made – to the doctor’s house, and the marketplace and other things damaged last night – though God knows nothing can be done for Arbuthnott himself. Then they will be passed on to what remains of the kirk session, for more fines and public penance, and then they will be left to go about their work. No good will come of creating more resentments.’

  I had hoped for better revenge than this for Marion Arbuthnott and her father. ‘They would have got worse for stealing a pig or slandering a shrewish wife.’

  The provost took little offence at this remark. ‘Oh, do not misunderstand me, Mr Seaton: the ringleaders will be appropriately dealt with. According to their crime and to their place, they will be dealt with. The minister will be put out of his pulpit. He will never preach within the bounds of this presbytery again. He will answer to his brethren, and there can be no doubt but that he will be deprived.’ It was evident that the thought gave him no little satisfaction.

  ‘And the session clerk?’ He gave a shallow laugh. ‘James Cardno? Cardno also is finished. The doorkeeper who guarded him last night tells me he has near lost his wits.’ That I could well believe: the man I had seen inflaming the mob last night had been on the very brink of insanity. ‘Cardno is very like to find himself banished the burgh. Aye, and then the session will be broken,’ continued the provost. ‘The power of the minister and session in this burgh will not again challenge stability and order as it did last night, and as it has threatened to do many times before now.’

  And that, I now understood, was what mattered to him, what had mattered to him last night. What had driven him last night was not sentiment, man-made or God-given, for Marion Arbuthnott or her father, but for the burgh of Banff itself.

  ‘And what of the baillie?’ I asked. I knew he would not be sorry to see the back of the Reverend Guild, but the provost hoped for too much if he thought this would be enough to make the baillie quiet in the matter of kirk discipline.

  ‘The baillie is immovable, you are right; but yet his hand might be weakened long enough, the complexion of the session and council ch
anged enough at the outcome of this business, that it will not matter.’ The provost spoke these last words to himself almost as much as he did to me. I wondered how many years he had waited for this moment, for the day when he would truly wrest control of the burgh of Banff from those who claimed to be the magistrates of God.

  ‘And what of Lang Geordie?’ I asked.

  The provost looked at me quizzically and repeated the name.

  ‘The beggar. The big, bearded cripple. He is the head of all who inhabit the codroche houses at the far side of the burgh, near the Sandyhill Gate.’

  ‘I know who he is,’ said Watt. ‘But what has the beggar man to do with the matter?’

  I told him of Lang Geordie’s part as I had heard it. The provost’s expression became a little more thoughtful. ‘I had not realised; I had not seen him at the burning.’ I realised that I had not either, but there was no reason to doubt the truth of the stable boy’s tale. The provost was nodding. ‘It may well be that he was used to rouse the rabble, to add the fear of violence to whatever the minister and Cardno fermented with their words, but I think he was of little moment in last night’s proceedings. He could be fined, but where would be the point in that? He has nothing to pay a fine without he steals it from another. Lang Geordie, as you said yourself, is the leader of all the shiftless, worthless, idle and debauched creatures in this burgh. He knows he – they – are here on sufferance, and that if they come too often to the attention of the authorities they will be suffered no more. So, they go about their shiftless business with a sort of discretion, within rules that they and we understand. They are whoremongers and thieves, I grant you. But they are our whoremongers and thieves, and they will do much to protect their position and their privilege. We have no need to fear incoming hordes of sturdy beggars as long as Lang Geordie and his crew are in the town.’ I saw then that there was a balance in everything, seen and unseen, in the daily life of the burgh, that there was a place for things that might seem to have no place. Still I was not satisfied, but I said no more to Walter Watt of Lang Geordie.

  We were in that same hall of the provost’s house that the corpse of Patrick Davidson had briefly rested in just six days ago. It had been a sombre enough place then, but it was worse now: a dead and empty place where a great man paced the floor alone. ‘How is your wife?’ I asked him. I had heard from Jaffray and in Mistress Youngson’s kitchen also that Geleis Guild was disconsolate over the death of her friend and helper, and that the treatment meted out to the corpse of Marion Arbuthnott was feared to send her from her senses. The children had been sent already to the home of the provost’s sister in Elgin for fear of what they would see or hear next in our burgh. How the young woman would have taken her brother the minister’s involvement in all that had passed, none could guess. The provost’s eyes were empty as he answered me.

  ‘She is almost beyond the reach of comfort. It should not have gone thus for my wife.’ And as he said so, he could not help looking up at the portrait on the wall. I wondered whether he feared being widowed a second time. I hoped for his sake and for hers that he would not be.

  But then the man became the provost and asserted himself once more. ‘And now, Mr Seaton, to business. You saw Straloch?’

  I answered that I had and I removed the sealed letter from my pocket. He took it and walked to the window on the south side of the room, where the late morning sunlight was beginning to filter through the dense glass. His eyes moved quickly across the page. Before they had reached the end an air of relief passed over his countenance and he nodded slowly to himself. ‘You have read this, Mr Seaton?’ he asked briskly.

  ‘No, provost, I have not. The letter is addressed to you. I do know the gist of Straloch’s opinion of the matter, though, and I am glad for it.’

  He was watching me carefully. ‘And you trust the man?’

  I thought about the quiet conversation in Straloch’s dining hall after I had first gone up to my bed; I thought of the sounds of horsemen leaving in the night, but I had no wish for further distractions or errands for the provost. ‘I trust his word on this: that if your nephew were any spy, he knew nothing about it before he saw that map.’

  ‘Then you still think my nephew was a traitor?’

  I answered him as honestly as I dared. ‘I am satisfied enough with Straloch’s answer. My concern is to help the living, not to speculate about the dead.’ Yet in truth, it was not complete honesty. Straloch had no knowledge of any planned invasion or the commissioning of Patrick Davidson to draw these maps, but I had seen in his eyes that he was not convinced that such a commission had not been given. He may well have ridden south himself as he had told me he would do, but it was just as likely that his young retainers had ridden at night, and with some urgency, to Strathbogie and the Marquis of Huntly. I was not ready to dismiss the possibility of Patrick Davidson’s treachery as easily as Walter Watt would have had me do. If there had been treachery, then there had been a motive for murder, and its discovery would bring closer the release of Charles Thom, for what interest did he have in treachery and papist plots? I did not like to dwell on the topic in this place and this company, and was glad when the provost turned the conversation to another matter.

  ‘And did you fulfil my private commission?’

  ‘To George Jamesone?’

  ‘The artist. Yes. What response had you from him?’

  I drew the second letter out of my cloak. There was no fire in the grate and the place was cold. The provost too still had his outer garments about him. Jamesone’s letter, as I had known, was shorter and pleased Walter Watt less. ‘I see he is now much in demand amongst the great ones, and cannot spare himself long to come to our mean burgh. Ach, well,’ he added, crumpling the letter and throwing it into the empty hearth, ‘perhaps it is not yet the time for paintings, but he will come at length, and it will be there, telling its story, long after we are gone.’ He came away from the window and started to head for the small door at the back of the room which led through to the rear of the house. He turned and nodded towards the main door, dismissing me abruptly. ‘You did your business well and with discretion, Mr Seaton. Do not trouble yourself further in the matter of my nephew. The appropriate authorities will see to their business there. Now I must wash away this pestilent smoke.’

  I was glad to see myself out, and free from further obligation to those who had so recently taken me into their trust. I closed the door of the empty hall firmly behind me and stepped out into the midday light of the street. I turned down Water Path to make my way back to the schoolhouse, needing to rest and to think and perhaps even to pray before I commenced my business of the afternoon. At the edge of my vision, for a brief, deceiving moment, I thought I glimpsed a figure flit through the gate in the castle wall. Again I experienced, more strongly now, the sensation that had dogged me since my return to Banff the night before: that I was being watched.

  TWELVE

  A Homecoming

  The ground floor of the tolbooth, usually given over to the payment of taxes and the collection of fines, was packed, heaving with armed men and overworked officials who looked as if they had been there all night. The stench from the crammed cells on the upper floors was beyond the capacity of doors and walls to contain and combined with the lingering smell of smoke that permeated from the outside to create a putrefying miasma that almost overwhelmed me. There was no appearance of anyone being in charge, and so I asked one guard and then another and then another. When the fourth finally told me, I could not at first comprehend what he said. But then I understood – half the town was chained and shackled in those cells, but Charles Thom was not there; he was gone. Charles was gone from the tolbooth, and no one could tell me where he was. ‘He was taken away. By order of the baillie. He was removed in the night.’ This was all the man knew, he swore to it, and his fellow guards claimed to know no more than he did. Charles might be in the cellars of the laird of Banff’s palace, or he might be in the dungeon of the sheriff’s castle – at
neither would I be given entry or have my questions answered. At worst – I hoped it was the worst – he would be out at the Ogilvy stronghold of Inchdrewer, but to ride out there would be to lose time I did not have. A messenger had ridden that morning, at dawn, to Aberdeen, to call back in person the sheriff to sit in judgement upon our burgh. There was no choice for me but to find out Baillie Buchan himself.

  The baillie, I knew, lived alone on the upper floors of a mean tenement up a vennel to the west end of High Shore. He had never married, and such house-keeping as he allowed to be done for him was performed by the wizened and mute crone whose son held the feu of the tenement. I had never ventured there before. No one visited the baillie. The vennel was dank and dark, an appropriate place for William Buchan to issue from, as he went on his nightly inspections of our town. It had perhaps not always been a place of such foreboding. Two pairs of initials and a date, 1572, were engraved on the lintel above the door, a statement of hope and faith.

  I banged hard on the timber and the chickens pecking in the backyard scattered, squawking at the unheard-of intrusion. It was the crone who came to the door. ‘I must see the baillie, urgently. He is not to be found in the town. Where will I find him?’ She looked at me with pale and watery eyes and nodded, twice, before holding up a bony finger to me, presumably that I should wait, then shutting the door. Two or three minutes later, she reappeared, opened wide the door, and stood back for me to pass. Then she pointed up the stairs and went back to her cooking pot. The mixed odours of fish broth and peat smoke pursued me silently as I ascended to the baillie’s quarters. There was no candle on the stairway and the few small windows of this gable house gave very little light, faced as they were by the solid houses just a few feet across the vennel. I found my way by groping the spiralling granite of the walls, and came at length to a small doorway opened onto the first landing. A dim and flickering light issued from the gap between door and jamb, and I pushed the door open quietly without knocking. Sitting in a comfortless wooden chair, by the small fire that struggled in the grate, was Baillie William Buchan. Opposite him, in an identical chair, a bowl of the broth at his hand, sat Charles Thom.