The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

by Shona MacLean

  There was little more I could do. I believed him, and I did not. He had known, I was certain, that I had come up here about the business of the murders, but he had not expected me to ask about the witch-hunt. So what had it been? He called something to the two guards. One opened the door and, giving me a look potent with threat, jerked his head towards it. The other came over and stooped down to Lang Geordie, who murmured something in the cant. I caught the last words though – Mary Dawson. The man pulled me up by my collar and pushed me through the darkness towards the doorway.

  Outside the dogs were waiting for me, snarling low. I avoided their eye. My elbow was caught as I stepped forward. ‘You were in Aberdeen, Seaton. Is Mary Dawson there?’

  ‘No,’ I replied with conviction, ‘she is not.’ So that was it; he had thought I had come to question him on the warning off of the Dawson sisters, or that I knew something of what they had known. It was with great relief that I finally reached the road leading back to the town from the Sandyhill Gate. The dogs had shadowed me all the way down from the settlement, stopping twenty yards from the roadway. I could feel them watching me for as long as the road remained in their sight. I did not look back. I was glad to win back to the schoolhouse, and glad of the few hours to myself to order my thoughts, between now and when I must appear at the doctor’s door.

  It was a pleasant walk to Jaffray’s. At last a little warmth was being carried on the air, and the evenings were growing lighter – the sky was a mellow golden rose reaching over the firth to the mountains of Sutherland. The storm of last Monday night and its attendant horrors could almost have been a distant memory, consigned to the last throes of winter, had it not left its bitter legacy everywhere I turned.

  The evening was a quieter affair than many we three had spent together. We each of us had much to reflect upon. And there was a contentment in the doctor’s household. I knew the emptiness I had so often left there when I closed the door behind me would be there no more. Charles, so often taciturn, was the quietest of all, but his was a quiet contentment and wonder of a man who has started to see things he never saw before. Ishbel came in and out of the parlour with steaming dishes and plates. Pickled herring and bread still warm, a fine rabbit pie – Charles’s favourite dish – peas, beans, and vegetables of whatever manner her store could provide, a rich gravy owing not a little to the contents of the doctor’s cellar, a sturdy egg custard with apples stewed in all manner of sweet spices. The doctor asserted he would be bankrupt before the week was out if they were to dine like this every night. Ishbel flushed with pride and Charles offered to go sing in the streets to pay his way.

  When the food was cleared and the uisge beatha brought out, we got up and took our accustomed seats around the fire. Jaffray’s parlour was no longer the cold and empty place it had seemed on my last few visits: it had the warmth of a home again, and told his story. The Delft tiles of the fireplace, his wedding gift to his wife, had delighted me as a child and delighted me still, with their happy scenes of life in the Dutch countryside. On the walls were the German woodcuts he had so carefully carried back with him from his studies, so many years ago. It was a man’s room, filled with books and the aroma of tobacco, but with echoes of the woman who had once been at its heart, in the tapestries on the wall, the pressed flowers, their colours long faded, an embroidered footstool that had been hers. Charles stretched out his feet to the hearth and looked into the slowly dancing flames. I had brought the book of poetry I had purchased for him, having meant to give it to him as a help to sustain him in his jail, and I gave it to him then. For the next half-hour, as the doctor and I talked of the news from Aberdeen, Charles was lost in the book. His lips moved in silence as we spoke, and he heard nothing of our talk. At length he started to hum some parts of a tune, and asked the doctor for some paper. ‘I will play this, before the week is done; I will play this for you all,’ and he hummed and mused to himself as he scrawled at the paper. The snatches of song that escaped him every so often began to work their way into my mind, until I could almost have sung them too. They reminded me of something. When Ishbel came in carrying a basket of fresh coals for the fire I broke off my talk with the doctor and told her of my meeting with Sarah Forbes and where she was now. She closed her eyes and uttered a prayer in her own tongue. ‘God’s mercy is with her. And his grace with you, Mr Seaton.’ When she left I saw that Jaffray was studying me curiously.

  ‘Did you know the girl, when she was in the burgh?’ he asked.

  I considered the question, and that not for the first time. ‘I cannot say that I never saw her. I knew by name and from some of your talk here that she was a friend of Ishbel’s.’

  Jaffray continued to study me, working as he did so at something stuck in his teeth. ‘That was a good thing you did, Alexander. Neither you nor your friend Cargill will have cause to regret it. Sarah will be a good help and companion to her mistress. And,’ he added, ‘a good mother to her own child.’

  Charles glanced up from his scrawling. ‘What is this? Are you speaking of women, Alexander? Mistress Youngson will have much to say.’

  I laughed. ‘Mistress Youngson has always much to say. I am not convinced Gilbert Grant has not perfect hearing, but only feigns his deafness.’

  ‘Without question he feigns it,’ rejoined Jaffray.

  As Charles returned to his composing, the doctor pressed me further on my trip to Aberdeen: With whom had I met? What gossip had I heard? When I mentioned George Jamesone, his interest quickened. ‘You went to see George Jamesone. Now why was that?’

  I told him of my commission to the painter from the provost. And then, with some trepidation, I relayed to him William Cargill’s concerns about my involvement with the painter and the possibility that his time in Antwerp and connection with Rubens might have led him into a relationship with Rubens’ Spanish masters. Jaffray frowned. ‘I remember Jamesone. He came to the burgh, as you know, several years ago, to paint Walter Watt and his wife. He was a clever man, and good company, too. But I think your friend is being carried away with rumours if he fears Jamesone is a spy.’

  Charles had put down his pen and was listening now. ‘Why should a painter be feared, simply because he has travelled? What can it have to do with the trouble in our town?’

  Jaffray looked at me, as the one most qualified, albeit reluctantly, to speak on the matter. ‘It is to do with the maps, Charles,’ I said.

  ‘The maps,’ he said slowly to himself, ‘the baillie’s maps.’ He looked at us, some understanding dawning. ‘When I was in the tolbooth, the baillie was asking me night and day about maps – what did I know of maps? Had Patrick Davidson spoken of maps? Had I seen any maps in our chamber? What had Marion to do with the maps? And yet he would not tell me anything about them. I truly did not know what he was asking me about, though after dwelling on it a while – I had much time for thinking – supposed he must have found some maps amongst Patrick’s belongings.’

  ‘He did,’ I said. ‘It was not simply that Patrick Davidson possessed maps, but that they were of this part of the land, from the sea coast as far as Strathbogie, with markings for Elgin, Turriff, and Aberdeen. They were in Davidson’s own hand. It is likely that they were drawn, or at least rough sketches drawn, on his gathering expeditions with Marion. Some of the further away ones may have been done – probably were, in fact – before he reached here.’

  Charles looked up at me with an air of resignation. ‘So that is why they were away so often and so long. I did not think it was the season for many plants, yet I know so little of flowers and their seasons I did not question it, for fear of showing my ignorance. For fear of shutting myself further out of their bond.’ He looked away. ‘Then Marion must have known of these maps. Do you think perhaps that is why she too was killed? But why should anyone fear a map, kill for a map?’

  Jaffray shook his head. ‘Oh, Charles. You are too innocent. The rest of the country sees invaders on every wave, with their books and their bells and their beads.’
r />   ‘Papists?’

  ‘Aye, papists,’ the doctor answered, ‘if it suits them so to be, as pretext for overrunning our country and overturning our church.’

  ‘I had not thought you so fervent for religion, doctor.’ There was no sarcasm, no sly humour in Charles’s observation. Just a statement of fact, which was daily evident.

  ‘Oh, do not mistake me, boy. I am no zealot; no James Cardno or William Buchan, but I have my faith and I know who will judge me when the Lord sees fit to lift me from my travails here. The Kirk, though, it is more than the ministers and the session and all the fulmination from the pulpits of idiots or sainted men. The Kirk is who we are: it is our freedom, and without it, we are lost.’

  I had never heard him talk in this manner before, not of the Kirk. I leaned forward further in my chair. ‘What do you mean, James?’

  ‘I mean that we are servile to no man. We can look at a king and know he is, like us, only a man in the face of God. Our nation will bow and scrape to no man and to no power so long as the Kirk of Scotland is by law established in this land. And that is why I would fight for it, fight against all the Spaniards and the French the legions of Rome can send against us, and against Charles Stuart himself if need be, for without it we are not men and we have no nation.’ And then I understood what I had wondered at but never before realised: James Jaffray, who seemed in his mind to live still in the great universities and cities and towns of the Europe of his youth, could only ever have called one place home, and he had been drawn back to it as an eagle to its nest.

  Charles spoke quietly, looking directly at no one. ‘Do you think there will be an invasion?’

  Jaffray came to himself a little. ‘I do not know. I think it very likely though, and likely too that Walter Watt’s nephew was up to his neck in the plotting of it. What did Straloch say to it, Alexander?’

  ‘That the work was well done, extremely well done, and would have done very well for a foreign army landing at our shores. But he denied knowledge of any commission to Patrick Davidson or anyone else for such work, and denied any knowledge of any plots of the sort.’

  ‘Then he is surely cut off from his master,’ said Charles, ‘for since when did the Marquis of Huntly not plot?’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Jaffray. ‘But Straloch is a good, honest man. Did you not find him so, Alexander?’

  It was a more difficult question than I had bargained for, or at least an honest answer was more difficult to find. ‘I think … I do not know, James. I think Huntly has some business afoot. My old friend, Matthew Lumsden, whom I met with in Old Aberdeen, is in Huntly’s retinue. He was to ride that day on business for the marquis, and Matthew is not a man you would use for diplomacy. Straloch himself rode early yesterday for Aberdeen and then Edinburgh on Huntly’s affairs, yet I heard horsemen leave the place in the night, and I would hazard they were bound for Strathbogie. What need could there have been for night-riding, what sudden urgency but information I had brought myself?’

  ‘Then we must be vigilant,’ said the doctor. ‘Now though, did you get Cargill’s notebooks? For that is the matter we must attend to here. Charles …’ But Charles Thom had fallen asleep in the chair to the right of the doctor’s fire, his stomach full and his heart something less heavy. Jaffray watched him sleep for a few moments, then quietly got up and signalled me to follow him over to the table, which Ishbel had long since cleared. I laid the book out and the doctor began to examine it, turning each leaf over carefully, and marvelling in a low voice at the quality of the drawings and the insight of the annotations. We had not yet reached the page I was sure the colchicum was sketched upon when there came a loud knocking at the doctor’s back door. Charles Thom was startled out of his sleep, and the doctor got to his feet. In a moment Ishbel was at the parlour door; Edward Arbuthnott, the apothecary, close behind her.

  ‘I am sorry, doctor,’ she said, ‘I—’

  ‘I am not here for the doctor, but the music master,’ he said, brushing past her with little ceremony. Charles, still not fully wakened, shambled to his feet. I took a step towards him, but Arbuthnott was in front of him before me. ‘Charles Thom, for all that you owe my family, who took you in and gave you food and lodging, and for the love you bore my girl, you will sing for her, you and your scholars, at her lykewake, will you not?’

  Charles blinked stupidly, not yet come to. ‘Her lykewake? Aye … aye, of course.’

  The look on Jaffray’s face told what was in my mind also. ‘Edward,’ he said, ‘you cannot be thinking of—’

  ‘Aye, but I am.’ The apothecary was defiant. ‘Why should my girl, my only child, be put to her rest without what others so much less worthy have had? She will have a lykewake and all the town will know what it has lost.’ He turned again to Charles. ‘So you will play at it, and your scholars too?’

  ‘Aye,’ said Charles, sitting back down now, discomfited. ‘I will.’ The apothecary nodded briskly, satisfied, and bade us goodnight.

  As the back door banged again and we heard Ishbel put the bolt up, Jaffray looked at me warily, but I said nothing. Charles looked at me, too. ‘I know you do not like them, Alexander, but it is not for the money, this time, but for Marion herself.’ We had argued often about it, I from the heart and he from the head. The lykewake, the festival of watching over the dead before they should be interred, their body making its final earthly journey as its soul began its own wanderings in the afterlife. A manifestation of how far the people were still steeped in the superstition of Romanism, if not paganism, which the Kirk would have given much to have eradicated from the burgh. But the people clung tenaciously to it. The civic authorities did not like it either, but so far they tolerated it. At the lykewake the master of the song school and his pupils would sing and play – that was where Charles made a good part of his money, and why he was loath to give it up. The council knew that if they banned their music master from performing at such gatherings, they would have to compensate him for his loss, and that they were not inclined to do.

  What they did not like, and the session fulminated against also, was the lavish entertainment laid out by the family of the deceased and the consequent over-indulgence of the mourners in sweetmeats and strong drink and substances that alter men’s minds. As the night wore on – for these celebrations were usually at night – the singing and the music would grow louder and less godly, until, when the song schoolchildren had most of them gone home, it would become utterly profane. Dancing would grow wilder, and lascivious behaviour would increase before the very eyes of the magistrates and the session. Few would be fit for their proper work the next day. Baillie Buchan and others of his ilk had fought long and hard to have the holding of lykewakes forbidden by the town, but to no avail, so far ingrained in the memories of the people were they. I would not argue with Charles about it tonight, though. ‘You must do as you think right, Charles. And I know it will not be for the money.’

  ‘I think I will go to my bed now,’ he said. ‘It has been a long and strange day.’

  ‘Take care you do not scald your feet,’ the doctor told him. ‘Ishbel will have put a warming pan in your bed. If not two, indeed, for now that you are here I should not be surprised to learn that mine is in there as well. I will be left to shift as I may without one, and no doubt freeze to death. Ah, the ingratitude of the young.’ The doctor was happy: all was once again as it should be in his life.

  Charles looked a little bashful. Taking up his book of Craig’s poetry, he bade us goodnight and made his way towards the kitchen, where Ishbel would not yet have finished her night’s work.

  We returned now to the table, and the examination of James Cargill’s notebook. The script was small and neat, the Latin perfect, but the drawings themselves were of an exquisite nature, beyond perfect. I looked at them in wonder for a few moments, as my older companion silently read. A bright yet distant look was in his eyes. I had seen this look on him before. He was transported to another time, another place. Alpine meadows and the valley
s of the Pyrenees. A group of young men, running, climbing with all the sureness of foot of mountain goats, and stopping, every so often, to hang on the words of their teacher, as he told them of every property, pointed out every small and fine detail, of some tiny plant or flower. ‘They were good times for you, James,’ I said.

  ‘Aye,’ he replied, ‘they were. But it is to the present that we must turn our eyes and our minds. You say you think you have come upon the flower?’

  ‘I cannot be sure, but it is the name that you told me.’ I took the book from him and then leafed through its pages until I found what I was looking for. I turned the book back towards him. ‘There,’ I said. ‘Is that it?’

  He nodded slowly, his eyes keen. ‘Aye,’ he said, ‘it is.’ He traced a finger beneath the outline of the flower, and began to read out the words. ‘“Petals the grey-blue of the northern sky after it has snowed. Calyx of deep purple sepals below, small, pale green bract. Stigma and anthers yellow, the colour of straw in September. The whole forming a large goblet on a slender white stem. Basal leaves, long, dark, glossy green straps, emerging after blooms. One corm will produce 6–8 blooms on 3–5 leaves. Unlike its benign relatives, flowers not in the autumn, but the spring.” Aye, that is it, that is it; it is quite different from the other colchicum, you know,’ he said, growing excited. He read on, using terms and talking of properties I did not understand, until his voice, slow and deliberate, with great emphasis, intoned, ‘“corm has the look of a small, elongated and blackened onion. Utterly and almost instantly lethal if ingested.”’ There was more, about where the plant was to be found, the difficulties of cultivation, the lack of any known beneficial medicinal use. Then words not in Latin, but in Cargill’s own native tongue and ours. ‘The Salome of all flowers: beautiful, and deadly.’ Jaffray gave a short, humourless laugh. ‘Little wonder he never married. Every beautiful woman must have called to mind for him some botanical instrument of death. But this is it, Alexander, this is the flower we seek. Through the vomit, the chicory scent could still be got in their hair.’ ‘And you have never seen it here?’