Seaton 01 - The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

by S. G. MacLean

  THE REDEMPTION OF ALEXANDER SEATON

  Shona MacLean

  Quercus

  First published in Great Britain in 2008 by Quercus

  This paperback edition published 2009 by

  Quercus

  21 Bloomsbury Square

  London

  WC1A 2NS

  Copyright © 2008 by Shona MacLean

  The moral right of Shona MacLean to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue reference for this book is available from the British Library

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Typeset by Ellipsis Books Limited, Glasgow Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

  To the memory of my parents,

  Gilleasbuig MacLean

  and

  Margaret Jane Farquharson MacLean

  There is a short glossary of Scottish words on at the end of this book.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Chapter One - The Tempest

  Chapter Two - A Dead Man’s Face

  Chapter Three - The Tolbooth

  Chapter Four - The Maps

  Chapter Five - Post-Mortem

  Chapter Six - A Journey

  Chapter Seven - Destination

  Chapter Eight - Much Business in Town

  Chapter Nine - The King’s College

  Chapter Ten - Straloch

  Chapter Eleven - Concerning Witches

  Chapter Twelve - A Homecoming

  Chapter Thirteen - The Wise Woman of Darkwater

  Chapter Fourteen - The Lykewake

  Chapter Fifteen - Old Stories’ Endings

  Epilogue

  Glossary

  Prologue

  Banff, 26 March 1626, 10 o’clock

  The younger of the two whores rifled the man’s pockets with expert fingers. She cursed softly. Nothing.

  ‘Leave off, then,’ said her sister. ‘The baillie will be here any minute.’

  Mary Dawson rolled the man back over onto his face. He groaned, then retched, and she cursed once more as he vomited bile over her foot. ‘Pig,’ she said, and kicked him. The wind sent a barrel careering past them down the brae to smash into a wall below. Somewhere, a dog took up a demented howling.

  ‘Leave off,’ insisted her sister.

  Mary turned away from the form slumped in the overflowing gutter. Janet was right: there was nothing to be gained here tonight. A quarter-hour would see them out of this tempest. She took her sister’s arm, ready to make for home, and then she froze. A hand had come from the ground and held her ankle. The words came in a ghostly rasp. ‘Help me,’ he said.

  Unable to shift her foot, Mary looked to her sister in silent, distilled fear. The other lifted a finger to her lips and came slowly towards the dying man. Mindless of her already filthy clothes, Janet knelt down in the gutter and brought her mouth to his ear. ‘Say it again.’

  The words came with even greater labour this time. ‘Help me,’ he repeated. Another convulsion took him. He gave up his grip on Mary’s ankle and his face sank into the mud.

  Janet Dawson looked up slowly at her sister, who began to shake her head. ‘Oh, no. We cannot. There has been evil here. This is no drunk. Think who he is. The baillie will come soon; they will have us for this.’

  ‘We cannot leave him,’ said Janet.

  ‘Please,’ her sister pleaded. ‘They will have us. Let’s get us away.’

  ‘He’ll be dead by morning if we leave him.’

  Mary looked at the still convulsing form at her feet. ‘He’s dead anyway.’ The bell above the tolbooth clock began to toll the hour. Her voice was urgent. ‘It is ten. The baillie … Let’s get us away.’ But she knew her words were useless.

  Janet Dawson, on hands and knees now, heaved the man’s left arm about her own neck and looked up at her sister. ‘Well? Am I to do this alone?’

  At length the two women got him to his feet, but all strength was gone from him, the paralysis spreading through his body slowly disabling him. They half-carried, half-dragged their burden across the cobbles of the Water Path towards the old schoolhouse. The wind whipped their hair across their faces and the rain lashed into their thinly clothed backs. His head, beyond his power to lift now, lolled first onto the one and then the other. Words came, forced from his constricting throat, but were lost in the darkness as the storm took hold of the night.

  The bolt on the pend gate leading to the backyard of the house gave little trouble to the sisters, and they passed through, taking the man the last few yards of his journey. A gust slammed the gate shut and the tableau was gone from view. The schoolhouse was all in darkness: no light from lantern or candle glimmered from the cracks in its shutters as it loomed three storeys over the narrow street below. No sounds came either of disturbance in the backland, of startled animals, no knocking on the door. It was not many minutes before they came out again the way they had gone in, not three this time but two.

  ‘Do you think they will find him?’ asked Mary.

  ‘They will find him.’

  ‘Aye, but in time?’

  Janet was weary now, anxious for her rest and to be out of the storm. ‘I cannot tell; we have done what we could. It is in God’s hands.’ They closed the pend gate behind them and went swiftly up the Water Path. As they forked to the left, Janet looked back. She had not been mistaken, then: they were watched. The figure met her eyes for a brief moment then disappeared into the darkness. She would not tell Mary whom she had seen, not until they were safe home. Perhaps it would be better not to tell her at all.

  ONE

  The Tempest

  Banff, the same night, two hours earlier

  The old woman lifted her candle the better to observe me.

  ‘You would not think of going out tonight?’

  ‘Aye, mistress, I would.’

  She fixed me with a look I knew well. ‘On a night such as this, no honest man would stir from his own hearth.’

  ‘Indeed he would not, mistress,’ I said. ‘But as you have often assured me, I am no honest man.’ I took down my hat and, bidding her no farewell, I went forth into the remorseless storm.

  The wind, which from my attic room in the old schoolhouse had wailed through every crack and crevice like a legion of harpies, was transformed out in the night into the implacable wrath of God himself. No lantern could withstand its force and every window was shuttered against its blasts. The sea raged over the harbour walls and soaked me with its spray. There was not a single light in the town of Banff to guide a decent man on his way. As for me, I knew my way well enough. I pulled my great furred cloak more tightly round me and pressed on. All manner of ordure rushed past my feet through the open gutters towards the sea. Many foul things could be disposed of on a night like this and tomorrow the streets would be washed clean of them. I was glad of the darkness.

  Some way ahead of me, perhaps only ten yards apart, lay St Mary’s kirk and the Market Inn, the one offering redemption, the other damnation. Once, I had believed I knew where each lay. Once, but not now. A
t the kirkyard I turned right and presently pushed open the door of the inn.

  Jaffray, of course, was already there. Charles Thom sat opposite him, but did not lift his head when I entered, despite the fearsome blast that followed me through the door and caused the shutters to bang on their hinges. The shore porters looked up for a moment from their gaming by the hearth, but seeing no one of interest, returned without comment to their dice. In a gloomy corner, furthest from the fire, watched James Cardno, the session clerk. My arrival prompted no greeting other than the slow smile of satisfaction which spread, ill-masked, across his lips. He was the eyes and ears of Baillie Buchan who, by some oversight on the part of Beelzebub, could not be in two places at once. I wondered what unfortunate soul the baillie was visiting himself upon on this hellish night.

  Jaffray hailed me as I approached his table. ‘An ill night, Alexander.’

  ‘It is that, doctor,’ I replied, taking my usual seat beside him.

  Charles Thom said nothing, but continued to gaze in misery at his ale. Such misery was best left alone; I would not press him. Jaffray, however, was determined to draw him out. He addressed himself again to me.

  ‘Charles is not in the best of spirits tonight, Alexander. I have been hard put to extract two words from him this last half-hour.’ He sucked ostentatiously on his pipe. ‘I have pulled more compliant teeth.’

  The young master of the burgh song school looked up at this. ‘What would you have me say? It is an evil night? The ale is good? My pupils sang well today? The kirk was cold yesterday and is like to be so again tomorrow? Take your pick, doctor, please.’ He returned to the contemplation of his ale.

  I shot Jaffray a quizzical glance. ‘Marion Arbuthnott,’ he replied, not quite under his breath. And louder still, ‘and our good provost’s nephew – an interesting fellow.’

  This was enough to rouse Charles once more from his indifference. ‘And what, precisely, is so interesting about him? That he has travelled? Well, so have you, doctor.’

  Jaffray raised a good-natured eyebrow. ‘And you think I am not the more interesting for it? I assure you, I was more of a dullard than Cardno there before I left on my peregrinatio.’

  This at least drew a smile from Charles, and I was hard put not to laugh out loud myself, aware as I was of the session clerk’s scowl burning into my back. The wind continued to howl through the shutters and down the great chimney-piece of the inn, muffling the conversations rising and falling in Mistress Johnston’s parlour. In between occasional arguments over the roll of the dice the shore porters pondered gloomily on the likelihood of the storm abating before the week’s end. No boat could drop anchor in the harbour in such weather and none could leave. With no work, there would be no wages. All along the coast it would be the same.

  ‘The poor box will be out for them before the week’s end,’ said Jaffray, nodding to Anne Johnston to send them over another round of ale.

  ‘There will be little enough in it,’ said Charles, not lifting his head from his tankard.

  ‘Oh? Who have you been asking for?’

  ‘John Barclay,’ replied Charles. ‘The boy has the voice of a very angel, and not a pair of shoes to his feet. In another age and another place, he would have a stall in a cathedral choir; he would be singing masses for the rich dead. But here, in this godly commonwealth of ours …’

  ‘He is safe from the tentacles of the idolater, and he can rely on the Christian charity of God’s people and the kirk to keep food in his belly and a coat to his back.’

  Charles looked to the doctor in mute incomprehension, but Jaffray sat tight-lipped now, only with his eyes directing Charles to where the session clerk sat, storing up his every word.

  ‘Amen to that,’ said Charles, instantly understanding, his precentor’s mask descending over the mischievous, amused, subversive face he reserved for myself and Jaffray and few others. As master of the song school he received no salary at all, but only the tuition fees of those of his pupils who could afford to pay him. As a perquisite of his post, however, allowing him to scrape a living, he was constrained to take up the psalm in the burgh kirk and to read the lesson there, all for the greater edification of the townspeople. The look of abject misery that settled on his person while performing these duties was born, I knew, of a profound lack of interest in the sentiments he was paid to intone and of an intense dislike of the cold. To those of Presbyterian inclination on the council and the kirk session, however, his demeanour accorded so completely with their own that John Knox himself could not have pleased them better.

  My friend’s ambitions were simple: to be left to himself and his music. His lack of concern for the good of his soul had given me much anguish in the days before my own fall. Yet, over this last year, Jaffray and I had remarked in him an alteration of spirit, the alteration that comes when a man realises that he no longer wishes to be alone. Edward Arbuthnott, apothecary of Banff, under whose roof Charles lodged, had a daughter, and with that daughter, as Jaffray had now convinced me, Charles was in love. But, like myself, Charles had few prospects of making his way to a more prosperous estate in life, and while Edward Arbuthnott was not an unduly ambitious man, he was as likely to give him his only daughter in marriage as James Cardno was to buy me a drink.

  I swallowed some of the Rhenish Anne Johnston had brought me and asked casually, ‘So you think Marion is beguiled by the new arrival?’

  Charles eyed me grudgingly. ‘Her mother certainly is. To that old besom Patrick Davidson is a prayer answered. Old Arbuthnott has years in him yet, but his wife cannot look at him without seeing six feet of good kirkyard earth piled over him, and herself and her daughter out on the street. She’ll have Marion married to Patrick Davidson the minute he’s finished his apprenticeship, and Arbuthnott can drop dead the next day for all she will care.’

  It was not difficult to believe this of the matron in question, and indeed there was little purpose in arguing the point with Charles. Even Jaffray could see that. The sense of Marion Arbuthnott marrying her father’s apprentice and keeping the business in the family was self-evident. The girl had no brothers, and her mother was no prize on her own. ‘And Marion? What does she think?’

  He was hesitant. ‘Who can tell? I think, maybe, she would not mind the idea.’

  ‘Ach, come now, Charles.’

  Charles looked at Jaffray. ‘No, doctor. I fear I am right. Since Patrick Davidson came to lodge with the Arbuthnotts I have rarely seen her, and I have spoken to her less. At mealtimes he regales us all with tales of his travels. Of France, and the Alps, and of what’s left of the Empire. He is a good storyteller, I’ll grant you. And the war,’ he lowered his voice, ‘he tells us of the horrors of the war.’

  The apothecary’s apprentice had not been the first to make his way to our corner of Scotland with tales of the brutality, the starvation, the rapine and the disease that marched the length and breadth of the Holy Roman Empire. Sons, brothers, friends had left our shores to fight for the Empire or against and had never come home. The frequent call of the kirk for collections to sustain our suffering brethren abroad kept the cause in minds that might have preferred to shut it out. It was in Charles’s mind, I knew, and the tales of suffering he had heard from Patrick Davidson, with whom he now shared his attic room at the apothecary’s, had engraved images in his head he would not share or indeed acknowledge. He sought to change the subject.

  ‘Anyhow, by night he plays the great hero while I can only play my tunes – the half of them banned by the minister and his godly brethren. And by day, well, by day while I spend my talent trying to wrest a tune from the urchins of this burgh or courting an early death in the freezing cold of that kirk, he trails Marion halfway across the country gathering berries and plants and the Lord alone knows what else for her father’s simples and syrups and ointments.’

  Jaffray put a warning hand on his arm. ‘Mind what you say, Charles. It has been spoken of already at the session and Cardno’s ears are strained to your every wo
rd.’

  The other’s expression darkened. ‘What have you heard?’

  ‘There are those who suspect the virtue of every unmarried woman, and,’ the doctor added quietly, ‘that is to say nothing of the witch-mongers.’

  I saw the embers of an old terror flicker in Charles Thom’s eyes, and he had the sense to say nothing more. He knew that Jaffray was no gossip, but the sickbed was a tremendous place for the imparting of news. The doctor missed nothing. The warning had been given and would be heeded. Through the noise of the storm, the bell over the tolbooth chimed as the town clock struck nine, and Charles drained the last of his ale. ‘Anyway, gentlemen, I must leave you. This is no night for aching hearts.’ He gathered up his hat and cloak and left, his face thunderous, not pausing to respond to James Cardno’s scarcely audible ‘Goodnight’.

  The door closed behind him and I was able to observe the doctor in one of his rare moments of rest. His short-cropped grey hair gave away something of his fifty years, but his brows were still dark and his eyes alert, and to me he had the strength and vigour of a man half his age. Perhaps I saw only what I wished to see. Conscious of Cardno’s interest in our conversation, we drank our wine in silence until a noisy dispute at the hearth over a suspect roll of the dice allowed us to take it up again, in low voices.

  ‘Do they really speak of witchcraft?’

  ‘They are ever vigilant. The new king shows less interest in it than his father once did, but it is a canker all the same and I doubt if it will ever be cut out.’

  I knew it was the hunger for the witch-hunt, rather than the ancient pagan charms and potions, that Jaffray spoke of. For too many of my fellow citizens, there was not a misfortune that could not be ascribed to the diabolic agency of another. Ignorance, carelessness, folly and sloth: when their fruits could not be blamed upon a stranger, the malediction of some friendless neighbour could be looked to instead. The vulnerable and friendless were well advised not to call attention upon themselves in times of ill fortune. ‘And does the session not see that the apothecary’s daughter and his apprentice have good cause for their plant-gathering?’ Something in the doctor’s expression made me hesitate. ‘Or is there more to it?’