Seaton 01 - The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

by S. G. MacLean

  Jaffray sighed deeply. ‘In the fetid minds of the session there is always more to it. If Marion Arbuthnott be found anything less than pure and virtuous, there are souls enough in this burgh who will see that she pays for it. That a healthy young man and a pretty young woman could wander abroad on their own and not fall prey to carnal lusts is more than our good baillie and his henchmen could conceive.’

  I looked long into the dregs of wine at the bottom of my pewter cup. ‘Perhaps they are right. I cannot tell.’

  Jaffray did not indulge me. ‘This is not a way for a young man to live, Alexander. You must give it up.’

  ‘I cannot, doctor, for it will not leave go of me.’

  ‘Then run from it, for it will poison you. I have known other men, good men, who would not let go of such bitterness; they are old now, and dead in their souls. Run from it, Alexander.’

  ‘I cannot. I have nowhere to go.’

  We had both said our piece, and so sat in silence a while, but away from his own hearth, the doctor was not comfortable with silences. He called for more wine from the innkeeper and returned to our earlier conversation as if there had been no pause. ‘Besides, I do not think Marion is completely lost to our young song schoolmaster. The more her mother presses the interests of Master Davidson, the more the girl will incline to Charles instead.’ He shrugged helplessly. ‘It is the way with women. My own dear wife, God rest her, only agreed to marry me because her mother could scarce tolerate the mention of my very name.’

  I knew this last point to be one of Jaffray’s most self-deprecating and favoured lies. When he had returned from Basel to his native burgh almost thirty years ago, clutching his medical degree in his hand, the summa cum laude of his laureation not yet grown dim in his ears, every mother in Banff had thrust her daughter in his path. He had had the pick of the crop, and he had chosen, as he often told me, the most beautiful and delicate flower of them all. For thirteen years, blighted though they were by the repeated tragedy of lost children, he had lived with the love of his life, until the last of the lost children took her with it. He had never tried to marry again, and I knew he never would.

  ‘Marion’s mother is a formidable woman all the same. Charles will not have it easy. I have never yet seen the apprentice – he does not come here in the evenings.’

  ‘Greater attractions at home than you and the shore porters?’

  I laughed. ‘Aye, perhaps. He has no need for further schooling and I have had no cause for recourse to the apothecary since you left for the south, so we have not met.’

  ‘And you have not been asked to sit down at the provost’s dinner table?’

  The question was in jest. I doubted the provost would wish to encourage a friendship between his nephew Patrick Davidson and myself, and the doctor knew quite well that he would not. He also knew that I would care little. ‘I cannot believe that you have not made yourself acquainted yet though, doctor. You have been back from your season in Edinburgh almost two days now.’

  ‘Aye, and should have returned before that. The place is full of ministers, and not a smiling face amongst them. They spread their misery like a silent plague. God forbid their like should take hold in these parts. The Reverend Guild trumpets here in Banff as he might, but we may comfort ourselves that no one listens to him.’ Cardno twitched and Jaffray gave me a sly smile. ‘It will be many a long day before I venture there again, or for so long. As for the apothecary’s apprentice – yes, I had hoped to meet him at the provost’s last night, but he was not in attendance. A pity, for there is much we could have talked of.’ He mused silently for a moment and then recalled himself from his reverie, an idea evidently having presented itself. ‘But of course. I will invite him to his dinner tomorrow night, and you also, Alexander. With him only lately returned from the continent he is well placed to tell us how things stand. It pains me to think what you have never seen, what you may never see, the great cathedrals and cities laid waste by this insanity of war. Gaping chasms your divinity professors at Aberdeen were powerless to fill.’ He nodded to himself. ‘But Patrick Davidson and I shall fill them for you; we will pick the continent to the bones. And I have a very fine piece of venison for just such an occasion.’

  ‘You have been treating the laird of Banff again, then?’ Jaffray, I knew, was in regular attendance on the laird, who was no more able than were the rest of his rank hereabouts to stay out of trouble and the reach of the point of a sword.

  The doctor leaned closer towards me with a conspiratorial smile and a cautious glance in the direction of the session clerk. ‘Indeed, no, but his steward was remarkably grateful for my assistance in the passing of a stone not long since.’ He sat back, satisfied already with the evening now taking shape in his mind. ‘Yes, I have some ointments to collect from Arbuthnott tomorrow; I will engineer myself an introduction to young Davidson and he shall be sitting across from you at my table by seven tomorrow night. You’ll be well rid of your charges by then?’

  ‘Well rid.’ In the summer months it pleased the burgh council and almost everyone else in Banff that my scholars and I should be in attendance upon one another at the grammar school from seven in the morning until six in the evening. When the winter nights began to draw in, some human pity and common sense impressed itself on our good magistrates, and they allowed that the children might arrive at eight and go home at five. Even so, I knew that in the coldest months of the year, many of my pupils had to stumble a good half of their journey home in the dark without a coat to their back or proper shoes to their feet. If it were not for Jaffray and the few like him there would be many more. My doctor friend practised what others preached. His wealth, he said, was held in stewardship only, and in life he returned to God that which was God’s. He had told me once that as the Lord had taken back into His own care all the children He had granted him, then he would care for those He had left behind. Many an orphan and a poor man’s child in Banff owed their education to the intensely personal piety of James Jaffray. One of them had been Charles Thom.

  ‘Will Charles be joining us?’

  Jaffray regarded me with dismay. ‘Alexander, I’ll swear I never saw a more intelligent man with less good sense than yourself. What in the world is the good of me removing Patrick Davidson from Arbuthnott’s table tomorrow night if not to give Charles a clear field? I shall stop at the song school on my way from the apothecary’s and tell our friend the good news, so he might make his preparations. I may even give him a few words of advice myself.’

  ‘I should start then by advising him to dispose of that scowl he sported tonight.’

  Jaffray nodded vigorously. ‘Indeed. On more than one occasion I was constrained to glance at Cardno by way of relief.’

  Before our laughter had died down, or the session clerk had mastered his evident fury, the door to the inn burst open and Jaffray’s stable boy, utterly drenched, stumbled through it. The look of urgency on his face cut our laughter dead. ‘Doctor, you must come. Lady Deskford is in child-bed at Findlater. His lordship urges you to make haste.’

  Jaffray drained the last of his glass as he swung his cloak around him. ‘For the love of God, on a night like this.’

  I put out a hand to stop him. ‘James, this is madness; you will never make it to Findlater tonight.’ Findlater Castle stood impregnable, cut fifty feet into an eighty-foot rock, nine miles to the east of Banff, glowering out over the Firth towards Sutherland, Caithness and beyond. So impregnable was it in fact as to be virtually uninhabitable. His lordship had built for his family a fine new house at Cullen, but his mother refused to shift, and insisted on keeping her daughter-in-law with her.

  The doctor brushed my hand away as his servant handed him his still-wet hat. ‘If I do not make it, Alexander, neither will she. That last bairn damn near killed her. It’s time Deskford took himself a mistress and let that girl alone.’ And with that he strode out, with never a backward glance to the company, on whom an astonished silence had fallen, save for the unmistakable sound
of James Cardno almost choking on his watery ale.

  I stayed in the inn another half-hour or so, no one bothering me. With little remaining to take his interest, Cardno had left not long after the second of my companions, and I was left to my thoughts undisturbed. What I paid out on drink in the Market Inn would have been better spent on coals for the unlit fire in my own hearth. Mistress Youngson had given up telling me so – I was a cause lost. Nine months ago I would not have thought of spending my evenings drinking here. It might pass – just – for James Jaffray or Charles Thom, but it would not pass for the minister of the Kirk of Scotland that I had then aspired to be. And yet, I was as well drinking here as I would be sitting by my own hearth, for I had no calling now. And how was such a life to be lived? I ordered another glass of the Rhenish and swallowed it down quickly. If the storm still raged I would scarcely feel it.

  Once out of the inn I was grateful as ever that the journey to my lodgings was a short one. Despite the hour and the undiminished severity of the elements there were other creatures abroad on High Shore as I made my way home. Even on such a night as this, the girls of the street sought to earn their living. The council and the session claimed not to tolerate ‘whore-mongering’ within their bounds, but Mary Dawson and her sister Janet had too much knowledge of too many of them to fall subject to any but the mildest correction. Discretion was their part of the bargain silently struck with the guardians of our burgh’s stability and morals. They called to me from the shelter of the kirkyard.

  ‘Mr Seaton, would you not like something to warm you on this awful night? That must be a cold bed you keep in the schoolhouse.’

  The righteous apoplexy of Mistress Youngson should she ever find one of the town’s whores, or indeed any woman, in my bed, made the prospect seem almost worthwhile. Almost. ‘As ever, ladies, I can’t decide between you, and I wouldn’t slight either of you for all the world.’

  Janet’s siren voice replied, ‘Nobody’s asking you to choose, Mr Seaton,’ followed by a good-natured cackle from the sisters.

  It was an offer they’d made more than once before, and one I had never yet been tempted to accept. ‘You would only break me,’ I returned, throwing them the last shilling from my pouch.

  ‘You’re the only decent man in Banff, Mr Seaton …’ and the rest of their words were lost in the wind as I pressed on, the wine and warmth from the inn piloting me home.

  As I neared the schoolhouse I noticed a fellow traveller on the other side of the road, at the foot of Water Path. He raised a hand as if to hail me, but his equilibrium failed him and he stumbled to his knees. He called something to me as he tried to right himself, but I did not wait to hear. The Good Samaritan pounded on my conscience, but I had seen myself home in worse condition than his more than once, and on worse nights than this. Winning to my own bed was a more pressing concern than helping a stranger to his. The good sisters would rob him, of course, if he had not spent all his money on drink that night, but they would see him to shelter before they did so. Turning into the pend at the side of the schoolhouse, I locked the gate behind me and left the fellow to his fate.

  As ever at this hour, the schoolhouse was all in darkness. My eyes were practised in seeing through the night gloom. I checked on my schoolroom as I passed. The worn and barren benches echoed to me the incantations of the ghosts of schoolboys past, myself included. Amo, amas, amat … amo; amo; amo. All was empty and still. The stove was cold, but I knew John Durno would remember his duty as usher and have it lit before I descended again in a few hours to resume my labours.

  Thirty-seven steps in darkness to the top of the house and my small and sparsely furnished room. I found my bed without the aid of lamp or candle as I had done many times since that night last summer when I had finally returned, after much wandering, from the meeting of the brethren in Fordyce. Not a minister then, or ever, but condemned always to my schoolmaster’s robe. Mistress Youngson’s celebratory dinner had lain cold and uneaten on the table two floors below. The rats had it in the end. No need now to toil late at my desk on my Greek, my Hebrew, my Syriac. The midnight oil no longer required to be burnt, so my lamp remained dark. Yet still, as I had done each night since then, I prayed, trying to reach God, trying to reach to that place where faith is. But, as it had been each night, that place was empty. And still I did not know where else to go. The withdrawal of God left me no means to justify my place in this world but to start again. And that beginning was always tomorrow.

  My usual sleep was sound and featureless, and I seldom had any awareness of night passing into morning. This night, though, the intermittent banging of the shutters in the storm permeated my consciousness and I pulled the bedclothes ever tighter round me. As the first stray shafts of daylight made their way through my attic window, the banging grew more insistent and I gradually became aware of my own name being called with rising urgency. It was my landlady.

  ‘Mr Seaton, Mr Seaton, for the love of God, wake up. Patrick Davidson lies dead in your schoolroom. Mr Seaton …’

  TWO

  A Dead Man’s Face

  And it was so. The stench reached my nostrils before my foot ever reached the bottom of the stair. Mistress Youngson had waited for me as I groped for my cloak and threw it over my shoulders, and she had led the way downstairs by the light of her candle, but when we reached the door of my schoolroom she hung back, as if not wanting to attract Death’s attention. I moved past her into the dimly lit room. The windows to the west that afforded some light to my scholars for the greater part of the day remained shuttered. The only candle was at the far end of the room, in the hand of her husband, Gilbert Grant, my friend and master in the grammar school of Banff. He had taught every scholar to come from the town in the last forty years, but now, in truth, I performed more and more of his duties as the weariness of age crept over him. He raised his eyes towards me and said sadly, ‘The boy is dead, Alexander; he is dead.’

  His wife, still keeping to the doorway, added, ‘I have sent the lad for Dr Jaffray.’

  I shook my head slowly as I drew closer. ‘Jaffray is not there. He was called out late last night, to Findlater …’ There was little point in continuing. I could see that Jaffray’s skills were, for Davidson, by several hours redundant now. The lifeless form of Patrick Davidson slumped across my desk, his head to one side in a pool of his own vomit, had a strange inevitability to it. The left arm stretched, palm outwards, in front of him, in an ultimately futile effort to support his head; the right hung down to his side, a few stray blades of the same grass that swam in the vomit before him still sticking between the fingers. I had never met the apothecary’s apprentice, but the agonised features of the corpse now lying not eight yards from where I stood were, I knew, also those of the man whom I had left in the gutter the night before. I had known from the moment I had stumbled from my bed that they would be. God had started with me a new game.

  Grant and I kept a sombre vigil over the body while we awaited the arrival of those who had to be informed of such things. The boy who had been sent for Jaffray had also been told to call up the baillie and the two town serjeants. A servant girl had been sent for the Reverend Guild. The doctor and the minister: one powerless to help in this world, the other powerless now to help in the next. The sins of Patrick Davidson would be called to his account regardless of whatever sentiments Mr Guild might intone.

  ‘He was a good lad, you know,’ said Grant. ‘A good, bright lad.’ He smiled at me. ‘Like you yourself. And he kept much to his own company, as you yourself would have done had it not been for the Master of Hay.’ There was no hurt in this; he spoke the truth. Gilbert Grant had known me as long as any other soul living, and there was no need for dissembling between us. ‘My memory is failing me though, Alexander. Were you ever in the school together as boys?’

  ‘I do not think so. I would have been gone to the college by the time he came up from the song school. My mother may have mentioned him, but in any holiday from my studies I was more often at
Delgatie than I was here in Banff. And when I was home I was far too lofty a personage to bother myself with the younger boys.’

  Grant’s eyes twinkled in a sad smile. ‘Aye, it has always been so. The young scholar returned to his native burgh is too grand to look down and see where he came from; you weren’t the first to leave with no mind to return.’

  He was right: others like me had gone before me and not returned for many a year. But my return had been different. Nine months ago, I had come back. I had come back the much-lauded scholar, the attestations of my divinity professor glowing in the paper in my hand. I had been pronounced well-versed in the biblical tongues, the handling of controversies, ecclesiastical history, and to be sound in matters of faith and doctrine. There remained but the sixth and final trial before the brethren, the ministers of this presbytery – to preach a sermon before them and the people that would meet with the approbation of both. And so I had preached at Boyndie kirk, whose people wanted me for their minister, and I had taken as my text Micah, chapter 7, verse 9:

  ‘I will bear the indignation of the Lord, because I have sinned against him until he plead my cause, and execute judgement for me: he will bring me forth to the light, and I shall behold his righteousness.’

  How could my sermon on that text have found favour? And yet it did. I who had lived a life blessed, who did not yet know the indignation of the Lord, who covered my own sin, even from myself. The words ought to have choked me in my throat for the shame of it. And yet they did not. My sermon had found favour with the people and with the brethren too. True, the Reverend Guild of Banff had raised one or two objections, but these were of no consequence and were treated as such. And later, in presbytery, the words that would have licensed me to open my mouth to preach as a minister of the Kirk of Scotland were already on the lips of the Moderator when the sudden entry into the kirk of Sir Alexander Hay, laird of Delgatie, Archie’s father and the benefactor of all my school and college days, stopped them where they were. Before the whole brethren he had declared his fervent opposition to my being accepted into the ministry and denounced me as a debauched and scandalous person unfit for so godly a calling. He further declared that my sin could not be countenanced amongst honest men and begged that the presbytery would treat no more of me as an expectant for the ministry. And on that bright, clear June afternoon in Fordyce, in that ancient and holy place, all the walls of my deception had come tumbling down around me. The Moderator, Mr Robert Dun, minister of Deskford, a just and godly man, refused to condemn me on the word of one person and I still remembered the kind pleading in his eyes as he had turned to me and offered me the floor to defend myself. Struck dumb with the realisation, at last, that the laird of Delgatie was right, I had offered no word in my own defence and stumbled from the kirk as a blind man from a burning building. Such had been the glorious homecoming of Alexander Seaton. And here before me was the homecoming of Patrick Davidson. I could not believe that he deserved his as I had done mine.