I crested the hill so that I could no longer see the burgh behind me, only the land to the south and the sea to the north and east. The North Sea, that had called too loud and too often. It was there still, the bank in the hollow that made for a natural hide, and he was there, waiting. I stopped about ten yards from him. He stood up slowly, carefully, and turned to me, the hat laid aside, the needless bandage removed from his eye. He extended his hand a little and opened his mouth as if he would speak. I did not hear him, I could not hear him. The world before me blurred and I could not see him. I fell to my knees and cried.
He was down beside me in a moment and I felt the strong arms around me, the beat of his familiar heart. My whole body was wracked with shaking, cut off in itself from the cold of the cold night. It seemed the breaths I took would not go to my lungs. I heard the smile in the golden voice. ‘It was always you who looked after me,’ he said. ‘How are we to manage if that has changed?’
The laugh that lurched from my throat helped me to master my own breathing, and I managed to look up into his face at last. A ravaged face. Disease had been there, and shot, the blade of a sword or knife. But a beautiful face still, alive in the eyes that were whole and undamaged, and in the ungovernable curve of the mouth. The face I had last seen fourteen years ago, and which I had thought I would never see again. One word was all I could manage. ‘Archie.’
He smiled again and hoisted me to my feet. ‘Aye Alexander, Archie. It has been a long road home.’
8
The Devil’s Recruit
Fourteen years it was since I had last seen Archie Hay. Fourteen years, since that damp, dark morning when we embraced on the quayside of Aberdeen as he was about to embark on the ship that would carry him to Denmark, and sworn, as we had done so often in our young lives, our everlasting brotherhood. It had been three years later that the messenger I had every day dreaded had banged on my door demanding I should make haste to Archie’s home at Delgatie, and his parents and sister, for Archie, he told me, was dead.
For almost two years we had heard nothing, save that he was wounded at Stadtlohn, where Christian of Brunswick’s army, in which he served, had been decimated by the Catholic Imperial forces under old General Tilly. Christian’s army had suffered six thousand dead and four thousand taken prisoner that day, and for long we had persuaded ourselves that Archie had been among the latter. Lord Hay would happily have sold every last stone of Delgatie and the souls of everyone in it to ransom his son, but no such ransom was ever asked, and then had come the news that it never would be.
News of his death had torn the heart out of his family, and what had come to pass afterwards meant that the woman I loved and the calling I had worked my whole life to attain were lost to me. For I had loved Archie’s sister Katharine, and she me, and we had fondly believed we might marry when Archie returned to take his place as his father’s heir. But on news of his death, my Katharine went from being indulged daughter to the hope and future of her family and their name, and the penniless divinity student who had been welcome as their son’s friend was not welcome as her husband. When her father learned that she had anyway come to my bed, he had banished her to a marriage, far to the south, with a much older kinsman, and denounced me before those who held the keys to my ministry in their hands. Bitterness and despair had been my companions for long afterwards, until the love of good friends, and of Sarah, who was now my wife, had lifted them from me.
And yet, here he sat now, by my side, and even through our clothing I felt the warmth of the blood that pumped in his veins. Archie Hay. A living, breathing man. No ghost, no spirit: I knew the very scent of him. He waited, almost scared to speak, it seemed, as my eyes took in the truth of the sight of him.
‘It cannot be.’ My words were barely audible. ‘They told us you were dead.’
He looked away to the sea before he answered.
‘I was dead. Not as you thought, perhaps. But I was dead to all I had ever been before I went to the wars.’
I did not understand him. ‘But how? We waited … surely you knew that we waited, we would never have given up …’
He shook his head. ‘I know that, Alexander, but the man who was carried insensible from the field of Stadtlohn twelve years ago was dead before he ever saw it.’ He opened a flask of brandy and offered me some, before drinking himself. ‘In a battle, some men desert, others are taken prisoner, or wounded and never found by their comrades. There are those in the field who will not hear the drummer beat the retreat, or will not see their comrades through the smoke and dust: they will be left behind. At Stadtlohn, I was one such. The last thing I saw was the cannon ball that had taken half my knee take the heads off six of my men. After that, I remember nothing until I woke to find myself in the barn of a kindly German peasant who had found me close to death after the rest of my regiment was long escaped into Holland. His old wife nursed me several weeks, in memory of their own son who was lost to them in some other war many years before, and when I was recovered, they urged me to go home.’ He smiled. ‘I told them I would, for their sake, for their son’s. I knew that I never could. I found my way to Mansfeld’s army, and heard news of my own death from an English officer there who did not know who I was. And so, one freezing winter’s night with little food and less pay, Captain Archibald Hay of Delgatie died and Sergeant John Nimmo, whose family were of no account and who was not given to seeking promotion, was born.’
‘Nimmo?’
He shrugged, the old grin on his face. ‘It was the nearest I could get to Nemo. I did listen to old Gilbert Grant in that schoolroom in Banff sometimes, you know.’
Nimmo. Nemo. No one.
Still I did not understand. ‘But why? Because you were rumoured dead you thought you could not come back alive? Good God, Archie, your parents …’
‘My parents would not have known the man who returned to them, and neither would you.’
‘But however bad your wounds …’
‘Will you listen, Alexander? The wounds you see are but the outward show of something worse, something that does not heal. What I had seen even in those two years before Stadtlohn rendered me something else. I had thought I was ready for the bloodshed, the brutality, all in the name of honour. But I knew nothing; I was ready for nothing.’ He took another drink from the flask. ‘Do you know what happens in a siege?’
‘Of course I know what happens in a siege.’
He shook his head. ‘No you don’t. You don’t know what happens to the people of a town that is held as a stronghold by one army in the face of assault by another.’
‘I know that eventually, when there is no food or water left, and no sign of relief, the commander of the town will surrender, or the opposing forces will undermine or storm the walls.’ He was listening to me with almost dead eyes that registered only disappointment. ‘Archie. I’m not a fool. I know you will have lost comrades, seen men maimed …’
‘Oh, I have,’ he said. ‘I have. But it is not that that I am talking about, for you expect that in war. What I had not expected was the sight of the inhabitants of a town we had just stormed or relieved. The first time, you know, I expected gratitude, a joyful welcome from the people we had liberated. I found instead creatures who could hardly stand up, near-skeletal mothers guarding the graves of their dead babies for fear they would be removed from the earth by others near starvation.’ His voice was relentless, as if he had forgotten he was talking to me. ‘I have, with my comrades, dug mass graves into which we threw a hundred bodies because there was no one else to bury them, and we had not the time to give them any more honourable a service.’ Then he came to himself and looked up at me. ‘Do you know, after the Swedish forces took Frankfurt an der Oder, it took six days to bury the dead? Six days.’ His voice dropped. ‘The worst were the times when the defending commander would not agree to terms.’
I did not want to know, but I knew I had to ask the question. ‘And if he did not?’
‘Then Hell was made real on earth
. No quarter. For garrison or citizenry alike. Men, women, children slaughtered. Homes ransacked for every last thing of any worth that could be carried away. I have seen commanders powerless to stop it as their men turned to beasts before their eyes, young girls violated alongside their mothers, houses and churches burned.’
I could say nothing, and he continued. ‘I have marched in armies from Prague to the Netherlands, from Sweden to Bavaria, Poland, to the very doors of the Habsburgs. I have looked on at the councils of kings. Nowhere is the soldier wanted, not by the townspeople they have come to protect or relieve, not by the peasants on whom they are quartered or whose lands are stripped bare that one army might have food and deny it to another. And I am a soldier. How could I have come back here? “With wolves we learn to howl and cry.” That is what my commander said as he ordered one of our regiment shot for the rape of a Saxon farmer’s daughter. He was right: every day we must guard ourselves against descending to the brutality of the beast. Every day. And the man who every day has to remind himself of that is no fit person to return to the society of friends and the love of the family into which he was born.’
I forced him to look at me. ‘I do not believe that of you.’
‘I think you must.’
‘But Archie, you do not need to continue on that path. I know. I know that with God’s help and the love of friends a man can put behind him the worst of himself.’
He said nothing, and I heard my voice rise in frustration. ‘And so you just continue in that life? And you go with Ormiston to entice others in the same way?’
He sighed. ‘No, Alexander, I do not. Not as you think it, anyway. I am as good a soldier as the next man, better than many. But the John Nimmo that I have become does not seek promotion. There are times when an anonymous man is of greater use to an army than a platoon of pikemen. I am a spy for my masters. The greater the intelligence I can bring them, the more I can misinform the enemy, the sooner this conflict will be brought to a close. I fight with my mind and my tongue now, not with my sword. Unless I have to,’ he added in a way that gave me to understand this was not a rare occurrence.
‘So why are you here with Ormiston?’
He shrugged. ‘Chance. I have met in with him from time to time, in the course of my travels. However you might dislike him personally, he is a good soldier – driven.’
‘How do you know I do not like him?’ I asked, with an uneasy laugh.
‘Hah! Because I know you, and I know the more the likes of Ormiston seek to please those around him, the less they will please you. And’ – he cleared his throat – ‘I was in Downie’s Inn the other night and was able to witness your civility in making the acquaintance of the dashing lieutenant. It was all I could do not to cheer you on, so pleased was I to see how little you have altered. You are still the Alexander of old, and it is a long time since anything has warmed my heart so much as that.’
‘You …?’
He sported a huge grin now. ‘Aye, at the top of the stair, in the shadows.’
I laughed, in spite of myself. ‘I knew it, I knew it.’
‘Did you, Alexander?’
I remembered now the movement that had caught my eye, the sense I had had ever since of being watched. And then I remembered what had been happening in the inn. ‘But you recruit for Ormiston all the same, chance or no?’
He shook his head again. ‘I rarely go among the recruits. This is only the second time I have returned to Scotland in fourteen years, the first that I have come here. I am with Ormiston only because I knew he was coming here, and I wanted a passage home. My mother died last year, as you know …’
‘I was sorry for it.’
‘I too, and every day has made me sorrier for the grief I gave her. I cannot do that to my father also, and have determined to see him one more time before he too passes.’
‘But why like this – in secret? No one would expect the Archie Hay who returned from the wars to be the same as he who left for them.’
He raised a sad eyebrow. ‘Wouldn’t they? But you and I would know, just how greatly he was altered, and we would mourn a second time the Archie that was gone. I do not think I could live day to day with that grief and the knowledge of it in your eyes. He will only live, as he was, in our minds if we let him lie in peace in the mud of Stadtlohn.’ He shivered against the cold, and passed me the brandy bottle. ‘Besides, I will have enemies, enemies to my cause. I’ll be of little use to the world of espionage should my identity be revealed here.’
I could not argue with him about that. The north still crawled with Papists who took heart from the reverses of the Protestant forces in Europe since the death of the great Swedish king, Gustav Adolph, and would not scruple to tell their contacts on the continent of the resurrection of Archie Hay.
‘So what will you do?’
‘I will ride out to Delgatie in a few nights’ time, when the full moon has passed and I can do so in greater darkness. I will spend one night there with the old man, tell him whatever lies it comforts him to hear, and then I will be away with Ormiston when he has finished his recruiting, on the first favourable tide.’
I nodded, not really listening, trying to take in the fact that the friend I had thought lost was not returned for good, but would soon be gone again.
I think he guessed my thoughts, for I felt his arm around me as he continued. ‘But before then, I thought God might grant me a few hours, a few evenings, with the friend I have loved more than any other, and who knew me when I was a better man.’
The brandy flask was long empty by the time I made my way back down in to the town, more than two hours later. If there were rumours at the session of St Fittick’s about demonic goings-on in the kirkyard at Nigg, worse might have been imagined by any unwary passer-by on the Heading Hill that night. The worst said and left in its proper place, we had moved on to Archie’s eager enquiries for news of old friends, and then, as such things must, to reminiscence of events past. Voices that had been low and measured became louder and more careless, smiles turned to laughter, memories of long-gone nights brought snatches of song. And then we had come to happy silence, and I realised that for all he had asked me about William Cargill and Elizabeth, about John Innes, Dr Jaffray and other old friends from Banff, he had asked not one question about me.
‘Archie,’ I began.
‘Yes?’
‘Two days ago, at the quayside, when the lads from the school were down looking at the ship …’
His eyes softened. ‘I met your son.’
‘He is … his mother, my wife …’ I did not know how to say it.
He put a hand on mine. ‘I know about Katharine. I know what happened to you both. May God forgive me, and I have often prayed that you, and she, might, but I knew, when I decided never to go back to Delgatie, that what we three had dreamed of could not be. You lost my sister, and much else besides, and I knew it would be so, and I sit before you now and tell you that I am sorrier for that than almost anything else I have done.’
He did not ask, directly, my forgiveness. On this hill, sheltered a little from the wind but not the night’s raw cold, I remembered things, feelings, faces, her face, that I had schooled myself, forced myself, over the years not to think on, to the point where they really had become just memories, nothing else. But tonight, for the first time in years, I felt the cold shock of them once more.
Archie watched me uneasily, waiting for something from me. At length I found what I thought might be the right words. ‘What happened, or did not happen, was God’s will, and what was not His will was my doing, not yours. I – I cannot speak for Katharine …’ I looked at him, but his expression remained the same and he offered me nothing, ‘but in my own life there have been …’
‘Compensations?’ he suggested.
‘No, not compensations.’ The word suggested something inferior, something that might be a palliative, go some way towards making up for what had been lost. ‘New, unforeseen directions. Blessings I could never h
ave looked for.’
Archie nodded. ‘She is a beauty, Alexander, a rare beauty. Do not take offence, now, but if I had been here, I’ll wager I would have given you a run for her affections.’
I laughed. ‘You would have run, all right; Sarah would have seen through your wiles in moments, and what she did not see, Elizabeth Cargill would have lost no time in telling her. What she sees in me, I still do not understand.’
‘Ach, you are not the worst, I suppose.’ He hesitated. ‘And the boy?’
‘He is not mine. Sarah was a servant in the house of Gilbert Burnett in Banff.’
‘The stonemason?’
‘Yes.’
I did not need to explain further. Archie spat. ‘It is a wonder no one has murdered him by now.’
I remembered a night when a friend of ours almost had, but I would tell him of that some other time.
‘He is a fine boy though, and named for you. He will do you credit – I could see that. But your fiery dame – and I think she was near enough coming out at me with a poker tonight, for I know she saw me – has another two that clamour about her skirts, and they have the look of Seatons if ever I saw them.’
I had trouble finding my voice. ‘Will you come to the house, Archie?’
He was up on his feet before the words were fully out of my mouth. ‘Tonight?’
I laughed. ‘Not tonight, they are all abed; all except Sarah, I suspect, and she will need a deal of bringing round and explaining to first – she’s not always wont to listen at a first telling.’
‘In my experience, too many of them listen too much, and hear more than has been said. But yes, another night. I forget, you see, that others do not live as I do, and that night and day are not simply degrees of concealment.’
The Devil's Recruit (Alexander Seaton 4) Page 8