The Devil's Recruit (Alexander Seaton 4)

by S. G. MacLean

  The soldiers parted to make way for Ormiston and his prisoner. Ross, having first spat at the ground before St Clair’s feet, walked ahead of them. St Clair himself looked neither left nor right. They stopped six feet in front of Lord Reay, and Ormiston forced the Frenchman down onto his knees.

  I glanced at George Jamesone, whose face was such a picture of astonishment I knew he understood no more of what was playing out before us than I did.

  ‘Well, Neil? What will you tell me about this wretch?’

  Ross never took his eyes from the gardener, who appeared now to fully comprehend his situation as one lost, and had therefore once more adopted his wonted expression of contempt.

  ‘It is Johnny Sinclair, your Lordship, that I have known since we first fought over crabs amongst the rocks of Wick Bay, neither of us higher than your knee. I should have put a knife through him nine years ago, the day I saw him turn up at Cromarty to board the ship that was taking our regiment to Gluckstadt, for he never did a good turn in all his life, and would as like take the last drop of water from the lips of a dying man as give him comfort. I warned him that day that if he ever stepped out of line or brought shame on our regiment I would kill him.’

  Lord Reay briefly glanced at St Clair before addressing himself once more to Neil Ross. ‘And yet he is not dead. I do not imagine that is because he brought glory to his colours instead.’

  Ross’s face contorted in disgust. ‘Indeed he did not, but I’ll put an end to him this very minute if your Lordship will but give the word.’

  ‘I suspect I shall have cause to, but tell me first what he is doing here on his knees in George Jamesone’s garden, instead of marching behind our colours or lying dead on a German battlefield.’

  Ross nodded, and it was clear that his anger now was tempered by memories clouded by grief. ‘Two years, Sinclair there kept himself out of my way and out of my notice – for where the service was hot he was rarely anywhere to be seen. But then we came to Stralsund, and at Stralsund there could be no hiding place.’

  The name was familiar to me from Archie’s stories, and also from Ormiston.

  ‘Mackenzie was in charge of the regiment.’

  ‘Aye, for your Lordship was on the way back from Scotland with new-raised recruits. An honourable and brave commander Captain MacKenzie was, Sir, and much loved by his men.’

  ‘I know it. But had I been there myself, perhaps …’

  ‘Saving your honour, Sir, there was nothing you could have done that Captain MacKenzie could not, unless perhaps make the Danish governor of the town have a better regard for the needs of our men, but that is away on the wind and cannot be changed now.’

  George had found his voice at last. ‘What did Jean St Clair – Sinclair – do at Stralsund?’

  Another of Lord Reay’s men spoke up. ‘I will tell you, for I remember him now, filth that he is. He left his comrades to die. I saw it myself. At the very moment it looked as if the enemy might break through the Frankentor and all be lost, Johnny Sinclair emptied the pockets of a comrade with his arm blown off that was screaming for his mother, and turned his tail and ran. Had I not been looking a German pike in the eye I would have put a bullet in him myself. Six weeks we were there, hardly a minute or a place to lay our heads, to change our linens; I hear the noise of those cannon now when I close my eyes at night. Five hundred of our regiment dead – more than lived to hold the place, and of those, few above a hundred were able to walk uninjured from its gates. Yet Johnny Sinclair plundered and fled over the bodies of his comrades. Give me the word, Sir, for if Neil Ross has not the stomach for it, I have.’

  Ross rounded on his comrade. ‘A word more of that and I’ll fillet you first, Eoin MacRae.’

  Lord Reay lifted his hand. ‘Enough. Lieutenant, you lost your own brother at Stralsund, though I can scarcely believe that you and this worthless pustule sailed in my regiment on the same ship. That he should live while your brother lies dead and honoured puts this man’s life in your hands, not mine. Death would be a release undeserved for such filth. Will you press him?’

  Throughout the soldiers’ narratives, Sinclair’s face had remained impassive, but now every feature came to life, and he tried to struggle to his feet between the two men who had moved to stand at either side of him. They took him by the arms and forced him back down to the ground, but he struggled to break free of them again.

  ‘You’ll not press me, Ormiston. You’ll not get me back over there again, do what you will to me. I would rather rot in the ground in this God-forsaken town than set a foot again upon German soil. Marching for weeks on end without pay, without food, without a blanket to cover us, and all while the likes of him trade us by numbers and take their dinner with kings.’

  At this, Ormiston, his gauntlet removed, gave Sinclair an almighty slap to the face that sent him collapsing back to the ground. To my surprise, the gardener, covered in dirt now and bleeding from a gash in his cheek, righted himself and began to speak again.

  ‘You don’t remember me, Ormiston, do you? Too busy shining your buttons and waiting to step into the next dead man’s boots, to get your next promotion. But I remember you, and I remember your brother, and his honourable death.’ He smiled, a horrible smile. ‘Will I tell you of your brother?’

  Ormiston’s face went white, and I saw the hand that held his sword begin to shake. I think Lord Reay saw it too, for slowly, he took the pistol from its holster at his side and handed it to the man beside him.

  ‘Load it, Urquhart,’ he said, without looking at the man to whom he spoke.

  When it was done, and it was done with expert speed, he took the sword from Ormiston’s hand and replaced it with the gun.

  ‘Remove that blemish from my regiment, Lieutenant,’ he said.

  And without a word, before all our eyes, in the middle of that late autumn afternoon, William Ormiston blew John Sinclair’s brains out.

  16

  Things Dormant

  ‘Dear God.’ Sarah sat down, almost as worn out by hearing of the events of the morning as I was by witnessing them. ‘Was Archie there?’

  ‘No. I haven’t seen him since I glimpsed him last night on the ship, and not spoken with him since he left here five nights ago. He doesn’t go in to the town with the lieutenant or any others from the ship during the day.’ I had had no chance to speak to him on the evening of Ormiston’s dinner, and none to search him out since. The report for the presbytery of our visit to St Fittick’s the day before remained unwritten. Events in the town since then had sent all that to the back of my mind. Sarah was still speaking, as if to herself.

  ‘But Christiane … I cannot believe it. And the gardener – he seemed so kind. Surely he could not have … and the other one … ? That the lieutenant just executed him there, in the garden …’

  I had been over and over the same ground with George and Louis that morning, for the news of more horrors in the garden had brought the French master running up from his house. I had seen men dead and men tortured, but I had never seen a living man all but slaughtered before my very eyes, and the sight had emptied my stomach. It had taken an hour in George’s studio, and half of a bottle of brandy between us, before I had even been fit to think of going home. And after the initial horror of what we had seen began to pass, it was Louis who realised it first: with St Clair, or Sinclair – it hardly mattered which now – had gone all knowledge he might have had of Guillaume Charpentier.

  ‘What an ending,’ George had said, ‘for a man who had worked in the Infanta’s garden in Brussels, to die like a dog in an overgrown scrap of land here in this poor town.’

  ‘Brussels or no, when he ran from Stralsund, he was never going to be able to run far enough,’ I said. The late autumn sunshine glinting though the panes of Jamesone’s window spoke of a world more tranquil than that we knew to be outside our doors. We could turn our eyes – our minds – from the horrors suffered by our brothers in other lands, but they would find us out anyway. There was nothing to b
e seen of the garden through the bare branches of the trees but golden, brown and red leaves piled one upon the other. You could not see the blood, darkened from red to brown, that stained those leaves. A man could only guess at the rot, the decay taking place around him and beneath his feet, and trust in God for the renewal that came, every spring from the dead remains of what had gone before.

  Going over it all again at home with Sarah brought me no nearer to an understanding of what was going on in our town. Eventually, I stopped even trying, and turned my mind to something I could at least achieve: my report to the presbytery on what William and I had learned at St Fittick’s Church the previous morning.

  Sarah attempted to persuade me to take some rest. ‘It will make little difference, I think, to the presbytery or to John Leslie if they receive your report tomorrow or the next day – the man is lost, and for you to make yourself ill by toiling over it today will do neither of you any good.’

  ‘I must finish it,’ I said impatiently. ‘I must finish something. Anything to dislodge the images of Johnny Sinclair and Christiane from my head.’

  Sarah hesitated. I avoided looking at her and kept my eyes firmly on the writing in front of me, but she was not to be thrown off. ‘It’s not just what happened in George’s garden today, is it? You haven’t been yourself since Archie returned.’

  ‘I, it has been … it’s nothing. I’m just tired.’

  ‘Tired?’ she raised her voice in frustration. ‘I have known you nine years, Alexander. Do you not think I know it when there is something wrong? You cannot shut me out of your troubles, however much you might wish to.’

  I put down my pen and tried to think what I could say to her.

  ‘It’s just that … it’s no small thing to know that one dear to you, whom you thought dead and mourned, has been alive all that time.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. There was a strange expression on her face as she watched me. ‘But it has been a few days now, and what you have learned seems to trouble you as much as it brings you joy. Will you not talk to me of it?’

  I leaned towards her and took her hand. ‘What I must say, I must say to Archie.’

  ‘Are you angry with him?’ she asked.

  ‘No, not angry, not that. But there are things I need to ask him, things I need to understand.’

  If I had hoped she would not pursue it I was to be disappointed. ‘What things? Do you mean?’ She swallowed. ‘Do you mean his sister?’

  ‘What? No – oh, no.’ I got up and went to her, putting my arms around her, but she did not crumple, and she did not want my comfort. She pulled back from me.

  ‘Is she here, Alexander?’

  I stepped back. ‘What?

  Katharine Hay? No. No.’

  ‘She is not at Bailie Lumsden’s house, with Lady Rothiemay?’

  I sat back down. ‘Why would you think that?’

  ‘Because I know who is there. I know of Isabella Irvine, who she is. I know that you have seen her there, so why not her friend?’ Her voice was steady and relentless. ‘I know you’ve been more often to George’s garden than you’ve told me. Do you think that now you are to become a minister no one brings gossip to my ears? Do you think me a fool?’

  I was stunned, guilt-ridden at being caught in a crime I had not committed. I could only wait until she had finished. ‘Never,’ I said. ‘I have never thought you a fool, and I have never sought to deceive you. I didn’t mention Isabella Irvine’s connection with the Hays because I didn’t want to hurt you, and yet I see I have done so anyway, and in truth, I take no pleasure in her society or our past connection myself.’

  She was not to be so easily mollified.

  ‘And the garden?’

  ‘I went to the garden to look for Seoras, and later for Christiane and Charpentier. Any other time it was that I might think. It seemed a place where I might be alone.’

  She nodded, as if finally I had given her the answer she had been looking for. She lifted her warm shawl from the back of a chair and put it round her shoulders. ‘Before Archie returned,’ she said, as she picked Davy from the floor and went out in to the yard to call Deirdre, ‘you had no wish for such solitude.’

  I wished I could have gone after them, to gather brambles on the Woolmanhill, but Sarah’s face had made it clear that our conversation, for now, was finished. Archie’s return had indeed placed a barrier between us, but Sarah did not know the truth of what it was. Whilst she could not see beyond my years-dead love for his sister, it was his revelation that Roisin O’Neill had borne my son that haunted my waking and sleeping hours. It was five nights now since I had spoken with him, and my need to see him became more urgent with every passing hour.

  Tensions in the burgh were such following the events of the last two days that I knew there was no possibility that I might go out into the darkness later that night to look for Archie. What I had to ask him could not be asked in front of Sarah, who now watched my every movement. But Isabella – she had seen him, and perhaps, through the lieutenant, offered my only way of reaching Archie. Isabella played too much on my mind. I could not believe that she had been complicit in the murder of Christiane Rolland, but of the disappearance of Guillaume Charpentier I was convinced she knew more than she had told. I was resolved to go and see her one more time.

  My report for the presbytery at last written, I sat a while in my chair by the fire to arrange my thoughts. Of all that had crowded into my mind these last two days, as I closed my eyes I saw not the destroyed face of Jean St Clair, but that of John Leslie as he had babbled about a creature flying through the air and speaking in tongues. I heard his voice. I heard the voice of Christiane Rolland, her terror that she was being watched in her coming and going from her brother’s home, in her working with Guillaume in the garden. She had even thought she was being watched in Baillie Lumsden’s house. I had dismissed her fears and now she was dead, and the man she had loved was missing. The half-hour that remained to me before I must leave to take my afternoon class was not a peaceful one.

  17

  Host

  In the late afternoon, my students’ appetite for a continuation of our lessons in Hebrew grammar was not what it might have been. There was not a soul in town who did not know that I had discovered Christiane Rolland hanging in George’s garden, or that Sinclair had been shot right in front of me. Of the girl’s death, no one asked me, but Sinclair’s seemed to be regarded as a spectacle provided for their fascination, to say nothing of the theories they exchanged over the disappearance of Charpentier. They had persisted with their questions until the six o’clock bell released us from one another’s company. As they trudged, dissatisfied, to their supper, I heard one of them mumble to another, ‘Never mind, Mr Williamson will be sure to tell us.’

  I knew that Peter Williamson, who lodged in the college and was nearer in age to the boys than he was to me, would indeed be sure to tell them all he and the other regents had been able to glean from me. Even the principal himself had been unable to feign lack of interest in the gruesome tale of Sinclair’s execution. I recounted for them the barest details, and yet had been unable to look at the food before me. I was consequently ravenous when I walked out of the college gates shortly before seven, and I should have gone home. But I could not face Sarah until I knew more of the truth from Archie, and once I did, I would find a way of telling it to her. There was word in the town that the troop ship was making ready to leave within the next two days, and I had to see Archie one more time before it did so. If I must reach him through Ormiston and Isabella, so be it.

  A freezing fog was descending on the town, and even a man who thought he knew his way might easily have got lost. It muffled the sounds of my own footsteps to something ghostly. Voices half-familiar came through the mist to me as I made my way to Baillie Lumsden’s house on the Guest Row, the Ghaist Row, so called for the unquiet spirits of the kirkyard towards which it led.

  The figures who stood their pikes by their sides at the front door were
no ghosts but armed men of living flesh who were more watchful for the living than they were for phantoms.

  ‘What is your business here tonight, Mr Seaton?’

  I considered telling them I was here to see Isabella, but was not certain that that would be enough to gain me admittance. ‘I have come at the request of Lady Rothiemay.’

  The one who had spoken to me nodded, but the other did not move his weapon. ‘Have you her note with you?’

  ‘Her Ladyship does not like to commit anything to writing.’ I answered. ‘In the present circumstances.’

  The man still looked unsure, but his companion had seen me come and go from the house on several occasions now, and persuaded him to let me past. The young girl who answered the door at their command was unfamiliar to me, and, as soon became evident, the house.

  ‘I am sorry, Sir – there are so many stairs here, and I only began my duties today. The rest are at the … are busy,’ she said confusedly.

  ‘If you could just tell me where Mistress Irvine is at the minute, I will find my way there myself.’

  She looked greatly relieved. ‘They are all in the Long Gallery.’

  I smiled at her. ‘Do you mean the Great Hall?’

  ‘No, Sir,’ she shook her head, quite clear. ‘The Long Gallery, on the floor above the Great Hall, up this stair.’ She indicated the narrow turnpike, and turned away, vindicated, when I set my foot on them. I had never been up to the Long Gallery before, for all the times I had been in this house. In fact, I was not certain that I had ever heard it mentioned, although at the back of my mind there was something Jamesone had said about painting work he had been unable to do for Lumsden. I had not paid him any great attention at the time. I wondered what purpose Lumsden might have in a Long Gallery, usually the preserve of the castles and strongholds of the powerful of the land, not of burgesses, however wealthy and influential they might be. I could not imagine a busy merchant such as he was, with all his additional duties on the council and as a baillie of the burgh, would have the leisure to play at bowls or shuttlecock or indulge in the other pleasures for which these places were intended.