Seaton 03 - Crucible of Secrets

by S. G. MacLean

  ‘No, although we spoke of books often. I assumed he and my husband and the others studied these together. Robert had no knowledge of German, and Richard has made it his own.’

  ‘They were written in German?’

  ‘Some of them, I think. Others in Latin. There were notes, too, in Robert’s own hand.’

  ‘Could you tell what these notes were about?’

  She shook her head. ‘One of the books, I presumed. I could make out nothing more than the title he had written at the top of one of the pages: Fama. That was all I saw.’

  Fama. Now I knew now why John had spoken of fraternity. I swallowed the last of the mint cordial Rachel Middleton had poured for me and rose from the bench, putting on my hat as I did so.

  After a brief farewell with a promise that I would come back the next day, I was gone, leaving the strange young woman to grieve for the man who had never been her husband, and fear for the one who was.

  ELEVEN

  Brothers of the Rosy Cross

  I cursed inwardly as I found the library to be locked and was halfway back down the outer stair before I remembered that I myself had the key. It was the third I tried that finally opened the door for me.

  It had been only three days since Robert Sim’s murder, but already the place had taken on the musty smell of disuse. I left the door open in the hope that some of what little air there was in the day might find its way in to the room. The register was still in the locked drawer in which I had left it at the end of my last morning’s work in here, beside it the catalogue. I understood Robert’s classification of works on the shelves, but was not yet fully conversant with the system set out in the catalogue itself, and it took me some time to find the entry that I was looking for. I had begun to think Rachel must be mistaken, or that what she had seen was not to be found in the library at all, but at last I came upon it, in Robert’s own hand: at Cassell, Wessell Presses, 1615, Allgemeine und General Reformation der gantzen Weiten Welt. Beneben der Fama Fraternitatis, des Löblichen Ordens des Rosenkreutzes. I noted the shelf mark and was across the library floor in a moment, scanning the spines of the books in front of me, and then I had it in my hand: the Fama, bound with its sister work the Confessio, the proclamations that had set the thinkers of continental Europe alight with excitement and expectation, the great manifestos of the Brothers of the Rosy Cross.

  I did not sit at Robert’s desk, as I had done on my last two visits, but in my own accustomed place, beneath the high west window, where the light was better. My German was not of the best, being so out of use since the days when I had still lived in Banff, and Dr Jaffray had taught it to me for, he said, my own edification, but what I suspected was his own entertainment.

  It should not have taken me more than an hour to read through what were, in essence, little more than pamphlets – a fable and a call to arms – and yet the memories and images brought to my mind by what was in them kept me there at my desk much later in the afternoon than I had planned. I read the tale, a myth, of a German monk, Christian Rosenkreutz, said to have been dead over a hundred years. Rosenkreutz, it was claimed, had travelled to the East, to Arabia to learn the knowledge of the ancients, the knowledge handed down to man by God in the earliest times, but corrupted through the ages. This knowledge, this key to understanding the book of the universe, had been lost to us in the West, buried under the inventions and encumbrances of the scholastics and the Papacy. Rosenkreutz had studied with the most learned Arabian scholars of the day, before continuing on to Africa, where knowledge was exchanged and ideas perfected. He had travelled at last to Spain, ready to share these marvellous gifts, the fruits of the great Hermetic quest, with Christendom, to offer the secrets that would unlock the mysteries of Creation and bring to an end illness, famine, war. He should have been feted, welcomed with open arms, but instead he had been mocked and scorned by those who had a greater interest in keeping the world in darkness.

  This had not been the end of Rosenkreutz’s tale. According to legend, he had returned to his native Germany, and there gathered to him three others of like mind. This new fraternity, the brotherhood of the Rosy Cross, took it upon themselves to part and travel through Europe, in secret, dressing in the clothing of those whose country they were in, adding to their knowledge and understanding of all disciplines and ministering to the sick. They agreed to meet once a year, in a spirit of brotherhood, to exchange and further perfect their knowledge, and that they should each choose a successor to carry on their work on their death. And so it had gone, but as the first and then second generation of brothers had died out, their successors lost touch with one another, even to the extent of not knowing where the original brothers were buried. And so it might have ended, but now came tidings of great joy, for the tomb of Christian Rosenkreutz had been found, and in it all the treasures, the secrets, the knowledge he had garnered. And at last the brotherhood, the secret successors and custodians of that great treasure, were ready to make themselves known, and to accept into their fraternity others who would truly know God and understand His universe.

  I had been a young scholar at the King’s College when first these pamphlets had become known. They had caused little excitement amongst us or our teachers, other than to afford some amusement at a pleasant story, or words of caution against secret societies promising hidden knowledge: such were the haunts of alchemists, cabbalists, magicians – all suspect. We knew what lay down that path, in our Presbyterian Scotland, with our king safe on England’s throne.

  But elsewhere, in the German lands, in Poland, in Bohemia, in England even, the effect of these pamphlets had been quite otherwise. A flurry of writings appeared all over Europe, announcing their authors’ urgent desire to be accepted into the fraternity. Some attacked the brotherhood, accusing them of being Jesuits. Others argued that God had already given us signs of revelations to come: new lands across the oceans had been discovered with peoples previously unheard of, writings long lost had been found again, new stars discovered in the heavens. The time of Revelation was at hand.

  There might have been little enough harm in all of this, had not the myth of the brotherhood become enmeshed with the great disturbances brewing all across Europe, where the Catholic Habsburgs and the Papacy sought to maintain control over the Holy Roman Empire, the German lands, in the face of rising Protestant peoples and princes. The Rosicrucian promise became entangled with the belief that Christendom was in the last days of a dark age and approaching the dawn of a new, that the days of the Papacy, and of the Habsburg Empire, would soon be over, swept away at last. It was proclaimed that the eagle of the Habsburgs would finally be vanquished by the rise of a lion, the Lion of Heidelberg, Frederick, Elector Palatinate, husband to the daughter of our own King James, and briefly the great hope of Protestant Europe.

  There had been such hope in those days amongst those who sought the Philosopher’s Stone, that essential element we shared with every other thing in the universe. But those hopes had died at the hands of the Habsburg armies at the battle of the White Mountain, outside Prague, where the Bohemian forces of Frederick of the Palatinate and Elizabeth Stuart, his queen, were utterly crushed, and the Holy Roman Empire, the length and breadth of the German lands, plunged into war, starvation, disease, despair. Such had been the gifts of the Philosopher’s Stone.

  And I had lost my friend there, too. My dearest friend Archie Hay, gone to fight for Elizabeth of Bohemia, and dead, with so many others, in her cause. I closed the book and almost laughed, so ludicrous was it that anyone ever had, yet more so that they still should, take seriously this tale of the Rosy Cross, this fable of a dead monk and his buried treasures. But there were those who had, it seemed: the physician Richard Middleton, the librarian Robert Sim, my friend John Innes and some unnamed other had created such a fraternity of their own. And of those four, one was now dead and another driven almost mad with terror. Returning the book to its shelf in disgust, I took up my hat and left the library.

  It was now long past
noon, and the sunshine of earlier in the day had gone, leaving behind it an oppressive grey heat. It was as if the absent wind had taken the air with it, too, for I had to labour to draw breaths from the meagre store around me. Faces that earlier had been cheery in the blue-skied morning now looked bothered and disgruntled. I was not at the King’s Port before I felt the first stirrings of a throbbing behind my temples, and I knew without even looking at the sky what weather we were to have.

  I had it in mind to stop before I got to the King’s College, at the Snow Kirk, and order my thoughts, set out to myself exactly what I must say to John and what I must ask of him about his brotherhood. I suspected he would be no better in mind and body than he had been when last I had seen him, and feared indeed that he might be worse; whatever words I used must not be wasted. As I was about to turn from the road on to the path that would take me to the kirkyard, a movement at the edge of the kirk itself took my eye. It was Andrew Carmichael. I was about to raise an arm in greeting to him when I stopped, frozen by what I saw. For there was a woman with him. He had one hand on her shoulder, and with the other was tenderly brushing the hair back from her face. My stomach lurched and it seemed that every voice I had ever heard screamed through my head, for I did not need to see her face to know that it was Sarah.

  *

  The heat was building and there was no trace of wind. He had often cursed the wind, the wind that went through you in this corner of Scotland as it did in no other. It would find its way through every layer of clothing, every wrapping a man might have, to travel through him and on to its next victim, but today, how glad he would have been to feel a current of air, fresh, cold, cleansing, on his face. Today, though, there was none of it.

  He looked out to the sea, hazy under the heavy heat of the sky, to what he had known once but could no longer see. How had it come to this? When had the turning been taken that had left him with blood on his hands, the turning that had led to the murder of Robert Sim? Had it been here, a matter of a few days ago, as he had looked in the librarian’s face, in his eyes, and seen the answer to his question before it had been asked? No, for Robert Sim had not been the author of his own Fate.

  When then? Where? Far from here, far to the south, standing in the cold stone hallway of a tower house, a letter in the bag at his feet, hearing of the death of a father and a grandfather?

  No, not then. He must go further back. Back across that sea and years ago, long before he had known the name of Robert Sim, to two young men at a crossroads, far from home. Two young men, companions together through years of study in Germany, in France, in the Low Countries, returning at last to the place of their birth, to settle to the lives and affairs of men.

  ‘One last adventure, one last place to see; so few of our countrymen have been there – and none that I know of,’ his companion had said, as he looked at the road leading further to the flat lands and marshes of the north.

  His eyes had been on the other road, the road for Rotterdam, and the ship that would take them home at last. But as ever, his companion had won the day, and they had turned for the northwest, and the road the signpost told them would take them to the town of Franeker.

  Then, perhaps, yes it had been then. But if not then, before that and before that and before that, to the beginning of time, when God had decreed that he was to be of the damned. For that one thing he knew above all else: he was damned for all eternity.

  TWELVE

  The Storm Breaks

  My scholars had never been so silent. They sat, dumbstruck, some of them not even lifting their pens and others letting them drop after the first few words, as I tore through the texts before me and gave the commentary of my life: nothing I had ever thought or felt about the authors whose work I had in my hands went unsaid, and where I thought them in error, blind or foolish I vented bile. When the bell sounded that would release my students to their breakfast, not a one amongst them moved.

  I looked at them and had had enough. ‘Go!’ I shouted, and then more quietly, as I tied the strings on my notes, ‘just go.’

  I myself could not face the other regents, the professors or even the principal. I had no stomach for food or drink anyway, and so did not leave the lecture hall. I lay my head on the desk and wished for peace. After a little time, John Strachan, who had been taking the class in my absence, appeared in the doorway.

  ‘Are you alright, Alexander?’

  ‘What? Yes, yes, I am fine,’ I said, raising my head and running a hand through hair that had not been combed since the previous morning.

  He looked unsure, but proceeded cautiously into the room. Evidently, some of the students had been talking to him, and warning him what he would find.

  ‘Are you not going to breakfast?’

  ‘No, I am not hungry.’

  Still he lingered, and I managed to muster some semblance of decency under his concerned gaze.

  ‘Is there something you need of me, John?’ I asked.

  ‘It is only that the porter is looking for you. William Cargill’s servant is at the gate and wishes to speak to you.’

  ‘Duncan? What could Duncan want with me?’ And then I knew it. Sarah. He had been her quiet champion since the day he’d met her. He had come to talk for Sarah, who would not come to the college herself.

  My voice, when it came, was hoarse. ‘I cannot see him.’

  Strachan looked at me. ‘Alexander, he is an old man. It is no small thing for him to come here …’

  I pressed the backs of my hands to my eyes then lifted my head once more. ‘I know that. I know it. And it is no small thing for me to say I cannot see him. Now please John, just leave me, and go.’

  With no option, John Strachan went, and my thoughts for the next ten minutes until the return of my scholars were even more miserable than they had been before.

  It was my misfortune and that of my class that the rest of the morning was to be given over to Ethics. The anger was out of me, and I could only mumble desultorily on the subject until I could decently set the students to debate amongst themselves upon it. How they conducted themselves for the next hour-and-a-half, I could not tell, noticing only when the last of them to leave the room told me that the bell had gone for the mid-day meal.

  By now I had begun to feel sick, my stomach empty and my throat parched. I pulled myself up and, remembering to take my notes and books with me, headed down towards the college buttery, where I begged a loaf of bread and some cheese from the cook’s boy, and took a jug of wine from the cellar before retreating with my meal to what was now my sanctuary: the library.

  I passed by my accustomed seat, and Robert Sim’s desk. I had tried, last night, in an effort to shut out the images that were crowding my mind, to search the register for the names of those other than Robert himself who might have taken an interest in the Fama of the Rosicrucians. I had burned the candle to its base but had found no one. And now, in the light of the day that showed up every speck of dust, every scuff on the floorboards, every knot in the wood of the place surrounding me, I could pretend no longer. Everywhere, I saw Sarah with Andrew Carmichael. I took myself to a darkened corner, where the shelves of the north wall met those of the east, and slumped down with my gown pulled around me, brought the jug to my lips and began to drink. The wine was sour in my gullet and burned my stomach, but I thought if I took enough of it I would not notice. I tore a hunk of the bread but could not swallow it. I curled up on the floor and prayed for sleep.

  And I did sleep. A deep sleep, a sleep that filled the cavern of my exhaustion. Once or twice, a noise of knocking, a voice, my name, penetrated somewhere through that wall of sleep, but not far enough to wake me. But then, it must have been hours later, a hammering, louder and louder, and a shouting of my name I could not ignore. It was William Cargill’s voice. At length, I came to and stumbled towards the door, fumbled with the lock until I had it turned and opened the door to him. With him was Dr Dun, the principal.

  What they saw when they looked at me told in t
heir faces.

  I saw the relief flood William’s face. ‘Alexander,’ was all he said.

  The principal shut his eyes a moment. ‘Thanks be to God. We had feared you dead.’ Then he turned to William. ‘I will leave you now. See that you take him home, and that he rests.’

  We waited until Dr Dun had made his way back down the outer stairs. William looked at me and shook his head. ‘Am I to be let in, or shall we have it out here, on the stair head? For I swear to you, man, I am not leaving this place until I know what madness has taken hold of you.’

  I dropped my hand from the door and walked back into the library, leaving him to follow me, which he did. He sat against the edge of Robert’s desk and I went over to my sleeping place and picked up the jug of wine. I offered it to him and he gave a curt ‘no’.

  ‘Are you going to tell me what this is about, Alexander?’

  ‘You had better ask my wife.’

  ‘Your wife? You can speak to me of your wife? Sarah was at our door, with your two children under her arms before five this morning. She had not slept the whole night, and was scarcely fit to speak by the time we got her inside. It took long enough to convince her – although I was hardly sure myself – that you had not been murdered. I went to the college myself, but the porter was under orders from the principal to let no one in before breakfast. All the fellow was able to tell me was that he had seen you come into the college last night, like a man that had seen the dead, that you had spoken to no one and that he had not seen you leave. How do you think Sarah took that news, after what happened to Robert Sim? And I had to leave them, because I had business with Thomas Burnett of Leys out at Crathes – I am just this minute back. And what do I hear the moment I enter my chambers? That Duncan – Duncan who is hard put to walk the length of the backland of my house these days – came up to the college asking to see you and was turned away.’ His face, sweating though he was in the heat, was now white with rage. He breathed heavily, twice, and spoke very slowly. ‘What is this about, Alexander?’