She turned now. ‘We will leave aside the fact that I had no choice, for whatever happened between us, I had no choice. But had I been a wealthy woman of good family, had I had no children, had I not been carrying your child, I would have stayed anyway.’ She put aside the gown she’d been holding. ‘I did not marry you because I needed a home – I had one with William and Elizabeth, and would always have had one there. I did not marry you because I needed a father for Zander – has the boy not three god-fathers of greater wealth and better standing than you?’
It was true. When Sarah’s son had been born, she had been reluctant to ask any to stand godfather to her bastard child, but the matter had soon been taken from her hands as William Cargill, Dr Jaffray and John Innes had stepped forward to claim that role.
‘And I did not marry you,’ she continued, holding my gaze in a challenge, ‘because no one else would have me.’ I opened my mouth to speak but she had not finished. ‘I married you because I loved you, Alexander Seaton. I knew from the first moment you bent down from your horse to speak to me that I would love you. From the moment you put your hands at my waist to lift me onto that horse, I knew that I would never let another man touch me. Nothing you have ever done, nothing you could ever say can change that, and if you were to walk out of that door now and never come back, I would die never loving another man.’
‘Nor I another woman,’ I said softly. I bent down to kiss her, and felt the touch of her lips on mine with all the thrill, all the wonder, of the very first time.
All would be well, then. Sarah must have heard what was being said about me, but she never spoke of it – she had heard such things often enough before. My own sense of unease that Matthew Jack was not the man I had sought receded a little in the gathering excitement as graduation day approached. Principal Dun himself became somewhat lighter of spirit, and although he tended Richard Middleton each day, I felt he too would be happier to see his younger colleague gone from our horizon. While his vigilance over his patient did not waver, that which he had so carefully exercised over me began to relax its grip, and I at last found myself able to come and go, unattended, from the college as the occasion suited me.
I took the opportunity, whenever it might arise, to slip out and visit the Middletons for myself, or to find an excuse to go to the King’s College in the Old Town, and call upon John Innes, who, under the care of the principal’s daughter, in the Mediciner’s manse there, seemed to strengthen a little in mind and spirit by the day. He called less now on his angels, and found some solace in quiet prayer, from the spectres of devils that still beset him in the short hours of darkness. I related to him, in as much detail as I could recall, the experiences of Pilgrim in Comenius’ Labyrinth, for the book itself had never been found. To my relief, the tale did not add to his delusions, but seemed to have a kind of enchantment of truth and light for him, which had been absent these latter weeks in the dark and stinking hermitage of his college room. He followed the progress of Pilgrim from day to day, and came with him to see the futility of the Rosicrucian dream. At the end of each visit, I thanked God that my friend, this kind and gentle man, had been pulled back from the edge of the abyss.
The last day before the final examinations and laureation dawned, a little hazy, but with promise of great heat. My own scholars, in their third year and with no examinations to face until our return to college in the autumn, had finished their course and been ploughed through it again by myself and John Strachan who had now proved himself sufficiently that he was to have Matthew Jack’s vacant place as regent. As some went happily off to the Links to play golf, and others down to the shops and booths of the Castlegate to fulfil some last commissions for their parents before returning home to the glens of Aberdeenshire and the scattered Highland settlements from which they had come, I too left the college. As I made my way down the Upperkirkgate, I saw, halfway down the street, a young boy of about twelve struggling out of William Cargill’s door carrying a large and vaguely familiar looking object in his arms. Dr Jaffray was following after him, his head turned towards William’s manservant, standing in the doorway.
‘Days of wickedness – you have it there, Duncan, you have it right. Days of wickedness. When a man such as David Melville cannot be trusted!’
I crossed over quickly, just as Jaffray’s lately bought map was about to fall from the hapless boy’s grasp. ‘What has our good bookseller done to so incur your wrath, Doctor?’ I asked, as I gave the grateful boy his penny and told him I would see to the doctor’s errand.
‘Good bookseller? Was there ever such a thing? A charlatan! A purveyor of fakes!’
‘Come, you know David Melville is neither of those things. You have been buying books from him for longer than I have myself.’
‘That is what makes it all the worse, that after all these years he should so abuse my custom and my trust as to sell me this.’
‘The map?’ I said, holding the thing at arms’ length the better to scrutinise it. ‘But it is a fine piece. There is no fakery here.’
‘The map is wrong, I tell you. It has the Frisian islands too far to the north or Gouda too far to the south – it is one thing or the other.’
I looked again at the map. The geography and topography of the Netherlands was not entirely unfamiliar to me, and it did not appear to me that anything was amiss.
‘But what makes you think that, Doctor?’ I asked.
Jaffray’s response was lost as a great sound of shouting and commotion reached us from the direction of the Castle-gate. A shadow passed across the doctor’s face; all thought of maps was forgotten as he thrust the object back through William’s still-open doorway and gripped my arm. ‘Come Alexander; I have heard such sounds before and they rarely portend good.’
And indeed, it was nothing good that we learned even before we had breasted the Broadgate. Word was spreading through the streets that Matthew Jack had broken free of his gaolers whilst being transferred from the tolbooth to the sheriff court, and was loose somewhere on the streets. My first thought was of Richard Middleton and his wife, but a guard had been set on the provost’s house as soon as the escape had become known. Every moment Matthew Jack was free, on the run, was a moment more for him to continue spinning out his web of malice. My mind worked quickly. Where was my wife? I could not remember what she had said that morning as I had left.
‘Sarah!’ I shouted. ‘Doctor, is Sarah at William’s house?’
My friend shook his head. ‘I have not seen her there all day. There was something I think about her staying at home – some preparations she had in hand for your students’ supper.’ His face told me instantly that his fears mirrored my own, and for all his sixty years he had turned and was pushing against the crowd to get back across the street before I was myself.
I must have reached the pend on our lane in less than two minutes. Jaffray, breathing hard, was some way behind me by now. I ran into the courtyard shouting Sarah’s name, and for the second time in recent days found the door to my own house barred against me. Before Jaffray had caught up with me, I had lifted the wooden bench from its place by the wall and begun to ram it against the door. The son of an elderly neighbour came running down the forestairs, shouting, until he realised who I was and joined me in my battering of the door. At last it gave way and I crashed in to find my daughter huddled in a corner, crying for her mother, and Sarah on the floor, lifeless but for the blood seeping from her head. Jaffray spoke quietly behind me. ‘Good God, Alexander, can it be him?’
It was. The thing that crouched over my wife, a knife in its hand was more beast than man, filthy, matted, covered in sores.
‘Have your brat cease its squalling, Seaton, or I’ll skewer it from here.’
As I took a step towards him, the old woman from across the courtyard scurried behind me to sweep Deirdre from the floor.
I turned to fall on my knees beside Sarah.
I heard Jack suck at his teeth. ‘She did not prove as accommodating as I thought.’
He was rubbing at a livid scratch on his face. ‘More feisty than the usual bitch in heat.’ He nodded towards the scar on my own neck. ‘Does she like to get it rough, Seaton? I can take her rough.’
Before I knew that the animal scream that filled the room was from my own throat, I felt my fist connect with his head. It was only with the first kick of my boot into his ribs that I heard the knife skitter across the floor, only with the second that I felt bone crunch beneath my foot. They had to pull me from him in the end and then they had to drag me from Sarah, where I held to her on the floor.
‘Good God, the place is like a flesher’s yard.’ It was William, downstairs.
‘I doubt it will ever clean,’ came a woman’s voice.
‘They said in the chambers that he had killed him.’
I did not know. I did not know if I had killed him. I did not care. Everything, almost everything I cared about lay, swathed in clean white linen, on the bed in front of me, my marriage bed.
‘Come away, Alexander,’ Jaffray said gently. ‘I must dress your hand.’
I shook my head. ‘I will not leave her.’
‘There is nothing you can do for her. Elizabeth will sit with her, will you not?’
They were treating me like a child. ‘Yes, I will sit with her.’ She smiled. ‘Go with the doctor, Alexander.’ And I went like a child.
I did not recognise the room downstairs in which I found my neighbour on her hands and knees, scrubbing as if her last days depended on it. I tried to speak but I could not, dazed, not knowing if the blood on the floor came from me, or from him, or from my wife.
William sat opposite me, never taking his eyes from mine as the doctor carefully cleaned and bound my hand. He kept swallowing, as if trying to swallow down the question he must ask. In all the days I had known him, I had never seen my friend, the great lawyer, the master rhetorician, so lost for words. As his eyes brimmed with tears and he reached out a hand to take mine, I knew I had never loved him so well.
‘She lives,’ I managed to say eventually. ‘She lives, William.’
‘And the child?’
Jaffray’s lips were bound tight. It was a moment before he spoke. ‘The midwife is with her. We will know soon.’
Elizabeth sat through the night with Sarah, William, having seen the children safely into the care of George Jamesone’s wife, with me. Jaffray tended to us all with the energy of a man half his age. I drank down everything he gave me, and slept for some of the hours of the night. In the morning, when at last she woke, her first question was of our unborn child.
‘Jaffray and the midwife believe that all will be well, but you must rest. Is that not so, Doctor?’
‘It is. The wound at your temple will heal in time, and it will not spoil your pretty face, my dear. Though nothing can be done for your senses, I fear.’
‘My senses?’ she murmured dozily.
‘Well, a bump on the head cannot put back what you lost years ago, to put up with this one for so long,’ he said, indicating me with a tilt of his head. ‘But truly, Sarah, you must rest. Elizabeth will not allow you across her door to do work, so you need not think of it, and Isobel Tosh will have Zander and Deirdre until you are well enough.’
‘But they will need to see me, and oh – Deirdre.’
She was remembering now, the scene our daughter had witnessed in the room below.
‘She is fine,’ I said. ‘They are both fine, and I will take them to you this afternoon. Deirdre knows the bad man will never come here again.’
The bad man would never be anywhere again, but the road from the tolbooth to the gibbet on Heading Hill. I had not killed him, William had told me late in the night after he had been out to talk to the sheriff and to see for himself that Jack was safely in chains once more. ‘You didn’t leave many bones in one piece, but you didn’t kill him, more’s the pity. Dr Dun went in there and patched him up sufficiently that they might set a rope round his neck to hang him.’
‘Dr Dun?’
‘It would not have been me, I’ll tell you. But for all that it was he who dismissed Jack from the college, the principal still feels a Christian duty towards him that few others could muster.’ William looked uncomfortable.
‘What is it? There is something else?’
He drew a breath. ‘Dr Dun got little thanks and much abuse for his troubles. Jack raved at everyone and everything that came near him. The townspeople who could get into the building, and the guards, thank God, jeered and spent their effort on heaping abuse on him rather than listen. For had he spoken in a clear calm voice, had they listened as I listened, they would have heard, amongst the ravings, what I heard.’
‘What did you hear. William?’
And he told me.
Had it not been so late, had my wife not being lying, insensible, in the room above us, we would have gone then to warn them, but as it was, we could only leave it until the morning.
Richard Middleton’s face was white, whiter even than it was after he had been attacked in the masons’ lodge by Matthew Jack.
It was his wife who spoke. ‘How did you know?’ she asked.
‘Matthew Jack,’ William said. ‘I think you must leave, now, before anyone else takes a moment to listen and understand what he is saying.’
The young doctor looked up at his wife. ‘Rachel, I am so sorry. I never meant to bring you to this. You do not deserve this. I will go alone. People will accept you for your brother’s good name and your own; they will soon forget about me.’
‘If I have not you, Richard, I have nothing. What is there here for me? I took your name years ago and discarded my own. And when I die, that name will be on my grave. The provost will not detain us, and what belongings we will need are already packed up. We can be gone by tomorrow.’
‘That is good,’ I said, ‘but you may have a little longer before another listens to what he says; it may be that all he says will be discounted as the mad ramblings of a mind lost.’
The young woman looked at me steadily. ‘But you did not discount them so, did you?’
I looked away a moment, ashamed almost. ‘No. I had begun to – to suspect.’
How long ago had I begun to suspect? At the very beginning, I think, when first Robert Sim’s landlady had told me of his night-time wanderings, for in all the time I had known him, Robert Sim had never once sought the company of women for anything other than their domestic aid or their conversation, never once. And for all Sarah and Elizabeth had discoursed on his need for a wife, I had known he would never take one. And when William had repeated to me the words that had tumbled forth from Matthew Jack’s mouth in all the filthy torrent of his invective, I had realised at last what were the unnatural practices of which he had spoken to me that night in the lodge: when Robert Sim had come alone, in the night, to the Middletons’ house, it had been to spend the hours of darkness not with the young woman, but with her husband.
Dr Dun’s face was grave. ‘You realise, do you not, Alexander, that this must be reported to the session. The crimes of Richard Middleton are an offence against God, and he must answer for them.’
I had rehearsed what I would next say carefully, for it had not been likely that the principal would accede to my request at the first time of asking, and I could not see how the thing was to be done without him. ‘He will answer for them, at the Day of Judgement. But others should not face the discipline of the kirk, and all that you know would follow, for things they have not done.’
‘You talk of his wife? She was complicit.’
I shook my head. ‘I talk of this college.’
Patrick Dun’s face darkened and his nostrils flared as he took in breath. ‘What are you telling me, Alexander? What are you telling me has been going on here under my very eye?’
‘Nothing, I think. I never heard a word, a whisper, about impropriety, or indeed much converse between Robert and the boys, and Richard Middleton was never in this place amongst them.’
‘Then why should anyone here
be brought before the kirk?’
‘Because of Matthew Jack,’ I said. ‘He knew Richard Middleton in Paris, when he was newly qualified and thought to set up in practice as a physician there. Jack thought the coincidence of their shared nationhood would give him access to the circle of his fellow countryman and his friends, but his overtures towards them were rejected. Jack saw to it in time that he was hounded from the city. When Matthew Jack eventually came to our college, and discovered Richard Middleton living in this burgh, he again sought revenge, but his old tales of secret, malign brother-hoods held little favour amongst our burgesses and so he waited, and he watched for something else. For years, Richard gave him nothing, no scrap of scandal that he could fix upon, lived quietly, built his practice and did not much seek the society of others. And then, his curiosity about what he found at the masons’ lodge took him to our library and Robert Sim. Whatever care they took, it was not enough, because Matthew Jack began to suspect the true nature of their association.’
‘That I can believe, but it still does not excuse Richard Middleton or – or Robert Sim,’ he added. ‘And I still fail to see how it threatens others in this college – your fellow teachers or the students under our care.’
‘Do you not remember the threats Jack flung at you, at this place, as he was put from its gates? Did you not hear what William heard last night, as you tended to Jack in his cell?’ In my frustration my voice was rising and I was speaking to the principal as I had never before done.
He started to shake his head slowly. ‘I paid no heed to his ramblings – I was tending his wounds.’
‘He made good on his threats, Patrick, as you set his bones and cleaned his sores. Amongst the garbled filth that poured from his mouth was that the Marischal College was a cesspit of sodomy. He was jeered and shouted down by the rabble down the stairs and outside who could not discern what he said, but if you yourself were to bring Richard Middleton before the session and accuse him of unnatural acts with Robert Sim, who was our own librarian, there are few within these walls who would escape the finger of suspicion, and no decent father would ever put his son here again. Boys who huddle together under a blanket through the winter nights in their chambers would find themselves accused of heinous crimes against nature and against God.’
Seaton 03 - Crucible of Secrets Page 23
