Gilbert Grant went across and laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘Come, my friend. You cannot undo what is done. It is God’s will.’
The provost’s wife returned, followed into the room by a servant bearing trays of dates, nuts, bread and cheese, and another with wine and goblets. Geleis Guild took the wine herself and poured generous measures for those who would take it. Then she took the trays from the servant, set them on a trestle near the fire, and urged us to eat. It was early in the morning for wine, but I suspected the provost kept a good cellar and I accepted a goblet gratefully. I was not disappointed. The others all ate and drank sparingly, save the minister, whose enthusiasm for sating his appetite was, I thought, misplaced. We were thus engaged when the sound of some commotion in the street reached us from the doorway. I turned towards it in time to see my drenched and mud-splattered friend, the master of the music school, thrust through it by the two town serjeants, who hastily shut and barred it against the jeering mob. Though thick, the door could not keep out the repeated cries of ‘murderer’ and the shrill sound of one voice screaming, ‘You will hang, Charles Thom, you will hang.’
THREE
The Tolbooth
Jaffray said nothing for a few moments. He dropped heavily into his chair and clenched his eyes tight shut. He was a man beyond exhaustion. The boy who had knelt down to remove his boots waited awkwardly and looked at me for guidance. I motioned towards the door and he got up and walked silently from the room.
‘I cannot believe it, Alexander. Their folly, my God, their folly.’ I crouched before him and started to remove the boots myself. The old familiar face was etched with lines of despair he usually masked in the face of the worst of human suffering. Whether from the great fatigue of his night and morning’s journeying, or his love for the young man who now lay bound in irons in the tolbooth, he could mask it no longer. I persuaded him to have some of the wine the girl had brought in, but he would eat nothing. He had had little sleep or sustenance since leaving the inn last night, and only the blank refusal of the town serjeants to allow him access to Charles in the tolbooth had forced him home now.
‘And you also think it was poison, then?’
‘I am near certain of it. I shall know more by tomorrow. My examination should reveal something of the nature of the compound or the manner of its administration. I would with all my heart that I were more knowledgeable in these matters, Alexander, but my skill is with the living, not the dead.’ He swallowed some wine and a determination came upon his face. ‘I must rise to it, though, and Arbuthnott will assist me, for there is no one else. There is no one else who can do this work for the boy.’ I did not know if it was Charles Thom or Patrick Davidson he spoke of. It scarcely mattered which. No one in Banff had a greater knowledge of medicines than did James Jaffray, nor of simples and compounds than Edward Arbuthnott – no one, apart perhaps from Patrick Davidson himself, and what he knew he now must rely on these two men to tell.
Jaffray’s initial examination of the body had been necessarily cursory. The watch at the West Port had been alerted to stop him and sent him directly to the provost’s house on his return to the burgh from Findlater. He knew the whole story – or as much as anyone did – by the time he alighted from his exhausted horse at the Castlegate. Charles, in a state of utter distraction, had already been marched down to the tolbooth by the baillie and the two town serjeants. The corpse remained in the great hall of the provost’s house. The discolouration of the mouth and tongue and of the fingers had been enough to tell Jaffray the young man had been poisoned. At length, the provost and the minister had reluctantly agreed that the corpse of Patrick Davidson should be removed from its present resting place and taken to the doctor’s home, where he, with the assistance of the town’s apothecary and one of the burgh barbers, should perform the necessary autopsy. Even as we spoke, I could hear the servant boy preparing the instruments the doctor would need for the operation. The barber would bring his own. In a little over two hours, these three men would commence their gruesome task.
Jaffray stood up in some agitation. ‘Damn them, Alexander. Damn them! What in all of creation has made them think Charles could have done this thing? What are the fools thinking? They have an innocent man in the wardhouse while a murderer laughs in the shadows. If only I had been here.’
‘You could have done nothing, here or no. I tried my best but it availed me nothing. It availed him nothing.’
‘Aye, but you …’ Jaffray stopped himself and a silence hung in the room; he was sorry for what he had been about to say. He need not have been sorry, for I knew it to be the truth. I was not a man whose word could save another. The pledge of one such as I was worthless. Jaffray had standing and respect. Jaffray was trusted and well-liked. If any man could choose one between us to vouch for him, no man would choose me. Yet not even James Jaffray could have prevented Charles Thom being warded in the tolbooth of Banff. And in the tolbooth Charles would stay, to await the decision of the magistrates’ court and then the assizes, on a charge of having murdered Patrick Davidson.
‘Not even you could have helped him, James. They had him condemned before he ever opened his mouth. In truth, the case against him is strong and he says nothing in his own defence. It was only last night that you and I joked with him over it. Cardno, as you know, noted our every word. The whole town knows Charles is besotted with the girl, but that she was casting her eye elsewhere.’
Jaffray knew too well the way of burgh gossip to discount this argument. ‘They are in the wrong, I am sure of it. He cannot suffer this injustice. We must see to it that he is brought to liberty.’
I had expected no less, but Jaffray’s belief would have to be tempered by an appreciation of just how bad things were. ‘Much stands against him, James. He does himself no favours. When the news was brought to Arbuthnott’s this morning, Charles was found not at the apothecary’s, or the song school, but in the kirk. Praying.’
I could see that this revelation shook Jaffray as it had startled me. The formality of Charles Thom’s religious observance had once been a great matter of debate between him and myself. I knew that to him the incantations he was paid to perform in the kirk were but empty ramblings, and that he had little real faith. Then it had been a matter of concern to me. Now though, we no longer spoke of such things. For now I knew too well how a man might exist in that state, although the notion of happiness was not relevant. It was to Charles’s credit that he had never once gloated over my new understanding. I knew he pitied in me the loss of what he had never had. That Charles Thom should have been found praying desperately in the kirk the morning after Patrick Davidson’s murder was a greater cause for concern to me than anything else that had happened in the last twelve hours. Jaffray was the only other man in Banff who would understand this.
‘Then he is in desperation.’
‘Yes, James. I fear he is.’
He sat down again and passed these things over in his mind. At length he looked up. ‘And he offers no defence? No explanation?’
I shook my head. ‘None. All he would tell the baillie was that he had gone directly to Arbuthnott’s after leaving the inn last night. The apothecary looked somewhat surprised at this, and I have to say that I do not altogether believe it myself. He claimed to have risen early this morning to attend to matters in his school, but again that is something of which I have doubts – as did the others who heard it.’
‘And the praying?’
‘They do not know him as we do, James. Not the minister, nor yet the baillie, the provost nor the session clerk. Not one of them asked him about the praying.’
‘And to you, Alexander? He would say nothing to you?’
I shook my head. ‘There was no opportunity for private speech between us. He was at the provost’s but a very short time before he was ordered to be warded in the tolbooth.’ I dropped my voice. ‘They would not let me go with him.’ But I had gone with him. In my mind, in my soul, I had gone with him. For as they had dragged him
out through the great oaken doors of the provost’s house he had called to me just as the dying man last night had called to me. He had called to me over his shoulder as they dragged him away, desperation in his eyes, ‘Help me, Alexander. For the love of God, help me!’ This time, I would not walk by on the other side.
‘And you will help him, Alexander. And I with you. For I promised his mother on her death-bed that I would watch over that boy, and my promise is not over yet.’ I had never guessed it, never wondered at it before. James Jaffray had watched over and provided for the orphaned Charles Thom through his boyhood and into early manhood simply because a dying mother had asked him to. Of all the souls I had encountered in my twenty-six years upon this earth, there were few who could compare with Dr James Jaffray.
When the servant girl came in with more coals for the fire, Jaffray instructed her to prepare a basket of food – bread, cheese, some of whatever broth was to be had from the kitchen – with some ale to be ready for me to take with me when I left. I was to take it to Charles in the tolbooth and to insist on being allowed to see him. From a cabinet in his workroom, the doctor also brought a syrup of balm. ‘Tell him to take it; it will cheer his heart and chase away his melancholy.’ I assured the doctor that I would not leave until Charles had swallowed some of the medicine. A thick rug, too, was thrust into my arms as I prepared to leave.
‘You are a good girl, Ishbel,’ said Jaffray. ‘I had not thought of the cold.’
The girl replied quietly, ‘He is always complaining of the cold, doctor.’
I took it from her. ‘He shall know that it comes from you, Ishbel.’ She might have said something more, but I was not sure, for she had turned away to leave the room.
‘You will tell him, Alexander, that we will move heaven and earth, you and I, to have him out of that place.’
Thus laden with provisions and instructions, I made to leave the doctor’s house, but almost at the door I remembered something that had lain half-forgotten in my mind all day.
‘Doctor,’ I said, ‘how went your mission to Findlater? You were not too late?’
‘Only by two days.’
‘Two days? I do not understand.’
‘No more do I, my boy, no more do I. But I tell you this, the Devil was in it, for her ladyship was not. No more was the old lady or any other of the family. The gate-keeper told me they had all shifted to Cullen two days since, his lordship having at last got the better of his mother. I did not proceed to Cullen, for I know they consult Reid when they are there – age prevents him going out to Findlater. It suited someone’s purpose that I should not be in Banff last night.’
‘Who brought the message?’ I asked.
Jaffray sighed. ‘I do not know. All the long way back from Findlater I seethed and raged and vowed I would get to the bottom of it.’ He went to the door leading into the kitchen hallway and called for the stable boy. He looked frightened when questioned, fearing he would be blamed for the doctor’s wild goose chase. ‘Who brought the message from Findlater last night, boy? Was it someone you knew to be from the castle?’
The boy stuttered. ‘I do not know, sir. I have never been that far out of the burgh. I don’t know the folk at the castle.’
‘But it was not anyone from the town? Think now.’
The boy was almost on the verge of tears. His words came out in a rush. ‘I’m sorry, sir; all I could see was someone in the darkness, with a cloak all blowing around them, and a hood nearly down over their face against the storm. They shouted across the yard that you were needed at Findlater. You were to lose no time, for her ladyship was in child-bed and had need of you. That was all; I don’t know who it was.’ He looked at me, pleading. ‘But they did say Findlater, sir, I know that, for I asked them twice, it being such a night.’
‘You did the right thing, Adam. But did you know the voice? Was it a man or a woman?’
Again the boy looked hopeless. ‘I do not know. A boy I think, but no one I know.’
I handed the boy a coin. ‘Go and see to the horse now. You have done no wrong.’ It was with great relief that he returned to the courtyard.
‘Who can it have been, James?’ I asked.
He shrugged, at a loss. ‘I do not know. A servant? A vagrant paid to perform the task and forget that they had done so? It little matters. The effect has been the same: someone saw to it that I was not here, and the boy is dead.’ He was not to be comforted, but his response would not be to indulge himself. ‘We must seek out this messenger and find out who sent him.’
A watch was being kept night and day at every entrance to the burgh, for fear of the plague that had been rumoured to be in the south. Anyone entering the burgh would have to state their identity, their place of origin and their business. I myself had taken my turn on the watch at the Sandyhills gate the night before last. I promised Jaffray that I would enquire at every port to the town whether there had been a messenger coming in with business for him last night.
I did not go directly to the tolbooth, for the baillie had warned me that no one would be permitted to see Charles until after the council had met, and that would be an hour or more yet. It was now a clear, brisk spring day. The sea rolled determinedly into the shore, but with no sense of the previous night’s vehemence. Everything looked clean and new, a contrast to the formless canker at work in the heart of the town itself. I was filled with a desire to get away from it for a time, to be on my own.
I left my burden at the schoolhouse and set out along the coast, towards the west. I pulled my hat down low and ignored the greetings and enquiries of the burgesses and of my fellow townsfolk as I strode along Low Shore, beneath the Rose Craig and past the new harbour works at Guthrie’s Haven. I would have stopped a while to watch the cormorants and sand pipers at Meavie Point, holding out to the last moment to their jagged perch until it was claimed at last by the irresistible sea, but I was not yet far enough from the town, and so pressed on. I passed by the fishermen’s huts at the Seatoun. They would not bother me; in fact, they took pains to avoid me. With them at least I knew it was no particular aversion to my person, but to my position, or at least that which I had aspired to. It was as bad luck, they said, for them to meet a minister as it was for them to cross the path of a woman on the way to their boats. The unforgiving sea had claimed too many of their number for their caution to be questioned. I had not become a minister. I had failed at the last hurdle – almost indeed at the last moment – but I had come close enough that the fishermen would avoid my person and avoid my eye on any day when they planned to put out their boats.
As I passed by their row of miserable huts, I cast my gaze upwards, towards the great rocky promontory known from ancient times as the Elf Kirk. It was a place held deeply suspect by the kirk session, and mothers warned their children against going there. Some, no doubt, respected the feeling of the session; others had greater fear of the deep gully and jagged rocks jutting from the swirling waters below. Whatever their reasons, few of the townsfolk would be seen there. It could be a place of great beauty too, as spring gave way to early summer and the rocks were clothed in cascading green velvet with pockets of yellow primroses and soft sea pinks clinging to its folds. There were no flowers today though; it was something of flowing white, fluttering slightly in the breeze that caught my eye. The folds of a woman’s cloak. Her head was uncovered and her long red hair, usually marshalled in a thick plait, hung loose down her back. Even at this distance I recognised Marion Arbuthnott. I would have called out to her, but she would not have heard me. I stood watching and in time she looked away from the ravine and out towards the sea. I lifted my arm and she saw me, but did not return my greeting. She looked at me for a long moment and then, pulling the hood of her white cloak up about her, she turned back towards the town. She had the air of a creature further from the living than the dead: I had within me a foreboding that she had had it in mind to harm herself, and I was thankful that Providence had allowed me to prevent that at least.
I pressed on, past the Seatoun and along the links to the shore of Boyndie Bay. I had often taken my scholars here, but the place was deserted today. I sat down on a large flat rock beneath a dune and looked out towards the horizon, remembering. I remembered my own schooldays, and the joy when the master had announced at the end of the morning lesson, if we had repeated our lesson to his satisfaction, that we would go to Boyndie Bay. I had not walked then, but run, run the whole way to the beach. We all ran, laughing and shouting, like the wind. And always, at the head of us all, was Archie. Archibald Hay, Master of Delgatie and heir to the castle and lands thereof. Archie, companion of my boyhood, the friend of my life. Closer than a brother and loved beyond measure. I would have given every grain of sand on the shore, every day of life that lay before me, to have Archie sitting beside me now.
The escapades of the Master of Hay were a legend in the North long before his schooldays were over. Our schoolfellows were too far in awe of him to demur at any scheme he might have, but I knew Archie from the depths of his heart, and I – I alone – could talk him out of his wild schemes. His parents knew this, and often enough before me, child that I was, thanked God for our friendship, for Archie was all their hope, the light of their life, and even their Katharine walked in his shadow.
Katharine, Archie’s younger sister, the quiet, watchful little girl, who had grown into a quiet, watchful young woman. She had taken the time to try to understand the world, whereas her brother had simply launched himself upon it. So delicate she was, and slender and pale, like the willow; I do not know when I first realised that I loved her. Sometime, it must have been, between leaving my boyhood games behind me and entering upon the world of men.
Over the years, when Archie and I had studied at the King’s College in Old Aberdeen, his parents had come often to their house in the Castlegate of the New Town, and they always took Katharine with them. At first, in the nature of boys, I paid her little heed, but as time got on and Archie quested after ever-wilder escapades, I began to notice her. There came a time when I began to speak to her of things other than all the commonplaces of our shared childhood, of her brother, of Banff, of Delgatie, of the characters who peopled her sphere and mine. We began to talk of the state of the kingdom, of the confusions in religion, of the world and its beauties and its perils. Her knowledge of languages, philosophy, poetry and history far outstripped her brother’s, and it was not long before I would call at the Hays’ town house whether Archie were with me or no. Her parents were indulgent, amused even. They gave little thought to Katharine, save to love her. Archie was all their hopes, and Katharine’s life was her own. To learn that Katharine felt for me as I did for her had been the most wondrous moment I had known.
The Redemption of Alexander Seaton Page 5
