The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

by Shona MacLean

  But I had no Katharine now, and there was no Archie beside me, nor ever would be. There would be no storming of the tolbooth, no mockery of the outrage of the dignitaries of burgh and Kirk. I must look to my own reserves to help Charles and hope that I would not be found wanting. I rose from my makeshift seat and began to make back towards the burgh, as the clouds rolled in from the west.

  At the schoolhouse I collected the provisions from the back pantry where I had left them. I was not greatly surprised to find the broth warmed and the basket a good deal heavier now. I looked at Mistress Youngson, searching for some new tone of address, because words of kindness were so out of use between us, but they would not come. ‘His mother was a good Christian woman,’ she said. ‘And I was always fond of the boy.’

  I did not slow my pace to speak to anyone as I passed by the marketplace and the old place of the Carmelites until I came to the tolbooth at the foot of Strait Path. The guard at the bottom doorway let me pass without comment or enquiry – it would be little mystery to any in the town what business I had there today. I seldom set foot in here unless it was to pay some new tax the crown or burgh had discovered a need for. This not being a day of taxation, the place was near silent, immovable. Another guard, having asked my business, opened for me the small doorway off to the right, giving onto the wardhouse and the stairway that would take me up to the jail itself. I had been through that door only once before in my life, when the burgh council had seen fit to instruct Gilbert Grant to take his charges on a visit of the tolbooth, that the sight of the fate of wrongdoers might discourage them from any such path in future. We boys from the town were used to all manner of smells, of damp, food, coal, peat, beasts and bodily wastes. We were used to the stink of the tanner’s yard and the soap-maker, of cheap tallow candles and sometimes wax, of yeast and malt brewing, of fish gut, seal blubber and seaweed. But the tolbooth was different: few of my schoolfellows could have known such a stench as greeted us on ascending the stairs to the burgh prison. All the bodily odours we had ever encountered were compressed and magnified within those thick, stone, near-windowless walls. The damp and the cold and the vermin vied for precedence in a stinking cavern of God-forsaken despair. I, and many others, had had nightmares for weeks after about what we had seen there, and I had vowed that I would never again set foot in such a place.

  I ascended the narrow and twisting stone stairs warily, for the light was very poor. Two-thirds of the way up, I heard footsteps begin to descend towards me. I stood still a moment and soon, emerging from the near-darkness, was the form of Baillie Buchan. ‘Mr Seaton. I had thought to see you here sooner.’ If the ambiguity of his words pleased him, he gave no sign of it.

  ‘And I would have been here sooner, had the door not been barred to me. On your instructions.’

  ‘The prohibition applied to more than yourself, but you would do well to think further on it. These are not fit matters for you to meddle in.’

  ‘It is not meddling to give succour to a friend, or to wish to see justice done.’

  ‘I pray God that you might, Mr Seaton, and that soon. The magistrates have committed the music schoolmaster to an assize before the sheriff, to stand trial for the murder of Mr Patrick Davidson.’

  Already. My throat went dry. My words can scarcely have been audible. ‘In the name of God, man.’

  ‘We all do our work in the name of God.’

  I shook my head slowly. ‘This is no work of God you do here. On what grounds do you charge him?’

  Buchan eyed me clearly. ‘I do not charge him, Mr Seaton. It is the whole body of magistrates sitting in council that charges him. He is, by common repute – and you will not deny this for you and Jaffray spoke of it only last night – he is by common repute infatuated with the girl Arbuthnott. She, as all the town knows, has wandered like a wanton through half the country after her father’s apprentice. Charles Thom gives no account of his movements last night after he left the inn, none at least that have an ounce of truth in them. His bed was never slept in at the apothecary’s – Edward Arbuthnott’s wife will vouch for that – and do not think I did not mark the question of his praying. Do you think me a hypocrite, that I cannot tell when one is void of faith? Your friend is lost, Mr Seaton, whatever the assize might say of him. Mind that you are not!’ With this he continued down past me, his last words repeating in my head.

  The guard on the door at the top of the stair searched my basket. ‘There are no weapons there.’ He disregarded my words and continued with his search until it was complete. His hand closed on the small package of dried fruit Mistress Youngson had slipped into the basket. ‘Leave it, or the baillie shall hear of it and you’ll be in here yourself soon enough,’ I warned him. He returned the package grudgingly and stood aside for me to stoop through the narrow doorway to the cells.

  The place – I will not call it a room – was but very dimly lit, only some glimmer of yellow light coming through the iron grille in the door. As my eyes became more accustomed to the near darkness, I discerned the figure of my friend Charles Thom, sitting with his back against the wall and his head resting over crossed arms on his knees. An iron gad ran the length of the centre of the room, and to this he was bound. He looked up as I stepped closer to him and forgetting his shackles tried to stand up to grasp my arm. The chain by which he was tethered brought him sharply back to the floor, but still he smiled. ‘Alexander, you are here.’

  ‘I would have been here sooner if they had allowed it. And Jaffray – it was with no little difficulty that they kept our good friend the doctor from storming their walls. He will be with you tomorrow morning at the latest, if his examination of the body keeps him too late.’ I had not wished to talk so soon of the death of Patrick Davidson, but perhaps this was not the place for pleasantries in any case.

  ‘They tell me he was poisoned.’ Charles’s voice had dropped to a low murmur and he did not look at me.

  I cleared some straw out of the way and sat down beside him on the rotting wooden floor. ‘Jaffray will know more by the morning of the nature of the substance itself, and the manner of its administration. Arbuthnott will assist him. We must pray God they will meet with success.’

  He smiled sadly. ‘It is a long time since you exhorted me to prayer, my friend, but I prayed today.’

  ‘I had heard you were found in the kirk. What brought you there, Charles?’

  He shook his head and his shoulders dropped a little lower. He began to speak slowly, unsure of himself. ‘I think I wanted forgiveness.’ I waited, and at length he continued. ‘I did not wish Patrick Davidson well, Alexander. I wished him no harm, but I did not wish him well. I wished him little success in all his endeavours here, and I wished him away from Banff.’

  ‘Because of Marion?’

  ‘What else? Only Marion. In fact, there was no other reason why I should have disliked him. He brought to the apothecary’s table and hearth a liveliness, an interest which had been absent before. He brought with him whole new vistas for conversation. He could converse on herbs and simples and compounds as well as Arbuthnott – and I suspect it was only diplomacy on his part that prevented him showing how much more he knew than his master. But he spoke on many things – places and people he had come to know on the continent, our own universities and their varying merits. And he knew something of music, too. He was no expert, but he had a good ear and was more knowledgeable than most of our fellow burgesses. What I would have given to have been where he had been and heard what he had heard.’

  ‘What do you mean, Charles?’

  ‘I mean the music, the masses in the great cathedrals of France and the Low Countries which have not been reduced to hollow chanting boxes as our churches here have been.’

  ‘You mean the music of the papists.’ Only Charles could have spoken even here so freely and with such contempt of our Church. I feared for him.

  ‘If you like,’ he said, ‘the music of the papists. But Alexander, you have no idea what we have lost.’

>   ‘The great human vanities of their ceremonies? Formality and splendours that took no notice of the common man? This is no loss, I think.’

  He smiled at me. ‘Oh, but you are wrong, Alexander. While our poor psalms are for the edification of man, these masses aspire to the ear of God himself. I have seen them in my mind, rising from the pages of those few fragments of choirbooks that escaped the torches of our iconoclasts, but what I would have given to have heard them sung, seen them in their proper places, as Patrick Davidson had done.’ I began then to understand that my friend’s formality in his kirk duties was not from a lack of faith, as I had always believed, but from a different understanding of it, and while I thought him still to be wrong, I loved him the more for it.

  ‘Was Patrick Davidson a papist, Charles?’ I asked.

  He looked surprised. ‘I do not know. We never spoke of it in that way. He spoke to me – when we were in our chamber – of the music and the beauty of the churches. And I played for him. In all, I had begun to think him a friend. And like yourself it is not an accolade I bestow lightly or often.’ He took a heavy breath and continued. ‘But then, of course, when I realised that Marion was lost to me I spurned every further attempt at friendship, and I gave up all hope of Marion. I doubt if she even noticed, but he … he did. And for that I am sorry, Alexander. For that I was praying this morning.’

  I knew now that he was telling me the truth. I wished I could have done something to give him comfort, but the words would not come.

  ‘And did you tell this to the baillie?’

  ‘What? William Buchan? Our blameless baillie cares nothing for feelings and regrets. Sin, crime, punishment and the wrath of the Lord upon such as me are what the baillie busies himself about. No, I told him nothing of this. James Cardno’s report of my conversation and conduct in the inn last night told him all he required to know of my feelings. What the baillie would know of me is where I was last night and in the early hours of this morning.’ He looked at me and waited. I waited a moment too, reluctant to take the role of inquisitor.

  ‘And where were you, Charles?’

  He sighed deeply, then looked me straight in the eye. ‘I was with Marion Arbuthnott.’ ‘I do not understand.’

  He lowered his voice even further, so that it was scarcely audible. ‘You must tell no one, Alexander, no one.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘Give me your word, or we will speak nothing further of this.’

  With the greatest reluctance, I gave him my word. I wish to God I had not: another murder might have been prevented.

  Reassured by my promise, he continued. ‘When I left the inn, I did as I had intended to do – I made directly for Arbuthnott’s house. I had no wish to be out in that storm a moment longer than it would take me to get from the inn to the apothecary’s. I had gone round to the back yard and just had my foot on the bottom step of the outer stair when the door at the top of it opened above me. I assumed it must be Davidson – for neither Arbuthnott nor his wife venture out at night, and for Marion it would have caused scandal. But Marion it was. She was startled, but when she saw it was me she came down the steps and bade me tell no one I had seen her. Well, I could think of nothing that would have brought her out in such an evil storm but an assignation with Patrick Davidson, and indeed, fired by the ale I had drunk in the inn, I accused her of as much.’

  ‘Which she denied?’

  He looked at me wearily. ‘No, Alexander, she did not deny it. That is to say, there was no assignation, but she was going out to search for him. She would not tell me why, or where he had gone, but only that she feared for him and would not rest until he returned home. She would not listen to my protests about the storm and the darkness, and the scandal if she were seen wandering out on such a night. When I insisted that I would not let her go alone, she begged me to go into the house and not to go with her.’

  ‘She wished to be alone when she found him?’

  ‘No, she insisted it was not so. She would not let me go with her because, she said, to do so would place me in some terrible danger – not from the storm, but from some genuine evil of which she was truly afraid.’

  ‘And what did you do?’

  ‘I went up the stair and into the house as she had bid me. I waited a few moments – not long, but long enough – and then I went out after her; I am not the great coward most would have me.’

  ‘I know you are not,’ I said. ‘Where did she go?’

  ‘She went first of all towards the kirkyard, but I think she must have caught sight of Janet and Mary Dawson, for she turned sharply away all of a sudden and made in the direction of the Rose Craig. She climbed the steep path up to the back of the castle grounds, and here I lost her for a few minutes. It was so dark, and yet I feared discovery, for she would have easily seen me if she had looked back. When I thought it safe to ascend the path myself, I did so. I could not see her, and I had left it too long to even hazard a reasonable guess as to which direction she might have gone. A gate in the castle wall was banging. At first I thought nothing of it, thinking it was only the wind. But then I noticed a little rag of plaiding snagged on a splinter in the wood. I went through the gate and still I could not see her, and I resolved to spend some time searching the grounds.

  ‘I must have been there half an hour or more, searching behind every wall, under every tree. Eventually I knew it was fruitless to search any further – if she had been in the castle grounds, she was not there now. There was no way I was going to venture down the path from the Rose Craig again – how either of us had made it up there in that wind and rain I do not know. I was heading for the gate in the wall that leads to the Water Path when it swung open and there stepping through it towards me was Marion. She was soaked to the very skin, and her hair blown all about her, and I could get no sense from her at all. She called out his name when she first realised there was someone on the path, and when I could make her understand that it was not Patrick Davidson but I myself who stood there, she all but collapsed. All she could say was, ‘I cannot find him, he will not be found.’ I think I must have half-carried her down the Water Path to High Shore. Thank God we were not seen – well, by any other than the Dawson sisters, that is. I managed eventually to get Marion back to her father’s house. Her mother takes a sleeping draught at night, and as we made little commotion I do not think her father was disturbed by us.’

  ‘At what hour did you reach the apothecary’s?’

  He considered a moment. ‘It was something after ten, I think. Not long after.’

  My heart sank within me. They had missed him by a few minutes, if that. Five minutes or less earlier down the Water Path and they would have met Patrick Davidson himself, and they would not have abandoned him to the gutter and his fate as I did. I thought I could guess the rest. ‘And you went back out searching for him early this morning, when you found he had not returned?’

  He shook his head. ‘No, I went back out last night. Marion was in such a state it was the only thing that would stop her going out herself.’

  He related to me then how he had walked the burgh boundaries, avoiding the entry ports on a plea by Marion. She had been almost as concerned that no one should know Charles Thom was searching for Patrick Davidson as she had been that Davidson should be found. He had been down every street, every vennel, every wynd in his search for the apothecary’s apprentice. He had searched relentlessly through the night until, feverish and exhausted, stumbling homewards in the early hours of the next morning, he had heard that Patrick Davidson was lying dead in my schoolroom. And all the while I had slumbered.

  A question had been forming in my mind. ‘Charles, why do you think Marion was so fearful that anyone should know you were looking for Patrick Davidson?’

  He reflected a moment. ‘I think she believed that whatever danger attended Patrick Davidson would also threaten whoever might know he was in danger. She had a foreknowledge that he was in danger last night, and very likely from whom and why, though she wo
uld not tell me. I truly believe that her foreknowledge of what happened last night puts her in danger of her life, Alexander. If anyone should learn of it, I am determined that they shall not make the connection to her through me.’

  I could see the sense in what he said, and that there was little point in trying to dissuade him from his resolve. ‘What have you told the baillie, then?’

  He gave a low laugh. ‘Nothing that he believes. I have told him that I returned to my bed at the apothecary’s, but having consumed so much ale in the inn was forced to get up again and go out into the air two hours or so later, as I was in fear of vomiting. I said I walked down to the Greenbanks and towards the sandbar at the river mouth to let the storm blast away my nausea and in the hope that it might render me sober. Once there, I began to realise my folly in setting out in such a tempest and sought shelter in the ferrymen’s hut, the ferrymen being stranded at the other side of the river with their boats. There, I fell asleep, and did not wake until the first essays of daylight.’ He smiled. ‘I always feel it is a good thing to give Baillie Buchan and James Cardno and their like a little of what they want. So firm is their belief in the debauchery of others that they are scarce likely to question it when presented with an admission. Certainly, Cardno nodded delightedly when I proffered that explanation.’