The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

by Shona MacLean

  ‘I could not tell you, master. I have the deafness in one ear,’ said the old man, with a sly smile. ‘I’ll have the girl set a fire in your study for Mr Seaton here. The room will be cold at this hour of the morning.’ And he went off in search of the kitchen girl, who was still out at the goats.

  ‘You are a good master, William,’ I said to my friend. ‘Your servants are fond of you, and would do much for you, I think.’

  ‘I am very fortunate. But it is beyond even Duncan’s power to keep Elizabeth at rest. He and the girl do all they can, but the time is soon coming when she will need more help, and I fear she will not take it.’

  ‘Do you really fear so much for her?’

  He sighed and put down his bread. ‘Aye, and with cause. She was ill, early this winter past, very ill, with a fever. She hardly swallowed a morsel – a bit of thin soup, little more – for nigh on three weeks. Sometimes she was so far in the fever she hardly knew my face. Dun had done all he could for her and I was on the point of sending for Jaffray when, thank God, she started to mend.’

  ‘But she is well now?’

  He gestured helplessly. ‘She was never strong, and she has not the strength even that she had before her illness. The pregnancy is hard on her. I pray God morning and night that she will survive the birth.’

  ‘And the child, too.’

  He looked at me sharply. ‘Oh, do not mistake me, Alexander. I love that child in her belly already, but at what price might I become a father? And then she insists she will feed the bairn herself. She will not listen to sense on the matter, Alexander; but she will not have the strength or the milk to nurse her own child. I am at a loss to know what to do with her.’

  But I was not. An inspiration came to me; a gift from God in my mind: Sarah Forbes. ‘William, I think I may have an answer. We will talk on the road to the Old Town.’

  He looked at me with curiosity but little optimism. ‘All right then, Alexander. I will see you after noon.’ And still with furrowed brow he took his hat and left on his morning’s business.

  I spent the next few hours lost in wonder at the notebooks of James Cargill, William’s uncle. I had fancied – and I think Jaffray had too in the throes of his enthusiasm – that I would carry a small, neatly bound book back to Banff with me for the study of the doctor and the apothecary. The moment I stepped into William’s study I was disavowed of this notion. On the desk, Duncan had placed an old leather kist with a curved lid; beside it was a key. Duncan had been Dr Cargill’s servant before he had been William’s. I knew by the reverence with which he turned the key in the lock that these papers were to him a treasure more valuable than jewels. He opened the lid and let his hand rest briefly on a book on top, then moved aside for me.

  ‘The doctor’s most valuable books are in the Marischal College library now, but these papers have not been touched these thirteen years. Have a care of them.’

  ‘I will,’ I promised the old man, and, satisfied, he left.

  I set to work immediately, lifting books or bundles out one at a time and trying to put them in order. There was no index, no catalogue, and indeed no apparent order in which the items had been set in the chest. At length I fixed on chronology as my best means of arranging the items and after some little time had the notebooks and bundles of letters and papers set out before me in the order they had been written. Jaffray had suggested that the colchicum would be most likely to have been sketched at the time of Cargill’s residence at Montbéliard. Consequently, I began with the first of his notebooks from 1596. The work was meticulous – the hand a fine italic and the abbreviations precise. The drawings were as detailed and careful and exact as any artist might have done, the colours rendered in words as well as Jamesone could have rendered them in paint. Not all was in Latin – true, the scientific and geographical detail was in clear and exact academic language – but much of what accompanied it was written in the Scots tongue. Had I not been engaged on such pressing and important work, I could have spent many contented hours reading through the journals of the student days abroad of James Cargill. I resolved that once I had found what I was looking for, I would ask William to allow me to take three or four of the notebooks back to Banff.

  It was towards the end of the third book that I found it at last: colchicum mortis, the plant that brought death. Cargill had sketched and labelled every aspect of it from seed to petal. Every detail of every part of the plant was drawn with what could only have been a very great effort at accuracy, and the moment I saw the sketch, colourless though it was, of the plant in flower, I knew I had seen it before. I had seen its globe-like head, large and yet delicate above its narrow, dark, strap-like leaves. The description in Scots given by Cargill of its colour was perfect. ‘The petals of the plant in flower,’ he wrote, ‘are like the pale grey blue of the winter sky over the northern sea after it has snowed.’ It was just that, exactly. And he wrote too of the terrible properties of this exquisite flower, the poison from its seeds that would send a man into convulsions before paralysing him; the certainty of death. He finished his account with, ‘Found only in the mountain passes between Basel and Montbéliard. Not known to be transported or to endure elsewhere. Dei Gratia.’ But Cargill’s God, like mine, had been minded to change his blessing, and the awful, beautiful plant had found a Scottish sanctuary and was growing somewhere in Banff. I knew, for I had seen it. I had seen it in the hand of a woman. But where, in whose hands, should every beat of my heart depend on it, I could not remember.

  I breathed deep and screwed my eyes tight shut, trying to force the memory from the recesses of my mind. It would not come. I got up and began to pace about the room, to look out of the window at the business of the street outside, to stare into the flames of the fire, but still it would not come. I pictured every woman I knew, put the flowers into her hand, but every time the face went blank and I could see nothing, discern nothing. I searched my awful dreams of the last night for assistance, but none would come. I prayed aloud, but my words echoed unanswered in the empty room. The face was blank, and the hand began to fade away. The case was presently hopeless, and would not be mended here, at this hour, in this room. Frustration, then fatigue crept over me. It wanted two hours yet till William was to return from his morning’s business. I returned all but the one, special journal to the leather kist, and returned to my room to sleep the sleep that had eluded me in the night.

  William had been glad of the walk up to the King’s College, glad of the chance to leave the confines of town for a while, if only for the neighbouring burgh not two miles up the road. It was a fine afternoon, and the schoolchildren of Aberdeen had taken gladly to their afternoon’s play at the links and on the King’s Meadows. I waited until we were beyond the Gallowgate port and past Mounthooly before I told William of my idea that Sarah Forbes might alleviate the coming burdens on Elizabeth’s strength. He listened carefully, quietly, without making the objections I had half-expected, even from him. For a moment after I had finished he said nothing, deep in thought, and then, ‘I think it may be possible that it would work, Alexander. I think it just possible that she would agree to it.’ He continued walking and then stopped. ‘You can obtain the relevant testimonials?’ I assured him that I could. ‘Then I shall clear the way here. I doubt there will be many objections from council or session. I will win the day.’

  ‘If Elizabeth will allow it.’

  William affected a look of mock indignation. ‘Do you suggest that I am not master in my own home, Mr Seaton? I wish it and it will be so!’ We both laughed, and I think for each of us, the rest of the journey was made with a lighter heart. The burden of concern for his wife weighed less heavy on him, and I had a feeling within me of having done good.

  We were still laughing as we walked through the door of the inn. Matthew Lumsden and John Innes were already there, at our favoured table between the front window and the side door of the inn. It had been a useful spot for Archie to watch and escape from, should anyone he did not wish to enco
unter be spied coming up the High Street. First Matthew, and then John got up and embraced me. ‘It has been too long, Alexander, too long.’

  I took off my hat and sat down on my old seat by the door. ‘It has indeed, and the fault is all mine.’

  ‘Old friends need not speak of fault. Who amongst us is blameless?’

  I studied the kind, open face. ‘You will never fall as I have done, John. You will never feel such shame you cannot look your friends in the eye.’

  He laid his hand over mine. ‘“And thou mayest remember, and be confounded and never open thy mouth any more because of thy shame, when I am pacified toward thee for all that thou hast done, saith the Lord God.”’

  ‘Ezekiel chapter six, verse nine,’ I said. Matthew sighed audibly and slurped his beer.

  John smiled. ‘I knew you could not have forgotten. That you have felt such shame is testament to God’s grace in you, his forgiveness.’

  ‘I see you are still too good, John,’ I said.

  ‘Too good by half,’ said Matthew as he beckoned the serving girl over to us. ‘They will make a bishop of him yet, if he is not careful.’

  ‘Hold your tongue, Matthew,’ said John, blushing a deeper red than was the hair on his head.

  ‘You still regent in the college here, then?’

  John nodded as he took another draught of his ale. ‘Aye. I have the second class now, but the competition from the Marischal College in the New Town threatens our numbers.’

  ‘Pah,’ snorted Matthew contemptuously.

  John put down his tankard. ‘Pah! Will not do, Matthew. What is your objection?’

  Matthew had never been one for thinking before he spoke, but now he took a moment before his reply. ‘My objection is that the very place was founded as an affront to the Gordons. The Earl Marischal gave church land that was not his to give—’

  ‘Matthew,’ cautioned William.

  ‘That was not his to give,’ continued the Marquis of Huntly’s man, ‘to the burgh of Aberdeen in order to curry favour with the magistrates and wrest influence in the town from the marquis’s family. But worse than that, he planned to set it up as a seminary more narrow and joyless than Geneva. Thank God the old devil was too mean to match his endowment to his schemes.’

  ‘The earl’s intentions were nothing darker than to promote necessary learning in our corner of Scotland, where this college here had taken so long to throw off the slough of Rome. And there were many here who refused to take up the new methods of learning brought in from France by Andrew Melville.’

  The very mention of Melville’s name was, I knew, guaranteed in itself to provoke an outburst of fury from Matthew. I was not to be disappointed. ‘Melville! Presbyterian upstart! Impertinent, disloyal—’

  I feared for him, so evident to any who cared to listen was his sympathy with Rome.

  ‘And yet we are all friends,’ said William, ‘and will always be so, I hope, for all our differences. Let us pray God that matters of politics and religion may never come between us.’

  ‘Amen to that,’ chorused my friends. Our conversation had been drifting into dangerous waters, and I had learned in Banff that there were unseen currents in such waters. Looking around the inn, no Baillie Buchan, certainly, no rabid session clerk came into view, but who was to say that others were not to be similarly feared? I steered the conversation to safer ground, concerned suddenly that my friendship with Matthew might be used against us both. It had been agreed between William and myself that nothing should be said before the other two about the troubles in Banff, and especially that no mention should be made to Matthew of my commission to Straloch. His loyalty to Huntly had always made him rash.

  The remainder of our meal passed in merry reminiscence of past deeds and some contemplation of future hopes. For my own part I would have been happy to listen to them all – William knew this and I think John saw it too, but Matthew would not have it. He was determined to draw from me some optimism, some plan for myself. He had never had much time for the ideas of the predestinarians. He had fallen himself many times, and confession before a mass priest in one of their many safe houses in Strathbogie had salved him of further conscience about it. He would not allow that my fall in the eyes of God and my disgrace before men had been inevitable, that the evil was inherent to me. Thus fallen, I knew I was counted amongst the damned.

  ‘It is nonsense, Alexander, and you must know it is. What? Because you took a girl to bed – and I have no doubt that is what is at the heart of the matter, but I will not press you on who she was – you have revealed yourself to be of the eternally damned? Well, if that be the case, my friend, you will find yourself the most feared man in the country, for why should you not now revel in your damnation? You are free now to murder, rape and rob without fear of further punishment in the afterlife since your course is already set.’

  There was no disputing with Matthew when he was in this humour, so I did not attempt to. I only said, ‘I still have a conscience though, Matthew. I still know the law of God, and it binds me not to treat my fellow man with contempt in this life.’ Even as the words were in my mouth, the image of Patrick Davidson came again to my mind. ‘I shall try to do what I can in this world, come what might in the next.’

  Matthew put down his tankard, pleased. ‘That is all I wanted to hear, Alexander. A lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth is a waste of an able man. Be mortified in your conscience if you must, but do not throw away the gifts God gave you because of it. There is a passage in Joel, is there not?’

  John came to his assistance, ‘“And rend your heart, and not your garments, and turn unto the Lord your God: for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and of great kindness, and repenteth him of the evil.”’ Sometimes it was too easy to forget that beneath Matthew’s bluster lay a simple but firm humanity. How could I ever have hoped to be a minister, when I was such a poor judge of even my own old friends?

  A little before two our party broke up. A group of Huntly’s men arrived, bound for the South, and Matthew was to ride with them on the marquis’s business. William was returning home to Elizabeth for the afternoon. John and I walked over to the college together. He, who had always been gentle and diligent, knew he would never be a bishop. He had been a hard-working student and was a competent teacher, but he did not have the sharpness of mind needed to distinguish him from so many others. Yet John was not ambitious, and was content to study and to teach within the safety of the college. I had used to wonder at his lack of ambition, but now I believe I envied it.

  We were soon at the entrance to the college, beneath the chapel’s great crown tower, symbol of our nation’s now slumbering imperial hopes. We went in under the gateway and John pointed out to me a door across the quadrangle where Dr Dun could be found. He embraced me again, and I promised that it would not be so long until we saw each other once more, then he hurried off to take his afternoon class.

  I found myself a little nervous as I approached Dr Dun’s door. He would know little of me, I hoped, but I knew much of him. Principal of the Marischal College, he was Mediciner here at King’s as well, a friend and support to the bishop in his efforts to reform the college and stamp out abuses where they might be found. In addition to these already heavy responsibilities, he carried out a busy medical practice amongst the wealthy landed families in the countryside about. He was all that Jaffray might have been, had my old friend not been content to fight his daily fight against pain, malnourishment and disease in our own small town.

  A student showed me to Dr Dun’s room, where I was greeted by a tall and spare-looking man of little more than forty. He dismissed the student and bade me sit down while he finished off the piece of work he was engaged upon. After a few moments he looked up. ‘Now, Mr Seaton, you are here on the matter of the bursaries?’

  Thankful for the lack of preliminaries, I launched gratefully into my well-rehearsed speech. ‘I have a young scholar of great promise in Banff, who, through his mother, has a claim to one o
f Dr Liddel’s bursaries at the Marischal College. I know there may well be several boys competing for the benefit. I am anxious that he should not be disadvantaged through some want on my part. In particular, I would like to know the standard of Greek that is required of petitioners for the bursaries. My own scholars are at an elementary stage in their Greek studies, but I am confident that with extra tuition I might be able to make up any deficiency.’

  Dun smiled broadly and put down the pipe he had been turning over in his hands. ‘Mr Seaton, if your scholars have any Greek at all, then they will be at no disadvantage against the town boys. We have, of course, excellent masters, but they have a great press of duties upon them and do not always attend to the school as much as might be required. Yet schooling is the most important work our kingdom has to offer. If we are to build the godly Commonwealth here in Scotland, schooling must be our foundation.’ I had heard this before, in many quarters, but Dun spoke with true conviction. If there were more such men the great project of our reformers might have a chance. He got up and lit his pipe from the fire. ‘Tell me, do you have another occupation, or aspirations, as well as your schoolmastering in Banff?’

  ‘I have no other occupation,’ I said, with, I hoped, sufficient finality that he should not press me further.

  Dun, however, was not to be put off. ‘And aspiration?’

  I shifted in my seat. ‘Whatever aspirations I might once have had are finished with.’

  Still he persisted. ‘You had some other calling?’

  There was little point now in further prevarication; he should have what he was asking for. ‘I had hopes once of being a minister. At my final trials I was accused of a wrongdoing I could not deny. The passage of time will not right that wrong. I will not recommence on my trials for the ministry.’

  He returned to his desk, the tips of his fingers pressed against one another. ‘And you have found another calling now, as a schoolteacher?’