The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

by Shona MacLean

  ‘This is God’s work, it is God’s work!’ screamed James Cardno. I had not noticed the session clerk until now, but he too was on a platform, at the right hand of the minister, the Reverend Robert Guild. The clerk’s face was alive with the certainty of his moment; all the days he had waited, watched, taken orders, been humiliated, they had all led to this. The fervour of his certainty lent a gleam to his eyes only glimpsed at before.

  The provost laughed. ‘God’s work? You’re the Devil’s whore, Cardno. Get down off there before I have you shot.’ The laughter was real, and it was the laughter of derision.

  The session clerk stumbled slightly as if the blow had been real. When he righted himself there was a trace of desperation on his countenance and panic in his voice. ‘God is not mocked! Provost or no, you will burn for your blasphemy! She was a witch! Satan has walked and danced these streets. It will be found out! It will be hidden no more!’

  Some members of the crowd had given off their own demented medley to follow the exchange between provost and session clerk, and some now took up their cries again, encouraged by Cardno’s maniacal defiance. Others, though, kept a watchful silence, or started to mumble amongst themselves. I watched the minister, and others in the crowd had turned to look at him too. He had stepped back, once, and then again from Cardno, but he could step no further, for he had reached his platform’s edge. He had no option but to face the crowd, and his brother-in-law. The provost now addressed him directly.

  ‘What say you, minister? It is time to stop this madness. There are whores yet in the town who would satisfy your lusts – you and all your like – without this barbarity. Remember you were once a man of God.’

  This was almost too much for the Reverend Guild, but Cardno took it as mother’s milk, waiting for his master to respond in kind. Robert Guild, however, was not the man to answer such a moment. Sweat rolled from his forehead down his fleshy cheeks. His chest heaved with indignation and fury and impotence. Cardno, though, would not allow it. ‘Tell him, minister, tell him what you know: of the sabbaths, the girl Arbuthnott and the provost’s own nephew at the Elf Kirk, of their nakedness, their calling on the dead! Your own nephew, provost! Tell him.’

  The crowd had fallen silent now. No voice was raised, and all that could be heard was the relentless burn and crackle of the fire and the corpse at its heart, with the quiet sobbing of Edward Arbuthnott. Eyes moved from the minister to the provost. Walter Watt’s face was contorted in disgust. ‘So this is what you have peddled, this filth. You … you sorry excuse for a man. That I have put up with you for my wife’s sake all these years. You and your perversions. And you lead these poor idiots with you. All to garner yourself a name.’

  The minister was shaking his head. ‘No, it is true. It is all true. There are witches abroad in this town. We none of us know which of our neighbours has lain with the Devil, has ridden the besom at his side. This town will pay, we will all pay dear, for this turning from godliness. The storm was the first sign. Beggars and famine and pestilence will be our lot. And invaders,’ he said quietly, but with a sly glance at the provost. ‘The witches must burn!’

  I could see, through the thick smoke and above the heads of the townspeople, that the minister had little faith in the words that fell in desperation from his mouth. The provost had at last openly condemned and abandoned him, and there was no retreat so he had to go forward, although he had neither the wit nor the stomach for it. For James Cardno, though, it was enough. He took up the minister’s words and fed them to the crowd, his voice rising higher and higher until at last it was a screech. ‘They have danced with the Devil; they have ridden the besom. Find out the witches; the witches must burn.’

  The blood within me turned cold. There was one girl, one body, lashed to the stake and aflame, but Guild and Cardno spoke of witches. They concerned themselves now not with the dead, but with the living. For the witch whose lifeless body burned before them, there were others, living, breathing, in this town, standing beside them, perhaps. Fearful looks moved from neighbour to neighbour. Each man and woman avoided the eye of any other, for to be caught would be to make oneself vulnerable. Vulnerable to the cry of ‘witch!’ Better to cry out than to be the one so called. I kept my own eyes straight ahead of me and stood my ground. Cardno carried some more with him now – not all, but some. There were those who took up the chant once more, and it was more menacing in its deliberateness than all the chaotic screeching of before. I feared that the provost might yet lose this battle. The chant was rising and several in the crowd were becoming more nervous. I looked to Thomas Stewart, the notary, but he was watching Walter Watt. Watt himself, however, was not looking at the crowd any more. He had turned his back three–quarters on them and was staring up the road behind him, the steep slope of Strait Path. I followed the line of his gaze, as had Thomas Stewart, and saw, approaching rapidly on thunderous hooves, a party of unknown riders, at their head Baillie Buchan.

  As they approached, all but the baillie’s horse whinnying in panic at the flames, I began to discern that every one of the front riders was clothed from head to toe in deepest black. This meant only one thing to me, and as they drew closer and their faces were caught in the light of moon and fire, I saw that I was right. The brethren who had witnessed and countersigned my own fall were coming in force to attend the culmination of the witch-hunt of Banff, and there rallying them was Baillie William Buchan. They came charging, yelling, shouting, and I feared their horses’ hooves would not stop until they had trampled us all underfoot. It was a wonder the beasts’ necks did not break. And yet they did stop, and out of the snorting of exhausted beasts, their hearts near bursting, and the settling of hooves on the cobbles, grew an expectant silence. It can scarcely have been a matter of seconds, but to me it seemed several long minutes. I waited, as the baillie drew in breath, to hear our doom.

  ‘Provost, the moderator is here and most of the brethren, as at your command.’ And he slid from his horse, utterly spent.

  There was some confusion before I and others understood that the brethren had come not to stoke the flames but to put an end to them. In the momentary commotion the provost ordered that the baillie be carried to Jaffray’s, and then the Moderator of the Presbytery of Fordyce heaved himself up on the scaffold cart beside him. The moderator, a gentle and fair man as I had known him, opened his mouth to speak and his voice was a roar.

  ‘Douse these flames! Put out that fire, or you will all burn longer and blacker than any witch that ever rode the besom. In the name of the Kirk of Scotland, cut down that girl.’ There was a great deal of movement at all sides of the crowd and I saw now that bucket upon bucket of water had been gathered ready from the nearby wells, and that a chain of men was in place from the laird of Banff’s garden to as near to the market cross as they could get. The provost now ordered the way to be cleared and I, like the others in the circle, began to force pathways in the crowd for the water-bearers. As the first sloshes of water fizzled onto the pyre the moderator took up his roar again. ‘And you, Robert Guild, by whose authority do you sanction this heathen orgy? In whose name, on whose behalf do you act? Slavering wretch! Get down off that podium. You will never preach in this or any other parish of the presbytery again.’ Robert Guild opened his mouth to protest, but what he said I did not hear as he was dragged from his platform and onto the dirt below, without ceremony, by two of the provost’s men. Cardno too was taken and he was hauled to the tolbooth, still noising out his demented accusations.

  Others were brought under arms also to the town jail, ringleaders or those thought to still have trouble in mind. In time the tolbooth was full to overflowing, and the dungeon of the castle was also brought into play. There would be much work for the session, the burgh court and then the sheriff when he returned to town in five days’ time, or sooner, surely.

  I do not know how long it took to douse and dull the flames, or when they cut what was left of the broken body of Marion Arbuthnott down from its charred stake and
carried her, covered in the town’s mortcloth, to the vault of St Mary’s kirk. When I saw that the provost and Thomas Stewart, with the neighbouring ministers and the lawmakers of our town had matters under control and no longer needed my help, I stole away from the market cross. I did not go directly to the schoolhouse, but went down past the kirk and the music school towards Low Shore. It was dark now, a pitch darkness at first, after the astonishing brilliance of the bonfire, but I knew my way of old. I had to get myself clean. I walked away from the town and what lights there were and went down to the shore itself. I took off my hat, my boots and my cloak, and stepped into the glacial waters. Wave after gentle wave came to me and I continued to walk out, until the water was so deep I could walk no more. Numb to my bones with the cold, I turned and lay on my back, floating, looking up at the clear, full moon. The night sky was the same, the same as it had always been. It reigned impassive over the folly and the futility of man below. And over me. I floated as long as I could, wondering at the corruptibility of God’s earthly creation, but it was no use; I would never be clean. I swam back to the shore. As I wrapped my soaking self in my cloak, I caught the smell of smoke still in my hair.

  And the smell was still in my hair now, this morning, as I led the apothecary away from the scene of his daughter’s last degradation to the decency of the schoolhouse. There would be no school today; Gilbert Grant had taken the authority upon himself. ‘But what of the session, of the council?’ his wife had asked, for once fearful and caring of the general opinion.

  ‘Let them look to what business they have on hand and I will look to mine. There is a spiral of madness, of fear in the town, and it must be brought under control; it must be stopped. The town itself must stop a moment before we all rush headlong to the abyss, shoving our neighbours before us and dragging our friends behind us in some blind folly. I will not hold the school until some sense and godly order is re-established in this town, and no mother in her senses would send her child away from her own skirts until the evil is rooted out.’ But what was the evil and where did its roots lie? To root it out it must be known, and there was further to go before we knew it.

  Mistress Youngson was glad to see me back. I had disturbed the house in my drenched homecoming last night and slipped away without eating this morning. The darker events in the town became, the less wicked I became in her eyes, and she now showed herself solicitous of my welfare. Once she had set water on the fire to heat for the apothecary, and called for dry blankets to clothe him in, she set two steaming bowls of porridge before us and bid us eat. The apothecary took nothing, did not even seem to notice the spoon in his hand, but I was ravenous and had emptied my plate in little time at all.

  ‘Where did you find him?’ she asked quietly.

  I told her.

  ‘He had been there all night?’

  ‘I do not know. I think so. God help him.’

  ‘Amen to that. He has lost his only light in this world. She was all his pride and his treasure. It is a wonder if he does not lose his mind also.’ It was Gilbert Grant who spoke. He turned to call for the serving girl. ‘We must send for Jaffray.’

  ‘I have sent her for him already,’ said his wife.

  I had not sat like this, familiar, in the schoolhouse kitchen for a long time, but it did not seem strange to do so now. Neither Gilbert Grant nor his wife had asked anything of my business in Aberdeen; I had little interest myself in those matters for the moment. My baggage and packages from the journey lay in my chamber, brought there by Jaffray’s stable boy last night before I had returned from my night swimming. We sat in silence. Even Mistress Youngson, who was seldom at rest, was still and quiet. ‘How did it come to this?’ I asked at length.

  The schoolmaster heaved himself to his feet and took a spill from the fire to light his pipe – something the mistress would have forbidden on other days. ‘How long have you been gone, Alexander? Four days, five?’

  I calculated. ‘I left for Aberdeen on Thursday morning, early, and returned last night. Five days.’

  ‘And yet it might have been a lifetime. A great pestilence has crept through this town in these five days.’ He thought a while, wearily. ‘There was a fearfulness brewing before you left. From the time the death of Patrick Davidson was noised about. You must have marked it?’

  I had not. I had been too taken up in events to realise how their consequences were infiltrating the minds of my townsfolk and feeding their ready capacity for fear.

  The old man continued. ‘The authorities had Charles thrown in the tolbooth soon enough, but there are more than ourselves who believe him innocent. It is of little comfort to them that an innocent man lies in chains while a murderer walks the streets.’

  ‘And he is still there.’

  ‘Aye,’ said the mistress, ‘but better there than in the hands of that mob last night. Who knows where next they might have turned?’

  And if they had not been checked in their witch-hunt, who would have been safe in the cold clarity of daylight? The flames and the heat and the darkness might send madness to men’s minds, but the daylight made them think themselves sane, and I knew that the witch-hunt legitimated by the light of day was a terrible thing. I did not wish to pursue this thought. ‘When did they turn on Marion?’ I asked. I did not much lower my voice; next to us he might have been, but Edward Arbuthnott had no notion of who was in the room with him or of what we said.

  Gilbert Grant sighed. ‘The ground was prepared before ever the boy was dead. There were rumours, voices raised at the session, about Marion and Patrick and their wanderings over the country. Arbuthnott gave assurances they were on plant-gathering expeditions, for his simples and compounds, but others of meaner minds saw debauchery, and finally witchcraft at the bottom of it. They were seen in places where it is best for those under suspicion not to be seen – the Elf Kirk, by the minister himself, it was said. They were seen at Darkwater and even, it was said, at Ordiquhill.’

  The image of Marion Arbuthnott high above the rocks at the Elf Kirk on the day after Patrick Davidson had been found dead came back, like the ghost of the girl herself, to my mind. But for the rest, I thought of the maps. It made sense that they should have been there, at Darkwater, that hidden stretch of beach below the fastness of Findlater, or at Ordiquhill, on the road from there to Huntly’s stronghold in Strathbogie. But Gilbert Grant had not been privy to the full discussion of the maps we had found, and I did not wish to endanger him or his wife by telling him more of the matter. That was a consideration for another time: for the present, Gilbert Grant was disposed to talk on.

  ‘When the boy was killed, and Jaffray pronounced the cause to be poison, there were many who saw no need to look any further for the evildoer than the apothecary’s shop, for who knew better the properties of plants than Marion Arbuthnott?’ I had not been aware of this growth of suspicion in the town, so caught up had I been in events. Gilbert Grant continued, ‘And it was seen, too, that those in authority also had their fears of Marion: the baillie and the doctor were at odds over her person just as the provost and the minister were last night over her soul. It was easily seen that the baillie suspected her of a hand in the deed, for he was rarely away from Arbuthnott’s door. Jaffray matched him in his constancy – he was there almost as often as the baillie. The doctor is known for a softness towards young women, an indulgence of their faults. The more he was seen to be protecting Marion from the baillie, the darker became the people’s guesses at what she might know. And yet,’ his voice faltered, and for a moment I thought he had lost the thread of what he was saying; I was wrong, for he continued, clear and with an unwonted bitterness, ‘still she managed to slip away. It is said she wandered the country in a state of distraction. People were afraid. Soon, the great storm of the night of the murder was ascribed to the conjuring of Marion Arbuthnott to cover her foul deeds. Then there were claims that she had been seen again at the Elf Kirk, conjuring black currents under the sea. On Saturday night a fishing boat from Seatoun bound
for home before the Sabbath was lost on the rocks in calm seas. Only by God’s grace did the men on board make it in safety to the shore.’

  Mistress Youngson had got up to put more coals on the fire under the pot. She looked over at Edward Arbuthnott, almost fearfully, and spoke in a low voice. ‘It is said that Marion went over again to Darkwater.’

  ‘Hush, woman; I will not have that nonsense in this house.’

  I was truly astonished: I had never before heard Gilbert Grant chastise his wife, nor come anywhere near it.

  ‘It is what they say,’ she repeated determinedly.

  I looked from one to the other in puzzlement. ‘I do not understand,’ I said. ‘Why should it signify, that she has been to Darkwater?’ I saw nothing very odd in her seeking solace there. The long white beach below the rock of Findlater Castle was indeed a beautiful place, and the cliffs would be coloured round with wild yellow primrose and the first pink flushes of thrift just now. I remembered my mother and Jaffray’s wife taking me there once when I had been a boy.

  The old couple now looked at me with equal puzzlement. ‘Do you not know, Alexander? But surely you remember?’

  ‘No,’ said Mistress Youngson. ‘He would have been no more than a bairn, if he was yet born indeed. In fact,’ now she was thinking, hard, ‘he was not even born. It was before his father had ever returned and brought his mother with him from Ireland. As well for her that it was.’

  ‘Please,’ I said. ‘I have no notion of what you are talking about.’

  Mistress Youngson came over to me. ‘It is the wise woman of Darkwater. The one who tended to you when you, when you were …’