The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

by Shona MacLean

  Yes: he had been there. As I had taken the pulpit and looked down across my last congregation, I had seen, watching me with a peculiar intensity, Baillie William Buchan. Unaccountably, I felt my breathing come heavier and my hand tremble slightly as my eye scanned the first line and then the second. At first I could not quite comprehend what I read, could not take it in, and I had to go back over the words again until I was certain of what they said. There, in my hand, in the home of a man I had long avoided, maligned and misunderstood, I read a testament to hopes dashed and faith betrayed: William Buchan had given thanks to the Lord for the gifts He had given me, as a preacher and minister to his people, for preserving me where others had been lost, as a blessing to my community and a comfort to my friends. He had thanked God that the promise he had seen in the boy I had been had been fulfilled in the man I had become. My heart was racing and I read on, disbelieving until, out of nowhere, came a most awful hammering noise, fit to wake the dead. I scarcely had time to shut the book and throw it back in the pile at the top of the kist before the baillie came stumbling from his chamber, dishevelled from sleep. He wrenched his cloak from the back of the door and lurched towards the stairs. I hastily shut the lid of the kist and went to stand by Charles, who was also drowsily coming to; I was ready to defend him if I had to.

  There was some commotion downstairs as the arrival strove to make himself understood to the crone, and then to get past her to the baillie. I should have relaxed at the voice, but my heart beat faster, for it could not be good news that drove him to this place, now, and in such a manner. There was shouting, insistent shouting, and the baillie trying to assert calmness, authority. At last he made himself understood, and I heard the men ascend the stairs. Charles tried to stand up, but his time in the tolbooth had weakened him greatly and he was far from his usual strength. It was not the baillie who came first through the door but Dr James Jaffray.

  ‘Alexander,’ he said, not comprehending that I should be there, and then his face changed and his body visibly sank as he saw Charles behind me. He took a pace towards us. ‘Oh, my boy, my dear boy.’ The baillie helped him to a chair and Charles knelt down at his feet, taking his hands. William Buchan, unused as he must have been to such displays of human feeling, stepped back into his chamber and, without fully closing the door, began to tidy himself. I poured some water for the doctor from the pitcher on the table.

  ‘Drink this, James; it will settle you.’

  He rubbed his hand across his eyes and as the heaving of his chest subsided, he took the tumbler from me and drank. When his old friend had recovered himself, Charles allowed himself a smile.

  ‘Well, doctor, would it be an irate husband or a desperate creditor that chased you to the baillie’s in such a spin?’

  The doctor also smiled and put down the tumbler. ‘No, but only two daft lads that are not safe to vague the streets on their own.’ He shook his head in a mock weariness. ‘There is nothing for it but I must find you both a wife to keep an eye on you, for I have work aplenty to keep me busy as it is.’

  ‘Just the one wife between us?’ asked Charles.

  ‘Aye, perhaps,’ replied the doctor, ‘and lucky to get that.’

  A hacking cough broke into their pleasant banter. ‘Perhaps,’ said the baillie, ‘we should come to the matter in hand.’ Charles stood up and I stood aside to let the baillie pass. ‘The doctor has just told me now what I believe you already know, Mr Seaton. He has told me that by his findings, Marion Arbuthnott was no suicide but died by the same hand that killed Patrick Davidson.’

  I nodded. ‘Yes, the doctor told me that this morning.’

  ‘What you will not have realised,’ continued the baillie, ‘perhaps because you would entertain no idea of his guilt in the first place, is that this proves, in as far as the thing can be proved, the music master innocent of the first crime as well as of the second.’

  I looked from the baillie to Jaffray, the realisation only gradually dawning. Neither of us had thought of it, because neither of us had believed for a minute that Charles had murdered Patrick Davidson. It had been alone, in the peace and quiet of his little back room, looking out through the window at his wife’s garden, that the doctor had at last seen it. This was the proof that would, in the sight of others, free Charles from the tolbooth and from the hangman’s noose. Charles sat down again and held his head in his hands.

  The doctor spoke again. ‘God forbid that any of us should take pleasure in such a thing. The girl should have been living and breathing and working yet in the apothecary’s shop and the provost’s nursery, but she is gone, and not by her own hand. We are too late now to prevent that injustice, but not another. Surely now, Buchan, the boy can go free?’

  The baillie slowly nodded. His face was impassive and I could not guess what his thoughts were. ‘Yes, doctor, he can go free. Or, at least, I will consent to release him into your care. I have the authority, although I will doubtless have much answering for it to do before the council. But mark me well, see that he does not wander alone about the streets, or leave the town. He is less safe now than ever he was in the tolbooth. Heed my counsel, doctor.’

  The doctor stood up, fully recovered now. ‘I will,’ and without further address to the baillie he turned to Charles. ‘Come on, boy, we’re going home.’

  As we descended the dark stairway, the baillie, from his narrow doorway, spoke to me. ‘And you, Mr Seaton, you also should be careful what you are about.’ I made no reply and was glad soon to be out into the relative light of the vennel.

  The homecoming to the doctor’s was a markedly different affair from our departure from the baillie’s. After her initial shock, Ishbel flew about the house making everything ready. The stable boy had been despatched within minutes to collect what was needful from the apothecary’s house; the rest could be got later. There was no notion that Charles would ever return to his attic room there, nor indeed, from the manner of the doctor and his housemaid, that he should ever leave their home. The contentment on the doctor’s face and the mild bemusement on Charles’s were as nothing to the determination of the young girl that the music master should not suffer one more moment’s hunger, thirst, cold or discomfort. That I was an imposition under her feet was made very clear, to my amusement rather than hurt, and to Jaffray’s too. Promising that I would indeed return to take my dinner with them that night, I left them to their moment. I had other business to attend to.

  It was a steep climb to the codroche houses, along Low Street and up Back Path with its new-built dwellings – young craftsmen making their mark on the world for all to see, engraving their love on the lintels above the doors of their new households. My father had told me once, as we had passed such a doorway, that he had wanted to do the same when he had first brought my mother home from Ireland, to tell the world that she was his and he hers. But there was no engraving above our door, I said. ‘No boy, your mother thought it not seemly. She did not want to be as the other craftsmen’s wives.’ And that had perhaps been it, the beginning of the crumbling of his dream, when she had started, unwittingly perhaps, to punish him, little by little, for her mistake.

  I turned left where Back Path met High Street, where some of the grander ones planned their houses away from the bustle of the marketplace and town, and headed up towards the Sandyhill Gate. The wind was not in my face, as it could often be, and it was a pleasant walk. I had no need to rush – Charles was out of the tolbooth, away from the danger of the sheriff’s judgement now, and those I sought would not be abroad until it grew dark. I had the time to rest a moment where the road for Strathbogie skirted the foot of the Gallowhill, and to look upon the town of my birth. At the end of its journey from the mountains of the Cairngorm, past the teeming woods of the Deerpark, the clear waters of the Deveron came straight as an arrow, an arrow of fine silver, at the sea, where it broadened out to meet the world. Under a sky that was endless, the great promontories of Tarlair and Troup Head towered over all that might come from the east,
and looked to the north and west, where the long golden stretch of the links invited us to our leisure. And our town nestled there, snug back from the west bank of the river, stretching towards its new harbour works at Guthrie’s Haven. Narrow winding streets, tentacles reaching up towards the castle, Caldhame, the Boyndie road and the Sandyhills, met together at the heart of the town. The kirk and the marketplace, the tolbooth and the laird of Banff’s palace, its long green garden stretching almost to the Greenbanks where the scholars played on this, another unlooked-for holiday. The tall town houses of the merchants jostled with the tenements filled with the poorer folk, the lower craftsmen, the day labourers, the indwellers. A tight, sometimes meandering network of vennels and alleyways, houses, workshops and backyards locked the streets together, a maze that ran through gardens, round wells, into courtyards, pigsties, stables, kailyards, middens. Such was Banff, a place so blessed by God in harvest of land and sea, gone rotten at the heart. And at that heart, I was. A huge cloud began to pass over the sun and the air instantly cooled. I quickened my pace towards the Sandyhill Gate and the codroche houses.

  They were not houses really, but shambling, windowless shacks of wood, turf and thatch of the sort the council was striving to banish from the town for fear of fire. They were set back a good bit from the road, up the hillside where a small burn ran down by the rowans and bramble bushes. No one from the town ventured to the codroche houses. The kirk session and council fulminated often against them and their inhabitants, but they were never levelled, never cleared. Filled with beggars, thieves and whores, the detritus of poverty that gave a name to all the fears of the good townspeople. The provost had told me why he tolerated them: they were weeds – weeds that we knew and could control, weeds that would prevent other, invasive weeds coming in and taking root. Weeds that could be managed. Yes, but I also suspected that up here, out of sight, the codroche houses could be, in the minds of my fellow townsmen, a place in which all the evil that was in their town could repose, a reason for them not to look in their neighbour’s face, in their own heart, and see it there instead.

  As I approached the huddle of shacks a trio of mangy, hungry dogs came towards me, snarling quietly. A small, filthy child, a girl perhaps, in thin rags, ran into one of the houses from the hen house where she had been gathering eggs. A young man – it might have been her father – soon emerged, a large stick in his hand. I did not know him. He did not call off the dogs. ‘What do you want?’ he asked.

  ‘I am here to see Lang Geordie,’ I said.

  His suspicion was all the greater.

  ‘Lang Geordie sees no one. What is your business?’

  ‘None of yours.’

  I kept my face steady but my heart was pounding and the dogs knew it. They crept closer, and at any moment, at a word from the beggar man, they would be at my throat. More figures had emerged from the houses, two or three other young men, little more than boys, a gaggle of dirty children, a young woman holding a baby, another big with child. Perhaps a dozen pairs of eyes fixed me with cold hostility. The closest dog let out a long growl and was about to spring when a low snarl in some tongue, some vagabond’s cant I did not understand, came from the doorway of the main shack. The dog cowered back with a yelp, as if struck, and then slunk away with its companions. The gathering of people at the doorway parted and surveying me, as he supported himself on two crutches, was Lang Geordie.

  The man must have been nearly seven feet tall, a giant almost. He had the wild hair and beard of an Old Testament prophet. The brandings on his cheek, marking him out as a ‘sturdy beggar’, repulsed on pain of death from some other town, only served to inspire greater fear in those who came upon him. I stood there, my chest still heaving from the encounter with the dogs, and waited.

  ‘If it is not the Devil’s apprentice,’ he said at length, with a hoarse laugh. His followers also laughed, some of the hostility in their eyes being replaced by a ready mockery, but only some. The young men continued to watch me with a clear and studied intent. ‘What do you want of me? Are you here for the whores? The word on the roads is that you prefer a higher class of siren in your bed.’ Again a laugh, more real now, from the gathering.

  So I had made Katharine the talk of the beggars and the thieves on the roads and hovels of the north. It was little wonder her friend Isabella Irvine despised me. I made no response to the jibe. ‘It is yourself I am here to see.’

  All jocularity was gone now from Lang Geordie’s face. He was studying me carefully, weighing me up. I think he had some notion then of what my business was. He uttered something in the cant to his people and they dispersed slowly to the places from which they had come, all but two of the younger men who continued to stand near him, on either side of the only door of the hovel. Lang Geordie gave them some instruction, too and then looked at me again. ‘Then come in, Mr Seaton, come in.’ I went carefully past the dogs and in between the two guards, stooping low, although not as low as Lang Geordie. Once inside, my eyes could scarce make out a thing. The door had been shut behind me and the only light came from the round smokehole in the middle of the roof and from the open fire itself. As my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom I could discern figures, shapes, huddled in various parts of the one long room that constituted the whole dwelling. A young woman stirred a pot of something – some broth of seaweeds – over the fire; an older woman, coughing as she did so, sang in an alien tongue to a baby in dirty swaddling; two small children scrabbled after something in a corner – a mouse or a rat. On a trestle bed at the far end of the room lay another woman, also coughing. The floor was beaten dirt and I knew not what I would find when I set one foot in front of the other. The stench and squalor were beyond my experience: even the tolbooth jail could scarcely compare with this. Lang Geordie ordered the woman up from the bed – the dwelling’s only furnishing – and as he took his seat there himself I saw that she was not a woman, but little more than a girl – fourteen, perhaps. She was wearing a tattered dress that I knew I had seen before, too large by far around the bosom and the hips. A whore’s dress; Mary Dawson’s dress. The vagabond chief saw me looking at the girl. ‘You can have her for a price – after our business is done,’ he said, very steady, with no insinuation.

  ‘I do not go with children,’ I said.

  ‘She is a child no longer,’ said the woman at the pot, bitterly. Geordie spat some reproach at her and she said no more.

  The two sentries were inside the hovel now, still keeping guard of the door. I lowered my voice, for I had only business with Geordie himself, and it was business he might not like known amongst his followers. I kept my voice low. ‘I have money,’ I said, ‘not for whores but for information.’ He was sizing me up, waiting to see what the offer was, what the terms. He had played this game before and he would wait as long as he needed to. There was nothing for it but to come straight to the matter. ‘Who paid you last night?’ I asked.

  He continued to fix me with his prophet’s eyes. ‘Last night? Now, what might have happened last night?’

  ‘You roused the rabble, the witch-mongers. You led them to the doctor’s door, to lay hands on the body of that poor murdered girl.’

  He continued to watch me in the same manner, a little pleased with himself. ‘I? I did not rouse that rabble, Mr Seaton. Your godly minister and session clerk had that well in hand; they had no need of a poor beggar man.’ He held his hands out self-deprecatingly, and smiled, almost engagingly, as he said it. I would gladly have knocked the last teeth from his head.

  ‘You led them,’ I said. ‘It was you who crossed the door of an honest man’s house when it was barred to you, you who knocked the stable boy to the floor. You gave the beast its head. You with your crutches – all the way down into the town. A great exertion it must have been for you. Do you tell me it was not done for profit? For what else would you have done it? Since when have you concerned yourself with witches?’

  The amusement, the playfulness departed from his face. The prophet’s look was gone,
too. His eyes were of stone, his voice a low rumble. ‘Since I watched my mother burn.’ He was looking into the past somewhere. ‘A hen had stopped laying; a child had grown sick; the water in a burn had gone bad. My mother had called at the house before, twice, desperate for succour to feed her bairns: she was given none.’ He paused and there was near silence in the dwelling. Even the children in the corner seemed to have stopped their playing. ‘It was thirty years ago and I can still hear her screams.’ He pulled himself suddenly to his feet, towering and cold in his anger. ‘So that is my concern with witches, Mr Seaton. They had started to talk of witches in the town – the storm, the fishing boats wrecked, the poisoning. And who do you think they would have turned on first, the good burgesses of Banff? I went for them before they came for us!’ He was taken by a coughing fit and the woman at the hearth brought over to him a ladle of water. She calmed him and got him to sit down on the bed again. The look I caught from her as she returned to her pot was one of covert fear. His breathing subsided and he let go his crutch, which I had thought he was going to strike me with. ‘And that girl, she was dead. What did it matter? Are we not all dust? It could not hurt her, and it gave them a corpse to work out their passions on, instead of a living man or woman. Now, get out of my house, and never let me see you back here, unless it be to stay,’ he added with menace.