The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

by Shona MacLean

  ‘Let him be resolved to Hell, for all I care. I have wages to pay.’

  ‘Then have your men do their work on time,’ answered the notary, ‘but there is to be no more work on this land until the minister’s fate is declared by the presbytery, and a new minister found.’

  ‘Aye, and it may be long enough before another blathering half-wit is forced to bleat from our pulpit.’ Having no further response, George Burnett, master mason and father of Sarah Forbes’s bastard child, swung his great bulk away from the notary and strode past me down the Water Path. The acrid brute smell of him caught in my throat as he passed, and made me want to vomit. He did not notice me, and I hoped never to see him again. By the time I had recovered myself, Thomas Stewart had gone, the great front door of the provost’s house shutting firmly on his shadow in the early-morning glow.

  No one seemed to notice me as I made my way across the Castlegate and up Boyndie Street. The watch on the burgh gate only questioned me briefly as I sought to leave the town, and within a quarter-hour of leaving the confines of the schoolhouse, I found myself again, gladly, on the open road.

  I had determined that the two or three hours my walk might take me would be spent in the ordering of my mind. I would apply the Ramist principles of one of my early regents at college, distilling the essential questions, dealing with them in their parts and setting the individual conclusions into clear and consequential schemata in my mind. But my thoughts would not permit themselves to be marshalled in such a way. Where I had hoped for clarity, confusion reigned. Faces, words, phrases, came wandering, sometimes staggering, to the forefront of my mind, dragging with them suspicions of spying, witchcraft, poisoning, papists, love, fear, jealousy, hate. Strange couriers in the night, calling Jaffray out of town, riding from Straloch, on the heels of Mary Dawson, fled now across the sea because she knew – what? Frantic searches for a dead man while he still lived, because of what secret knowledge? Flowers not known but known, by myself, by the doctor, by the apothecary, in a notebook, of the dead, but in another place too, and by another. ‘James and the flowers’. James Cardno? James Jaffray? James Cargill? Who?

  As the miles went on, my thoughts meandered so far from where they had started, I scarcely knew what the questions were. How would Sarah Forbes and her child fare in Aberdeen? What had I brought into the lives of William Cargill and his wife and their unborn child? Would the children be natural companions, or would they grow up to dislike and envy one another? Does a man choose his friends, or are they chosen by God? What would my life have been without Archibald Hay? What would he who had such a big life, who had known the world and died in it, think of me now, and the smallness of my life that had taken me nowhere? Where was his sister now? Had she told all to Straloch’s niece, who hated me so? Was Straloch to be trusted? Had Patrick Davidson truly been a spy? And so, without resolution or clarity, insight or enlightenment, I went on. By the time I came to the fork in the road where my choice was to make for Fordyce by one route or Sandend by the other, I could almost have believed that the brethren were still there, gathered at Fordyce, waiting for me to come and present myself before them, to meet my last trial, once again, for the ministry.

  The damp air around me took on a chill as I left the Cullen road and turned off to my right, towards the sea once more, and the cliffs from which Findlater glowered over to the mountains of the north. By the time I crested the hill at Brankanenthum and began the descent towards Findlater on its neck of rock, the haar had begun to creep in from the sea. It crawled ashore and up the rock, enfolding all it passed in a blanket of impenetrable grey fog. Halfway up the cliff-side, forty or fifty feet or more, the castle grew straight up, a stately palace from the rock. Gradually, the haar took it too, till all that remained was a ghostly shadow of what once my eyes had seen. I grew uneasy. It might be hours, or days even, until this fog lifted, and I must not stay long from Banff. For all that I misliked and feared the superstition and the excess of the lykewake, I was determined that Charles should not be exposed to the risks there alone. I must win back to Banff before tomorrow night, come what may.

  As Findlater evanesced before my eyes, I wondered what an invading army, were it to land today, would make of its first footfall on Scotland, a grey pall of wretchedness laid over this land for which they risked their lives. And what defence should they find here, should they arrive today, to claim Scotland for their popish realm? A failed minister on his way to consult a witch. I uttered a prayer that should the day come when the Spaniard set the prow of his boat on Darkwater beach, God would send down all the haar of the oceans in his path.

  I had no memory of my last visit here, save for when Jaffray had come to take me home. I had been here only once before that, many, many years ago. It had been a holiday, when my mother and Jaffray’s wife, one startling summer’s day, had taken me with them early in the morning from my bed, and brought me to this wonderful, secret place, to play and swim for hours. I had little memory of them or how they had passed the time that day, so taken up had I been with my own childish pleasures. What was certain was that the paths I had run down, the dunes I had tumbled on at the age of six or seven on a warm summer’s day, were blasted and wind-blown and so altered in this mist I was in hazard of broken limbs with almost every step. More, if I fell here, from this precipice ninety feet above the strand, I might never be found, or if found, I might never survive to tell the tale. Jaffray’s pleas of the morning and of last night came to me through the mist, but it was too late now to heed them.

  A few stumbling steps forward and I came to a halt. I could not see my foot in front of me; every step might bring me closer to death on the rocks. The heavy mist obscured the sounds of the sea, the birds of the air, everything but the noise of my heart thumping in my breast. All around me was an eerie, grey silence. Yet through it, through the impenetrable haar, I knew I was being watched. Further movement was not possible: I froze where I was, and it came. An arm caught me, a wizened, bony hand, coming, it seemed, from the ground and clamping itself around my wrist. ‘Do not move, Alexander Seaton. If you value your life, do not move a muscle.’

  I waited, scared almost to breathe. It was a voice I knew, but from where I could not tell. Another hand appeared from below, bearing an amber torch, glowing through the mist, and then hair, grizzled, grey, unkempt. Slowly the head rose towards me and I saw myself looking into the yellowed eyes of the wise woman of Darkwater. She might have been any age from forty to seventy. Her teeth were nearly all gone, and there was no humour and, I thought, little humanity in her face. Her eyes searched mine for a moment, and she seemed satisfied. ‘Step backwards three paces, and then turn to your left.’

  I did as she said, for want of an option. Once I had done so, she moved past me with scarcely a disturbance of the air. I saw her a little better now. Even without her stoop, she would have been little over five feet tall. Now I saw behind her, by the light of her torch, a steep drop through a crevice in the rock; I had been a few inches from falling to my death. As I struggled to master my tongue, she appraised me more fully. I felt I did not meet entirely with her approval. ‘Like your mother still. I wondered when you would come.’ She turned to her left. ‘Follow in my footsteps – precisely, mind – and do not deviate. This is a bad path you have taken.’ It took twenty minutes, twenty silent minutes apart from the occasional ‘mind your foot there; keep to the right; no, not that stone,’ from the crone before we had made our way safely onto the sand. Once there, she did not stop, nor turn to address or question me; she simply walked on, and I knew that I was to follow. I could hear the sea now, lapping gently onto the shore, but I could not tell how far from me it was.

  We walked the length of the beach and at the end of it she started to climb again, up the dunes and towards the far headland. Then it seemed to me that she had disappeared; I followed in the direction she had gone, for a moment seeing nothing but a vague impression of the hillside. Then – though I do not know whether it was a glimpse of flame o
r the smell of smoking wood that drew me – I at last discerned just ahead of me the opening to a cave in the side of the headland.

  ‘Well, come in then, and pull over that board behind you, or we will both die of the damp and the cold.’

  To my left there was a double lattice screen covered in stretched hide, higher than myself and broader than the cave opening, which was wide enough to let two men pass. I pulled it along on wooden runners and lashed it by leather thongs to bolts of iron hammered into the wall. To my surprise, the cavern was warm and dry. The crone had thrown driftwood onto the fire and it blazed well. The floor was covered in rush matting and knotted rugs, which looked to be made of rags, oddments, knotted and woven together. A table, a chair, a bed and shelving had all been fashioned from what the sea had brought to the shore of Darkwater. Wrecks and rubbish from boats on the firth and further afield had served the woman well. A pulley hung overhead, suspended from huge hooks of iron chiselled into the rock, and from it hung a myriad of drying plants, only some of whose names I knew. She followed the line of my vision and lowered the pulley, taking down some specimens and setting them on the workbench behind her. She spoke almost absent-mindedly to me.

  ‘Lesser celandine. For the piles,’ she said with a grim smile. ‘Sweet violet – but you, I think, have no trouble with your breathing. Common chickweed – for the skin. You are pasty of face, but healthy enough. Coltsfoot – you will be needing that should you return to Banff in this – you will be in bed with the fever for a week. But this, perhaps, this is what you need.’ She held out the long stems of a plant crowned by clustered heads of small, pale pink flowers. ‘Valerian. It will relieve the insomnia, allow sleep, help with the tensions in your head.’ I knew the plant well. My mother had often taken it in simples and decoctions that I had fetched her from Arbuthnott. I did not want to remember these things.

  ‘I am not here for your medicines or healing,’ I said. ‘There is something I need you to tell me.’

  She put down the flowers and looked at me cautiously. ‘Three times in as many weeks I have had a visitor from Banff who has spoken these words to me. The first is dead, the second also. I have saved your life three times now; I would not have you the third.’

  Three times? I thought the old woman wandered in her mind. ‘I would be fodder for the gulls by now had you not steadied me out on the cliffs.’

  She looked at me with what might almost have been contempt. ‘Hmph. You would be fodder for nothing. You would not be here at all, nor anywhere else in your life gone by. Time enough for that. But tell me why you have come, what it is you think I can tell you.’ I was not certain that she was speaking of last summer, but she was evidently in no humour to go into our past relationship in greater detail and I had other business in mind, so I left it. She indicated a place behind me, and I sat down on a mattress of sorts, covered by a fleece. A sheep wandering away from the flock, tumbling over the edge of the cliff as I had almost done, would have been a fine treasure trove to the old woman. I scanned what I could of the cavern, but nothing in it was familiar to me. The fruits of land and sea had not been wasted here. I wondered at the struggle some men have to gain riches in a world where God so easily will gift them. By the time I had settled myself, she had taken off the long cloak of sealskin that had protected her from the elements. Shapeless layers of unbleached wool and a tunic of rabbit skins protected her against such elements of cold as found their way into her home. She gathered a mortar and pestle from a niche in the cavern wall and continued with her work, never looking at me. ‘Go on then,’ she said. ‘Tell me your business.’

  ‘These visitors you had. Were they Patrick Davidson and Marion Arbuthnott?’

  She paused in her work, her back still to me. All movement was stopped. ‘Are you here on the baillie’s business?’ she asked.

  ‘I am here on my own,’ I said. ‘Will you answer my question, for all that?’

  She considered. ‘Have you no fear of death too, then?’

  It was a question I fought with now almost every night, a question that had stolen from me many hours of sleep. ‘I have fear of the judgement that is to come and of those last waking moments when I cannot deny a wasted life. But they will come at their time, and it is not in my power to say whether that time is today or sixty years from now.’

  She recommenced her grinding. ‘That is perhaps for the best. Those who seek to have power over the time of their death waste the days of their living in worrying about it.’

  ‘And were Patrick Davidson and Marion Arbuthnott amongst them?’

  She ladled water from a barrel into a small pot hanging over the fire. She was very precise as to the number of ladles full, and did not answer me until she had finished. ‘They wished for the power over life, and the knowledge of death.’

  ‘I do not understand you.’

  She sighed and at last sat down opposite me, on the other side of the fire, the simmering pot between us. She looked directly into my eyes, did not blink.

  ‘Alexander Seaton. I knew you before you were born, before you were of this world. I knew you before your father knew you. Your mother came to me as many others have done – it was the doctor’s wife that took her.’

  ‘Jaffray’s?’ I interrupted.

  ‘Aye, Jaffray’s. She had been here to me before, Jaffray’s wife. In a desperation that I could save her bairns, give her some compound, some infusion, some charm even, that they should live. But it was beyond my power or knowledge, as it was of her husband’s, to effect such a thing. We fed her carrots to promote conception, had her drink decoctions of salted sage juice to stave off the miscarriage, and gave her savin. She took the wild, stinking arrach to cure her womb. She even slept with an empty cradle at her bedside, although her husband did not like this – he feared it was charming. And still they died, every one, scarce afore they had drawn breath. And then she took your mother here.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Was she too in fear of losing a child?’

  She spat to the side and looked at me again. ‘No, she was in fear of having one. You.’

  All sound stopped in my ears, and in the middle of its roar, I knew what was coming next. I had no wish to hear it from this hag. I uttered the words myself. ‘She wanted something from you to help her cast me from her womb.’

  She nodded slowly, evidently taking little pleasure in the conversation.

  ‘But what you gave her failed, just as what you gave the doctor’s wife to save her bairns failed.’

  ‘No,’ she replied, emotionless, ‘it did not, for I gave her nothing. Do not misunderstand me, Mr Seaton. There are many ways to help a woman rid herself of a child – it is not difficult. Many women have come to me in distress with the same request and I have helped them, but not all, and your mother was one whom I refused.’

  The crone pulled back the lattice screen a moment, and the fog seeped into her dwelling. Nothing of the outer world could be seen. Inside the cavern, all save the fire and the pot now boiling above it was silent and still. I had returned to the place where the fact of my life had been decided. Jaffray had known what I would learn here, and that was why he had tried to stop me.

  ‘Why did you refuse her?’

  She stopped watching me and returned to her pot. ‘Because I knew she would regret it. She did not truly want it. She wanted her life to be other than what it was and it could not be if she was tied to you. It was your father, or his world, she did not want. She wanted back to her own place, and her own like, but she could not go with you, so she sought to lose you, to dissolve the thing that would bind her here. I did not let her. There are choices that a woman must live with, and your mother had to live with hers. To the end of her days. It was not spite on my part, mind, but I knew she did not really want it. She could have effected the thing herself, if she had truly had her heart in it. There were many things she could have done, many things she could have taken. She could have taken dog’s mercury, or the wild carrot. She could have drunk a strong tincture
of tansy, or wallflowers, or juniper berries. She could have used nutmeg; it is known.’

  ‘My mother would not have known of such things,’ I said.

  She smiled a bitter smile. ‘You think not? I think she had such knowledge: she knew of the darkness. The doctor’s wife could not see it though; she had thought your mother wished to be taken here for help with conceiving a child, not losing one. The deceit was great – a great and cruel betrayal. I have not known many women who could have trampled in that way over the heartbreak of a friend. But God has his reasons, although I cannot fathom Him.’

  ‘His reasons?’ My senses had been obliterated by the shock that my mother had not wanted me to draw breath, and I was not really following the crone now.

  ‘Aye. His reasons. For blessing the one and torturing the other.’ She looked up at me with keen eyes. ‘For it is a torture, you know, to have the love within you for a child that will not be conceived, or if so, not born living. I have known many women who are mothers in their hearts, in their souls, but who never yet conceived or bore the child they carried within them. I have known women go through life with a broken heart for the loss of a tiny scrap of humanity that was all the world to them. They say Jaffray’s wife, and the provost’s wife too, Helen, the first one, died young because they were worn out with the constant burden of the children they carried and lost. They didn’t: they died of despair.’ She breathed a deep sigh. ‘There is a despair that leads to distraction. The last time I saw Helen Black she was fearful, on the edge of losing her mind through grief, in such desperation for a living child as if she could go on no more without it. And yet there have been many more, like your mother, who came to me that I might cast off the bairn within them. But one woman at the edge of her wits does not see what another suffers.’ She looked into memories in the flames. ‘It was a warm autumn day they came, I remember. But their journey homeward must have been cold as December, your mother full of her resentments and regrets, and the doctor’s wife abandoned to her devastation.’