The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

by Shona MacLean

  These were not the women I remembered. ‘You are wrong,’ I said. ‘They were friends. They even brought me here one day, I am sure of it.’

  Something nearly approaching a smile crossed the old woman’s lips, and there were images in her eyes. ‘Aye, they did bring you. The coldness between them passed when you were born, for your mother took you to her heart with joy the moment she saw you. She recoiled from the knowledge of what she had almost done. She was filled with remorse. Elizabeth, the doctor’s wife, could not carry hatreds against other of God’s creatures, and so they were reconciled. They brought you here on your sixth birthday, that I might see what I was to be thanked for. That is how I knew you, when I found you last year, stumbling in your delirium on the road from Sandend. You are still all your mother’s son.’

  I almost laughed. ‘But that there were twenty years between those times.’

  She stirred her pot and looked up at me. ‘Had it been forty I would have known you. You have the same eyes, and the same soul. A man cannot change his soul.’

  ‘But he can lose it,’ I said.

  She narrowed her eyes quizzically. ‘Are you turned papist, then?’

  ‘No,’ I was emphatic, ‘never that.’

  She sniffed, tiring of this line of conversation. I myself did not wish to pursue it: she had been leading me further away from what I wanted to know. ‘What did you mean,’ I began cautiously, ‘when you said Marion Arbuthnott and Patrick Davidson sought the power over life and the knowledge of death?’ I was fearful now, sitting here in this cavern, surrounded by herbs and plants and animal skins. In my head, the cries of the witch-mongers began to sound.

  She asked me once more, ‘You are not on the baillie’s business?’

  I repeated that I was not.

  ‘Nor yet the minister’s?’

  ‘We have no minister now, in Banff.’

  ‘Indeed?’

  ‘Since …’ I hesitated, unwilling to speak in this place of witchcraft.

  ‘Since they burnt that poor girl for a witch,’ she said.

  I lowered my head. ‘Yes. Robert Guild will never preach in Banff again.’

  She spat again. ‘Well, since you are here for neither Kirk nor council, I will tell you. The girl was with child. The bairn was his – her father’s apprentice. They came to me at first to ask for some compound or practice that might help her carry the bairn a few weeks longer – beyond its term. They wished to marry, but they knew that before they had the banns up her belly would be swelling and their secret known. They did not wish that shame on the bairn’s name, or the humiliation for themselves of sitting before the kirk on the stool for all the hypocrites to rail at. Also, I think the girl did not wish to disappoint her father. She did not say so, but I have seen it many times, and the look was in her eyes that I have seen on many others.’

  The horror of it came cold on me. This was what Jaffray had known; this the secret of the dead that he had kept in the face of all my questioning. And he had had to watch, helpless, as the mob had taken her dead body from his house and added barbarity to barbarity. A mother had been murdered and within her her child, and it had been burned in her womb. I did not know how I would face the lykewake Arbuthnott intended for his daughter. The thing had been macabre enough without this.

  My voice was hoarse. ‘Were you able to help them?’ I asked.

  The crone shook her head. She indicated with a sweep of her hand the shelves of bottles and jars behind her. ‘My skill is in cutting short a woman’s time, or when it comes to it, assisting a living child into the arms of a living mother, when God so grants it. For the prolonging of a pregnancy I can do little, save to tell a woman to eat well and avoid toilsome labours. I explained this to them. She was much downcast, he agitated. I told them there had been many come to me in a worse case than they; that they should take their punishment and know that it would pass. I told them of those who have come to me in desperate straits – even of his own aunt, who had near lost her wits in fear and gone about like a thing haunted by the end of her life over the loss of all her children.’ She stirred her pot thoughtfully. ‘Aye, haunted she was indeed by them.’ She did not linger long in her reverie. ‘And so they left. And then the next thing I knew, the boy was dead by an unknown hand.’ She paused again for thought, before adding very matter-of-fact, ‘It may have been her father.’

  I made no response to this, for it was a distraction from the path my mind was now taking. ‘Marion Arbuthnott came to see you again, did she not?’

  ‘Aye,’ she responded warily, ‘she did.’

  ‘What did she come for the second time?’

  She looked at me carefully, assessing me. For a moment I feared she might lie, try to tell me that the girl had come for some charm or compound to rid her of her fatherless child. But something set in the crone’s face. A decision, a resolution. She would trust me. ‘She came to ask me about a flower.’

  ‘Colchicum mortis.’

  She nodded slowly. ‘Aye, that. She wanted to know if I knew of it. I have some little knowledge of it, of its nature and properties, but I have never seen nor used it, or known anyone who has. This I told her, and she was greatly disappointed. I told her to ask her father, but she said she could not risk that.’ She stopped. ‘Or did she say risk him? I cannot remember.’

  I knew why: Marion Arbuthnott knew that knowledge of this evil was almost as deadly as the poison of the plant itself. It was the knowledge that had made her fear for Charles Thom and a conviction that had been proven correct by her own death. I persisted, nonetheless. ‘Did she tell you why she wanted to know about this plant?’

  ‘It took much to draw it out from her, for she was a close, strange girl, and frightened. But she told me in the end. The lad, she said, had been quiet, preoccupied, all their journey back to Banff. He had scarcely spoken two words on the long road home. But, as they had crested the Gallowhill and begun their descent into the town, he had stopped dead, as if struck by a vision. And then he had said quietly those two words. Colchicum mortis. He had repeated them, and then had said no more but that he must leave her, for he had urgent business to attend to. She had seen him only once more, at her father’s table the next night. He had eaten nothing and appeared agitated still, excited almost, but it was a dark sort of excitement. She told me she had a presentiment of evil.’ The crone shrugged. ‘And maybe she had; she was a sensitive child, and knowing. Anyhow, the boy had told her he had some business on hand that night, and she was not to ask him of it, or seek to follow him. The next morning he was dead.’ The woman’s tale told, she lifted her pot and set it in a dark recess to cool.

  There was no more to be had from her, and I stood up and began to pull on my cloak. She looked up.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I am returning to Banff,’ I said. ‘I must before dark. There is much I must attend to.’

  She smiled. ‘You will not get back to Banff this night. The fog will not lift till the morning. You would be lost in five minutes and dead in ten.’ It was not an opinion, but a statement of fact. She lit a small lamp and set it by me. Then she went to a chest in some dark recess of the cavern and brought out a slim volume, old and well read. ‘This is my only book, save the Bible. You may entertain yourself with it if you wish. I do not seek company, and I have spoken more these last two weeks than I would wish to in half a year.’ She brought me also a bowl of mussels and a hunk of bread. It was the last exchange we had for many hours.

  I pulled the lamp closer to me and opened the book at the title page: The Poems of William Dunbar. Dunbar. An unexpected warmth spread through me, a memory of childhood evenings by the fire, listening to my father, the day’s toils over, telling stories of his youth, of his journeying with the laird of Delgatie. Those were the nights he would sing the old ballads or say the poems. Those had been the magical nights, when my mother too had been young again and had remembered why she had loved him. For me, it was not the great adventures overseas, nor the ballads of
romance, but those poems in our own Scots tongue, written by a court clerk dead a hundred years, that had allowed me to glimpse for a brief hour the humanity of my own father. I had not looked at or listened to one of Dunbar’s poems since the day they told me he was dead. I feared almost to open the book further, for what memory I would find there. I laid the volume down and settled back on the furs and skins beneath me, hoping for sleep. None came. The silence of the sea outside was more terrifying than all the fury of its rages. The crone was oblivious to it. Some powders she had been grinding she now put in a glass jar and was adding distilled water, drop by drop. She would sniff at it every so often, then mutter to herself before adding some other powder.

  I had learnt what I had come to learn from her, and had no wish to tarry longer in this place, but her advice was good: there could be no sense in attempting to reach Banff before morning. There was much I could have done in these futile hours, in any other place but this. I had no idea what hour of the day or night it was. I gave over trying to sleep and opened the volume once more, this time having the courage to turn the pages further.

  The crone had finished her work and had gone about some necessary business in a place she had shown to me deep into the back of the cave, and I was still reading, lost in another time, my father’s voice resonant in my ear. Even after she had put out the lamp and laid herself out to sleep on her trestle bed, the words echoed in my mind through the darkness from fifteen, twenty years ago. The ballads, the lusty drinking songs, the comic ditties on court life, all had come to life again in my head, and had brought warmth to me. But now, in the darkness of this cavern, with the haar seeping through the silent black, my father’s sonorous voice at last spoke the words that had ended all those evenings, and sent me to my sleep in fear: timor mortis conturbat me. The fear of death disquiets me. It was the only certainty I had now to hold on to: the certainty of death. And the knowledge of death was everywhere in this place where three times now I had been accorded life. I prayed for sleep, for peace, and, many hours into the night, it came.

  I was awakened by a blast of fresh air on my face. My eyes sought in vain the familiar objects of my own chamber in the schoolhouse until I remembered where I was. The crone had gone outside. I followed the passage of light to the cave entrance and pushed back the partition myself. Sunlight pierced my eyes. The haar had lifted. A clear, fine spring day spread out the beauty of the firth before me. With little conversation, the old woman busied herself about making some breakfast, and while I ate she worked once more at her potions. As I finished my porridge and rose to gather my few things she turned. ‘Wait. It is not quite ready.’ Without further explanation, she went back to her work, and spent some minutes checking on jars and bottles, finally selecting two small vessels into which she poured different liquids from the concoctions she had been making the previous night. She handed me the bottles. ‘This,’ she said, indicating the one containing a murky, yellowish treacle, ‘you are to give to Baillie Buchan. It is the remedy he seeks.’ I opened my mouth to say something but she silenced me. ‘You know all you need to. Give it to him.’ The other bottle contained a clear, almost blue tonic. ‘This you will take for yourself. One spoonful at night. You will sleep more easy, and the dreams will not bother you.’

  ‘Did I speak my dreams last night? Did I call out?’ Sometimes lately, I had woken in the night at the sound of my own cry.

  ‘I know your dreams of old,’ she said, ‘and have banished them before.’

  And it was because of some preparation such as this, I guessed, that I remembered nothing of my last stay here, less than one year ago. ‘I have no money,’ I said.

  ‘I look for none,’ she replied. ‘Take them, and do as I say. May God go with you.’ As I stepped out of the cavern she spoke to me for the last time. It was as if she had been considering whether to tell me or not. ‘The girl, Marion Arbuthnott, asked me if I knew what the flower looked like, this flower that you seek. As I told you, and her, I have never seen it, but I saw a picture of it once in an old herbal, under poisons. I was able to describe it to her, for she had a good knowledge of plants and their parts, and she pictured it well. She knew it from somewhere; she had seen it. When she left here, I have a mind she was going to seek it out.’

  ‘She found it,’ I said, ‘and it killed her.’

  The old woman nodded. ‘I feared it might, in some fashion. I believe that you too have in mind to find it. Take care that you do not follow her too soon down death’s dark passageway.’ She turned away from me and retreated into the shadows of her dwelling. I left the cavern gladly and set out for home.

  It seemed a shorter journey back to Banff than that I had made yesterday. Such was my purpose I scarcely noticed the miles disappear behind me. It was not yet noon when I headed the Gallow Hill and saw set out before me the old burgh. As I descended the road into town I could see before me those blue flowers, just as Marion Arbuthnott had done, falling, falling. I could almost touch them.

  FOURTEEN

  The Lykewake

  The door of my chamber had only just closed behind me when I heard the voice.

  ‘Hello, Alexander.’ I spun round and saw him sitting there, in the dim light in the corner of the room: Thomas Stewart. ‘You have been gone a long time.’

  ‘Not so long, really,’ I said, removing my hat but staying standing. ‘I had not expected a visitor.’

  Though he smiled, his face was troubled. ‘You will be weary after your journey, but I must speak with you now. It would have been better if I had spoken before.’ There had been a strange silent watchfulness in the town as I had made my way down through it; those whose eye I had caught had not held my look, but had quickly turned away. And now I felt unaccountably frightened to see the notary sitting there in my room. The fire had not been lit for two days and all was coldness and emptiness.

  ‘Ask me what you will, Thomas,’ I said.

  He shifted uneasily in his seat. ‘I am here on a matter of formality, Alexander, and I wish you to understand that it is the office and not the man who sits before you here. It is the only safeguard for friendships that I know.’ I understood, now. I understood who it was that the messenger had been despatched to by the watch on my return to the burgh by the Boyndie gate less than an hour ago, and I understood that this visit augured nothing good for me. He shifted again on the bench and at length got up and began to pace the room. ‘I have come to ask you questions, yes, but to caution you too.’

  ‘To caution me?’

  ‘Yes.’ He stopped pacing and stood halfway down the room, facing me. ‘It is rumoured throughout the town that you went yesterday to Findlater and to Darkwater, and that you passed the night in the dwelling of the wise woman, the crone there. Is there truth in this?”

  ‘From whose mouth have you had it?’

  ‘From one that is not to be doubted.’

  ‘Then you know that it is true,’ I said.

  ‘I had hoped it might not be,’ he said quietly. And then he turned on me with exasperation. ‘Why must you court controversy, Alexander? Have you any idea of the dangers you expose yourself to?’

  ‘What? By visiting an old midwife, and sheltering a night in her cave from the fog? Would it have been better for me to have hazarded my life in the haar on the cliff tops?’

  ‘It would have been better for you not to have gone at all,’ he said with some vehemence.

  ‘Thomas,’ I said, ‘she is not a witch, but an old woman who tired of this world and its fancies and furies.’

  ‘Do you think it matters, Alexander, whether she indulges in the black arts or does not? In the minds of some of the townsfolk she is already condemned as a servant of Lucifer, and you by your association with her. Be she utterly without blemish, once that idea is firmly fixed in the minds of the people there will be nothing to save her, or you. The witchhunt has broken out of the south-west and has spread to Fife. What happened here was not the end of it, only the start.’ He looked at me for a moment, makin
g a decision. ‘Though Jaffray would never say, there are those who believe you spent your,’ he searched for words, ‘your lost days, last year, in the care of the crone.’

  ‘Then they are right,’ I said, ‘though I remember nothing of it.’

  ‘And why should that be, Alexander, if not that she cast some charm upon you, to make you forget? How then can you know what you had done, or been, those lost days?’

  ‘I was a man, Thomas, just a man. Not bound then to God or the Devil, but to my own self, and it is that that she tried to help me forget. Her charm failed me, I think.’

  ‘Then I am sorry for it. But do nothing further to kindle their suspicions.’

  ‘Nor their fires?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ he replied grimly, ‘nor their fires.’ He was silent for a moment, but I knew he had more to say. He cleared his throat, still more uncomfortable than before. ‘I think, and I hope I may be wrong in this, and that you will forgive me for it, but I think you have it in mind to seek out for yourself the killer in our midst.’

  ‘You are not wrong.’

  ‘Can I ask your reasoning?’

  I thought of Patrick Davidson, not on that last night of his life, when he had made the desperate appeal to me that I had chosen not to hear, but in all the time before that, all the weeks he had been in Banff before his death. I had never sought out his company in all that time. I had avoided it, and would have done even had Jaffray not been away in the South. The truth, which I had determinedly turned my face from these last few days and weeks, was that the arrival of Patrick Davidson had discomfited me; for he had been what I should have aspired to be. Neither high nor base born, he had been educated and travelled far afield in pursuit of his education and his passions, proper passions. He had pursued a calling many thought beneath him for his love of it. He had been happy, kindly, well lettered and well loved. In another life, in another world, at another time, like Charles Thom, how gladly I would have called him friend. But that life and time and world had gone long before Patrick Davidson ever returned to the place of his childhood. And so I turned my face from him. To the end, I had turned from him. I was determined to be able to face him now, if not in this life, then in the next. How could I make Thomas Stewart understand this?