The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

by Shona MacLean

  ‘Alexander, you look as if you might faint. Eat, my boy, eat. My wife tells me you have had nothing since you returned home to us this day. She bids you eat.’ I accepted the plate and nodded my gratitude towards Mistress Youngson, who had taken over the duties of hostess from the grieving mother. A cup of warm, spiced wine was also handed to me, and as I ate and drank I began to recover myself somewhat. Gilbert Grant seemed content to eat in silence, looking up at me every now and then to make sure I did not flag. I was glad of it, for I was in no mood for conversation, even with this most gentle and genial of men. A reckoning was building in this place tonight that the music and the food and the drink and the dancing flames could not mask, and I was resolved to see it when it came. All around me I could sense a watching and a waiting.

  Charles and his boys, the older and better players, embarked upon a courante, and some of the wealthier merchants, along with the landed folk, took up their wives and daughters and set forth to dance, mindful of their status and their dignity. I looked over to the baillie, who kept his place near the music master and the dais. His face was set as a stone; for the baillie, one dance, be it ever so graceful, was as much fuel for the Devil’s fire as the wildest debauch. For myself, I had not seen dancing since that last Christmas at Delgatie, and I was drawn to watch as men and women moved with care in set steps towards each other, turned away, went back and took each other’s hands again to move on in stately, mannered procession. All was propriety, all was order. The faces were as masks, but the eyes, the eyes always gave something away.

  The dance came to an end, and before I had stepped back properly into the crowd, another had begun. Unwitting and unwilling, I found myself in a line of four men. Four women faced us, and before me was the pale and wasted form of Geleis Guild. I looked up to where the provost stood: he watched me, motionless. Was this a test? Was I to know that I was not to lay a hand upon this fragile, delicate ornament of his office and his place? I knew that well enough. The music began and I stepped forward and took the slender hand, for there was nothing to step back to. Geleis Guild looked straight ahead into nothing, as if she did not see me, and the dance progressed. No word, no acknowledgement of who I was, escaped her. I had not set eyes on her since that morning when we had brought the lifeless body of Patrick Davidson to her house. The double grief for her friend had almost washed all life from her. I wondered what decoction Jaffray had given her, for she looked as one who is already halfway to the next world. But then, as the dance neared its end, and we passed across one another for the last time, her mouth brushed my hair. The words took whatever strength was left to her. ‘Do not fail them,’ she breathed, and then her hand fell from mine and she had been folded back once again into the crowd. The provost no longer watched me – I could not see him – but the eyes of many others, of Dr Jaffray, of Thomas Stewart, of Baillie Buchan, all were on me now. I would have given much then to pass quietly as a stranger from the company. I stepped back towards the edges of the crowd and waited for it to envelop me.

  From somewhere in the darkening gathering, over the aroma of the roasting meat and the pungent spices, over too the thick, warm stench of human sweat and dirt, a new sensation reached my nostrils and my mind. It was not the smoke from the spit-fire, or the bonfire made to warm us, nor yet from the tobacco of Virginia Jaffray so often railed against yet so much enjoyed, but sweet-smelling, of some other leaf dried and burned for the alteration of mind and spirit. It was reaching that time in the evening when such drugs would be smoked and others taken, their seeds crushed into drinks. The baillie and others of his ilk agonised over the danger to our souls from a few harmless songs and dances. How the Devil must have laughed at their simplicity, as he reached into our very minds and visions, with his pagan gifts from the New World. I wanted my wits about me tonight, and moved swiftly away from the source of the strange perfume, wondering at the words of the provost’s wife. Do not fail them.

  Some of the younger music scholars had been sent home, their promised penny in their hand to give to their mother, and the music and the dancing was becoming less stately. The doctor stepped up with Ishbel as the players struck up a popular measure. The cittern now came into play for the first time in the evening, and the tabor beat in perfect time to the small pipe over which Charles’s fingers flew, his eyes smiling as Ishbel blushed to the doctor’s exaggerated manners. For all that had occurred these last few days, and for all the dreadful sorrow that had occasioned this celebration, ten years had fallen from the doctor this night. The call went up for a lustier tune. I had avoided lykewakes these many years past – students were banned from them in Aberdeen, but Archie had always made a hearty mourner. I knew that there came a point always when the authorities, in the shape of minister, session clerk, baillie or town serjeant, would call a halt to the festivities, in fear for the public morals and for order in the town. And this was the point at which they would have done so, at the point where the drinking surpassed the eating, when strange substances began to subvert the order of men’s minds, and when good humour threatened to spill over into debauchery.

  Tonight though, Banff was a town without minister or session clerk; the town serjeants and all their men needed every resource for the guarding of the prisoners dispersed over town. All the provost’s care and attention was taken up this night on preventing the unravelling of his young wife’s mind and the utter collapse of her spirit. There was only the baillie, but the baillie, like me, was waiting, watching for what was surely to come. After a hesitant glance at William Buchan, which drew no response, Charles took up his fiddle and let fly with the opening notes of the favourite, ‘Gallua Tom’. The piccolo took up the challenge, and the two, with the tabor beating out their time and the cittern struggling to keep pace, flew against one another in speed and dexterity as in battle joined. The courtyard became a mass of bodies, heaving, whirling, laughing, flinging one another across the floor. The flickering light of the torches played upon their writhing forms, catching the glistening beads of sweat that trickled down their foreheads and the glinting, shining, eager eyes, the lascivious, open mouths.

  And then, as the music reached its height and the dancers could scarcely keep pace with the playing, there came looming, crashing into my view the massive form of George Burnett, master stonemason, tormentor of Sarah Forbes and father of her child. Being flung on his arm, a look of terror on her face, was Ishbel. My stomach lurched. I stepped forward to grab the girl, but they had gone whirling past and I was knocked and cursed out of the way by oncoming dancers. Where was the doctor? I looked round but could not see him. I looked after George Burnett and Ishbel, but they had been carried on the tide of the dance and I had no hope of reaching them until they came back round to me. I caught a glimpse of the huge, gnarled fingers on the girl’s slender arm, and I thought of those same hands roughly forcing Sarah Forbes. And yet she had not been crushed, she had not been destroyed, and now she and her child would be safe in Aberdeen, away from him. But Ishbel, no, Ishbel had not that strength. She would be crushed by him like a flower beneath his feet, and it would kill the doctor. A crushed flower, a broken, fallen, flower. And then I saw it, as the music threatened to carry all with it in a whirlwind of madness and swirling bodies. As the strange-scented smoke again snaked towards me I saw the flowers falling to the floor, falling from an open hand, and I saw the face of the woman who had once held them. She called to me through the music, through silence, through time. Janet and Mary Dawson had heard it wrongly, for Patrick Davidson had not said ‘James and the flowers’ at all.

  I began to push and crash my way through the crowd. The music was now disjointed, discordant, and faltered to a stop as Charles Thom leapt from the stage bellowing at George Burnett to leave off his hold on the girl. On another night, at another time, I would have been there with him, but now I could but commit him and Ishbel to God and to each other. There was other work of the stonemason’s I must see to tonight. A group of tanners and dyers, laughing, drinking, blocked the
entrance to the vennel leading back out onto the street. Feeling sick, I tried to ask them to let me pass, but the words fell disordered from my mouth. ‘Falling down again, eh, Mr Seaton?’ Their laughter was less derision than amusement.

  ‘I need to get past,’ I said.

  ‘Not before you take a cup with us.’ A voice I did not know was joined by a hand I could not rightly see. A cup was pressed on me, its contents burning with heat and spices. I drank quickly, but a dancer hurled from the floor slammed into my back and most of the warm liquid was spilled down my front. More laughter, and the craftsmen parted to let me by. I stumbled through the vennel and out into the open street, the noises of the lykewake following me into the clear night. Men and women, shapes and shadows, emerged from corners, fell back against walls, slipped down dark pends and vennels, all having forgotten the business of the night, the burned and blackened corpse of a murdered girl.

  Curses and shouting and noises of commotion followed me into the street; I turned around in time to see George Burnett, oaths flowing from his mouth, be bodily ejected from the apothecary’s pend, Thomas Stewart behind him warning him not to come back. I slumped into a doorway to let the stonemason pass, swaying on unsteady feet, blood coursing from his nose. Charles had had the better of it and Ishbel would be all right, thank God. Burnett caught a glimpse of me just before he reached the door of the Market Inn. Uttering another curse he pushed through it, and the music from the lykewake streamed into the night as the door banged shut behind him. I had scarcely the strength to stand now, and would have been no match for him, drunk though he was.

  Over in the kirkyard all was dark and silent: no Dawson sisters now, or ever again, to call to me, or to give aid to a fallen stranger. Clouds passed from the face of the moon and the houses of the burgh stood like crooked sentinels in its light. The way was clear ahead of me and I did not have the option tonight of choosing any other. My throat was dry and beset by a raging thirst; only a supreme effort kept me from diverting my steps to the schoolhouse well, not so far away now. I forced one foot in front of the other, and somehow, nauseous, shivering, I began to drag myself along High Shore, and towards the Water Path. I glanced again at the kirkyard: bricks and mortar motionless for hundreds of years slowly began to shift and sway before my eyes. Headstones, large, small, flat, jagged to the ground, began to dance: I saw the headstones dance. Terror gripped me and I hastened my steps, but I too was swaying, hardly able to keep myself from falling over onto the swirling ground beneath my feet. The strains of music from the lykewake followed me but lost their tune, became discordant and then a cacophony of screeching the further up the path I progressed. They were joined, I knew it, by a wailing that was not of this life or this world. I dared not look back again at the kirkyard.

  The street narrowed as I ascended Water Path. The house frontages were narrower, the buildings closer together. Twisting alleyways ran off from the street into yards and backlands and emerged further on having met and crossed others. Any man – or woman – could shadow my path, to overtake me, without being seen by me from the street. Away from the heat and the clamour of the lykewake, the intoxication of its sounds and aromas, of the music and the smoke, my mind was alive to all the terrors of the night. My throat burned in desperation for a drink, but to stop now, to turn back, would be death. I knew that. I could only look ahead, but nothing was as it should have been; nothing was as I knew it to be. Where there were two steps I saw four, moving away and coming closer together. Where I knew there to be only one door, I saw two, banging in unison in a wind that did not blow. I wanted to shut my eyes, to shut out these visions, and look ahead at the one vision I knew to be true, the vision of Helen’s face. It stayed with me. I fixed the eye of my mind on hers and held her there as I forced myself on, as she led me on towards the end of her story. At last I reached my goal, just before the Water Path joined with the Castlegate, just before I came upon the high walls of the castle grounds. The breath and the eyes of the shadows were closer behind me now; I could feel their coldness on my skin. I turned, stumbling, into an opening in the half-crumbled wall to my left and found myself surrounded by the rubble and the foundations of the minister’s new manse.

  I had no lantern, torch or candle with me, and the great oaks and horse chestnut trees, just coming into bud as they were, let through only dappled partings of the moon’s light. It was much darker here than it had been out on the street. The sound of the wind in the trees echoed that of the sea returning to the shore; noises of my fellow man from the town below were but a distant memory and murmur. This was a desolate place, too full of ghosts. Their fingers were in my hair. Shaking them loose, I scrambled over stones and trenches to the area where, as Sarah Forbes had told me and as the notary’s discussion with George Burnett had confirmed, the old garden had not yet been cleared. Helen’s garden. There, in the far corner, beneath a wall, sheltered from the sea, the ground had scarce been disturbed; a chorus of deathly voices in my head whispered that this was the place. I stumbled over a branch and only just managed to right myself before my foot went into the trench. I cried out, but no sound came; my mouth, my tongue moved, but all in silence, powerless. No one would hear my cries: a just revenge for Patrick Davidson.

  I forced myself up once more and my eye caught sight of something glinting in the moonlight. I moved closer. I had not been deceived – it was glass, thick, old, weather-worn glass. I stooped down, thinking at first it must be a window pane the builders had mislaid. But it was not a window pane, set though it was in what had once been a solid wooden frame. Mastering my flailing hands, I slid the frame along on reluctant runners and there, beneath, the palest of blue in the pale moonlight, I saw the beauty of death, the slender, delicate blooms of the colchicum mortis. I stretched out my hand in wonder towards it. A branch cracked that was not beneath my foot; the rasping cough filled my ears. I spun round in time to see the sharp-boned features of Baillie William Buchan’s face bearing down on me, and the rock smashing towards my head.

  FIFTEEN

  Old Stories’ Endings

  The vast frame of Thomas Stewart barred the door. Iron bars filled a solitary window high above me. There was no furnishing to the room, other than the trestle bed on which I lay. The walls and floor, both stone, were bare of any covering. It was daylight, but I could not tell what time of day it was: late morning, perhaps. I could not hear the sea. I tried to lift my head, but the burning stone inside it brought it crashing down once more upon the mattress. Thomas Stewart immediately shouted through a grille in the door for a guard. A man appeared, a message was given and the grille was slammed shut once more. Slowly, the notary turned to me. He came closer, searching my face for further presence of life. I opened my mouth in an attempt to speak, but little more than a croak emerged. He dipped a cup into a basin of water by the side of the bed and trickled some onto my lips. I swallowed, but the intense pain in my head overwhelmed any relief I had hoped for. I tried again. ‘The baillie?’ I asked.

  ‘He is here.’

  ‘And the provost?’ I managed.

  The notary shook his head. ‘He has not been found. It was some time before the baillie was able to raise the alarm, and by the time messages were got to the town ports, Walter Watt was gone. He left by the Sandyhill Gate, riding hard. The men on the watch did not challenge him, for who would challenge the provost?’

  One had, one man. Much of last night remained in some foggy recess of my mind I could not yet reach, and yet one thing I did remember: William Buchan had saved my life. I could see him still, lunging at the provost’s arm as Walter Watt aimed the sharp garden rock at my head. I could see him still, being thrown back by the stronger man. And then I saw him rise again, somehow, as Walter Watt lifted his hand a second time. Here my mind clouded over, and I could see no more.

  ‘Is he badly hurt?’ I asked.

  ‘He is bruised about the face, and his hand is badly gashed – he will admit to nothing else – but he might have fared much worse against
such an opponent, were it not for the merciful Providence of the storm.’

  ‘The storm?’

  ‘Aye. The storm of the night Patrick Davidson died ripped branches from trees throughout the country. It was one such branch the baillie managed to lift and bring down upon the neck of the provost before he could strike you again. The provost somehow righted himself before the baillie could, and fled, but William Buchan would not go after him until he had seen that you lived, and stemmed your bleeding.’ He lowered his voice. ‘He could never have caught him anyway; he could scarce walk by the time he reached us to raise the alarm. But the garden, Alexander – how did you know?’

  I looked towards the water and he trickled some more into my mouth. Less pain this time, greater relief. I could answer truthfully, at last. ‘Patrick Davidson told me.’

  Before the notary could respond, the door behind him swung open slowly and there, between two guards, stood Baillie Buchan.

  How could I put into words all that I had to say to him? I had scarcely the strength to speak, no more had he to hear. His face was sallower still, and his bones stood out as from a cold skull. ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  He regarded me for a long hard minute and finally spoke. ‘Let the thanks be unto God. He has revealed the truth, and you have been His instrument. He has preserved you for His work, and it will be my great blessing to see it completed.’

  ‘When did you know?’ I asked.

  The baillie was taken by one of his coughing fits, and Thomas Stewart called for a chair to be brought.

  William Buchan waved the chair away and kept to his feet. ‘Eight years ago, I knew,’ he said. ‘And every day since, I have, on my knees, implored God that He would grant Helen justice in this world, as He himself will have judgement in the next.’