The Devil's Recruit (Alexander Seaton 4)

by S. G. MacLean

  I felt a dread creep through me, of hearing again a tale I had thought long buried. I did not want to hear it again here, in my own home, from the lips of my best friend. ‘It is a little late,’ I said, ‘to hear the drunken fables of Irish beggars.’

  ‘Oh, refugees they may have been, but these men were not beggars, and their tale no fable. They told me of an old woman, Maeve O’Neill, a matriarch of the Irish cause, and of her two grandsons, one an Irishman, another a Scot.’

  I looked at him, ready to plead, almost. ‘Archie, I do not want to think of these things. It was seven years ago, it was another world and another life that has no place here. My cousins are dead and my grandmother’s cause lost. Almost all I knew and cared for in Ulster is gone.’

  ‘Not all though.’

  ‘Do you tell me my grandmother has fled to Spain? I had thought it would take more than one king’s army to shift her from Ulster.’

  Archie smiled. ‘I heard she was a woman of some mettle, your mother’s mother. But no, the old woman, I hear, holds fast to her keep in Carrickfergus, and schemes her schemes. It was another woman I saw in Madrid. And this was no grandmother, but a rare and delicate beauty, like a pale flower of spring amid the gaudy colours of summer. She had with her a son, a boy of five then, who was treated with much honour on account of her dead husband, your cousin Sean.’

  ‘Macha? She has left Carrickfergus?’ Macha was no pale and delicate flower, but warm, brown and strong. Perhaps the years since I had seen her had wrought a change in her.

  But he shook his head. ‘This woman was not called Macha, but Roisin O’Neill. She claimed herself as Sean’s wife, but there were those that said she never had been. They never said it to her face, though, on account of her lineage. And her child.’ Roisin, the name of the woman from that other world who might almost have kept me there. I swallowed, but could not make myself speak. Archie glanced again at the sleeping children in the bed, Deirdre closest to the wall, her arms wrapped around her little brother. I loved Davy with all my heart and soul, but he had little of me in him: he was the very image of his mother. Archie looked back to me again and fixed me with his gaze.

  ‘Your son is very like you, Alexander, very like.’

  11

  Encounters

  Sleep, when it had come, was filled with images of children. A little girl, bleeding to death in the straw, a little boy, alone, wandering empty marble corridors, looking for his father. I tried desperately to force some noise from my throat that he might hear me. When at last I managed to cry out I woke both myself and Sarah. I sat up, breathing heavily, and she put a hand to my forehead. ‘Alexander, you are ill.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It was a dream, but a dream. A nightmare. I’m sorry to have woken you.’

  She didn’t appear to be listening to me. ‘Your nightshirt is drenched with cold sweat. I will fetch you another.’

  ‘Sarah, I am fine.’

  ‘You are not,’ she countered. ‘You are shaking and near enough grey. Put that on while I warm you something.’

  I struggled into the clean nightshirt and a few minutes later swallowed the decoction of chamomile she had warmed over the embers of the fire Archie and I had left. The drink warmed me a little but, as she drifted back to sleep, I could feel my whole body still trembling.

  When the drummer came through the town at six Sarah insisted that I could not go in to the college that day; I insisted that I would. I had little enough time left with my scholars before I would be called to my ministry. That was what I told her, but the truth was that I could not stay in this little house, looking up at the rafters of the roof, and listen to the life of my family go on downstairs as if I was the same man to them today that I had been yesterday.

  I thought the morning would never end. When the bell rang for the mid-day meal I knew I could not endure again the questions of concern for my well-being from the other regents and the principal himself, the exhortations that I should go home to my bed. The matter was taken from my hands by Peter Williamson, who had the third class.

  ‘Wander round an empty schoolroom speaking to yourself if that is your wish – but you will have no scholars this afternoon.’

  ‘Why not? I am perfectly able …’

  Peter silenced my protests. ‘Well, that is a matter of debate. However, even you are not able to teach students who are not there. The loch is frozen inches thick. I have secured the principal’s permission to take the boys curling. You are not permitted to join us. Dr Dun says if you are still within the college walls in a quarter hour he will come and administer physic to you himself.’

  The thought of the principal’s concern was too much. I took my cap from the door and pulled on my gloves. ‘You have convinced me, Peter – I’m going home.’

  But I did not go home; I could not. I needed some time alone with the thoughts that had been clamouring to be heard all day, and most of the previous night.

  The streets of the burgh were as full as ever – more so, for Lord Reay’s men had begun their search for Seoras MacKay. Not a house nor a backland, a woodshed nor a sty was to be missed. For all the civic pride on which the provost might stand, he was, in truth, powerless to stop them, but could only see to it that they were attended in their searches by at least one member of the council or a burgh officer.

  It astonished me that a man like Lord Reay, for all that he had grown up in a Highland glen, could think there was any hiding place in the town of Aberdeen. Whatever he suspected of its nooks and crannies, its outhouses and alleyways, I knew it for a warren in which a man might hardly know a moment’s solitude, still less lie undiscovered, captive or at his own will, for nigh on five days. There was to be no turning from the world in our godly commonwealth, no monastic indulgence, no veneration of the life of the hermit.

  Not for the first time in my adult life, I questioned whether those who had sought to pass their lives in such solitude could have been altogether wrong. And yet, I realised there was a place where a hermit might find a moment’s peace, even here. I had seen it marked out on a plan four days ago, in George Jamesone’s studio. A pavilion, he had called it, or summerhouse. Not yet built, but I knew there would be somewhere in that garden, if nowhere else, that I might have an hour alone.

  There were parties of Strathnaver’s men in every quarter of the town, but I could not see any yet on the Upperkirkgate or the Schoolhill as I made my way by the old Blackfriars’ into Jamesone’s garden. As I pushed back the rusted iron gate, I wondered what the good burgesses would make of the Doric gateways George planned to erect at the entrances to his Arcadia. There were those, I knew, who would not like his pretensions or the trumpeting of his wealth, but a man who had painted the king was unlikely to care.

  Somewhere, away towards the eastern wall of the garden, I could hear the sounds of chopping and hewing – the two Frenchmen busy still at their clearing work. I sought instead some hidden corner on the western side, and followed a rough path down a grassy slope to the seclusion of the pond.

  The water had frozen completely, and even the weeds beneath it were invisible to the eye under the inches of dull ice. The branches of the trees around me, denuded now of many of their leaves, were powdered white against the grey skein of a sky that promised an early snow. Autumn was barely a few weeks old but already the promise of a hard winter was settling on the town. Looking around me I saw now what I had missed in the night, a moss-covered seat set into the high stone wall. At intervals in the wall, George had already marked where niches were to be hewn out and statues set, but today there were no eyes of stone to watch me. I brushed away the accumulated muck of many autumns, as much as I could, and doubling my cloak carefully beneath me, sat down in that hidden place.

  I shivered, knowing I should be at home in my bed. It had all come to this. One man who had thought he could live the life of two and it never be known, had been shown that he could not. Not half a mile from here, on the Gallowgate, a large and respectable house, its rooms still emp
ty, awaited its new minister. In a cramped cottage even closer to where I sat, a woman who had done me no wrong prepared her family for shifting to that fine house. And here I sat, a fraudulent man who had no place in either house, and should have been somewhere else.

  A boy in Aberdeen who carried my name but not my blood, another, in Spain, who thought his father dead and did not know he was my son; two women who deserved better at my hands. And the God to whom I must pray had known this all along. I besought Him to give me the reason, to show me how I should begin to right these wrongs. My head was in my hands and I did not know I begged aloud until I heard a woman speak my name.

  ‘Mr Seaton.’

  I knew the voice but I could not look up. Perhaps if I did not look up she would retreat, back amongst the trees and bushes through which she must have come. But the voice came again, closer, and I jolted as a gloved hand touched my shoulder. The hand was retracted.

  ‘I am sorry.’ It was Isabella Irvine. She wore a long green velvet cloak, lined with fur, its hood up against the cold. Her feet had made little sound on the frosted grass, and she stood directly of front to me now, looking at me with an unwonted concern. ‘Is there anything I can do for you? Can I find you some help?’

  ‘You?’ I could scarcely believe what she was saying to me. ‘You of all people must know I am beyond it.’

  She took a step backwards. There was no hostility in her face, and I felt almost sorry for having spoken to her harshly. ‘I am sorry, Mr Seaton, I do not understand.’

  I ran my hand through my hair. ‘I think you understand me too well, as you made clear at our first meeting.’

  I saw that it gave her some discomfort to remember it, and I wondered what could have occurred in the last twentyfour hours that could have wrought such a change in her demeanour to me.

  She was thinking carefully over her words. ‘It was many years ago, and I did not know … you must believe me when I tell you I am sorry for it now.’

  I sat up now and looked at her properly, a little startled by this. ‘Now? Since when is the “now”? Since when are you sorry? Not before the day of the trials, when I can assure you you made plain to me that I was as constant in your affections as ever I had been.’

  ‘Mr Seaton, I …’

  I was in no mood to listen to her. ‘Whatever has brought on this change of heart in you, I can assure you it is an erroneous one. For you had me to rights, all those years ago, Mistress Irvine, and would do better to return to your former views.’ I stood up. ‘You may have the seat: I am taking my leave. No doubt the lieutenant will be here soon, and I fear we three would make mismatched companions.’

  My remark had hit home, for I saw a brief panic flit across her eyes. ‘I am not meeting the lieutenant.’

  I had already begun to walk away. ‘I have no interest in your trysting, but I would urge you to be careful how you deal with your good name.’

  In my hurry to get away from her, I found within a few minutes that I had taken the wrong path, and was walking through ever boggier ground and denser thicket until I was thoroughly lost. At every turn I was faced with overgrown hawthorn or rose run wild. There was nothing to do but retrace my steps until I found the place where I had made the wrong turn. After much frustration, I came, at last, to a small clearing where two paths crossed. By one I could see my way to the centre of the garden, where Jamesone planned to erect his pavilion high up at the end of an avenue of fruit trees leading to the amphitheatre; by the other, narrower, more overhung with the branches of old and stubborn shrubs, I could see back to the pond. The sky had darkened still further, ponderous with snow, and the place looked bleaker than even I had rendered it. Isabella Irvine was still on the bench where I had left her, but she was no longer alone. A man sat by her, his back turned partly towards me and his head close to hers. They were deep in conversation, and kept their voices low. I could not have told what they said anyway, for the handsome, well-built man who had his hands over hers was not Lieutenant Ormiston, but Guillaume Charpentier, and they spoke in French.

  As quietly as I could, I left them to their conference. I wandered further into the garden. The amphitheatre, overhung at each edge of the semi-circle by two huge horse-chestnuts, seemed still emptier and more silent than it had done the last time I had been here. A dead place. It did not seem possible that people had gathered here once to laugh and wonder and be entertained, or that they ever would again.

  I could hear no sounds of activity now from the thickets to my left where Jamesone’s maze was planned and I had no wish to come upon St Clair. The man’s face seemed locked in a sneer, as if he hated every soul he had ever met, and he discomfited me. I was unsure which way to turn. It seemed that even here there was no peace or solitude in which to seek to comprehend what Archie had told me last night: I had another son and he was a refugee with his mother in Spain, dependent on the charity of strangers. My hands and feet were cold almost beyond endurance: the answer to these new troubles would not be found here, or in a day, or indeed on my own. I would seek counsel from God, but I knew I also had to talk of it again with Archie. For now, my body was weary, and I turned for home.

  I went up the pathway of the planned orchard, and came out eventually at the clearing George had marked out for his pavilion, his summerhouse. My quickest route out of the garden would be through a narrow gate in the eastern wall that gave onto a vennel that came out on the Schoolhill. I quickened my pace in that direction, but was brought up short by the sight of the old, recently restored workshop ahead of me. Through the yellow light of its one window, I could see my artist friend there, poring over a large book and talking animatedly to Christiane Rolland. Standing a little apart from them, looking intently where Jamesone pointed on the page, was Jean St Clair. Just at the wrong moment George lifted his head to point to an area of the garden and I was seen. There would be no hurrying on; George gestured largely with his arm, and there was nothing for it but to go into the little stone hut and join them.

  A small hearth at one end and the stout, lime-washed walls made the place a haven of warmth in the bleak wilderness surrounding it. It smelled of old iron, musty sacking and fresh earth. Wooden planking that looked to be of recent construction provided deep shelving up one of the walls, the shelves ranged with wooden boxes, many labelled. Heaps of bulbs of differing size and shape had been sorted into separate sections, and a series of smaller, labelled drawers suggested that what gleaning of seeds could take place at this late time of year had already been done.

  ‘Alexander! You are here more often than I am myself! You are half-frozen, man. Come in to the warmth and tell me what it is that you seek so earnestly in my garden.’

  I nodded to Christiane, who looked no better today than she had done the previous afternoon in Baillie Lumsden’s house, and ignored St Clair, which was as he seemed to prefer.

  ‘Only a place for reflection, George,’ I said, my breath rising in the air in front of me.

  ‘And in a few months, my friend, you will have it. Look here.’

  He beckoned me over to where Christiane Rolland, her fingers red with the cold, was bent over a sheet of foolscap, onto which she was copying notes by the light of a small lamp by her elbow. ‘Christiane has been labelling the areas for planting, according to Guillaume and Jean’s ideas, naming the flowers as you and I would understand them.’

  I leaned over, the closer to see the plan. The notes from which she copied and translated were in a different hand which I knew not to be her own. They were in a very precise italic, the Latin perfect, some of the names of the plants familiar to me from notes belonging to William Cargill’s botanist uncle that I had examined years ago. I glanced at St Clair, who was now carefully cleaning some tools at the far end of the workbench, and back to the notes.

  ‘These are the work of the gardeners?’

  ‘Of Guillaume, not Jean – I do not think the fellow can read or write, but he knows his business all the same.’

  ‘Guillaume Charpentie
r has been very well schooled though, it would seem.’

  ‘Yes,’ said George, ‘and it makes our job much the easier, does it not, Christiane?’

  ‘I do not see how we could accomplish it without him,’ she said quietly, without raising her head.

  I looked to George, who pulled a face that told me he had not the slightest idea as to what troubled Christiane. Clearly she had not confided her discomfort regarding Seoras MacKay to him.

  I sought to cheer her a little, but wished a few moments later that I hadn’t. I pointed to an area of the planting scheme she had already filled in. ‘That will be a very pleasant meadow, come summertime.’

  He nodded. ‘It is somewhere where the children might play, and run and laugh and be happy. “Let all things smile and seem to welcome the arrival of your guests.” An injunction from Alberti,’ he said, pointing to the tome at his elbow. ‘I am going to paint it over the loggia to my pavilion. I hope we shall have many summers there, we friends, and watch our children grow.’

  His words pained me, and he could not know why. ‘It is difficult to believe that the place I have just walked through, so desolate as it is now, so absent of life, could ever become a place so vibrant.’

  He put an arm on my shoulder. ‘You spend too long in your classroom with your musty books. The world will be a different place when you learn to distinguish what is merely dormant from what is dead.’

  Christiane’s hand stopped moving over the paper and I regretted that I had ever come in here, for my visit had done neither her nor me any good. St Clair had gone out to lock his tools away in the small storehouse next to the workshop and I was about to take my leave when a servant from Jamesone’s house came running through the door. ‘The Highlanders are in the house,’ the man said, when he could catch his breath, ‘and when they have finished searching they are to make for here. The constable said to fetch you.’