The Devil's Recruit (Alexander Seaton 4)

by S. G. MacLean

‘You did right, Patrick. Alexander, will you see Christiane here safe home?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said.

  The girl had already covered her inkpot and begun to set aside her work. ‘But what of Guillaume? If they come upon him in the garden … should I not go and find him? If the Highlanders come upon him, they will neither understand the other.’

  ‘Guillaume is a hearty chap,’ George reassured her, ‘and could break a Highlander in half as easily as he breaks a rowan branch. Besides, it will not come to that. The fellow has a smile that speaks for him in many languages, as I am inclined to suspect you have noticed …’

  Christiane flushed under his kindly gaze. My heart sank for her a little at the thought of where he was now, and with whom, for it had become plain to me yesterday that she considered Isabella her friend. I would not have had her find them together.

  ‘Perhaps we could send St Clair to let him know.’

  George was also better pleased with this plan. ‘Will you tell him, Christiane, that some soldiers are coming to search the garden for the missing students, and it would be better if he and Guillaume were in here? Do not worry, I will explain to Lord Reay’s men who they are – no harm will come to them.’

  I suspected Christiane had as little concern for the welfare of the taciturn St Clair as I had, but she acquiesced and I went with her, that she might explain to the scrawny Frenchman what was required of him, but when we got outside, he was nowhere to be seen. I was only able to dissuade Christiane from her intention to wander the garden herself in search of Guillaume by pleading my need to get back soon to my own home to be with my wife and children.

  Her face was desolate as we left the garden, and I thought again of the legend George planned to have inscribed over the gates: Let all things smile and seem to welcome the arrival of your guests. As I pulled the rotting gate to on the dark and forbidding place he sought to make a sanctuary, I prayed that the winter might be a short one.

  12

  Shipboard

  Sarah had dosed me with compounds and decoctions from the apothecary from the moment I had arrived home, before sending me to bed, where she had set a fire in the rarely used hearth. Despite the agitation of my mind, I had slept solidly for six hours and not even noticed her get into bed beside me at the end of the day. Sleep came more fitfully in the remaining hours of the night, as my thoughts ranged, in no good order, over everything from fantastic schemes for finding the son I had never met to sober realisation that he was better off where he was, for there was one thing I did understand: if he was with his mother, he could not be with me.

  All the next day it was the same. Sarah had sent word to the principal that I was too ill to accompany my scholars to the Sabbath preaching in the kirk. I was desperate to talk again with Archie, but I knew there was no way of getting a message out to the ship without attracting notice and that he could not risk a visit to my home in daylight, or even in the darkness, on the Sabbath. Come Monday morning, my body, if not my mind, was greatly rested and stronger.

  After our early lessons, I did not accompany my class to the common hall for breakfast but went instead up the stairway to the regents’ chambers. I had not seen Hugh Gunn since the day of Lord Reay’s arrival and the boy’s condition had been weighing on my mind. The guards Seoras’s father had set on the door of Hugh’s chamber subjected me to less scrutiny than I had expected, and I was admitted to the room with little difficulty.

  The physician, Ossian, looked up from the small table at which he sat writing. He smiled over to the figure sitting up on the bed. ‘You have a visitor, Uisdean.’

  Hugh was properly dressed, and although still very pale and thin, with darkened circles beneath his eyes, it was evident that his fever was gone and he was in a much better condition than when last I had seen him.

  ‘It’s good to see you so much recovered, Hugh,’ I said.

  There was no response, just an uneasy awareness from the young man that I was talking to him. I glanced to the physician for explanation.

  ‘He will not understand you. He still hasn’t regained his facility for the Scots tongue. It’s as if something will not allow him to speak, not permit him to understand.’

  I had not noticed the figure sitting in a chair in the corner behind the door. Too large a figure for this small room; too great a figure for this company.

  ‘Your Lordship, please excuse me. I just wanted to see how Hugh was. I will not disturb you.’

  Lord Reay stood up. ‘You do not. Uisdean has spoken of you kindly – he has had little enough to say of others in this town. It may do him some good to see you, but you must talk to him in our tongue, which I see you speak like an Irishman.’

  ‘My mother was Irish. I learnt my Gaelic in Ulster. It is much out of use with me, but it passes.’

  MacKay nodded. ‘It passes well enough.’

  I turned to the doctor. ‘Is he well enough for me to speak to him?’

  Ossian nodded. ‘The swelling of his tongue is almost gone, but he still has difficulty with some sounds, and you might have to listen closely. In the main though, what ails him is in his mind, and it will not be got out if he will not speak of it.’

  Looking first to Lord Reay for permission, I took up the chair beside Hugh Gunn’s bed. I began with some pleasantries about his health and about life in the college, and gradually moved on to the matter that was exercising me.

  ‘Have you any knowledge yet of what happened that night after you left the inn? Any memory?’

  He shook his head. ‘I remember nothing after we decided to get back to the college through the old town gardens. It was Seoras’s suggestion. Normally, I wouldn’t go near the place, but I was cold and angry and just wanted away to my bed as soon as I could get there. I wasn’t sure which path to take, but Seoras seemed to know where he was going.’

  ‘He knew the gardens?’

  What might have been a smile came onto Hugh’s face. ‘Oh, Seoras knew the gardens. He could not tell you one plant from another, but he knows that place like the back of his hand. He has …’ He glanced at Lord Reay and lowered his voice. ‘He has been there often enough.’

  ‘You need not scruple for my benefit, Uisdean,’ said Lord Reay. ‘I know my son’s shortcomings well enough, and I daresay Mr Seaton does also. And no doubt he will speak in your favour, if the time should come when you need it.’

  The boy looked up and there was a new determination in his face, a light in his eye. ‘And I will need it, will I not? For I know they are saying in the town, and even here in the college that I have killed Seoras, and dumped his body somewhere.’

  MacKay stood up. ‘Who has said that to you, boy?’

  Hugh was defiant. ‘Is it not so, then?’

  The chief’s fist clenched. ‘It is so, but you should not have been told.’ He looked to Ossian. ‘Was it that old crone from the town?’

  The physician shook his head. ‘I got rid of her the day we came. It was one of the regents. He has been at the door every day, asking after Uisdean. A young skinny fellow with a lazy eye, who claims he wants to learn medicine. He told Murdo MacKenzie, and Murdo, half-wit that he is, told Uisdean.’

  Peter Williamson. ‘There would have been no malice in it, only folly. Hugh, I think I have come to know you well enough. I do not believe you are capable of what you are accused of.’

  Lord Reay regarded me thoughtfully for a moment. ‘And Seoras?’ he asked at last. ‘What would he be capable of?’

  I hesitated.

  ‘I would have an honest answer.’

  ‘Seoras was a boy who readily gave himself to be misunderstood. He was careless of the feelings of others. He gave slights as jests but they were not taken as such. He trifled with women who did not know they were trifled with. He never understood,’ I finished carefully, ‘that he was no longer in Strathnaver, and not subject to such tolerance in this town as is accorded to a chief’s son in his own country.’

  Lord Reay nodded and I realised that nothing
I had said was of any great surprise to him. ‘And I think there is a woman at the root of this somewhere, is there not, Uisdean?’

  The young man looked startled, like a hare caught in the hunt. ‘A woman? I don’t know …’

  ‘You have spoken in your sleep, my boy. Both Ossian and I have heard you several times murmur the name Christiane. You never once had a thing to yourself that Seoras did not try to take from you. Tell me of this Christiane.’

  I remembered Christiane’s fears, her suspicions of Seoras. Weighing the look I could see on Hugh’s face I sensed his reluctance to speak of this to Seoras’s father at all, still less in front of me. ‘I will leave you to it,’ I said, standing up. ‘But I will come back whenever you want me to.’

  Lord Reay stood also. ‘That will be tonight.’

  ‘Tonight?’

  ‘The magistrates of this town are fools who understand nothing of the bond of soldiering. They are convinced that if Seoras is not dead, he is on the troop ship. Ormiston has humoured them so far as to permit a search of the ship tonight. I and some others are to take our dinner with him aboard ship afterwards. I think you should also be there.’

  I scrambled in my mind for some excuse. ‘The lieutenant and I …’

  Lord Reay had no humour for the petty dislikes of men of little account. ‘The lieutenant is a soldier and will do as I tell him. I will be bringing Hugh with me – this town will see that I have no suspicion of him, or of Ormiston, either. Your presence will show that the college is also of my mind.’

  There was nothing I could say in the face of such an injunction. As I walked disconsolately back down the tower steps, it came to me that at least I might find some opportunity aboard the recruiting ship for some private words with Archie.

  *

  I had watched, along with my scholars and the other regents, as the recruits were brought to shore each day at intervals to exercise on the Queen’s Links. They were put through their training with pikes and swords by a sergeant who looked as if he had faced down more foes than the recruits would ever see. We watched, day by day, as those destined to be infantrymen grew in confidence and aptitude in their handling of the massive pikes – over twenty feet in length – that they would carry with them in their marches and whose spear point could reach the eye or belly of a musketeer before his weapon could be fired, or tumble an unwary cavalier from his horse. Some, with their halberd heads like spiked axes, could pierce armour and disembowel a man with two thrusts. Before our eyes, these raw recruits were drilled, somehow, to march, wheel on a front, close ranks, open ranks, change distance, all in concert and all keeping steady their weapon. In the courtyard of the college, in the streets of the town, where more than two boys were gathered, pikes would be improvised and drills imitated. Methods discovered by the Dutch, perfected by the Swedish king, passed on to his Scottish mercenaries and so played out in the burghs of our small nation. Ormiston was exercising his men as any good commander would have done, but also he was implanting in the next generation a dream of war.

  Of still greater fascination than the pikemen were the musketeers. The guns, Archie told me, had been taken on at Dundee. Far from the suffering, there was always money to be made. I wondered how it was that a man such as Ormiston could raise the funds for such an adventure. There were names, we knew, of lesser barons and second sons who had made their way higher in the world of the Dane, the court of the German Habsburgs, the Muscovite, than they ever could have done at home, but Ormiston’s was not among them. Every man, I supposed, might have his time and this, it seemed, was his. Archie had told me he was a good soldier, a good leader of men, and Archie was not one to flatter. I had to concede that in this regiment he was raising, there was much to admire.

  I did not envy the men their outdoor pursuits in the hard frost or the falling snow that had succeeded it. ‘They had better get used to it,’ said Peter Williamson to me, ‘for they will have no comfort once they light in Germany. More of them will die of starvation or plague than ever come under enemy fire. My cousin has told me of it. Endless days of marching and only an open field to sleep in. Cold that we cannot even imagine. My God, a man’s life would have to be hard here before he would go willingly to such torments.’

  ‘They are not all running from something,’ I replied. ‘Some go for honour, for wealth, for adventure.’

  ‘Aye,’ he said, ‘and some are dragged from their beds or their prison cells and never seen by friend or family again.’

  I laughed. ‘You sound like my wife, Peter. You do not think that there are such amongst these surely?’

  ‘No? Then ask yourself why they are marched to the links and back, looking neither left nor right, not allowed an hour at the market, or in an alehouse. Ormiston does not want to risk losing even one of these men, and he does not want them talking to the townsfolk either.’

  And so I did watch, and they were marched and closely guarded by their officers as they went from quayside to links and back again, and into the boats that returned them to the safety of the carrack that in a few days would take them to Germany.

  It was not long after five that evening that I myself was crossing over to that carrack, along with Lord Reay, the physician Ossian, Hugh Gunn, Baillie Lumsden – the only member of the town council willing to undertake this exercise – and, somewhat to my surprise, Katharine Forbes, Lady Rothiemay.

  Lumsden was not best pleased. ‘MacKay has put me in the devil of a position. I know for a certainty that a warrant for her arrest has already passed Dundee on its way to the sheriff in Banff, who will no doubt be well aware, as is half the country, that her Ladyship is residing with me. And now I am escorting her onto a ship known to be bound overseas.’

  ‘We must hope the captain does not weigh anchor until we are safely back ashore,’ I said, laughing.

  ‘It is not you and I that concern me. If her Ladyship was to take it in mind to flee her troubles …’

  ‘Katharine Forbes will never leave this country of her own accord,’ I said, puzzled at Lumsden’s concern.

  Lumsden looked beyond my shoulder to the boat we were getting ever closer to. ‘There is something …’ Then he smiled and clapped me on the shoulder. ‘Pay me no heed. Sea travel puts my head and my stomach at odds with everything else.’

  *

  Little though I knew of boats, the merchantman looked an impressive vessel to me, and well adapted to the times. Three-masted, square-rigged and of Dutch construction, she must have been about a hundred feet in length and would have taken a sizeable cargo. Whatever she had transported to Scotland across the North Sea – Dutch pantiles, Baltic grain, Norwegian fir – her cargo on return would be men and arms. I could not help but notice the gun ports as we drew alongside; all but one were closed, but through the one that was not could clearly be seen the barrel of a cannon, and it looked to be trained on the town.

  ‘An oversight, surely,’ said Lumsden.

  ‘Ormiston does not strike me as a man given to oversights,’ I commented, as we prepared to climb the rope ladder up to the main deck.

  The lieutenant, the ship’s captain beside him, was waiting for us. Following the recruits’ salute to Lord Reay, the captain, a Holsteiner, assured us in thickly accented but good Scots that his ship and his quarters were at our disposal. He would show us around his vessel, but he would not join us in our dinner.

  Genial though he was, I paid little attention to the captain and neither, I noticed, did Baillie Lumsden. His eyes, like mine, were looking beyond the welcoming party, to what lay behind them: row upon row of faces – some young, healthy, optimistic, others scared, still others older-looking, cynical, with nowhere else left to go. The welcoming ceremonies attended to, MacKay went round them all, looking briefly into the face of every man, giving some a word or a nod, others a dismissive glance. To two or three of the young men, bound for officers’ rank, he asked a question. All shook their heads. None of them had seen Seoras or knew anything of him.

  I think I was
the only one of our party who searched that crowded deck for another figure, and I found him; Archie had been standing to the side of the recruits, the very embodiment of the forbidding Sergeant Nimmo – hunched, hooded, alien to the conventions of society, not inviting conversation. Not even MacKay had slowed his pace when passing Sergeant Nimmo. I thought for a moment that Lady Rothiemay had glanced in his direction, but if she had, her glance had swiftly moved on, and I knew she could not have remarked any resemblance to the long-dead heir to Delgatie, for it was not a thing she would have kept to herself.

  Her Ladyship, along with Ossian and Hugh, were shown to the captain’s cabin, and myself, Lumsden and Lord Reay invited to proceed to the inspection of the ship and the search for a boy who would not be there. I felt the old familiar sway of the vessel under my feet, the power lurking within the slightly agitated sea. I saw, for a moment only, how ludicrous to a seaman the fixedness of land must seem, how futile the getting and having of the lives of the people within the never-moving confines of the town. The two towns of Aberdeen were still very visible to me – I had seen them from shipboard before, but never before had I been so aware that the weighing of an anchor could take me from them. We started with the forecastle deck, and proceeded, by way of quarter deck and waist deck to the dark belly of the ship: the hold. Ever since my time in Ireland I had been wary of descent through hatches, darkened spaces. Ormiston spotted my discomfort; I saw the curiosity in his eyes but he said nothing.

  And here we came to where a hundred and fifty men ate and slept and waited for their transportation across the northern seas to fight in countries they had never seen in the armies of foreign princes. I wondered that they could find enough air to breathe, or stomach the odour of humanity that filled the place when they did so. The light was poor but the lieutenant had provided us with lanterns by which we probed every corner, investigated every shadow. Sleeping mats and blankets were rolled up beside the packs that were all the recruits’ own belongings. Crate upon crate of arms were stored down here too – pistols, muskets, powder belts and flasks, lead bullets and musket rests. But for all the firepower, the smoke and flame and burning inherent in those weapons, it was the contents of the other crates that chilled me the most – the horsemen’s hammers, stunted square hammer-head on one side, steel pick on the other; maces with flanged heads and pointed steel finials, obscene almost in the intricacy and delicacy of the decoration of their shafts; quillion daggers with double or serrated blades. Through the noise and the smoke of the guns, men would look their enemy in the eye and fight, hand to hand, for their lives, to butcher or be butchered. I wondered what armour might protect them from such savagery.