The Devil's Recruit (Alexander Seaton 4)

by S. G. MacLean

  From here we descended at last to the orlop deck, where cables, powder, salt, kegs of wine and ale, and other provisions for the voyage were kept. I knew half-a-dozen of Lord Reay’s men had been left on the upper decks lest any suspicious movements among the troops or, indeed, the fur-hatted sailors, might indicate some subterfuge, but throughout the whole ship, from galley and boatswain’s store to gunroom where the cannon were kept and, finally, back on deck, there was no sign that Seoras MacKay was here, or ever had been.

  As the search had gone on, and it had become increasingly evident that we were on a fruitless errand, Strathnaver’s interest in the undertaking seemed to lessen. The anger in his voice was directed not at Ormiston, but at those who sat on the shore and pronounced upon others. ‘I trust you will take your report of our researches back to the council, Baillie.’

  ‘I will, my lord,’ said Lumsden.

  ‘And you may tell them,’ his Lordship continued, ‘that they are to impugn the word of the lieutenant here no longer. As he and I have told them, my son has never signed up to his recruit or been on this ship.’

  Lumsden was careful with his words. ‘It is, in fairness, the duty of the town to investigate every possibility, and I am afraid this seemed the most likely. I am truly sorry we did not find Seoras here. I begin to fear the truth of the matter will never be known.’

  Had it not already been freezing, the look in Lord Reay’s eyes would have turned all around him to ice. ‘Oh, the truth will be known, Baillie; if others must go before me to the gates of Hell, the truth will be known.’

  Ormiston said nothing. There was no triumph over the town, no mockery of myself in his eyes, just the utter subordination, abnegation, of a soldier to his old commander. I had dressed in my best stand of clothes, as had Lumsden, a wealthier man than me by far, but even he could not begin to rival the magnificence of the great chief or the assured elegance of Ormiston. Lord Reay was wearing black velvet breeches and a doublet the colour of claret which was edged in gold brocade, a shirt of white silk showing through the slashed sleeves. Collar and cuffs were edged with finely worked Flemish lace, around his waist he wore a black sash, and in his hat a magnificent ostrich plume. Ormiston was dressed in a suit of the deepest green, almost black, with silver buttons to the jacket and buckles to his shoes. Everything in his bearing spoke quality and elegance, and the fact that he was used to keeping finer company than mine or Lumsden’s. I thought at first his great effort was made all on his old colonel’s behalf, but when we were at last brought to the captain’s cabin, high on the poop deck, I realised it had probably been for someone else.

  We had all to stoop on entering the cabin. It seemed an unfeasibly small chamber in which the master of the vessel slept and ate, and yet a table had been laid that would sit eight people. Lamps had been lit, and hung from hooks on the ceiling, huge scrolls that must have been charts were rolled up and stored between the captain’s desk and his bed. There were brass instruments attached to the wall, and books firmly kept in place along one shelf. Most, I could see, dealt with matters of navigation, or of port regulations. I committed as much as I could to memory, that I might relay what I had seen to Zander. Already seated and waiting for us was Lady Rothiemay, along with Hugh Gunn and MacKay’s physician. It soon became clear that the empty place beside her had been intended for Isabella Irvine.

  Ormiston could not hide his disappointment. ‘I am sorry Mistress Irvine was unable to accompany you tonight, your Ladyship.’

  Katharine Forbes took a long, slow draught of the wine that had been set before her. ‘Isabella begins to show signs of a fever, and I have put her to her bed – a crossing of the harbour in an open boat would have done her no good. What the girl needs is a day at the hunt. The cold in towns is not healthy. It is a wonder anyone survives the winter in such a place.’ She nodded graciously to Lumsden. ‘Always respecting your kind hospitality, Baillie.’

  He made a half bow. ‘Your Ladyship would be an ornament to any house, winter or summer.’

  Katharine Forbes smiled and waved her hand dismissively at him. ‘I am too old for such flattery. And as to the summertime, you would not find me then within the walls of a town, for the summers are even worse. Breeding grounds for pestilence. And other contaminations.’ I could not be certain that Katharine Forbes had not looked at me when she had pronounced this last, referring, I knew, to the reformed religion, which had a much greater hold in the towns than it ever had in the hills and mountains of our hinterland. I wondered again that her evident contempt for our kirk had so far escaped the notice of the authorities. As she and Lord Reay continued to discuss the inconveniences of town life, I reflected that if Lumsden was right, the walls enclosing her come summer would not be those of Aberdeen but the tolbooth of Edinburgh.

  I was seated next to Hugh, who understood without asking that Seoras had not been found.

  ‘Was there not even a sign of him?’ he asked under his breath.

  ‘None,’ I replied.

  Our conversation was necessarily in Gaelic, and Lord Reay was evidently keeping an ear to it. ‘You must excuse my foster son, Katharine,’ he said to Lady Rothiemay, ‘for in his illness he has sought refuge in his mother tongue. No doubt he will regain the facility of Scots as his health improves. You might try him in French though.’

  ‘French?’

  ‘Aye, if my money has not been wasted. Seoras and Hugh have been going to lessons with a French master in the town twice weekly these last few months. I have a mind to send them under Huntly to the Garde Eccosaise and see what the French court might make of them.’

  It was clear that he would not countenance the idea that his son was dead until he saw the boy’s body in front of him, and I would not be the man to argue with him here about it. ‘Then they will meet in with your nephew, Baillie.’

  ‘Your nephew, Lumsden?’

  The baillie looked a little uncomfortable at my reference to Matthew. I should have realised that some of my old college friend’s escapades at home and abroad might not be too readily publicised by those of his family in positions of authority. The baillie, who was active not only on our burgh council, but also served as a commissioner to parliament in Edinburgh, clearly had not planned to discuss his rebellious nephew in our present company. He took a good swallow of his wine.

  ‘My nephew is an old friend of Mr Seaton’s, and Alexander here helped him out of more than one scrape when they were boys. But Matthew is now a loyal adherent of the Marquis of Huntly and has taken service in the Garde. I am sure he would prove a good friend to Seoras and Hugh in Paris.’

  Lord Reay seemed well pleased with this. ‘And I daresay Seoras will similarly rely upon Uisdean to get him out of scrapes in Paris – there are many temptations in that town. They will have merry times there, the pair of them, but they will not forget the call of home, either, I am sure.’

  ‘Oh,’ enquired Lady Rothiemay, ‘is there a pretty girl waiting for our young friend back in Strathnaver, I wonder?’

  ‘Indeed there is,’ said MacKay. ‘Hugh has been promised these ten years to Elizabeth Murray, a fine, healthy girl of good family.’

  At the name of Elizabeth Murray, Hugh looked up, briefly, and I realised that whatever the French master’s sister might have thought of him, all his dreams of Christiane Rolland could have come to nothing anyway.

  Lady Rothiemay was happy to try Hugh in French. He answered haltingly at first, and she was delighted. She spoke gently, and waited patiently for his answers. It occurred to me that her own older son could not have been much older than Hugh was when he had been burned to death five years ago by his family’s Crichton enemies in the tower of Frendraught. Now her son’s memory was held in a chalice of poems and her own desire for vengeance. I doubted if even MacKay’s grief, should Seoras not be found, could be more tempestuous or of greater duration. I remembered something William had said when I’d told him of Lady Rothiemay’s connection to the Highland lord. ‘You didn’t know he was kin to Katha
rine Forbes? How can you not have done? There’s something in their blood will make them start a fight in an empty room. They say MacKay fell out with all of Caithness and half of Sutherland. There was no one left for him to fight with at home, so he took himself off abroad.’

  But Lady Rothiemay did not have that option, and so had to fight her old fights, time and again, at home, and it was not long before she and MacKay were bandying opinions about persons at court – who was to be trusted and who not. The former, it appeared, was a very small group. Lumsden and Ossian had fallen into the easy conversation of two learned and well-bred men. Only the lieutenant sat in silence, Isabella Irvine’s empty place seeming to mock his finery. He cut a solitary figure and I thought I saw beyond the façade for once, to a lonely man.

  At a lull in the conversation, he began to ask after Isabella.

  Lady Rothiemay’s answers were curt, and it became clear to me that she was actively hostile to any courtship of her young companion by the lieutenant. It crossed my mind that Isabella Irvine, regardless of her own feelings for Ormiston, was very probably not ill at all.

  As we set to the dishes that had been brought up from the galley, Lady Rothiemay paid a special attention to Hugh and took some time in pressing food upon him that she thought would do him good. As he demurred, she called Ossian to her support, and between them, gradually, they began to draw him out of himself a little, even to laugh. Her Ladyship watched him a moment, smiling, and she murmured, ‘How he reminds me of my son.’

  There was not one of us around the table who did not know of the terrible death of her oldest son and his friends in a fire, at the hands of their hosts in the tower house of Frendraught. Poems had been written of it, ballads sung, but she would never see her boy again. MacKay put his hand over hers and gripped it firm.

  ‘I will never forgive them, you know. Never.’

  Ormiston looked at her directly. ‘Such a death can never be forgiven, only avenged.’

  ‘You also have suffered loss.’ It was a statement, not a question.

  He took a drink from his glass. ‘My younger brother, Duncan.’ And he told us of a golden boy who had worshipped him and followed him to the wars.

  ‘In my first recruit?’ asked Lord Reay.

  Ormiston nodded. ‘All my life, he had been at my shoulder before my shadow was, and so it was in this case too. Nothing I could say would dissuade him from coming with me. And while we waited for the transports, we and the thousands like us, we trained, we green boys, and we became comrades. Before we ever set foot in Denmark or saw the glint of a Habsburg halberd, we were comrades.’

  Lord Reay took up the tale then and told how these young comrades, his Scots Brigade, had fought together through many vicissitudes. ‘And then we went over to the service of the King of Sweden, and so partook of his glory.’

  Here a toast, the first of several that night, was drunk to the memory of Gustav Adolph, great champion of Protestant Europe, the fallen Lion of the North.

  Lady Rothiemay had been watching Ormiston all through this. ‘When did you lose your brother, Lieutenant?’

  Ormiston put down his glass. ‘At Stralsund, your Ladyship. The city was laid under siege by the Imperialists and had called on us for help. We came in by sea; our ship was struck by cannon-shot and ran aground, but still we managed to make it to the wharves and so into the town. We were there six weeks, night and day defending the Frankentor, the weakest part of the town, scarcely with time to sleep or change our clothes. I did not know what fear was until I entered those walls: the endless torrent of bullets, the roar of cannon that could be heard thirty miles away. I saw comrade after comrade fall. And yet we held firm, and the town was saved.’

  ‘The gratitude of the burghers must have been great,’ said Lumsden.

  Ormiston’s voice was scarcely audible. ‘The gratitude of the burghers was not what it might have been.’

  Lord Reay saw the lieutenant’s discomfort with the subject and, his face set like rock, took up the telling of the story. It was a tale of boys, exhausted from the daily horrors they were called upon to face, given not so much as a roof over their heads at night by the foreign townsfolk who had called them there. ‘We lost many good men at Stralsund. I had been back to Scotland to raise further recruits, and the Danish commander in the town handled things very badly. By God, had I been there, things would have been different.’

  The mood was now very sombre, and Lady Rothiemay sought to lighten it. ‘But all the same, this soldiering of yours is a brotherhood, is it not, regardless of the side on which a man fights? There are Scotsmen on both sides of this terrible war, I know, and I cannot believe that they ever truly forget they are Scotsmen.’

  ‘Indeed they do not, my Lady. Tell me, Lieutenant, were you at Freistadt?’

  The lieutenant smiled. ‘I was, Sir.’

  MacKay spread wide his hands, ‘Then the floor is yours, boy.’ And Ormiston told us a tale of the Swedish king’s capture, outside Nuremberg, of a handful of Imperialist soldiers, amongst whom were Colonel John Gordon and Major Walter Leslie, the two old acquaintances of whom Archie and I had spoken only two nights before. ‘Gustav Adolph, as a mark of the esteem in which he held men of our nation, offered to set them free without ransom, but such was their honour that they would not permit it, and so they stayed with us, their countrymen, a full five weeks, and a merry time was made of it.’

  The tale delighted Lady Rothiemay, and she went into a long reminiscence of her dealings with the families of both officers. The dinner had become more congenial than I could have hoped for, but it was evident that Hugh Gunn’s strength had been tested to its limit long before the meal was half-way through. A little after we had heard the town’s bells ring seven, Ossian made plain to Lord Reay that Hugh would need to get back to his bed soon. Ormiston, who seemed to have a genuine concern for the young man’s well-being, was not long in making the arrangements for the small boat to be called that would take the boy and his doctor back to the town, while Lord Reay’s vessel awaited the rest of us. I would happily enough have gone with them, in the hope that I might manage a minute alone with Archie while the boat was readied, but it was clear no such thing was to be thought of and so I spent a good two hours more listening to tales of valour, and of squalor, from the wars.

  As preparations were at last being made for us to leave the ship, I managed to draw the lieutenant aside alone for a moment.

  ‘No,’ he said, eventually, in answer to what I had asked him. ‘I cannot bring Sergeant Nimmo to you. When the sergeant needs you, he will seek you out. It is better for both of you that way.’

  There was something in his tone that made his words almost a warning, and as I sat alone by the embers of my own fire later that night, I reflected it would not be a good thing to make an enemy out of Lieutenant William Ormiston.

  13

  Flights of Fancy

  I had been bone weary by the time I had reached back to my house from the ship, but there was to be no getting to sleep until a full report of everything I had seen on my visit aboard had been given to Zander, who had forced himself to stay awake until my return.

  And so it was with a sinking heart that I read the missive sent early to my door the next morning by the session clerk of St Nicholas. Further alarms at St Fittick’s Kirk across the water at Nigg Bay had worsened the state of the minister’s mind and given rise to rumours of illicit gatherings and unnatural practices that the session there urgently requested our help in putting an end to. By some justification elusive to us, William and I had been deputed by our session clerk to meet with our brethren at Nigg and there to investigate the nature of the problem.

  ‘Babbling about witches, and fairies and spirits flying through the trees, speaking in tongues, things risen from the dead. They had to pull him from the pulpit. I hope to God he was drunk when they did so,’ said William.

  I echoed his hope. If John Leslie had been drunk in the pulpit, then he would surely lose it, but if he had been
sober and talking of witnessing spirits in flight in the kirkyard, then a much worse fate might befall him.

  It was a cold morning, and the wind whipped right off the sea to find us on the benches of the ferry as it edged its way carefully across the mouth of the Dee from Futty to the southern shore at Torry. I had not drunk to excess, nor anything like it on Ormiston’s boat the night before, but all the same, I would ten times rather have been in my unmoving classroom, with its modicum of warmth, than amongst the sway and swell of this open boat. ‘It is a wonder they let John Leslie preach yesterday,’ I said. ‘He’d been babbling five days at least – for it was Wednesday that we heard of it at the session.’

  William, struggling despite his wrappings of hide and fur to keep the cold out, muttered his agreement. ‘He had come again to his senses by Friday, it seems, and the session thought the episode passed. They have been so afraid that they will lose their minister and not get another one that they’ve turned a blind to what every man knows: Leslie is a drunkard. I have it on authority from John Spalding, my clerk who has his ear to every rumour in the town, that he swore to the elders that he would not touch another drop. And yet yesterday he was at it again, rambling and railing about the ungodly dead rising and dancing in St Fittick’s kirkyard.’

  The look on my face must have betrayed my mind as we passed silently by the recruiting ship on its moorings. There was no sign of any of the soldiers on deck yet.