The Devil's Recruit (Alexander Seaton 4)

by S. G. MacLean

  I was not to meet Archie until the afternoon, and had my classes to see to in the morning. I drove my scholars hard, setting them exercises of translation from Latin to Greek and thence into Hebrew. I allowed them to discuss any difficulties with one another, and soon enough there was a steady murmur that covered the silence of the room. For there was a silence, emanating from the bench where Seoras MacKay and Hugh Gunn had always sat together. This silence seemed to accuse me, for I had hardly thought of them these last few days, so quickly had they faded from my concern in the face of the other things that had happened in the town.

  When the bell went for the midday meal, I dismissed my scholars quickly and left the college the back way, through the gardens. The image of Christiane Rolland as we had found her had haunted me for two days and nights, and I did not wish to remember the girl that way. Before I went to meet Archie, I was resolved to look upon her one more time, at rest, where she lay in St Ninian’s Chapel on the Castlehill. As I went out at the back gate, I was met by the figure of Ossian coming along the path towards me. I had to look twice to be certain it was him. Instead of his usual tunic and plaid, he was dressed in a long, belted, academic gown and wore a cap over his usually free-flowing locks. His face registered my surprise, and he broke in to a smile.

  ‘Is it my attire that confuses you, Mr Seaton?’

  ‘No, no,’ I began and then, ‘well, yes. Until now, you’ve been every inch the soldier. I hadn’t expected to find you today in the garb of the learned physician.’

  He looked down at his garments. ‘A soldier on the march is a soldier on the march, and must dress accordingly. But here in your college, I have the leisure to attend my patient in a proper room, with a bed in it and clean water, linen, and abundant medicines to hand. It seemed more fitting and respectful that I should dress here as Dr Dun, Dr Gordon and Dr Johnston do. I am on my way now to eat with my good colleagues while I have the opportunity.’

  ‘Hugh can manage without you, then?’ I asked.

  ‘He manages better every day. But I haven’t left him entirely alone. Your young friend Peter Williamson has been assiduous in his attentions.’ He laughed. ‘Neither knows a word the other says, but they seem to manage together well enough. He tells me he has a desire to study medicine, and I think he may have some aptitude for it. I’m of a mind to put in a word to Lord Reay that he might assist him, for I have the impression he has not two pennies to rub together.’

  ‘I’d be surprised if he had one, never mind two,’ I said.

  Ossian looked down at my own clothes, my academic gown replaced by a riding coat, my cap by a hat.

  ‘You are making a journey?’

  ‘I have some business to attend to out in the country,’ I replied. I could not tell him the same lie I had told Dr Dun to cover my absence – that I had heard word someone of Seoras’s description had been sighted in the town of Turriff. ‘But first I thought to take a moment’s prayer in St Ninian’s Chapel to seek God’s guidance in all these troubles.’

  Ossian nodded. ‘Then you will find Hugh there, where I have just left him. He keeps a vigil over her. This has been a heavy blow to him, after all that has already passed.’

  I bade farewell to the physician, and as he went his way through the winter vegetable garden back into the college, I went out past the backlands to the chapel in the precincts of the long-gone castle that had once guarded our town.

  I was glad to see two of Lord Reay’s men at the chapel door. Despite Ossian’s confidence in my friend, I did not much like the idea of Hugh Gunn out and about in this burgh with only Peter Williamson to protect him.

  The chapel – no longer used as a place of worship – was familiar to me from its occasional use as a court, and as a common meeting place of our presbytery. It was also, increasingly, the favoured place of lying in rest of the wealthy and influential of this town. In the normal run of things, a girl like Christiane Rolland would never have been placed here, but Baillie Lumsden had done it as a mark of respect to Louis, and in some way to comfort him.

  Inside, the place was almost bare of any adornment. There was a bleakness to the sturdy walls and flagstone floor that gave it a special solemnity as the resting place of the dead. The only furnishing was at the far end of the chapel, where the chairs of the consistory court were ranged along the side walls, and the massive carved oak altar, endowed by a burgh provost over a hundred years before, had survived the destructive rage of the iconoclasts.

  It was before this altar, on a simpler table, that the body of Christiane Rolland had been laid. The mortcloth, the town’s best, had been pulled back and folded down at her waist, so that her hands rested on top of it, and it looked for all the world as if the girl were sleeping. At each end of the bier was a candle, as if their light might keep her warm. Beside her, like a sentinel, stood Hugh Gunn, his head bowed. Like me, he was no longer in the clothes of a scholar, but unlike me, he was dressed in the saffron shirt and coloured plaid of his north-country kinsmen. He was no longer the boy I had thought I’d known over three years, but every inch the soldier. As he stood there, oblivious to my presence, I realised I had never looked at him properly on his own, for it was always Seoras that took the eye. Seoras, compact, dark, strong, eyes that danced with mischief and sometimes something more, a small mouth that could be cruel when it wanted to. Hugh had always been the other one, quieter, tall, more strongly built, handsome even, with pale grey eyes, fine cheekbones and a long nose, balanced by straight fair hair that fell to his shoulders. A watcher, a listener, better – it seemed to me – than him he had had to watch and listen to. And now, as the search for that other probed ever-deeper into the secret places of the town, and stretched wider into the hinterland, the rivers, bridges, fields, woods, it was as if he had imposed this new silence on himself for fear he must step out of the shadows now and become the one who must talk and do.

  So taken was I with the image of Hugh and Christiane that I had not noticed Peter Williamson standing in the near-darkness of the doorway, by the old baptismal font. His voice startled me.

  ‘He has been like that an hour. Not a movement. Not a word.’

  I kept my voice low, as he had done. ‘And you have been here with him all that time?’

  He was downcast. ‘Much good may it do him now. If I had watched them better, him and Seoras that night after Downie’s Inn, we might none of us be here now.’

  ‘Come, Peter, you cannot think that had a part in Christiane’s murder?’

  ‘Have you a better explanation?’

  ‘No, but yours is no explanation at all. Does Hugh remember nothing yet?’

  ‘I don’t know. He has erected a wall of silence for himself. I cannot penetrate beyond it.’

  It was clear that Peter had no wish to pursue our conversation, and so I left him to his thoughts. The sound of my footsteps going up the aisle were out of place in the quiet stillness of the chapel and they roused Hugh from his vigil. It was as if he had forgotten, for a moment, that there was anyone but himself and this dead girl that he had loved.

  ‘Mr Seaton, I, I didn’t hear you …’

  ‘I haven’t come to disturb you, Uisdean, I just wanted to see her a moment for myself. At peace, as she should be.’

  He shook his head and I saw that his eyes were filled with tears. ‘She was sixteen years old. She should not be at peace. She should be laughing and singing and lighting the world as she always did. She should be dancing, flitting from one thing to another, free, like a bird in that garden.’ He had been standing rigid but now his shoulders sank. ‘That garden, dear God. If only she had known.’

  ‘Known what?’

  ‘About Charpentier. That he was a priest.’

  And so the word was out already. It had not taken long. My first act on arriving at the college that morning had not been to go to my classroom, but to take two reports to Dr Barron, Professor of Divinity and Moderator of our presbytery. One told the sorry tale of John Leslie, Minister of St Fittick’s Kir
k at Nigg Bay, the other gave notice of hearsay, that an unknown seaman, drunk in an inn, had been heard to say George Jamesone’s gardener was known from all the ports of Spain to this as a Jesuit. For all that they might have warranted it, I could not call down the forces of retribution of law and kirk upon the Baillie, nor Lady Rothiemay and Isabella either. What Archie had told me of my son’s welfare in Madrid stopped my hand at that, and though my conscience forced me to denounce him, I had given Charpentier a twelve-hour start.

  I could see Hugh’s hopeless thought. ‘If Christiane had known he was a priest, she might never have loved him.’

  He was certain of it. ‘No, and she would have had no cause to go in to that garden to see him, nor meet her death at his hands.’

  I cleared my throat. ‘I don’t think Charpentier killed Christiane.’

  This shook him out of his stasis. ‘What? Who else could it have been? She found out his secret and he resolved to murder her, and now he has fled.’

  I shook my head. ‘He fled because I discovered his secret. And he cannot have murdered Christiane because he was … elsewhere, when she met her killer in that garden.’

  He crumpled his brow. ‘But how can you know that?’

  ‘I cannot tell you, but I had it from one whose word I trust. He wouldn’t have lied to me about this.’

  ‘But then, who …?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ I hesitated to go on, but things could scarcely be made worse – the worst lay before him now, in this chapel. I took a deep breath, and kept my voice low, although I knew Peter Williamson would not understand a word of what was said between us anyway. ‘Uisdean, did you ever see Christiane after the night you were attacked and Seoras disappeared?’

  His face lightened. ‘Yes, she came to see me, twice, in my room in the college. The first time, Peter tells me, I was insensible, and did not even know she was there. But she left a book for me – something in French that she thought might entertain me. Rabelais.’ He smiled. ‘I don’t know what Louis would say to her even knowing of such a fellow.’

  ‘Nor I,’ I said, glad to see him cheered for a moment, but it was only a moment.

  ‘The second time, I was awake again and the fever passed. When she spoke to me first, I didn’t have a word of Scots to answer her. But then she tried me in French and the wonder of it was I could follow and answer every word.’

  ‘I think you enjoyed your lessons at the French master’s house.’

  ‘They were happy times for me.’

  ‘And your mind has stored them in a place for such times, where there’s no room, it would seem, for the rest of your life in Aberdeen.’

  ‘I mean no disrespect, Mr Seaton, but this is not my place – I don’t belong here, and I will be glad to be away from it and amongst my own people.’

  ‘Your own people? Even in the wars?’

  ‘There will be more of them there than there are here, and Lord Reay won’t make me stay here with Seoras gone.’

  ‘You don’t want to gain your degree?’

  ‘I have no interest in it. I will go abroad and serve where Lord Reay tells me to serve, and that gladly.’ He stroked Christiane’s cold brow. ‘There’s nothing here for me now.’

  Still I was hesitant, but I had to know. ‘When she came to see you that second time, did she tell you of her fears?’

  He looked up at me. ‘About what?’

  ‘About Seoras,’ I said. ‘She had got it in her mind that he was watching her, following her.’

  ‘Yes, she told me, and I told her it could not be. Mr Seaton, I have known him all my life. I know him better than I knew my own mother. For all his faults, he would not do this thing to me. He would never have taken a trick so far. He would have tired of the business by now.’

  It was this last that seemed most like Seoras to me. ‘You think he would have tired of it?’

  He nodded. ‘He was already beginning to, by that last Monday night. We saw the two Frenchmen in the inn and he said he was of a mind to leave Christiane to the gardener.’ He ploughed his fingers through his hair and gave a laugh with no humour in it. ‘The gardener. It never crossed his mind that she might think of me. And that is what I told Lord Reay, when he finally got to the bottom of Seoras’s trifling with Christiane. I told him nothing of my own feelings for her – there would have been no point.’

  Because Lord Reay already had a wife marked out in Strathnaver for his foster son.

  I remembered MacKay’s insistence on seeing Christiane’s body. ‘How did his Lordship react?’

  Hugh shrugged. ‘As I had expected him to. He cursed Seoras for a knave, and many other things. It angered him that she should have had cause to fear him, but at the same time it gave him hope.’

  ‘That his son might still be alive?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You mean he did not dismiss Christiane’s fears – that he thought it possible Seoras might be tormenting her still …?’

  ‘Yes. I told him it was wrong, that it could not be. Seoras is gone.’

  ‘Are you so certain he’s gone?’

  He put a hand over his heart, in the manner of one making an oath. ‘I don’t feel him any more. Here.’ He pressed the hand harder. ‘These last few days, something has gone from my spirit. Seoras has gone.’

  ‘Since the night I sent you away from Downie’s Inn, the night you both went missing?’

  He shook his head. ‘No. Since Sunday morning. I slept late – after the others had all left for the kirk. When I first woke, I knew he was gone.’

  I could not understand him. ‘Are you telling me Seoras had been with you until then? In the college?’

  ‘No, no. But I had felt the sense of him.’ He looked down again at Christiane. ‘Those close to me are being taken. Is it me, do you think? Is it me that’s the cause?’ I was about to tell him ‘No,’ when he continued. ‘But why then was I returned? To suffer more perhaps?’ He put a hand to the hilt of his sword, which, as a student, he should not have been carrying. ‘Well, they shall not see it, whoever has done this thing. I will be away from this town as soon as Lord Reay leaves, and go to France as soon as he will let me.’

  His mind was made up, and I wondered whether in his determination he would even allow himself the time to grieve. I wondered if the wars would change this young man as they had changed Archie Hay. I thought he had begun to change already.

  There was less than an hour before I had to meet Archie at the other side of the Old Town, at the Brig o’ Balgownie, and I could not afford to stay much longer, but there was one more question I wanted to ask him.

  ‘Uisdean, when you and the doctor left Ormiston’s meal early the other night, did anyone else leave with you? I mean, go ashore in the boat?’

  There was no hesitation. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It was the recruiting sergeant.’

  20

  Delgatie

  He was waiting for me in a small wood not far from the Brig o’ Balgownie, where he would not be seen from the road. Earlier in the day, all roads from the town, but especially this one, had been crawling with men sent out in search of the reported Jesuit priest, known as Guillaume Charpentier. I suspected that by now Charpentier would be with my friend Matthew Lumsden in some Popish fastness in Strathbogie or Strathdon, and that he would never be caught.

  As I approached the appointed place, Archie stepped out from between the trees to greet me, but the smile on his face died when he saw the look on mine.

  ‘Don’t tell me you come to say you’ll not come with me?’

  ‘I don’t know. Will you tell me the truth, now?’

  He laughed, a little nervously. ‘But Alexander, I have already told you.’

  ‘Not all, though.’

  ‘All that you asked. What else would you know?’

  ‘Did you kill Christiane Rolland?’

  His face blanched. He looked away and then looked back, angry almost. ‘I? Murder a girl? My God, Alexander, how low your opinion of me has fallen if you think me cap
able of that.’

  ‘Then tell me where you were on Monday night, when I was on your ship with your lieutenant?’

  He started to say something, but my question had unseated whatever easy reply he had been about to make. ‘I … I told you, I was at Father Guillaume’s Mass in the old town. I was his escort.’

  I shook my head slowly. ‘Do not lie to me, Archie. Do not lie to me any more.’

  ‘I swear to you, Alexander, I’m not lying.’

  I felt the ire rising within me. ‘For God’s sake, it was after seven when you left the ship. You could hardly have got ashore and up to the old town much before eight.’

  ‘No, that’s true. Guillaume was already robed and preparing to say Mass when I got there.’

  ‘Why didn’t you go before, if you were to be his escort?’

  He sighed heavily. ‘Because I hadn’t known I would be needed at all. Isabella was to take him up to Old Aberdeen, and she did, but a note that Lumsden had brought aboard with him meant I had to see Guillaume myself that night.’

  ‘What did the note say?’

  ‘That there was a matter Guillaume urgently needed to discuss with William Ormiston or myself.’

  ‘And what was that matter?’

  ‘He could not tell me until after the Mass. And by then it was too late.’ He took a breath. ‘Christiane had spent a good deal of time at Baillie Lumsden’s house – you know that, don’t you?’

  I nodded.

  ‘It seems she had been … aware … of persons there who did not wish to be seen. She got it into her mind that it was the son of Lord Reay – the boy that has not been found.’

  ‘I know that,’ I said, becoming impatient.

  ‘She went looking for him, Alexander. In Lumsden’s house.’

  ‘You are not going to tell me she found him?’

  He shook his head. ‘She found, or rather overheard, someone else – Matthew.’

  ‘Matthew Lumsden?’

  ‘Yes. In conversation with Lieutenant Ormiston about the recruit – the true purposes of the recruit.’