The Redemption of Alexander Seaton (3 page)

‘Mr Seaton, would you not like something to warm you on this awful night? That must be a cold bed you keep in the schoolhouse.’

The righteous apoplexy of Mistress Youngson should she ever find one of the town’s whores, or indeed any woman, in my bed, made the prospect seem almost worthwhile. Almost. ‘As ever, ladies, I can’t decide between you, and I wouldn’t slight either of you for all the world.’

Janet’s siren voice replied, ‘Nobody’s asking you to choose, Mr Seaton,’ followed by a good-natured cackle from the sisters.

It was an offer they’d made more than once before, and one I had never yet been tempted to accept. ‘You would only break me,’ I returned, throwing them the last shilling from my pouch.

‘You’re the only decent man in Banff, Mr Seaton …’ and the rest of their words were lost in the wind as I pressed on, the wine and warmth from the inn piloting me home.

As I neared the schoolhouse I noticed a fellow traveller on the other side of the road, at the foot of Water Path. He
raised a hand as if to hail me, but his equilibrium failed him and he stumbled to his knees. He called something to me as he tried to right himself, but I did not wait to hear. The Good Samaritan pounded on my conscience, but I had seen myself home in worse condition than his more than once, and on worse nights than this. Winning to my own bed was a more pressing concern than helping a stranger to his. The good sisters would rob him, of course, if he had not spent all his money on drink that night, but they would see him to shelter before they did so. Turning into the pend at the side of the schoolhouse, I locked the gate behind me and left the fellow to his fate.

As ever at this hour, the schoolhouse was all in darkness. My eyes were practised in seeing through the night gloom. I checked on my schoolroom as I passed. The worn and barren benches echoed to me the incantations of the ghosts of schoolboys past, myself included.
Amo, amas, amat
…
amo; amo; amo
. All was empty and still. The stove was cold, but I knew John Durno would remember his duty as usher and have it lit before I descended again in a few hours to resume my labours.

Thirty-seven steps in darkness to the top of the house and my small and sparsely furnished room. I found my bed without the aid of lamp or candle as I had done many times since that night last summer when I had finally returned, after much wandering, from the meeting of the brethren in Fordyce. Not a minister then, or ever, but condemned always to my schoolmaster’s robe. Mistress Youngson’s celebratory dinner had lain cold and uneaten on the table two floors below. The rats had it in the end. No need now to toil late at my desk on my Greek, my Hebrew, my Syriac. The midnight
oil no longer required to be burnt, so my lamp remained dark. Yet still, as I had done each night since then, I prayed, trying to reach God, trying to reach to that place where faith is. But, as it had been each night, that place was empty. And still I did not know where else to go. The withdrawal of God left me no means to justify my place in this world but to start again. And that beginning was always tomorrow.

My usual sleep was sound and featureless, and I seldom had any awareness of night passing into morning. This night, though, the intermittent banging of the shutters in the storm permeated my consciousness and I pulled the bedclothes ever tighter round me. As the first stray shafts of daylight made their way through my attic window, the banging grew more insistent and I gradually became aware of my own name being called with rising urgency. It was my landlady.

‘Mr Seaton, Mr Seaton, for the love of God, wake up. Patrick Davidson lies dead in your schoolroom. Mr Seaton …’

TWO

A Dead Man’s Face

And it was so. The stench reached my nostrils before my foot ever reached the bottom of the stair. Mistress Youngson had waited for me as I groped for my cloak and threw it over my shoulders, and she had led the way downstairs by the light of her candle, but when we reached the door of my schoolroom she hung back, as if not wanting to attract Death’s attention. I moved past her into the dimly lit room. The windows to the west that afforded some light to my scholars for the greater part of the day remained shuttered. The only candle was at the far end of the room, in the hand of her husband, Gilbert Grant, my friend and master in the grammar school of Banff. He had taught every scholar to come from the town in the last forty years, but now, in truth, I performed more and more of his duties as the weariness of age crept over him. He raised his eyes towards me and said sadly, ‘The boy is dead, Alexander; he is dead.’

His wife, still keeping to the doorway, added, ‘I have sent the lad for Dr Jaffray.’

I shook my head slowly as I drew closer. ‘Jaffray is not there. He was called out late last night, to Findlater …’ There was little point in continuing. I could see that Jaffray’s skills
were, for Davidson, by several hours redundant now. The lifeless form of Patrick Davidson slumped across my desk, his head to one side in a pool of his own vomit, had a strange inevitability to it. The left arm stretched, palm outwards, in front of him, in an ultimately futile effort to support his head; the right hung down to his side, a few stray blades of the same grass that swam in the vomit before him still sticking between the fingers. I had never met the apothecary’s apprentice, but the agonised features of the corpse now lying not eight yards from where I stood were, I knew, also those of the man whom I had left in the gutter the night before. I had known from the moment I had stumbled from my bed that they would be. God had started with me a new game.

Grant and I kept a sombre vigil over the body while we awaited the arrival of those who had to be informed of such things. The boy who had been sent for Jaffray had also been told to call up the baillie and the two town serjeants. A servant girl had been sent for the Reverend Guild. The doctor and the minister: one powerless to help in this world, the other powerless now to help in the next. The sins of Patrick Davidson would be called to his account regardless of whatever sentiments Mr Guild might intone.

‘He was a good lad, you know,’ said Grant. ‘A good, bright lad.’ He smiled at me. ‘Like you yourself. And he kept much to his own company, as you yourself would have done had it not been for the Master of Hay.’ There was no hurt in this; he spoke the truth. Gilbert Grant had known me as long as any other soul living, and there was no need for dissembling between us. ‘My memory is failing me though, Alexander. Were you ever in the school together as boys?’

‘I do not think so. I would have been gone to the college by the time he came up from the song school. My mother may have mentioned him, but in any holiday from my studies I was more often at Delgatie than I was here in Banff. And when I was home I was far too lofty a personage to bother myself with the younger boys.’

Grant’s eyes twinkled in a sad smile. ‘Aye, it has always been so. The young scholar returned to his native burgh is too grand to look down and see where he came from; you weren’t the first to leave with no mind to return.’

He was right: others like me had gone before me and not returned for many a year. But my return had been different. Nine months ago, I had come back. I had come back the much-lauded scholar, the attestations of my divinity professor glowing in the paper in my hand. I had been pronounced well-versed in the biblical tongues, the handling of controversies, ecclesiastical history, and to be sound in matters of faith and doctrine. There remained but the sixth and final trial before the brethren, the ministers of this presbytery – to preach a sermon before them and the people that would meet with the approbation of both. And so I had preached at Boyndie kirk, whose people wanted me for their minister, and I had taken as my text Micah, chapter 7, verse 9:

‘I will bear the indignation of the Lord, because I have sinned against him until he plead my cause, and execute judgement for me: he will bring me forth to the light, and I shall behold his righteousness.’

How could my sermon on that text have found favour? And yet it did. I who had lived a life blessed, who did not yet know the indignation of the Lord, who covered my own sin, even from myself. The words ought to have choked me
in my throat for the shame of it. And yet they did not. My sermon had found favour with the people and with the brethren too. True, the Reverend Guild of Banff had raised one or two objections, but these were of no consequence and were treated as such. And later, in presbytery, the words that would have licensed me to open my mouth to preach as a minister of the Kirk of Scotland were already on the lips of the Moderator when the sudden entry into the kirk of Sir Alexander Hay, laird of Delgatie, Archie’s father and the benefactor of all my school and college days, stopped them where they were. Before the whole brethren he had declared his fervent opposition to my being accepted into the ministry and denounced me as a debauched and scandalous person unfit for so godly a calling. He further declared that my sin could not be countenanced amongst honest men and begged that the presbytery would treat no more of me as an expectant for the ministry. And on that bright, clear June afternoon in Fordyce, in that ancient and holy place, all the walls of my deception had come tumbling down around me. The Moderator, Mr Robert Dun, minister of Deskford, a just and godly man, refused to condemn me on the word of one person and I still remembered the kind pleading in his eyes as he had turned to me and offered me the floor to defend myself. Struck dumb with the realisation, at last, that the laird of Delgatie was right, I had offered no word in my own defence and stumbled from the kirk as a blind man from a burning building. Such had been the glorious homecoming of Alexander Seaton. And here before me was the homecoming of Patrick Davidson. I could not believe that he deserved his as I had done mine.

‘How did he come to this, Gilbert?’ I asked.

He looked down at the body, a corruption of the work of God to something abhorrent. It was not a thing that could be comprehended in his universe of the schoolroom. ‘I do not know,’ he said. ‘I truly do not know. Perhaps the doctor will tell us, or the baillie, no doubt. But it should never have come to this. I saw another life marked out for him.’ He paused. ‘And never such a death.’

‘What was his life, Gilbert?’ I asked.

The old man turned from the image before him and sought a recess of his mind. ‘A life of love,’ he said at length. ‘His was a life of love. His father, a lawyer in Aberdeen, died while Patrick was still a baby, and he was taken then by his mother to live with her sister here in Banff. Her sister was Helen – Walter Watt’s first wife – although he was not provost then, but a prospering merchant. Walter and Helen had no child of their own; she was with child often, but she never carried one a full nine months. Jaffray did all he could for her, but not one of them lived. I think she would have,’ he hesitated, ‘I think she would have given much for just one of them to live. But she was not blessed. It wore her out in the end. She was not thirty when she died. But the boy – this boy, Patrick Davidson, her sister’s son – was the light of her life. They loved that boy as much as any parents could. He was always to be seen around Helen’s skirts in the market place, at the kirk, or atop Walter’s shoulders as he saw to his cargoes at the quayside or walked for pleasure along the cliff tops in his rare periods of leisure. But then the boy’s mother married again, and took him with her when her new husband, a minister, was called to the charge of a kirk in Fife. Helen’s heart was finally broken, and she died soon afterwards. When Patrick was about fourteen, he matriculated at the university
at St Andrews. I do not think he came back here often until he returned to take up his apprenticeship at Arbuthnott’s. It is a pity you could not have known him. He was a fine boy.’

I watched as he stroked the cold forehead. He uttered not another word. His thoughts were evidently of the child the man had been, mine of the staggering stranger calling for compassion, of the dying man dismissed as a drunkard. The gnawing shame in my gut might have been too much for one who did not live each day with such a sentiment. I could find no words to comfort my old friend and so said nothing. I do not know how long we sat there before the strange companionship of we three men was interrupted by the arrival of Mistress Youngson with a bowl of porridge and warm milk, which she handed to me. ‘Take this up to your room and dress, Alexander. The baillie and his men will be here soon, and there will be little enough time for food and drink after that.’ It was nine months since she had uttered my Christian name, and so surprised was I by the unwonted tenderness that, forgetting to thank her, I ascended the stairs without a word.

I re-entered the schoolroom perhaps a quarter of an hour later, to find the officers of burgh and kirk already there. In the room, aside from Gilbert Grant, were five other living souls: Baillie William Buchan, self-appointed arbiter of all things moral or otherwise in this burgh; the two town serjeants; James Cardno the session clerk, whose report of my movements on the previous evening would still, I had no doubts, be ringing in the baillie’s ears, and Mr Robert Guild, minister of Banff and brother to Geleis, the provost Walter Watt’s young wife. Guild was no friend of mine – he had been none those nine months ago at Fordyce and he was
none now. I was glad to see him there, nonetheless – his well-known antipathy to William Buchan promised that the baillie would not have all his own way in whatever was about to unfold.

As ever, the baillie was dressed entirely in black, save for the plain white collar at his neck. The slight stoop to his shoulders and the ever-watchful eyes gave him something of the aspect of a carrion crow watching its prey. He addressed me without turning his head. ‘You have joined us at last, Mr Seaton. Evil has been at work here.’ He glanced slightly in my direction. ‘You were abroad late last night?’

‘Late. Late enough.’ I walked the length of the room to my desk.

The baillie was ever alive to the possibility – probability – of evil in the doings of his fellow townsmen, but I knew as I looked again into the face of the dead man that on this occasion at least, he was right. The eyes of Patrick Davidson were frozen in a grotesque comprehension of what was happening to him. There could be no doubt: this had been no natural death, no accidental consequence of too much bad drink. Some external human agency had been employed in the ending of this earthly existence. I spoke my thoughts. ‘Poison.’