The Redemption of Alexander Seaton (31 page)

I myself had no notion of Patrick Davidson as a message from God. In his short time in our burgh he had gathered plants, drawn maps and courted a girl. There had been no public speeches, no preaching, no giving of admonition or warning by him. No passing on of messages. And yet I could not mock the old man’s fears.

‘But you, Gilbert, you have nothing to answer for, you who do only good to friend and stranger alike. Whatever has brought this visitation of darkness upon our town, it is not you.’

In less than a moment I saw that the words I had intended for comfort aroused only a sudden and real anger. ‘I, nothing to answer for? Who amongst us has nothing to answer for, is without sin? It is not I. What nonsense did you hear preached in Aberdeen? We are all sinners. We are none of us capable of doing the least good thing, unless it be the Lord who ordains it. God destroyed the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, and could find only one good man. If there is one good man here, it is not me.’

If not you, then who, I thought. Who in this town could argue our case in the face of the wrath of the creator? ‘And yet it does not stop you trying,’ I said.

‘As we are commanded to do. And you too, I know, Alexander, you try also to do good as you are commanded to do.’

I could not answer him, and was glad when I was summoned through to the kitchen, to help the doctor bring Edward Arbuthnott back to his comfortless home.

‘How will he fare?’ I asked Jaffray, after we had seen Arbuthnott settled into his own bed under the care of his wife, in whom the advent of a true disaster seemed to have awoken some common sense and, what I had never remarked in her before, affection.

Jaffray pursed his lips. ‘He will be as a man who waits for nothing more than the grave, I fear. Marion was all his hope and joy.’

The door to Jaffray’s consulting room, the scene of last night’s desolation, was shut when we arrived in the house, but I suspected all would be clean and orderly again. The doctor went first to the kitchen, to warn Ishbel that I would be coming for my dinner that night. He wanted proper news
of my trip to the town, and to interrogate me in peace, and there were things I had to ask of him. He emerged from the kitchen and ushered me quietly towards his study. ‘Ishbel is taking it very badly,’ he said, in a low voice. ‘I do not know how it was that I never saw it before, but I think, whether he realises it or not, he has taken her heart. They will let no one in to see him, and though she sends baskets of food up to the tolbooth every day, I do not know whether he gets them.’

‘You have not been allowed in to him?’

‘But once. It was Thomas Stewart who persuaded the provost. The baillie was near beside himself to be let in on the interview, but Stewart said he would come in with me himself and that would be enough.’ Jaffray paused, remembering. ‘And it was enough. He has a quiet authority to him, the notary, that even the baillie cannot question. I think he will sit in the provost’s seat one day.’

We had reached Jaffray’s parlour by now, and mention of the provost had recalled me to my earlier appointment. ‘I cannot wait long,’ I said. ‘I should have seen Walter Watt by now, to report on my business.’

‘Then I will not keep you.’

‘But tell me first,’ I said. ‘How was Charles when you saw him?’

Jaffray sighed deeply. ‘He was … less sanguine than I had hoped to find him. He sees little prospect of success in our endeavours to free him. And I fear he is getting ill.’

‘Any man would get ill in that festering hole.’

‘Indeed. Ishbel’s clean blankets can only do so much against the cold and the damp in that place, and he has been a week now without proper exercise. Being parted from his
music and, strange to say, his pupils, affects him too, I think. I fear he might take a fever and not have the will to defeat it.’ Then a thought came to him that cheered him somewhat. ‘You must see him today though, Alexander. They will surely let you see him?’

‘Have no fear over that,’ I said. ‘They will let me see him or they will know nothing of my business in Aberdeen or at Straloch. But I doubt if there will be much room in the tolbooth after last night.’

‘No. No more in Hell, either,’ Jaffray added bitterly. He opened the door and shouted through the house for some kindling to be brought for his fire.

‘Do you think there is anything in what Mistress Youngson hinted at? That if Charles had not been secure in the tolbooth they would have turned on him last night too?’

Jaffray looked up from his efforts with the fire. ‘I am certain of it. You did not see them at their height, Alexander. They were like a pack of wolves. We had very little warning of it. I was carrying out the examination. Her mother insisted on it – against Arbuthnott’s wishes – but his wife was certain her daughter would never have taken her own life.’

‘And had she? Did you have time to discover that much?’

Jaffray looked at me. ‘I did, and she had not. I am as certain as I can now ever be that she died by the same method as Patrick Davidson, and by the same hand.’

‘How can you know that?’

‘The vomit, the contortions in the face, the signs that paralysis had begun to take hold – they were all the same. And yet I could not get very far, to find better proof, before the baillie burst through the door. I did not understand him at first; I thought he had lost his senses.’ The scene was being
replayed in his mind. ‘ “Jaffray, they are coming. Cover her up. For the love of God, man, they are coming for her!” And before I knew what he was rambling about, the minister and Cardno and a whole mob of them were through the door. They had pushed the lad aside and Ishbel was knocked to the ground. They near trampled the baillie underfoot till they got to me and stopped. They commanded me – the minister did – to leave off my examination and give them her body. I refused. I told them my work was none of their concern and to get out of my house. And then they pushed me aside too. The mob would have had their hands in her very entrails had the minister not started shrieking at them to leave off, lest they be tainted with the witch’s blood. And then at last, I understood. It was the witch-hunt, and the baillie had come to warn me of it. It was over in moments. They had smashed the place up and taken her naked body from the slab and were gone, and the baillie had gone too, to take horse for Boyndie, where the presbytery was meeting, and the moderator, to try to stop them in their madness. And then you came and we were in the state that you found us in.’ He was breathing hard now, and his hands were shaking. The stable boy came in with the kindling for the fire and I saw the bruise on his face from where he had been knocked aside the night before.

‘Will you bring the doctor some of his port wine?’ I asked him. ‘And Adam?’

‘Yes, Mr Seaton?’

‘Are you all right yourself now?’

The boy blinked and bit his lip. ‘Yes, sir. I am fine.’

‘Who was it that hit you?’

‘It was Lang Geordie.’

The same Lang Geordie who had warned Janet and Mary Dawson away from Banff. ‘The beggar man? What had he to do with it all?’

The boy looked at me in surprise. ‘It was him who was first through the door, sir. After the baillie and before the minister. They say in the town that it was Lang Geordie who first set up the cry of witch.’

After he had come with the wine and gone again, I asked Jaffray something that it shamed me to ask, but which I had to know.

‘Do you think she was, James?’

‘What?’

‘Do you think Marion Arbuthnott was a witch?’

He got up heavily and stood looking out through the window to his garden. ‘No. She was not a witch: she was a young girl with a knowledge of herbs and flowers, who was prettier, and more intelligent than most of the girls of her age, and who did not care to waste her time on mixing with them. She was the companion and friend instead of the wife of the provost, and she took up with a boy who had been here and left to travel to mysterious lands. And that was more than this town would allow.’

Yet still I could not leave it. ‘But why then did she go to the wise woman of Darkwater? Not only with Patrick Davidson, but alone herself, after he was dead?’ A silence hung where there had never before been silence between us.

‘Did you get her to speak to you, James, after his death?’

‘Yes,’ he conceded at last. ‘Just the one time, she spoke to me, but there was nothing she said that touched on our business or Charles’s.’

I had never seen him like this before, and was not convinced
that he was not keeping something from me. ‘What did she tell you, James?’

The doctor did not turn to look at me when he replied. ‘There are things that are no longer of this world – that it is only for the dead to know.’

It was with heavy steps and a heavier heart that I climbed Strait Path to the Castlegate where the provost’s house was to be found. He had left word at the tolbooth that he could not wait longer on me there and had to go home to his wife. I had little inclination now to waste further time and effort on his errands, and little interest, if truth were told, in the question of his nephew’s maps and papist plots. There were greater dangers, greater evils being made manifest before us as we woke and walked and slept in this very town than anything that threatened from without or in the future. And horrible as the death of Patrick Davidson had seemed to begin with, it was worse now, and perhaps there would be worse to come. What Charles had most feared had come to pass. Marion Arbuthnott was dead and that death was part of the chain that had begun with that of Patrick Davidson.

The burgh, as far as I could see, was returning to its usual state and rhythm of life, the only sign of last night’s debauch being the whiff of smoked wood the wind carried with it. But perhaps, as Gilbert Grant had hinted, such perversions had always been lurking in the hearts of my fellow townsmen, never far beneath the surface of their neighbourliness and godliness. How easily the good neighbours had taken up the call of Lang Geordie, an idle beggar, a masterless man, usually feared and reviled. How ready they had been to follow the
lead of one they would gladly otherwise have seen hounded from the burgh. I banged on the door of the provost’s house, the noise loud and echoing in the empty street.

Walter Watt himself opened the door to me. He had a dishevelled air and his eyes were shot through with redness from lack of sleep. He also carried with him the smell of smoke from last night. I realised the man had not yet been to his bed, and I felt a little shamefaced.

‘I am sorry I did not come to meet with you at the appointed time.’

He waved away my apology as he left me to shut the door behind myself. ‘I would not have had the leisure to see you much earlier than now anyway. I have been busy with the baillie and the dean of guild most of the morning.’

‘The baillie is recovered, then?’ I asked in surprise. I had not thought to ask Jaffray about his patient of last night.

He eyed me shrewdly. ‘The baillie is a man driven. Where others would have buckled and collapsed, he sustains himself on a determination not of woman born. I would have no fears for the baillie.’

‘The dean of guild, last night, I did not notice …’ again my voice trailed away. I did not know which side the leader of all our burgh’s craftsmen had taken.

The provost took my meaning straight away, though. ‘He was with us, thank God. If he had not been, we would be in a worse case than we are already in.’

I thought of the quietly industrious burgh I had passed through that morning. ‘You think the commerce of the town will suffer?’ I said.

He smiled at me, but there was no humour in his eyes. ‘You are a man of learning, Mr Seaton, but a craftsman’s son
also. You must know that nothing passes within the burgh that does not in some manner affect trade and good government. And, I would suspect, your mind was much on other matters this morning. Did you, for instance, pass the coopers’ yard?’

I confessed that I had not.

‘How many of the baxters were calling their wares in the marketplace this morning? And were you, by chance, out by the tannery? Can you smell them?’ Sometimes, with the wind blowing from the west, the nauseating smells of the tanners’ work were wafted down to the burgh itself, and could be caught in the air and in the throat. But not today. The provost was watching me and saw that I began to understand.

‘Half the tanners are in the tolbooth. With three of the baxters. Master and apprentice alike. Most of the coopers, along with the chandlers and God knows how many of the domestic servants in the burgh, as well as two or three merchants whose names would surprise you, have been parcelled out between the laird of Banff’s strong room and the castle dungeon. Had the moderator and his brethren been half an hour later, the back of the burgh would have broken under the strain. It was curbed with scarcely more minutes to spare.’ He looked at me and spoke with a coldness that sent a shiver through my body. ‘They were at the point of going after the living as well as the dead. Your friend Charles Thom would not have survived the night, had their madness been allowed to grow. And then we would have had more murderers on our hands than all the dungeons in Banff can hold. The town is quiet today, yes, but it is not at rest.’

‘And how will you act?’ I asked, for it was plain that no other man in Banff could guide the affairs of the town out of the morass they had fallen into.

He rubbed a wearied hand across his brow. ‘Oh, the most of them will come before the baillie court in the morning. There will be fines to pay, and reparations to be made – to the doctor’s house, and the marketplace and other things damaged last night – though God knows nothing can be done for Arbuthnott himself. Then they will be passed on to what remains of the kirk session, for more fines and public penance, and then they will be left to go about their work. No good will come of creating more resentments.’

I had hoped for better revenge than this for Marion Arbuthnott and her father. ‘They would have got worse for stealing a pig or slandering a shrewish wife.’

The provost took little offence at this remark. ‘Oh, do not misunderstand me, Mr Seaton: the ringleaders will be appropriately dealt with. According to their crime and to their place, they will be dealt with. The minister will be put out of his pulpit. He will never preach within the bounds of this presbytery again. He will answer to his brethren, and there can be no doubt but that he will be deprived.’ It was evident that the thought gave him no little satisfaction.