The Redemption of Alexander Seaton (32 page)

‘And the session clerk?’ He gave a shallow laugh. ‘James Cardno? Cardno also is finished. The doorkeeper who guarded him last night tells me he has near lost his wits.’ That I could well believe: the man I had seen inflaming the mob last night had been on the very brink of insanity. ‘Cardno is very like to find himself banished the burgh. Aye, and then the session will be broken,’ continued the provost. ‘The power of the minister and session in this burgh will not again challenge
stability and order as it did last night, and as it has threatened to do many times before now.’

And that, I now understood, was what mattered to him, what had mattered to him last night. What had driven him last night was not sentiment, man-made or God-given, for Marion Arbuthnott or her father, but for the burgh of Banff itself.

‘And what of the baillie?’ I asked. I knew he would not be sorry to see the back of the Reverend Guild, but the provost hoped for too much if he thought this would be enough to make the baillie quiet in the matter of kirk discipline.

‘The baillie is immovable, you are right; but yet his hand might be weakened long enough, the complexion of the session and council changed enough at the outcome of this business, that it will not matter.’ The provost spoke these last words to himself almost as much as he did to me. I wondered how many years he had waited for this moment, for the day when he would truly wrest control of the burgh of Banff from those who claimed to be the magistrates of God.

‘And what of Lang Geordie?’ I asked.

The provost looked at me quizzically and repeated the name.

‘The beggar. The big, bearded cripple. He is the head of all who inhabit the codroche houses at the far side of the burgh, near the Sandyhill Gate.’

‘I know who he is,’ said Watt. ‘But what has the beggar man to do with the matter?’

I told him of Lang Geordie’s part as I had heard it. The provost’s expression became a little more thoughtful. ‘I had not realised; I had not seen him at the burning.’ I realised
that I had not either, but there was no reason to doubt the truth of the stable boy’s tale. The provost was nodding. ‘It may well be that he was used to rouse the rabble, to add the fear of violence to whatever the minister and Cardno fermented with their words, but I think he was of little moment in last night’s proceedings. He could be fined, but where would be the point in that? He has nothing to pay a fine without he steals it from another. Lang Geordie, as you said yourself, is the leader of all the shiftless, worthless, idle and debauched creatures in this burgh. He knows he – they – are here on sufferance, and that if they come too often to the attention of the authorities they will be suffered no more. So, they go about their shiftless business with a sort of discretion, within rules that they and we understand. They are whoremongers and thieves, I grant you. But they are our whoremongers and thieves, and they will do much to protect their position and their privilege. We have no need to fear incoming hordes of sturdy beggars as long as Lang Geordie and his crew are in the town.’ I saw then that there was a balance in everything, seen and unseen, in the daily life of the burgh, that there was a place for things that might seem to have no place. Still I was not satisfied, but I said no more to Walter Watt of Lang Geordie.

We were in that same hall of the provost’s house that the corpse of Patrick Davidson had briefly rested in just six days ago. It had been a sombre enough place then, but it was worse now: a dead and empty place where a great man paced the floor alone. ‘How is your wife?’ I asked him. I had heard from Jaffray and in Mistress Youngson’s kitchen also that Geleis Guild was disconsolate over the death of her friend and helper, and that the treatment meted out to the corpse of
Marion Arbuthnott was feared to send her from her senses. The children had been sent already to the home of the provost’s sister in Elgin for fear of what they would see or hear next in our burgh. How the young woman would have taken her brother the minister’s involvement in all that had passed, none could guess. The provost’s eyes were empty as he answered me.

‘She is almost beyond the reach of comfort. It should not have gone thus for my wife.’ And as he said so, he could not help looking up at the portrait on the wall. I wondered whether he feared being widowed a second time. I hoped for his sake and for hers that he would not be.

But then the man became the provost and asserted himself once more. ‘And now, Mr Seaton, to business. You saw Straloch?’

I answered that I had and I removed the sealed letter from my pocket. He took it and walked to the window on the south side of the room, where the late morning sunlight was beginning to filter through the dense glass. His eyes moved quickly across the page. Before they had reached the end an air of relief passed over his countenance and he nodded slowly to himself. ‘You have read this, Mr Seaton?’ he asked briskly.

‘No, provost, I have not. The letter is addressed to you. I do know the gist of Straloch’s opinion of the matter, though, and I am glad for it.’

He was watching me carefully. ‘And you trust the man?’

I thought about the quiet conversation in Straloch’s dining hall after I had first gone up to my bed; I thought of the sounds of horsemen leaving in the night, but I had no wish for further distractions or errands for the provost. ‘I trust his
word on this: that if your nephew were any spy, he knew nothing about it before he saw that map.’

‘Then you still think my nephew was a traitor?’

I answered him as honestly as I dared. ‘I am satisfied enough with Straloch’s answer. My concern is to help the living, not to speculate about the dead.’ Yet in truth, it was not complete honesty. Straloch had no knowledge of any planned invasion or the commissioning of Patrick Davidson to draw these maps, but I had seen in his eyes that he was not convinced that such a commission had not been given. He may well have ridden south himself as he had told me he would do, but it was just as likely that his young retainers had ridden at night, and with some urgency, to Strathbogie and the Marquis of Huntly. I was not ready to dismiss the possibility of Patrick Davidson’s treachery as easily as Walter Watt would have had me do. If there had been treachery, then there had been a motive for murder, and its discovery would bring closer the release of Charles Thom, for what interest did he have in treachery and papist plots? I did not like to dwell on the topic in this place and this company, and was glad when the provost turned the conversation to another matter.

‘And did you fulfil my private commission?’

‘To George Jamesone?’

‘The artist. Yes. What response had you from him?’

I drew the second letter out of my cloak. There was no fire in the grate and the place was cold. The provost too still had his outer garments about him. Jamesone’s letter, as I had known, was shorter and pleased Walter Watt less. ‘I see he is now much in demand amongst the great ones, and cannot spare himself long to come to our mean burgh. Ach, well,’
he added, crumpling the letter and throwing it into the empty hearth, ‘perhaps it is not yet the time for paintings, but he will come at length, and it will be there, telling its story, long after we are gone.’ He came away from the window and started to head for the small door at the back of the room which led through to the rear of the house. He turned and nodded towards the main door, dismissing me abruptly. ‘You did your business well and with discretion, Mr Seaton. Do not trouble yourself further in the matter of my nephew. The appropriate authorities will see to their business there. Now I must wash away this pestilent smoke.’

I was glad to see myself out, and free from further obligation to those who had so recently taken me into their trust. I closed the door of the empty hall firmly behind me and stepped out into the midday light of the street. I turned down Water Path to make my way back to the schoolhouse, needing to rest and to think and perhaps even to pray before I commenced my business of the afternoon. At the edge of my vision, for a brief, deceiving moment, I thought I glimpsed a figure flit through the gate in the castle wall. Again I experienced, more strongly now, the sensation that had dogged me since my return to Banff the night before: that I was being watched.

TWELVE

A Homecoming

The ground floor of the tolbooth, usually given over to the payment of taxes and the collection of fines, was packed, heaving with armed men and overworked officials who looked as if they had been there all night. The stench from the crammed cells on the upper floors was beyond the capacity of doors and walls to contain and combined with the lingering smell of smoke that permeated from the outside to create a putrefying miasma that almost overwhelmed me. There was no appearance of anyone being in charge, and so I asked one guard and then another and then another. When the fourth finally told me, I could not at first comprehend what he said. But then I understood – half the town was chained and shackled in those cells, but Charles Thom was not there; he was gone. Charles was gone from the tolbooth, and no one could tell me where he was. ‘He was taken away. By order of the baillie. He was removed in the night.’ This was all the man knew, he swore to it, and his fellow guards claimed to know no more than he did. Charles might be in the cellars of the laird of Banff’s palace, or he might be in the dungeon of the sheriff’s castle – at neither would I be given entry or have my questions answered. At worst – I
hoped it was the worst – he would be out at the Ogilvy stronghold of Inchdrewer, but to ride out there would be to lose time I did not have. A messenger had ridden that morning, at dawn, to Aberdeen, to call back in person the sheriff to sit in judgement upon our burgh. There was no choice for me but to find out Baillie Buchan himself.

The baillie, I knew, lived alone on the upper floors of a mean tenement up a vennel to the west end of High Shore. He had never married, and such house-keeping as he allowed to be done for him was performed by the wizened and mute crone whose son held the feu of the tenement. I had never ventured there before. No one visited the baillie. The vennel was dank and dark, an appropriate place for William Buchan to issue from, as he went on his nightly inspections of our town. It had perhaps not always been a place of such foreboding. Two pairs of initials and a date, 1572, were engraved on the lintel above the door, a statement of hope and faith.

I banged hard on the timber and the chickens pecking in the backyard scattered, squawking at the unheard-of intrusion. It was the crone who came to the door. ‘I must see the baillie, urgently. He is not to be found in the town. Where will I find him?’ She looked at me with pale and watery eyes and nodded, twice, before holding up a bony finger to me, presumably that I should wait, then shutting the door. Two or three minutes later, she reappeared, opened wide the door, and stood back for me to pass. Then she pointed up the stairs and went back to her cooking pot. The mixed odours of fish broth and peat smoke pursued me silently as I ascended to the baillie’s quarters. There was no candle on the stairway and the few small windows of this gable house gave very little light, faced as they were by the solid houses
just a few feet across the vennel. I found my way by groping the spiralling granite of the walls, and came at length to a small doorway opened onto the first landing. A dim and flickering light issued from the gap between door and jamb, and I pushed the door open quietly without knocking. Sitting in a comfortless wooden chair, by the small fire that struggled in the grate, was Baillie William Buchan. Opposite him, in an identical chair, a bowl of the broth at his hand, sat Charles Thom.

‘I had expected you before now, Mr Seaton.’ There was a seriousness to the baillie’s voice; it was without its usual air of suspicion and accusation.

‘I have been … occupied,’ I said, looking at Charles while I spoke to the baillie. I do not know what kind of picture I presented to these two who seemed so much less surprised by my arrival than I was at what I found.

‘As you see, the music master is here now.’ The baillie indicated a bench by the small deal table against the side wall of the room. ‘Will you not also sit, Mr Seaton?’ I sat down and waited, still looking at Charles, who ventured a small smile and then looked down at his feet again. He was thinner; the circles beneath his hazel eyes larger and darker than when I had last seen him a week ago, and there were blemishes, the beginnings of sores, on his skin. Yet his hair was clean and brushed and hung unmatted on his shoulders. He had shaved and was in a clean white shirt and coarse but warm woollen overclothes that I did not recognise as his. They could not have been the baillie’s, for he was a more sparely built man than Charles. I guessed they belonged to the son of the house.

Gaunt though Charles was, he looked, in truth, in better
health than the baillie, who appeared truly ill. His sallow skin, usually taut, seemed to hang from his bones. His eyes were dark shadowed sockets, and his body was hunched and racked with a wrenching cough. I recalled his virtual collapse from his horse last night and what Jaffray had said of his ceaseless activity since the discovery of Patrick Davidson’s body. I remembered, too, the provost’s assertion that he had been up half the night with the baillie in setting the business of the burgh in some sort of order. The man who had been carried to the doctor’s last night should have gone home to his bed and slept. It was plain that the baillie had done neither. Unlike Charles, he had evidently not yet washed or shaved – the first time I had seen him in such a condition – and the reek of smoke hung about him yet, as it had done the provost.

He opened his mouth to speak again, but was taken by a coughing fit. When he had recovered himself, he reached for a wooden beaker of water at his elbow and took a long draught. I did not like this. I did not like the voice that began to whisper to me that I should pity this man, this sick man, this gaoler, inquisitor, spy. ‘I am glad to see you returned to the burgh, Mr Seaton. I had wondered, afterwards, if we had been wise to send you away to Aberdeen at such a time.’

‘Did you fear I would abscond? Baillie, I have nowhere to go.’