The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

NINE The King’s College

My sleep was fitful and filled with nightmares. Several times through the night I found myself awake, listening in the darkness to sounds of the sleeping house. Each time I slipped back into the realm of sleep only to find myself in some new place of terror, with an unseen assailant awaiting me. Always I was in chains – under the altar of a ruined church; in a vault filled with the dead, my own dead; at my desk in Banff, with the cold hands of Patrick Davidson clasped to my wrist. In each dream the terror came closer till I could almost smell the warmth of human flesh. At the last, I thought I caught a sight, a glimpse only, of the face of my assailant. When I awoke I could not tell who it had been. I did not sleep again after that, but lay in the darkness for long hours, while the town bell tolled the stages of the night. Before six, I rose and threw some water over my face. I looked out over the garden but little stirred: the animals were at their rest; the cock had not yet crowed.

I took a spill to the still glowing embers in the hearth and lit the candle by my bedside. From the small kist at the foot of my bed I took out the letter and turned it over in my hands. It was addressed to Walter Watt, Provost of Banff, and sealed by the ring of George Jamesone. Turn it a hundred or a thousand times, yet nothing could be seen of what was written inside. This pastime of espionage was new to me, but I was certain that no great intrigues and treacheries could be drawn up in so short a time, no message of any great import given in the few lines I had seen Jamesone scribble.

I put the letter back in the kist and threw on my outer clothing. Down in the kitchen all was warm and busy. Elizabeth was not yet up, but William was already at his breakfast and giving his instructions for the day, principally that the mistress should not be allowed to over-work and should be made to rest.

‘Have no fear, master, she’ll not get the better of me.’ The old manservant had due respect for his master, and love too. The mistress that had once been a kitchen maid was no match for his benign dictatorship of the house.

When William looked up to greet me I saw at once that he had slept little better than I had. ‘I see we have been dreaming the same dreams,’ he said.

‘May God forbid that you or any other should have the dreams that I had last night.’ I sat down and accepted the bowl of hot porridge that the serving girl offered me. William bade the girl go see to the goats, but to his houseman he said nothing.

‘Have you found any answers, after the events of last night?’

I shook my head. ‘I have questions, more questions, but few answers.’

He broke a piece of bread from the loaf on the table and smeared some butter on it. ‘You have no idea who it might have been that the women saw as they carried Patrick Davidson to the schoolhouse?’

‘None. Well, no. That is a lie. I am over-laden with ideas. By the time the clock had struck four this morning there was not a soul in Banff I did not suspect.’

William smiled. ‘Aye. For all my exhortation of you to tell her nothing of all this, I was hard put myself not to waken Elizabeth and ask her her views on the matter. For the whores to be tolerated so long and only now to be banished, forced to flee for fear of their lives, can have little to do with the nature of their profession. They must indeed have seen the murderer – and been seen by him. But who could take the risk of sending a warning message to them by a known vagrant?’

‘I do not know, but I suspect it may have been Lang Geordie, or one of his band, who was used to call Jaffray away to Findlater on the night of the murder.’

‘I think you are right,’ said William. ‘Unless it was the beggar man himself who killed the apprentice?’ He said this more in hope than expectation, and offered no argument when I disagreed with the idea.

‘Poison would not be Lang Geordie’s style. A knife in the back in a dark alleyway, and then being left to bleed in the gutter – that would have been Patrick Davidson’s fate at the hands of Lang Geordie or his men.’

‘Aye,’ said William, ‘the poison is the thing. And then the maps, and Marion Arbuthnott’s prescience of some evil to befall her father’s apprentice.’ He rubbed the heels of his hands into his eyes, as if to gouge the confusion from them. ‘What sense is to be made of it all?’

I swallowed the last spoonful of my porridge. ‘I do not know. These questions and others have been troubling me the whole night. But I mean to make sense of them, to make a start at least. You have business this morning?’

He nodded. ‘Yes, but I shall be here before twelve, and then we can walk up to the King’s College to take our dinner with John and Matthew before you must go to your appointment with Principal Dun.’ He paused. ‘You are still happy to meet with our friends again?’

When William had first received my letter telling him of my plans to make this trip to Aberdeen, and asking if I might lodge with him, he had taken it as a sign that I had emerged from the great black tunnel of despair that I had hidden myself in since my disgrace. He had written back to me almost instantly, suggesting that we should seek out some old friends of our student days who were to be in the Old Town at the time of my visit. My first impulse had been to say no, I could not face it, but Jaffray had dissuaded me from being so hasty. Now the meeting no longer filled me with dread. Indeed, the thought of seeing those friends again gave me some pleasure. ‘I will be glad to see them,’ I said. ‘But as for the morning, I mean to use it to examine your uncle’s notebooks. Jaffray is sure that if the flower used to poison Patrick Davidson is to be found, it will be found there.’

‘Then you must use my study. The light there is the best in the house, and it is the room furthest from the kitchen, so you will have peace. What these women find to gossip and cackle about the whole day long, I do not know. I am sure old Duncan only pretends at deafness to save himself having to listen to them. Is that not right, Duncan?’

‘I could not tell you, master. I have the deafness in one ear,’ said the old man, with a sly smile. ‘I’ll have the girl set a fire in your study for Mr Seaton here. The room will be cold at this hour of the morning.’ And he went off in search of the kitchen girl, who was still out at the goats.

‘You are a good master, William,’ I said to my friend. ‘Your servants are fond of you, and would do much for you, I think.’

‘I am very fortunate. But it is beyond even Duncan’s power to keep Elizabeth at rest. He and the girl do all they can, but the time is soon coming when she will need more help, and I fear she will not take it.’

‘Do you really fear so much for her?’

He sighed and put down his bread. ‘Aye, and with cause. She was ill, early this winter past, very ill, with a fever. She hardly swallowed a morsel – a bit of thin soup, little more – for nigh on three weeks. Sometimes she was so far in the fever she hardly knew my face. Dun had done all he could for her and I was on the point of sending for Jaffray when, thank God, she started to mend.’

‘But she is well now?’

He gestured helplessly. ‘She was never strong, and she has not the strength even that she had before her illness. The pregnancy is hard on her. I pray God morning and night that she will survive the birth.’

‘And the child, too.’

He looked at me sharply. ‘Oh, do not mistake me, Alexander. I love that child in her belly already, but at what price might I become a father? And then she insists she will feed the bairn herself. She will not listen to sense on the matter, Alexander; but she will not have the strength or the milk to nurse her own child. I am at a loss to know what to do with her.’

But I was not. An inspiration came to me; a gift from God in my mind: Sarah Forbes. ‘William, I think I may have an answer. We will talk on the road to the Old Town.’

He looked at me with curiosity but little optimism. ‘All right then, Alexander. I will see you after noon.’ And still with furrowed brow he took his hat and left on his morning’s business.

I spent the next few hours lost in wonder at the notebooks of James Cargill, William’s uncle. I had fancied – and I think Jaffray had too in the throes of his enthusiasm – that I would carry a small, neatly bound book back to Banff with me for the study of the doctor and the apothecary. The moment I stepped into William’s study I was disavowed of this notion. On the desk, Duncan had placed an old leather kist with a curved lid; beside it was a key. Duncan had been Dr Cargill’s servant before he had been William’s. I knew by the reverence with which he turned the key in the lock that these papers were to him a treasure more valuable than jewels. He opened the lid and let his hand rest briefly on a book on top, then moved aside for me.

‘The doctor’s most valuable books are in the Marischal College library now, but these papers have not been touched these thirteen years. Have a care of them.’

‘I will,’ I promised the old man, and, satisfied, he left.

I set to work immediately, lifting books or bundles out one at a time and trying to put them in order. There was no index, no catalogue, and indeed no apparent order in which the items had been set in the chest. At length I fixed on chronology as my best means of arranging the items and after some little time had the notebooks and bundles of letters and papers set out before me in the order they had been written. Jaffray had suggested that the colchicum would be most likely to have been sketched at the time of Cargill’s residence at Montbéliard. Consequently, I began with the first of his notebooks from 1596. The work was meticulous – the hand a fine italic and the abbreviations precise. The drawings were as detailed and careful and exact as any artist might have done, the colours rendered in words as well as Jamesone could have rendered them in paint. Not all was in Latin – true, the scientific and geographical detail was in clear and exact academic language – but much of what accompanied it was written in the Scots tongue. Had I not been engaged on such pressing and important work, I could have spent many contented hours reading through the journals of the student days abroad of James Cargill. I resolved that once I had found what I was looking for, I would ask William to allow me to take three or four of the notebooks back to Banff.

It was towards the end of the third book that I found it at last: colchicum mortis, the plant that brought death. Cargill had sketched and labelled every aspect of it from seed to petal. Every detail of every part of the plant was drawn with what could only have been a very great effort at accuracy, and the moment I saw the sketch, colourless though it was, of the plant in flower, I knew I had seen it before. I had seen its globe-like head, large and yet delicate above its narrow, dark, strap-like leaves. The description in Scots given by Cargill of its colour was perfect. ‘The petals of the plant in flower,’ he wrote, ‘are like the pale grey blue of the winter sky over the northern sea after it has snowed.’ It was just that, exactly. And he wrote too of the terrible properties of this exquisite flower, the poison from its seeds that would send a man into convulsions before paralysing him; the certainty of death. He finished his account with, ‘Found only in the mountain passes between Basel and Montbéliard. Not known to be transported or to endure elsewhere. Dei Gratia.’ But Cargill’s God, like mine, had been minded to change his blessing, and the awful, beautiful plant had found a Scottish sanctuary and was growing somewhere in Banff. I knew, for I had seen it. I had seen it in the hand of a woman. But where, in whose hands, should every beat of my heart depend on it, I could not remember.

I breathed deep and screwed my eyes tight shut, trying to force the memory from the recesses of my mind. It would not come. I got up and began to pace about the room, to look out of the window at the business of the street outside, to stare into the flames of the fire, but still it would not come. I pictured every woman I knew, put the flowers into her hand, but every time the face went blank and I could see nothing, discern nothing. I searched my awful dreams of the last night for assistance, but none would come. I prayed aloud, but my words echoed unanswered in the empty room. The face was blank, and the hand began to fade away. The case was presently hopeless, and would not be mended here, at this hour, in this room. Frustration, then fatigue crept over me. It wanted two hours yet till William was to return from his morning’s business. I returned all but the one, special journal to the leather kist, and returned to my room to sleep the sleep that had eluded me in the night.

William had been glad of the walk up to the King’s College, glad of the chance to leave the confines of town for a while, if only for the neighbouring burgh not two miles up the road. It was a fine afternoon, and the schoolchildren of Aberdeen had taken gladly to their afternoon’s play at the links and on the King’s Meadows. I waited until we were beyond the Gallowgate port and past Mounthooly before I told William of my idea that Sarah Forbes might alleviate the coming burdens on Elizabeth’s strength. He listened carefully, quietly, without making the objections I had half-expected, even from him. For a moment after I had finished he said nothing, deep in thought, and then, ‘I think it may be possible that it would work, Alexander. I think it just possible that she would agree to it.’ He continued walking and then stopped. ‘You can obtain the relevant testimonials?’ I assured him that I could. ‘Then I shall clear the way here. I doubt there will be many objections from council or session. I will win the day.’

‘If Elizabeth will allow it.’

William affected a look of mock indignation. ‘Do you suggest that I am not master in my own home, Mr Seaton? I wish it and it will be so!’ We both laughed, and I think for each of us, the rest of the journey was made with a lighter heart. The burden of concern for his wife weighed less heavy on him, and I had a feeling within me of having done good.

We were still laughing as we walked through the door of the inn. Matthew Lumsden and John Innes were already there, at our favoured table between the front window and the side door of the inn. It had been a useful spot for Archie to watch and escape from, should anyone he did not wish to encounter be spied coming up the High Street. First Matthew, and then John got up and embraced me. ‘It has been too long, Alexander, too long.’

I took off my hat and sat down on my old seat by the door. ‘It has indeed, and the fault is all mine.’

‘Old friends need not speak of fault. Who amongst us is blameless?’

I studied the kind, open face. ‘You will never fall as I have done, John. You will never feel such shame you cannot look your friends in the eye.’

He laid his hand over mine. ‘“And thou mayest remember, and be confounded and never open thy mouth any more because of thy shame, when I am pacified toward thee for all that thou hast done, saith the Lord God.”’

‘Ezekiel chapter six, verse nine,’ I said. Matthew sighed audibly and slurped his beer.

John smiled. ‘I knew you could not have forgotten. That you have felt such shame is testament to God’s grace in you, his forgiveness.’

‘I see you are still too good, John,’ I said.

‘Too good by half,’ said Matthew as he beckoned the serving girl over to us. ‘They will make a bishop of him yet, if he is not careful.’

‘Hold your tongue, Matthew,’ said John, blushing a deeper red than was the hair on his head.

‘You still regent in the college here, then?’

John nodded as he took another draught of his ale. ‘Aye. I have the second class now, but the competition from the Marischal College in the New Town threatens our numbers.’

‘Pah,’ snorted Matthew contemptuously.

John put down his tankard. ‘Pah! Will not do, Matthew. What is your objection?’

Matthew had never been one for thinking before he spoke, but now he took a moment before his reply. ‘My objection is that the very place was founded as an affront to the Gordons. The Earl Marischal gave church land that was not his to give–’

‘Matthew,’ cautioned William.

‘That was not his to give,’ continued the Marquis of Huntly’s man, ‘to the burgh of Aberdeen in order to curry favour with the magistrates and wrest influence in the town from the marquis’s family. But worse than that, he planned to set it up as a seminary more narrow and joyless than Geneva. Thank God the old devil was too mean to match his endowment to his schemes.’

‘The earl’s intentions were nothing darker than to promote necessary learning in our corner of Scotland, where this college here had taken so long to throw off the slough of Rome. And there were many here who refused to take up the new methods of learning brought in from France by Andrew Melville.’

The very mention of Melville’s name was, I knew, guaranteed in itself to provoke an outburst of fury from Matthew. I was not to be disappointed. ‘Melville! Presbyterian upstart! Impertinent, disloyal–’

I feared for him, so evident to any who cared to listen was his sympathy with Rome.

‘And yet we are all friends,’ said William, ‘and will always be so, I hope, for all our differences. Let us pray God that matters of politics and religion may never come between us.’

‘Amen to that,’ chorused my friends. Our conversation had been drifting into dangerous waters, and I had learned in Banff that there were unseen currents in such waters. Looking around the inn, no Baillie Buchan, certainly, no rabid session clerk came into view, but who was to say that others were not to be similarly feared? I steered the conversation to safer ground, concerned suddenly that my friendship with Matthew might be used against us both. It had been agreed between William and myself that nothing should be said before the other two about the troubles in Banff, and especially that no mention should be made to Matthew of my commission to Straloch. His loyalty to Huntly had always made him rash.

The remainder of our meal passed in merry reminiscence of past deeds and some contemplation of future hopes. For my own part I would have been happy to listen to them all – William knew this and I think John saw it too, but Matthew would not have it. He was determined to draw from me some optimism, some plan for myself. He had never had much time for the ideas of the predestinarians. He had fallen himself many times, and confession before a mass priest in one of their many safe houses in Strathbogie had salved him of further conscience about it. He would not allow that my fall in the eyes of God and my disgrace before men had been inevitable, that the evil was inherent to me. Thus fallen, I knew I was counted amongst the damned.

‘It is nonsense, Alexander, and you must know it is. What? Because you took a girl to bed – and I have no doubt that is what is at the heart of the matter, but I will not press you on who she was – you have revealed yourself to be of the eternally damned? Well, if that be the case, my friend, you will find yourself the most feared man in the country, for why should you not now revel in your damnation? You are free now to murder, rape and rob without fear of further punishment in the afterlife since your course is already set.’

There was no disputing with Matthew when he was in this humour, so I did not attempt to. I only said, ‘I still have a conscience though, Matthew. I still know the law of God, and it binds me not to treat my fellow man with contempt in this life.’ Even as the words were in my mouth, the image of Patrick Davidson came again to my mind. ‘I shall try to do what I can in this world, come what might in the next.’

Matthew put down his tankard, pleased. ‘That is all I wanted to hear, Alexander. A lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth is a waste of an able man. Be mortified in your conscience if you must, but do not throw away the gifts God gave you because of it. There is a passage in Joel, is there not?’

John came to his assistance, ‘“And rend your heart, and not your garments, and turn unto the Lord your God: for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and of great kindness, and repenteth him of the evil.”’ Sometimes it was too easy to forget that beneath Matthew’s bluster lay a simple but firm humanity. How could I ever have hoped to be a minister, when I was such a poor judge of even my own old friends?

A little before two our party broke up. A group of Huntly’s men arrived, bound for the South, and Matthew was to ride with them on the marquis’s business. William was returning home to Elizabeth for the afternoon. John and I walked over to the college together. He, who had always been gentle and diligent, knew he would never be a bishop. He had been a hard-working student and was a competent teacher, but he did not have the sharpness of mind needed to distinguish him from so many others. Yet John was not ambitious, and was content to study and to teach within the safety of the college. I had used to wonder at his lack of ambition, but now I believe I envied it.

We were soon at the entrance to the college, beneath the chapel’s great crown tower, symbol of our nation’s now slumbering imperial hopes. We went in under the gateway and John pointed out to me a door across the quadrangle where Dr Dun could be found. He embraced me again, and I promised that it would not be so long until we saw each other once more, then he hurried off to take his afternoon class.

I found myself a little nervous as I approached Dr Dun’s door. He would know little of me, I hoped, but I knew much of him. Principal of the Marischal College, he was Mediciner here at King’s as well, a friend and support to the bishop in his efforts to reform the college and stamp out abuses where they might be found. In addition to these already heavy responsibilities, he carried out a busy medical practice amongst the wealthy landed families in the countryside about. He was all that Jaffray might have been, had my old friend not been content to fight his daily fight against pain, malnourishment and disease in our own small town.

A student showed me to Dr Dun’s room, where I was greeted by a tall and spare-looking man of little more than forty. He dismissed the student and bade me sit down while he finished off the piece of work he was engaged upon. After a few moments he looked up. ‘Now, Mr Seaton, you are here on the matter of the bursaries?’

Thankful for the lack of preliminaries, I launched gratefully into my well-rehearsed speech. ‘I have a young scholar of great promise in Banff, who, through his mother, has a claim to one of Dr Liddel’s bursaries at the Marischal College. I know there may well be several boys competing for the benefit. I am anxious that he should not be disadvantaged through some want on my part. In particular, I would like to know the standard of Greek that is required of petitioners for the bursaries. My own scholars are at an elementary stage in their Greek studies, but I am confident that with extra tuition I might be able to make up any deficiency.’

Dun smiled broadly and put down the pipe he had been turning over in his hands. ‘Mr Seaton, if your scholars have any Greek at all, then they will be at no disadvantage against the town boys. We have, of course, excellent masters, but they have a great press of duties upon them and do not always attend to the school as much as might be required. Yet schooling is the most important work our kingdom has to offer. If we are to build the godly Commonwealth here in Scotland, schooling must be our foundation.’ I had heard this before, in many quarters, but Dun spoke with true conviction. If there were more such men the great project of our reformers might have a chance. He got up and lit his pipe from the fire. ‘Tell me, do you have another occupation, or aspirations, as well as your schoolmastering in Banff?’

‘I have no other occupation,’ I said, with, I hoped, sufficient finality that he should not press me further.

Dun, however, was not to be put off. ‘And aspiration?’

I shifted in my seat. ‘Whatever aspirations I might once have had are finished with.’

Still he persisted. ‘You had some other calling?’

There was little point now in further prevarication; he should have what he was asking for. ‘I had hopes once of being a minister. At my final trials I was accused of a wrongdoing I could not deny. The passage of time will not right that wrong. I will not recommence on my trials for the ministry.’

He returned to his desk, the tips of his fingers pressed against one another. ‘And you have found another calling now, as a schoolteacher?’

It would perhaps have been politic to have obliged him, but I was resolved to be done with such dishonesty. ‘Schoolmastering will never be a calling to me, but it is what I did before, while I was a divinity student on my trials, and it is something I can do; a man must eat. And I know, as you will tell me, that it performs a necessary role in society, and for that, and for the affection I bear my scholars, I do it as well as I am able, but for myself I have no great love for the task and derive no great satisfaction from it.’

‘I am sorry to hear that, Mr Seaton, for I think that a schoolmaster who will travel fifty miles for the sake of one pupil, who takes the time to teach Greek to the sons of a small burgh such as Banff, and of whose proficiency in many disciplines I had already heard, has much to offer. If, as you say, you will never return to the pursuit of your first calling, it is a great pity that you derive little comfort from your second. For myself, I do not believe that God gives a man such gifts as you have been given only to condemn him to repeated failures.’ He did not call for his servant to show me out, but rose and accompanied me out into the quadrangle himself. ‘The trials for the bursary take place at the end of June, when I trust we will meet again. May God go with you until then.’ He turned away and I watched him disappear beyond the cloister into the darkness of the college. I walked over to the well and drew up some water. It was cool and clear, and the taste of it brought me back to this place several years ago, when the future had been a realm of possibility, and the past a thing not considered.

I finished the ladle of water I had drawn from the bucket and was about to move on when I heard footsteps coming towards me from the college gateway. I knew those footsteps. Had I not stopped to indulge my thirst I could have been away out of this place by now – the college gateway was not ten yards from the road. Instead I was here, in the centre of my gilded past, with no means of avoiding the eye of the one man in the whole of Aberdeen, new town and old, whom I had most wished not to meet. I looked up, waiting for the reckoning to come. The face coming towards me broke into a smile of genuine joy; a hand reached out and grasped mine.

‘Alexander Seaton, it is truly you? I had not thought to see you here again, though I have often wished and prayed for it. What has brought you back to us? Why did you not tell me you were coming? Have you been waiting on me long? I have been kept busy the whole morning on college business with my father.’ Dr John Forbes of Corse, son of the bishop and Professor of Divinity in the King’s College of Aberdeen, the most learned man I knew, stood before me, his face filled with affection. He was a man of the deepest spirituality and had had greater hopes for me than even I had ever done. There can have been few teachers more disappointed by the failure of a pupil than he had been by mine.

So shocked was I at the sight of him there that, for a few moments, I could find no words to answer him. Nevertheless, I think my face told him my thoughts, for his hand fell away and his smile faded. ‘Alexander, you have not come to see me, have you?’

‘No,’ I replied, my voice dry. ‘I had business with Dr Dun, about the bursaries, and had to come and meet him here.’ I registered the hurt in his eyes and cursed my pride. ‘I am sorry; I should have told you I was coming, but I was …’ There was little point in lying to this man who for four years had been my spiritual guide and who had kept the fervour of my calling burning within me. He deserved at least my honesty. ‘I was ashamed,’ I said.

Dr Forbes well knew the cause of my shame. Astonishment at my failure to secure the approval of the Presbytery of Fordyce had given way to fury, and he and his father had both written to the brethren, demanding an explanation. The brethren had responded obliquely – for they had not the information to do otherwise, and had directed both the bishop and his son to myself and to my Lord Hay of Delgatie. Bishop Forbes had written then to Delgatie, his son to me. His lordship, I was given to understand, had given a plain and truthful account of the grounds of his objection to my person and to my candidature for the ministry. I had written that whatever the family of Hay should accuse me of, of that was I guilty, before God and man. Urgent letters of friendship and entreaty to turn to him for spiritual counsel had flown from the divinity professor’s rooms at the King’s College of Old Aberdeen to my attic room in the schoolhouse of Banff. None had been answered. Now here we stood, face to face, no hiding behind silence.

Dr Forbes stood squarely before me. ‘There is a time for shame, and a time for repentance.’ His voice was measured, calm. ‘You were right to feel shame for your deeds, but to hold fast to that shame at the expense of all else is an indulgence. You were carnal – who among us has not been tempted, has not fallen? You betrayed the trust of a friend and patron. Ungrateful and graceless indeed, but who amongst us has not been guilty of ingratitude, of gracelessness in our behaviour?’

I looked at the man. How was I to believe that he might ever have been led into such behaviour, such immorality as I had? He leant against the wall of the well, tired-looking now, his eyes searching mine for an understanding I was struggling to find. ‘You may have sinned, Alexander, but remember the words of the prophet: He waits to be gracious.’

I felt the resilience seeping from me. ‘I have tried, believe me, doctor, I have tried. I have looked for God, called on God, but found myself only in a wilderness.’

He spoke gently, quoting Ezekiel. ‘“For my gracious Lord was pleased to let me see, that, by leading me into this wilderness, and pleading with me there, would he bring me into the bond of the Covenant.” In all your years here, Alexander, you grappled with and mastered the most abstruse theological propositions. You could argue any point almost as well as I could myself. For all that though, God’s greatest gift in you was the pure faith with which He graced you. It was that above all that I thought would make you the finest of ministers. I have no doubt that you could still argue with insight and exactitude whichever point I might throw your way, but I fear you have forgotten the most important lesson of all, the promise of that Covenant.’

I looked at him, expectantly. He answered my unasked question. ‘The Son of God came into this world to save sinners such as you and me. That is the great Covenant. Do not ask me ever to believe, Alexander, that you have grown so arrogant as to think your sin greater than His sacrifice.’

I could not look at him. ‘Take thought on this,’ he said. ‘For friendship’s sake promise me that you will. Come back and see me soon. We will work on this together. Never be ashamed to call me friend.’ He clasped my hand and then left me.

My last night with William and Elizabeth was an evening of quiet contentment. Elizabeth had, to our great relief, at length agreed to my suggestion for easing her present and coming burdens. She asked many questions, and I felt that only the whole truth, as far as I knew it, would be worth telling to her, so I did. Anger and compassion vied within her as I told her Sarah Forbes’s tale, and at the end of it it was all that William and I could do to prevent her from setting out there and then to put the matter to rights.

‘Alexander will see to it all on Monday,’ William assured her. ‘All will be well; only have patience.’

I had much to prepare for the following day’s journey, and was glad, for once, of an excuse to retire early. As I lay in my bed in William’s house, my candle snuffed out and the shutters still open, I looked up at the northern stars, at the majesty of the works of God. They challenged me, as Matthew and Dr Forbes had challenged me, to leave off from my self-imposed indulgence of penitence and sloth, and to set forth once again with purpose on this earthly life. My last thought, before I was finally conquered by sleep, was that I was looking forward to the day to come.