The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

ELEVEN Concerning Witches

The ashes still blew about the early morning marketplace. All was quiet. The images and sounds that had haunted me through the night were gone now, altogether gone. Alone, at the bottom of the sodden, lifeless pyre, crouched Edward Arbuthnott. He had no cloak or hat about him, and the wind blew through his clothing without remorse. He held his head in black-streaked hands and the tears still flowed down his cheeks. I walked over to him, conscious of the sound of my footfalls amongst the pools and ashes.

‘Come, Edward, she is not here. She was never here.’

The apothecary glanced up at me and slowly shook his head as if I did not understand. ‘They took her; they burnt her. My own girl, my princess. They burnt her here. Black.’

I took off my cloak and wrapped it around him. ‘She was gone, her soul long gone before they took her from Jaffray’s. She will be buried decently in the kirkyard. They will not triumph over her.’

‘In truth?’

‘In truth,’ I said.

‘And I can take her flowers there.’ He did not resist as I eased him to his feet. He shuffled uncomplainingly forward, like an old woman with no more interest in this world. I would not take him home yet: the hysterics of his wife would be no comfort, do no good to him, and the sight of him in such a condition might well finish her.

Where were the people, all the people who, on any other weekday morning, would have been here? There was not a soul to be seen but myself and my broken companion, and where there was usually bustle and human warmth there was now just silence and desolation. I glanced up at the town clock as I guided Arbuthnott away from the market cross and towards the schoolhouse and Mistress Youngson’s welcoming kitchen. The provost could wait on our meeting, on the letters in my bag another hour or two; I doubted whether he had yet had leisure to remember me or my business in these last days. Certainly, the man I had seen last night rise above the fury of the flames would have little thought of maps or painters.

I had heard the baying of the crowd long before I had seen it. As I ran from Jaffray’s door towards the marketplace, I had felt not that I was getting closer to the mob but it to me. The smell first and then the heat of it wrapped around my throat and stung my eyes as the relentless clamour for the flesh of its victim grew louder in my ears. And when I turned the corner to face the market cross the sight before me froze me where I stood. It was a vision of Hell that John Knox himself could not have conjured. The people of Banff had become one heaving mass of thick, blackened clothes, red-glowing faces, some alive with spittle and foaming at the mouth in their excitement, eyes gleaming and glinting with a desire that was not of God’s sending. The mass, consumed with its own success, pressed in on itself as the eagerness for its prey rose. There was a chanting, a rising chanting, and beyond it shrieking and screaming, worse than the gulls. Through it all there pierced an inhuman wailing, issuing from the throat of Marion Arbuthnott’s father. Gilbert Grant and some other decent men held him back from cleaving to his child as she burned. And she did burn. High, high above the heads of the crowd that fed upon her, her body, naked, the skin of the girl who had been so white as to be almost a ghost in life, burned to a dark and broken black, a gnarled, dry, unspeakable black, the hair on her singeing and crackling and curling and melting, the dead mouth open in a silent scream.

Disgust and horror overwhelmed me. My first instinct was to run from it, but I could not move. My feet were rooted to the ground and I could do nothing but stare, transfixed, at the terror. An arm grabbed mine and shook me from the stupor of revulsion. ‘Alexander! Thank God you are returned safe. Come, man, we must end this.’ Thomas Stewart, the town notary, was dragging me with him around the side of the crowd to the steps of the tolbooth. It was then that I saw Walter Watt. He was there, shouting instructions to the town serjeants and to the laird of Banff’s men who had been put at his disposal. Some other burgesses I saw too there, who had not succumbed to the clamour of the witch-mongers. Of the baillie there was no sign. The town serjeant was throwing out pistols to the men of the watch as the laird’s men drew their own. I, and some others, were handed swords and clubs. Thomas Stewart shouted to us that we were to circle round the crowd, no further one from the other than the length of a man’s arm with outstretched sword. It was hard to hear over the noise of the fire at its sickening work and the rising hysteria of the mob, yet within a short while, the ring was in place. And then a shot rang through the air. Walter Watt stood atop the scaffold cart, the moon now at its fullest clear behind him, the smoke from his pistol rising into the yellow darkness of the night. His eyes shone through the flames and his voice was clear above the clamour. ‘Get back, you curs, you filthy rabble. What court is this? I have your names, every one. You will never work another day, nor sleep another night in this burgh if you do not leave off this Devil’s work!’ He swung his arm, his pistol arm, towards the tolbooth. ‘You will all sweat there before this night is through.’

‘This is God’s work, it is God’s work!’ screamed James Cardno. I had not noticed the session clerk until now, but he too was on a platform, at the right hand of the minister, the Reverend Robert Guild. The clerk’s face was alive with the certainty of his moment; all the days he had waited, watched, taken orders, been humiliated, they had all led to this. The fervour of his certainty lent a gleam to his eyes only glimpsed at before.

The provost laughed. ‘God’s work? You’re the Devil’s whore, Cardno. Get down off there before I have you shot.’ The laughter was real, and it was the laughter of derision.

The session clerk stumbled slightly as if the blow had been real. When he righted himself there was a trace of desperation on his countenance and panic in his voice. ‘God is not mocked! Provost or no, you will burn for your blasphemy! She was a witch! Satan has walked and danced these streets. It will be found out! It will be hidden no more!’

Some members of the crowd had given off their own demented medley to follow the exchange between provost and session clerk, and some now took up their cries again, encouraged by Cardno’s maniacal defiance. Others, though, kept a watchful silence, or started to mumble amongst themselves. I watched the minister, and others in the crowd had turned to look at him too. He had stepped back, once, and then again from Cardno, but he could step no further, for he had reached his platform’s edge. He had no option but to face the crowd, and his brother-in-law. The provost now addressed him directly.

‘What say you, minister? It is time to stop this madness. There are whores yet in the town who would satisfy your lusts – you and all your like – without this barbarity. Remember you were once a man of God.’

This was almost too much for the Reverend Guild, but Cardno took it as mother’s milk, waiting for his master to respond in kind. Robert Guild, however, was not the man to answer such a moment. Sweat rolled from his forehead down his fleshy cheeks. His chest heaved with indignation and fury and impotence. Cardno, though, would not allow it. ‘Tell him, minister, tell him what you know: of the sabbaths, the girl Arbuthnott and the provost’s own nephew at the Elf Kirk, of their nakedness, their calling on the dead! Your own nephew, provost! Tell him.’

The crowd had fallen silent now. No voice was raised, and all that could be heard was the relentless burn and crackle of the fire and the corpse at its heart, with the quiet sobbing of Edward Arbuthnott. Eyes moved from the minister to the provost. Walter Watt’s face was contorted in disgust. ‘So this is what you have peddled, this filth. You … you sorry excuse for a man. That I have put up with you for my wife’s sake all these years. You and your perversions. And you lead these poor idiots with you. All to garner yourself a name.’

The minister was shaking his head. ‘No, it is true. It is all true. There are witches abroad in this town. We none of us know which of our neighbours has lain with the Devil, has ridden the besom at his side. This town will pay, we will all pay dear, for this turning from godliness. The storm was the first sign. Beggars and famine and pestilence will be our lot. And invaders,’ he said quietly, but with a sly glance at the provost. ‘The witches must burn!’

I could see, through the thick smoke and above the heads of the townspeople, that the minister had little faith in the words that fell in desperation from his mouth. The provost had at last openly condemned and abandoned him, and there was no retreat so he had to go forward, although he had neither the wit nor the stomach for it. For James Cardno, though, it was enough. He took up the minister’s words and fed them to the crowd, his voice rising higher and higher until at last it was a screech. ‘They have danced with the Devil; they have ridden the besom. Find out the witches; the witches must burn.’

The blood within me turned cold. There was one girl, one body, lashed to the stake and aflame, but Guild and Cardno spoke of witches. They concerned themselves now not with the dead, but with the living. For the witch whose lifeless body burned before them, there were others, living, breathing, in this town, standing beside them, perhaps. Fearful looks moved from neighbour to neighbour. Each man and woman avoided the eye of any other, for to be caught would be to make oneself vulnerable. Vulnerable to the cry of ‘witch!’ Better to cry out than to be the one so called. I kept my own eyes straight ahead of me and stood my ground. Cardno carried some more with him now – not all, but some. There were those who took up the chant once more, and it was more menacing in its deliberateness than all the chaotic screeching of before. I feared that the provost might yet lose this battle. The chant was rising and several in the crowd were becoming more nervous. I looked to Thomas Stewart, the notary, but he was watching Walter Watt. Watt himself, however, was not looking at the crowd any more. He had turned his back three-quarters on them and was staring up the road behind him, the steep slope of Strait Path. I followed the line of his gaze, as had Thomas Stewart, and saw, approaching rapidly on thunderous hooves, a party of unknown riders, at their head Baillie Buchan.

As they approached, all but the baillie’s horse whinnying in panic at the flames, I began to discern that every one of the front riders was clothed from head to toe in deepest black. This meant only one thing to me, and as they drew closer and their faces were caught in the light of moon and fire, I saw that I was right. The brethren who had witnessed and countersigned my own fall were coming in force to attend the culmination of the witch-hunt of Banff, and there rallying them was Baillie William Buchan. They came charging, yelling, shouting, and I feared their horses’ hooves would not stop until they had trampled us all underfoot. It was a wonder the beasts’ necks did not break. And yet they did stop, and out of the snorting of exhausted beasts, their hearts near bursting, and the settling of hooves on the cobbles, grew an expectant silence. It can scarcely have been a matter of seconds, but to me it seemed several long minutes. I waited, as the baillie drew in breath, to hear our doom.

‘Provost, the moderator is here and most of the brethren, as at your command.’ And he slid from his horse, utterly spent.

There was some confusion before I and others understood that the brethren had come not to stoke the flames but to put an end to them. In the momentary commotion the provost ordered that the baillie be carried to Jaffray’s, and then the Moderator of the Presbytery of Fordyce heaved himself up on the scaffold cart beside him. The moderator, a gentle and fair man as I had known him, opened his mouth to speak and his voice was a roar.

‘Douse these flames! Put out that fire, or you will all burn longer and blacker than any witch that ever rode the besom. In the name of the Kirk of Scotland, cut down that girl.’ There was a great deal of movement at all sides of the crowd and I saw now that bucket upon bucket of water had been gathered ready from the nearby wells, and that a chain of men was in place from the laird of Banff’s garden to as near to the market cross as they could get. The provost now ordered the way to be cleared and I, like the others in the circle, began to force pathways in the crowd for the water-bearers. As the first sloshes of water fizzled onto the pyre the moderator took up his roar again. ‘And you, Robert Guild, by whose authority do you sanction this heathen orgy? In whose name, on whose behalf do you act? Slavering wretch! Get down off that podium. You will never preach in this or any other parish of the presbytery again.’ Robert Guild opened his mouth to protest, but what he said I did not hear as he was dragged from his platform and onto the dirt below, without ceremony, by two of the provost’s men. Cardno too was taken and he was hauled to the tolbooth, still noising out his demented accusations.

Others were brought under arms also to the town jail, ringleaders or those thought to still have trouble in mind. In time the tolbooth was full to overflowing, and the dungeon of the castle was also brought into play. There would be much work for the session, the burgh court and then the sheriff when he returned to town in five days’ time, or sooner, surely.

I do not know how long it took to douse and dull the flames, or when they cut what was left of the broken body of Marion Arbuthnott down from its charred stake and carried her, covered in the town’s mortcloth, to the vault of St Mary’s kirk. When I saw that the provost and Thomas Stewart, with the neighbouring ministers and the lawmakers of our town had matters under control and no longer needed my help, I stole away from the market cross. I did not go directly to the schoolhouse, but went down past the kirk and the music school towards Low Shore. It was dark now, a pitch darkness at first, after the astonishing brilliance of the bonfire, but I knew my way of old. I had to get myself clean. I walked away from the town and what lights there were and went down to the shore itself. I took off my hat, my boots and my cloak, and stepped into the glacial waters. Wave after gentle wave came to me and I continued to walk out, until the water was so deep I could walk no more. Numb to my bones with the cold, I turned and lay on my back, floating, looking up at the clear, full moon. The night sky was the same, the same as it had always been. It reigned impassive over the folly and the futility of man below. And over me. I floated as long as I could, wondering at the corruptibility of God’s earthly creation, but it was no use; I would never be clean. I swam back to the shore. As I wrapped my soaking self in my cloak, I caught the smell of smoke still in my hair.

And the smell was still in my hair now, this morning, as I led the apothecary away from the scene of his daughter’s last degradation to the decency of the schoolhouse. There would be no school today; Gilbert Grant had taken the authority upon himself. ‘But what of the session, of the council?’ his wife had asked, for once fearful and caring of the general opinion.

‘Let them look to what business they have on hand and I will look to mine. There is a spiral of madness, of fear in the town, and it must be brought under control; it must be stopped. The town itself must stop a moment before we all rush headlong to the abyss, shoving our neighbours before us and dragging our friends behind us in some blind folly. I will not hold the school until some sense and godly order is re-established in this town, and no mother in her senses would send her child away from her own skirts until the evil is rooted out.’ But what was the evil and where did its roots lie? To root it out it must be known, and there was further to go before we knew it.

Mistress Youngson was glad to see me back. I had disturbed the house in my drenched homecoming last night and slipped away without eating this morning. The darker events in the town became, the less wicked I became in her eyes, and she now showed herself solicitous of my welfare. Once she had set water on the fire to heat for the apothecary, and called for dry blankets to clothe him in, she set two steaming bowls of porridge before us and bid us eat. The apothecary took nothing, did not even seem to notice the spoon in his hand, but I was ravenous and had emptied my plate in little time at all.

‘Where did you find him?’ she asked quietly.

I told her.

‘He had been there all night?’

‘I do not know. I think so. God help him.’

‘Amen to that. He has lost his only light in this world. She was all his pride and his treasure. It is a wonder if he does not lose his mind also.’ It was Gilbert Grant who spoke. He turned to call for the serving girl. ‘We must send for Jaffray.’

‘I have sent her for him already,’ said his wife.

I had not sat like this, familiar, in the schoolhouse kitchen for a long time, but it did not seem strange to do so now. Neither Gilbert Grant nor his wife had asked anything of my business in Aberdeen; I had little interest myself in those matters for the moment. My baggage and packages from the journey lay in my chamber, brought there by Jaffray’s stable boy last night before I had returned from my night swimming. We sat in silence. Even Mistress Youngson, who was seldom at rest, was still and quiet. ‘How did it come to this?’ I asked at length.

The schoolmaster heaved himself to his feet and took a spill from the fire to light his pipe – something the mistress would have forbidden on other days. ‘How long have you been gone, Alexander? Four days, five?’

I calculated. ‘I left for Aberdeen on Thursday morning, early, and returned last night. Five days.’

‘And yet it might have been a lifetime. A great pestilence has crept through this town in these five days.’ He thought a while, wearily. ‘There was a fearfulness brewing before you left. From the time the death of Patrick Davidson was noised about. You must have marked it?’

I had not. I had been too taken up in events to realise how their consequences were infiltrating the minds of my townsfolk and feeding their ready capacity for fear.

The old man continued. ‘The authorities had Charles thrown in the tolbooth soon enough, but there are more than ourselves who believe him innocent. It is of little comfort to them that an innocent man lies in chains while a murderer walks the streets.’

‘And he is still there.’

‘Aye,’ said the mistress, ‘but better there than in the hands of that mob last night. Who knows where next they might have turned?’

And if they had not been checked in their witch-hunt, who would have been safe in the cold clarity of daylight? The flames and the heat and the darkness might send madness to men’s minds, but the daylight made them think themselves sane, and I knew that the witch-hunt legitimated by the light of day was a terrible thing. I did not wish to pursue this thought. ‘When did they turn on Marion?’ I asked. I did not much lower my voice; next to us he might have been, but Edward Arbuthnott had no notion of who was in the room with him or of what we said.

Gilbert Grant sighed. ‘The ground was prepared before ever the boy was dead. There were rumours, voices raised at the session, about Marion and Patrick and their wanderings over the country. Arbuthnott gave assurances they were on plant-gathering expeditions, for his simples and compounds, but others of meaner minds saw debauchery, and finally witchcraft at the bottom of it. They were seen in places where it is best for those under suspicion not to be seen – the Elf Kirk, by the minister himself, it was said. They were seen at Darkwater and even, it was said, at Ordiquhill.’

The image of Marion Arbuthnott high above the rocks at the Elf Kirk on the day after Patrick Davidson had been found dead came back, like the ghost of the girl herself, to my mind. But for the rest, I thought of the maps. It made sense that they should have been there, at Darkwater, that hidden stretch of beach below the fastness of Findlater, or at Ordiquhill, on the road from there to Huntly’s stronghold in Strathbogie. But Gilbert Grant had not been privy to the full discussion of the maps we had found, and I did not wish to endanger him or his wife by telling him more of the matter. That was a consideration for another time: for the present, Gilbert Grant was disposed to talk on.

‘When the boy was killed, and Jaffray pronounced the cause to be poison, there were many who saw no need to look any further for the evildoer than the apothecary’s shop, for who knew better the properties of plants than Marion Arbuthnott?’ I had not been aware of this growth of suspicion in the town, so caught up had I been in events. Gilbert Grant continued, ‘And it was seen, too, that those in authority also had their fears of Marion: the baillie and the doctor were at odds over her person just as the provost and the minister were last night over her soul. It was easily seen that the baillie suspected her of a hand in the deed, for he was rarely away from Arbuthnott’s door. Jaffray matched him in his constancy – he was there almost as often as the baillie. The doctor is known for a softness towards young women, an indulgence of their faults. The more he was seen to be protecting Marion from the baillie, the darker became the people’s guesses at what she might know. And yet,’ his voice faltered, and for a moment I thought he had lost the thread of what he was saying; I was wrong, for he continued, clear and with an unwonted bitterness, ‘still she managed to slip away. It is said she wandered the country in a state of distraction. People were afraid. Soon, the great storm of the night of the murder was ascribed to the conjuring of Marion Arbuthnott to cover her foul deeds. Then there were claims that she had been seen again at the Elf Kirk, conjuring black currents under the sea. On Saturday night a fishing boat from Seatoun bound for home before the Sabbath was lost on the rocks in calm seas. Only by God’s grace did the men on board make it in safety to the shore.’

Mistress Youngson had got up to put more coals on the fire under the pot. She looked over at Edward Arbuthnott, almost fearfully, and spoke in a low voice. ‘It is said that Marion went over again to Darkwater.’

‘Hush, woman; I will not have that nonsense in this house.’

I was truly astonished: I had never before heard Gilbert Grant chastise his wife, nor come anywhere near it.

‘It is what they say,’ she repeated determinedly.

I looked from one to the other in puzzlement. ‘I do not understand,’ I said. ‘Why should it signify, that she has been to Darkwater?’ I saw nothing very odd in her seeking solace there. The long white beach below the rock of Findlater Castle was indeed a beautiful place, and the cliffs would be coloured round with wild yellow primrose and the first pink flushes of thrift just now. I remembered my mother and Jaffray’s wife taking me there once when I had been a boy.

The old couple now looked at me with equal puzzlement. ‘Do you not know, Alexander? But surely you remember?’

‘No,’ said Mistress Youngson. ‘He would have been no more than a bairn, if he was yet born indeed. In fact,’ now she was thinking, hard, ‘he was not even born. It was before his father had ever returned and brought his mother with him from Ireland. As well for her that it was.’

‘Please,’ I said. ‘I have no notion of what you are talking about.’

Mistress Youngson came over to me. ‘It is the wise woman of Darkwater. The one who tended to you when you, when you were …’

‘When I was in my delirium,’ I finished for her. Nobody spoke to me, openly, of that time, when Jaffray had had a message from the old woman of Darkwater that she had found me, wandering, delirious, near the crag of Findlater, and had taken me safe into her home to nurse me. I had very little recollection of it myself; the days between my disgrace at Fordyce and the arrival of Jaffray to take me home to Banff were lost to my memory, and I made little effort to seek them out there.

Mistress Youngson continued. ‘She lives in a sort of shack, does she not? Or a cave at the far end of the beach – I have never been myself so I could not say for sure,’ she added somewhat too hurriedly. ‘She is held by many to be a witch. She sets great store by the healing and holy wells, by secret pools known only to herself. It is said she consorts with the spirits, the wee folk–’

Again Gilbert Grant stopped his wife. The serving girl had returned from Jaffray’s and her eyes were growing wide. ‘To return to the point,’ said the woman, ‘in the last great scare of the witches, before you were born or the old king had gone down to England, the woman of Darkwater was lucky to escape the stake. It was said that only the fear of her great powers and great fellowship with Beelzebub stopped the others from naming her.’

I had heard something of this time, of course, but people did not care to speak much of it. To speak of it too freely might be to give life to the memory, to the fears in people’s breasts, and to start it all again. There was something I had not known of before, though. I looked at the old woman. ‘And what has this to do with my mother? You said it was as well for her that it was past before she ever came here.’

The old couple remained silent, uneasy, not knowing what to say. It was Edward Arbuthnott, almost forgotten in the corner, who spoke up. ‘Because she was different. Like my Marion, your mother was different.’

Mistress Youngson went and sat by him on the bench. ‘Aye, she was.’ She looked at me and smiled. ‘Your mother was tall and beautiful, with her long dark hair, hanging loose, and those grey-green eyes, like your own. She spoke differently; she had different ways. And though she was not a papist, that she was Irish was enough for many. Your father knew it, that she was different, and that it was not well-liked, but he was proud of her for it, until it broke the both of them. There were those who resented her for her marriage, who thought your father would have done better, by himself and by the town, to have taken a local girl to wife.’ She looked away a moment, and I wondered if she had been one of them. ‘This is not an easy place to be different. The longer she was here, the more of an outsider she became. And–’

‘And she would not have fared well at the hands of the witchmongers, I fear.’ I looked at Gilbert Grant, who was looking directly, honestly at me, and I felt cold to my heart.

There was little sound in the room now, save the bubbling of the water starting to boil, and the slow and heavy breathing of Edward Arbuthnott as he looked again into the flames. ‘I do not know why Marion was there,’ he said. ‘At Darkwater. There is no good reason for a young, unmarried girl to visit such a woman. No reason for my girl to have been there. They would have burnt her alive if they could have got her, but they could not; she ended her life before they could take it from her.’

Again the image came to my mind. I spoke in a low voice to Gilbert Grant. ‘Was it at the Elf Kirk? Did she jump in the end from the Elf Kirk?’

Both Grant and his wife turned puzzled frowns on me. ‘At the Elf Kirk? No, boy, surely you have heard. She poisoned herself on the Rose Craig. She was found there, dead, by Geleis Guild and her four children on the evening of the Sabbath; they had gone that way to pick flowers to take to Marion before the service in the kirk. But Marion already had flowers; when they found her, she was wearing a garland of henbane in her hair.’

Henbane: the wanderers awaiting their transportation across the Styx, it was said, had worn henbane in their hair. And in the wilder imaginings of the townfolk, henbane was the special flower of the diabolic, of the witches and warlocks who flew in the night in their satanic ecstasies. But Marion Arbuthnott would have been in no ecstasy. I thought of the provost’s lovely, delicate young wife and of her four pretty children. I remembered the sight that had greeted me across my schoolroom desk only a week ago. It was not fitting that children should see such a thing. I prayed God, sincerely, that he might take the vision of it from their minds. I had not long, I am thankful, to dwell on this, for there was the sound of a familiar commotion from the front parlour and soon James Jaffray was showing himself into the schoolhouse kitchen. With no needless greeting or ceremony he went directly to where the apothecary sat and knelt before him, taking his left hand in his own and putting the other to the man’s forehead. ‘You are ill, my friend. There is a fever coming on you. We must get you quickly to your bed. Your wife can prepare the simples?’

Arbuthnott tried to rally himself. ‘I will take mallow; there is always some ready for the fevers.’

The doctor nodded. ‘I will see to it also that she prepares you a dish of rhubarb. And a decoction of melancholy thistle in some wine. It will revive your spirits a little.’

The apothecary nodded wearily. ‘For myself, I wish for nothing now other than death, but the woman cannot manage on her own. Without myself or Marion, she would be destitute. But for myself, for myself,’ watery eyes now stared at some distant private vision, ‘all is gone.’

‘Come now,’ said Jaffray kindly, ‘you are still needed in the town. I have not half your knowledge of medicines and cures, and there is no one else now.’

Arbuthnott raised bitter eyes towards him. ‘And do you think I would lift a hand to help any one of them, after what they have done to my beautiful girl?’

‘Not all, now.’

‘No,’ the man conceded, ‘not all.’

We left the kitchen then to the doctor and the apothecary and the mistress, who stayed to help bathe the sick man and persuade him to take a little warm broth before he should move out in the cold again. A spare suit of Gilbert Grant’s clothing was found for him; my own only spare set of clothes was on my back, my other now being pummelled by the maidservant in a tub in the backyard. I should have been more thoughtful before taking to my night-swimming. It had done me little good.

The schoolmaster retired then to his study, inviting me to keep him company. It was a place of comfort and good reflection, a place of exercise for the mind, and my heart always warmed to the old man when he asked me to join him there.

‘I have something for you first,’ I said. ‘I will be down in a minute.’ I headed up the stairs as he made himself comfortable in his easy chair. The packages and luggage carried over by Jaffray’s stable boy were lying by my bed. I checked all were there; none had gone amiss on my journey. The mid-morning gloom afforded very little light to my small chamber, but I found what I was looking for without much difficulty. I was down again at Gilbert Grant’s door only a few moments after leaving him. He was sitting in contemplation by the room’s only window, an unlit candle at his elbow. Around him was an air of sadness I had seen on him only once before, when I had finally come home and told him that what he had heard about my final trial for the ministry had been true. He was a man too ready to share in the sufferings of those dear to him, and of the innocent. In his many long years as schoolmaster in Banff, he had come to love many and had had cause to weep with them too often. His face lightened a little when he noticed me in the doorway.

‘Come in, Alexander, come in. We will rest ourselves here. While we cannot be of any use, at least we can keep ourselves from getting in the way.’ I smiled as I recalled how often I had heard his wife scold him for being in the way. She was always so busy, in the midst of much movement, and he preferred to be quiet and move little, but I think she knew that the reason he was always in her road was that he loved her so dearly. Before settling myself in the only other seat in the room I handed him the package.

‘I have brought you this from Aberdeen, from Melville’s.’

‘Ah, is it really? From Melville?’ He was thinking, searching in his mind, delaying the pleasure by not unbinding and opening the package straight away. ‘I have not had a minute to ask you how you fared on your journey, or to quiz you for news from the town. I trust to God that there is no such business there as we have on hand here?’

‘None that I have seen,’ I assured him, ‘although what goes on up the vennels or behind the pends of other men’s houses I do not know. This time last week we would not have thought such things possible here in Banff.’

He raised his eyebrows at me a little in surprise. ‘Ah, would we not, do you think?’ He mused quietly a moment. ‘But you are young. I forget sometimes, Alexander, how young you really are; you have the air of one who has seen more of the world than he cares to. You will not remember that we have seen this sort of thing before. And yet we have learned nothing. Like the Israelites, time and time again we have turned our face from God and He has hidden His face from us.’

‘You think this portends the judgement of God on us?’

‘No. This is the turning from God and not the judgement. What the judgement will be I dread to live to see.’ He opened the package now, knowing all the while that it was the Bible that was there. Without examination, without the careful caress of the finely bound volume that I had half expected, he opened the book and, with well-practised hands found the passage he wanted. He started to read, and although his finger ran along the lines, he did not look at them, for the words were already at his lips. ‘Hosea, chapter four: “Hear the word of the Lord ye children of Israel; for the Lord hath a controversy with the inhabitants of the land, because there is no truth, nor mercy, nor knowledge of God in the land. By swearing, and lying, and killing and stealing, and committing adultery, they break out and blood touches blood. Therefore shall the land mourn, and every one that dwelleth therein shall languish.”’

I cleared my throat. ‘But does the prophet not also say, “I will heal their backsliding, I will love them freely”?’

I had not spoken in this way, preached to another human being in many months, and the words came strangely unbidden from my mouth. Grant afforded me a saddened smile. ‘Indeed he does, Alexander. But how shall we answer to this offer of God? How did the Israelites answer when sent the Redeemer? Was he not slain? What if this young man, Patrick Davidson, was also sent to us from God?’ He looked up sharply. ‘No redeemer mind, but a prophet, a messenger only, to tell us something, to get us to mend our ways. And he is slain. How now shall God deal with us?’

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.

‘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.