The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

FIFTEEN Old Stories’ Endings

The vast frame of Thomas Stewart barred the door. Iron bars filled a solitary window high above me. There was no furnishing to the room, other than the trestle bed on which I lay. The walls and floor, both stone, were bare of any covering. It was daylight, but I could not tell what time of day it was: late morning, perhaps. I could not hear the sea. I tried to lift my head, but the burning stone inside it brought it crashing down once more upon the mattress. Thomas Stewart immediately shouted through a grille in the door for a guard. A man appeared, a message was given and the grille was slammed shut once more. Slowly, the notary turned to me. He came closer, searching my face for further presence of life. I opened my mouth in an attempt to speak, but little more than a croak emerged. He dipped a cup into a basin of water by the side of the bed and trickled some onto my lips. I swallowed, but the intense pain in my head overwhelmed any relief I had hoped for. I tried again. ‘The baillie?’ I asked.

‘He is here.’

‘And the provost?’ I managed.

The notary shook his head. ‘He has not been found. It was some time before the baillie was able to raise the alarm, and by the time messages were got to the town ports, Walter Watt was gone. He left by the Sandyhill Gate, riding hard. The men on the watch did not challenge him, for who would challenge the provost?’

One had, one man. Much of last night remained in some foggy recess of my mind I could not yet reach, and yet one thing I did remember: William Buchan had saved my life. I could see him still, lunging at the provost’s arm as Walter Watt aimed the sharp garden rock at my head. I could see him still, being thrown back by the stronger man. And then I saw him rise again, somehow, as Walter Watt lifted his hand a second time. Here my mind clouded over, and I could see no more.

‘Is he badly hurt?’ I asked.

‘He is bruised about the face, and his hand is badly gashed – he will admit to nothing else – but he might have fared much worse against such an opponent, were it not for the merciful Providence of the storm.’

‘The storm?’

‘Aye. The storm of the night Patrick Davidson died ripped branches from trees throughout the country. It was one such branch the baillie managed to lift and bring down upon the neck of the provost before he could strike you again. The provost somehow righted himself before the baillie could, and fled, but William Buchan would not go after him until he had seen that you lived, and stemmed your bleeding.’ He lowered his voice. ‘He could never have caught him anyway; he could scarce walk by the time he reached us to raise the alarm. But the garden, Alexander – how did you know?’

I looked towards the water and he trickled some more into my mouth. Less pain this time, greater relief. I could answer truthfully, at last. ‘Patrick Davidson told me.’

Before the notary could respond, the door behind him swung open slowly and there, between two guards, stood Baillie Buchan.

How could I put into words all that I had to say to him? I had scarcely the strength to speak, no more had he to hear. His face was sallower still, and his bones stood out as from a cold skull. ‘Thank you,’ I said.

He regarded me for a long hard minute and finally spoke. ‘Let the thanks be unto God. He has revealed the truth, and you have been His instrument. He has preserved you for His work, and it will be my great blessing to see it completed.’

‘When did you know?’ I asked.

The baillie was taken by one of his coughing fits, and Thomas Stewart called for a chair to be brought.

William Buchan waved the chair away and kept to his feet. ‘Eight years ago, I knew,’ he said. ‘And every day since, I have, on my knees, implored God that He would grant Helen justice in this world, as He himself will have judgement in the next.’

‘But why did you wait so long? Why did you not speak out before now? If you have indeed spoken out yet?’ I looked at Thomas Stewart, who by his eyes directed me back to the baillie.

‘I had not the proof; I had only the certainty of my own heart, my own mind. I could not accuse a man of such a thing on those grounds – the Devil lays many snares for those who are not watchful of their own weaknesses, and I knew mine. I had to wait and watch these eight years, and he never put a foot wrong. Until two weeks ago, when he plunged himself once more into the acts of darkness and I knew his day was approaching. But still there was no proof, and strive though I might, and did, I could find none. But I prayed also; I prayed that the Lord might aid me in my striving. And He did, with the discovery of Patrick Davidson’s maps; I knew then that I was to send for you. And when you came, and showed yourself not to have been corrupted by your failings, as men had thought, I knew that you were the man who could do what I could not. I had of times asked myself why God had given you such gifts, if they were only to be thrown away on the whim of your human failings. I had forgotten that our true calling is not always that which seems most likely to the eyes of men.’

‘I am not called to be a searcher out of murderers,’ I said coldly.

‘No,’ he replied, ‘but a searcher for the truth. Even from your youngest days, I had marked you out as a searcher for the truth.’

From my youngest days. His words took me back three days to that bare chamber of his, to the kist that lay on the floor, to the notes I had read as he and Charles slept, of my sermon at Boyndie kirk. What great hopes he had had for my ministry, what thanks he had given for my gifts. And what a mockery I had made of his faith in me. Now, in this moment, he was telling me that what I had done, he had not: where I had given myself up as lost to God’s plan in this world and His salvation in the next, he never had. I would never have believed that I could have felt warmth for William Buchan, or been desirous of being worthy of his praise, but I felt it now, humbled and honoured by the words of one I had so scorned.

He continued. ‘From the moment the provost chose to entrust you with the maps, I knew you would go where I could not, ask what I could not, find what I could not. So I watched you, and I had you watched, and followed.’

Now I understood, all those times when I had felt myself to be watched, fancied I had heard footsteps but seen no man behind me when I turned. ‘By Lang Geordie?’

For the first time in my life, I heard William Buchan laugh, a full, mirthful, delighted laugh. ‘Lang Geordie?’ he repeated, in disbelief. ‘No, Mr Seaton, I at least do not consort with thieves and idle beggars.’

‘Then who?’

‘It was me, Alexander,’ Thomas Stewart said softly, ‘it was me.’

My mind struggled to open doors on the last few days, on things I had not understood. I had known I was watched, but had never had an inkling of by whom. In Aberdeen, on the road from Straloch, even … ‘You, Thomas, it was you who followed me to Darkwater?’ I marvelled that the man had not stumbled to his death.

‘No, it was not.’ It was the baillie’s voice. ‘The notary could not be spared, and I feared you were getting too close, that the danger was too great. It was I who tracked your path to Darkwater. To the crone. She saw me, of course. But I knew she would not tell you. She has long been of my mind.’

The baillie and the witch? This was beyond my comprehension. But indeed she had seen him: the tonic she had given me that I had forgotten to give him, of Rosa Solis, Sun Dew, for his ravished lungs: how else could she have known? I looked at him. ‘You could not have survived the night,’ I said.

‘The Lord watched over me,’ he countered. ‘I have often had cause to be at Findlater on business. Once I had seen you safely taken in by the woman, I sought out shelter with the keeper of the castle. At first light, when the worst of the haar had lifted, I was granted the trustiest of horses from their stable, and it brought me safe back to Banff well before you. I could not have left the burgh while Charles Thom was still in the tolbooth, for fear that he might have been killed before I returned, and so I sent the notary here to shadow and watch you. But with the music master free and in the safe protection of the doctor, I was able to watch over you for myself.’ He was again taken by a convulsion of coughing, and this time he consented to take the seat pressed on him. He accepted a drink of water and, waving away a second, turned to the notary. ‘The doctor?’

‘He has been alerted. He should be here within the hour.’

‘Where are we?’ I still had no notion of where I was, but was certain I was not in Banff.

‘Inchdrewer. We are at Inchdrewer.’ The majestic keep of the Ogilvies, perhaps four miles from Banff, surveying the countryside all around. The mere knowledge of it had terrified me as a boy, and in my childhood imaginings it had been home to the ogres of my mother’s tales. The notary continued, ‘The baillie and I agreed that it was safer to have you here, out of the town altogether, until at least the sheriff gets here. The doctor was hard put to permit it, but the burgh was not safe. Jaffray would have been here with you, but there are still fears for the music master, and so he agreed to stay in the town.’

‘And Ishbel?’

‘The girl is safe, and unsullied,’ answered the baillie. ‘And George Burnett will never lay his hand on a maiden of this burgh again. The new council and the new provost will not tolerate such a man in the bounds of Banff.’

‘New council?’ The council elections were not to be held until Martinmas, as they were every year.

The baillie was strengthened by the challenge. ‘Half the present council are in the tolbooth or the laird of Banff’s dungeon. The provost is fled. As soon as the sheriff is returned, a new council and provost will be elected. A godly magistrate will have the governance of our town, and the days of Babylon will be over.’ But this was no crowing triumph of one man over an old enemy, of William Buchan over Walter Watt, for the baillie was looking over at Thomas Stewart. And the notary – soon, I realised, to be provost of Banff – simply looked at his feet and said, ‘God’s will be done.’

Into the silence came a rumble, then a thunder of hooves. Thomas Stewart ran to block the door and there was a shouting of guards through the castle. The baillie did not flinch at the commotion, but my mind, racing in a head that was pounding with every heartbeat, went straight to Walter Watt. Who was to say he had not gone for reinforcements? Who would take the word of a disgraced schoolmaster and an embittered baillie, known to have been set against him for years, against the upright, forthright, wealthy provost of Banff? The horses came closer, the shouting grew more urgent, and my mind coursed down avenues it had never before seen. Was Walter Watt Huntly’s man? The maps of Patrick Davidson – might not his uncle have been the agency that called him to Banff? What had truly been in the letters to Gordon of Straloch? To Jamesone? But no; George Jamesone called me back to what I knew to be true: that this was not a matter of spies and maps and papist plots. This was a matter of a husband, his wife, a young man and some flowers, and by the mouths of the whores of Banff who thought they had heard ‘James and the flowers’, Patrick Davidson had told me it was at the very beginning. My apprehension faded as I heard the voice of James Jaffray corralling off the castle walls. Thomas Stewart had gone down to meet him.

‘And he lives yet? He lives?’

The notary sought to calm the doctor. ‘He is well, doctor; he speaks and understands and has taken a little water. He lives.’

‘God be praised! I should never have permitted the journey.’

The baillie rose from his chair, dredging his chest for breath. ‘There was little choice, Jaffray. In the confusion of the night, we had to get him to a place of surety.’

The doctor passed the baillie with never a look and arrived at my bedside. The strain on the kind face subsided. ‘And so, Alexander Seaton. You have taken a bump on the head. Stealing apples from the manse garden at your age!’

Laughter hurt my head. ‘There are no apples to be got in April, doctor. Did they teach you nothing of use in your medical studies?’

‘Very little,’ he smiled, ‘very little.’ He gently lifted some of the hair back from my forehead. Some strands had stuck in the drying blood of the wound and I winced as he tugged them free. He uttered a soft curse at himself. ‘That should have been cut before I cleaned and stitched it. It is time this town had a new doctor; an old man in his cups working with a needle by candlelight! You could have lost your eye. What were you about, William Buchan? You should have had me thrown in the tolbooth long ago, and a decent sober young physician set in my place.’

The baillie laughed again through his wheezing. ‘There is none can fill your place, James Jaffray, none. May the God that sent you back to us preserve you long for us.’

‘Amen,’ I said.

The doctor’s eyes were filling and he looked away briskly from me. ‘Aye, well, you will live. And I dare say a clout on the head may knock some sense into you, for nothing else will.’

I winced. ‘I have had many a clout on the head before,’ I said, ‘but none has had such an aftermath as this. It is worse than the worst morning after a night’s drinking. And I know it is not that, for I drank very little last night.’

Jaffray surveyed me gravely. ‘You drank enough. A few mouthfuls more and you would have been dead.’

I laughed out loud, despite the pain it gave me. ‘Doctor, I had but two cups of wine, the one of them spilt on the ground for the most part. I have drunk more with you at the inn while waiting on our dinner.’

‘You should thank God for whoever knocked that second cup from your hand, Alexander, for the dregs of the poison were still in it when the notary picked it up from the ground.’

I looked at Thomas Stewart. ‘I was behind you; I saw nothing but the hand that passed you the cup and then I saw you drop it. I would have been straight after you, had it not been for the fight that broke out on the dance floor. Whoever thought Charles Thom incapable of murder did not see him last night: it took four of us to pull him from George Burnett’s throat. By the time the commotion was over you were gone from sight. The baillie bade me stay at the lykewake while he went to look for you. When I found the cup lying on the ground I gave it to the doctor. We had had fears that your life might have been in danger.’

‘And they were right,’ said the doctor. ‘The dregs of the belladonna were there in plenty.’

‘Belladonna?’ I asked stupidly.

‘Aye, belladonna. It is still to be seen in your eyes. Your pupils are like plates. He wanted to make sure you were robbed of the power of speech before it killed you. Have you a thirst, Alexander?’

‘It rages.’

‘And what do you recall of events after you left the lykewake?’

I closed my eyes and searched my memory for something. Fleeting glimpses of things came to me, a sensation of apprehension, but little else. I tried again. This time there was something more, and apprehension was replaced by real fear. I looked to the doctor and swallowed hard. ‘I think, it is hazy, you know, but I think at the kirkyard,’ I hesitated, not knowing how the baillie would react to what I had to say.

‘Go on,’ said Jaffray.

I glanced at the baillie for a moment. ‘I think I saw the dead walk.’ I had expected thunderous rebuke, accusations of blasphemy, witchcraft, consorting with spirits, but none came. William Buchan merely looked at the doctor and the doctor nodded.

‘The visions. You saw the visions. The belladonna brings on hallucinations. It is what the witches use to send them on their orgies of commune with the dead, to send them in their flights for Satan. It is fortunate for your mind and soul that the baillie came upon you when he did.’

‘And for my body too,’ I added. ‘I do not think the provost had it in mind that I should live to tell his tale.’

‘No,’ agreed Jaffray. ‘No more do I.’ He went and murmured something to the notary who, nodding, sent one of the doorkeepers back down the stairs. The baillie had joined the doctor and the notary in conference, and for a moment none heeded me. I strained to hear their words, but could make out little. William Buchan asked Jaffray for news of the provost, but all I could hear by way of reply was ‘Carnousie’. Carnousie. Nearer Turriff than Banff, yet away from the sea. If he wanted to get away, he should have gone by the sea. Some more instructions were relayed further down the castle and attention returned to me.

‘Mr Seaton,’ said the baillie, ‘I doubt the doctor will permit you to be moved again for some days–’

‘Indeed I will not,’ interrupted Jaffray with some emphasis.

‘And the notary and myself cannot tarry much longer from Banff. There is much to be attended to. Nevertheless, there is much I would know of you.’

‘And perhaps tell me?’

He eyed me steadily for a moment. His mouth scarcely moved. ‘Perhaps. But first, I would be grateful if you would tell me what you were telling the notary when I entered the room.’

My head was thumping more than ever, and again I tried to remember. I looked to Thomas Stewart for help and he lifted paper from a shelf by the door and began to read. In my first moments of bleary consciousness, I had not noticed him writing it. ‘When I asked you how you had known, you said that Patrick Davidson had told you.’

I remembered. A dead man had spoken to me, and I had listened, and heard, and understood at last, as I had not done while he lived. And so I told them, and as I spoke, the notary wrote. I told them, with shame, but honestly, of my staggering vision on the night of the murder, of the whores and of the man in the gutter. I told them of seeing Janet Dawson beaten from the burgh to the rhythm of the drum, and of her desperate words to me before she was torn away, Patrick Davidson’s last words. Not ‘James and the flowers’ as she and her sister believed they had heard on that stormy, drink-fuelled night, from the lips of a vomiting, dying man, but ‘Jamesone – the flowers’. George Jamesone and the flowers – the colchicum mortis – falling from the open hand of Patrick Davidson’s aunt, dead eight years. As I had finally realised last night at the lykewake, the painter’s words had come back to me, ‘You look, but you do not see.’ Standing in the great hall of the provost’s house, with the body of Patrick Davidson lying on a table beside me, I had seen a portrait hanging on the wall. It was a portrait of a man and a woman, a wellmade man and his pale, grieving wife, flowers falling from her hand and lying crushed and lifeless at her feet. Their lost children, each a perfect promise of beauty in this life, of hope, that had slipped from her grasp. And around them, amongst the paraphernalia of their wealth, their attainments and their aspirations, hidden away in a dark corner, almost out of sight, was a lute, a lute with a broken string. Disharmony, a love that has been strained and snapped, the painter’s vision of what he truly saw before him. Completed only a few weeks before Helen Black, the aunt of Patrick Davidson and first wife of Walter Watt, Provost of Banff, had died. The loved, beloved aunt; the aunt who had been almost a mother to him.

The grieving boy had left and studied and prospered in the world. And in that world he had pursued the love of botany, planted in him by the conversations at his uncle’s fireside between Walter Watt and James Cargill, physician and great botanist. Had the provost not told us so himself? The boy had travelled, and the career in law, so dry, so lacking in the life and sun and water and air and colour and texture and fragrance that he truly loved, had gradually been pushed aside as he became more and more entranced by the world of science, of medicine and, above all, of plants. Patrick Davidson had known his calling: he would study the apothecary’s art. And where else would he go to apprentice than the place of his happy boyhood, where the first stirring of that love for the minute perfections of God’s creation had taken him? And so he had returned to Banff, and had been welcomed by the provost as a lost son, and taken to the heart of a new family. He had sat down to dine in his uncle’s great hall, and let his eyes drift up to rest for a moment on the face of his dearly loved, long-dead aunt. But just for a moment, for then his eyes travelled further, to her hand and past her skirts to the floor, and he saw what he should not have been able to see. He saw what had no godly cause to be in that painting, or in this town, or this land even. He saw the flowers whose only use, beautiful though they were, was the procuring of a death, her death. But he did not let himself make the connection, did not want to see it, until he went with Marion Arbuthnott to Darkwater.

‘And what did he learn there? What did you learn there?’ asked the baillie in a strange voice. He knew the answer but did not wish to know it.

There was no need for me to tell them of the child that Marion had been carrying – if they did not know it already, it was none of their concern. A vision of my own mother came to me, but I pushed it away. ‘He learned,’ I began, ‘that his aunt, Helen, had gone to her in desperation, after all that Jaffray,’ I looked at the doctor and with an incline of his head he urged me to go on, ‘after all that Jaffray or any other could do to help her carry a living child to its delivery failed her.’

‘There were many others who did the same,’ said the doctor, softly. ‘Would to God that he had given me the skill to effect that if nothing else.’

The expected reproof from the baillie did not come. He simply said, ‘Continue, Mr Seaton.’ We had yet to come to the point.

‘They learned that eight years ago, Helen Black, from grief and fear, had almost reached the limits of her senses.’

The notary laid off his writing. ‘Do you say she took her own life?’

I opened my mouth to answer, but the baillie was there before me, speaking quietly, as to himself. ‘No, never that. It was taken from her.’

Thomas Stewart looked from one to the other of us. ‘The crone told you this?’

I started to shake my head but the pain stilled me. ‘No, she did not. But I think, I am almost certain, that the knowledge of his aunt’s fear and desperation, so close to the time of her death – the same time at which the picture, with those flowers in it, was painted – convinced Patrick Davidson that his aunt had been poisoned.’

The notary turned to Jaffray. ‘Doctor, how did she die?’

Into Jaffray’s eyes came an image of eight years ago, and of two weeks ago, and of four days ago. His words were slow and deliberate, as the revelation came to him. ‘She died quickly, and in agony, of a sudden vomiting through which she had not the strength to crawl. That is how it was described to me, for I came too late.’

‘You were not there?’ I asked.

He closed his eyes as realisation took him. ‘I had been making my summer visit to Glenlivet, to the mountain people. I was away from Banff longer than I had planned to be, for on my journey back to the town I was waylaid perhaps twenty miles from home by Lang Geordie and his crew. They begged that I would treat their needs – and indeed they were many – before I returned to the burgh, for at that time they were not allowed to show their faces in the town. I was with them two days.’ Jaffray lowered his voice and spoke almost to himself. ‘And that was the only other time I saw Walter Watt shaken as he was two weeks ago. Both times I thought it was for grief.’ He sat down on the end of the bed, his head in his hands. I could not lift my arm to comfort him.

‘He has played too easily upon your goodness, doctor. Hold fast to the good you have done, not to the evil that was beyond your power to change.’

Jaffray looked up wearily at the baillie. ‘And have you not spent your life in fighting evil, William Buchan?’

‘It is my calling,’ was the simple answer.

The notary put down his paper. ‘There is something here that I do not understand. You are telling us, if I have the thing to rights, that Walter Watt murdered his first wife, poisoned her in fact, and that it was because his nephew discovered this and confronted him with the knowledge that he too was murdered?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That is what I believe.’

‘But he loved Helen. He grieves for her yet; I know it, for I have seen it myself in his unguarded moments. I cannot believe that he could have killed her. Why would he ever have done such a thing? What did her grief over her children signify in this?’

There was a silence in the room. I could guess the answer, and I understood now that the other two knew it also. It was a cold, sharp answer, and across the room I saw it cut into old wounds. It was not for me to respond to Thomas Stewart. ‘He killed her,’ began the baillie, ‘because she could not give him a dynasty. And so she knew it, and spent the last months of her life in terror and despair.’ His voice fell away. ‘He killed her because he did not love her enough.’ There was a complete silence in the room, and through it the baillie’s words echoed to a time and a place long past, and to a love long dead. His head fell forward on his chest and his shoulders heaved as he struggled for breath. The doctor went to him and kneeling before him grasped both his wrists in his own two hands, counting the breaths with him until the struggle subsided. I knew now who the H.B. was that had lovingly stitched the hanging on the baillie’s wall, so many years ago. I cursed my stupidity that I had not realised it before.

The sound of horses and wheels on the bumpy track broke into the rhythm of the breathing and gradually thundered over it as the new arrivals came closer. A clatter of hooves in the courtyard was soon followed by a shout for the doctor, and assuring himself that the baillie’s crisis was over, Jaffray got up and made for his next patients. I studied William Buchan, unnoticed, but what his thoughts were at that moment I could not tell. Thomas Stewart pulled up a chair at the side of my bed, and spoke in a low voice. ‘Tell me again about these flowers you spoke of, and how they told Patrick Davidson of his uncle’s crime.’

I tried to sit up a little, the better to get my breath, and to speak. ‘You know the portrait of Walter Watt and Helen that hangs in the great hall of the provost’s house?’

The notary nodded. ‘I have often seen it, but never taken great notice of it.’

‘In that painting, Helen is holding flowers in her hand – are a symbol of her hopes, her children. But the flowers are falling from her hand, and many lie already crushed on the floor.’

‘Her lost babies,’ said the notary.

‘Yes. Jamesone himself told me, if I had had the wit to listen properly. The point is, those flowers are not – or were not – grown in these parts. The laird of Banff tried many years ago, and failed to cultivate them after bringing some specimens back from his travels abroad. But another did not fail. Walter Watt did not fail. And Walter Watt knew, probably from the mouth of James Cargill himself, that these plants were utterly lethal in all their parts. I believe he grew them at first for love of their beauty, and that is why they are there in the painting, as something beautiful. But when, sometime afterwards, he could no longer stand the strain of his wife’s repeated losses of their children, when he came to realise that this woman, whom he is acknowledged to have loved, would bear him no heir, he took the roots of that same plant and poisoned her with them. He was safe until the day someone else came and looked upon that portrait and saw the flowers for what they were.’

‘His own nephew,’ said the notary, understanding now. ‘And he never thought to take the painting down? He did not think discovery possible? Truly, the man’s arrogance was monstrous.’

‘Monstrous, yes, but I think also, in spite of all he had done, he loved her still. And just like Walter Watt himself, all that Patrick Davidson saw when he looked at that portrait was his beloved aunt’s face. It was not until he had been to Darkwater, and considered the wise woman’s words, that he questioned his aunt’s state of mind before her death, and that led him back to the picture, painted in her last weeks on this earth, and the flowers that she held in her hand. I think he confronted his uncle with his suspicions, but where he intended to take the matter from that point, I do not know. Perhaps he did not know himself. In the end, it was immaterial: he died because of it.’

He pressed me further. ‘How do you think the thing was brought about?’

‘That I cannot tell you,’ I said.

‘Perhaps there is someone else who can,’ murmured the baillie, who had been listening throughout. ‘No matter, though. Continue, Mr Seaton.’

I reached for another sip of water which Thomas Stewart helped me to. ‘I do not know that there is anything left I can tell you,’ I said.

The notary, though, had more he would know. ‘Do you think Patrick Davidson revealed his knowledge to Marion Arbuthnott?’ His line of thought was logical; it was what Marion had feared and what Charles Thom had soon come to understand – that the possession of this knowledge would be as a death warrant to whoever came to own it.

‘No,’ I replied, ‘I am certain he did not.’

‘Why not?’ asked the notary.

‘Because she would not have kept on searching if he had.’ It was the baillie who had spoken. He had got up from his chair and now began to pace the room. ‘She would not have needed to continue searching for the truth of his death if she had known it already.’

He had said exactly what I had been thinking. ‘That was why she went back to the wise woman of Darkwater after his death,’ I said. ‘Because she still did not know. The crone told me that. That Marion had gone back to her, asking about the colchicum, and she, the old woman, had been able to describe it to her. She had described to her the flower that, in the course of her duties as nursery maid to Geleis Guild, the girl must have seen, captured in oils on canvas, a dozen times a day. And now Marion is dead. She, too, must have confronted the provost.’

Again the baillie demurred. ‘I do not think so. As soon as she returned from Darkwater she sent word by her father that she wished to see me. It was just after noon. The council had convened as a matter of urgency, to discuss the defence of the burgh in the event of foreign attack. The meeting was to be held in the utmost secrecy, and the town serjeant had been warned that it was not to be disturbed. It was almost five by the time we had finished with the business and, fool that I was, instead of going directly to the apothecary’s, I made my usual evening inspection of the tolbooth.’ He was revisiting the scene in his mind. ‘By the time I reached Arbuthnott’s, the girl had gone. Her mother told me she had gone in a distracted state to meet with Geleis Guild shortly after sending me her note. She had returned later, in a worse case than she had left in, and would tell her mother nothing of the cause, but said only she must speak to me. A little after four, a messenger had arrived from the provost’s house, requesting her to go there as a matter of urgency. Marion had set out immediately, and her mother never saw her alive again. She was found not two hours later by Geleis Guild in the castle grounds. Dead, dead.’

Images of a young woman gazing towards the waves from the height of the Elf Kirk, of the same woman softly singing to the children of Geleis Guild in the garden of the provost’s house, of the same woman, dead and burning on a stake at the market cross of Banff filled my mind. At the last, they merged, horribly, with the indelible memory of Patrick Davidson lying, grass in his hands and his mouth, sprawled and dead across my desk in a pool of his own vomit.

This was not right. There was something that could not be right. ‘It was Geleis Guild who found her?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ said the notary, ‘and her children.’

And her children. She could not have done that, knowing what was to be found. And why, only last night at the lykewake, had she urged me on in my searches?

The baillie interrupted my wonderings. ‘Something puzzles you, Mr Seaton.’

‘Aye, it does. It is Geleis Guild. I do not understand her. She is a woman distraught, and yet she must have joined with her husband in his murderous doings.’

‘Why would you think that?’ quizzed the baillie.

It was evident to me. ‘Because I do not see how the provost could have been murdering Marion Arbuthnott while he was with you in the council chamber.’

Comprehension came over the baillie’s face. ‘But Walter Watt was not there. The nature of our discoveries about his nephew’s activities caused some alarm amongst those few who knew of it, and it was adjudged best to keep the meeting a secret from the provost until such time as we had a clear knowledge and understanding of his nephew’s activities and connections hereabouts. Walter Watt was not in the council chamber when Marion Arbuthnott died. To judge by the carriage of his wife these last days, I think it very unlikely she was an accomplice in his deeds.’

A soft voice drifted to us from the doorway. ‘You are wrong, baillie, you are wrong.’ And there, like a wraith from another world, stood Geleis Guild herself. Her pallor was complete, her eyes rimmed in red, then black, her hair loose and dull on her shoulders. She had the air of one further from the living than the dead. She could scarcely support herself in the doorway, and around her wrists were thick bands of linen, applied, as I later learned, a few hours ago by the doctor, in a desperate effort to stay the harm that she had determined to do herself.

Jaffray came in behind her. ‘Take a seat, my dear; you are not well enough to be up yet.’

‘It matters little,’ she said, but nevertheless allowed herself to be led to a chair.

The baillie watched her, carefully, and with a strange curiosity on his face. ‘I cannot fathom it, mistress. Indeed, I cannot believe it. Would you really have us believe that you were the willing companion of your husband’s deed?’

‘Not willing,’ she said. ‘No, never that.’

I saw it now, I thought. ‘Nor witting, either?’ I asked.

She looked over to me with a terrible desperation in her eyes, and made as if to speak but stopped, at a loss.

‘Did you know what your husband was about, mistress?’ asked the baillie.

She shook her head. ‘Not at first. Not at all. I did not know all until Marion told me.’ She looked down at her wrists and began to pick at the bandages, speaking almost absently as she did so. ‘I should have realised long ago. Sometimes I think I should have wondered.’ She trailed off, and then, having lost herself a few moments in her musing, she was recalled back to the present. ‘I was little more than a girl when Helen died. In truth, I remember very little about her. She was a married woman, the wife of one of the magistrates with whom my brother, Robert, was keen to curry favour – for even then it could be seen that Walter would be a man of importance, and my brother liked to be counted amongst the men of importance. My brother had hopes that I might make an impression on Helen – become her companion, help her in the nursery – be to her in fact what Marion was to become to me. But Helen had her own friends – older women – like your mother,’ she said, looking at me with an effort at kindness in her eyes.

‘And as for the nursery – there was to be no nursery.’ She paused and made herself leave off the picking at the bandages. ‘When she died, my brother made a great show of sorrow, which I knew was not real. He would imagine himself perpetually required to give succour and counsel at Walter Watt’s house, but I know Robert is an object of contempt to honourable and intelligent men, and such I could clearly perceive to be the case with Walter also. And yet, invitations came to us often from the magistrate, and soon I came to understand that it was not my brother’s but my own company that Walter sought. I could not understand it, for he was deep, so deep in grief and love for his wife. He spoke little of her, but her face was always in his eyes, her name always ready to fall silent from his lips. I was not yet seventeen when it was agreed between him and Robert that we should marry, that I should take Helen’s place.’ She gave a small, humourless laugh. ‘What a mockery! That I should take her place? He was kind to me, I can never deny that; he took pleasure – took his pleasure with me, and I came to love him beyond measure, and child after child though I bore him, I knew I would never take Helen’s place. And so it went on, and by the grace of God, as I thought, our family thrived and Walter rose higher and higher in the burgh. I knew of no one better blessed, yet there was still a dark emptiness within him that I think was only truly filled when he looked at Helen’s portrait. I thought she haunted him, and perhaps she did, and the memory of her tormented him.’

‘And in all that time, mistress, you truly suspected nothing?’

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘And then Patrick came home. I must confess,’ and here, for the first time, she allowed herself a real smile, ‘I felt a little anxious at the prospect. He had come to visit us once before, but just for a few days, before he left for the continent, but this time he was coming to stay. For years, I had heard nothing but the praises of this boy – this young man as he was to be. To Walter he had been as a son. He had once said to me, before he could stop himself – for he was always careful not to hurt me – if he could have had such a son, of Helen, he could have asked for nothing more. There was a joy in him when he heard Patrick was coming home that I had rarely seen, and I know he left Arbuthnott in little doubt as to how the boy was to be treated – it was impressed upon the apothecary what an honour it was for him to have and house such an apprentice.’

‘And when the boy did return, how were things between them then?’

A light came into her eyes as she replied to the baillie. ‘It was a thing lovely to behold. They were as father and son reunited. And in truth, for myself, I could not be jealous. Walter was so happy and so proud to show off his own little ones to Patrick who, he said, would be as a brother to them. And so it was. I have seldom met such a good, loving young man, and I know from Walter, and Arbuthnott – and indeed Marion – that he was greatly gifted. I had never seen my husband at such peace. That Patrick and Marion then became attached made it all the sweeter for me. There was true happiness in our household. It was our time of true happiness.’

I had known such a time. ‘And then?’ I said.

She looked at me directly and spoke bluntly. ‘And then, it came to its end. Patrick was invited to take his dinner with Walter and with the doctor, who had just returned from Edinburgh, and who was very desirous to meet him.’ The doctor, I could guess, had not been subtle in pressing for an invitation. ‘Patrick had been that day with Marion out to Sandend, then onto Findlater and Darkwater, gathering plants as she told me. He did not go back to the apothecary’s to wash or to change his clothing when they returned, but came directly here. A change had come over him – he was not his usual, easy self, but nervy and agitated. He was most desirous of seeing Walter privately before the doctor should arrive. I asked him to rest, or to take a little refreshment while he waited, but he would have none of it, and spent the whole time in gazing intently at the portrait on the wall – the one of Walter and Helen.’

‘And did they have this private interview?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘They did. I heard nothing of it – I was in the kitchens – but within half an hour of Walter arriving home, it was over – Patrick had left. Walter looked ill, shaken. He would have put off the doctor if he could have done. He would not tell me what was wrong or why Patrick had left, just that the boy had been upset, but he had managed to calm him and would speak with him the next day.’

‘And was that the last you saw of the boy?’ The baillie was watching her keenly.

She looked at her hands again and then directly at William Buchan. ‘No,’ she said, ‘it was not.’

‘He came to the house again?’

‘I think so. That is,’ she hesitated, unsure how to proceed. ‘I did not see him come, but I saw him leave.’

‘When was it?’ asked the baillie.

She shook her head and began to weep.

‘It was the night of the storm, was it not?’ I said.

She nodded and then began to weep all the more uncontrollably. ‘I had scarcely seen Walter all day. He had spent much of the morning in his business room and then the afternoon out and about in the town. He was drenched and muddy when he returned home. He said he wanted no supper, and was not to be disturbed in his work, although I heard him later go down to the kitchen where a pot of stew had been left on the hearth. I had much trouble with the children that evening – they were in such great fear of the storm. I was concerned about Walter, and sat at my needlework for as long as I could, but a little before ten, tiredness overwhelmed me and I decided to retire without having seen my husband. As I was mounting the back stairs, I saw a hooded figure come out of Walter’s work room and leave the house by the side door, directly onto Water Path. I thought it was Patrick by the height and gait of him. I was so anxious to put right whatever had gone wrong with him and Walter, I threw a cloak around my shoulders and went out without even a lantern to try to overtake him. I had not expected the tempest outside to be so bad, and I made little headway in catching him up – the streets were near enough turned to rivers. I kept him in my sights, but then he started stumbling, falling, grabbing out at walls, banks, even the grass, it seemed to try to steady himself. I knew he was not drunk, because he had walked straight enough when he had left Walter’s room and our house. I started to run, to go to his aid and then I saw …’ She stopped, and bit her lip.

‘You saw me, did you not?’

‘Yes, Mr Seaton,’ she said quietly, ‘I saw you. I thought you would have helped him, but–’

‘But I did not.’ I could feel the eyes of the baillie and the notary on me, held fast, now, and I could not look at either of them.

The baillie’s mind was working quickly. ‘And so you helped him to the schoolroom, in the hope that Mistress Youngson would hear and find him?’

‘No,’ she looked up, surprised, defensive even. ‘Had I reached him, I would have helped him home – to the apothecary’s, or to the doctor’s if I could have managed it. Even to the schoolhouse, but I would have roused someone, wherever it might have been.’

‘But you did not?’ queried the baillie.

‘No,’ her voice was flat. ‘I could not. As I watched Mr Seaton pass by, I saw two figures coming from the direction of the churchyard, and they saw me.’

‘The Dawson sisters,’ I said.

She nodded. ‘They waited until you had turned into the schoolhouse pend and then went to him. They managed to lift him between them and drag him – somehow – after the way you had gone. They were gone from sight a few minutes and I waited – I thought they must have roused you. When they came out again, one of them looked towards where I stood. She turned again as they took the other fork up the path, as if to tell me all was well, that I could go back now. And so I did.’

Her head sank into her hands and I realised that someone else, for two weeks, had been carrying something of my guilt. ‘There was little you could have done,’ I offered her. ‘You were not to know they had not alerted me. The fault is not yours.’ My words did little to comfort her, if indeed they reached her at all.

The baillie gave her a moment, but there were still many questions to be answered, and every moment wasted was a moment more for Walter Watt to make good his flight. ‘After all this,’ he began, ‘you still did not suspect your husband? Even when you heard how Patrick Davidson had died?’

She shook her head dumbly, her face puffy and blotched now. ‘I was very scared, when the news of Patrick’s death was brought to us the next morning, that his falling out with Walter might have something to do with it, in some manner or other. But then when I saw how Walter took the terrible news, how desolate it left him, I could not believe that he had had anything to do with it. And he did not want to talk to me about it; I could see that well enough.’

Yes, I remembered. Remembered how keen Walter Watt had been to shield his wife from us that morning when we had brought the dead body of Patrick Davidson on a bier to their home. I remembered how he had urged her away to the nursery early in that conference. And I remembered also how determined he had been, to begin with, to argue that I must have been with his nephew the night before. Only with the suggestions of Charles Thom as a worthy suspect for the murder had the provost lost interest in pressing my possible guilt.

‘You told him, did you not, what you had seen, and by whom you had been seen? And you told him you had seen me?’

She looked at me, somewhat confused. ‘I – yes, I did.’ Unwilling, yes, but unwitting more so, she had consigned Janet and Mary Dawson to a perpetual banishment from this town; even, for Mary, from Scotland itself, warned off by the provost’s henchman. And she would, but for the chance and ill-luck of Charles Thom, have consigned me to the hangman’s noose. I was to have been her husband’s scapegoat. But why then had he taken me into his confidence, entrusted me with the mission of the maps? I saw that my pride had set a trap for me. Once he had seen that the papers found in his nephew’s room bore no account of Patrick Davidson’s suspicions of him, the maps in themselves had mattered little to him. I had no doubt a report of my encounter with Janet Dawson as she had been beaten from the burgh bounds would have reached his ears. I had not been entrusted with some important mission on the burgh’s behalf: I had been got out of the way.

The baillie had perhaps seen too many weeping women pleading ignorance of their husband’s deeds, or perhaps his antipathy towards the Reverend Guild extended to his sister, but he certainly was not yet satisfied or finished with Geleis Guild. ‘Do you have any knowledge of flowers, mistress, of the science of botany?’

‘Why, no. Not more than is common for uses in the nursery and about the household, but in truth, even in that my knowledge was lacking, for with Marion to assist me, there was little need for me to look into such things myself.’

‘But your husband had knowledge?’ he persisted.

She shook her head slowly. ‘I never knew it. He never once, in all the time I knew him, showed any interest in plants. Indeed, the garden of his first home, that he shared with Helen, had been a wondrous place, but it soon went to neglect after her death, and his housekeeper took over the growing of what was needful for the kitchens. He did not even seem to mind that Helen’s Eden would be destroyed to make way for my brother’s new manse.’

‘Helen’s Eden was destroyed long ago, mistress, and he the serpent.’

Geleis Guild had no answer to the baillie’s words, and simply bit her lip, then said, ‘It was only once Patrick returned, and they reminisced about their old days together, that I learned Walter had had a love of plants and flowers. I did not dwell long on the strangeness of it – I just thought it something too closely tied to Helen for him to think of without her.’

‘It was, for it was what he used to kill her. The flowers that were to bring death to her, and to her nephew, and to Marion Arbuthnott, still grow in the garden of that house.’

‘But Walter gifted the house and land to the kirk for my brother – and for all the ministers to follow. It was his great desire that the land be cleared for the new manse as soon as possible. He went often to check on the work, and was greatly frustrated by the delays occasioned by George Burnett’s appearances before the session over his fornication with the servant girl.’

‘The servant girl.’ Said as if she had no name. In Sarah Forbes’s position, how would Geleis Guild have fared? With less dignity, I told myself, and with no resilience at all.

The baillie’s voice was cold. ‘He wanted the evidence of his crime destroyed before the boy returned and saw it. But he could not bring himself to destroy it by his own hand, for fear that he would need it again. I think he wished the decision to be taken from him, and so they were still there, to be used in the killing of Patrick Davidson and then of Marion Arbuthnott.’

‘Do not mistake me, baillie,’ she said, suddenly strong, ‘I do not doubt that it was his hand that killed them all, but I still do not understand it, for he loved Helen – loves her yet – and Patrick too.’

‘And yet,’ he replied, talking to her but looking at me, ‘for some men, worldly ambition will fill the void left by what they imagine to be the greatest love. He did not truly love her at all.’

There was little comprehension in the young woman’s eyes, and her bodily weakness was becoming more and more evident. The doctor had held his tongue longer than I would have thought possible, but he could hold it no longer. ‘I must get this girl to her rest, baillie. You can take up your questioning again tomorrow.’

The baillie nodded his assent, but said, ‘I must know one more thing, mistress. When did you finally understand what your husband was doing, and what he had done?’

She was standing now, leaning on the doctor’s arm. ‘When Marion came to me, to tell me what she knew. She wanted to warn me, to get the children away. But I did not believe her, and so I took her tales to Walter, who had me call her back, that he might reassure her, as he said. And I was touched,’ she smiled bitterly, ‘touched by his concern for her, for she looked truly ill. He left me with her and went himself to fetch her some broth from the kitchen. He spoke to her a few moments, kindly, gently, to calm her fears. He told me that he himself would see her safe home, but that first of all I should “bid the girl eat,” and so I did, and sent her to her death.’ The finality in the last words precluded any further questioning, and Jaffray took Geleis Guild away, to begin her own sentence of despair.

I was alone in the room now with William Buchan. ‘You feared Marion might stumble on the truth and make it known, before there could be evidence or anything to protect her. That is why you strove so hard to keep everyone from her.’

‘Aye,’ he replied, ‘to her own cost, and to theirs. If only the girl had told what she knew to me. Then I would have had him, and he could have done no further harm.’

‘It was perhaps not God’s will,’ I said, no longer self-conscious at speaking of God’s will with this man who strove daily to see and have it enacted on this earth.

‘It was God’s judgement on me, on my pride, on my carriage towards my fellow man, that she did not take her burden to me sooner. And I must look to it. I must look to it.’ So saying, he got up from his chair, coughing, and without a backward glance to where I still lay, William Buchan, who last night had stayed the murderous hand of Walter Watt as it readied itself to crash down a second time on my forehead, left me to my thoughts.