The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

SEVEN Destination

I awoke the next day to a bright clear Aberdeen morning such as I had known nowhere else. As I lay, hands behind my head, looking up at the curved ceiling, the bell of St Nicholas kirk began to strike the hour: one, two, three … it tolled nine times. Nine o’clock. I could not remember the last time I had slept until this hour. I would have been about my labours in my schoolroom in Banff over two hours by now, ready to send the town boys home for their breakfasts. A pitcher of fresh water had been set by the Delft wash bowl in my room. Someone must have come in with it in the hours since dawn, but I had heard nothing.

My body had been weary after the long ride and its strange meeting, but I had not seen William in nearly a year and there had been an unburdening at my destination, which had left my mind and heart something clearer than they had been for many months. Even as I had entered Aberdeen, with its narrow winding streets of tall houses and its busy lanes of people, dogs and beasts, the stifling feeling that had oppressed me in Banff had begun to lift. And then, once Elizabeth had been finally persuaded that I was not actually ill, and had brought us a fine dinner of roasted capons and cold ham pie, she had left us to the talk of men and of friends, and I had told William my story.

When I had finished, he hesitated. ‘It is,’ he began, ‘something of what I had imagined, although I could not have guessed it all. And you have heard nothing of Katharine since?’

‘Nothing since that last meeting on the road from Fordyce, though for a time I could scarcely remember even that. Now, though, the words are burned on my very soul, every one of them, hers and mine.’

‘You must not dwell on it, Alexander.’

‘That is what Jaffray says, too, in his many different ways that he thinks so subtle.’

William smiled. ‘The doctor’s heart is on his sleeve, and for all his learning and experience of the world he cannot hide it. And yet I think his counsel is good.’

I shrugged. ‘Oh, it is good, but it is counsel easier to offer than to act upon. I have tried with all my strength not to dwell on it. I have tried to drink it out of my mind, my body. I have, in my worst of days, disgraced myself with other women, but in the end the knowledge of it finds me out again.’

I had told him everything, even the last part, that part without which it might have been easier to face myself.

William had guessed, long before Archie himself had, what were my feelings for Katharine. Archie and I had spoken of it for the first and only time on the eve of his departure for the Bohemian Wars. There had been a great feasting and speech-making that night in the town house of the Hays. The great and the good of Aberdeen to burgh and to land had toasted Archie’s family, his valour, his honour and his health, and then toasted them again. Archie and I had been party to many such nights together, but on this occasion I noticed that while he smiled and laughed and joined the toasts, in reality he ate little and drank less, and the smile faded as soon as its recipient turned his or her attention elsewhere. I often wonder now whether Archie knew then that he was going to his death, and that he would not see these faces or the sun set on this town again. The noise of the drinking, the laughing and the music rose, and the light of the fire made faces dance in and out of fleeting shadows. As the company was roaring at a lewd tale of an Edinburgh minister and the wife of a rich Leith merchant, I felt Archie’s hand on my shoulder and he leant towards my ear. ‘Come, Alexander, let us away.’ I do not think anyone noticed us slip out, save Katharine, whose eyes kept count of all I did.

We made our way down the servants’ stairs and out through the kitchen to the backland. Light from the upper windows kept our feet from misadventure in the courtyard, and we slipped through a side gate into the vennel leading to the Broadgate, away from the house. I did not need to ask Archie where we were going – we had used this route often, to escape the eyes first of his parents, then his tutor, and occasionally of any of the town’s officers who might have come to look for him. In a few moments we were out on Broadgate and headed towards Guestrow in the direction of Maisie Johnston’s house. Maisie Johnston had brewed ale in the burgh for forty years, and there was but a handful of burgesses on the council or the session who could deny in truth that they had ever been carried home, incapable, from her parlour or spirited, half dressed, out of her back door when the session on its rounds knocked at the front.

The cur in the yard scarcely stirred as Archie knocked on the back door of the house. It knew of old who was permitted to be here and who was not. The mistress herself opened the door to us, and nodding to me, she led the way up the stairs to an apartment I had never been in before. I had not Archie’s taste for whoring, and my previous visits to Maisie’s house had always stopped at the drinking parlour at the foot of the stairs. It was with some relief, then, that I saw the room she opened to us was unoccupied, and that a table had been set with food and drink and two places. Maisie took a coin from Archie, nodded again and left the room without having uttered a word.

Archie sank down on a settle and let out a huge sigh as the door closed behind her. ‘Thank God, some peace at last.’ This was not his usual style of talking.

‘And since when have you sought peace?’ I asked.

He was silent a long moment. ‘I crave – a kind of peace, an end to the hunting and the dancing and the days of no consequence. I crave a peace that comes when a man finds his place, when he …’ He was searching for the words.

‘When he meets his calling?’

‘Yes,’ he said, as if he had only just now realised it. ‘When he meets his calling.’

‘And that is what, in truth, you are sailing to tomorrow? To meet your calling?’

He unbuckled his cloak and let his hat fall to the floor. ‘Well, it is not here that I will meet it. I cannot play the fool all my life. One day I will have to return here, return to Delgatie, take my father’s place, have charge of the lands, the tenants, the family debt. I will have to fight my neighbours as they will me. I will have my honour slighted and trample on that of others. I will marry me a wife I do not love and father as many bairns on her as she can bring forth into the world. I will die and I will leave my son my debt and my lands and my quarrels, and so it will go on. But, Alexander, do not tell me that is my calling. I cannot believe that God in his heaven does not ask something else of me on this earth.’

I had known always that there was more to my friend, to the foster brother that he had declared himself to be, than the laughing, drinking, dangerous, adored noble son, but it was a part of himself that he took pains not to reveal, even to me. Tonight though, there was to be no dissembling, for either of us. There would be no mysteries, no unanswered questions, no lack of understanding to carry down the years to our deaths, should we never meet again.

‘And do you think, Archie, that in these foreign wars you can do something that you could not do at home? You have no need to prove your honour or your courage here.’

He poured wine into the glasses, finer work they were than I would have thought to find in this house, and handed one to me. ‘What passes for courage here is but a case of me doing what it is known I shall do, what those who went before me did. It will change nothing. But the wars on the continent have greater stakes than our petty doings on these shores. I have a choice. I do not have to go there, but I choose to go; I wish to play in that great game, and to make a difference.’

I was silent for a moment, searching for the right words that he would carry with him. ‘I think you are wrong,’ I said.

‘How so?’

‘I think there is a difference to be made here. Changes in the world need not always proceed from kings and their causes. A change in one man, howsoever lowly he be in the beginning, can affect many in the end.’

His eyes twinkled and a smile played about his mouth, just as it did when he knew he had a better hand of cards than I, or when I had made a careless move on the chessboard. ‘And there you have it, Zander. I could not have put it better myself. As ever, you give yourself away without knowing that you do.’

‘I do not understand.’

‘It is in your words, Alexander, in your words. You speak of a change in one man. That is your calling, not mine. Your mission is to change what men are. Mine is to change what men must face, to put right by force the damage done when those of your vocation have failed. Mine is to seek to alter the destinies of kingdoms from the top, yours from the very smallest component in them. Neither of us will succeed alone, but we may one day come close to one another in our paths.’ He drained his glass and refilled it. ‘Until then, though, there is food, there is drink, and there are women, by God, there are women.’ His face, his mood had reverted to their old selves. His well-accustomed mask was in place; he had told me what he had to and we would not need to touch on the subject again.

‘Archie …’

He looked up briefly from the chicken leg he was gnawing at with some gusto.

‘Archie, there is something I have wanted to tell you, to talk to you about before you leave. I …’

Again the twinkling eyes, the playful smile. ‘You are in love with my little sister.’

I felt the breath go out of me, and could say nothing for a moment.

He shook his head and laughed. ‘Oh, Zander, you think me a dullard after all. How many years now? One, two? Half the pretty girls in Aberdeen and Banff have thrown themselves at your feet, while I have had to make do with the wanton ones, and you have shunned them. Twelve months or more ago, my friend, I realised that you were in love. It did not take a great casting about to find the object of your affections. At first I was bemused, I will confess. The idea that my sister could be seen by any man as other women are seen by me had not occurred to me. And then for a while I reasoned that it was simply that she talked more sense than I that led you to seek out her company, but in the end I could not deny what to others had been long obvious.’

‘To others?’

‘Why, aye. To my mother and to yours.’

This was horrible; I felt I would vomit.

‘Och, Alexander. You have the colour of a dead fish, and much the same expression. Bear up, man. It is not so bad. My mother is a little pleased, your own delighted, and of course your father does not know.’

‘God be thanked. And yours?’

Archie shrugged and reached for a mutton chop. ‘My father knows, but he trusts my mother in these matters, and Katharine can put her heart where it pleases her.’

‘That is your father’s view?’

He nodded. ‘In as far as he takes a view. He knows you are a good man, and the son of the best of men. He loves his daughter and would see her happy. Trust in me, Zander. I will return from these wars covered in glory. I will marry me that fertile, rich bride of my parents’ choosing. Katharine will be of less consequence than a brood hen. They’ll let her marry whom she wants.’

‘I hope to God you’re right.’

He tossed a mutton bone to his dog, lying between us on the floor. ‘Of course I’m right, Zander. Am I not always right? Besides,’ he sighed as he got up and went to the window, looking out over the blackness that was the burgh at night, ‘my parents love me well, too well. I shall ask them, and she will be yours.’

As ever, he had run on to a thing decided, leaving little space or time for reason. ‘But what of Katharine? Will she have me?’

He looked at me, astonished. ‘You do not know? You have never tried her on it?’

‘I have never … I did not think … No.’

He shook his head in amused exasperation. ‘Well, Alexander, on that score I cannot help you. On that you must shift for yourself. But I think you will find a willing listener to your pleas. And then we would be truly brothers, and there would be nothing dearer to my own heart.’ He smiled at the thought and presently his smile took on a look of mischief. ‘And you shall have the kirk at Turriff, or King Edward or Banff, and thunder from the pulpit at my wicked and wanton ways.’ And thus he tried to make light of our parting, thanking God that he would soon be relieved of my ‘lang dreep’ of a face. ‘If ever there was a minister born it’s you, Zander. You will sermonise the life out of them.’

We laughed, and as the rumble of our laughter receded, we remained in companionable silence a few minutes, he kicking at a log with the toe of his boot, I watching the candle flicker and splutter in the draught. I wondered when next I would see that loved, arrogant, noble face, hear that roaring laugh. I wondered how war would change him, how living out in the world, away from our charmed college life, would change me, how my practice of the word of God would measure against my knowledge of it.

He broke into my reverie by throwing his unbuckled sword at my feet. ‘Enough of this lovesick nonsense, Mr Seaton. Tonight you will accompany me on my farewells to the “ladies” of Aberdeen. You must not be completely out of practice when you get my poor deluded sister to your bed and I … I must not disappoint the ladies, for tomorrow I sail from our safe harbour, and how they will weep for the Master of Hay!’

And that night with Archie had been the last of my wild nights. For two years after that, I had immersed myself in my divinity studies. My mother had died in the second winter after my graduation to Master of Arts. She had been ill a long time by then, too ill to travel. My father had not come to hear me present my theses – he had no Latin anyway. For those two years my head was buried so deep in my books, and she and her mother came so rarely into town, that I hardly saw Katharine above a dozen times. I do not recollect what nonsense I spoke to her the first few times. The harder I struggled to say something that would imprint my image on her soul, the worse the nonsense became. But one day, nearly two years after Archie had left, I walked from Old Aberdeen to the house in the New Town. The Hays were preparing to journey back to their fastness for the winter, and I would not see them again for several months. I went to bid them safe journey and farewell, as Lady Hay had asked me to do. We ate a cold dinner and drank the good wine that his lordship did not wish to leave in the house. Lady Hay busied herself with many questions about my studies and my progress and the comfort of my college room. His lordship, wary now of too close a familiarity with matters of religion, plied me for the college gossip. And through it all, as I held my conversations with her parents, my thought, my mind, was all on Katharine. She was a child no longer – had not been these last three years – and the knowledge of her proximity engulfed me.

The meal ended all too soon. The parting was over quickly. But as Katharine passed me at the entrance, just as she was about to step out onto the Castlegate, a huge careless hound bounded past her to join his master’s train, and toppled her into my arms. I felt the softness of her through her winter furs, and the warmth of her breath against my neck. The heat of it ran through my whole body, and I held her a moment longer than was needed. She steadied herself, and I could see the flush of confusion on her cheeks. She left, with no spoken farewell.

I did not see her again until the Yuletide festivities at Delgatie. The kirk session might fulminate as it liked, but the laird of Delgatie would have his Christmas feasting, and all his adherents would know his hospitality as if there had never been a reformation of religion in our country. The dancing and the music and the storytelling, more raucous with every new teller, went on for three days, and by the end of the first I had danced, spoken, laughed, sung with Katharine more than I had in the previous two years. At first, in the dancing, the thrill of being able to touch her in full view of all the company without attracting notice or censure almost paralysed me. Her red silk gown, embroidered with golden flowers and tendrils, and the sparkling jewels set in her pale blonde hair, made her seem like a visitor from some winter world of fable. By the end of the evening I did not want to relinquish my hold on her. I could not sleep that night; I could not eat the next morning. I could not pray; I could scarcely read the lesson in the castle chapel. My lord would hunt after breakfast, but I, a student of divinity, was spared the obligation to attend him on his hunt. Katharine’s mother was overseeing the work of the kitchens, in preparation for the night’s feasting to come.

And so it was that I came upon her on the stairs. No great work of chance, really. In truth, I know I had been looking for her, as I think she had for me. The great turnpike stairway of Delgatie was broad enough for us to pass with ease, but not so broad that we could not somehow contrive between us a slight stumble, a touch. A brush of her shoulder against my chest. ‘Alexander.’ She said my name and called to every part of me. I pulled her close into me and held her as if my very breath depended upon it. We were there a long time. How it was that no one in the castle came upon us I do not know. I feared that if once I should let her go she would be gone for ever, that I would never recapture that moment, that feeling of pure existence, a complete engrafting of my whole self upon the world. But loosen her I did, eventually. She did not run, or evanesce, but took my hand and led me further up the stairs then down the three steps to her own chamber. I had not set foot in the room for years, not since as boys Archie and I had crept in there to steal a doll, which we then set on a stack in the castle yard and burned as a witch. From that day her mother had forbidden us to cross the threshold.

The room I stepped into had lost many of its childish trappings – it was a lady’s chamber. The wall hangings and bedding were of rich damask. A tapestry showed a knot of berries and flowers. A Venetian looking glass of the finest quality hung on the wall. Katharine took my hand and led me to a settle by the fire. She took rugs from the chest beneath the window seat and cushions from the high, heavily canopied bed. On a table was a box of the deepest ebony, inlaid with mother-of-pearl. I had been with Archie when he had bought it for her, the last gift he gave her. I knew it to be filled with her grandmother’s gold and jewels, kept for great occasions; at other times she preferred to wear but a single cream pearl at her neck. Outside, although it was not yet midday, the sky was darkening to a heavy and deep grey, and snow began to fall. A candle flickered under a copper burner, filling the room with a warm incense of winter. She bade me build up the fire and went down to the great hall to fetch wine, cold meat, cheese, nuts and pastries from the side table laid out for those who would take a midday meal. Two or three times she went back and forth between her chamber and the hall, and was remarked by no one. We spent the remainder of the day together, with the rugs wrapped around us by the fire, holding each other and talking of how long we had loved until now, and how we should manage our secret until Archie came home. We could not marry until I had completed my divinity studies, until I had a man’s station in the world. Until Archie came home to plead the case of the friend who was not worthy of Katharine’s hand. We would not speak our love to any other until Archie came home.

The months passed, the yuletide festivities were long over, I passed my course in divinity to the approbation of all my teachers, and still Archie did not come home. I took up my teaching post in the grammar school of Banff while waiting for a kirk to fall vacant. The kirk of Boyndie in my own presbytery, not four miles from the town of Banff, fell vacant, and I was invited to preach there, to commence on my trials for the ministry. Still Archie did not come home.

And then the news arrived that he was dead. ‘They will weep for the Master of Hay!’ he had said. And they did weep. The whole of the North wept, a torrent of unceasing grief for the heir to Delgatie. The best and bravest of our youth, the hope and pride of his family, slaughtered in the German mud. I had been with him seventeen years, different as black and white and closer than brothers. I should have been with him then. I should have walked beside his horse through the mud; I should have put my body between his heart and the bayonet that killed him; I should have cradled his head in my lap as he died, leaving me worthless and alone.

Archie’s family was not to be consoled. His mother cried as if her very heart had been ripped out. His father looked into the long tunnel of death with no light behind him. They wanted me with them every hour of their blackest days. For I was of Archie, no substitute, no second or third best, but of their boy. They looked at me and they saw us climbing trees at seven. They saw us diving into waterfalls at twelve, fishing, hawking, laughing. They saw us ride through the castle gates at fifteen, to King’s College and all the delights of Aberdeen, riding to manhood and to our future. In my eyes they still saw their son’s brilliant smile. In my hearing, my Lord Delgatie begged forgiveness of God for grieving so deeply for his son. The God of Scotland gave children and He took them and His will was not to be questioned. I watched the old man’s heart break.

As for Katharine, Katharine was all but forgotten in those first weeks. She was left, frozen in her own grief, a loved younger child but no compensation for the heir that was lost. So engulfed was I during those early weeks in the maelstrom of grieving at Delgatie that I did not see it at first, but Katharine did. Katharine, the sole heir to Delgatie, must marry now, and marry well. No minister, nor bishop even, but land and family. The heirs of Delgatie would spring not from the son but from his sister, and all my hopes lay with Archie where he had fallen.

There was no one to speak for us. A relative was found, an old, wealthy, childless relative. Katharine would be despatched to his Borders tower-house to marry him and bear him children and return one day, or send her son, to hold Delgatie for the Hays. She understood; I understood. There was no pleading, no begging not to be sent to the cold bed of a man so old he might have been her father, no protest that one day I would be a man whom their daughter might, with no dishonour, marry. All that was gone.

Fate, in all her wilful cruelty, or helped along perhaps by Katharine’s now fearful and watchful parents, decreed that the day of my final trials at Fordyce should be the day of Katharine’s departure for her Borders jail. We had four weeks, a month of warning, but in that month I could only see her once. My preparations for the final trial, my work in the school, and Katharine’s farewell progress round the ladies and castles of Banff, Moray and the Garioch gave us but one day, and one night. Wary as she was by now, Archie’s mother could not refuse me that last hospitality. His lordship was away from home, but she watched us; we were scarcely left alone together two minutes in the day.

And then, in the darkness of the night, I stole to Katharine’s chamber and for the first and only time I took her as my wife, and told her she would always be my wife and mine only. And we slept, naked under the cover, entwined in each other’s arms. I had not meant to fall asleep. I should not have fallen asleep and slumbered with her those long hours till dawn. The light of the early May morning and the singing of the birds gradually began to play upon my eyes and ears. The perfect warmth and comfort of waking with Katharine still in my arms was slowly replaced by a dawning horror that I should not still be here. And as I opened my eyes, Katharine’s head and loosened hair across my bare chest, her pale arm on my shoulder, I was met by the horror of Lady Hay’s face. Her skin was drained of all colour save grey. She moved her mouth but no words would come. Her eyes were filled with the cold disaster of the scene before her. And then she spoke. Slowly, quietly. ‘Get out. You are filth. Get out.’ And then the woman who had loved me as a son staggered from the room and vomited.

And that had been my parting from Katharine, less than three weeks before my final trial for the ministry. I do not know how I kept my senses. A lie. I know how I kept my senses. I had lost the man who would have called himself my brother; I had lost the woman who should have been my wife. I had betrayed my childhood. Everything of my heart, what I had understood as my kin, was closed to me. Yet I still had my calling; I had always had my calling. Even in my one night with Katharine I had told myself there was no sin, because I had meant her for my wife. I did not acknowledge my wrong. Parted from her, I might have been convulsed with grief. Yet I had my calling and my trials were before me. I threw myself still deeper into my books. In those three weeks, less, I turned the Bible on its head and turned it back again. I composed the sermon of my life. There could be no chance of failure, of rejection. I would live for and through my calling. And this I believed until the words were in the mouth of the Moderator of the Presbytery of Fordyce that would have licensed me to preach as a minister of the Kirk of Scotland. And in that moment all tranquillity, all that I still understood in the world was shattered by the cry of my Lord Hay of Delgatie. His wife had finally broken and told him that very morning what I had done, and he had ridden to Fordyce with all the devils in Hell at his heels. He would die before he would see me a minister. He would throw in my face my betrayal of himself and of his family and every single thing they had done for me through all the years of my life. He laid not a finger on me, but before the brethren I was as a man beaten into a stupor. The moderator, aghast, pleading in his eyes, asked me to defend myself. But I could not utter a word. I had no answer for my accuser, for there was none left to give. My dignity lost, I stumbled from the kirk of Fordyce.

This much, or the gist of it, William Cargill had known, or guessed. Knowing of old of my feelings for Katharine, he had known what Archie’s death would mean for us. The whole of the North knew of my humbling, my great fall, at Fordyce. But if my humiliation had been public, Katharine’s was worse. What was not known was guessed at, and whispered on the roads, in the inns, in the great halls of castles and at the firesides of hovels. Her name was bartered by those who were not worthy even to look on her face. Many wild theories abounded, until the people had some new scandal to keep their tongues active and their spirits content, but I had destroyed what I most loved, and Katharine, banished to that cold marriage bed, could never come back to Delgatie again.

William and I had never spoken of it before last night. ‘And for this, for what many men have done, ministers among them indeed, you were cast out from your brethren and they will never let you become a minister? Alexander, it is hypocrisy, and you should not bend to it. Why, Delgatie himself was a notorious adulterer in his younger days.’

I had heard this argument before, from Charles Thom, who had also guessed aright at the heart of the scandal. Jaffray had not argued in such a way, for he knew me better. ‘No, the hypocrisy has been mine, William. My Lord Hay is the head of a family, a magnate, a soldier, a leader of men. What he does in his bed or any other is of no consequence. Yet I sought to be a minister in God’s Kirk, to lead people from the path of damnation to the blessed assurance of righteousness. I knew what I did was wrong. And such was my arrogance in the face of God that I thought it did not matter because it was I who did it. And …’

‘And what?’

‘It was a betrayal. And my every memory of my whole life up to that point is coloured now by the knowledge of that betrayal. There is nothing in me that is not rotten.’

William would not allow this. ‘No, I will not have it. You did what other men, worse men have done. You loved the girl and she you. God in his Providence decreed she should not be your wife. In that at least, you may be wretched, but you are not rotten, for it was no work of yours that killed Archie and took Katharine from you.’

If this had only been so, I might have found myself a more tolerable being. But it was not so. William did not know it; no one knew it, save myself and Katharine. I had had a chance, only a chance, to hold onto the shreds of my life and to make of it something new. But I had rejected it, left it in the gutter. For, on the day of my fall at Fordyce, Katharine too had ridden from Delgatie. She had taken the finest horse left in the stables and she had ridden as no woman before her could have ridden. It availed her nothing. She could not catch her father’s party; she could not overtake him or plead my cause before the brethren as she had sworn to her mother she would do. By the time she arrived at Fordyce the kirk and kirkyard were empty and the brethren gone. She asked all about, but no one could tell her where I was or which way I had gone. Eventually, she came across a pedlar who had seen me on the road to Sandend. It did not take her long to find me then. I was on foot, and my form as well known to her as her own. We had not seen each other since that early morning in her chamber at Delgatie. How often since then I had meditated on the words, taken from the book of Proverbs and painted on the beams of that room’s ceiling: ‘If thou does labour in honesty, the labour goes, the honour bides with thee. If thou does any vice allow, the shame remains when pleasure is ago.’ The shame was burning now into me, burning my eyes so I could scarcely see. And the shame engendered in me a kind of madness, I think. There on the road she slid from her mount and took a step towards me.

‘Stay,’ I said.

‘Alexander …’

‘Come no closer. Do not come near to me.’

‘But Alexander–’

‘You know what has happened. You must know it. It is lost, all lost.’

‘But no, Alexander. No. All that is nothing to me. I love you more than life itself. I would defy God, my father, my mother, and all the legions of Hell to be with you. Alexander, I will not go. I will not marry him. I am yours. I will be yours. Alexander. We can marry and we can live, somehow.’

I was shaking my head at her, stepping back as she took another step forwards. ‘You have lost your mind.’

‘No, Alexander, but I have found my will. I will not leave you.’

She was before me, in all her pale and distracted beauty, and a troop of demons was taking hold of my mind. ‘You must leave me, Katharine, for I will not have you. You say it means nothing to you? Well, it means everything to me, and you have cost me all. All.’ All? What ‘all’ did I think there was without her? What ministry, what life did I think I would have led that did not have her in it? There was none, I knew that now. But I think, truly, in that moment I had been out of my senses, for I had turned from her and strode away, leaving her collapsed and crying in the road, the woman I had sworn to love until the day I died. Sometimes at night, when all the schoolhouse was silent save the noise of the sea at the shore, I would be kept awake by the sound of Katharine Hay’s desperate cries, as she lay weeping where I had left her, lying in the dirt on the road to Sandend. A hundred times on those nights I would have gone back to her, but she was no longer there.

And that I had told last night to William Cargill, the first living soul to hear from my lips how I had rejected the woman who had humbled and dishonoured herself for me. I wanted someone to know me for what I was. The bitterness Jaffray was always counselling me to let go of was at the root of my soul, and my soul knew what I had done.

William had sat silently for a long time after I had finished. He stoked the fire and stared into the flames. Finally he turned to me and said, ‘And yet I know you for a good man, Alexander. And this will pass. All pain will pass.’ We had said nothing further of the matter and had retired to our beds soon after, before the bell of St Nicholas struck midnight. If he could, I knew that William would take the great burden from my shoulder, and tell me I need carry it no longer, and I loved him for it. But William would never understand that should I once put down that rock, the man I had once believed myself to be would be destroyed for ever.