The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

TWELVE A Homecoming

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘The town of Aberdeen has dangers enough of its own, but with all that has passed in this burgh these last few days, there is cause to fear for all men.’ He leaned slightly towards me and was taken by another, briefer, coughing fit. ‘You met with no trouble in Aberdeen?’ I remembered Mary Dawson and her fear of being pursued by men sent from Banff, her terror that I was one of them. Perhaps I, too, had been watched in Aberdeen.

‘I met with no trouble there,’ I said.

‘And for the other business, your commission?’

‘To Straloch, you mean?’

He glanced briefly at Charles, but evidently adjudged that Charles would have little interest, and perhaps less opportunity, than any man in Banff of spreading rumours about foreign invasions and papist plots. ‘Aye, to Straloch. What other commission did you have?’ I decided to tell him nothing of my visit to George Jamesone on the provost’s behalf.

‘None.’

He was satisfied. ‘What said the laird to our business?’ He was watching me eagerly, as if there was a particular answer he was anxious I should give.

‘He said he knew of no such plot, no commission of cartography. He thought the work well executed. The provost has his letter.’ It was evident this answer did not please him, but I intended to spend no more time on the matter of the maps. My friend, under accusation of murder, sat before me, clean-shaven in the baillie’s own house in a suit of another man’s clothes. I cared little now for plots and maps. ‘How do you come to be here, Charles?’ I asked.

He looked at the baillie, who watched him steadily. ‘I was taken last night, about the hour of ten, from the tolbooth to this house under guard by Baillie Buchan and the notary, Thomas Stewart. I am told it was for fear of my life that I was brought here, fear that I would meet the same fate as Marion.’ His voice was flat, and fell on the last word.

I looked to the baillie, but he was talking directly to Charles. ‘Wicked and barbarous deeds were done in this town last night. Many of the guilty were brought to the tolbooth. They held her for a witch, and you had consorted with her. They held you answerable for the death of a strange visitor to our town. They wanted less, much less, to feed their frenzy. They would have torn your limbs from your body by morning.’

I had seen the mob last night. I did not dispute the baillie’s point. ‘And why here?’

The baillie stood up and was again taken by a fit of coughing. He steadied himself on the arm of his chair and then straightened himself to his usual dignity. ‘Because there is nowhere else, Mr Seaton. Every prison in Banff is full, full to the brim, and in each one of them there are those who would gladly have the music master for their next victim. Nowhere else was safe, and there remained no guards to be spared, so I have become the guard. My landlady’s son, who through the night watched over Charles Thom, must go about his lawful work today. I am but one man, and I must rest, and make my devotions. And so I prayed you would come and you have come. I ask of you one hour and a half, that I may cleanse myself of the stench of last night, and rest, and pray God for his guidance. One hour and a half I ask you to guard your friend well, Mr Seaton. Do I have your word that you will?’

I was astonished, and could think of no other response than to say yes. A very brief flicker of relief passed over the baillie’s face and he moved towards the small door to the left of the room, to the chamber I supposed he must sleep in, in those few hours when he consented to sleep. Before the door he stopped and turned. ‘Counsel your friend to pay heed to all that I have said to him, Mr Seaton. He can do nothing now for the dead, but for the living he must tell the truth; he must tell me what he knows.’ He took a well-worn Bible from the shelf by the door, and without further word he went to his chamber, leaving me with my prisoner.

So here we were, Charles and I, at William Buchan’s hearth. How often, how many nights, had we entertained ourselves with tales of the baillie, of his omnipresence and omniscience? How many times had we felt ourselves under the baillie’s disapproving eye on his nightly check of the inns and taverns of Banff that no apprentice or servant or infamous drunkard should be served with wine or ale? Yet here we were at his fireside while he washed, and prayed, and slept next door. It was Charles who broke the silence first, his eyes crinkling in the familiar smile. ‘We have surely come up in the world, Alexander, that we are guests in this house.’

I got up and took the seat opposite him, so lately vacated by the baillie. I leaned forward a little, my voice low. ‘Are we guests, do you think, Charles, or are we both prisoners? I think the baillie would be pleased to have me, also, where he can keep an eye on me.’

He laughed. ‘You might well be right. He was much agitated at your absence in Aberdeen. Not just myself, but Gilbert Grant also was plied for information about your plans there – what your business was, where you would lodge, who you were like to visit – I had all this from Jaffray.’

‘He told me he had been allowed in to see you.’

Charles looked down at the floor. ‘Aye, the once. But I would not have had it so; I would not have had him see me in that place. It was enough to know he thought of me – would have known that without all the baskets he sent up.’ There was a great sense of failure, of having disappointed, in his voice.

‘Charles, Jaffray has seen and suffered much in this life. He has few illusions about what fate can do to those who do not deserve it. You surely did not expect him to rest until he had seen you? He will not rest until he has seen you free and justice done.’ I hesitated, unsure how best to say what had to be said. ‘Whatever justice there can be done, now.’

Charles set down his empty bowl upon the hearth, and traced his finger a moment in the ashes. ‘What justice can be done? How can any justice be done in this life for Patrick Davidson or for Marion?’ He gave off his tracing and lay with his head back in the chair, his eyes tight shut. When they finally opened I could see they were filled with tears. I had nothing to comfort him and he was right: there was no justice; there could only be retribution. But Charles was not a man with a stomach for retribution, and he would only turn his back further on the ways of this barbaric world.

‘Do you think it is over, Charles?’

‘What is over?’

‘The killing,’ I said.

He pushed the hair back over his forehead in a gesture I knew well. ‘Killing or dying? I do not know. Patrick was murdered, no one doubts that, I know. But,’ he took a deep breath and swallowed hard, ‘Marion … they tell me she died by her own hand.’

I thought of the confusion of last night. Surely Jaffray had told someone, some authority other than just myself. I lowered my voice further still, conscious as I was of the baillie’s even breathing on the other side of the door. ‘Charles, has no one told you? Marion did not die by her own hand, Jaffray is adamant on that. He swears before God that she died by the same hand, and in the same manner, that killed Patrick Davidson.’

What colour there was drained from Charles’s face. ‘Then the killing has not stopped,’ he said.

I watched him intently, watched for any flicker, any sign that would tell me something. ‘Charles, is the baillie right? Do you know something?’

He bit his lower lip and shook his head slowly. ‘I know nothing, Alexander, nothing. I would to God that I did. Since Marion’s death, the baillie has been at me night and day, as he was at Marion before it. But I know not even what manner of knowledge he seeks. He is like a dog worrying at a burrow from which the hare has only one escape. He will not let up, and I can tell him nothing.’ He looked away at the slowly dying embers in the meagre fire. ‘It is as if he knows very well what it is that he seeks, but he must have another say it for him.’

A thought was now becoming more formed in my mind, a thought that had been taking shape for some days now. ‘Do you think it possible that what the baillie seeks to establish is not what you know, but whether you know? You remember what you told me of Marion’s behaviour on the night of your search together for Patrick Davidson: she was almost as determined that no one should guess she had confided in you as she was to find Davidson. She feared as much for you as for him. She knew that the very suspicion that you had knowledge of what Davidson was about would put your life in danger. Who can say now that she was wrong? She paid that price herself.’ I could see, from Charles’s face, that my point was not lost on him. ‘You say, and I have had it from Jaffray also, that the baillie rarely left off his questioning of her, and now, since her death, he has taken you into his own charge.’ The coldness I felt was little to do with the bare and cheerless room in which we sat. ‘Charles, you must continue to play the ignorant; you must continue to hold fast that you know nothing.’

He looked at me with exhaustion in his eyes, exhaustion of the soul. ‘That will be no great triumph, no great achievement, for truly, Alexander, I know nothing. If you will not believe me, how should I convince the baillie? But Marion confided nothing to me but her certainty of danger itself. Had it been otherwise I would have told him by now. I have not your resolve.’

‘And I have not your humanity.’ I thought of Marion Arbuthnott, of the girl who had always been distant, detached, content in herself, until Charles had been able to draw from her some of the warmth of friendship. I wondered again where that might have led, had not Patrick Davidson come soon after, and with him the first experience of love.

Charles broke the silence. ‘Whatever burden Marion carried after Patrick Davidson’s death, she carried it alone. I could not help her, for I was never allowed to see her after they found him, and I do not think she even tried to go to the tolbooth to see me.’

‘She was lost in herself by then, Charles. No one could reach her save the children, Geleis Guild’s children, but she wanted no further human contact, nor comfort either, I think.’

‘But that is it, of course! There is one in whom she might have confided. Not the baillie, certainly, for she feared him. No, but in Geleis Guild. I think it possible she did, for she – the provost’s wife – came to see me once, in the tolbooth. The guards dared not prevent her. It was three days ago. She also was watchful, anxious to evade the baillie’s surveillance, I remember that.’

‘Why did she come to see you?’

‘I do not know,’ he said. ‘I was so glad at the time to see a kind face that I did not question it. She told me she gave no credence to the notion that I could have murdered Patrick or anybody. She spoke of her anxiety to see Marion again, alone, for they were companions, and she knew how hard all these things would be on her. I think in truth that Marion was her only friend. She was anxious to see her, but she could never escape the baillie’s watchful eye, still less get past him at the apothecary’s door. I hope to God she did not get to see her, or she will be in danger now herself.’

‘I would have little fear on that score. I think the provost’s mind is bent upon protecting his wife from whatever there is yet to come.’

‘I think, then, that he is a wise man,’ said Charles, quietly. ‘You will ask Jaffray about it, though?’

‘I will,’ I promised him. Charles was greatly wearied and looked ready to sleep. I would not tax or question him further. As his eyelids flickered and then closed, I moved quietly from my chair. I had never wondered about the baillie’s home, never considered him as a private person, for the life of the individual was always to him a thing of wickedness and impiety, an offence to God and a threat to the commonwealth. There was little comfort in this room, and little more, I suspected, in the small chamber leading off from it where he had gone to wash and where he now slept. William Buchan was a merchant who carried out a steady trade; he must have been a man of some wealth, yet there were few – if any – signs of it here. There were no wall hangings, such as even in Banff could now be found in the homes of some of the wealthier merchants, but one simply embroidered canvas above the door to the baillie’s chamber. Each corner was adorned with a small symbol of the seasons of the year – a lamb, a cornflower, a russet apple, a sprig of holly – but it was the wording in the centre that caught the eye. I knew, without the neat legend beneath it, that it was taken from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians; it was a verse I had pondered often myself: But I would have you without carefulness. He that is unmarried careth for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord. At the very bottom corner, in tiny lettering, were the initials HB and the date 1610. I had, in my lifetime, seen many verses from the Bible rendered in thread and canvas, but I had never seen one such as this. Was this then what drove the baillie, what lay at the heart of his inhumanity? Was it that his own mother had set him on this course of coldness towards his fellow man in some supposed pursuit of godliness? I could think of no other who could have done so.

The room itself was scarcely less bare than the walls. The only furnishings were the two hard wooden chairs on which Charles Thom and I sat and the table and bench to the side of the room. A kist with a strong lock – keeping the papers of business, I assumed – was below the one small window. There was no rug or matting on the swept wooden floor, and no ornament of any sort – what bowls and plate there were were either wooden or of coarse, local work, not burnished or painted. A low bookshelf was set against one wall, and it was to this that I gave my attention. It was from here that Buchan had picked the Bible as he had gone to his rest, yet another Bible remained. I took it from the shelf and opened it. Inscribed inside, in a thin and uncertain hand were the words: To William, walk always in the fear of the Lord and in the certainty of your mother’s love, Isabella Farquhar. 1596. The baillie could scarce have been ten years old when his mother had given him that Bible. But more, I realised that whoever had stitched those words that had condemned him to a lifetime of arid loneliness, it had not been his mother.

This was not the place to set my mind to that mystery and I resumed instead my examination of the baillie’s small library. The Psalms. Some tracts and pamphlets against the Catholics, the Jesuits, the government of bishops and the perils of assuming one’s own will, all in the vernacular. All as I would have expected, all save one. For William Buchan too had an edition of Craig’s poetical works, identical to that I had bought for Charles so recently in Aberdeen, yet this copy was well thumbed, well used, evidently oft read. This was not a man whom I thought poetry could have touched. As I wondered at this, my foot struck against another kist, long and low, beneath the shelf. On this one there was no lock. I bent down and opened the lid as quietly as I could. Inside, bound together, were little exercise books such as I would allow the better pupils to keep, like diaries or commonplace books. I carefully unbound the pile nearest the top and took the first book in my hand. On the front was written, in the baillie’s small and steady hand, ‘Sermons, March 1624–June 1625’, and inside there were notes and meditations on every sermon he had heard in those fifteen months. The whole pile of notebooks beneath it went back year upon year, month upon month, week upon week as far as my own childhood and beyond. A lifetime of the man was in those books, and I would have given much for the freedom to peruse them, but I was too conscious of the low, rasping breathing coming from just the other side of the door.

I could not help but open the most recent exercise book, though. The baillie had attended the kirk in Banff, mostly, but he had travelled too, all around the presbytery. He had found much to praise, many words of wisdom on which to meditate and to thank the Lord for, but he had found more to censure. Laxity in discipline, ignorance of the true meaning of the scriptures, error in the interpretation of God’s plan. Most of all, though, there was near a fury, fury at the ignorance, incompetence, and hypocrisy of the Reverend Guild. I could disagree with nothing he said of Guild’s preaching. Then a thought struck me. I rifled backwards through the pages and indeed it was there: 22 June, year of God one thousand six hundred and twenty-five. Mr Alexander Seaton, undermaster at Banff Grammar School, expectant for the ministry. At Boyndie Kirk.

Yes: he had been there. As I had taken the pulpit and looked down across my last congregation, I had seen, watching me with a peculiar intensity, Baillie William Buchan. Unaccountably, I felt my breathing come heavier and my hand tremble slightly as my eye scanned the first line and then the second. At first I could not quite comprehend what I read, could not take it in, and I had to go back over the words again until I was certain of what they said. There, in my hand, in the home of a man I had long avoided, maligned and misunderstood, I read a testament to hopes dashed and faith betrayed: William Buchan had given thanks to the Lord for the gifts He had given me, as a preacher and minister to his people, for preserving me where others had been lost, as a blessing to my community and a comfort to my friends. He had thanked God that the promise he had seen in the boy I had been had been fulfilled in the man I had become. My heart was racing and I read on, disbelieving until, out of nowhere, came a most awful hammering noise, fit to wake the dead. I scarcely had time to shut the book and throw it back in the pile at the top of the kist before the baillie came stumbling from his chamber, dishevelled from sleep. He wrenched his cloak from the back of the door and lurched towards the stairs. I hastily shut the lid of the kist and went to stand by Charles, who was also drowsily coming to; I was ready to defend him if I had to.

There was some commotion downstairs as the arrival strove to make himself understood to the crone, and then to get past her to the baillie. I should have relaxed at the voice, but my heart beat faster, for it could not be good news that drove him to this place, now, and in such a manner. There was shouting, insistent shouting, and the baillie trying to assert calmness, authority. At last he made himself understood, and I heard the men ascend the stairs. Charles tried to stand up, but his time in the tolbooth had weakened him greatly and he was far from his usual strength. It was not the baillie who came first through the door but Dr James Jaffray.

‘Alexander,’ he said, not comprehending that I should be there, and then his face changed and his body visibly sank as he saw Charles behind me. He took a pace towards us. ‘Oh, my boy, my dear boy.’ The baillie helped him to a chair and Charles knelt down at his feet, taking his hands. William Buchan, unused as he must have been to such displays of human feeling, stepped back into his chamber and, without fully closing the door, began to tidy himself. I poured some water for the doctor from the pitcher on the table.

‘Drink this, James; it will settle you.’

He rubbed his hand across his eyes and as the heaving of his chest subsided, he took the tumbler from me and drank. When his old friend had recovered himself, Charles allowed himself a smile.

‘Well, doctor, would it be an irate husband or a desperate creditor that chased you to the baillie’s in such a spin?’

The doctor also smiled and put down the tumbler. ‘No, but only two daft lads that are not safe to vague the streets on their own.’ He shook his head in a mock weariness. ‘There is nothing for it but I must find you both a wife to keep an eye on you, for I have work aplenty to keep me busy as it is.’

‘Just the one wife between us?’ asked Charles.

‘Aye, perhaps,’ replied the doctor, ‘and lucky to get that.’

A hacking cough broke into their pleasant banter. ‘Perhaps,’ said the baillie, ‘we should come to the matter in hand.’ Charles stood up and I stood aside to let the baillie pass. ‘The doctor has just told me now what I believe you already know, Mr Seaton. He has told me that by his findings, Marion Arbuthnott was no suicide but died by the same hand that killed Patrick Davidson.’

I nodded. ‘Yes, the doctor told me that this morning.’

‘What you will not have realised,’ continued the baillie, ‘perhaps because you would entertain no idea of his guilt in the first place, is that this proves, in as far as the thing can be proved, the music master innocent of the first crime as well as of the second.’

I looked from the baillie to Jaffray, the realisation only gradually dawning. Neither of us had thought of it, because neither of us had believed for a minute that Charles had murdered Patrick Davidson. It had been alone, in the peace and quiet of his little back room, looking out through the window at his wife’s garden, that the doctor had at last seen it. This was the proof that would, in the sight of others, free Charles from the tolbooth and from the hangman’s noose. Charles sat down again and held his head in his hands.

The doctor spoke again. ‘God forbid that any of us should take pleasure in such a thing. The girl should have been living and breathing and working yet in the apothecary’s shop and the provost’s nursery, but she is gone, and not by her own hand. We are too late now to prevent that injustice, but not another. Surely now, Buchan, the boy can go free?’

The baillie slowly nodded. His face was impassive and I could not guess what his thoughts were. ‘Yes, doctor, he can go free. Or, at least, I will consent to release him into your care. I have the authority, although I will doubtless have much answering for it to do before the council. But mark me well, see that he does not wander alone about the streets, or leave the town. He is less safe now than ever he was in the tolbooth. Heed my counsel, doctor.’

The doctor stood up, fully recovered now. ‘I will,’ and without further address to the baillie he turned to Charles. ‘Come on, boy, we’re going home.’

As we descended the dark stairway, the baillie, from his narrow doorway, spoke to me. ‘And you, Mr Seaton, you also should be careful what you are about.’ I made no reply and was glad soon to be out into the relative light of the vennel.

The homecoming to the doctor’s was a markedly different affair from our departure from the baillie’s. After her initial shock, Ishbel flew about the house making everything ready. The stable boy had been despatched within minutes to collect what was needful from the apothecary’s house; the rest could be got later. There was no notion that Charles would ever return to his attic room there, nor indeed, from the manner of the doctor and his housemaid, that he should ever leave their home. The contentment on the doctor’s face and the mild bemusement on Charles’s were as nothing to the determination of the young girl that the music master should not suffer one more moment’s hunger, thirst, cold or discomfort. That I was an imposition under her feet was made very clear, to my amusement rather than hurt, and to Jaffray’s too. Promising that I would indeed return to take my dinner with them that night, I left them to their moment. I had other business to attend to.

It was a steep climb to the codroche houses, along Low Street and up Back Path with its new-built dwellings – young craftsmen making their mark on the world for all to see, engraving their love on the lintels above the doors of their new households. My father had told me once, as we had passed such a doorway, that he had wanted to do the same when he had first brought my mother home from Ireland, to tell the world that she was his and he hers. But there was no engraving above our door, I said. ‘No boy, your mother thought it not seemly. She did not want to be as the other craftsmen’s wives.’ And that had perhaps been it, the beginning of the crumbling of his dream, when she had started, unwittingly perhaps, to punish him, little by little, for her mistake.

I turned left where Back Path met High Street, where some of the grander ones planned their houses away from the bustle of the marketplace and town, and headed up towards the Sandyhill Gate. The wind was not in my face, as it could often be, and it was a pleasant walk. I had no need to rush – Charles was out of the tolbooth, away from the danger of the sheriff’s judgement now, and those I sought would not be abroad until it grew dark. I had the time to rest a moment where the road for Strathbogie skirted the foot of the Gallowhill, and to look upon the town of my birth. At the end of its journey from the mountains of the Cairngorm, past the teeming woods of the Deerpark, the clear waters of the Deveron came straight as an arrow, an arrow of fine silver, at the sea, where it broadened out to meet the world. Under a sky that was endless, the great promontories of Tarlair and Troup Head towered over all that might come from the east, and looked to the north and west, where the long golden stretch of the links invited us to our leisure. And our town nestled there, snug back from the west bank of the river, stretching towards its new harbour works at Guthrie’s Haven. Narrow winding streets, tentacles reaching up towards the castle, Caldhame, the Boyndie road and the Sandyhills, met together at the heart of the town. The kirk and the marketplace, the tolbooth and the laird of Banff’s palace, its long green garden stretching almost to the Greenbanks where the scholars played on this, another unlooked-for holiday. The tall town houses of the merchants jostled with the tenements filled with the poorer folk, the lower craftsmen, the day labourers, the indwellers. A tight, sometimes meandering network of vennels and alleyways, houses, workshops and backyards locked the streets together, a maze that ran through gardens, round wells, into courtyards, pigsties, stables, kailyards, middens. Such was Banff, a place so blessed by God in harvest of land and sea, gone rotten at the heart. And at that heart, I was. A huge cloud began to pass over the sun and the air instantly cooled. I quickened my pace towards the Sandyhill Gate and the codroche houses.

They were not houses really, but shambling, windowless shacks of wood, turf and thatch of the sort the council was striving to banish from the town for fear of fire. They were set back a good bit from the road, up the hillside where a small burn ran down by the rowans and bramble bushes. No one from the town ventured to the codroche houses. The kirk session and council fulminated often against them and their inhabitants, but they were never levelled, never cleared. Filled with beggars, thieves and whores, the detritus of poverty that gave a name to all the fears of the good townspeople. The provost had told me why he tolerated them: they were weeds – weeds that we knew and could control, weeds that would prevent other, invasive weeds coming in and taking root. Weeds that could be managed. Yes, but I also suspected that up here, out of sight, the codroche houses could be, in the minds of my fellow townsmen, a place in which all the evil that was in their town could repose, a reason for them not to look in their neighbour’s face, in their own heart, and see it there instead.

As I approached the huddle of shacks a trio of mangy, hungry dogs came towards me, snarling quietly. A small, filthy child, a girl perhaps, in thin rags, ran into one of the houses from the hen house where she had been gathering eggs. A young man – it might have been her father – soon emerged, a large stick in his hand. I did not know him. He did not call off the dogs. ‘What do you want?’ he asked.

‘I am here to see Lang Geordie,’ I said.

His suspicion was all the greater.

‘Lang Geordie sees no one. What is your business?’

‘None of yours.’

I kept my face steady but my heart was pounding and the dogs knew it. They crept closer, and at any moment, at a word from the beggar man, they would be at my throat. More figures had emerged from the houses, two or three other young men, little more than boys, a gaggle of dirty children, a young woman holding a baby, another big with child. Perhaps a dozen pairs of eyes fixed me with cold hostility. The closest dog let out a long growl and was about to spring when a low snarl in some tongue, some vagabond’s cant I did not understand, came from the doorway of the main shack. The dog cowered back with a yelp, as if struck, and then slunk away with its companions. The gathering of people at the doorway parted and surveying me, as he supported himself on two crutches, was Lang Geordie.

The man must have been nearly seven feet tall, a giant almost. He had the wild hair and beard of an Old Testament prophet. The brandings on his cheek, marking him out as a ‘sturdy beggar’, repulsed on pain of death from some other town, only served to inspire greater fear in those who came upon him. I stood there, my chest still heaving from the encounter with the dogs, and waited.

‘If it is not the Devil’s apprentice,’ he said at length, with a hoarse laugh. His followers also laughed, some of the hostility in their eyes being replaced by a ready mockery, but only some. The young men continued to watch me with a clear and studied intent. ‘What do you want of me? Are you here for the whores? The word on the roads is that you prefer a higher class of siren in your bed.’ Again a laugh, more real now, from the gathering.

So I had made Katharine the talk of the beggars and the thieves on the roads and hovels of the north. It was little wonder her friend Isabella Irvine despised me. I made no response to the jibe. ‘It is yourself I am here to see.’

All jocularity was gone now from Lang Geordie’s face. He was studying me carefully, weighing me up. I think he had some notion then of what my business was. He uttered something in the cant to his people and they dispersed slowly to the places from which they had come, all but two of the younger men who continued to stand near him, on either side of the only door of the hovel. Lang Geordie gave them some instruction, too and then looked at me again. ‘Then come in, Mr Seaton, come in.’ I went carefully past the dogs and in between the two guards, stooping low, although not as low as Lang Geordie. Once inside, my eyes could scarce make out a thing. The door had been shut behind me and the only light came from the round smokehole in the middle of the roof and from the open fire itself. As my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom I could discern figures, shapes, huddled in various parts of the one long room that constituted the whole dwelling. A young woman stirred a pot of something – some broth of seaweeds – over the fire; an older woman, coughing as she did so, sang in an alien tongue to a baby in dirty swaddling; two small children scrabbled after something in a corner – a mouse or a rat. On a trestle bed at the far end of the room lay another woman, also coughing. The floor was beaten dirt and I knew not what I would find when I set one foot in front of the other. The stench and squalor were beyond my experience: even the tolbooth jail could scarcely compare with this. Lang Geordie ordered the woman up from the bed – the dwelling’s only furnishing – and as he took his seat there himself I saw that she was not a woman, but little more than a girl – fourteen, perhaps. She was wearing a tattered dress that I knew I had seen before, too large by far around the bosom and the hips. A whore’s dress; Mary Dawson’s dress. The vagabond chief saw me looking at the girl. ‘You can have her for a price – after our business is done,’ he said, very steady, with no insinuation.

‘I do not go with children,’ I said.

‘She is a child no longer,’ said the woman at the pot, bitterly. Geordie spat some reproach at her and she said no more.

The two sentries were inside the hovel now, still keeping guard of the door. I lowered my voice, for I had only business with Geordie himself, and it was business he might not like known amongst his followers. I kept my voice low. ‘I have money,’ I said, ‘not for whores but for information.’ He was sizing me up, waiting to see what the offer was, what the terms. He had played this game before and he would wait as long as he needed to. There was nothing for it but to come straight to the matter. ‘Who paid you last night?’ I asked.

He continued to fix me with his prophet’s eyes. ‘Last night? Now, what might have happened last night?’

‘You roused the rabble, the witch-mongers. You led them to the doctor’s door, to lay hands on the body of that poor murdered girl.’

He continued to watch me in the same manner, a little pleased with himself. ‘I? I did not rouse that rabble, Mr Seaton. Your godly minister and session clerk had that well in hand; they had no need of a poor beggar man.’ He held his hands out self-deprecatingly, and smiled, almost engagingly, as he said it. I would gladly have knocked the last teeth from his head.

‘You led them,’ I said. ‘It was you who crossed the door of an honest man’s house when it was barred to you, you who knocked the stable boy to the floor. You gave the beast its head. You with your crutches – all the way down into the town. A great exertion it must have been for you. Do you tell me it was not done for profit? For what else would you have done it? Since when have you concerned yourself with witches?’

The amusement, the playfulness departed from his face. The prophet’s look was gone, too. His eyes were of stone, his voice a low rumble. ‘Since I watched my mother burn.’ He was looking into the past somewhere. ‘A hen had stopped laying; a child had grown sick; the water in a burn had gone bad. My mother had called at the house before, twice, desperate for succour to feed her bairns: she was given none.’ He paused and there was near silence in the dwelling. Even the children in the corner seemed to have stopped their playing. ‘It was thirty years ago and I can still hear her screams.’ He pulled himself suddenly to his feet, towering and cold in his anger. ‘So that is my concern with witches, Mr Seaton. They had started to talk of witches in the town – the storm, the fishing boats wrecked, the poisoning. And who do you think they would have turned on first, the good burgesses of Banff? I went for them before they came for us!’ He was taken by a coughing fit and the woman at the hearth brought over to him a ladle of water. She calmed him and got him to sit down on the bed again. The look I caught from her as she returned to her pot was one of covert fear. His breathing subsided and he let go his crutch, which I had thought he was going to strike me with. ‘And that girl, she was dead. What did it matter? Are we not all dust? It could not hurt her, and it gave them a corpse to work out their passions on, instead of a living man or woman. Now, get out of my house, and never let me see you back here, unless it be to stay,’ he added with menace.

There was little more I could do. I believed him, and I did not. He had known, I was certain, that I had come up here about the business of the murders, but he had not expected me to ask about the witch-hunt. So what had it been? He called something to the two guards. One opened the door and, giving me a look potent with threat, jerked his head towards it. The other came over and stooped down to Lang Geordie, who murmured something in the cant. I caught the last words though – Mary Dawson. The man pulled me up by my collar and pushed me through the darkness towards the doorway.

Outside the dogs were waiting for me, snarling low. I avoided their eye. My elbow was caught as I stepped forward. ‘You were in Aberdeen, Seaton. Is Mary Dawson there?’

‘No,’ I replied with conviction, ‘she is not.’ So that was it; he had thought I had come to question him on the warning off of the Dawson sisters, or that I knew something of what they had known. It was with great relief that I finally reached the road leading back to the town from the Sandyhill Gate. The dogs had shadowed me all the way down from the settlement, stopping twenty yards from the roadway. I could feel them watching me for as long as the road remained in their sight. I did not look back. I was glad to win back to the schoolhouse, and glad of the few hours to myself to order my thoughts, between now and when I must appear at the doctor’s door.

It was a pleasant walk to Jaffray’s. At last a little warmth was being carried on the air, and the evenings were growing lighter – the sky was a mellow golden rose reaching over the firth to the mountains of Sutherland. The storm of last Monday night and its attendant horrors could almost have been a distant memory, consigned to the last throes of winter, had it not left its bitter legacy everywhere I turned.

The evening was a quieter affair than many we three had spent together. We each of us had much to reflect upon. And there was a contentment in the doctor’s household. I knew the emptiness I had so often left there when I closed the door behind me would be there no more. Charles, so often taciturn, was the quietest of all, but his was a quiet contentment and wonder of a man who has started to see things he never saw before. Ishbel came in and out of the parlour with steaming dishes and plates. Pickled herring and bread still warm, a fine rabbit pie – Charles’s favourite dish – peas, beans, and vegetables of whatever manner her store could provide, a rich gravy owing not a little to the contents of the doctor’s cellar, a sturdy egg custard with apples stewed in all manner of sweet spices. The doctor asserted he would be bankrupt before the week was out if they were to dine like this every night. Ishbel flushed with pride and Charles offered to go sing in the streets to pay his way.

When the food was cleared and the uisge beatha brought out, we got up and took our accustomed seats around the fire. Jaffray’s parlour was no longer the cold and empty place it had seemed on my last few visits: it had the warmth of a home again, and told his story. The Delft tiles of the fireplace, his wedding gift to his wife, had delighted me as a child and delighted me still, with their happy scenes of life in the Dutch countryside. On the walls were the German woodcuts he had so carefully carried back with him from his studies, so many years ago. It was a man’s room, filled with books and the aroma of tobacco, but with echoes of the woman who had once been at its heart, in the tapestries on the wall, the pressed flowers, their colours long faded, an embroidered footstool that had been hers. Charles stretched out his feet to the hearth and looked into the slowly dancing flames. I had brought the book of poetry I had purchased for him, having meant to give it to him as a help to sustain him in his jail, and I gave it to him then. For the next half-hour, as the doctor and I talked of the news from Aberdeen, Charles was lost in the book. His lips moved in silence as we spoke, and he heard nothing of our talk. At length he started to hum some parts of a tune, and asked the doctor for some paper. ‘I will play this, before the week is done; I will play this for you all,’ and he hummed and mused to himself as he scrawled at the paper. The snatches of song that escaped him every so often began to work their way into my mind, until I could almost have sung them too. They reminded me of something. When Ishbel came in carrying a basket of fresh coals for the fire I broke off my talk with the doctor and told her of my meeting with Sarah Forbes and where she was now. She closed her eyes and uttered a prayer in her own tongue. ‘God’s mercy is with her. And his grace with you, Mr Seaton.’ When she left I saw that Jaffray was studying me curiously.

‘Did you know the girl, when she was in the burgh?’ he asked.

I considered the question, and that not for the first time. ‘I cannot say that I never saw her. I knew by name and from some of your talk here that she was a friend of Ishbel’s.’

Jaffray continued to study me, working as he did so at something stuck in his teeth. ‘That was a good thing you did, Alexander. Neither you nor your friend Cargill will have cause to regret it. Sarah will be a good help and companion to her mistress. And,’ he added, ‘a good mother to her own child.’

Charles glanced up from his scrawling. ‘What is this? Are you speaking of women, Alexander? Mistress Youngson will have much to say.’

I laughed. ‘Mistress Youngson has always much to say. I am not convinced Gilbert Grant has not perfect hearing, but only feigns his deafness.’

‘Without question he feigns it,’ rejoined Jaffray.

As Charles returned to his composing, the doctor pressed me further on my trip to Aberdeen: With whom had I met? What gossip had I heard? When I mentioned George Jamesone, his interest quickened. ‘You went to see George Jamesone. Now why was that?’

I told him of my commission to the painter from the provost. And then, with some trepidation, I relayed to him William Cargill’s concerns about my involvement with the painter and the possibility that his time in Antwerp and connection with Rubens might have led him into a relationship with Rubens’ Spanish masters. Jaffray frowned. ‘I remember Jamesone. He came to the burgh, as you know, several years ago, to paint Walter Watt and his wife. He was a clever man, and good company, too. But I think your friend is being carried away with rumours if he fears Jamesone is a spy.’

Charles had put down his pen and was listening now. ‘Why should a painter be feared, simply because he has travelled? What can it have to do with the trouble in our town?’

Jaffray looked at me, as the one most qualified, albeit reluctantly, to speak on the matter. ‘It is to do with the maps, Charles,’ I said.

‘The maps,’ he said slowly to himself, ‘the baillie’s maps.’ He looked at us, some understanding dawning. ‘When I was in the tolbooth, the baillie was asking me night and day about maps – what did I know of maps? Had Patrick Davidson spoken of maps? Had I seen any maps in our chamber? What had Marion to do with the maps? And yet he would not tell me anything about them. I truly did not know what he was asking me about, though after dwelling on it a while – I had much time for thinking – supposed he must have found some maps amongst Patrick’s belongings.’

‘He did,’ I said. ‘It was not simply that Patrick Davidson possessed maps, but that they were of this part of the land, from the sea coast as far as Strathbogie, with markings for Elgin, Turriff, and Aberdeen. They were in Davidson’s own hand. It is likely that they were drawn, or at least rough sketches drawn, on his gathering expeditions with Marion. Some of the further away ones may have been done – probably were, in fact – before he reached here.’

Charles looked up at me with an air of resignation. ‘So that is why they were away so often and so long. I did not think it was the season for many plants, yet I know so little of flowers and their seasons I did not question it, for fear of showing my ignorance. For fear of shutting myself further out of their bond.’ He looked away. ‘Then Marion must have known of these maps. Do you think perhaps that is why she too was killed? But why should anyone fear a map, kill for a map?’

Jaffray shook his head. ‘Oh, Charles. You are too innocent. The rest of the country sees invaders on every wave, with their books and their bells and their beads.’

‘Papists?’

‘Aye, papists,’ the doctor answered, ‘if it suits them so to be, as pretext for overrunning our country and overturning our church.’

‘I had not thought you so fervent for religion, doctor.’ There was no sarcasm, no sly humour in Charles’s observation. Just a statement of fact, which was daily evident.

‘Oh, do not mistake me, boy. I am no zealot; no James Cardno or William Buchan, but I have my faith and I know who will judge me when the Lord sees fit to lift me from my travails here. The Kirk, though, it is more than the ministers and the session and all the fulmination from the pulpits of idiots or sainted men. The Kirk is who we are: it is our freedom, and without it, we are lost.’

I had never heard him talk in this manner before, not of the Kirk. I leaned forward further in my chair. ‘What do you mean, James?’

‘I mean that we are servile to no man. We can look at a king and know he is, like us, only a man in the face of God. Our nation will bow and scrape to no man and to no power so long as the Kirk of Scotland is by law established in this land. And that is why I would fight for it, fight against all the Spaniards and the French the legions of Rome can send against us, and against Charles Stuart himself if need be, for without it we are not men and we have no nation.’ And then I understood what I had wondered at but never before realised: James Jaffray, who seemed in his mind to live still in the great universities and cities and towns of the Europe of his youth, could only ever have called one place home, and he had been drawn back to it as an eagle to its nest.

Charles spoke quietly, looking directly at no one. ‘Do you think there will be an invasion?’

Jaffray came to himself a little. ‘I do not know. I think it very likely though, and likely too that Walter Watt’s nephew was up to his neck in the plotting of it. What did Straloch say to it, Alexander?’

‘That the work was well done, extremely well done, and would have done very well for a foreign army landing at our shores. But he denied knowledge of any commission to Patrick Davidson or anyone else for such work, and denied any knowledge of any plots of the sort.’

‘Then he is surely cut off from his master,’ said Charles, ‘for since when did the Marquis of Huntly not plot?’

‘Indeed,’ said Jaffray. ‘But Straloch is a good, honest man. Did you not find him so, Alexander?’

It was a more difficult question than I had bargained for, or at least an honest answer was more difficult to find. ‘I think … I do not know, James. I think Huntly has some business afoot. My old friend, Matthew Lumsden, whom I met with in Old Aberdeen, is in Huntly’s retinue. He was to ride that day on business for the marquis, and Matthew is not a man you would use for diplomacy. Straloch himself rode early yesterday for Aberdeen and then Edinburgh on Huntly’s affairs, yet I heard horsemen leave the place in the night, and I would hazard they were bound for Strathbogie. What need could there have been for night-riding, what sudden urgency but information I had brought myself?’

‘Then we must be vigilant,’ said the doctor. ‘Now though, did you get Cargill’s notebooks? For that is the matter we must attend to here. Charles …’ But Charles Thom had fallen asleep in the chair to the right of the doctor’s fire, his stomach full and his heart something less heavy. Jaffray watched him sleep for a few moments, then quietly got up and signalled me to follow him over to the table, which Ishbel had long since cleared. I laid the book out and the doctor began to examine it, turning each leaf over carefully, and marvelling in a low voice at the quality of the drawings and the insight of the annotations. We had not yet reached the page I was sure the colchicum was sketched upon when there came a loud knocking at the doctor’s back door. Charles Thom was startled out of his sleep, and the doctor got to his feet. In a moment Ishbel was at the parlour door; Edward Arbuthnott, the apothecary, close behind her.

‘I am sorry, doctor,’ she said, ‘I–’

‘I am not here for the doctor, but the music master,’ he said, brushing past her with little ceremony. Charles, still not fully wakened, shambled to his feet. I took a step towards him, but Arbuthnott was in front of him before me. ‘Charles Thom, for all that you owe my family, who took you in and gave you food and lodging, and for the love you bore my girl, you will sing for her, you and your scholars, at her lykewake, will you not?’

Charles blinked stupidly, not yet come to. ‘Her lykewake? Aye … aye, of course.’

The look on Jaffray’s face told what was in my mind also. ‘Edward,’ he said, ‘you cannot be thinking of–’

‘Aye, but I am.’ The apothecary was defiant. ‘Why should my girl, my only child, be put to her rest without what others so much less worthy have had? She will have a lykewake and all the town will know what it has lost.’ He turned again to Charles. ‘So you will play at it, and your scholars too?’

‘Aye,’ said Charles, sitting back down now, discomfited. ‘I will.’ The apothecary nodded briskly, satisfied, and bade us goodnight.

As the back door banged again and we heard Ishbel put the bolt up, Jaffray looked at me warily, but I said nothing. Charles looked at me, too. ‘I know you do not like them, Alexander, but it is not for the money, this time, but for Marion herself.’ We had argued often about it, I from the heart and he from the head. The lykewake, the festival of watching over the dead before they should be interred, their body making its final earthly journey as its soul began its own wanderings in the afterlife. A manifestation of how far the people were still steeped in the superstition of Romanism, if not paganism, which the Kirk would have given much to have eradicated from the burgh. But the people clung tenaciously to it. The civic authorities did not like it either, but so far they tolerated it. At the lykewake the master of the song school and his pupils would sing and play – that was where Charles made a good part of his money, and why he was loath to give it up. The council knew that if they banned their music master from performing at such gatherings, they would have to compensate him for his loss, and that they were not inclined to do.

What they did not like, and the session fulminated against also, was the lavish entertainment laid out by the family of the deceased and the consequent over-indulgence of the mourners in sweetmeats and strong drink and substances that alter men’s minds. As the night wore on – for these celebrations were usually at night – the singing and the music would grow louder and less godly, until, when the song schoolchildren had most of them gone home, it would become utterly profane. Dancing would grow wilder, and lascivious behaviour would increase before the very eyes of the magistrates and the session. Few would be fit for their proper work the next day. Baillie Buchan and others of his ilk had fought long and hard to have the holding of lykewakes forbidden by the town, but to no avail, so far ingrained in the memories of the people were they. I would not argue with Charles about it tonight, though. ‘You must do as you think right, Charles. And I know it will not be for the money.’

‘I think I will go to my bed now,’ he said. ‘It has been a long and strange day.’

‘Take care you do not scald your feet,’ the doctor told him. ‘Ishbel will have put a warming pan in your bed. If not two, indeed, for now that you are here I should not be surprised to learn that mine is in there as well. I will be left to shift as I may without one, and no doubt freeze to death. Ah, the ingratitude of the young.’ The doctor was happy: all was once again as it should be in his life.

Charles looked a little bashful. Taking up his book of Craig’s poetry, he bade us goodnight and made his way towards the kitchen, where Ishbel would not yet have finished her night’s work.

We returned now to the table, and the examination of James Cargill’s notebook. The script was small and neat, the Latin perfect, but the drawings themselves were of an exquisite nature, beyond perfect. I looked at them in wonder for a few moments, as my older companion silently read. A bright yet distant look was in his eyes. I had seen this look on him before. He was transported to another time, another place. Alpine meadows and the valleys of the Pyrenees. A group of young men, running, climbing with all the sureness of foot of mountain goats, and stopping, every so often, to hang on the words of their teacher, as he told them of every property, pointed out every small and fine detail, of some tiny plant or flower. ‘They were good times for you, James,’ I said.

‘Aye,’ he replied, ‘they were. But it is to the present that we must turn our eyes and our minds. You say you think you have come upon the flower?’

‘I cannot be sure, but it is the name that you told me.’ I took the book from him and then leafed through its pages until I found what I was looking for. I turned the book back towards him. ‘There,’ I said. ‘Is that it?’

He nodded slowly, his eyes keen. ‘Aye,’ he said, ‘it is.’ He traced a finger beneath the outline of the flower, and began to read out the words. ‘“Petals the grey-blue of the northern sky after it has snowed. Calyx of deep purple sepals below, small, pale green bract. Stigma and anthers yellow, the colour of straw in September. The whole forming a large goblet on a slender white stem. Basal leaves, long, dark, glossy green straps, emerging after blooms. One corm will produce 6–8 blooms on 3–5 leaves. Unlike its benign relatives, flowers not in the autumn, but the spring.” Aye, that is it, that is it; it is quite different from the other colchicum, you know,’ he said, growing excited. He read on, using terms and talking of properties I did not understand, until his voice, slow and deliberate, with great emphasis, intoned, ‘“corm has the look of a small, elongated and blackened onion. Utterly and almost instantly lethal if ingested.”’ There was more, about where the plant was to be found, the difficulties of cultivation, the lack of any known beneficial medicinal use. Then words not in Latin, but in Cargill’s own native tongue and ours. ‘The Salome of all flowers: beautiful, and deadly.’ Jaffray gave a short, humourless laugh. ‘Little wonder he never married. Every beautiful woman must have called to mind for him some botanical instrument of death. But this is it, Alexander, this is the flower we seek. Through the vomit, the chicory scent could still be got in their hair.’

‘And you have never seen it here?’

‘Never. There are perhaps some like it in appearance, in the blue at least, but the purple calyx and stigma, these I have never seen here. Have you?’ He asked the question absent-mindedly, little thinking that there could be any other than one answer. When I did not reply, he looked up from studying the book. ‘Have you seen it, Alexander?’

I hesitated. ‘I … I do not know. I do not think so. That is – I think I may have done.’ There was something, something flitting before my eyes, in my mind. A glimpse, little more, of blue, with purple, falling, falling. I searched harder. I shut my eyes against the warm golden light of the room, for it was another type of light I sought – darker, colder, more still. I tried to clear my mind of the almost inaudible breathing of the fire, the heavier intrusion of my companion, the knowledge of the life and movement in the room and the power of the sea in the darkness outside, but I could not. The image, the memory of the image was gone, and now all I had was a construction of my own making. I opened my eyes, shaking my head in a slow frustration. ‘I am sorry, James,’ I said. ‘It is gone. Whatever I thought I remembered, it is gone.’

The look of hopefulness faded from his face to be replaced by one of disappointment. ‘Do you think it was in Banff itself, or out in the country somewhere, maybe? Was it wild, or in a garden? Do you think it might even have been in Aberdeen?’ This last suggestion lit some small flicker of possibility in my memory. Had it been in Aberdeen? Somewhere in Aberdeen? There was something that seemed to make it possible, but no. I could reach no further than that into the recesses of my mind, and then the flickering light went out.

‘No, doctor, I am sorry; there is nothing.’

‘Ah, well,’ he said, ‘maybe something will bring it back to you. With these drawings at least, we know what it is that we deal with, and that is something.’ He closed the book and again smoothed his hand over the front cover. ‘You told your friend William Cargill why we wanted these notebooks?’

‘There was no other way to explain my sudden interest in botany, and,’ I added, ‘in the way of friendship, I wanted to talk with him about the business.’

He smiled. ‘I am glad you are allowing your friends to be friends again. And what did William Cargill think of this business here? The murder, I mean, and the imprisonment of Charles.’

I looked at him. ‘He said that I should take great care. He fears for me in all this, that there are signs pointing to me, there for when people are ready to look.’

Jaffray’s eyes were steady. ‘He is right. I have thought it myself and never said it, though perhaps I should have done. And do you fear this, Alexander?’

A few weeks ago I would have said I had no more fear of what man – or, in the blackest of my days, God – could do to me. But that was no longer true. I had been out again in the world of men; I was not a thing damaged beyond use as I had for long believed. I had lost the respect of the world once and, as I saw it, the access to God also. ‘I think I would like to keep what name I have left to me, and what future too.’

‘Then you must take a great care, Alexander, that you do not lay yourself open to further danger. When you were in Aberdeen, did you tell anyone other than William Cargill of our desire to see the notebooks, or of our reason for it?’

‘I told no one.’

‘And you have shown no one the notebooks, until now?’

‘No one,’ I asserted. At Straloch I had kept them well hidden amongst the things I had taken into the house with me, having been careful not to leave them in the stables with my horse and other goods, for fear of fire. ‘Does it matter so much?’

He considered. ‘Perhaps not, but the fewer people who suspect you of drawing closer to the truth of this thing, the safer you will be.’

‘And will you show them to Arbuthnott?’ I asked.

‘It would perhaps be wiser not to. I do not think it will do him good to dwell over-much on the means of Marion’s death. But,’ he continued, ‘it may be that we have no choice, for he would have a better knowledge than either of us of the plants that grow hereabouts, and the drawings might spark some memory in him. It was Marion though, Marion who would have known more surely than anyone where it is to be found.’

‘And you had only the one opportunity to speak privately with her while I was gone?’

‘I did,’ he said. ‘For when the baillie was not about her, her mother was, and she would not talk before either of them.’

‘And she really told you nothing of this business?’ I pressed. He turned away and stoked the fire. ‘We spoke of other things.’

I knew of old the tenor of Jaffray’s voice when he wished to close a subject, and it betrayed him now. Yet I was not ready to leave it. ‘Do you think she knew about Davidson’s activities – the map-drawing, and what it was for?’

‘She cannot but have known about it – certainly about the drawing, for when else would he have made his sketches than when they were wandering about the countryside? As to the espionage – if there was any – Marion was not the girl to get caught up in great causes or secret plots. They would have been an unnecessary distraction for her from the essentials of life – of her life at least. She had too great an interest in her father’s craft and in other science to waste her time on the politics and religion of nations. I think had Davidson been involved in those pursuits, or attempted to entangle her in them, their companionship would have come to an earlier and cleaner end.’

I thought about the girl, trying to remember the few true conversations we had had together. Jaffray was right. In her hours away from her work in the provost’s nursery, she had worked steadily and with great focus on the understanding of the pharmacopoeia of her father’s craft and the nature and purpose of every plant that grew around these parts. She would have cared little for Spanish invaders or popish plots, and certainly would not have lost her life in their defence. But how far might her fascination with science have taken her? ‘Jaffray,’ I began, ‘do you truly give no credence to the idea that she was …’

His brow darkened and he looked at me hard. ‘Go on, Alexander.’

‘Do you truly give no credence to the idea that she meddled in witchcraft?’

He breathed a great sigh of exasperation. ‘This again? Do you tell me you believe that pernicious nonsense?’

‘No,’ I answered truthfully and emphatically, ‘I do not.’

‘Then why …?’

‘Because she went to all the places, James. The Elf Kirk, Ordiquhill, where John Philp is much suspected as a witch, where the waters are said to have properties, and Darkwater.’

Instead of continuing in his anger, Jaffray broke into a smile and laughed at me, though nervously, I thought. ‘Oh, Alexander, come now. Half the bairns in the town are at the Elf Kirk precisely because their mothers and the session warn them from it. And as for Ordiquhill and Darkwater, well, both are places of importance to those who would seek to land or make their way inland from our coast. Findlater guards the coast at Darkwater, and Ordiquhill is on the road from there to Strathbogie, by Fordyce. Davidson would need to know them both for his mapping.’ He turned away from me and went again to stoke the fire. I knew he was hiding something from me.

‘James, she went twice to Darkwater: once with Davidson, and once on her own, after he was dead. They say she went to the wise woman.’

He spun round angrily. ‘“They say”. Who is this new “they” in whom you place such trust?’

‘It was much muttered by the mob last night–’

Jaffray was incredulous. ‘What? You now take the word of a rabble under the direction of a beggarman thief? Lang Geordie would have great interest in directing any accusation of witchcraft away from himself and his followers.’

‘Yes, I know that. He admitted as much to me himself. But there was also Mistress Youngson. She is no idle gossip, as you know, and she wished the girl no ill.’

Jaffray’s shoulders sank. ‘Aye, you are right. She did not.’ He went to the door and looked down the passageway. Nothing stirred in the house. ‘I know that Marion went to Darkwater, with Davidson, and alone. I think I know why she went, and there was no witchcraft nor yet spying in it.’ I waited, but he evidently considered himself to have finished. ‘Oh, for the love of God, Alexander, you of all people must know the crone is not a witch. Who nursed you from your delirium last year? Who saved you from death on the rocks of Findlater?’ I knew it, I knew it all, for Jaffray had told it to me, but I had no memory of any of it, nothing until the day Jaffray arrived on the beach below the castle rock to take me home. He continued, ‘She is no witch, but a healing woman, a wise woman who was in her day a skilled midwife who brought many into this world who might otherwise have died in their struggle. But then, years ago now, I do not remember when, she took herself off, away from the world, to that cave in Darkwater to glean her living from the sea and from the cliffs and plants around her. I have not seen her since then, but they say it was because she had seen too much pain and death where there should have been joy and life. There are those who say she feared the witch-mongers, who are too ready to blame the misfortunes of life or the will of God on the agency of another. And that may be true – it would not have been long before the death of some child would have been laid at her door.’

I wondered if in different circumstances, in another life, Jaffray and Lang Geordie would have met. In this matter they had a similar view of our world, but were so circumstanced that it was unlikely either would ever know it. ‘Marion and Patrick Davidson went to the wise woman for some sort of help?’

He nodded. ‘I think it likely.’

‘Why did she go a second time? After he was dead?’

‘I do not know. Perhaps there was a something …’ his voice trailed away. ‘But I do know that she was determined on going. I counselled her against it, as did Geleis Guild, who had called me to see to her, for she could see that the girl was not well. It was to no avail – I had had no great hopes that it would be, for I had got little of sense from her in all the time I spent with her after you left for Aberdeen. One thing she was adamant about was that she would free Charles, she was determined on it, for she knew he had not killed Patrick.’

‘And she has freed him,’ I said.

‘Aye, God rest her, she has.’ One of the candles in the sconce spluttered out, filling this homely room with melancholy.

‘When did she go to Darkwater?’ I asked.

‘It was on the day before her death.’

Ideas were forming in my mind, then threatening to slip away before I could take hold of them. ‘James, do you think it possible that this wise woman, this midwife, may have knowledge of the plant, the colchicum? That perhaps, indeed, she may have more to do with this business than we have guessed at?’ I could feel a growing excitement as I spoke. I knew what I would do, and so did Jaffray. He looked at me a long moment and began to shake his head.

‘You cannot be thinking of this. No good can come of it. Charles is freed. You must not put yourself in danger of taking his place.’

‘What kind of freedom is it to hide in the safe places while a murderer walks the streets? What rest can there be for the man who glimpses the right path but takes the wrong one, for fear he will snag his coat on some thorn? I can do some good in this, James.’

Jaffray was not to be persuaded. ‘You have some notion in your mind that you have been chosen to bring the killer of these two people to a reckoning – whether before God or man I cannot tell. You believe you have been called to accomplish this. But, Alexander, there are proper authorities whose place and function it is to investigate and try these matters, and you are not one of them. When Charles was falsely accused and falsely imprisoned by those authorities, it was for us, his friends, to do everything in our power to free him. But that thing is done now, and it is no business of yours to carry on in this. You trespass on the rights of those whose duty it is and in doing so may bring danger on yourself and on other innocents.’ There was a depth of sadness in his eyes that might have won me over were it not that there was something more than a grain of truth in what he said.

‘You are right, doctor, I do feel called to continue in this until the murderer is brought to answer before man, and then God. It is not pride – believe what you like, but it is not pride, only an attempt to propitiate my own shame.’

‘Shame?’

‘Yes, shame. Shame that I ignored the cries of that man as he crawled to his death. The town whores did that good for him that I had refused to do. They brought him to what they thought to be a place of safety. And he died, alone and in wretched agonies, while I slept sound and warm in my bed above. So I do believe that God has given me this duty, that he put it in the baillie’s mind to call me to the counsel about the maps, to make my mission to Straloch. I believe it was God who put me in the path of Janet Dawson as she was hounded from our burgh, and Mary Dawson when she fled from Aberdeen. Charles is free, and I thank God for that, but I believe I am called none the less to make some recompense.’

‘Alexander,’ he said in a low voice, ‘I truly do not believe you understand what danger you may be putting yourself in by this course. You are,’ he searched a moment for the right word, ‘vulnerable. You could easily enough be made a target for the murder accusation yourself. You do not quite belong to this burgh – born and bred here though you have been: you are almost as different as was your mother, and there are those who yet remember her. You think last night was foul, barbarous? You are right, but it was nothing to what you in your twenty-six years have not seen. The barbarity of the witch-hunt, of the tortures, the probing for evidence, the burning stake with the screams of a living human being rising from its flames are beyond all imagining. Do not go to Darkwater, Alexander; it will avail you nothing, and, I doubt, do little to solace the living who already grieve for their dead.’

I had never before known Jaffray give up the fight. That he should do so, even partially out of fears for me, saddened me greatly. ‘But James, it may well be that this murderer’s killing has not finished. I cannot rest easy in myself if I believe there is a way to end this and I do not take it.’

He was not quite ready to relent. ‘But why should that way lead to Darkwater?’

‘I do not know. But I have a belief that it does and I must follow it. I will leave at first light and be back well before dusk, my friend. Do not fear for me.’ I took up my cloak and hat and bade him goodnight.