The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

THIRTEEN The Wise Woman of Darkwater

Jaffray made one final effort to dissuade me from going to consult with the wise woman at Darkwater. A little after dawn on the Thursday morning, as I was washing, he appeared at the door of my chamber, and Mistress Youngson behind him. I saw at once that he had told her of my intention. The doctor watched as I put on my outer garments. I picked up my cloak with the marten collar, a gift from the Lady Hay on my laureation to Master of Arts. ‘You are still intent on this madness then,’ said the doctor.

‘It is not madness, doctor, but this thing has taken hold of me, and I fear it will lead to some madness, or despair, if I do not finish it. I do not think there is a choice.’

It was as if I had not spoken. ‘Alexander, I beg of you not to go; it will do no good and may bring you harm.’

I would have made a reply, but the schoolmaster’s wife was there before me. There was a coldness in her voice which, despite the hundred lectures of disapproval she had found fitting to give me, I had never heard before. ‘You must not go, Alexander. You will bring down upon your head and your soul things that cannot by man be lifted.’ Had I known her less well, I might have believed myself cursed.

‘Have no fear, mistress. My faith may be weak and my calling lost, but the Devil shall not yet have me for his own. And as to the world of men, be assured I will have a care to bring no trouble to your door.’

Her response was softly spoken and it pierced my heart. ‘My door has opened many times to your troubles, Mr Seaton. I have no fears on that count.’ She turned back down the stairs. I felt shame at the sight of the old woman’s retreating back. How many times could I throw my ingratitude in her face? Jaffray lingered a little longer, but soon also left, his face leaden with disappointment.

The town I passed through was quiet still, and there was menace in the quiet. So many still lay shut up in the tolbooth, or out at Inchdrewer, or in the castle dungeons, awaiting the sheriff’s judgement. They would not have long to wait. Surely the sheriff must return soon. It was reported that the witchhunt had begun again in Fife, and in Ayrshire, too. It was spreading, spreading with its own fire, and its flames left behind only the charred remains of men’s souls. The loud madness of the mobs at the pyre was as nothing to the quiet madness in a man’s mind as he desperately sought to save himself by damning another. The outbreak at Banff must be contained and then the burgh made safe against incursions of the hunt from outside. No one mentioned the fear, the fear of neighbour of neighbour, of accusations false or fancied, the dark twisting of the mind. To mention it would have been to call it down upon us.

The silence that had begun to weigh on me was broken by the clear tones of Thomas Stewart as I neared the top of Water Path on my way towards the Boyndie Road. ‘You shall have your fee when the work is done, not a moment before.’

Reply was made in a coarser voice. It was George Burnett. ‘Let the council be damned. I was to have payment at Whitsun. The work cannot be finished if I am not allowed to continue with it.’

The notary was little perturbed by the curse. ‘The work should have been finished by now, and you would have had your money at Whitsun. But it is there for all to see – the ground is scarce cleared enough in places for the founds to be properly dug. The town will bear no further expense for a new manse until the matter of the minister is resolved.’

‘Let him be resolved to Hell, for all I care. I have wages to pay.’

‘Then have your men do their work on time,’ answered the notary, ‘but there is to be no more work on this land until the minister’s fate is declared by the presbytery, and a new minister found.’

‘Aye, and it may be long enough before another blathering half-wit is forced to bleat from our pulpit.’ Having no further response, George Burnett, master mason and father of Sarah Forbes’s bastard child, swung his great bulk away from the notary and strode past me down the Water Path. The acrid brute smell of him caught in my throat as he passed, and made me want to vomit. He did not notice me, and I hoped never to see him again. By the time I had recovered myself, Thomas Stewart had gone, the great front door of the provost’s house shutting firmly on his shadow in the early-morning glow.

No one seemed to notice me as I made my way across the Castlegate and up Boyndie Street. The watch on the burgh gate only questioned me briefly as I sought to leave the town, and within a quarter-hour of leaving the confines of the schoolhouse, I found myself again, gladly, on the open road.

I had determined that the two or three hours my walk might take me would be spent in the ordering of my mind. I would apply the Ramist principles of one of my early regents at college, distilling the essential questions, dealing with them in their parts and setting the individual conclusions into clear and consequential schemata in my mind. But my thoughts would not permit themselves to be marshalled in such a way. Where I had hoped for clarity, confusion reigned. Faces, words, phrases, came wandering, sometimes staggering, to the forefront of my mind, dragging with them suspicions of spying, witchcraft, poisoning, papists, love, fear, jealousy, hate. Strange couriers in the night, calling Jaffray out of town, riding from Straloch, on the heels of Mary Dawson, fled now across the sea because she knew – what? Frantic searches for a dead man while he still lived, because of what secret knowledge? Flowers not known but known, by myself, by the doctor, by the apothecary, in a notebook, of the dead, but in another place too, and by another. ‘James and the flowers’. James Cardno? James Jaffray? James Cargill? Who?

As the miles went on, my thoughts meandered so far from where they had started, I scarcely knew what the questions were. How would Sarah Forbes and her child fare in Aberdeen? What had I brought into the lives of William Cargill and his wife and their unborn child? Would the children be natural companions, or would they grow up to dislike and envy one another? Does a man choose his friends, or are they chosen by God? What would my life have been without Archibald Hay? What would he who had such a big life, who had known the world and died in it, think of me now, and the smallness of my life that had taken me nowhere? Where was his sister now? Had she told all to Straloch’s niece, who hated me so? Was Straloch to be trusted? Had Patrick Davidson truly been a spy? And so, without resolution or clarity, insight or enlightenment, I went on. By the time I came to the fork in the road where my choice was to make for Fordyce by one route or Sandend by the other, I could almost have believed that the brethren were still there, gathered at Fordyce, waiting for me to come and present myself before them, to meet my last trial, once again, for the ministry.

The damp air around me took on a chill as I left the Cullen road and turned off to my right, towards the sea once more, and the cliffs from which Findlater glowered over to the mountains of the north. By the time I crested the hill at Brankanenthum and began the descent towards Findlater on its neck of rock, the haar had begun to creep in from the sea. It crawled ashore and up the rock, enfolding all it passed in a blanket of impenetrable grey fog. Halfway up the cliff-side, forty or fifty feet or more, the castle grew straight up, a stately palace from the rock. Gradually, the haar took it too, till all that remained was a ghostly shadow of what once my eyes had seen. I grew uneasy. It might be hours, or days even, until this fog lifted, and I must not stay long from Banff. For all that I misliked and feared the superstition and the excess of the lykewake, I was determined that Charles should not be exposed to the risks there alone. I must win back to Banff before tomorrow night, come what may.

As Findlater evanesced before my eyes, I wondered what an invading army, were it to land today, would make of its first footfall on Scotland, a grey pall of wretchedness laid over this land for which they risked their lives. And what defence should they find here, should they arrive today, to claim Scotland for their popish realm? A failed minister on his way to consult a witch. I uttered a prayer that should the day come when the Spaniard set the prow of his boat on Darkwater beach, God would send down all the haar of the oceans in his path.

I had no memory of my last visit here, save for when Jaffray had come to take me home. I had been here only once before that, many, many years ago. It had been a holiday, when my mother and Jaffray’s wife, one startling summer’s day, had taken me with them early in the morning from my bed, and brought me to this wonderful, secret place, to play and swim for hours. I had little memory of them or how they had passed the time that day, so taken up had I been with my own childish pleasures. What was certain was that the paths I had run down, the dunes I had tumbled on at the age of six or seven on a warm summer’s day, were blasted and wind-blown and so altered in this mist I was in hazard of broken limbs with almost every step. More, if I fell here, from this precipice ninety feet above the strand, I might never be found, or if found, I might never survive to tell the tale. Jaffray’s pleas of the morning and of last night came to me through the mist, but it was too late now to heed them.

A few stumbling steps forward and I came to a halt. I could not see my foot in front of me; every step might bring me closer to death on the rocks. The heavy mist obscured the sounds of the sea, the birds of the air, everything but the noise of my heart thumping in my breast. All around me was an eerie, grey silence. Yet through it, through the impenetrable haar, I knew I was being watched. Further movement was not possible: I froze where I was, and it came. An arm caught me, a wizened, bony hand, coming, it seemed, from the ground and clamping itself around my wrist. ‘Do not move, Alexander Seaton. If you value your life, do not move a muscle.’

I waited, scared almost to breathe. It was a voice I knew, but from where I could not tell. Another hand appeared from below, bearing an amber torch, glowing through the mist, and then hair, grizzled, grey, unkempt. Slowly the head rose towards me and I saw myself looking into the yellowed eyes of the wise woman of Darkwater. She might have been any age from forty to seventy. Her teeth were nearly all gone, and there was no humour and, I thought, little humanity in her face. Her eyes searched mine for a moment, and she seemed satisfied. ‘Step backwards three paces, and then turn to your left.’

I did as she said, for want of an option. Once I had done so, she moved past me with scarcely a disturbance of the air. I saw her a little better now. Even without her stoop, she would have been little over five feet tall. Now I saw behind her, by the light of her torch, a steep drop through a crevice in the rock; I had been a few inches from falling to my death. As I struggled to master my tongue, she appraised me more fully. I felt I did not meet entirely with her approval. ‘Like your mother still. I wondered when you would come.’ She turned to her left. ‘Follow in my footsteps – precisely, mind – and do not deviate. This is a bad path you have taken.’ It took twenty minutes, twenty silent minutes apart from the occasional ‘mind your foot there; keep to the right; no, not that stone,’ from the crone before we had made our way safely onto the sand. Once there, she did not stop, nor turn to address or question me; she simply walked on, and I knew that I was to follow. I could hear the sea now, lapping gently onto the shore, but I could not tell how far from me it was.

We walked the length of the beach and at the end of it she started to climb again, up the dunes and towards the far headland. Then it seemed to me that she had disappeared; I followed in the direction she had gone, for a moment seeing nothing but a vague impression of the hillside. Then – though I do not know whether it was a glimpse of flame or the smell of smoking wood that drew me – I at last discerned just ahead of me the opening to a cave in the side of the headland.

‘Well, come in then, and pull over that board behind you, or we will both die of the damp and the cold.’

To my left there was a double lattice screen covered in stretched hide, higher than myself and broader than the cave opening, which was wide enough to let two men pass. I pulled it along on wooden runners and lashed it by leather thongs to bolts of iron hammered into the wall. To my surprise, the cavern was warm and dry. The crone had thrown driftwood onto the fire and it blazed well. The floor was covered in rush matting and knotted rugs, which looked to be made of rags, oddments, knotted and woven together. A table, a chair, a bed and shelving had all been fashioned from what the sea had brought to the shore of Darkwater. Wrecks and rubbish from boats on the firth and further afield had served the woman well. A pulley hung overhead, suspended from huge hooks of iron chiselled into the rock, and from it hung a myriad of drying plants, only some of whose names I knew. She followed the line of my vision and lowered the pulley, taking down some specimens and setting them on the workbench behind her. She spoke almost absent-mindedly to me.

‘Lesser celandine. For the piles,’ she said with a grim smile. ‘Sweet violet – but you, I think, have no trouble with your breathing. Common chickweed – for the skin. You are pasty of face, but healthy enough. Coltsfoot – you will be needing that should you return to Banff in this – you will be in bed with the fever for a week. But this, perhaps, this is what you need.’ She held out the long stems of a plant crowned by clustered heads of small, pale pink flowers. ‘Valerian. It will relieve the insomnia, allow sleep, help with the tensions in your head.’ I knew the plant well. My mother had often taken it in simples and decoctions that I had fetched her from Arbuthnott. I did not want to remember these things.

‘I am not here for your medicines or healing,’ I said. ‘There is something I need you to tell me.’

She put down the flowers and looked at me cautiously. ‘Three times in as many weeks I have had a visitor from Banff who has spoken these words to me. The first is dead, the second also. I have saved your life three times now; I would not have you the third.’

Three times? I thought the old woman wandered in her mind. ‘I would be fodder for the gulls by now had you not steadied me out on the cliffs.’

She looked at me with what might almost have been contempt. ‘Hmph. You would be fodder for nothing. You would not be here at all, nor anywhere else in your life gone by. Time enough for that. But tell me why you have come, what it is you think I can tell you.’ I was not certain that she was speaking of last summer, but she was evidently in no humour to go into our past relationship in greater detail and I had other business in mind, so I left it. She indicated a place behind me, and I sat down on a mattress of sorts, covered by a fleece. A sheep wandering away from the flock, tumbling over the edge of the cliff as I had almost done, would have been a fine treasure trove to the old woman. I scanned what I could of the cavern, but nothing in it was familiar to me. The fruits of land and sea had not been wasted here. I wondered at the struggle some men have to gain riches in a world where God so easily will gift them. By the time I had settled myself, she had taken off the long cloak of sealskin that had protected her from the elements. Shapeless layers of unbleached wool and a tunic of rabbit skins protected her against such elements of cold as found their way into her home. She gathered a mortar and pestle from a niche in the cavern wall and continued with her work, never looking at me. ‘Go on then,’ she said. ‘Tell me your business.’

‘These visitors you had. Were they Patrick Davidson and Marion Arbuthnott?’

She paused in her work, her back still to me. All movement was stopped. ‘Are you here on the baillie’s business?’ she asked.

‘I am here on my own,’ I said. ‘Will you answer my question, for all that?’

She considered. ‘Have you no fear of death too, then?’

It was a question I fought with now almost every night, a question that had stolen from me many hours of sleep. ‘I have fear of the judgement that is to come and of those last waking moments when I cannot deny a wasted life. But they will come at their time, and it is not in my power to say whether that time is today or sixty years from now.’

She recommenced her grinding. ‘That is perhaps for the best. Those who seek to have power over the time of their death waste the days of their living in worrying about it.’

‘And were Patrick Davidson and Marion Arbuthnott amongst them?’

She ladled water from a barrel into a small pot hanging over the fire. She was very precise as to the number of ladles full, and did not answer me until she had finished. ‘They wished for the power over life, and the knowledge of death.’

‘I do not understand you.’

She sighed and at last sat down opposite me, on the other side of the fire, the simmering pot between us. She looked directly into my eyes, did not blink.

‘Alexander Seaton. I knew you before you were born, before you were of this world. I knew you before your father knew you. Your mother came to me as many others have done – it was the doctor’s wife that took her.’

‘Jaffray’s?’ I interrupted.

‘Aye, Jaffray’s. She had been here to me before, Jaffray’s wife. In a desperation that I could save her bairns, give her some compound, some infusion, some charm even, that they should live. But it was beyond my power or knowledge, as it was of her husband’s, to effect such a thing. We fed her carrots to promote conception, had her drink decoctions of salted sage juice to stave off the miscarriage, and gave her savin. She took the wild, stinking arrach to cure her womb. She even slept with an empty cradle at her bedside, although her husband did not like this – he feared it was charming. And still they died, every one, scarce afore they had drawn breath. And then she took your mother here.’

‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Was she too in fear of losing a child?’

She spat to the side and looked at me again. ‘No, she was in fear of having one. You.’

All sound stopped in my ears, and in the middle of its roar, I knew what was coming next. I had no wish to hear it from this hag. I uttered the words myself. ‘She wanted something from you to help her cast me from her womb.’

She nodded slowly, evidently taking little pleasure in the conversation.

‘But what you gave her failed, just as what you gave the doctor’s wife to save her bairns failed.’

‘No,’ she replied, emotionless, ‘it did not, for I gave her nothing. Do not misunderstand me, Mr Seaton. There are many ways to help a woman rid herself of a child – it is not difficult. Many women have come to me in distress with the same request and I have helped them, but not all, and your mother was one whom I refused.’

The crone pulled back the lattice screen a moment, and the fog seeped into her dwelling. Nothing of the outer world could be seen. Inside the cavern, all save the fire and the pot now boiling above it was silent and still. I had returned to the place where the fact of my life had been decided. Jaffray had known what I would learn here, and that was why he had tried to stop me.

‘Why did you refuse her?’

She stopped watching me and returned to her pot. ‘Because I knew she would regret it. She did not truly want it. She wanted her life to be other than what it was and it could not be if she was tied to you. It was your father, or his world, she did not want. She wanted back to her own place, and her own like, but she could not go with you, so she sought to lose you, to dissolve the thing that would bind her here. I did not let her. There are choices that a woman must live with, and your mother had to live with hers. To the end of her days. It was not spite on my part, mind, but I knew she did not really want it. She could have effected the thing herself, if she had truly had her heart in it. There were many things she could have done, many things she could have taken. She could have taken dog’s mercury, or the wild carrot. She could have drunk a strong tincture of tansy, or wallflowers, or juniper berries. She could have used nutmeg; it is known.’

‘My mother would not have known of such things,’ I said.

She smiled a bitter smile. ‘You think not? I think she had such knowledge: she knew of the darkness. The doctor’s wife could not see it though; she had thought your mother wished to be taken here for help with conceiving a child, not losing one. The deceit was great – a great and cruel betrayal. I have not known many women who could have trampled in that way over the heartbreak of a friend. But God has his reasons, although I cannot fathom Him.’

‘His reasons?’ My senses had been obliterated by the shock that my mother had not wanted me to draw breath, and I was not really following the crone now.

‘Aye. His reasons. For blessing the one and torturing the other.’ She looked up at me with keen eyes. ‘For it is a torture, you know, to have the love within you for a child that will not be conceived, or if so, not born living. I have known many women who are mothers in their hearts, in their souls, but who never yet conceived or bore the child they carried within them. I have known women go through life with a broken heart for the loss of a tiny scrap of humanity that was all the world to them. They say Jaffray’s wife, and the provost’s wife too, Helen, the first one, died young because they were worn out with the constant burden of the children they carried and lost. They didn’t: they died of despair.’ She breathed a deep sigh. ‘There is a despair that leads to distraction. The last time I saw Helen Black she was fearful, on the edge of losing her mind through grief, in such desperation for a living child as if she could go on no more without it. And yet there have been many more, like your mother, who came to me that I might cast off the bairn within them. But one woman at the edge of her wits does not see what another suffers.’ She looked into memories in the flames. ‘It was a warm autumn day they came, I remember. But their journey homeward must have been cold as December, your mother full of her resentments and regrets, and the doctor’s wife abandoned to her devastation.’

These were not the women I remembered. ‘You are wrong,’ I said. ‘They were friends. They even brought me here one day, I am sure of it.’

Something nearly approaching a smile crossed the old woman’s lips, and there were images in her eyes. ‘Aye, they did bring you. The coldness between them passed when you were born, for your mother took you to her heart with joy the moment she saw you. She recoiled from the knowledge of what she had almost done. She was filled with remorse. Elizabeth, the doctor’s wife, could not carry hatreds against other of God’s creatures, and so they were reconciled. They brought you here on your sixth birthday, that I might see what I was to be thanked for. That is how I knew you, when I found you last year, stumbling in your delirium on the road from Sandend. You are still all your mother’s son.’

I almost laughed. ‘But that there were twenty years between those times.’

She stirred her pot and looked up at me. ‘Had it been forty I would have known you. You have the same eyes, and the same soul. A man cannot change his soul.’

‘But he can lose it,’ I said.

She narrowed her eyes quizzically. ‘Are you turned papist, then?’

‘No,’ I was emphatic, ‘never that.’

She sniffed, tiring of this line of conversation. I myself did not wish to pursue it: she had been leading me further away from what I wanted to know. ‘What did you mean,’ I began cautiously, ‘when you said Marion Arbuthnott and Patrick Davidson sought the power over life and the knowledge of death?’ I was fearful now, sitting here in this cavern, surrounded by herbs and plants and animal skins. In my head, the cries of the witch-mongers began to sound.

She asked me once more, ‘You are not on the baillie’s business?’

I repeated that I was not.

‘Nor yet the minister’s?’

‘We have no minister now, in Banff.’

‘Indeed?’

‘Since …’ I hesitated, unwilling to speak in this place of witchcraft.

‘Since they burnt that poor girl for a witch,’ she said.

I lowered my head. ‘Yes. Robert Guild will never preach in Banff again.’

She spat again. ‘Well, since you are here for neither Kirk nor council, I will tell you. The girl was with child. The bairn was his – her father’s apprentice. They came to me at first to ask for some compound or practice that might help her carry the bairn a few weeks longer – beyond its term. They wished to marry, but they knew that before they had the banns up her belly would be swelling and their secret known. They did not wish that shame on the bairn’s name, or the humiliation for themselves of sitting before the kirk on the stool for all the hypocrites to rail at. Also, I think the girl did not wish to disappoint her father. She did not say so, but I have seen it many times, and the look was in her eyes that I have seen on many others.’

The horror of it came cold on me. This was what Jaffray had known; this the secret of the dead that he had kept in the face of all my questioning. And he had had to watch, helpless, as the mob had taken her dead body from his house and added barbarity to barbarity. A mother had been murdered and within her her child, and it had been burned in her womb. I did not know how I would face the lykewake Arbuthnott intended for his daughter. The thing had been macabre enough without this.

My voice was hoarse. ‘Were you able to help them?’ I asked.

The crone shook her head. She indicated with a sweep of her hand the shelves of bottles and jars behind her. ‘My skill is in cutting short a woman’s time, or when it comes to it, assisting a living child into the arms of a living mother, when God so grants it. For the prolonging of a pregnancy I can do little, save to tell a woman to eat well and avoid toilsome labours. I explained this to them. She was much downcast, he agitated. I told them there had been many come to me in a worse case than they; that they should take their punishment and know that it would pass. I told them of those who have come to me in desperate straits – even of his own aunt, who had near lost her wits in fear and gone about like a thing haunted by the end of her life over the loss of all her children.’ She stirred her pot thoughtfully. ‘Aye, haunted she was indeed by them.’ She did not linger long in her reverie. ‘And so they left. And then the next thing I knew, the boy was dead by an unknown hand.’ She paused again for thought, before adding very matter-of-fact, ‘It may have been her father.’

I made no response to this, for it was a distraction from the path my mind was now taking. ‘Marion Arbuthnott came to see you again, did she not?’

‘Aye,’ she responded warily, ‘she did.’

‘What did she come for the second time?’

She looked at me carefully, assessing me. For a moment I feared she might lie, try to tell me that the girl had come for some charm or compound to rid her of her fatherless child. But something set in the crone’s face. A decision, a resolution. She would trust me. ‘She came to ask me about a flower.’

‘Colchicum mortis.’

She nodded slowly. ‘Aye, that. She wanted to know if I knew of it. I have some little knowledge of it, of its nature and properties, but I have never seen nor used it, or known anyone who has. This I told her, and she was greatly disappointed. I told her to ask her father, but she said she could not risk that.’ She stopped. ‘Or did she say risk him? I cannot remember.’

I knew why: Marion Arbuthnott knew that knowledge of this evil was almost as deadly as the poison of the plant itself. It was the knowledge that had made her fear for Charles Thom and a conviction that had been proven correct by her own death. I persisted, nonetheless. ‘Did she tell you why she wanted to know about this plant?’

‘It took much to draw it out from her, for she was a close, strange girl, and frightened. But she told me in the end. The lad, she said, had been quiet, preoccupied, all their journey back to Banff. He had scarcely spoken two words on the long road home. But, as they had crested the Gallowhill and begun their descent into the town, he had stopped dead, as if struck by a vision. And then he had said quietly those two words. Colchicum mortis. He had repeated them, and then had said no more but that he must leave her, for he had urgent business to attend to. She had seen him only once more, at her father’s table the next night. He had eaten nothing and appeared agitated still, excited almost, but it was a dark sort of excitement. She told me she had a presentiment of evil.’ The crone shrugged. ‘And maybe she had; she was a sensitive child, and knowing. Anyhow, the boy had told her he had some business on hand that night, and she was not to ask him of it, or seek to follow him. The next morning he was dead.’ The woman’s tale told, she lifted her pot and set it in a dark recess to cool.

There was no more to be had from her, and I stood up and began to pull on my cloak. She looked up.

‘Where are you going?’

‘I am returning to Banff,’ I said. ‘I must before dark. There is much I must attend to.’

She smiled. ‘You will not get back to Banff this night. The fog will not lift till the morning. You would be lost in five minutes and dead in ten.’ It was not an opinion, but a statement of fact. She lit a small lamp and set it by me. Then she went to a chest in some dark recess of the cavern and brought out a slim volume, old and well read. ‘This is my only book, save the Bible. You may entertain yourself with it if you wish. I do not seek company, and I have spoken more these last two weeks than I would wish to in half a year.’ She brought me also a bowl of mussels and a hunk of bread. It was the last exchange we had for many hours.

I pulled the lamp closer to me and opened the book at the title page: The Poems of William Dunbar. Dunbar. An unexpected warmth spread through me, a memory of childhood evenings by the fire, listening to my father, the day’s toils over, telling stories of his youth, of his journeying with the laird of Delgatie. Those were the nights he would sing the old ballads or say the poems. Those had been the magical nights, when my mother too had been young again and had remembered why she had loved him. For me, it was not the great adventures overseas, nor the ballads of romance, but those poems in our own Scots tongue, written by a court clerk dead a hundred years, that had allowed me to glimpse for a brief hour the humanity of my own father. I had not looked at or listened to one of Dunbar’s poems since the day they told me he was dead. I feared almost to open the book further, for what memory I would find there. I laid the volume down and settled back on the furs and skins beneath me, hoping for sleep. None came. The silence of the sea outside was more terrifying than all the fury of its rages. The crone was oblivious to it. Some powders she had been grinding she now put in a glass jar and was adding distilled water, drop by drop. She would sniff at it every so often, then mutter to herself before adding some other powder.

I had learnt what I had come to learn from her, and had no wish to tarry longer in this place, but her advice was good: there could be no sense in attempting to reach Banff before morning. There was much I could have done in these futile hours, in any other place but this. I had no idea what hour of the day or night it was. I gave over trying to sleep and opened the volume once more, this time having the courage to turn the pages further.

The crone had finished her work and had gone about some necessary business in a place she had shown to me deep into the back of the cave, and I was still reading, lost in another time, my father’s voice resonant in my ear. Even after she had put out the lamp and laid herself out to sleep on her trestle bed, the words echoed in my mind through the darkness from fifteen, twenty years ago. The ballads, the lusty drinking songs, the comic ditties on court life, all had come to life again in my head, and had brought warmth to me. But now, in the darkness of this cavern, with the haar seeping through the silent black, my father’s sonorous voice at last spoke the words that had ended all those evenings, and sent me to my sleep in fear: timor mortis conturbat me. The fear of death disquiets me. It was the only certainty I had now to hold on to: the certainty of death. And the knowledge of death was everywhere in this place where three times now I had been accorded life. I prayed for sleep, for peace, and, many hours into the night, it came.

I was awakened by a blast of fresh air on my face. My eyes sought in vain the familiar objects of my own chamber in the schoolhouse until I remembered where I was. The crone had gone outside. I followed the passage of light to the cave entrance and pushed back the partition myself. Sunlight pierced my eyes. The haar had lifted. A clear, fine spring day spread out the beauty of the firth before me. With little conversation, the old woman busied herself about making some breakfast, and while I ate she worked once more at her potions. As I finished my porridge and rose to gather my few things she turned. ‘Wait. It is not quite ready.’ Without further explanation, she went back to her work, and spent some minutes checking on jars and bottles, finally selecting two small vessels into which she poured different liquids from the concoctions she had been making the previous night. She handed me the bottles. ‘This,’ she said, indicating the one containing a murky, yellowish treacle, ‘you are to give to Baillie Buchan. It is the remedy he seeks.’ I opened my mouth to say something but she silenced me. ‘You know all you need to. Give it to him.’ The other bottle contained a clear, almost blue tonic. ‘This you will take for yourself. One spoonful at night. You will sleep more easy, and the dreams will not bother you.’

‘Did I speak my dreams last night? Did I call out?’ Sometimes lately, I had woken in the night at the sound of my own cry.

‘I know your dreams of old,’ she said, ‘and have banished them before.’

And it was because of some preparation such as this, I guessed, that I remembered nothing of my last stay here, less than one year ago. ‘I have no money,’ I said.

‘I look for none,’ she replied. ‘Take them, and do as I say. May God go with you.’ As I stepped out of the cavern she spoke to me for the last time. It was as if she had been considering whether to tell me or not. ‘The girl, Marion Arbuthnott, asked me if I knew what the flower looked like, this flower that you seek. As I told you, and her, I have never seen it, but I saw a picture of it once in an old herbal, under poisons. I was able to describe it to her, for she had a good knowledge of plants and their parts, and she pictured it well. She knew it from somewhere; she had seen it. When she left here, I have a mind she was going to seek it out.’

‘She found it,’ I said, ‘and it killed her.’

The old woman nodded. ‘I feared it might, in some fashion. I believe that you too have in mind to find it. Take care that you do not follow her too soon down death’s dark passageway.’ She turned away from me and retreated into the shadows of her dwelling. I left the cavern gladly and set out for home.

It seemed a shorter journey back to Banff than that I had made yesterday. Such was my purpose I scarcely noticed the miles disappear behind me. It was not yet noon when I headed the Gallow Hill and saw set out before me the old burgh. As I descended the road into town I could see before me those blue flowers, just as Marion Arbuthnott had done, falling, falling. I could almost touch them.