The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

FOURTEEN The Lykewake

The door of my chamber had only just closed behind me when I heard the voice.

‘Hello, Alexander.’ I spun round and saw him sitting there, in the dim light in the corner of the room: Thomas Stewart. ‘You have been gone a long time.’

‘Not so long, really,’ I said, removing my hat but staying standing. ‘I had not expected a visitor.’

Though he smiled, his face was troubled. ‘You will be weary after your journey, but I must speak with you now. It would have been better if I had spoken before.’ There had been a strange silent watchfulness in the town as I had made my way down through it; those whose eye I had caught had not held my look, but had quickly turned away. And now I felt unaccountably frightened to see the notary sitting there in my room. The fire had not been lit for two days and all was coldness and emptiness.

‘Ask me what you will, Thomas,’ I said.

He shifted uneasily in his seat. ‘I am here on a matter of formality, Alexander, and I wish you to understand that it is the office and not the man who sits before you here. It is the only safeguard for friendships that I know.’ I understood, now. I understood who it was that the messenger had been despatched to by the watch on my return to the burgh by the Boyndie gate less than an hour ago, and I understood that this visit augured nothing good for me. He shifted again on the bench and at length got up and began to pace the room. ‘I have come to ask you questions, yes, but to caution you too.’

‘To caution me?’

‘Yes.’ He stopped pacing and stood halfway down the room, facing me. ‘It is rumoured throughout the town that you went yesterday to Findlater and to Darkwater, and that you passed the night in the dwelling of the wise woman, the crone there. Is there truth in this?”

‘From whose mouth have you had it?’

‘From one that is not to be doubted.’

‘Then you know that it is true,’ I said.

‘I had hoped it might not be,’ he said quietly. And then he turned on me with exasperation. ‘Why must you court controversy, Alexander? Have you any idea of the dangers you expose yourself to?’

‘What? By visiting an old midwife, and sheltering a night in her cave from the fog? Would it have been better for me to have hazarded my life in the haar on the cliff tops?’

‘It would have been better for you not to have gone at all,’ he said with some vehemence.

‘Thomas,’ I said, ‘she is not a witch, but an old woman who tired of this world and its fancies and furies.’

‘Do you think it matters, Alexander, whether she indulges in the black arts or does not? In the minds of some of the townsfolk she is already condemned as a servant of Lucifer, and you by your association with her. Be she utterly without blemish, once that idea is firmly fixed in the minds of the people there will be nothing to save her, or you. The witchhunt has broken out of the south-west and has spread to Fife. What happened here was not the end of it, only the start.’ He looked at me for a moment, making a decision. ‘Though Jaffray would never say, there are those who believe you spent your,’ he searched for words, ‘your lost days, last year, in the care of the crone.’

‘Then they are right,’ I said, ‘though I remember nothing of it.’

‘And why should that be, Alexander, if not that she cast some charm upon you, to make you forget? How then can you know what you had done, or been, those lost days?’

‘I was a man, Thomas, just a man. Not bound then to God or the Devil, but to my own self, and it is that that she tried to help me forget. Her charm failed me, I think.’

‘Then I am sorry for it. But do nothing further to kindle their suspicions.’

‘Nor their fires?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he replied grimly, ‘nor their fires.’ He was silent for a moment, but I knew he had more to say. He cleared his throat, still more uncomfortable than before. ‘I think, and I hope I may be wrong in this, and that you will forgive me for it, but I think you have it in mind to seek out for yourself the killer in our midst.’

‘You are not wrong.’

‘Can I ask your reasoning?’

I thought of Patrick Davidson, not on that last night of his life, when he had made the desperate appeal to me that I had chosen not to hear, but in all the time before that, all the weeks he had been in Banff before his death. I had never sought out his company in all that time. I had avoided it, and would have done even had Jaffray not been away in the South. The truth, which I had determinedly turned my face from these last few days and weeks, was that the arrival of Patrick Davidson had discomfited me; for he had been what I should have aspired to be. Neither high nor base born, he had been educated and travelled far afield in pursuit of his education and his passions, proper passions. He had pursued a calling many thought beneath him for his love of it. He had been happy, kindly, well lettered and well loved. In another life, in another world, at another time, like Charles Thom, how gladly I would have called him friend. But that life and time and world had gone long before Patrick Davidson ever returned to the place of his childhood. And so I turned my face from him. To the end, I had turned from him. I was determined to be able to face him now, if not in this life, then in the next. How could I make Thomas Stewart understand this?

I could not, and I did not try. Instead, I told him what had once been a part of the truth. ‘When Charles Thom was charged and imprisoned over this murder, Jaffray and I swore we would not rest until we had him freed. Well, he is freed now, and that is enough for the doctor – he has concerns enough in the world – but I am too far in to come out now.’

The notary did not like what he heard. He began to speak slowly, deliberately. ‘Alexander, I must counsel you to leave off from this task. There are snares everywhere in this business. If you are not caught by cries of witchcraft, you may well be taken as a plotter and a spy.’

‘A spy? How so?’

‘The townsfolk may well hold Marion Arbuthnott to have been a witch, and Patrick Davidson to have been a victim of her craft, but I think it much more like he was a spy, and she his willing helper, for it is certain if he was not involved in the one it was the other.’

‘You are wrong,’ I said. ‘He did love her.’

He looked at me sceptically, puzzled as to how I had come by such assurance. He evidently did not have the time to waste on such matters. ‘Whether he loved the girl or not is of little moment. What should concern you is that by meddling too far in his affairs you might well find yourself tainted by them.’

‘Is it the office or the man who tells me that?’ I asked.

He replied firmly, quietly. ‘It is both.’

I took flint and lit the tallow candle, for little light reached my chamber at this time of the day. I wanted to see the notary’s face. ‘Thomas, you yourself were amongst those who involved me in the matter of Patrick Davidson’s maps. How else would I have known of their existence, or of fear of plots, other than those which are constantly with us? How can you now accuse me of something that you know was none of my doing?’

‘I accuse you of nothing,’ he said, ‘but some of your encounters on your trip to Aberdeen were ill-advised.’

I could not follow him. ‘In Aberdeen I lodged with an old friend, a respected lawyer, known in this town and in this house, and to you yourself.’

He nodded. ‘William Cargill is a good man.’

I was no longer in the mood for platitudes. ‘I achieved the purposes of my visit as far as the school here is concerned, and I fulfilled the commissions on which I was sent by this town. I cannot see where the fault is to be found in that. And if it is a question of George Jamesone, the artist, then you must refer to the provost, for I–’

He cut me short. ‘It is not of the artist, or Principal Dun or Doctor Forbes or any of those citizens of whom I speak. You will not tell me, I hope, that you met with Matthew Lumsden on the business of this town?’

‘Matthew Lumsden? What is Matthew Lumsden to do with this?’

‘That is what I would have you tell me.’ Here I saw we had reached the point of the interview.

Apprehension grew within me. ‘Matthew Lumsden is my friend,’ I said. ‘He has been so for many years.’

‘Matthew Lumsden is an adherent of the Marquis of Huntly. He has raised his head and spoken too loud and too often on matters he would have been wiser to keep to himself. His opinions are known and his religious adherence guessed at. Circumstanced as you are, he is a man whose company it would be better not to keep.’

I got up and walked over to the door; I opened it. ‘He is a man who has not sold his honour for office. I will choose my own friends, Mr Notary.’

If the notary made any reply as he left, I did not hear it. As the door closed behind him, I felt I had lost a friend I had never properly valued, and I was sorry for it, but my words could not be retracted. My clothes were still damp from the journey back from Darkwater, my head was aching and I was beginning to shiver. I took the stopper from the bottle the crone had given me and drank down a mouthful of the bitter liquid. As I sank onto my bed, I realised, too late now, that Thomas Stewart should not have known my movements in Aberdeen at all.

The voice came to me as from a distant place. It entered my dreams and called me from them. For without cause have they hid for me their net in a pit, which without cause they have digged for my soul. Clear and pure, the voice came closer. It was joined by other voices, many voices, solemn, low, in unison, following the words exactly. The voices were marching on me, chanting. I stumbled from my bed, covered still in the warm damp of my clothes. But in mine adversity they rejoiced, and gathered themselves together: yea, the abjects gathered themselves together against me, and I knew it not: they did tear me and ceased not. Closer still came the voices. My eyes not properly opened, I felt my way from my chamber and out onto the top of the stairs. Four steps down, not yet fully out of my slumber, I pressed my face to the small window set deep in the outer turnpike wall. The crowd, for it was indeed a crowd, snaked from its tail, just clearing the kirkyard gate, by way of Low Shore and the western end of the kirk, round to its head at High Shore, where it would soon pass beneath, far beneath, my window. Behind the bier, she downcast and he defiant, walked the apothecary and his wife, and at the very head, as I had known he must be, was Charles Thom. His voice, always a gift from God, stood forth alone, reaching to the Heavens: Lord, how long wilt thou look on? Rescue my soul from their destructions, my darling from the lions. Alone, high above them and in a quiet voice, I took up the psalm, word for word, note for note, and joined with all those other voices in the commencement of the lykewake of Marion Arbuthnott.

I had to find another stand of clothes – I could not go out in my nightshirt, yet I could scarcely remain like this. The warmth of my body from the bed had dissipated and the cold of the clothes cloyed at my every inch of skin. My other vestments, beaten in a tub just yesterday by the maid, hung yet before the kitchen fire, sending steam still to the ceilings and rolling back down the wall. I returned to my room and brought the key down from the mantelshelf where it had lain for nine months, disturbed only by the cleaning hand of Mistress Youngson or her maid. I crouched by the bed and dragged out the kist. The lock was stiff, but gave way at the third twist of the key in my hand. I opened the lid quietly, fearful, foolishly, that I should be discovered in the act. And yet in but half an hour I would stand before many who knew me in that which I now hesitated to move from its tomb. I lifted the papers first – why should I have kept my sermon? And there beneath, pristine, made from love and worn but once, were the night-black drapes of a man of God, the cloak and suit of fine English cloth, with the velvet collar, made up for me by Banff’s finest tailor at the behest of all my kind friends here: Gilbert Grant and his wife, Jaffray, Charles, who had not two ha’pennies to rub together, and the parents of some of my scholars, who often had none. I had stood in my fine new clothing before the brethren at the Presbytery of Fordyce on that June night, and heard the laird of Delgatie pronounce my doom. Had I paid for them myself, the garments would have been long since consigned to the fire, but as I had not they had remained there, locked away in the kist beneath my bed, a hidden symbol of my fall. And tonight, in this town lost to its terror of a darkness it did not understand, gathering in a pagan farewell to a murdered girl and her unborn child, I would wear them again. It was almost fitting. I removed my sickly damp rags and began to dress.

The town bell had just tolled seven when I passed under the archway at the side of the apothecary’s shop. The rhythmic chanting of the psalms and the tentacled aroma of roasting meats guided my steps. It was a mild evening, and the sun had not yet sunk beyond the mountains of the west. The sea was peaceful. Charles’s voice seemed to guide the waves as they came surely to the shore, the people in unison taking up the line behind him, their voices rumbling away like the pebbles as the waves rolled them back to the sea. Many of the mourners had spilled out into the courtyard – although the women remained yet in the house. Unseen, as I thought, on my arrival, I scanned the faces of the people gathered there, some shifting slowly from one stance to another, some talking in low voices to their neighbours. I marvelled, but was in truth little surprised, at the hypocrisy of my townsmen – how many of them had gathered together not three hundred yards from here, but two nights ago, and watched the body burn of the girl they now mourned? As I began to pass amongst them, I noticed how few of any note were absent from this gathering. The guilds were there, those who were not locked away awaiting justice, their deans wearing the regalia of their office in honour of their fellow guildsman, the apothecary. Baxters, candlemakers, coopers, fleshers, shoemakers, dyers, weavers, hammermen. How resplendent, how strong had I seen my own father on many a night such as this. How my mother had hated the public appropriation of such private grief. She had not understood.

There was the baillie, watching. I was not greatly surprised to see him: despite his oft-rehearsed condemnation of such ‘popery’ as the lykewake, he was a man who liked to know his enemy. And there, not amongst the general throng, but alone in the shadows of the doorway to the apothecary’s house, was the provost. My eye met his and he gave me the briefest of nods before retreating further back into the shadows, where a white wraith flitted behind him; Geleis Guild also had come to mourn her friend and helper. As I turned my gaze from the doorway I caught a glimpse, from the corner of my eye, of Jaffray. He was deep in conference with Thomas Stewart, and had evidently not seen me. I took a step towards them and the doctor looked up in my direction. I had not seen him since he had pleaded with me not to go to Darkwater. He raised a hand to acknowledge me, but the notary avoided my eye. Stung, I turned back towards the place the music was coming from.

My minister’s garb cutting a path for me through my astonished neighbours, I made my way eventually towards the circle at the front of the throng, nearest to where the song schoolmaster and his scholars stood. Charles directed the boys in the old way, standing before them behind a makeshift lectern, turning the pages of the choirbook with one hand as he directed the boys behind him with the other. Away from the inn, away from Jaffray’s, away from the kirk, he was a man transformed. The cares of his world and the confines of his duties lifted from him, he was at liberty, so seldom granted him, to enjoy fully and to offer to us his God-given gifts. The psalm he now took up was not, as the others had been, a monotone, stripped of all decoration and ornamentation, but something worthy of the gifts and training of a true musician. Voices of master and boys rose in magnificent polyphony, urging the Lord, for Marion Arbuthnott, to ‘judge and avenge my cause’.

Baillie Buchan, whom I discovered a few feet away from me, did not move throughout the rendition of the whole piece, yet his face hardened in disapproval with every new proof of the virtuosity of my friend. He never once took his eyes from Charles though, and it was only as master and boys then set themselves in reports on the eighteenth psalm that he seemed to notice me. He said nothing, but moved slowly closer to me, evidently set on the guarding of either Charles or myself from escape.

In a moment he was at my shoulder. I was emboldened by the gradual dying of the light. ‘The psalm is not to your taste, baillie?’ I asked.

‘The psalm is to my taste,’ he said. ‘The words of King David, cried out to our Lord, assured in the righteousness of his cause in a sinful world. But this playing upon it, this decoration and ostentation, born of the vanity of men, turns my stomach. What need has the psalmist of such perversions?’

‘Surely, baillie, our music master’s voice is a gift from God?’

He turned on me a look of frozen contempt for my words. ‘Do you not recall the words of John Knox? Or is he out of favour with the great Episcopalians of the King’s College?’ There was the disdain in his voice of a man who made no compromise.

‘I am no stranger to the works of John Knox,’ I replied, ‘and neither were my masters.’ And indeed I recalled the words of the great Reformer, and their exposition as my classmates and I had debated the place of music in the worship of God. For the baillie, there was no debate.

He spoke quietly. ‘He knew of the snares of the world waiting on all men, and warned against such as these. The schoolmaster’s gifts should be applied to the edification of the people, not to the parading of his own vanity.’ The vehemence of his words was almost beyond his strength to muster, and the baillie was overcome by the now familiar retching cough.

A spit with a hog roasting on it turned in one corner, near to the apothecary’s well. Some ragged urchins were already gathering near it, ready to risk the wrath of the cook for the chance of a hot meal. I was hungry, and would gladly have sat down and eaten something myself, for I felt weak from hunger and fatigue. It was not time for eating though; the long trestle tables laid out in the courtyard were as yet empty of the delights that the women of Arbuthnott’s kin had been preparing all day. The time of solemnity had not yet passed – that of gluttony and excess was still to come. My fine suit of English wool with its long cloak and collar were not sufficient to take the damp and cold from my bones. I began to feel shivery, and searched out a place beside the fire. Gladly would I have returned to my bed, for I had little time for lykewakes and the superstitions they recalled, but I felt impelled to stay and see the night through.

The psalm the scholars were singing was finally brought to its dolorous end, and, with scarcely enough pause for breath, a new sound filled the air, a sweet and melancholic melody I knew well. One of the older boys had taken up his flute, while another played on the rebec, his bow calling a plaintive tune across the strings, and Charles began to sing out, no psalm now, but a mourning lover’s air – ‘I wish I was where Helen lies’. The women had come out of the house now. Some still stood on the backstairs, while others moved softly amongst the guests in the courtyard. And then, as from another place, the timeless notes of a clarsach joined with the flute and the rebec, matched to Charles’s own voice. I turned my eyes to the source of the sound, for I knew Charles was no harpist. There, on a stool a little behind the musicians’ dais, sat Ishbel, the doctor’s girl, her fingers gently caressing the strings of the clarsach, as those of her people had done for centuries before. The instrument spoke the agony of lost love, of a life and of dreams departed, and for a few moments all other noise ceased. Charles himself fell silent. As the notes followed one another on the air, and the song came at last to its end, I saw that many in the crowd were now weeping. Marion Arbuthnott’s moment had come. The doctor moved towards the girl, pride and love glowing in him. At the top of the forestairs, engulfed in her desolation, stood Marion’s mother, her head buried in the shoulder of Mistress Youngson, whose eyes looked out on her own memories. Most of all though, it was the baillie that I noticed. He too was looking out, far from the place and time he now stood in, to an image of something long lost, long gone. I had never before seen such humanity in his face. Charles did not move, but watched Ishbel for many moments. His lips parted slightly and gradually came together again. A veil had been lifted from his eyes.

Once having composed himself, the doctor, with Ishbel firmly clamped in a father’s embrace, called out, ‘Come now, Charles, let us have something to lift our hearts.’ Charles took a moment to come out of his spell, but smiling, took up his bow, called out a name to his players, who took up pipe, drum and tabor, and led them in a hearty harvest tune. The new sound was as a signal to mourners – guests and hosts both. Women bustled and boys ran up and down from the kitchen to the courtyard, and soon the trestles were filled with salvers, bowls and baskets of every sort of food imaginable: pies filled with pigeon, fish, rabbit; all manner of breads, pastries, puddings; custards, cakes, sweetmeats of every description. The council and the session had proclaimed time and again against such feasting, and this indeed was more of a wedding banquet than a funeral feast; but for Marion Arbuthnott there would be no wedding and all that her anguished parents could now do for her, they would do.

The sun had gone at last, and its amber glow faded. Torches were lit in sconces about the courtyard walls, casting grotesque shadows of men, women and children in perverse celebration of the passage of a soul, two souls, into death. I tried not to look at them. I wanted to talk again with Thomas Stewart – it was not right that things should have been left between us as they had this afternoon, and it was for me to set things right with him. I stood up, my head setting inside my skull like molten lead as I did so, and began to cast around for some sight of the notary. There were too many people now, moving about alone or in groups, from fire, to table, to spit; I had no clear line of vision or access anywhere. I gradually pushed and jostled my way through them until I reached the place where I had seen the notary talking with Jaffray, but both were long gone now. The shivering of earlier now alternated with waves of intense heat throughout my body, culminating in the thumping of my head. I came to a bench and sat down again, fearful that my legs would buckle beneath me. Before I could breathe out my relief to be resting again, an arm shoved into my shoulder, almost knocking me from my seat. I looked round quickly but saw nothing save the ragged hem of a deftly retreating cloak. Lang Geordie’s men had somehow got themselves here tonight, I was sure of it. It was not a night to sit in the dark corners, on the margins: safety lay in the heart of the crowd, and I forced myself to my feet again, and towards the busy tables. I could not tell if it was my own body that swayed, or those I pressed through, yet I knew my feet were not steady. I cursed the wise woman of Darkwater and her sleeping tonic, and my own stupidity in taking it not seven hours ago.

At last I found my way through the throng. I slipped onto a bench and had a platter of food – crackling pork, baked apple with cloves, a dark and peppery gravy and warm bread – pressed into my hand. It was Gilbert Grant who stood above me.

‘Alexander, you look as if you might faint. Eat, my boy, eat. My wife tells me you have had nothing since you returned home to us this day. She bids you eat.’ I accepted the plate and nodded my gratitude towards Mistress Youngson, who had taken over the duties of hostess from the grieving mother. A cup of warm, spiced wine was also handed to me, and as I ate and drank I began to recover myself somewhat. Gilbert Grant seemed content to eat in silence, looking up at me every now and then to make sure I did not flag. I was glad of it, for I was in no mood for conversation, even with this most gentle and genial of men. A reckoning was building in this place tonight that the music and the food and the drink and the dancing flames could not mask, and I was resolved to see it when it came. All around me I could sense a watching and a waiting.

Charles and his boys, the older and better players, embarked upon a courante, and some of the wealthier merchants, along with the landed folk, took up their wives and daughters and set forth to dance, mindful of their status and their dignity. I looked over to the baillie, who kept his place near the music master and the dais. His face was set as a stone; for the baillie, one dance, be it ever so graceful, was as much fuel for the Devil’s fire as the wildest debauch. For myself, I had not seen dancing since that last Christmas at Delgatie, and I was drawn to watch as men and women moved with care in set steps towards each other, turned away, went back and took each other’s hands again to move on in stately, mannered procession. All was propriety, all was order. The faces were as masks, but the eyes, the eyes always gave something away.

The dance came to an end, and before I had stepped back properly into the crowd, another had begun. Unwitting and unwilling, I found myself in a line of four men. Four women faced us, and before me was the pale and wasted form of Geleis Guild. I looked up to where the provost stood: he watched me, motionless. Was this a test? Was I to know that I was not to lay a hand upon this fragile, delicate ornament of his office and his place? I knew that well enough. The music began and I stepped forward and took the slender hand, for there was nothing to step back to. Geleis Guild looked straight ahead into nothing, as if she did not see me, and the dance progressed. No word, no acknowledgement of who I was, escaped her. I had not set eyes on her since that morning when we had brought the lifeless body of Patrick Davidson to her house. The double grief for her friend had almost washed all life from her. I wondered what decoction Jaffray had given her, for she looked as one who is already halfway to the next world. But then, as the dance neared its end, and we passed across one another for the last time, her mouth brushed my hair. The words took whatever strength was left to her. ‘Do not fail them,’ she breathed, and then her hand fell from mine and she had been folded back once again into the crowd. The provost no longer watched me – I could not see him – but the eyes of many others, of Dr Jaffray, of Thomas Stewart, of Baillie Buchan, all were on me now. I would have given much then to pass quietly as a stranger from the company. I stepped back towards the edges of the crowd and waited for it to envelop me.

From somewhere in the darkening gathering, over the aroma of the roasting meat and the pungent spices, over too the thick, warm stench of human sweat and dirt, a new sensation reached my nostrils and my mind. It was not the smoke from the spit-fire, or the bonfire made to warm us, nor yet from the tobacco of Virginia Jaffray so often railed against yet so much enjoyed, but sweet-smelling, of some other leaf dried and burned for the alteration of mind and spirit. It was reaching that time in the evening when such drugs would be smoked and others taken, their seeds crushed into drinks. The baillie and others of his ilk agonised over the danger to our souls from a few harmless songs and dances. How the Devil must have laughed at their simplicity, as he reached into our very minds and visions, with his pagan gifts from the New World. I wanted my wits about me tonight, and moved swiftly away from the source of the strange perfume, wondering at the words of the provost’s wife. Do not fail them.

Some of the younger music scholars had been sent home, their promised penny in their hand to give to their mother, and the music and the dancing was becoming less stately. The doctor stepped up with Ishbel as the players struck up a popular measure. The cittern now came into play for the first time in the evening, and the tabor beat in perfect time to the small pipe over which Charles’s fingers flew, his eyes smiling as Ishbel blushed to the doctor’s exaggerated manners. For all that had occurred these last few days, and for all the dreadful sorrow that had occasioned this celebration, ten years had fallen from the doctor this night. The call went up for a lustier tune. I had avoided lykewakes these many years past – students were banned from them in Aberdeen, but Archie had always made a hearty mourner. I knew that there came a point always when the authorities, in the shape of minister, session clerk, baillie or town serjeant, would call a halt to the festivities, in fear for the public morals and for order in the town. And this was the point at which they would have done so, at the point where the drinking surpassed the eating, when strange substances began to subvert the order of men’s minds, and when good humour threatened to spill over into debauchery.

Tonight though, Banff was a town without minister or session clerk; the town serjeants and all their men needed every resource for the guarding of the prisoners dispersed over town. All the provost’s care and attention was taken up this night on preventing the unravelling of his young wife’s mind and the utter collapse of her spirit. There was only the baillie, but the baillie, like me, was waiting, watching for what was surely to come. After a hesitant glance at William Buchan, which drew no response, Charles took up his fiddle and let fly with the opening notes of the favourite, ‘Gallua Tom’. The piccolo took up the challenge, and the two, with the tabor beating out their time and the cittern struggling to keep pace, flew against one another in speed and dexterity as in battle joined. The courtyard became a mass of bodies, heaving, whirling, laughing, flinging one another across the floor. The flickering light of the torches played upon their writhing forms, catching the glistening beads of sweat that trickled down their foreheads and the glinting, shining, eager eyes, the lascivious, open mouths.

And then, as the music reached its height and the dancers could scarcely keep pace with the playing, there came looming, crashing into my view the massive form of George Burnett, master stonemason, tormentor of Sarah Forbes and father of her child. Being flung on his arm, a look of terror on her face, was Ishbel. My stomach lurched. I stepped forward to grab the girl, but they had gone whirling past and I was knocked and cursed out of the way by oncoming dancers. Where was the doctor? I looked round but could not see him. I looked after George Burnett and Ishbel, but they had been carried on the tide of the dance and I had no hope of reaching them until they came back round to me. I caught a glimpse of the huge, gnarled fingers on the girl’s slender arm, and I thought of those same hands roughly forcing Sarah Forbes. And yet she had not been crushed, she had not been destroyed, and now she and her child would be safe in Aberdeen, away from him. But Ishbel, no, Ishbel had not that strength. She would be crushed by him like a flower beneath his feet, and it would kill the doctor. A crushed flower, a broken, fallen, flower. And then I saw it, as the music threatened to carry all with it in a whirlwind of madness and swirling bodies. As the strange-scented smoke again snaked towards me I saw the flowers falling to the floor, falling from an open hand, and I saw the face of the woman who had once held them. She called to me through the music, through silence, through time. Janet and Mary Dawson had heard it wrongly, for Patrick Davidson had not said ‘James and the flowers’ at all.

I began to push and crash my way through the crowd. The music was now disjointed, discordant, and faltered to a stop as Charles Thom leapt from the stage bellowing at George Burnett to leave off his hold on the girl. On another night, at another time, I would have been there with him, but now I could but commit him and Ishbel to God and to each other. There was other work of the stonemason’s I must see to tonight. A group of tanners and dyers, laughing, drinking, blocked the entrance to the vennel leading back out onto the street. Feeling sick, I tried to ask them to let me pass, but the words fell disordered from my mouth. ‘Falling down again, eh, Mr Seaton?’ Their laughter was less derision than amusement.

‘I need to get past,’ I said.

‘Not before you take a cup with us.’ A voice I did not know was joined by a hand I could not rightly see. A cup was pressed on me, its contents burning with heat and spices. I drank quickly, but a dancer hurled from the floor slammed into my back and most of the warm liquid was spilled down my front. More laughter, and the craftsmen parted to let me by. I stumbled through the vennel and out into the open street, the noises of the lykewake following me into the clear night. Men and women, shapes and shadows, emerged from corners, fell back against walls, slipped down dark pends and vennels, all having forgotten the business of the night, the burned and blackened corpse of a murdered girl.

Curses and shouting and noises of commotion followed me into the street; I turned around in time to see George Burnett, oaths flowing from his mouth, be bodily ejected from the apothecary’s pend, Thomas Stewart behind him warning him not to come back. I slumped into a doorway to let the stonemason pass, swaying on unsteady feet, blood coursing from his nose. Charles had had the better of it and Ishbel would be all right, thank God. Burnett caught a glimpse of me just before he reached the door of the Market Inn. Uttering another curse he pushed through it, and the music from the lykewake streamed into the night as the door banged shut behind him. I had scarcely the strength to stand now, and would have been no match for him, drunk though he was.

Over in the kirkyard all was dark and silent: no Dawson sisters now, or ever again, to call to me, or to give aid to a fallen stranger. Clouds passed from the face of the moon and the houses of the burgh stood like crooked sentinels in its light. The way was clear ahead of me and I did not have the option tonight of choosing any other. My throat was dry and beset by a raging thirst; only a supreme effort kept me from diverting my steps to the schoolhouse well, not so far away now. I forced one foot in front of the other, and somehow, nauseous, shivering, I began to drag myself along High Shore, and towards the Water Path. I glanced again at the kirkyard: bricks and mortar motionless for hundreds of years slowly began to shift and sway before my eyes. Headstones, large, small, flat, jagged to the ground, began to dance: I saw the headstones dance. Terror gripped me and I hastened my steps, but I too was swaying, hardly able to keep myself from falling over onto the swirling ground beneath my feet. The strains of music from the lykewake followed me but lost their tune, became discordant and then a cacophony of screeching the further up the path I progressed. They were joined, I knew it, by a wailing that was not of this life or this world. I dared not look back again at the kirkyard.

The street narrowed as I ascended Water Path. The house frontages were narrower, the buildings closer together. Twisting alleyways ran off from the street into yards and backlands and emerged further on having met and crossed others. Any man – or woman – could shadow my path, to overtake me, without being seen by me from the street. Away from the heat and the clamour of the lykewake, the intoxication of its sounds and aromas, of the music and the smoke, my mind was alive to all the terrors of the night. My throat burned in desperation for a drink, but to stop now, to turn back, would be death. I knew that. I could only look ahead, but nothing was as it should have been; nothing was as I knew it to be. Where there were two steps I saw four, moving away and coming closer together. Where I knew there to be only one door, I saw two, banging in unison in a wind that did not blow. I wanted to shut my eyes, to shut out these visions, and look ahead at the one vision I knew to be true, the vision of Helen’s face. It stayed with me. I fixed the eye of my mind on hers and held her there as I forced myself on, as she led me on towards the end of her story. At last I reached my goal, just before the Water Path joined with the Castlegate, just before I came upon the high walls of the castle grounds. The breath and the eyes of the shadows were closer behind me now; I could feel their coldness on my skin. I turned, stumbling, into an opening in the half-crumbled wall to my left and found myself surrounded by the rubble and the foundations of the minister’s new manse.

I had no lantern, torch or candle with me, and the great oaks and horse chestnut trees, just coming into bud as they were, let through only dappled partings of the moon’s light. It was much darker here than it had been out on the street. The sound of the wind in the trees echoed that of the sea returning to the shore; noises of my fellow man from the town below were but a distant memory and murmur. This was a desolate place, too full of ghosts. Their fingers were in my hair. Shaking them loose, I scrambled over stones and trenches to the area where, as Sarah Forbes had told me and as the notary’s discussion with George Burnett had confirmed, the old garden had not yet been cleared. Helen’s garden. There, in the far corner, beneath a wall, sheltered from the sea, the ground had scarce been disturbed; a chorus of deathly voices in my head whispered that this was the place. I stumbled over a branch and only just managed to right myself before my foot went into the trench. I cried out, but no sound came; my mouth, my tongue moved, but all in silence, powerless. No one would hear my cries: a just revenge for Patrick Davidson.

I forced myself up once more and my eye caught sight of something glinting in the moonlight. I moved closer. I had not been deceived – it was glass, thick, old, weather-worn glass. I stooped down, thinking at first it must be a window pane the builders had mislaid. But it was not a window pane, set though it was in what had once been a solid wooden frame. Mastering my flailing hands, I slid the frame along on reluctant runners and there, beneath, the palest of blue in the pale moonlight, I saw the beauty of death, the slender, delicate blooms of the colchicum mortis. I stretched out my hand in wonder towards it. A branch cracked that was not beneath my foot; the rasping cough filled my ears. I spun round in time to see the sharp-boned features of Baillie William Buchan’s face bearing down on me, and the rock smashing towards my head.