The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

ONE The Tempest

Banff, the same night, two hours earlier

The old woman lifted her candle the better to observe me.

‘You would not think of going out tonight?’

‘Aye, mistress, I would.’

She fixed me with a look I knew well. ‘On a night such as this, no honest man would stir from his own hearth.’

‘Indeed he would not, mistress,’ I said. ‘But as you have often assured me, I am no honest man.’ I took down my hat and, bidding her no farewell, I went forth into the remorseless storm.

The wind, which from my attic room in the old schoolhouse had wailed through every crack and crevice like a legion of harpies, was transformed out in the night into the implacable wrath of God himself. No lantern could withstand its force and every window was shuttered against its blasts. The sea raged over the harbour walls and soaked me with its spray. There was not a single light in the town of Banff to guide a decent man on his way. As for me, I knew my way well enough. I pulled my great furred cloak more tightly round me and pressed on. All manner of ordure rushed past my feet through the open gutters towards the sea. Many foul things could be disposed of on a night like this and tomorrow the streets would be washed clean of them. I was glad of the darkness.

Some way ahead of me, perhaps only ten yards apart, lay St Mary’s kirk and the Market Inn, the one offering redemption, the other damnation. Once, I had believed I knew where each lay. Once, but not now. At the kirkyard I turned right and presently pushed open the door of the inn.

Jaffray, of course, was already there. Charles Thom sat opposite him, but did not lift his head when I entered, despite the fearsome blast that followed me through the door and caused the shutters to bang on their hinges. The shore porters looked up for a moment from their gaming by the hearth, but seeing no one of interest, returned without comment to their dice. In a gloomy corner, furthest from the fire, watched James Cardno, the session clerk. My arrival prompted no greeting other than the slow smile of satisfaction which spread, ill-masked, across his lips. He was the eyes and ears of Baillie Buchan who, by some oversight on the part of Beelzebub, could not be in two places at once. I wondered what unfortunate soul the baillie was visiting himself upon on this hellish night.

Jaffray hailed me as I approached his table. ‘An ill night, Alexander.’

‘It is that, doctor,’ I replied, taking my usual seat beside him.

Charles Thom said nothing, but continued to gaze in misery at his ale. Such misery was best left alone; I would not press him. Jaffray, however, was determined to draw him out. He addressed himself again to me.

‘Charles is not in the best of spirits tonight, Alexander. I have been hard put to extract two words from him this last half-hour.’ He sucked ostentatiously on his pipe. ‘I have pulled more compliant teeth.’

The young master of the burgh song school looked up at this. ‘What would you have me say? It is an evil night? The ale is good? My pupils sang well today? The kirk was cold yesterday and is like to be so again tomorrow? Take your pick, doctor, please.’ He returned to the contemplation of his ale.

I shot Jaffray a quizzical glance. ‘Marion Arbuthnott,’ he replied, not quite under his breath. And louder still, ‘and our good provost’s nephew – an interesting fellow.’

This was enough to rouse Charles once more from his indifference. ‘And what, precisely, is so interesting about him? That he has travelled? Well, so have you, doctor.’

Jaffray raised a good-natured eyebrow. ‘And you think I am not the more interesting for it? I assure you, I was more of a dullard than Cardno there before I left on my peregrinatio.’

This at least drew a smile from Charles, and I was hard put not to laugh out loud myself, aware as I was of the session clerk’s scowl burning into my back. The wind continued to howl through the shutters and down the great chimney-piece of the inn, muffling the conversations rising and falling in Mistress Johnston’s parlour. In between occasional arguments over the roll of the dice the shore porters pondered gloomily on the likelihood of the storm abating before the week’s end. No boat could drop anchor in the harbour in such weather and none could leave. With no work, there would be no wages. All along the coast it would be the same.

‘The poor box will be out for them before the week’s end,’ said Jaffray, nodding to Anne Johnston to send them over another round of ale.

‘There will be little enough in it,’ said Charles, not lifting his head from his tankard.

‘Oh? Who have you been asking for?’

‘John Barclay,’ replied Charles. ‘The boy has the voice of a very angel, and not a pair of shoes to his feet. In another age and another place, he would have a stall in a cathedral choir; he would be singing masses for the rich dead. But here, in this godly commonwealth of ours …’

‘He is safe from the tentacles of the idolater, and he can rely on the Christian charity of God’s people and the kirk to keep food in his belly and a coat to his back.’

Charles looked to the doctor in mute incomprehension, but Jaffray sat tight-lipped now, only with his eyes directing Charles to where the session clerk sat, storing up his every word.

‘Amen to that,’ said Charles, instantly understanding, his precentor’s mask descending over the mischievous, amused, subversive face he reserved for myself and Jaffray and few others. As master of the song school he received no salary at all, but only the tuition fees of those of his pupils who could afford to pay him. As a perquisite of his post, however, allowing him to scrape a living, he was constrained to take up the psalm in the burgh kirk and to read the lesson there, all for the greater edification of the townspeople. The look of abject misery that settled on his person while performing these duties was born, I knew, of a profound lack of interest in the sentiments he was paid to intone and of an intense dislike of the cold. To those of Presbyterian inclination on the council and the kirk session, however, his demeanour accorded so completely with their own that John Knox himself could not have pleased them better.

My friend’s ambitions were simple: to be left to himself and his music. His lack of concern for the good of his soul had given me much anguish in the days before my own fall. Yet, over this last year, Jaffray and I had remarked in him an alteration of spirit, the alteration that comes when a man realises that he no longer wishes to be alone. Edward Arbuthnott, apothecary of Banff, under whose roof Charles lodged, had a daughter, and with that daughter, as Jaffray had now convinced me, Charles was in love. But, like myself, Charles had few prospects of making his way to a more prosperous estate in life, and while Edward Arbuthnott was not an unduly ambitious man, he was as likely to give him his only daughter in marriage as James Cardno was to buy me a drink.

I swallowed some of the Rhenish Anne Johnston had brought me and asked casually, ‘So you think Marion is beguiled by the new arrival?’

Charles eyed me grudgingly. ‘Her mother certainly is. To that old besom Patrick Davidson is a prayer answered. Old Arbuthnott has years in him yet, but his wife cannot look at him without seeing six feet of good kirkyard earth piled over him, and herself and her daughter out on the street. She’ll have Marion married to Patrick Davidson the minute he’s finished his apprenticeship, and Arbuthnott can drop dead the next day for all she will care.’

It was not difficult to believe this of the matron in question, and indeed there was little purpose in arguing the point with Charles. Even Jaffray could see that. The sense of Marion Arbuthnott marrying her father’s apprentice and keeping the business in the family was self-evident. The girl had no brothers, and her mother was no prize on her own. ‘And Marion? What does she think?’

He was hesitant. ‘Who can tell? I think, maybe, she would not mind the idea.’

‘Ach, come now, Charles.’

Charles looked at Jaffray. ‘No, doctor. I fear I am right. Since Patrick Davidson came to lodge with the Arbuthnotts I have rarely seen her, and I have spoken to her less. At mealtimes he regales us all with tales of his travels. Of France, and the Alps, and of what’s left of the Empire. He is a good storyteller, I’ll grant you. And the war,’ he lowered his voice, ‘he tells us of the horrors of the war.’

The apothecary’s apprentice had not been the first to make his way to our corner of Scotland with tales of the brutality, the starvation, the rapine and the disease that marched the length and breadth of the Holy Roman Empire. Sons, brothers, friends had left our shores to fight for the Empire or against and had never come home. The frequent call of the kirk for collections to sustain our suffering brethren abroad kept the cause in minds that might have preferred to shut it out. It was in Charles’s mind, I knew, and the tales of suffering he had heard from Patrick Davidson, with whom he now shared his attic room at the apothecary’s, had engraved images in his head he would not share or indeed acknowledge. He sought to change the subject.

‘Anyhow, by night he plays the great hero while I can only play my tunes – the half of them banned by the minister and his godly brethren. And by day, well, by day while I spend my talent trying to wrest a tune from the urchins of this burgh or courting an early death in the freezing cold of that kirk, he trails Marion halfway across the country gathering berries and plants and the Lord alone knows what else for her father’s simples and syrups and ointments.’

Jaffray put a warning hand on his arm. ‘Mind what you say, Charles. It has been spoken of already at the session and Cardno’s ears are strained to your every word.’

The other’s expression darkened. ‘What have you heard?’

‘There are those who suspect the virtue of every unmarried woman, and,’ the doctor added quietly, ‘that is to say nothing of the witch-mongers.’

I saw the embers of an old terror flicker in Charles Thom’s eyes, and he had the sense to say nothing more. He knew that Jaffray was no gossip, but the sickbed was a tremendous place for the imparting of news. The doctor missed nothing. The warning had been given and would be heeded. Through the noise of the storm, the bell over the tolbooth chimed as the town clock struck nine, and Charles drained the last of his ale. ‘Anyway, gentlemen, I must leave you. This is no night for aching hearts.’ He gathered up his hat and cloak and left, his face thunderous, not pausing to respond to James Cardno’s scarcely audible ‘Goodnight’.

The door closed behind him and I was able to observe the doctor in one of his rare moments of rest. His short-cropped grey hair gave away something of his fifty years, but his brows were still dark and his eyes alert, and to me he had the strength and vigour of a man half his age. Perhaps I saw only what I wished to see. Conscious of Cardno’s interest in our conversation, we drank our wine in silence until a noisy dispute at the hearth over a suspect roll of the dice allowed us to take it up again, in low voices.

‘Do they really speak of witchcraft?’

‘They are ever vigilant. The new king shows less interest in it than his father once did, but it is a canker all the same and I doubt if it will ever be cut out.’

I knew it was the hunger for the witch-hunt, rather than the ancient pagan charms and potions, that Jaffray spoke of. For too many of my fellow citizens, there was not a misfortune that could not be ascribed to the diabolic agency of another. Ignorance, carelessness, folly and sloth: when their fruits could not be blamed upon a stranger, the malediction of some friendless neighbour could be looked to instead. The vulnerable and friendless were well advised not to call attention upon themselves in times of ill fortune. ‘And does the session not see that the apothecary’s daughter and his apprentice have good cause for their plant-gathering?’ Something in the doctor’s expression made me hesitate. ‘Or is there more to it?’

Jaffray sighed deeply. ‘In the fetid minds of the session there is always more to it. If Marion Arbuthnott be found anything less than pure and virtuous, there are souls enough in this burgh who will see that she pays for it. That a healthy young man and a pretty young woman could wander abroad on their own and not fall prey to carnal lusts is more than our good baillie and his henchmen could conceive.’

I looked long into the dregs of wine at the bottom of my pewter cup. ‘Perhaps they are right. I cannot tell.’

Jaffray did not indulge me. ‘This is not a way for a young man to live, Alexander. You must give it up.’

‘I cannot, doctor, for it will not leave go of me.’

‘Then run from it, for it will poison you. I have known other men, good men, who would not let go of such bitterness; they are old now, and dead in their souls. Run from it, Alexander.’

‘I cannot. I have nowhere to go.’

We had both said our piece, and so sat in silence a while, but away from his own hearth, the doctor was not comfortable with silences. He called for more wine from the innkeeper and returned to our earlier conversation as if there had been no pause. ‘Besides, I do not think Marion is completely lost to our young song schoolmaster. The more her mother presses the interests of Master Davidson, the more the girl will incline to Charles instead.’ He shrugged helplessly. ‘It is the way with women. My own dear wife, God rest her, only agreed to marry me because her mother could scarce tolerate the mention of my very name.’

I knew this last point to be one of Jaffray’s most self-deprecating and favoured lies. When he had returned from Basel to his native burgh almost thirty years ago, clutching his medical degree in his hand, the summa cum laude of his laureation not yet grown dim in his ears, every mother in Banff had thrust her daughter in his path. He had had the pick of the crop, and he had chosen, as he often told me, the most beautiful and delicate flower of them all. For thirteen years, blighted though they were by the repeated tragedy of lost children, he had lived with the love of his life, until the last of the lost children took her with it. He had never tried to marry again, and I knew he never would.

‘Marion’s mother is a formidable woman all the same. Charles will not have it easy. I have never yet seen the apprentice – he does not come here in the evenings.’

‘Greater attractions at home than you and the shore porters?’

I laughed. ‘Aye, perhaps. He has no need for further schooling and I have had no cause for recourse to the apothecary since you left for the south, so we have not met.’

‘And you have not been asked to sit down at the provost’s dinner table?’

The question was in jest. I doubted the provost would wish to encourage a friendship between his nephew Patrick Davidson and myself, and the doctor knew quite well that he would not. He also knew that I would care little. ‘I cannot believe that you have not made yourself acquainted yet though, doctor. You have been back from your season in Edinburgh almost two days now.’

‘Aye, and should have returned before that. The place is full of ministers, and not a smiling face amongst them. They spread their misery like a silent plague. God forbid their like should take hold in these parts. The Reverend Guild trumpets here in Banff as he might, but we may comfort ourselves that no one listens to him.’ Cardno twitched and Jaffray gave me a sly smile. ‘It will be many a long day before I venture there again, or for so long. As for the apothecary’s apprentice – yes, I had hoped to meet him at the provost’s last night, but he was not in attendance. A pity, for there is much we could have talked of.’ He mused silently for a moment and then recalled himself from his reverie, an idea evidently having presented itself. ‘But of course. I will invite him to his dinner tomorrow night, and you also, Alexander. With him only lately returned from the continent he is well placed to tell us how things stand. It pains me to think what you have never seen, what you may never see, the great cathedrals and cities laid waste by this insanity of war. Gaping chasms your divinity professors at Aberdeen were powerless to fill.’ He nodded to himself. ‘But Patrick Davidson and I shall fill them for you; we will pick the continent to the bones. And I have a very fine piece of venison for just such an occasion.’

‘You have been treating the laird of Banff again, then?’ Jaffray, I knew, was in regular attendance on the laird, who was no more able than were the rest of his rank hereabouts to stay out of trouble and the reach of the point of a sword.

The doctor leaned closer towards me with a conspiratorial smile and a cautious glance in the direction of the session clerk. ‘Indeed, no, but his steward was remarkably grateful for my assistance in the passing of a stone not long since.’ He sat back, satisfied already with the evening now taking shape in his mind. ‘Yes, I have some ointments to collect from Arbuthnott tomorrow; I will engineer myself an introduction to young Davidson and he shall be sitting across from you at my table by seven tomorrow night. You’ll be well rid of your charges by then?’

‘Well rid.’ In the summer months it pleased the burgh council and almost everyone else in Banff that my scholars and I should be in attendance upon one another at the grammar school from seven in the morning until six in the evening. When the winter nights began to draw in, some human pity and common sense impressed itself on our good magistrates, and they allowed that the children might arrive at eight and go home at five. Even so, I knew that in the coldest months of the year, many of my pupils had to stumble a good half of their journey home in the dark without a coat to their back or proper shoes to their feet. If it were not for Jaffray and the few like him there would be many more. My doctor friend practised what others preached. His wealth, he said, was held in stewardship only, and in life he returned to God that which was God’s. He had told me once that as the Lord had taken back into His own care all the children He had granted him, then he would care for those He had left behind. Many an orphan and a poor man’s child in Banff owed their education to the intensely personal piety of James Jaffray. One of them had been Charles Thom.

‘Will Charles be joining us?’

Jaffray regarded me with dismay. ‘Alexander, I’ll swear I never saw a more intelligent man with less good sense than yourself. What in the world is the good of me removing Patrick Davidson from Arbuthnott’s table tomorrow night if not to give Charles a clear field? I shall stop at the song school on my way from the apothecary’s and tell our friend the good news, so he might make his preparations. I may even give him a few words of advice myself.’

‘I should start then by advising him to dispose of that scowl he sported tonight.’

Jaffray nodded vigorously. ‘Indeed. On more than one occasion I was constrained to glance at Cardno by way of relief.’

Before our laughter had died down, or the session clerk had mastered his evident fury, the door to the inn burst open and Jaffray’s stable boy, utterly drenched, stumbled through it. The look of urgency on his face cut our laughter dead. ‘Doctor, you must come. Lady Deskford is in child-bed at Findlater. His lordship urges you to make haste.’

Jaffray drained the last of his glass as he swung his cloak around him. ‘For the love of God, on a night like this.’

I put out a hand to stop him. ‘James, this is madness; you will never make it to Findlater tonight.’ Findlater Castle stood impregnable, cut fifty feet into an eighty-foot rock, nine miles to the east of Banff, glowering out over the Firth towards Sutherland, Caithness and beyond. So impregnable was it in fact as to be virtually uninhabitable. His lordship had built for his family a fine new house at Cullen, but his mother refused to shift, and insisted on keeping her daughter-in-law with her.

The doctor brushed my hand away as his servant handed him his still-wet hat. ‘If I do not make it, Alexander, neither will she. That last bairn damn near killed her. It’s time Deskford took himself a mistress and let that girl alone.’ And with that he strode out, with never a backward glance to the company, on whom an astonished silence had fallen, save for the unmistakable sound of James Cardno almost choking on his watery ale.

I stayed in the inn another half-hour or so, no one bothering me. With little remaining to take his interest, Cardno had left not long after the second of my companions, and I was left to my thoughts undisturbed. What I paid out on drink in the Market Inn would have been better spent on coals for the unlit fire in my own hearth. Mistress Youngson had given up telling me so – I was a cause lost. Nine months ago I would not have thought of spending my evenings drinking here. It might pass – just – for James Jaffray or Charles Thom, but it would not pass for the minister of the Kirk of Scotland that I had then aspired to be. And yet, I was as well drinking here as I would be sitting by my own hearth, for I had no calling now. And how was such a life to be lived? I ordered another glass of the Rhenish and swallowed it down quickly. If the storm still raged I would scarcely feel it.

Once out of the inn I was grateful as ever that the journey to my lodgings was a short one. Despite the hour and the undiminished severity of the elements there were other creatures abroad on High Shore as I made my way home. Even on such a night as this, the girls of the street sought to earn their living. The council and the session claimed not to tolerate ‘whore-mongering’ within their bounds, but Mary Dawson and her sister Janet had too much knowledge of too many of them to fall subject to any but the mildest correction. Discretion was their part of the bargain silently struck with the guardians of our burgh’s stability and morals. They called to me from the shelter of the kirkyard.

‘Mr Seaton, would you not like something to warm you on this awful night? That must be a cold bed you keep in the schoolhouse.’

The righteous apoplexy of Mistress Youngson should she ever find one of the town’s whores, or indeed any woman, in my bed, made the prospect seem almost worthwhile. Almost. ‘As ever, ladies, I can’t decide between you, and I wouldn’t slight either of you for all the world.’

Janet’s siren voice replied, ‘Nobody’s asking you to choose, Mr Seaton,’ followed by a good-natured cackle from the sisters.

It was an offer they’d made more than once before, and one I had never yet been tempted to accept. ‘You would only break me,’ I returned, throwing them the last shilling from my pouch.

‘You’re the only decent man in Banff, Mr Seaton …’ and the rest of their words were lost in the wind as I pressed on, the wine and warmth from the inn piloting me home.

As I neared the schoolhouse I noticed a fellow traveller on the other side of the road, at the foot of Water Path. He raised a hand as if to hail me, but his equilibrium failed him and he stumbled to his knees. He called something to me as he tried to right himself, but I did not wait to hear. The Good Samaritan pounded on my conscience, but I had seen myself home in worse condition than his more than once, and on worse nights than this. Winning to my own bed was a more pressing concern than helping a stranger to his. The good sisters would rob him, of course, if he had not spent all his money on drink that night, but they would see him to shelter before they did so. Turning into the pend at the side of the schoolhouse, I locked the gate behind me and left the fellow to his fate.

As ever at this hour, the schoolhouse was all in darkness. My eyes were practised in seeing through the night gloom. I checked on my schoolroom as I passed. The worn and barren benches echoed to me the incantations of the ghosts of schoolboys past, myself included. Amo, amas, amat … amo; amo; amo. All was empty and still. The stove was cold, but I knew John Durno would remember his duty as usher and have it lit before I descended again in a few hours to resume my labours.

Thirty-seven steps in darkness to the top of the house and my small and sparsely furnished room. I found my bed without the aid of lamp or candle as I had done many times since that night last summer when I had finally returned, after much wandering, from the meeting of the brethren in Fordyce. Not a minister then, or ever, but condemned always to my schoolmaster’s robe. Mistress Youngson’s celebratory dinner had lain cold and uneaten on the table two floors below. The rats had it in the end. No need now to toil late at my desk on my Greek, my Hebrew, my Syriac. The midnight oil no longer required to be burnt, so my lamp remained dark. Yet still, as I had done each night since then, I prayed, trying to reach God, trying to reach to that place where faith is. But, as it had been each night, that place was empty. And still I did not know where else to go. The withdrawal of God left me no means to justify my place in this world but to start again. And that beginning was always tomorrow.

My usual sleep was sound and featureless, and I seldom had any awareness of night passing into morning. This night, though, the intermittent banging of the shutters in the storm permeated my consciousness and I pulled the bedclothes ever tighter round me. As the first stray shafts of daylight made their way through my attic window, the banging grew more insistent and I gradually became aware of my own name being called with rising urgency. It was my landlady.

‘Mr Seaton, Mr Seaton, for the love of God, wake up. Patrick Davidson lies dead in your schoolroom. Mr Seaton …’