The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

THREE The Tolbooth

Jaffray said nothing for a few moments. He dropped heavily into his chair and clenched his eyes tight shut. He was a man beyond exhaustion. The boy who had knelt down to remove his boots waited awkwardly and looked at me for guidance. I motioned towards the door and he got up and walked silently from the room.

‘I cannot believe it, Alexander. Their folly, my God, their folly.’ I crouched before him and started to remove the boots myself. The old familiar face was etched with lines of despair he usually masked in the face of the worst of human suffering. Whether from the great fatigue of his night and morning’s journeying, or his love for the young man who now lay bound in irons in the tolbooth, he could mask it no longer. I persuaded him to have some of the wine the girl had brought in, but he would eat nothing. He had had little sleep or sustenance since leaving the inn last night, and only the blank refusal of the town serjeants to allow him access to Charles in the tolbooth had forced him home now.

‘And you also think it was poison, then?’

‘I am near certain of it. I shall know more by tomorrow. My examination should reveal something of the nature of the compound or the manner of its administration. I would with all my heart that I were more knowledgeable in these matters, Alexander, but my skill is with the living, not the dead.’ He swallowed some wine and a determination came upon his face. ‘I must rise to it, though, and Arbuthnott will assist me, for there is no one else. There is no one else who can do this work for the boy.’ I did not know if it was Charles Thom or Patrick Davidson he spoke of. It scarcely mattered which. No one in Banff had a greater knowledge of medicines than did James Jaffray, nor of simples and compounds than Edward Arbuthnott – no one, apart perhaps from Patrick Davidson himself, and what he knew he now must rely on these two men to tell.

Jaffray’s initial examination of the body had been necessarily cursory. The watch at the West Port had been alerted to stop him and sent him directly to the provost’s house on his return to the burgh from Findlater. He knew the whole story – or as much as anyone did – by the time he alighted from his exhausted horse at the Castlegate. Charles, in a state of utter distraction, had already been marched down to the tolbooth by the baillie and the two town serjeants. The corpse remained in the great hall of the provost’s house. The discolouration of the mouth and tongue and of the fingers had been enough to tell Jaffray the young man had been poisoned. At length, the provost and the minister had reluctantly agreed that the corpse of Patrick Davidson should be removed from its present resting place and taken to the doctor’s home, where he, with the assistance of the town’s apothecary and one of the burgh barbers, should perform the necessary autopsy. Even as we spoke, I could hear the servant boy preparing the instruments the doctor would need for the operation. The barber would bring his own. In a little over two hours, these three men would commence their gruesome task.

Jaffray stood up in some agitation. ‘Damn them, Alexander. Damn them! What in all of creation has made them think Charles could have done this thing? What are the fools thinking? They have an innocent man in the wardhouse while a murderer laughs in the shadows. If only I had been here.’

‘You could have done nothing, here or no. I tried my best but it availed me nothing. It availed him nothing.’

‘Aye, but you …’ Jaffray stopped himself and a silence hung in the room; he was sorry for what he had been about to say. He need not have been sorry, for I knew it to be the truth. I was not a man whose word could save another. The pledge of one such as I was worthless. Jaffray had standing and respect. Jaffray was trusted and well-liked. If any man could choose one between us to vouch for him, no man would choose me. Yet not even James Jaffray could have prevented Charles Thom being warded in the tolbooth of Banff. And in the tolbooth Charles would stay, to await the decision of the magistrates’ court and then the assizes, on a charge of having murdered Patrick Davidson.

‘Not even you could have helped him, James. They had him condemned before he ever opened his mouth. In truth, the case against him is strong and he says nothing in his own defence. It was only last night that you and I joked with him over it. Cardno, as you know, noted our every word. The whole town knows Charles is besotted with the girl, but that she was casting her eye elsewhere.’

Jaffray knew too well the way of burgh gossip to discount this argument. ‘They are in the wrong, I am sure of it. He cannot suffer this injustice. We must see to it that he is brought to liberty.’

I had expected no less, but Jaffray’s belief would have to be tempered by an appreciation of just how bad things were. ‘Much stands against him, James. He does himself no favours. When the news was brought to Arbuthnott’s this morning, Charles was found not at the apothecary’s, or the song school, but in the kirk. Praying.’

I could see that this revelation shook Jaffray as it had startled me. The formality of Charles Thom’s religious observance had once been a great matter of debate between him and myself. I knew that to him the incantations he was paid to perform in the kirk were but empty ramblings, and that he had little real faith. Then it had been a matter of concern to me. Now though, we no longer spoke of such things. For now I knew too well how a man might exist in that state, although the notion of happiness was not relevant. It was to Charles’s credit that he had never once gloated over my new understanding. I knew he pitied in me the loss of what he had never had. That Charles Thom should have been found praying desperately in the kirk the morning after Patrick Davidson’s murder was a greater cause for concern to me than anything else that had happened in the last twelve hours. Jaffray was the only other man in Banff who would understand this.

‘Then he is in desperation.’

‘Yes, James. I fear he is.’

He sat down again and passed these things over in his mind. At length he looked up. ‘And he offers no defence? No explanation?’

I shook my head. ‘None. All he would tell the baillie was that he had gone directly to Arbuthnott’s after leaving the inn last night. The apothecary looked somewhat surprised at this, and I have to say that I do not altogether believe it myself. He claimed to have risen early this morning to attend to matters in his school, but again that is something of which I have doubts – as did the others who heard it.’

‘And the praying?’

‘They do not know him as we do, James. Not the minister, nor yet the baillie, the provost nor the session clerk. Not one of them asked him about the praying.’

‘And to you, Alexander? He would say nothing to you?’

I shook my head. ‘There was no opportunity for private speech between us. He was at the provost’s but a very short time before he was ordered to be warded in the tolbooth.’ I dropped my voice. ‘They would not let me go with him.’ But I had gone with him. In my mind, in my soul, I had gone with him. For as they had dragged him out through the great oaken doors of the provost’s house he had called to me just as the dying man last night had called to me. He had called to me over his shoulder as they dragged him away, desperation in his eyes, ‘Help me, Alexander. For the love of God, help me!’ This time, I would not walk by on the other side.

‘And you will help him, Alexander. And I with you. For I promised his mother on her death-bed that I would watch over that boy, and my promise is not over yet.’ I had never guessed it, never wondered at it before. James Jaffray had watched over and provided for the orphaned Charles Thom through his boyhood and into early manhood simply because a dying mother had asked him to. Of all the souls I had encountered in my twenty-six years upon this earth, there were few who could compare with Dr James Jaffray.

When the servant girl came in with more coals for the fire, Jaffray instructed her to prepare a basket of food – bread, cheese, some of whatever broth was to be had from the kitchen – with some ale to be ready for me to take with me when I left. I was to take it to Charles in the tolbooth and to insist on being allowed to see him. From a cabinet in his workroom, the doctor also brought a syrup of balm. ‘Tell him to take it; it will cheer his heart and chase away his melancholy.’ I assured the doctor that I would not leave until Charles had swallowed some of the medicine. A thick rug, too, was thrust into my arms as I prepared to leave.

‘You are a good girl, Ishbel,’ said Jaffray. ‘I had not thought of the cold.’

The girl replied quietly, ‘He is always complaining of the cold, doctor.’

I took it from her. ‘He shall know that it comes from you, Ishbel.’ She might have said something more, but I was not sure, for she had turned away to leave the room.

‘You will tell him, Alexander, that we will move heaven and earth, you and I, to have him out of that place.’

Thus laden with provisions and instructions, I made to leave the doctor’s house, but almost at the door I remembered something that had lain half-forgotten in my mind all day.

‘Doctor,’ I said, ‘how went your mission to Findlater? You were not too late?’

‘Only by two days.’

‘Two days? I do not understand.’

‘No more do I, my boy, no more do I. But I tell you this, the Devil was in it, for her ladyship was not. No more was the old lady or any other of the family. The gate-keeper told me they had all shifted to Cullen two days since, his lordship having at last got the better of his mother. I did not proceed to Cullen, for I know they consult Reid when they are there – age prevents him going out to Findlater. It suited someone’s purpose that I should not be in Banff last night.’

‘Who brought the message?’ I asked.

Jaffray sighed. ‘I do not know. All the long way back from Findlater I seethed and raged and vowed I would get to the bottom of it.’ He went to the door leading into the kitchen hallway and called for the stable boy. He looked frightened when questioned, fearing he would be blamed for the doctor’s wild goose chase. ‘Who brought the message from Findlater last night, boy? Was it someone you knew to be from the castle?’

The boy stuttered. ‘I do not know, sir. I have never been that far out of the burgh. I don’t know the folk at the castle.’

‘But it was not anyone from the town? Think now.’

The boy was almost on the verge of tears. His words came out in a rush. ‘I’m sorry, sir; all I could see was someone in the darkness, with a cloak all blowing around them, and a hood nearly down over their face against the storm. They shouted across the yard that you were needed at Findlater. You were to lose no time, for her ladyship was in child-bed and had need of you. That was all; I don’t know who it was.’ He looked at me, pleading. ‘But they did say Findlater, sir, I know that, for I asked them twice, it being such a night.’

‘You did the right thing, Adam. But did you know the voice? Was it a man or a woman?’

Again the boy looked hopeless. ‘I do not know. A boy I think, but no one I know.’

I handed the boy a coin. ‘Go and see to the horse now. You have done no wrong.’ It was with great relief that he returned to the courtyard.

‘Who can it have been, James?’ I asked.

He shrugged, at a loss. ‘I do not know. A servant? A vagrant paid to perform the task and forget that they had done so? It little matters. The effect has been the same: someone saw to it that I was not here, and the boy is dead.’ He was not to be comforted, but his response would not be to indulge himself. ‘We must seek out this messenger and find out who sent him.’

A watch was being kept night and day at every entrance to the burgh, for fear of the plague that had been rumoured to be in the south. Anyone entering the burgh would have to state their identity, their place of origin and their business. I myself had taken my turn on the watch at the Sandyhills gate the night before last. I promised Jaffray that I would enquire at every port to the town whether there had been a messenger coming in with business for him last night.

I did not go directly to the tolbooth, for the baillie had warned me that no one would be permitted to see Charles until after the council had met, and that would be an hour or more yet. It was now a clear, brisk spring day. The sea rolled determinedly into the shore, but with no sense of the previous night’s vehemence. Everything looked clean and new, a contrast to the formless canker at work in the heart of the town itself. I was filled with a desire to get away from it for a time, to be on my own.

I left my burden at the schoolhouse and set out along the coast, towards the west. I pulled my hat down low and ignored the greetings and enquiries of the burgesses and of my fellow townsfolk as I strode along Low Shore, beneath the Rose Craig and past the new harbour works at Guthrie’s Haven. I would have stopped a while to watch the cormorants and sand pipers at Meavie Point, holding out to the last moment to their jagged perch until it was claimed at last by the irresistible sea, but I was not yet far enough from the town, and so pressed on. I passed by the fishermen’s huts at the Seatoun. They would not bother me; in fact, they took pains to avoid me. With them at least I knew it was no particular aversion to my person, but to my position, or at least that which I had aspired to. It was as bad luck, they said, for them to meet a minister as it was for them to cross the path of a woman on the way to their boats. The unforgiving sea had claimed too many of their number for their caution to be questioned. I had not become a minister. I had failed at the last hurdle – almost indeed at the last moment – but I had come close enough that the fishermen would avoid my person and avoid my eye on any day when they planned to put out their boats.

As I passed by their row of miserable huts, I cast my gaze upwards, towards the great rocky promontory known from ancient times as the Elf Kirk. It was a place held deeply suspect by the kirk session, and mothers warned their children against going there. Some, no doubt, respected the feeling of the session; others had greater fear of the deep gully and jagged rocks jutting from the swirling waters below. Whatever their reasons, few of the townsfolk would be seen there. It could be a place of great beauty too, as spring gave way to early summer and the rocks were clothed in cascading green velvet with pockets of yellow primroses and soft sea pinks clinging to its folds. There were no flowers today though; it was something of flowing white, fluttering slightly in the breeze that caught my eye. The folds of a woman’s cloak. Her head was uncovered and her long red hair, usually marshalled in a thick plait, hung loose down her back. Even at this distance I recognised Marion Arbuthnott. I would have called out to her, but she would not have heard me. I stood watching and in time she looked away from the ravine and out towards the sea. I lifted my arm and she saw me, but did not return my greeting. She looked at me for a long moment and then, pulling the hood of her white cloak up about her, she turned back towards the town. She had the air of a creature further from the living than the dead: I had within me a foreboding that she had had it in mind to harm herself, and I was thankful that Providence had allowed me to prevent that at least.

I pressed on, past the Seatoun and along the links to the shore of Boyndie Bay. I had often taken my scholars here, but the place was deserted today. I sat down on a large flat rock beneath a dune and looked out towards the horizon, remembering. I remembered my own schooldays, and the joy when the master had announced at the end of the morning lesson, if we had repeated our lesson to his satisfaction, that we would go to Boyndie Bay. I had not walked then, but run, run the whole way to the beach. We all ran, laughing and shouting, like the wind. And always, at the head of us all, was Archie. Archibald Hay, Master of Delgatie and heir to the castle and lands thereof. Archie, companion of my boyhood, the friend of my life. Closer than a brother and loved beyond measure. I would have given every grain of sand on the shore, every day of life that lay before me, to have Archie sitting beside me now.

The escapades of the Master of Hay were a legend in the North long before his schooldays were over. Our schoolfellows were too far in awe of him to demur at any scheme he might have, but I knew Archie from the depths of his heart, and I – I alone – could talk him out of his wild schemes. His parents knew this, and often enough before me, child that I was, thanked God for our friendship, for Archie was all their hope, the light of their life, and even their Katharine walked in his shadow.

Katharine, Archie’s younger sister, the quiet, watchful little girl, who had grown into a quiet, watchful young woman. She had taken the time to try to understand the world, whereas her brother had simply launched himself upon it. So delicate she was, and slender and pale, like the willow; I do not know when I first realised that I loved her. Sometime, it must have been, between leaving my boyhood games behind me and entering upon the world of men.

Over the years, when Archie and I had studied at the King’s College in Old Aberdeen, his parents had come often to their house in the Castlegate of the New Town, and they always took Katharine with them. At first, in the nature of boys, I paid her little heed, but as time got on and Archie quested after ever-wilder escapades, I began to notice her. There came a time when I began to speak to her of things other than all the commonplaces of our shared childhood, of her brother, of Banff, of Delgatie, of the characters who peopled her sphere and mine. We began to talk of the state of the kingdom, of the confusions in religion, of the world and its beauties and its perils. Her knowledge of languages, philosophy, poetry and history far outstripped her brother’s, and it was not long before I would call at the Hays’ town house whether Archie were with me or no. Her parents were indulgent, amused even. They gave little thought to Katharine, save to love her. Archie was all their hopes, and Katharine’s life was her own. To learn that Katharine felt for me as I did for her had been the most wondrous moment I had known.

But I had no Katharine now, and there was no Archie beside me, nor ever would be. There would be no storming of the tolbooth, no mockery of the outrage of the dignitaries of burgh and Kirk. I must look to my own reserves to help Charles and hope that I would not be found wanting. I rose from my makeshift seat and began to make back towards the burgh, as the clouds rolled in from the west.

At the schoolhouse I collected the provisions from the back pantry where I had left them. I was not greatly surprised to find the broth warmed and the basket a good deal heavier now. I looked at Mistress Youngson, searching for some new tone of address, because words of kindness were so out of use between us, but they would not come. ‘His mother was a good Christian woman,’ she said. ‘And I was always fond of the boy.’

I did not slow my pace to speak to anyone as I passed by the marketplace and the old place of the Carmelites until I came to the tolbooth at the foot of Strait Path. The guard at the bottom doorway let me pass without comment or enquiry – it would be little mystery to any in the town what business I had there today. I seldom set foot in here unless it was to pay some new tax the crown or burgh had discovered a need for. This not being a day of taxation, the place was near silent, immovable. Another guard, having asked my business, opened for me the small doorway off to the right, giving onto the wardhouse and the stairway that would take me up to the jail itself. I had been through that door only once before in my life, when the burgh council had seen fit to instruct Gilbert Grant to take his charges on a visit of the tolbooth, that the sight of the fate of wrongdoers might discourage them from any such path in future. We boys from the town were used to all manner of smells, of damp, food, coal, peat, beasts and bodily wastes. We were used to the stink of the tanner’s yard and the soap-maker, of cheap tallow candles and sometimes wax, of yeast and malt brewing, of fish gut, seal blubber and seaweed. But the tolbooth was different: few of my schoolfellows could have known such a stench as greeted us on ascending the stairs to the burgh prison. All the bodily odours we had ever encountered were compressed and magnified within those thick, stone, near-windowless walls. The damp and the cold and the vermin vied for precedence in a stinking cavern of God-forsaken despair. I, and many others, had had nightmares for weeks after about what we had seen there, and I had vowed that I would never again set foot in such a place.

I ascended the narrow and twisting stone stairs warily, for the light was very poor. Two-thirds of the way up, I heard footsteps begin to descend towards me. I stood still a moment and soon, emerging from the near-darkness, was the form of Baillie Buchan. ‘Mr Seaton. I had thought to see you here sooner.’ If the ambiguity of his words pleased him, he gave no sign of it.

‘And I would have been here sooner, had the door not been barred to me. On your instructions.’

‘The prohibition applied to more than yourself, but you would do well to think further on it. These are not fit matters for you to meddle in.’

‘It is not meddling to give succour to a friend, or to wish to see justice done.’

‘I pray God that you might, Mr Seaton, and that soon. The magistrates have committed the music schoolmaster to an assize before the sheriff, to stand trial for the murder of Mr Patrick Davidson.’

Already. My throat went dry. My words can scarcely have been audible. ‘In the name of God, man.’

‘We all do our work in the name of God.’

I shook my head slowly. ‘This is no work of God you do here. On what grounds do you charge him?’

Buchan eyed me clearly. ‘I do not charge him, Mr Seaton. It is the whole body of magistrates sitting in council that charges him. He is, by common repute – and you will not deny this for you and Jaffray spoke of it only last night – he is by common repute infatuated with the girl Arbuthnott. She, as all the town knows, has wandered like a wanton through half the country after her father’s apprentice. Charles Thom gives no account of his movements last night after he left the inn, none at least that have an ounce of truth in them. His bed was never slept in at the apothecary’s – Edward Arbuthnott’s wife will vouch for that – and do not think I did not mark the question of his praying. Do you think me a hypocrite, that I cannot tell when one is void of faith? Your friend is lost, Mr Seaton, whatever the assize might say of him. Mind that you are not!’ With this he continued down past me, his last words repeating in my head.

The guard on the door at the top of the stair searched my basket. ‘There are no weapons there.’ He disregarded my words and continued with his search until it was complete. His hand closed on the small package of dried fruit Mistress Youngson had slipped into the basket. ‘Leave it, or the baillie shall hear of it and you’ll be in here yourself soon enough,’ I warned him. He returned the package grudgingly and stood aside for me to stoop through the narrow doorway to the cells.

The place – I will not call it a room – was but very dimly lit, only some glimmer of yellow light coming through the iron grille in the door. As my eyes became more accustomed to the near darkness, I discerned the figure of my friend Charles Thom, sitting with his back against the wall and his head resting over crossed arms on his knees. An iron gad ran the length of the centre of the room, and to this he was bound. He looked up as I stepped closer to him and forgetting his shackles tried to stand up to grasp my arm. The chain by which he was tethered brought him sharply back to the floor, but still he smiled. ‘Alexander, you are here.’

‘I would have been here sooner if they had allowed it. And Jaffray – it was with no little difficulty that they kept our good friend the doctor from storming their walls. He will be with you tomorrow morning at the latest, if his examination of the body keeps him too late.’ I had not wished to talk so soon of the death of Patrick Davidson, but perhaps this was not the place for pleasantries in any case.

‘They tell me he was poisoned.’ Charles’s voice had dropped to a low murmur and he did not look at me.

I cleared some straw out of the way and sat down beside him on the rotting wooden floor. ‘Jaffray will know more by the morning of the nature of the substance itself, and the manner of its administration. Arbuthnott will assist him. We must pray God they will meet with success.’

He smiled sadly. ‘It is a long time since you exhorted me to prayer, my friend, but I prayed today.’

‘I had heard you were found in the kirk. What brought you there, Charles?’

He shook his head and his shoulders dropped a little lower. He began to speak slowly, unsure of himself. ‘I think I wanted forgiveness.’ I waited, and at length he continued. ‘I did not wish Patrick Davidson well, Alexander. I wished him no harm, but I did not wish him well. I wished him little success in all his endeavours here, and I wished him away from Banff.’

‘Because of Marion?’

‘What else? Only Marion. In fact, there was no other reason why I should have disliked him. He brought to the apothecary’s table and hearth a liveliness, an interest which had been absent before. He brought with him whole new vistas for conversation. He could converse on herbs and simples and compounds as well as Arbuthnott – and I suspect it was only diplomacy on his part that prevented him showing how much more he knew than his master. But he spoke on many things – places and people he had come to know on the continent, our own universities and their varying merits. And he knew something of music, too. He was no expert, but he had a good ear and was more knowledgeable than most of our fellow burgesses. What I would have given to have been where he had been and heard what he had heard.’

‘What do you mean, Charles?’

‘I mean the music, the masses in the great cathedrals of France and the Low Countries which have not been reduced to hollow chanting boxes as our churches here have been.’

‘You mean the music of the papists.’ Only Charles could have spoken even here so freely and with such contempt of our Church. I feared for him.

‘If you like,’ he said, ‘the music of the papists. But Alexander, you have no idea what we have lost.’

‘The great human vanities of their ceremonies? Formality and splendours that took no notice of the common man? This is no loss, I think.’

He smiled at me. ‘Oh, but you are wrong, Alexander. While our poor psalms are for the edification of man, these masses aspire to the ear of God himself. I have seen them in my mind, rising from the pages of those few fragments of choirbooks that escaped the torches of our iconoclasts, but what I would have given to have heard them sung, seen them in their proper places, as Patrick Davidson had done.’ I began then to understand that my friend’s formality in his kirk duties was not from a lack of faith, as I had always believed, but from a different understanding of it, and while I thought him still to be wrong, I loved him the more for it.

‘Was Patrick Davidson a papist, Charles?’ I asked.

He looked surprised. ‘I do not know. We never spoke of it in that way. He spoke to me – when we were in our chamber – of the music and the beauty of the churches. And I played for him. In all, I had begun to think him a friend. And like yourself it is not an accolade I bestow lightly or often.’ He took a heavy breath and continued. ‘But then, of course, when I realised that Marion was lost to me I spurned every further attempt at friendship, and I gave up all hope of Marion. I doubt if she even noticed, but he … he did. And for that I am sorry, Alexander. For that I was praying this morning.’

I knew now that he was telling me the truth. I wished I could have done something to give him comfort, but the words would not come.

‘And did you tell this to the baillie?’

‘What? William Buchan? Our blameless baillie cares nothing for feelings and regrets. Sin, crime, punishment and the wrath of the Lord upon such as me are what the baillie busies himself about. No, I told him nothing of this. James Cardno’s report of my conversation and conduct in the inn last night told him all he required to know of my feelings. What the baillie would know of me is where I was last night and in the early hours of this morning.’ He looked at me and waited. I waited a moment too, reluctant to take the role of inquisitor.

‘And where were you, Charles?’

He sighed deeply, then looked me straight in the eye. ‘I was with Marion Arbuthnott.’

‘I do not understand.’

He lowered his voice even further, so that it was scarcely audible. ‘You must tell no one, Alexander, no one.’

‘But …’

‘Give me your word, or we will speak nothing further of this.’

With the greatest reluctance, I gave him my word. I wish to God I had not: another murder might have been prevented.

Reassured by my promise, he continued. ‘When I left the inn, I did as I had intended to do – I made directly for Arbuthnott’s house. I had no wish to be out in that storm a moment longer than it would take me to get from the inn to the apothecary’s. I had gone round to the back yard and just had my foot on the bottom step of the outer stair when the door at the top of it opened above me. I assumed it must be Davidson – for neither Arbuthnott nor his wife venture out at night, and for Marion it would have caused scandal. But Marion it was. She was startled, but when she saw it was me she came down the steps and bade me tell no one I had seen her. Well, I could think of nothing that would have brought her out in such an evil storm but an assignation with Patrick Davidson, and indeed, fired by the ale I had drunk in the inn, I accused her of as much.’

‘Which she denied?’

He looked at me wearily. ‘No, Alexander, she did not deny it. That is to say, there was no assignation, but she was going out to search for him. She would not tell me why, or where he had gone, but only that she feared for him and would not rest until he returned home. She would not listen to my protests about the storm and the darkness, and the scandal if she were seen wandering out on such a night. When I insisted that I would not let her go alone, she begged me to go into the house and not to go with her.’

‘She wished to be alone when she found him?’

‘No, she insisted it was not so. She would not let me go with her because, she said, to do so would place me in some terrible danger – not from the storm, but from some genuine evil of which she was truly afraid.’

‘And what did you do?’

‘I went up the stair and into the house as she had bid me. I waited a few moments – not long, but long enough – and then I went out after her; I am not the great coward most would have me.’

‘I know you are not,’ I said. ‘Where did she go?’

‘She went first of all towards the kirkyard, but I think she must have caught sight of Janet and Mary Dawson, for she turned sharply away all of a sudden and made in the direction of the Rose Craig. She climbed the steep path up to the back of the castle grounds, and here I lost her for a few minutes. It was so dark, and yet I feared discovery, for she would have easily seen me if she had looked back. When I thought it safe to ascend the path myself, I did so. I could not see her, and I had left it too long to even hazard a reasonable guess as to which direction she might have gone. A gate in the castle wall was banging. At first I thought nothing of it, thinking it was only the wind. But then I noticed a little rag of plaiding snagged on a splinter in the wood. I went through the gate and still I could not see her, and I resolved to spend some time searching the grounds.

‘I must have been there half an hour or more, searching behind every wall, under every tree. Eventually I knew it was fruitless to search any further – if she had been in the castle grounds, she was not there now. There was no way I was going to venture down the path from the Rose Craig again – how either of us had made it up there in that wind and rain I do not know. I was heading for the gate in the wall that leads to the Water Path when it swung open and there stepping through it towards me was Marion. She was soaked to the very skin, and her hair blown all about her, and I could get no sense from her at all. She called out his name when she first realised there was someone on the path, and when I could make her understand that it was not Patrick Davidson but I myself who stood there, she all but collapsed. All she could say was, ‘I cannot find him, he will not be found.’ I think I must have half-carried her down the Water Path to High Shore. Thank God we were not seen – well, by any other than the Dawson sisters, that is. I managed eventually to get Marion back to her father’s house. Her mother takes a sleeping draught at night, and as we made little commotion I do not think her father was disturbed by us.’

‘At what hour did you reach the apothecary’s?’

He considered a moment. ‘It was something after ten, I think. Not long after.’

My heart sank within me. They had missed him by a few minutes, if that. Five minutes or less earlier down the Water Path and they would have met Patrick Davidson himself, and they would not have abandoned him to the gutter and his fate as I did. I thought I could guess the rest. ‘And you went back out searching for him early this morning, when you found he had not returned?’

He shook his head. ‘No, I went back out last night. Marion was in such a state it was the only thing that would stop her going out herself.’

He related to me then how he had walked the burgh boundaries, avoiding the entry ports on a plea by Marion. She had been almost as concerned that no one should know Charles Thom was searching for Patrick Davidson as she had been that Davidson should be found. He had been down every street, every vennel, every wynd in his search for the apothecary’s apprentice. He had searched relentlessly through the night until, feverish and exhausted, stumbling homewards in the early hours of the next morning, he had heard that Patrick Davidson was lying dead in my schoolroom. And all the while I had slumbered.

A question had been forming in my mind. ‘Charles, why do you think Marion was so fearful that anyone should know you were looking for Patrick Davidson?’

He reflected a moment. ‘I think she believed that whatever danger attended Patrick Davidson would also threaten whoever might know he was in danger. She had a foreknowledge that he was in danger last night, and very likely from whom and why, though she would not tell me. I truly believe that her foreknowledge of what happened last night puts her in danger of her life, Alexander. If anyone should learn of it, I am determined that they shall not make the connection to her through me.’

I could see the sense in what he said, and that there was little point in trying to dissuade him from his resolve. ‘What have you told the baillie, then?’

He gave a low laugh. ‘Nothing that he believes. I have told him that I returned to my bed at the apothecary’s, but having consumed so much ale in the inn was forced to get up again and go out into the air two hours or so later, as I was in fear of vomiting. I said I walked down to the Greenbanks and towards the sandbar at the river mouth to let the storm blast away my nausea and in the hope that it might render me sober. Once there, I began to realise my folly in setting out in such a tempest and sought shelter in the ferrymen’s hut, the ferrymen being stranded at the other side of the river with their boats. There, I fell asleep, and did not wake until the first essays of daylight.’ He smiled. ‘I always feel it is a good thing to give Baillie Buchan and James Cardno and their like a little of what they want. So firm is their belief in the debauchery of others that they are scarce likely to question it when presented with an admission. Certainly, Cardno nodded delightedly when I proffered that explanation.’

‘But not the baillie.’

He let out a sigh. ‘No, not the baillie. William Buchan, I think, has more knowledge of his fellow man than many might think, and he is no fool. His questions come back time and again to Marion. He suspects she was in some way involved last night. He intends to question her as soon as he has the results of the examination from Jaffray. I fear it will not go well for her if she is left alone with him.’

I thought of the lost girl I had seen this morning, staring into the depths from the Elf Kirk, and I promised him I would do what I could, but in truth I had no idea where to begin. I was not indifferent to Marion Arbuthnott’s fate, but I did not feel certain that she was as innocent in this whole sad story as Charles Thom believed her to be. She was a person of secrets, and now he found himself entrapped by one of them. It was for him that my anxiety increased. I made one last assault on his resolve. ‘But what of yourself? You must do something to help yourself.’

‘There is nothing I can do, Alexander.’ He took my hand. ‘I must rely on my friends, and on the mercy of God.’

How the wheel had turned with us – I who had been abandoned by faith at the first real testing, and he who had had no faith until the troubles of others’ lives had crashed in on him. At length I stood up, exasperated at his obstinacy and my own inadequacy. ‘But you cannot stay in this place,’ I said. ‘It is scarcely fit for beasts. Jaffray and I will do everything in our power to have you out of this place. And more,’ I paused and breathed deep, aware that the promise I was about to give would involve me in things I had no knowledge of: ‘I will do all I can to discover who did kill Patrick Davidson, for I know you did not.’

He closed his eyes tight and opened them again, pushing his head back against the wall. ‘No, I did not kill him. I thought Marion was all the world to me, but she made her choice. In life or death I know that he was her choice. To kill him would have availed me nothing. And anyway,’ he looked up with a rare twinkle in his eye, ‘if I were the murdering kind, there are a good few in Banff whose names would be on my list before that of Patrick Davidson.’

As I descended the steps of the tolbooth I could hear the clear and plaintive strains of some highland air. I had never tried to master the Gaelic tongue as Charles had done, but the words that penetrated to my very core spoke of loss, some irredeemable loss, whose pain it was beyond the power of our Scots tongue to render.

Once out again into the damp light of the afternoon I had no inclination to return to the schoolhouse. I decided instead to seek out the truth behind Jaffray’s call out to Findlater. The large as well as the smaller ferry boat had been tied up last night, for fear of loss in the tempestuous sea, but a stranger might have entered Banff at some landward port. I set out on a tour of all the gateways to the burgh, starting at Sandyhill and making my way via the Gallowhill and Boyndie Street to Caldhame and the Seatoun, but my enquiries availed me nothing. There had been no report of any stranger – or burgess indeed – attempting to enter the burgh from the outside last night, and only Jaffray and his manservant were known to have left it. I had not been the first to ask these questions, for the baillie had been there before me. And now he would be assured, as I was myself, that Patrick Davidson’s killer had not been a stranger to Banff, but an inhabitant of the town itself.

I returned to town the long way, by way of the Gallowhill. And there I came upon the hanging tree. I stood beneath the gibbet and determined that Charles would not swing from it. If I accomplished nothing else in my now Godless existence, I would accomplish that. I spent a moment looking down over the town and out to the sea beyond, asking myself whether the truth was to be found there, or whether it had already been washed away. Washed away like the river Deveron endlessly running out to the sea. I recalled to myself the lines of Alexander Craig, the poet, who had built his house on the Rose Craig, looking imperiously out over the town. Charles Thom, Marion Arbuthnott, perhaps even Patrick Davidson himself had played out their last tragic act together beneath his walls last night. His words took on for me a meaning that I doubt he had meant to give them.

I believe I stood a long time there, beneath the gibbet, meditating on those lines, but I have no notion of how long it might have been. I was aware of feeling colder as the haar drifted in from the sea and obscured some of the burgh from my view. Slowly, the sound of a drum brought me from my reverie. The drum that preceded the hangman. I waited, my eyes closed, and the drum came nearer. A hand reached out and touched my neck, a human hand. For a moment, a brief moment, my heart stopped beating in my breast.

‘Oh, Mr Seaton, a mercy, Mr Seaton, please God.’ Before I had opened my eyes and located the voice in my memory, a rougher hand pulled the first away. A rougher voice called out – one of the town serjeants.

‘Janet Dawson. Do not lay your filthy fingers upon any citizen of this burgh. You have been told the judgement of the magistrates – do not pretend ignorance!’

And then the other serjeant began to intone, with evident pleasure, ‘You are to be banished furth of these bounds. A lewd and licentious liver, a whore, a keeper of codroche houses. You and your sister also. You are to be scourged by the hangman from this place hence, and never to return within the freedom of this burgh, on pain of death.’ He turned to the burgh hangman, whose was the rough hand that had pulled Janet Dawson’s pleading fingers from their touch, a gentle touch, on my neck. ‘Strip her to the waist.’

I turned my face away, unable to watch as Janet Dawson, who had had her whore’s dignity, was deprived of the dignity of a woman. I heard the hangman raise his whip and the hurling whoosh as the knotted leather swept towards her bare flesh. It was the punishment, all too readily used, meted out by the burgh fathers to any woman whose honour was questioned and who could not prove herself beyond doubt. But the Dawson sisters’ whoredom was as established as it was notorious. That Janet was now being scourged from the burgh on pain of death should she ever return I could not comprehend. Again I heard the demented whoosh of the scourge. And I heard a voice call out, my own voice; it shouted ‘No!’ The whip crashed down on the woman’s side but was not raised a third time. The town’s officer looked at me. ‘I take no pleasure in it, Mr Seaton.’

‘Then dress her again, and leave her be to quit this place unmolested. You have done the magistrates’ bidding.’ I looked at Janet as, cowering, she pulled her torn bodice over herself and scrabbled in the dirt for her shawl. ‘I will testify to that.’

The officer uttered a harsh ‘Leave her,’ to the hangman, who looked disappointed of his prey. Janet rushed at me all of a sudden, grabbing my collar. The officer made to seize her but I held him away. She spoke desperately to me. ‘A word, a kind word, Mr Seaton. A coin. Any coin. To help a poor woman, a kind word, Mr Seaton.’ I fumbled in my pocket and drew out two pennies – of little use to her as they were. She grabbed them and raised her face to mine, as if she would kiss me. But she did not kiss me. She whispered in haste in my ear, just as they came to drag her off me. ‘“James and the flowers,” Mr Seaton. The last words he ever spoke.’

I stood and watched, as they recommenced the scourging and drove her from the burgh bounds at the beat of their drum.