The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

FIVE Post-mortem

The girl’s eyes were alive with questions.

‘Let me in, Ishbel, and I’ll tell you.’

Jaffray’s servant looked a little abashed as she held the door open wider for me and helped me off with my cloak. ‘The doctor’s in his study, Mr Seaton. I’ll get you your supper.’

‘But I haven’t come for my supper.’

She was unmoved. ‘The doctor said you would come when you finished your work at the tolbooth. He said you’d be wanting your supper.’ She turned and headed for the kitchen. Further protestation on my part was useless and I made my way down the long hallway towards Jaffray’s study at the back of the house. Here James Jaffray used to watch his wife in her garden, through the little study window, and here I believed he watched her still. More than once I had walked into the room to find him gazing out into the darkness, his hand on the page of an open book he could not have told me the title of. I knocked gently on the door. A slight shuffle and then the familiar hearty voice.

‘Aye, Ishbel, that’s all right, come in.’

I entered. ‘It’s not Ishbel, I’m sorry to say. Are you waiting on your supper?’

He started, then laughed heartily. ‘Well, you could make a minister yet, with yon creeping step and that knock of a girl.’ Then his face registered regret, but there had been no malice in his joke. ‘You have been much busied with this business today, Alexander. I spent the morning going through the shelves at the apothecary’s, checking he kept only the licensed poisons. When I had finished I learnt from Arbuthnott that you were at the tolbooth. For a moment I feared that Charles Thom’s fate had befallen you also. It was some time before the serjeant was able to persuade me that you were detained in the council chamber and not above in the jail.’

‘If I ever suffer that misfortune I doubt that I would show myself the stoic that Charles does.’

A light came into the doctor’s eyes. ‘They have not broken him, then. Thanks be to God. He is better than all they can do to him. But his body is not strong.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘and that is a hellish place that they have him.’

‘I know it, for I have been called there often enough to salve the sores of poor souls rotting in there.’

‘And did they permit you access to the tolbooth today?’

He snorted contemptuously. ‘The baillie has left instructions that I am not to be in commune with Charles. The confines of his narrow mind have expanded themselves to imagine that I have no other object in visiting the boy than to pass on details of what my examination has found, that Charles might be all the better placed to deny complicity.’ Then he asked in a lowered voice, ‘You have been to him, Alexander. What is he hiding? He surely has no part in this business, but he is keeping some secret, is he not?’

I hesitated. Charles had made me promise to tell no one of his night searching with Marion for Patrick Davidson, yet the bond of honour and friendship that bound us had been all but forged by James Jaffray. The secrets Charles would keep from Jaffray were those that a son would keep from his father, but Charles’s silence before Baillie Buchan was of a quite other nature – it was for fear of imperilling the life of Marion Arbuthnott. I told him what I knew. He listened carefully, and when I came to the end of my short monologue, he nodded slowly. ‘It is as I suspected. Charles will say nothing in his own defence for fear of endangering Marion.’ He stoked the fire absent-mindedly. ‘Then you and I must prove his innocence, Alexander. Have you had the opportunity of speech with Marion yet?’

I shook my head. ‘None has, as far as I can gather. The baillie has tried, I believe, but has had even less from her lips than he has from Charles’s. I do not know if she would speak any more freely to me than she does to Buchan. And it is a pity, for there are other matters that I would ask her of.’

‘What matters are these?’

I filled my glass with some of the wine Ishbel had left out for us and began to tell him of the maps. He listened with great interest and, to my surprise, no little knowledge, interrupting every now and again to seek clarification of some point or to ask about the reactions of the others engaged in the examination of the drawings and their notes. Before I had got halfway through my narrative he advised a visit to Straloch. Then he raised the question of espionage, and, like me, he suspected the hand of Spain, and of course, of Huntly.

‘And how does the provost take the news? Does he defend the boy?’

I reflected. ‘When Gilbert Grant and I first arrived at the tolbooth, the provost was shaken, very shaken. He was as a man who can scarce follow events, still less control them. I have never seen him in such a way before.’

Jaffray was remembering. ‘I have. Once,’ he said.

I waited for further explanation, but he waved his hand dismissively. ‘It is unimportant. Go on.’

‘In time, he mastered himself. His defence of his nephew became more – reasoned. Had his authority not been added to Thomas Stewart’s caution and good sense, we would be there yet.’

Jaffray smiled. ‘Listening while the minister piled up a pyre for heretics then managed to set himself atop it.’

‘I wish I had your facility with words, doctor, for that is just exactly what would have happened.’ And who then in Banff would be safe? I could have written there and then the names of twenty papists who did not flaunt their faith but did not hide it sufficiently. If Patrick Davidson was indeed shown to have been a papist spy, God alone knew what would happen in our town. Jaffray’s mind was clearly working along the same lines.

‘Did they question the provost as to his nephew’s time abroad, whether he fell in with papists there – was he in the region of Douai, or Paris even?’

‘You think he might have been to one of the Scots seminaries there?’

‘Well, when did ever you hear of a new-trained priest, returned from France to declare himself as such? They all come by clandestine roads, disguised as students, teachers, doctors, even.’

‘I do not think he was a priest. The subject was not raised in that way. No mention was made of Douai, or indeed of Paris. And yet …’

‘And yet?’ prompted the doctor.

‘When I spoke to Charles, he told me of Davidson’s love of the music, the masses, the great cathedrals he saw on his travels. I think he may well have had papist leanings.’ If this had been the case, he could have made common cause with many – prominent Gordons among them – within easy reach of Banff.

‘If Davidson was in clandestine meetings with papists, they must have taken place, as must his map-drawing, on his gathering expeditions.’

‘With Marion,’ I said.

‘Yes, we are back once more to Marion, and I would be more than astonished if the baillie had not come to the same reasoning. He will question her closely on it if he suspects she has any knowledge at all that might be useful to him. She may have held out against him so far, but I doubt she has the strength of will to do so indefinitely.’

I thought about the girl as I had seen her the day before, peering into the depths and then looking through me when I hailed her at the Elf Kirk. I was not as sure as Jaffray that even Baillie Buchan could reach to what she knew. The doctor, however, was not to be reassured.

‘It is necessary that we should know what she hides if we are to help Charles.’ He closed his eyes, the better to concentrate on the problem. ‘I will see her, tomorrow.’ He called for Ishbel and handed her a hastily scribbled note, addressed to Arbuthnott. ‘Have the boy take that to the apothecary’s. Tell him he must give it only into the hand of Arbuthnott and that he must see to it that he reads it immediately. He is to lose no time.’ Ishbel, who had been given many stranger commissions before, went immediately without question. I looked to my friend for an explanation. ‘I have told him that Buchan will come looking for his daughter tonight and that he is to give the girl a sleeping draught and see to it that she takes it. I have told him that I will come and see to her in the morning, and that no one else is to be admitted to see her until I have done so.’

‘Will he do it?’

‘He will do it. The man is in a state of near terror – a murder and now perhaps treason – all emanating from his house. If Baillie Buchan comes looking for his daughter, Arbuthnott will know it is for no good purpose to Marion or her family. He must know as well as you and I do that the girl is implicated up to her neck.’

It was, in the circumstances, a chilling assessment of Marion Arbuthnott’s situation. Her graceful neck might yet be circled round with the executioner’s rope, she not being high born enough to lay it beneath his axe. The knowledge that Charles’s fate rested in hers added to my already mounting sense of apprehension. In the alleyways and vennels, the backlands and the courtyards of Banff, evil was waiting. Watching. And it would not watch for ever. It was only ten days now till the sheriff returned to hold the assize. Ten days perhaps, to save our friend.

‘Will she talk to you, doctor?’

‘Aye, she will. I have known her since she drew her first breath. She will know her friends from those she cannot trust, or those who cannot help her.’

‘With Davidson dead, and Charles in the tolbooth, what friends are left to her?’

‘You and I, Alexander. You and I, and she must know that soon. I am certain that whatever the nature of her burden, she cannot carry it alone much longer.’

And then a thought struck me, and I wondered that it had not done him also. ‘The minister’s sister, though. Geleis Guild.’ The provost’s wife. ‘They are friends, are they not, she and Marion? And Marion helps with the children. Might she not unburden herself to her?’

Jaffray reflected. ‘I had not thought of that. Aye, she might, when she comes to herself a bit. But those would be women’s things. We can do nothing for a murdered heart, but perhaps we can help dispel her more immediate fears. I will talk to her, tomorrow,’ Jaffray repeated, and I did not see the need for further questions on the matter.

The candles on the mantelpiece were burning low. The church bell had struck seven, but it was still light outside the window. The usual caw of the gulls trying their luck at the shore and the town middens was joined now by the twilight songs of the spring birds. At last, as April approached, we were hauling ourselves out of the last dregs of winter and towards the light and freedom of the spring and summer. It was as if the storm of two nights ago had blown the darkness further back across the northern seas. The doctor went over to his desk and picked up a sheet of paper, which he handed to me.

‘These are the findings of my examination of the corpse of Patrick Davidson.’ I waited. ‘He was poisoned.’ A matter-of-fact statement; a piece of common knowledge. He took the paper back out of my hand, crumpled it, and threw it in the fire. ‘Patrick Davidson was one of the healthiest specimens it has ever been my duty to examine. And yet he is dead. Dead because someone took the root of a small and beautiful flower and fed it to him. So lethal was it that it started to kill him before it ever reached his stomach, for there was little trace of it there. He was lost to this world from the moment he swallowed it.’

I did not understand. ‘A flower? But … if there was no trace, how do you know–’

‘I know because we found it in the vomit, Arbuthnott and I, before we ever had the barber help us open him up. We found elements of the root, pieces and two whole slices, in the vomit congealed on his hair and his clothes. Mistress Youngson is a woman of experience and wisdom – she knows what to clean away and what to leave. It was the apothecary who spotted it. The man has an eagle’s eye, and a knowledge of botany far in advance of my own. And yet, when he pointed it out and voiced his supposition, I knew him to be right.’

‘What is it?’

‘Colchicum mortis – the colchicum of death.’

A flower. ‘James and the flowers.’ The words of Janet Dawson, whispered so urgently only yesterday, came back to me now. But Jaffray was warming to his theme, and did not notice my abstraction.

‘You will not have heard of it. Indeed, why would you have? I have never come across a case myself before. Other varieties of colchicum, of course, are of use in medicine and cooking.’

‘In cooking?’ I knew that poisons were often used in the preparation of medicines, but that they were put into food was something new to me. ‘Is that not dangerous?’

Jaffray laughed. ‘Saffron, Alexander, saffron. Many women will use it for its colour and its flavouring. It is obtained from the stamen of the colchicum and Arbuthnott stocks it openly on his shelves. I have often myself prescribed it for the treatment of gout and arthritis. However, a high dose can be dangerous, giving rise to palsies and fits. Arbuthnott, like any good apothecary, will measure his doses carefully.’

‘So someone has been storing it up, with a murderous intent.’

Jaffray shook his head. ‘No. It was the root, remember, the sliced root that we found. Almost like a small, discoloured onion – by the look of it he had eaten it in a stew. There are many varieties of colchicum that, wrongly used, will harm a man, but only one that will kill him, and with such speed. The colchicum mortis; to judge from Patrick Davidson’s face, and the set of his corpse when he was discovered, he had suffered convulsions and paralysis before his death.’

I remembered the contorted features and the grotesque arrangement of the body I had seen dead at my desk, and I did not argue with the doctor. He continued. ‘The plant is grown and its properties well known in the Alps where, despite its beauty, none will touch it. I have seen it only once and at a distance, at a lecture at Montpellier nearly thirty years ago. I cannot pretend I remember it clearly or could describe it accurately. Later, though, I did see some sketches of the flower.’

I was as ignorant of botany as it had been possible for a student of divinity to be. I had always been so taken up with the internal world of man that the external, with all its seasonally changing beauties, had in many ways remained a mystery to me. And yet I was doubtful. ‘And with this knowledge you can identify the root of one small plant?’

Jaffray reached again for his pipe. ‘I cannot be certain I would even have thought of it had not Arbuthnott drawn my attention to the residue in the hair. The root – bulb, in fact – could be from one of several plants, but none with such lethal effect as the colchicum mortis.’ He paused for a moment in thought, sombre. ‘Poisoning is an act of veiled and contemptible cowardice, born in the blackest region of a man’s heart. It admits of no possibility of the victim fighting back. And yet …’ he hesitated.

‘Yet what?’

‘I do not think, in the end, that the murderer was able to fully conceal his crime from the boy. The colchicum should have no taste, but I believe that in his last minutes, Patrick Davidson knew he had been poisoned. Death did not come quickly enough for either of them.’

There came a searing flash in my mind again of a man calling out to me, a man falling, trying to get up, calling to me for help. A wave of nausea ran through me. Mine had been the second face that night to condemn him to death. I did not want this to be true.

‘Why do you think so, James?’

‘The grass. A dog eats grass to make itself sick. There is no briony to be had at this time of year, for that would have done the trick, so in his last conscious moments in this world, Patrick Davidson resorted to the behaviour of a dog in an attempt to save his own life. He tried to make himself vomit because he knew he had been poisoned.’

‘How long would he have suffered?’ My voice could barely hold the question.

‘Longer than he should have done. Fifteen, perhaps twenty minutes.’

And when, in those fifteen or twenty minutes, had I seen him? How near to death or to the possibility of salvation had Patrick Davidson been when he had made his desperate, hopeless appeal to me? ‘And Arbuthnott is of your view?’

‘I did not discuss that point with the apothecary. I trust him implicitly on the matter of plants and compounds, but the human psyche is beyond his expertise.’ He smiled mischievously. ‘Else he would not have married him such a wife.’

I could not help but smile myself, grave though the present matter was. The doctor had seen greater tragedies and greater evil before, no doubt, and it was only his humour that allowed him to bear it day after day. He called his humour a gift of faith, a grace. It was a gift greatly misunderstood by some of the narrower minds in our community, those whose chief delight in life was to cast withering glances and utter words of reproach. Those such as Baillie Buchan, James Cardno and even, I sometimes thought, my landlady, Mistress Youngson. ‘What does Arbuthnott have to say about the provenance of the root? Was it taken from his shop?’

Jaffray shook his head. ‘He has never had nor would ever have it. There is, he claims – and I do not disbelieve him, for I know of none myself – no use in medicine or hygiene for the root of that variety of the species. I checked every shelf and every drawer in that shop today – there is no poison under the apothecary’s roof that is not on the permitted list.’

‘Then was it grown here?’ I knew that many plants native to the Alps had become favourites in the gardens of landed and professional people who had returned to our shores after study abroad. Some grew them for further study, but many, I knew, simply for the joy of it.

Again Jaffray was doubtful. ‘That was my own next thought. I know little enough about the cultivation of flowers myself – it is Ishbel who tends to Elizabeth’s garden – so I went and enquired of Gilbert Jack.’ As ever, the doctor had seen to the heart of the matter: if any man in Banff knew of the flower, it would be the laird of Banff’s gardener. The laird’s palace gardens ran down opposite the kirkyard and towards the Greenbanks, taking in much of what had once formed the yards and gardens of the Carmelites in the burgh. Three generations of gardeners – Gilbert Jack’s father and grandfather before him – had redeemed what was best in those gardens: the herbarium, the kitchen garden, the orchard with its many types of apple, plum and pear, and had created a garden that was the glory of the north. If Gilbert Jack could not grow something in Banff, it probably could not be grown here at all.

‘And?’

‘And it cannot be grown here. The winds and the salt air are too harsh. He knows because he tried once, many years ago, with bulbs the laird had brought from the continent, and failed. So that should have been an end to the matter.’

‘But it has not been.’

‘No, it has not.’ He went to light another candle against the failing light. ‘I fear that my examination is next to worthless. It has done nothing to bring us any nearer to discovering the identity of Patrick Davidson’s killer. And so it does nothing to open the locks of the tolbooth for Charles.’ He returned heavily to his chair.

‘It may yet do something.’

‘I do not see how.’

‘“James and the flowers”.’ I murmured it quietly to myself and then repeated it to him, more clearly this time. ‘“James and the flowers”.’

Jaffray’s face was a study in incomprehension.

‘They were the last words Patrick Davidson ever spoke: “James and the flowers”.’

He looked at me, unable to understand something. ‘But Alexander, how do you know?’

I had forgotten, completely, to tell him of my encounters with the Dawson sisters – either on the night of the murder or with Janet Dawson yesterday. And, I now acknowledged, with a sinking heart, that I had utterly neglected to tell him of my own sighting of Patrick Davidson on the night of his death. And so I told him it all. Throughout the narrative he said nothing, but his eyes, when I told him of my abandonment of my fellow creature calling for help, spoke much of what was in his heart. I saw in him a deep and sincere sorrow and a disappointment he could not mask – the one for Patrick Davidson, the other for me. I made no excuses for I knew there were none. I finished my piece and he sat in silent contemplation of what I had told him. After a time, he spoke.

‘And you say it was a little before ten? Where was he heading to, or coming from?’

I shook my head. ‘That I cannot tell you. He was,’ I cleared my throat, ‘he was slumped against the wall of the Castle grounds, before he fell. He may have fallen before that – I do not know. I did not,’ and my voice fell, ‘I did not linger long enough to see a second time if he righted himself, or where he tried to go.’

‘And in those ten, fifteen minutes from where he’d parted from his killer, he might have travelled far enough.’ He sighed deeply, ‘No, it does not help us.’ He paused, and then roused himself again. ‘But what do you think it means, “James and the flowers”?’

I confessed that I had little idea – the matter had been put almost entirely from my mind by the discovery of the maps, and the explanations that did suggest themselves to me I did not like.

Jaffray packed his pipe again and reached another spill from the fire to light it.

‘Evidently,’ he said, ‘the flowers refers to the colchicum: the boy knew exactly what he had been poisoned with. And as for the “James” – well, I fear there can only be one conclusion.’

I hesitated to say it; I had been avoiding the thought. ‘The murderer?’

‘Indeed, what else?’

‘Then it does not help us greatly. For every ten men in Banff, two will be named James.’

Jaffray smiled. ‘And one of them is myself.’

I looked at the loved old face. ‘And you, my friend, I discount. But as for the rest – how can we tell who had dealings with Patrick Davidson and who did not?’

‘We ask anyone who knew him. At the same time we must see where any other evidence may point, and if that also points to James, then so much the better.’ Jaffray was animated, for he had a scheme, a plan. He was not a man who liked to wait upon events.

I set my mind to work. The killer of Patrick Davidson must have a minute knowledge of plants and their properties – even than a physician and as good as an apothecary. Not only of native plants, but also of the more exotic alpine species that could not be found or grown on our harsh and windblown scrap of God’s earth. And to know of this colchicum mortis they must have travelled or have been in close commune with someone who had. As the doctor sat looking sadly into the fire, I went through the burgh in my mind, in search of the most likely poisoner. There was the apothecary himself, Edward Arbuthnott. There was only his word to say that he did not have access to a stock of the colchicum roots. But then, why would he have pointed them out to Jaffray, and what possible motive might he have for murdering his apprentice? The doctor himself? I could not countenance such a thing. There was Marion Arbuthnott – might she have managed to obtain the plant without her father’s knowledge? Again, I could see no possible reason she might want Davidson dead. By all appearances she had loved him. Her mother? No. According to Charles, Marion’s marriage to Patrick Davidson had been her mother’s goal. And if there had been some scandal? Betrothal, not murder, was the answer to that type of scandal – for such as Marion and Davidson, at least. I was certain Charles had no knowledge of or interest in botany. True, he would have access to Arbuthnott’s stores, but if Arbuthnott did not store the poison – again, I was going around in a circle, and arriving where I had begun. I was tired and my head was beginning to ache at the temples. ‘I must go, James. The light is fading and I rise early tomorrow.’

‘Tomorrow?’

‘Yes, I had almost forgotten myself. I must go into Aberdeen, about the business of the bursaries.’

Jaffray was interested. ‘Indeed? The bursaries? But yes, I recall now. And will you find lodging in the college, or in the town?’

‘The town. I will lodge with my old friend William Cargill–’

‘James Cargill’s nephew?’ The doctor interrupted. ‘Yes. William is married now and has his own home in the Green quarter. He has been building up a lucrative lawyer’s business since his return from Leiden. He’ll be the town’s advocate in Edinburgh before long.’

Jaffray was unimpressed. ‘A great pity that he did not follow his uncle into medicine. The young–’ He was about to launch himself into one of his well-rehearsed diatribes on the laziness and thanklessness of my generation – not a word of which he meant – when he stopped suddenly. ‘Of course. James Cargill. Cargill’s notebooks – that is where I saw the sketch of the flower! If anyone in the north of Scotland ever knew that flower it would have been James Cargill.’

‘But the doctor has been dead these ten years and more,’ I protested.

He brushed this aside. ‘It matters little. His notebooks were the most exact I ever saw. He was an excellent physician yet his great pleasure, passion even, was the study of botany. He told me once that he was never happier than the summer he spent at Montbéliard with Jean Bauhin in the gathering and study of flowers. These troubles in the Empire would break his heart, if he lived today. Yes, I must see James Cargill’s notebooks. If his nephew has them, I trust you will manage to persuade him to lend us them awhile.’

‘I have no doubt. But how might they help?’

Jaffray muttered at my idiocy. ‘They will show us the flower. Arbuthnott has but a very hazy memory of its appearance, and I none. If we at least know what the plant from which these noxious bulbs are harvested looks like, then it may avail us something. Gilbert Jack may yet be proved wrong – perhaps it has been grown here, but we will never discover it if we do not know what it looks like.’ I felt Jaffray and I were leading each other farther and farther on the same wild goose chase, but we had nowhere else to go if we were to help our friend. I assured the doctor I would do my best to secure James Cargill’s notebooks.

‘Good, good,’ he said. ‘But this business of the maps, Alexander, I doubt it will avail Charles Thom anything. If Davidson were spying for every papist from here to Madrid, what good does the discovery of it do Charles Thom?’

This was a question I had asked myself as I’d walked down towards the doctor’s from the tolbooth. ‘If Davidson was a papist spy, then that would at least allow of a motive for his murder other than this nonsense of jealousy over a woman. It may be that his activities had been found out – that he was murdered to prevent his maps falling into the hands of his sponsors. Yet in such a case, why not accuse and try him openly?’

‘Because it would cause panic, my boy. And it might expose others whom the authorities might not wish to have exposed.’

The pain in my head was now throbbing relentlessly. The faces of Patrick Davidson, the provost, Marion Arbuthnott, Baillie Buchan, Charles Thom, the unseen Gordon of Straloch were all crowding in on me.

For his part, on my mission, Jaffray took it upon himself to enquire into Patrick Davidson’s connections in the burgh and its hinterland – be they Gordons, papists or simply ‘Jameses’, while I was away. My headache receded after I swallowed a draught of laudanum he had given me from his own store, and he and I talked much later into the night than I had planned, of other things. Finally, having promised that I would leave fresh provisions from Ishbel for Charles at the tolbooth before I left Banff early the following morning, I bade the doctor’s household farewell until I should return from Aberdeen.