The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

SIX A Journey

There was already much business at the shore as I passed on my way to the tolbooth early next morning. The first boats since the great storm of Monday had put into port, and their wares had already been unloaded to make way for salmon, grain and woolfells destined for their entrepôt at Aberdeen. The shore porters who had spent Monday night gaming in the inn were now busily engaged on their proper labours. Traders and merchants’ boys ferried goods from the harbour to the market place in small carts or on their backs. The gulls were circling and cawing round the gutting station where the women cleaned the fish just landed for salting. Everything was as it had always been, as if the murder had been but a pedlar’s tale. The slight haar brought a smell of stagnant seaweed up from the shore; I had never liked it. I was glad that much of today’s journey would take me many miles away from the coast, almost till I reached Aberdeen itself.

The provost was not yet there when I arrived at the tolbooth, and I was directed instead to his house on the Castlegate. I had hoped to see Charles before I left, but the town serjeant was under strict instruction that no one – and something in his manner implied that it was myself in particular who was meant – was to be permitted access to the jail. It was becoming clear that Charles was to be kept from any communication with his friends.

As I drew near to the provost’s house I saw him waiting for me in the open doorway. He hailed me from a distance of ten yards. ‘Mr Seaton. I am glad you are about your business early. You will reach Aberdeen in daylight?’ There was no apology for his lateness and I had expected none.

‘Easily. I have Gilbert Grant’s horse, and I will change mounts at Turriff.’

He cast a practised eye over the animal. It was no thoroughbred, but it was a sturdy and dependable beast. ‘Keep a watchful eye around you as you go. There are vagabonds aplenty on the roads who would not scruple to attack a schoolmaster. The map must not fall into the wrong hands.’

‘I can take care of myself well enough.’ There was nothing Walter Watt could tell me about vagabonds on the highways. Three times in four years Archie and I had been set upon as we returned from the college to his father’s stronghold of Delgatie. But Archie had been taught to manage a sword before he could manage a pen and, from the very beginning of our friendship when, small boys though we were, he had realised what a hopeless knight I was, what he knew he had taught to me. From each assault we had come away with our purses and our pride intact.

The provost seemed satisfied. He handed me a leather pouch with the chosen map inside. ‘You know what you are to ask Straloch. And remember that – you are to ask him. Our business here in this burgh is none of his.’

‘I know little of this burgh’s business, provost; only that on which I am sent.’

‘I’d wager you know more than that. I did not entirely speak the truth yesterday, when I told the minister I knew little of your ill repute. I know it all, Mr Seaton: the drinking, the whoring, the attempts at self-harm. You have had a wild time of it, six months or more.’

‘All that is past.’

‘Perhaps. The baillie for one is of a mind that it may be so, and that is something in your favour. I care little for the censure of the Kirk, but I have seen you in sack-cloth on the stool of repentance. I know nothing of the state of your soul or the extent of your repentance, but I know of your humiliation before the whole town. Better men have been banished from this town for little worse than you have done.’

‘I know as well as any man what I have been and what I am, provost. For the state of my soul I cannot answer, but my repentance is complete. If I had the choice, I would not still be here. But I have no other place in this world.’

He looked at me, but said nothing. As well as the map, and a private letter of his for delivery in Aberdeen, he held a written authority to Straloch to treat me as the representative of the burgh of Banff. He handed me them all with a final instruction. ‘You must tell no one of the purpose of your visit to Straloch. There will be bloodshed and dissent in this town should the fear of a popish plot become generally known. You have been entrusted with a matter of great importance. Do not disgrace this burgh. Or yourself.’

He turned away into the darkness of his doorway and I bade my farewell to his back. As I left the house, early in the day though it was, I heard the sound of a child crying from over the garden wall. I took a step towards the gate and stopped: a little girl, the provost’s daughter, perhaps three or four years of age, was lying on the stony path where she had just fallen, her chubby arm grazed and bleeding. I would have gone to lift her up, but Marion Arbuthnott, unnoticed by me until now, was there before me. She lifted the child tenderly then gently examined the injury. Murmuring some words of comfort she softly kissed the curly head and carried the girl in to her mother. As she was about to step through the door she turned to me and nodded, briefly, in acknowledgement. She had not taken the sleeping draught then; she had not hidden herself away. All would be well with the girl I had had such fears for but two days ago at the Elf Kirk.

When I reached the sandbar at the mouth of the Deveron the larger of the two town ferries was waiting. The tide was high, unlike the day twelve years ago or more when Archie and I had been riding from Banff to Delgatie. He had insisted that the water was low enough and the sandbar wide enough for our horses to ford the river with ease. The horses had made it, just, but only the diligence of Paul Black, the ferryman, had saved their two young riders from drowning. The tongue-lashing he had given each of us once he had pulled us both to safety at the end of his boatman’s hook was as nothing to the leathering we both received at the hands of the laird’s stable master for risking the horses. Eight years later, that same stable master had sent his only son to the Bohemian wars to serve the young Master of Hay, and the two fathers, master and servant, had wept together when they received the news that neither would return. Yet here was I still: on a borrowed horse, little more than a messenger, of no great worth to those who thought themselves my friends and of none to myself.

Paul Black still held the tack of the ferry. He hailed me from a distance, an identical boat hook in his hand. ‘Bring him round this way, Mr Seaton.’ He helped me settle and tie the animal. Having seen to the other travellers he did not cast off, but instead came over to talk with me. ‘I am sorry, Mr Seaton, you will be inconvenienced today. The smaller boat is not out.’

‘I have no need of the smaller boat,’ I said, not comprehending.

‘No, but it means we will have to wait for Sarah Forbes.’ He nodded back in the direction of the town and I followed the line of his vision. The name Sarah Forbes was something familiar to me, but I did not know why. Then, as I looked towards the town, I remembered, and the bleakness of it filled me. A crowd, not large but notable none the less, was making its way past the Greenbanks towards the ferry landing. At its head was the town drummer who struck out a relentless beat. The image in my mind was of George Burnett, master mason. He had sat in the kirk last Sunday on the stool of repentance, as I myself before the whole congregation had often done. His public shaming was in recompense for his having been found guilty of the sin of fornication, adulterous fornication, with one of his servants, which he had denied until Sarah Forbes’s six-month swollen belly gave him the lie. He would sit on the stool another two weeks, for the good of his soul and the edification of his neighbours, and he would pay a six-shilling fine which would be put into the hand of the presbytery divinity bursar such as I had once been. As for Sarah Forbes, who could take her punishment but not pay her fine, she and her unborn child had been condemned to banishment from the burgh, never to be found again within its bounds, on pain of death. Such was justice in our godly commonwealth.

At the sound of the drum I had thought immediately of Mary Dawson. I had not seen her since Monday night, and had not heard of her about the town since her sister Janet’s banishment. I wondered what fate had befallen her.

As the procession came to a halt, the town’s officer read out the terms of Sarah Forbes’s banishment one more time. A woman spat; another hurled a stone that missed the girl but caught the drummer on the cheek. Some filthy names were called and then the performance was over. Paul Black helped the girl and her meagre belongings onto the boat and the crowd turned away, the mundane business of the day calling their attention once more. Once aboard, the girl reached in a small leather pouch and brought out a coin which she held out to Paul Black. He shook his head and closed her fingers back over it. She settled herself at the end of a bench opposite me and looked directly ahead of her out to sea. She spoke to no one and no one spoke to her on the short crossing to the other side of the Deveron. As we landed on the east bank of the river, I had to wait for Paul Black to help me off with the horse, and stood back as he reached for the girl’s bundle and then her hand to steady her as she stepped warily down the gangplank.

‘You are a good man, Paul,’ I said, as he untied Gilbert Grant’s horse for me.

‘“Whosoever shall receive this child in my name receiveth me.’” There being no travellers waiting for passage back over the river to Banff, he set to the oars with his three sons and soon the boat was pulling away towards the opposite side of the river.

Sarah Forbes was walking away in the direction of the parish of King Edward. I myself had a call to pay there with packages from Mistress Youngson to the minister’s wife, who was her sister. She had given me to understand that the nondelivery of these packages safely into her sister’s own hands would place in jeopardy my continued residence in the schoolhouse, protest her husband however much he might. Still on foot and leading my horse by the head, I had caught up with the banished girl in less than a minute. I could not just get up on the beast’s back and ride past her. ‘It is Sarah, is it not?’

She glanced at me and then looked ahead of her, blankly. ‘Yes. I think that is well known, today anyway.’ She continued on her way.

‘You are Ishbel’s friend, Ishbel MacGillivray?’

Her face had lightened a little when she turned it towards me again. ‘Yes. Ishbel is my friend. I doubt I will ever see her again, though. And the doctor too, he was good to me. He tried–’ She paused, unsure how to proceed.

‘You must know the doctor is my friend. You are free to speak with me. My name is Alexander Seaton.’

Now at last she smiled, a smile that lifted her face from the ordinary and took something of the wariness from her eyes. ‘I know who you are, sir. Your name is also known.’ She looked down as if she regretted being so open, then said, ‘But Ishbel says you are a good man, and that the doctor thinks well of you.’

‘The doctor thinks better of me than I deserve. He tried to help you, then?’

She nodded. ‘He guessed at my condition two months ago. He spoke up for me before the session and at the council, but it did not sway them. Why should it? I am a fallen woman.’

‘Where will you go now?’

‘I have nowhere to go but my uncle’s house – on the far side of King Edward. If he will take me.’

‘Are you afraid he will not?’

She gave me a dubious smile and then looked down at her belly. ‘He had little enough opinion of me before he sent me to work in Banff, and he will have less now. Anyway, I must get on. The haar is coming in. Goodbye, Mr Seaton.’

I remained motionless by my obedient mount as she walked away and up the track. ‘Wait,’ I called. ‘Please wait.’

She turned around and lowered her head.

‘Sarah …’

‘What do you want from me?’

‘I …’ I did not know the answer. ‘It is a long walk to King Edward. Six miles, maybe.’

‘Not so long. Two hours, or a little more, will take me there. Anyway, I am in no great hurry.’

That I could believe well enough. The condemnation of the citizens of Banff would hardly have faded in her ears before that of her aunt and uncle started.

‘It will be hot when the haar lifts. Much of your journey will be uphill. I am going by King Edward myself.’ I indicated the saddle, broad and worn by many years in the old schoolmaster’s service. ‘If I moved these bags a little, and doubled this blanket, there would be room …’

She looked at me, perplexed, and then laughed out loud, a true laugh of delighted mirth. ‘Mr Seaton, where are your eyes? Have you seen the size of me? The poor beast’s back would break with me up there as well, and you would have to sit on his ears just to make room for me.’

I stood aside from the horse and stepped a little closer to her. ‘You do not understand, Sarah. If you can make yourself comfortable up there, I will walk.’

She parted her lips slightly and drew in her breath as if she was about to say something. She looked up at me for a moment and then looked away as the pale green eyes that had looked blankly out to sea on the ferry threatened to give way to her feelings. She took the hand that I held out and let me lift her up onto the horse.

We passed only one or two people on the road, and they took little notice of us. I thought of her former master George Burnett, the father of her child. I had never liked the man, and neither had my father before me. I remembered my father coming home from meetings of the craft guild and talking of the swagger and the coarseness of George Burnett. But the stonemasons were a powerful guild in Banff, and Burnett the most skilled amongst them.

‘Will George Burnett care for his child?’ It was not unknown for a father to raise a natural son with those of his marriage.

Again she laughed, a different laugh this time. ‘Care for his child? George Burnett is too busy to concern himself with anything so profitless. These last storms have cost him many days’ work, and the fine the session forced from him is more than he thinks me or my baby worth. He should have been much further on with the building of the minister’s new house by now, but the weather has held him up so badly he still has much of the garden ground to clear before he can even complete the foundations. The longer it takes him, the longer he will wait on his payment. My fate is of little interest to him, other than that I should be out of his wife’s sight and cease to cause him inconvenience. He will not acknowledge the child. But I would have it no other way.’ I waited for her to continue, and she did. ‘I arrived in Banff a maiden and no whore. I have left it a maiden no longer, but I am no whore either. While there is breath in my body he will never set a hand on my baby.’ She placed her hand over her belly, and in that moment I knew she would kill to protect her child if she had to. I began to fear a little less for Sarah Forbes.

The rest of our journey passed quietly and we arrived in King Edward without incident. Sarah’s uncle lived on the far side of the parish, where the road dipped then rose again towards Turriff. Mistress Youngson’s sister lived, of course, in the manse beside her husband’s kirk. As we approached the kirkyard gate I sensed the young woman shifting uneasily on the horse’s back.

‘Is there something the matter?’

She smiled, too bright a smile. ‘I am fine, thank you, just fine. But I think maybe it would be better if I walked from here. It would do your name no good to be seen here with me, and you do not deserve to be calumniated for your kindness.’

‘Nor you for your condition. I think, perhaps …’ I hesitated, but she was looking at me intently. ‘I think perhaps, it was not your will that George Burnett should have–’ This was none of my business, but I was too far on now to go back.

She looked away. ‘No, it was not my will.’

‘I am sorry,’ I said.

I reached up to help her down from the beast’s back, but as I set her gently on the ground I – without knowing what I did – let my hands rest a moment at her waist. From the warmth under my fingers I felt the full force of a small kick, a touch from another world. I pulled my hand away as if burnt, then placed it back in wonder. She smiled, a little confused, as I was. I had not known such an intensity of human touch, different, and yet greater than that I had known in my passion for Katharine Hay. I think I would have stood like that a lifetime. The sound of the byre door opening startled me from my reverie, and I managed to step back a pace or two from Sarah Forbes before Mistress Youngson’s sister emerged carrying a pail of freshly taken milk.

Esther Youngson, wife of the minister of King Edward, knew me immediately. Carrying the pail carefully, she walked towards us, smiling, as her sister seldom allowed herself to do. ‘It is Mr Seaton, is it not? And,’ she looked beyond me and put down her pail, ‘Sarah Forbes. Oh, Sarah, my child, so it is true, then.’ Sarah, who had held her head high as she had walked away from the jeers and stones of the mob at Banff could not withstand the tenderness of an old woman who had known her from childhood. She hung her head and wept. Mistress Youngson made her way past me and held the girl for a moment until the crisis subsided. There would be no going to her uncle’s just yet. Carrying the milk and the packages that had brought me here, I followed the two women into the manse.

Hamish MacLennan, a formidable preacher and fervent for the discipline of the kirk, was not at home. His wife insisted that Sarah lie down on the serving girl’s bed set into the kitchen wall. Despite her protests that she was not tired, it was scarcely ten minutes before the level rise and fall of her breathing told us she was asleep. In sleep she looked younger than her eighteen or nineteen years, almost childlike. Mistress Youngson laid another blanket over her and came across to where I sat on the window seat.

There was bread baking in the oven and its aroma filled the room. The warmth of the kitchen enveloped me so that I too felt I might sleep. In childhood I had often sought out the kitchen and the window seat. From there I would watch my mother at her work and listen to her stories of her Ulster homeland. There were many legends, of kings and princes and giants, and of the fairy folk, tales that would have had my mother up before the session, just for the telling of them, had it been known. To me the saddest story was not of princesses, or sea-folk or fairies, but of a young woman, a wealthy burgess’s daughter of Carrickfergus. The girl had fallen in love with a Scottish soldier returning to his homeland by way of Ireland from exile in France with his master. The young woman’s father had been opposed to any match between them; his daughter had not been brought up to be the wife of a mere soldier, a hammerman to trade. She had been educated in the ways of a lady to be the wife of a lawyer or civil servant or wealthy merchant. He forbade his daughter to see any more of the soldier. Three weeks later, the laird of Delgatie set sail in the night with his men up Belfast Lough and away towards Scotland, far away from his lovely daughter. But when the maidservant went to wake the girl in the morning she found the girl was gone, gone sailing to Scotland with the laird of Delgatie and his armourer, Andrew Seaton, my father.

I never tired of hearing the story as I sat silent in the window seat, watching as my mother kneaded bread and plucked birds and gutted fish; I watched as she rubbed the ointments Jaffray had prescribed from the apothecary into the sore and calloused hands that had been meant for sewing and drawing up household accounts and playing the lute. Or I would sit there working at my Latin and Greek until the light faded or my father found me and called me instead to the smithy, where he and his apprentice toiled before the roaring furnace over axes and hunting spears and swords of every description.

‘The girl is exhausted.’ It was Mistress Youngson’s voice that broke into my daydream. ‘Did she ride with you all the way from Banff, or did you meet with her on the road?’

‘I saw her on the ferry. She took a good deal of persuading before she would consent to get up on the horse. She had been of a mind to walk.’ A thought crossed my mind as Mistress Youngson’s question repeated itself in my head. ‘The child is not mine,’ I said. ‘I never spoke to her until this day. I–’

The old woman smiled. ‘Calm yourself, boy. I know whose child it is. The girl should never have been sent to work in that man’s house. My own sister, your master’s wife, told me what manner of man he was, and I warned her uncle and aunt not to put her there.’

‘And they did it anyway?’

She nodded.

I wondered what sort of home the girl was returning to, what kind of place in this world she was bringing her child into. ‘Will they take her in?’

‘Aye, they will. But she’ll have a hard time of it.’ She went wearily over to the hearth and stirred the pot from which the smell of mutton stew drifted over to me. I remembered my commission from her sister, forgotten in all the business of Sarah, and handed her the packages.

Mistress Youngson’s eyes lit up. She had a child’s delight in receiving a gift. There was hardly a mystery about the first package – four fresh herring, bought before it was light at the shore of Banff. The second package revealed a pot of honey, a gift from the hives in the laird of Banff’s great garden. There was a letter, which the old woman set up high on the mantel, for when she could take her time and read it on her own. Last was a soft, bulky parcel, wrapped in a muslin cloth and tied with hemp. A note was stitched to the cloth. Across the table I could read the words as the minister’s wife unfolded a knitted woollen shawl, the colour of oatmeal, with a tiny silken bow stitched at the corner: for Sarah Forbes’s bairn. How had I ever reached such a pass, to have lost the affection and respect of a woman of so stern demeanour and yet so replete with quiet kindness?

The minister’s wife insisted I take some of the mutton stew she had made for her husband’s dinner. ‘In any case, Mr MacLennan will have no notion of mutton stew when he catches sight of these herring.’ She ladled me out a huge bowl from her steaming pot and went to the kist for oatmeal to coat the fish in.

By the time I had finished my meal, Sarah Forbes still slept soundly. There was no reason I could find words or voice for to stay until she woke, yet I was reluctant to leave. Mistress Youngson had assured me that she herself would go with Sarah to her uncle’s house, once she was awake and had taken a good hot meal. She assured me also that she would make it known in very clear terms that she and her husband would keep an eye on how the girl was treated. Yet I could see that she still had fears for Sarah’s welfare and that of her child. I walked out of the manse door and then I turned back to Mistress Youngson with my hand at my pouch. I pressed the coins into her hand. Five pounds Scots – the price of some books I had been going to buy for myself in Aberdeen. ‘Give it to them. Tell them it is from friends in Banff. It is for her food, and she must not be made to work beyond noon. Tell them there will be more when the child comes, if her friends are satisfied that she is not mistreated.’

She closed her hand over the coins and I could see tears in her eyes. ‘You are a good man, for all … for all else that might have happened.’ Further explanation was unnecessary. I thanked her for her kindness and rode away from King Edward.

The road became busier over the last few miles to Turriff with country people returning from the morning market in the town. Some of them might have known me, but I kept my hat pulled down low and, avoiding their eyes, kept my gaze fixed directly ahead of me. I did not turn to the left where the road branched off for Delgatie. I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I had reached this crossing and continued directly ahead rather than turning towards that great stronghold. I can have been little more than five years old when I first rode up with my father. Every step of the horse took me further into this strange, unimagined world. And then I had seen the castle. Only an ogre, I thought, a giant such as held sway in my mother’s stories, could live in such a place as that. Try as he might my father could not make me believe that the lord of that castle was the same jovial man who would arrive at the foundry with a great retinue of men, ordering arms for fighting and weapons for the hunt. He would joke with my father about my long slim fingers and my pale boy’s hands, and ask me to show him where were my hammerman’s muscles. I remembered my mother coming out on one such occasion and fixing his lordship with what I knew to be her most dangerous look and saying to him, ‘This child will be no hammerman,’ before taking my arm from his hand and bringing me back into her kitchen. My father was so ashamed it was days before I heard him address a word to her. But the laird of Delgatie never made sport of me again.

But that was over twenty years ago, that first of many visits, that first time I had met Archie, the laird’s boisterous bear cub of a son, who even at five years old transfixed and overwhelmed me with his intoxicating spirit. And then too I had met Katharine, the serious three-year-old Katharine, who even then watched her brother with a quiet wariness far beyond her years. But now Archie was dead, and Katharine was here no longer, gone far, far away from her home and her family because of me, and their father would have thrown me from the castle’s ramparts rather than welcome me within its walls once more.

The horse travelled steadily on, and I was soon in Turriff. I had no need to tarry in the town beyond changing my horse and delivering a letter from Jaffray to one of the doctors there. I refused the doctor’s offer of refreshment, and with the wind at my back left Turriff and rode hard towards Aberdeen.

The first time Archie and I had taken this road together we had been little more than fifteen, boys still, setting out for our studies at the King’s College in Aberdeen. We had ridden from the gates of Delgatie as his mother and sister watched from an upper window, my head full of Latin and Greek and Archie’s full of fighting and women. At the head of us, his lordship himself had ridden.

My own father no longer rode with Lord Hay. He was a burgess of Banff now, and owed his allegiance first to the town and then to the king. The laird would have given me a horse that almost matched Archie’s, but my father would not allow it, the first time in his life that he had ever spoken against Lord Hay. And the laird, understanding my father better then than I did, had not pressed the point but had had his stable master bring me round a roan cob – a respectable mount for one of my station. My father had by then stopped believing that I would ever be apprenticed to his trade. I was as tall and strong and able as any son he might have wished for, but I had my eye on other prizes and had little regard for the craft at which he excelled. I think he would gladly have burned the books my mother gave me in his hottest furnace, if he had thought she might ever forgive him. She would not have done, and he knew that well enough. But there had been bitter words between them on the eve of my leaving Banff for the college.

The evening had started well enough. Gilbert Grant was there, and Jaffray had come round too and brought the young Charles Thom with his fiddle to give us some music. In his bag the doctor had also brought a jar of the uisge beatha distilled by the mountain people, the people of Glenlivet to whom he journeyed every year in the summer. It was forbidden and fulminated against from every pulpit, but the doctor cared little for such fulmination when he was amongst friends. My mother made a small show of protest before going to fetch beakers for the men, and when she had her back turned, my father let the doctor pour a small measure into my own cup. ‘Be sure to sip it, boy. A taste. You will not need to swallow.’ I had never tasted anything like it. It numbed my lips and set fire to my tongue before melting, sweeter and more mellow than the finest of honey, on the roof of my mouth.

As the evening wore on, I noticed my father become more and more silent. At last he stood up and bade Charles Thom hold off from his playing. He pushed the food and drink away from him and then he addressed himself to me. If any had expected some final parting words of love or advice or paternal pride, they were disappointed. Before my mother and my friends, my father told me to remember that the one and only cause of my going to the King’s College was to serve the Master of Hay. Whatever vanities I might indulge in, whatever foolishness others might fill my head with, I was to remember I owed it all to the family of Delgatie, whose servant I was. Having said his piece, he called the dog from the hearth and strode out of the door. In the sudden silence of the room, I looked at my mother’s face and saw a death in it. For years she had quietly, secretly as she thought, nurtured my mind, brought me books, talked to me of everything she knew of the world, of philosophy and poetry and religion. She had made me into the son she would always have had, wherever Providence might have led her, and in her struggle to do it she had trampled on the man she knew my father to be and rendered him something else. In making me so completely hers, she had taken me from him, and I never saw it until that night. I do not know if my mother ever uttered a word to my father again.

And yet, my father had been right. My Latin and Greek would have availed me nothing had it not been for my connection to Archie. Of the few bursaries then available for poor scholars at King’s College, I was not eligible for any. All the available resources of the Kirk were focused on helping the divinity bursar of the presbytery survive his studies without starving or freezing. My father was not poor, but by no means could he keep me four years at the college while training up the apprentice he would not otherwise have needed. So, like a handful of other fortunate young men, I would undertake my studies, my fees paid and living full board in the college, as the servant of a nobleman friend. Archie. I had to rouse him twice in the morning, after the bursar had come past with his bell; I had to find ways of getting him past the janitor after the night curfew had fallen and the college gates were shut, holding him as straight as I could to try to mask the extent of his intoxication; more than once I had to travel in the other direction with him, concealing between our two cloaks some pretty girl who should have been at home in bed in her father’s house many hours before; I had to get him to the college kirk in the hours of divine service and do my best to keep him awake while he was there. In all, I did what I could to keep him out of trouble, and most of all, out of fights. It would not matter where a fight was, what it was over or whom it involved; if Archie got the merest whiff of it he would be in the thick of it in minutes, or, often enough, he would start a fight where there had been no fight at all. ‘Mind him well, Alexander,’ Archie’s mother had said as she bade me farewell, ‘and for the love of God, keep him safe.’

I had kept him safe as long as I could, then he had taken his path and I mine. Now he was dead and I was not. There had been a point in his dying. I rode on. Turriff was soon behind me, and then Old Meldrum. I passed close by Straloch in the mid-afternoon, my hand going instinctively to my saddlebag where the map was hidden. I traversed the barren lands to the north and west of Aberdeen, only the horse sparing me complete isolation. Then I turned the beast’s head towards the Don and followed the river’s course as it made its last few miles towards the sea, until at last I saw the twin spires of St Machar’s Cathedral on their sturdy towers, challenging the godless to approach Aberdeen. Godless or not, my heart warmed to the sight. The Irish saint’s seat, rising above the great river where it curved in the shape of a bishop’s crook, had always been for me the gateway to a place that was home. It was not long before the hooves of my mount were clattering over the cobbles of the Brig o’ Balgownie, and I was nodding to carters and other country people on horseback or foot, making for home after their business in the two towns. The road swept out past the Bishop’s Ward and over the marshland towards the sea, the east coast, looking out towards Norway, Denmark and then the Baltic, unseen, but full of possibilities, and then it turned back towards the town. I passed the port to the Bishop’s Green and the Chaplain’s Court. The Machar kirk was behind me now, to my right, and, for the first time in almost a year, I was back in Old Aberdeen.

I headed down Don Street towards the Market Cross, where the Chanonry met the High Street. I could not see beyond the frontages, but I knew that behind the houses blossom would be forming on the trees in the orchards and gardens of College Bounds. The market was finished now, and the stallholders had cleared away their booths and gone home. Dogs and gulls occupied themselves with clearing whatever unwanted wares and produce might have fallen to the ground. The pigeons of the bishop’s old dovecote always fed well on market days. As I passed the majestic crown tower of the college chapel, my heart nearly gave within me. I was a part of those stones, a century old and more; I belonged to that place, with all the others who had gone before me and with those still to come. Yet at this moment, this hour and day of my life, I had no place there.

I passed out of College Bounds and made my way up the Spittal hill, past the ruins of the Snow kirk to my left and then the Spittal kirk to my right. What a desecration of churches there had been these past sixty years, all in the name of God. Further down, as the road descended towards the town of New Aberdeen, I passed the old Leper House. Unwelcome as they were within the burgh, there had been here a place of some compassion where they might rest. A light breeze stirred the arms of the windmill on Windmill Hill, overlooking the cornfields where they bordered the town. It was not long before I reached the Calsey Port, emblazoned with the royal arms to give weight to its authority, and, having answered for my name, place of origin, business in the burgh and lodgings when staying there, was riding down the Gallowgate towards the heart of New Aberdeen.

The houses rose on either side of me, three and four storeys high. Some were divided into tenements, the apartments on the upper floors being reached by wooden flights of outside stairs. Other dwellings were grander, the houses of wealthy merchants, professionals and landed men with business in the town. I turned down into the Upperkirkgate. The houses here were not so grand as those of the Gallowgate, the rents cheaper, but here too, many had aspirations, with brightly painted porches giving onto the street. Halfway down I reined in the horse outside a modest two-storey house with the legend E. P. 1624. W. C. engraved in fine gold lettering above the lintel. Elizabeth Philip and William Cargill. Tying the beast to a post in the road, I knocked on the door. There seemed to be a great commotion and rustling of skirts inside until at length the door was answered. My friend’s wife stood there in the doorway, her eyes alight and her cheeks glowing, filled, mirabile dictu, with happiness to find me there.

‘Alexander, oh, Alexander. How we have missed you.’ She held her hand out towards me and I took a step closer, removing my hat as I did so. She looked again in my face, my eyes. Her arm fell to her side. ‘In the name of God, Alexander, what has befallen you?’