Shona MacLEAN - The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

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.’