Shona MacLEAN - The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

‘Nor will find,’ I responded, ‘unless Patrick Davidson arises and tells you the name of the one who slew him.’

The baillie probed me with his long, unflinching gaze. ‘Charles Thom is at liberty to talk for himself, but chooses not to. If his reasons are known to you, you would do well to divulge them. It would go the better for you both.’ His eyes searched mine for a moment, but he returned to the matter in hand. ‘It is not in the case of Charles Thom we require help from yourself and Mr Grant. The papers we wish you to examine belong to Mr Patrick Davidson.’

Now I thought I understood something of the provost’s pallor.

‘What are these papers?’ I asked.

Stewart turned the first of the piles and passed it across the table. ‘That is what we would like you to tell us, although we know, broadly, what they are. What we would ascertain is what they mean.’

I pulled over a chair for Gilbert Grant but remained standing myself. Buchan placed a new-lit candle at the older schoolmaster’s elbow. My own eyesight was far better than my colleague’s. At first glance I saw what the papers were. I would have to choose my words with care.

‘These are maps,’ I said.

‘Indeed,’ agreed Buchan. ‘But have you ever seen such maps before, Mr Seaton?’

I looked again and shook my head. It was the truth. I had seen town sketches, and maps, in my college days. Yet, for all I had seen before, I had never seen such work as this. The maps, perhaps a dozen in all, were not printed copies but original hand-drawn sketches, showing natural coastline features such as bays, river mouths, sandbars and rocks – all annotated and named. The Collie Rocks were there, Meavie Point, the Maiden Craig, the Bow Fiddle Rock, and many more besides. The hills and cliffs that rose above them were named. But there too were the man-made features – the new harbour works at Banff, the harbour at Sandend, the fastness of Findlater above the bay at Darkwater. And roads there were, and bridges, kirks, townships, strongholds. The whole coastline from Gamrie and Troup Head to Findlater and beyond to Cullen was sketched out in a manner which, to one who knew these places, could not be mistaken. At the edge of each sketch an arrow, next to what could only be a roadway, annotated ‘to Elgin’, ‘to Turriff’, ‘to Strathbogie’. It was this last that began to give me the clue, if I had needed it, to the possible significance of the discovery of these documents, and the unrest they caused to those in the room, not least the provost. Gilbert Grant passed me paper after paper. ‘These are astonishing; I have never seen such work.’ He looked towards Thomas Stewart. ‘I had not thought the coastline here to be mapped.’

‘It is – or rather was – not,’ replied the notary. ‘The fishermen have their charts of course, but these are rudimentary and obscure, and can only be understood by those with great knowledge of the sea hereabouts.’

Grant shook his head in wonder. ‘Then where did he get them? Whose work are they?’

‘His own.’ Baillie Buchan’s voice was dry and deliberate.

‘You cannot be sure.’ Again the provost was in a rash of panic. The baillie lost patience and almost spat.

‘Arbuthnott confirms it.’ He thrust a paper towards the provost. ‘Do you deny yourself that it is his hand?’ And then another, and another. ‘Or this? Or this?’ The provost nodded slowly then sat down on a chair, his head in his hands. I picked up the papers he had let fall to the floor. Not maps these, but notes, numbered notes and symbols with their meaning. A symbol for a bridge, for a well, for a mill, for a farmstead, a ferry, a ford. Notes on strongholds and the names of those who held them – Findlater, Inchgower, Carnousie, Delgatie, Rothiemay, Frendraucht – all and many more were there. To my surprise, Buchan seemed to address himself to me rather than to Gilbert Grant. ‘What do you make of these documents?’

I chose my words with care. ‘I have some little knowledge of mapping, but I do not claim great expertise.’

‘And it is taught at neither of the colleges in Aberdeen?’

I considered. ‘No. There is some talk of a mathematics professor at Marischal College, but no man has yet been found to take the post.’

The baillie nodded, satisfied. ‘Mr Grant?’

My elder colleague sighed. ‘I can add little to what Alexander has said. The craftsmanship, the penmanship is of a high quality – but as to cartography, I know near to nothing of that.’

‘And why should you?’ asked the baillie, ‘for maps are scarce the business of honest men.’

Notary Stewart cleared his throat and the provost roused himself. ‘Have a care, Buchan. You might not slander the dead, but you risk great slander of the living. Robert Gordon of Straloch is known to have an interest in the matter of maps.’

Buchan was unbowed. ‘A Gordon is not above suspicion. Straloch may well have a hand in this. Did the boy speak of any commission, any patron in this work?’

Arbuthnott, to whom the question was chiefly addressed, asserted, with some vehemence, that Davidson had not spoken of this work at any time. The provost also denied ever having heard mention that his nephew was engaged on such an enterprise.

The baillie returned to me. His view that maps were not the business of honest men did not, it appeared, preclude a conviction that I knew all about them. ‘What would you say, Mr Seaton, is the purpose of these maps?’

‘I cannot answer that, baillie. Only Patrick Davidson and whoever sponsored him can answer that.’

‘You guess at more than you will admit, Mr Seaton, or you would not talk of “sponsors”.’

The baillie was correct, loath though I was to admit it. I knew more of maps and mapping and their cause and their uses than I wished to say, for Archie Hay had written to me of them. Archie, who had never looked at a map in his life, had never needed to for the whole of the terrain of the north was written into his very soul, had discovered his great God-given gift when he had left the shores of Scotland for the great wars of the Empire. He had discovered the value, the necessity to the foreign soldier and the foreign army, of maps. It had been with the greatest of difficulty, and relying almost completely on me and my powers of dissuasion, that Archie’s parents had prevented him from throwing up his studies in Aberdeen and going to the war in Bohemia as soon as he heard of the defeat of the Bohemian forces at the White Mountain. The Elector Frederick, newly chosen king of Bohemia, the Winter King, champion of Protestantism against the papist Habsburgs, had suffered ignominious defeat. As Archie had told me, indiscreetly and on more than one occasion, he cared not a jot for the Bohemians or the Protestant cause, but he would die in the defence of Frederick’s queen, Elizabeth Stewart, daughter of King James and sister of our present King, Charles. In 1622, four years ago, Archie had left home, family and country to fight to the death, as he said, in the defence of the Winter Queen.

When he could, Archie wrote to me, a small handful of letters I kept with me still. He wrote of the fighting, of the filth, the privations, the brutality of the Habsburgs and the suffering of the peasants. And he wrote of maps. Archie, who had been hard put to attend one lecture in three in our college days, fell upon the art of cartography with a passion. He learnt the art and its uses from students of the new French and German military schools. He used spies and eventually went himself, under cover of disguise, into enemy territory to chart and learn the lie of the land. At the time I had marvelled at the letters, at Archie’s enthusiasm for this new type of knowledge, and I had marvelled at the knowledge itself. And I knew what the documents Baillie Buchan was holding out towards me very probably meant. The baillie knew it too, but would have it from my mouth.