Shona MacLEAN - The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

Jaffray raised a good-natured eyebrow. ‘And you think I am not the more interesting for it? I assure you, I was more of a dullard than Cardno there before I left on my peregrinatio.’

This at least drew a smile from Charles, and I was hard put not to laugh out loud myself, aware as I was of the session clerk’s scowl burning into my back. The wind continued to howl through the shutters and down the great chimney-piece of the inn, muffling the conversations rising and falling in Mistress Johnston’s parlour. In between occasional arguments over the roll of the dice the shore porters pondered gloomily on the likelihood of the storm abating before the week’s end. No boat could drop anchor in the harbour in such weather and none could leave. With no work, there would be no wages. All along the coast it would be the same.

‘The poor box will be out for them before the week’s end,’ said Jaffray, nodding to Anne Johnston to send them over another round of ale.

‘There will be little enough in it,’ said Charles, not lifting his head from his tankard.

‘Oh? Who have you been asking for?’

‘John Barclay,’ replied Charles. ‘The boy has the voice of a very angel, and not a pair of shoes to his feet. In another age and another place, he would have a stall in a cathedral choir; he would be singing masses for the rich dead. But here, in this godly commonwealth of ours …’

‘He is safe from the tentacles of the idolater, and he can rely on the Christian charity of God’s people and the kirk to keep food in his belly and a coat to his back.’

Charles looked to the doctor in mute incomprehension, but Jaffray sat tight-lipped now, only with his eyes directing Charles to where the session clerk sat, storing up his every word.

‘Amen to that,’ said Charles, instantly understanding, his precentor’s mask descending over the mischievous, amused, subversive face he reserved for myself and Jaffray and few others. As master of the song school he received no salary at all, but only the tuition fees of those of his pupils who could afford to pay him. As a perquisite of his post, however, allowing him to scrape a living, he was constrained to take up the psalm in the burgh kirk and to read the lesson there, all for the greater edification of the townspeople. The look of abject misery that settled on his person while performing these duties was born, I knew, of a profound lack of interest in the sentiments he was paid to intone and of an intense dislike of the cold. To those of Presbyterian inclination on the council and the kirk session, however, his demeanour accorded so completely with their own that John Knox himself could not have pleased them better.

My friend’s ambitions were simple: to be left to himself and his music. His lack of concern for the good of his soul had given me much anguish in the days before my own fall. Yet, over this last year, Jaffray and I had remarked in him an alteration of spirit, the alteration that comes when a man realises that he no longer wishes to be alone. Edward Arbuthnott, apothecary of Banff, under whose roof Charles lodged, had a daughter, and with that daughter, as Jaffray had now convinced me, Charles was in love. But, like myself, Charles had few prospects of making his way to a more prosperous estate in life, and while Edward Arbuthnott was not an unduly ambitious man, he was as likely to give him his only daughter in marriage as James Cardno was to buy me a drink.

I swallowed some of the Rhenish Anne Johnston had brought me and asked casually, ‘So you think Marion is beguiled by the new arrival?’

Charles eyed me grudgingly. ‘Her mother certainly is. To that old besom Patrick Davidson is a prayer answered. Old Arbuthnott has years in him yet, but his wife cannot look at him without seeing six feet of good kirkyard earth piled over him, and herself and her daughter out on the street. She’ll have Marion married to Patrick Davidson the minute he’s finished his apprenticeship, and Arbuthnott can drop dead the next day for all she will care.’

It was not difficult to believe this of the matron in question, and indeed there was little purpose in arguing the point with Charles. Even Jaffray could see that. The sense of Marion Arbuthnott marrying her father’s apprentice and keeping the business in the family was self-evident. The girl had no brothers, and her mother was no prize on her own. ‘And Marion? What does she think?’

He was hesitant. ‘Who can tell? I think, maybe, she would not mind the idea.’

‘Ach, come now, Charles.’

Charles looked at Jaffray. ‘No, doctor. I fear I am right. Since Patrick Davidson came to lodge with the Arbuthnotts I have rarely seen her, and I have spoken to her less. At mealtimes he regales us all with tales of his travels. Of France, and the Alps, and of what’s left of the Empire. He is a good storyteller, I’ll grant you. And the war,’ he lowered his voice, ‘he tells us of the horrors of the war.’

The apothecary’s apprentice had not been the first to make his way to our corner of Scotland with tales of the brutality, the starvation, the rapine and the disease that marched the length and breadth of the Holy Roman Empire. Sons, brothers, friends had left our shores to fight for the Empire or against and had never come home. The frequent call of the kirk for collections to sustain our suffering brethren abroad kept the cause in minds that might have preferred to shut it out. It was in Charles’s mind, I knew, and the tales of suffering he had heard from Patrick Davidson, with whom he now shared his attic room at the apothecary’s, had engraved images in his head he would not share or indeed acknowledge. He sought to change the subject.

‘Anyhow, by night he plays the great hero while I can only play my tunes – the half of them banned by the minister and his godly brethren. And by day, well, by day while I spend my talent trying to wrest a tune from the urchins of this burgh or courting an early death in the freezing cold of that kirk, he trails Marion halfway across the country gathering berries and plants and the Lord alone knows what else for her father’s simples and syrups and ointments.’

Jaffray put a warning hand on his arm. ‘Mind what you say, Charles. It has been spoken of already at the session and Cardno’s ears are strained to your every word.’

The other’s expression darkened. ‘What have you heard?’

‘There are those who suspect the virtue of every unmarried woman, and,’ the doctor added quietly, ‘that is to say nothing of the witch-mongers.’

I saw the embers of an old terror flicker in Charles Thom’s eyes, and he had the sense to say nothing more. He knew that Jaffray was no gossip, but the sickbed was a tremendous place for the imparting of news. The doctor missed nothing. The warning had been given and would be heeded. Through the noise of the storm, the bell over the tolbooth chimed as the town clock struck nine, and Charles drained the last of his ale. ‘Anyway, gentlemen, I must leave you. This is no night for aching hearts.’ He gathered up his hat and cloak and left, his face thunderous, not pausing to respond to James Cardno’s scarcely audible ‘Goodnight’.

The door closed behind him and I was able to observe the doctor in one of his rare moments of rest. His short-cropped grey hair gave away something of his fifty years, but his brows were still dark and his eyes alert, and to me he had the strength and vigour of a man half his age. Perhaps I saw only what I wished to see. Conscious of Cardno’s interest in our conversation, we drank our wine in silence until a noisy dispute at the hearth over a suspect roll of the dice allowed us to take it up again, in low voices.

‘Do they really speak of witchcraft?’

‘They are ever vigilant. The new king shows less interest in it than his father once did, but it is a canker all the same and I doubt if it will ever be cut out.’