Shona MacLEAN - The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

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.