Shona MacLEAN - The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

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?’

I awoke the next day to a bright clear Aberdeen morning such as I had known nowhere else. As I lay, hands behind my head, looking up at the curved ceiling, the bell of St Nicholas kirk began to strike the hour: one, two, three … it tolled nine times. Nine o’clock. I could not remember the last time I had slept until this hour. I would have been about my labours in my schoolroom in Banff over two hours by now, ready to send the town boys home for their breakfasts. A pitcher of fresh water had been set by the Delft wash bowl in my room. Someone must have come in with it in the hours since dawn, but I had heard nothing.

My body had been weary after the long ride and its strange meeting, but I had not seen William in nearly a year and there had been an unburdening at my destination, which had left my mind and heart something clearer than they had been for many months. Even as I had entered Aberdeen, with its narrow winding streets of tall houses and its busy lanes of people, dogs and beasts, the stifling feeling that had oppressed me in Banff had begun to lift. And then, once Elizabeth had been finally persuaded that I was not actually ill, and had brought us a fine dinner of roasted capons and cold ham pie, she had left us to the talk of men and of friends, and I had told William my story.

When I had finished, he hesitated. ‘It is,’ he began, ‘something of what I had imagined, although I could not have guessed it all. And you have heard nothing of Katharine since?’

‘Nothing since that last meeting on the road from Fordyce, though for a time I could scarcely remember even that. Now, though, the words are burned on my very soul, every one of them, hers and mine.’

‘You must not dwell on it, Alexander.’

‘That is what Jaffray says, too, in his many different ways that he thinks so subtle.’

William smiled. ‘The doctor’s heart is on his sleeve, and for all his learning and experience of the world he cannot hide it. And yet I think his counsel is good.’

I shrugged. ‘Oh, it is good, but it is counsel easier to offer than to act upon. I have tried with all my strength not to dwell on it. I have tried to drink it out of my mind, my body. I have, in my worst of days, disgraced myself with other women, but in the end the knowledge of it finds me out again.’

I had told him everything, even the last part, that part without which it might have been easier to face myself.

William had guessed, long before Archie himself had, what were my feelings for Katharine. Archie and I had spoken of it for the first and only time on the eve of his departure for the Bohemian Wars. There had been a great feasting and speech-making that night in the town house of the Hays. The great and the good of Aberdeen to burgh and to land had toasted Archie’s family, his valour, his honour and his health, and then toasted them again. Archie and I had been party to many such nights together, but on this occasion I noticed that while he smiled and laughed and joined the toasts, in reality he ate little and drank less, and the smile faded as soon as its recipient turned his or her attention elsewhere. I often wonder now whether Archie knew then that he was going to his death, and that he would not see these faces or the sun set on this town again. The noise of the drinking, the laughing and the music rose, and the light of the fire made faces dance in and out of fleeting shadows. As the company was roaring at a lewd tale of an Edinburgh minister and the wife of a rich Leith merchant, I felt Archie’s hand on my shoulder and he leant towards my ear. ‘Come, Alexander, let us away.’ I do not think anyone noticed us slip out, save Katharine, whose eyes kept count of all I did.

We made our way down the servants’ stairs and out through the kitchen to the backland. Light from the upper windows kept our feet from misadventure in the courtyard, and we slipped through a side gate into the vennel leading to the Broadgate, away from the house. I did not need to ask Archie where we were going – we had used this route often, to escape the eyes first of his parents, then his tutor, and occasionally of any of the town’s officers who might have come to look for him. In a few moments we were out on Broadgate and headed towards Guestrow in the direction of Maisie Johnston’s house. Maisie Johnston had brewed ale in the burgh for forty years, and there was but a handful of burgesses on the council or the session who could deny in truth that they had ever been carried home, incapable, from her parlour or spirited, half dressed, out of her back door when the session on its rounds knocked at the front.

The cur in the yard scarcely stirred as Archie knocked on the back door of the house. It knew of old who was permitted to be here and who was not. The mistress herself opened the door to us, and nodding to me, she led the way up the stairs to an apartment I had never been in before. I had not Archie’s taste for whoring, and my previous visits to Maisie’s house had always stopped at the drinking parlour at the foot of the stairs. It was with some relief, then, that I saw the room she opened to us was unoccupied, and that a table had been set with food and drink and two places. Maisie took a coin from Archie, nodded again and left the room without having uttered a word.

Archie sank down on a settle and let out a huge sigh as the door closed behind her. ‘Thank God, some peace at last.’ This was not his usual style of talking.

‘And since when have you sought peace?’ I asked.

He was silent a long moment. ‘I crave – a kind of peace, an end to the hunting and the dancing and the days of no consequence. I crave a peace that comes when a man finds his place, when he …’ He was searching for the words.