Shona MacLEAN - The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

As for Katharine, Katharine was all but forgotten in those first weeks. She was left, frozen in her own grief, a loved younger child but no compensation for the heir that was lost. So engulfed was I during those early weeks in the maelstrom of grieving at Delgatie that I did not see it at first, but Katharine did. Katharine, the sole heir to Delgatie, must marry now, and marry well. No minister, nor bishop even, but land and family. The heirs of Delgatie would spring not from the son but from his sister, and all my hopes lay with Archie where he had fallen.

There was no one to speak for us. A relative was found, an old, wealthy, childless relative. Katharine would be despatched to his Borders tower-house to marry him and bear him children and return one day, or send her son, to hold Delgatie for the Hays. She understood; I understood. There was no pleading, no begging not to be sent to the cold bed of a man so old he might have been her father, no protest that one day I would be a man whom their daughter might, with no dishonour, marry. All that was gone.

Fate, in all her wilful cruelty, or helped along perhaps by Katharine’s now fearful and watchful parents, decreed that the day of my final trials at Fordyce should be the day of Katharine’s departure for her Borders jail. We had four weeks, a month of warning, but in that month I could only see her once. My preparations for the final trial, my work in the school, and Katharine’s farewell progress round the ladies and castles of Banff, Moray and the Garioch gave us but one day, and one night. Wary as she was by now, Archie’s mother could not refuse me that last hospitality. His lordship was away from home, but she watched us; we were scarcely left alone together two minutes in the day.

And then, in the darkness of the night, I stole to Katharine’s chamber and for the first and only time I took her as my wife, and told her she would always be my wife and mine only. And we slept, naked under the cover, entwined in each other’s arms. I had not meant to fall asleep. I should not have fallen asleep and slumbered with her those long hours till dawn. The light of the early May morning and the singing of the birds gradually began to play upon my eyes and ears. The perfect warmth and comfort of waking with Katharine still in my arms was slowly replaced by a dawning horror that I should not still be here. And as I opened my eyes, Katharine’s head and loosened hair across my bare chest, her pale arm on my shoulder, I was met by the horror of Lady Hay’s face. Her skin was drained of all colour save grey. She moved her mouth but no words would come. Her eyes were filled with the cold disaster of the scene before her. And then she spoke. Slowly, quietly. ‘Get out. You are filth. Get out.’ And then the woman who had loved me as a son staggered from the room and vomited.

And that had been my parting from Katharine, less than three weeks before my final trial for the ministry. I do not know how I kept my senses. A lie. I know how I kept my senses. I had lost the man who would have called himself my brother; I had lost the woman who should have been my wife. I had betrayed my childhood. Everything of my heart, what I had understood as my kin, was closed to me. Yet I still had my calling; I had always had my calling. Even in my one night with Katharine I had told myself there was no sin, because I had meant her for my wife. I did not acknowledge my wrong. Parted from her, I might have been convulsed with grief. Yet I had my calling and my trials were before me. I threw myself still deeper into my books. In those three weeks, less, I turned the Bible on its head and turned it back again. I composed the sermon of my life. There could be no chance of failure, of rejection. I would live for and through my calling. And this I believed until the words were in the mouth of the Moderator of the Presbytery of Fordyce that would have licensed me to preach as a minister of the Kirk of Scotland. And in that moment all tranquillity, all that I still understood in the world was shattered by the cry of my Lord Hay of Delgatie. His wife had finally broken and told him that very morning what I had done, and he had ridden to Fordyce with all the devils in Hell at his heels. He would die before he would see me a minister. He would throw in my face my betrayal of himself and of his family and every single thing they had done for me through all the years of my life. He laid not a finger on me, but before the brethren I was as a man beaten into a stupor. The moderator, aghast, pleading in his eyes, asked me to defend myself. But I could not utter a word. I had no answer for my accuser, for there was none left to give. My dignity lost, I stumbled from the kirk of Fordyce.

This much, or the gist of it, William Cargill had known, or guessed. Knowing of old of my feelings for Katharine, he had known what Archie’s death would mean for us. The whole of the North knew of my humbling, my great fall, at Fordyce. But if my humiliation had been public, Katharine’s was worse. What was not known was guessed at, and whispered on the roads, in the inns, in the great halls of castles and at the firesides of hovels. Her name was bartered by those who were not worthy even to look on her face. Many wild theories abounded, until the people had some new scandal to keep their tongues active and their spirits content, but I had destroyed what I most loved, and Katharine, banished to that cold marriage bed, could never come back to Delgatie again.

William and I had never spoken of it before last night. ‘And for this, for what many men have done, ministers among them indeed, you were cast out from your brethren and they will never let you become a minister? Alexander, it is hypocrisy, and you should not bend to it. Why, Delgatie himself was a notorious adulterer in his younger days.’

I had heard this argument before, from Charles Thom, who had also guessed aright at the heart of the scandal. Jaffray had not argued in such a way, for he knew me better. ‘No, the hypocrisy has been mine, William. My Lord Hay is the head of a family, a magnate, a soldier, a leader of men. What he does in his bed or any other is of no consequence. Yet I sought to be a minister in God’s Kirk, to lead people from the path of damnation to the blessed assurance of righteousness. I knew what I did was wrong. And such was my arrogance in the face of God that I thought it did not matter because it was I who did it. And …’

‘And what?’

‘It was a betrayal. And my every memory of my whole life up to that point is coloured now by the knowledge of that betrayal. There is nothing in me that is not rotten.’

William would not allow this. ‘No, I will not have it. You did what other men, worse men have done. You loved the girl and she you. God in his Providence decreed she should not be your wife. In that at least, you may be wretched, but you are not rotten, for it was no work of yours that killed Archie and took Katharine from you.’

If this had only been so, I might have found myself a more tolerable being. But it was not so. William did not know it; no one knew it, save myself and Katharine. I had had a chance, only a chance, to hold onto the shreds of my life and to make of it something new. But I had rejected it, left it in the gutter. For, on the day of my fall at Fordyce, Katharine too had ridden from Delgatie. She had taken the finest horse left in the stables and she had ridden as no woman before her could have ridden. It availed her nothing. She could not catch her father’s party; she could not overtake him or plead my cause before the brethren as she had sworn to her mother she would do. By the time she arrived at Fordyce the kirk and kirkyard were empty and the brethren gone. She asked all about, but no one could tell her where I was or which way I had gone. Eventually, she came across a pedlar who had seen me on the road to Sandend. It did not take her long to find me then. I was on foot, and my form as well known to her as her own. We had not seen each other since that early morning in her chamber at Delgatie. How often since then I had meditated on the words, taken from the book of Proverbs and painted on the beams of that room’s ceiling: ‘If thou does labour in honesty, the labour goes, the honour bides with thee. If thou does any vice allow, the shame remains when pleasure is ago.’ The shame was burning now into me, burning my eyes so I could scarcely see. And the shame engendered in me a kind of madness, I think. There on the road she slid from her mount and took a step towards me.