Shona MacLEAN - The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

Before our laughter had died down, or the session clerk had mastered his evident fury, the door to the inn burst open and Jaffray’s stable boy, utterly drenched, stumbled through it. The look of urgency on his face cut our laughter dead. ‘Doctor, you must come. Lady Deskford is in child-bed at Findlater. His lordship urges you to make haste.’

Jaffray drained the last of his glass as he swung his cloak around him. ‘For the love of God, on a night like this.’

I put out a hand to stop him. ‘James, this is madness; you will never make it to Findlater tonight.’ Findlater Castle stood impregnable, cut fifty feet into an eighty-foot rock, nine miles to the east of Banff, glowering out over the Firth towards Sutherland, Caithness and beyond. So impregnable was it in fact as to be virtually uninhabitable. His lordship had built for his family a fine new house at Cullen, but his mother refused to shift, and insisted on keeping her daughter-in-law with her.

The doctor brushed my hand away as his servant handed him his still-wet hat. ‘If I do not make it, Alexander, neither will she. That last bairn damn near killed her. It’s time Deskford took himself a mistress and let that girl alone.’ And with that he strode out, with never a backward glance to the company, on whom an astonished silence had fallen, save for the unmistakable sound of James Cardno almost choking on his watery ale.

I stayed in the inn another half-hour or so, no one bothering me. With little remaining to take his interest, Cardno had left not long after the second of my companions, and I was left to my thoughts undisturbed. What I paid out on drink in the Market Inn would have been better spent on coals for the unlit fire in my own hearth. Mistress Youngson had given up telling me so – I was a cause lost. Nine months ago I would not have thought of spending my evenings drinking here. It might pass – just – for James Jaffray or Charles Thom, but it would not pass for the minister of the Kirk of Scotland that I had then aspired to be. And yet, I was as well drinking here as I would be sitting by my own hearth, for I had no calling now. And how was such a life to be lived? I ordered another glass of the Rhenish and swallowed it down quickly. If the storm still raged I would scarcely feel it.

Once out of the inn I was grateful as ever that the journey to my lodgings was a short one. Despite the hour and the undiminished severity of the elements there were other creatures abroad on High Shore as I made my way home. Even on such a night as this, the girls of the street sought to earn their living. The council and the session claimed not to tolerate ‘whore-mongering’ within their bounds, but Mary Dawson and her sister Janet had too much knowledge of too many of them to fall subject to any but the mildest correction. Discretion was their part of the bargain silently struck with the guardians of our burgh’s stability and morals. They called to me from the shelter of the kirkyard.

‘Mr Seaton, would you not like something to warm you on this awful night? That must be a cold bed you keep in the schoolhouse.’

The righteous apoplexy of Mistress Youngson should she ever find one of the town’s whores, or indeed any woman, in my bed, made the prospect seem almost worthwhile. Almost. ‘As ever, ladies, I can’t decide between you, and I wouldn’t slight either of you for all the world.’

Janet’s siren voice replied, ‘Nobody’s asking you to choose, Mr Seaton,’ followed by a good-natured cackle from the sisters.

It was an offer they’d made more than once before, and one I had never yet been tempted to accept. ‘You would only break me,’ I returned, throwing them the last shilling from my pouch.

‘You’re the only decent man in Banff, Mr Seaton …’ and the rest of their words were lost in the wind as I pressed on, the wine and warmth from the inn piloting me home.

As I neared the schoolhouse I noticed a fellow traveller on the other side of the road, at the foot of Water Path. He raised a hand as if to hail me, but his equilibrium failed him and he stumbled to his knees. He called something to me as he tried to right himself, but I did not wait to hear. The Good Samaritan pounded on my conscience, but I had seen myself home in worse condition than his more than once, and on worse nights than this. Winning to my own bed was a more pressing concern than helping a stranger to his. The good sisters would rob him, of course, if he had not spent all his money on drink that night, but they would see him to shelter before they did so. Turning into the pend at the side of the schoolhouse, I locked the gate behind me and left the fellow to his fate.

As ever at this hour, the schoolhouse was all in darkness. My eyes were practised in seeing through the night gloom. I checked on my schoolroom as I passed. The worn and barren benches echoed to me the incantations of the ghosts of schoolboys past, myself included. Amo, amas, amat … amo; amo; amo . All was empty and still. The stove was cold, but I knew John Durno would remember his duty as usher and have it lit before I descended again in a few hours to resume my labours.

Thirty-seven steps in darkness to the top of the house and my small and sparsely furnished room. I found my bed without the aid of lamp or candle as I had done many times since that night last summer when I had finally returned, after much wandering, from the meeting of the brethren in Fordyce. Not a minister then, or ever, but condemned always to my schoolmaster’s robe. Mistress Youngson’s celebratory dinner had lain cold and uneaten on the table two floors below. The rats had it in the end. No need now to toil late at my desk on my Greek, my Hebrew, my Syriac. The midnight oil no longer required to be burnt, so my lamp remained dark. Yet still, as I had done each night since then, I prayed, trying to reach God, trying to reach to that place where faith is. But, as it had been each night, that place was empty. And still I did not know where else to go. The withdrawal of God left me no means to justify my place in this world but to start again. And that beginning was always tomorrow.

My usual sleep was sound and featureless, and I seldom had any awareness of night passing into morning. This night, though, the intermittent banging of the shutters in the storm permeated my consciousness and I pulled the bedclothes ever tighter round me. As the first stray shafts of daylight made their way through my attic window, the banging grew more insistent and I gradually became aware of my own name being called with rising urgency. It was my landlady.

‘Mr Seaton, Mr Seaton, for the love of God, wake up. Patrick Davidson lies dead in your schoolroom. Mr Seaton …’

And it was so. The stench reached my nostrils before my foot ever reached the bottom of the stair. Mistress Youngson had waited for me as I groped for my cloak and threw it over my shoulders, and she had led the way downstairs by the light of her candle, but when we reached the door of my schoolroom she hung back, as if not wanting to attract Death’s attention. I moved past her into the dimly lit room. The windows to the west that afforded some light to my scholars for the greater part of the day remained shuttered. The only candle was at the far end of the room, in the hand of her husband, Gilbert Grant, my friend and master in the grammar school of Banff. He had taught every scholar to come from the town in the last forty years, but now, in truth, I performed more and more of his duties as the weariness of age crept over him. He raised his eyes towards me and said sadly, ‘The boy is dead, Alexander; he is dead.’

His wife, still keeping to the doorway, added, ‘I have sent the lad for Dr Jaffray.’

I shook my head slowly as I drew closer. ‘Jaffray is not there. He was called out late last night, to Findlater …’ There was little point in continuing. I could see that Jaffray’s skills were, for Davidson, by several hours redundant now. The lifeless form of Patrick Davidson slumped across my desk, his head to one side in a pool of his own vomit, had a strange inevitability to it. The left arm stretched, palm outwards, in front of him, in an ultimately futile effort to support his head; the right hung down to his side, a few stray blades of the same grass that swam in the vomit before him still sticking between the fingers. I had never met the apothecary’s apprentice, but the agonised features of the corpse now lying not eight yards from where I stood were, I knew, also those of the man whom I had left in the gutter the night before. I had known from the moment I had stumbled from my bed that they would be. God had started with me a new game.