Shona MacLEAN - The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

Others were brought under arms also to the town jail, ringleaders or those thought to still have trouble in mind. In time the tolbooth was full to overflowing, and the dungeon of the castle was also brought into play. There would be much work for the session, the burgh court and then the sheriff when he returned to town in five days’ time, or sooner, surely.

I do not know how long it took to douse and dull the flames, or when they cut what was left of the broken body of Marion Arbuthnott down from its charred stake and carried her, covered in the town’s mortcloth, to the vault of St Mary’s kirk. When I saw that the provost and Thomas Stewart, with the neighbouring ministers and the lawmakers of our town had matters under control and no longer needed my help, I stole away from the market cross. I did not go directly to the schoolhouse, but went down past the kirk and the music school towards Low Shore. It was dark now, a pitch darkness at first, after the astonishing brilliance of the bonfire, but I knew my way of old. I had to get myself clean. I walked away from the town and what lights there were and went down to the shore itself. I took off my hat, my boots and my cloak, and stepped into the glacial waters. Wave after gentle wave came to me and I continued to walk out, until the water was so deep I could walk no more. Numb to my bones with the cold, I turned and lay on my back, floating, looking up at the clear, full moon. The night sky was the same, the same as it had always been. It reigned impassive over the folly and the futility of man below. And over me. I floated as long as I could, wondering at the corruptibility of God’s earthly creation, but it was no use; I would never be clean. I swam back to the shore. As I wrapped my soaking self in my cloak, I caught the smell of smoke still in my hair.

And the smell was still in my hair now, this morning, as I led the apothecary away from the scene of his daughter’s last degradation to the decency of the schoolhouse. There would be no school today; Gilbert Grant had taken the authority upon himself. ‘But what of the session, of the council?’ his wife had asked, for once fearful and caring of the general opinion.

‘Let them look to what business they have on hand and I will look to mine. There is a spiral of madness, of fear in the town, and it must be brought under control; it must be stopped. The town itself must stop a moment before we all rush headlong to the abyss, shoving our neighbours before us and dragging our friends behind us in some blind folly. I will not hold the school until some sense and godly order is re-established in this town, and no mother in her senses would send her child away from her own skirts until the evil is rooted out.’ But what was the evil and where did its roots lie? To root it out it must be known, and there was further to go before we knew it.

Mistress Youngson was glad to see me back. I had disturbed the house in my drenched homecoming last night and slipped away without eating this morning. The darker events in the town became, the less wicked I became in her eyes, and she now showed herself solicitous of my welfare. Once she had set water on the fire to heat for the apothecary, and called for dry blankets to clothe him in, she set two steaming bowls of porridge before us and bid us eat. The apothecary took nothing, did not even seem to notice the spoon in his hand, but I was ravenous and had emptied my plate in little time at all.

‘Where did you find him?’ she asked quietly.

I told her.

‘He had been there all night?’

‘I do not know. I think so. God help him.’

‘Amen to that. He has lost his only light in this world. She was all his pride and his treasure. It is a wonder if he does not lose his mind also.’ It was Gilbert Grant who spoke. He turned to call for the serving girl. ‘We must send for Jaffray.’

‘I have sent her for him already,’ said his wife.

I had not sat like this, familiar, in the schoolhouse kitchen for a long time, but it did not seem strange to do so now. Neither Gilbert Grant nor his wife had asked anything of my business in Aberdeen; I had little interest myself in those matters for the moment. My baggage and packages from the journey lay in my chamber, brought there by Jaffray’s stable boy last night before I had returned from my night swimming. We sat in silence. Even Mistress Youngson, who was seldom at rest, was still and quiet. ‘How did it come to this?’ I asked at length.

The schoolmaster heaved himself to his feet and took a spill from the fire to light his pipe – something the mistress would have forbidden on other days. ‘How long have you been gone, Alexander? Four days, five?’

I calculated. ‘I left for Aberdeen on Thursday morning, early, and returned last night. Five days.’

‘And yet it might have been a lifetime. A great pestilence has crept through this town in these five days.’ He thought a while, wearily. ‘There was a fearfulness brewing before you left. From the time the death of Patrick Davidson was noised about. You must have marked it?’

I had not. I had been too taken up in events to realise how their consequences were infiltrating the minds of my townsfolk and feeding their ready capacity for fear.

The old man continued. ‘The authorities had Charles thrown in the tolbooth soon enough, but there are more than ourselves who believe him innocent. It is of little comfort to them that an innocent man lies in chains while a murderer walks the streets.’

‘And he is still there.’

‘Aye,’ said the mistress, ‘but better there than in the hands of that mob last night. Who knows where next they might have turned?’

And if they had not been checked in their witch-hunt, who would have been safe in the cold clarity of daylight? The flames and the heat and the darkness might send madness to men’s minds, but the daylight made them think themselves sane, and I knew that the witch-hunt legitimated by the light of day was a terrible thing. I did not wish to pursue this thought. ‘When did they turn on Marion?’ I asked. I did not much lower my voice; next to us he might have been, but Edward Arbuthnott had no notion of who was in the room with him or of what we said.

Gilbert Grant sighed. ‘The ground was prepared before ever the boy was dead. There were rumours, voices raised at the session, about Marion and Patrick and their wanderings over the country. Arbuthnott gave assurances they were on plant-gathering expeditions, for his simples and compounds, but others of meaner minds saw debauchery, and finally witchcraft at the bottom of it. They were seen in places where it is best for those under suspicion not to be seen – the Elf Kirk, by the minister himself, it was said. They were seen at Darkwater and even, it was said, at Ordiquhill.’

The image of Marion Arbuthnott high above the rocks at the Elf Kirk on the day after Patrick Davidson had been found dead came back, like the ghost of the girl herself, to my mind. But for the rest, I thought of the maps. It made sense that they should have been there, at Darkwater, that hidden stretch of beach below the fastness of Findlater, or at Ordiquhill, on the road from there to Huntly’s stronghold in Strathbogie. But Gilbert Grant had not been privy to the full discussion of the maps we had found, and I did not wish to endanger him or his wife by telling him more of the matter. That was a consideration for another time: for the present, Gilbert Grant was disposed to talk on.

‘When the boy was killed, and Jaffray pronounced the cause to be poison, there were many who saw no need to look any further for the evildoer than the apothecary’s shop, for who knew better the properties of plants than Marion Arbuthnott?’ I had not been aware of this growth of suspicion in the town, so caught up had I been in events. Gilbert Grant continued, ‘And it was seen, too, that those in authority also had their fears of Marion: the baillie and the doctor were at odds over her person just as the provost and the minister were last night over her soul. It was easily seen that the baillie suspected her of a hand in the deed, for he was rarely away from Arbuthnott’s door. Jaffray matched him in his constancy – he was there almost as often as the baillie. The doctor is known for a softness towards young women, an indulgence of their faults. The more he was seen to be protecting Marion from the baillie, the darker became the people’s guesses at what she might know. And yet,’ his voice faltered, and for a moment I thought he had lost the thread of what he was saying; I was wrong, for he continued, clear and with an unwonted bitterness, ‘still she managed to slip away. It is said she wandered the country in a state of distraction. People were afraid. Soon, the great storm of the night of the murder was ascribed to the conjuring of Marion Arbuthnott to cover her foul deeds. Then there were claims that she had been seen again at the Elf Kirk, conjuring black currents under the sea. On Saturday night a fishing boat from Seatoun bound for home before the Sabbath was lost on the rocks in calm seas. Only by God’s grace did the men on board make it in safety to the shore.’