Shona MacLEAN - The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

Mistress Youngson had got up to put more coals on the fire under the pot. She looked over at Edward Arbuthnott, almost fearfully, and spoke in a low voice. ‘It is said that Marion went over again to Darkwater.’

‘Hush, woman; I will not have that nonsense in this house.’

I was truly astonished: I had never before heard Gilbert Grant chastise his wife, nor come anywhere near it.

‘It is what they say,’ she repeated determinedly.

I looked from one to the other in puzzlement. ‘I do not understand,’ I said. ‘Why should it signify, that she has been to Darkwater?’ I saw nothing very odd in her seeking solace there. The long white beach below the rock of Findlater Castle was indeed a beautiful place, and the cliffs would be coloured round with wild yellow primrose and the first pink flushes of thrift just now. I remembered my mother and Jaffray’s wife taking me there once when I had been a boy.

The old couple now looked at me with equal puzzlement. ‘Do you not know, Alexander? But surely you remember?’

‘No,’ said Mistress Youngson. ‘He would have been no more than a bairn, if he was yet born indeed. In fact,’ now she was thinking, hard, ‘he was not even born. It was before his father had ever returned and brought his mother with him from Ireland. As well for her that it was.’

‘Please,’ I said. ‘I have no notion of what you are talking about.’

Mistress Youngson came over to me. ‘It is the wise woman of Darkwater. The one who tended to you when you, when you were …’

‘When I was in my delirium,’ I finished for her. Nobody spoke to me, openly, of that time, when Jaffray had had a message from the old woman of Darkwater that she had found me, wandering, delirious, near the crag of Findlater, and had taken me safe into her home to nurse me. I had very little recollection of it myself; the days between my disgrace at Fordyce and the arrival of Jaffray to take me home to Banff were lost to my memory, and I made little effort to seek them out there.

Mistress Youngson continued. ‘She lives in a sort of shack, does she not? Or a cave at the far end of the beach – I have never been myself so I could not say for sure,’ she added somewhat too hurriedly. ‘She is held by many to be a witch. She sets great store by the healing and holy wells, by secret pools known only to herself. It is said she consorts with the spirits, the wee folk–’

Again Gilbert Grant stopped his wife. The serving girl had returned from Jaffray’s and her eyes were growing wide. ‘To return to the point,’ said the woman, ‘in the last great scare of the witches, before you were born or the old king had gone down to England, the woman of Darkwater was lucky to escape the stake. It was said that only the fear of her great powers and great fellowship with Beelzebub stopped the others from naming her.’

I had heard something of this time, of course, but people did not care to speak much of it. To speak of it too freely might be to give life to the memory, to the fears in people’s breasts, and to start it all again. There was something I had not known of before, though. I looked at the old woman. ‘And what has this to do with my mother? You said it was as well for her that it was past before she ever came here.’

The old couple remained silent, uneasy, not knowing what to say. It was Edward Arbuthnott, almost forgotten in the corner, who spoke up. ‘Because she was different. Like my Marion, your mother was different.’

Mistress Youngson went and sat by him on the bench. ‘Aye, she was.’ She looked at me and smiled. ‘Your mother was tall and beautiful, with her long dark hair, hanging loose, and those grey-green eyes, like your own. She spoke differently; she had different ways. And though she was not a papist, that she was Irish was enough for many. Your father knew it, that she was different, and that it was not well-liked, but he was proud of her for it, until it broke the both of them. There were those who resented her for her marriage, who thought your father would have done better, by himself and by the town, to have taken a local girl to wife.’ She looked away a moment, and I wondered if she had been one of them. ‘This is not an easy place to be different. The longer she was here, the more of an outsider she became. And–’

‘And she would not have fared well at the hands of the witchmongers, I fear.’ I looked at Gilbert Grant, who was looking directly, honestly at me, and I felt cold to my heart.

There was little sound in the room now, save the bubbling of the water starting to boil, and the slow and heavy breathing of Edward Arbuthnott as he looked again into the flames. ‘I do not know why Marion was there,’ he said. ‘At Darkwater. There is no good reason for a young, unmarried girl to visit such a woman. No reason for my girl to have been there. They would have burnt her alive if they could have got her, but they could not; she ended her life before they could take it from her.’

Again the image came to my mind. I spoke in a low voice to Gilbert Grant. ‘Was it at the Elf Kirk? Did she jump in the end from the Elf Kirk?’

Both Grant and his wife turned puzzled frowns on me. ‘At the Elf Kirk? No, boy, surely you have heard. She poisoned herself on the Rose Craig. She was found there, dead, by Geleis Guild and her four children on the evening of the Sabbath; they had gone that way to pick flowers to take to Marion before the service in the kirk. But Marion already had flowers; when they found her, she was wearing a garland of henbane in her hair.’

Henbane: the wanderers awaiting their transportation across the Styx, it was said, had worn henbane in their hair. And in the wilder imaginings of the townfolk, henbane was the special flower of the diabolic, of the witches and warlocks who flew in the night in their satanic ecstasies. But Marion Arbuthnott would have been in no ecstasy. I thought of the provost’s lovely, delicate young wife and of her four pretty children. I remembered the sight that had greeted me across my schoolroom desk only a week ago. It was not fitting that children should see such a thing. I prayed God, sincerely, that he might take the vision of it from their minds. I had not long, I am thankful, to dwell on this, for there was the sound of a familiar commotion from the front parlour and soon James Jaffray was showing himself into the schoolhouse kitchen. With no needless greeting or ceremony he went directly to where the apothecary sat and knelt before him, taking his left hand in his own and putting the other to the man’s forehead. ‘You are ill, my friend. There is a fever coming on you. We must get you quickly to your bed. Your wife can prepare the simples?’

Arbuthnott tried to rally himself. ‘I will take mallow; there is always some ready for the fevers.’

The doctor nodded. ‘I will see to it also that she prepares you a dish of rhubarb. And a decoction of melancholy thistle in some wine. It will revive your spirits a little.’

The apothecary nodded wearily. ‘For myself, I wish for nothing now other than death, but the woman cannot manage on her own. Without myself or Marion, she would be destitute. But for myself, for myself,’ watery eyes now stared at some distant private vision, ‘all is gone.’

‘Come now,’ said Jaffray kindly, ‘you are still needed in the town. I have not half your knowledge of medicines and cures, and there is no one else now.’

Arbuthnott raised bitter eyes towards him. ‘And do you think I would lift a hand to help any one of them, after what they have done to my beautiful girl?’

‘Not all, now.’

‘No,’ the man conceded, ‘not all.’

We left the kitchen then to the doctor and the apothecary and the mistress, who stayed to help bathe the sick man and persuade him to take a little warm broth before he should move out in the cold again. A spare suit of Gilbert Grant’s clothing was found for him; my own only spare set of clothes was on my back, my other now being pummelled by the maidservant in a tub in the backyard. I should have been more thoughtful before taking to my night-swimming. It had done me little good.