Shona MacLEAN - The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

‘Then I will not keep you.’

‘But tell me first,’ I said. ‘How was Charles when you saw him?’

Jaffray sighed deeply. ‘He was … less sanguine than I had hoped to find him. He sees little prospect of success in our endeavours to free him. And I fear he is getting ill.’

‘Any man would get ill in that festering hole.’

‘Indeed. Ishbel’s clean blankets can only do so much against the cold and the damp in that place, and he has been a week now without proper exercise. Being parted from his music and, strange to say, his pupils, affects him too, I think. I fear he might take a fever and not have the will to defeat it.’ Then a thought came to him that cheered him somewhat. ‘You must see him today though, Alexander. They will surely let you see him?’

‘Have no fear over that,’ I said. ‘They will let me see him or they will know nothing of my business in Aberdeen or at Straloch. But I doubt if there will be much room in the tolbooth after last night.’

‘No. No more in Hell, either,’ Jaffray added bitterly. He opened the door and shouted through the house for some kindling to be brought for his fire.

‘Do you think there is anything in what Mistress Youngson hinted at? That if Charles had not been secure in the tolbooth they would have turned on him last night too?’

Jaffray looked up from his efforts with the fire. ‘I am certain of it. You did not see them at their height, Alexander. They were like a pack of wolves. We had very little warning of it. I was carrying out the examination. Her mother insisted on it – against Arbuthnott’s wishes – but his wife was certain her daughter would never have taken her own life.’

‘And had she? Did you have time to discover that much?’

Jaffray looked at me. ‘I did, and she had not. I am as certain as I can now ever be that she died by the same method as Patrick Davidson, and by the same hand.’

‘How can you know that?’

‘The vomit, the contortions in the face, the signs that paralysis had begun to take hold – they were all the same. And yet I could not get very far, to find better proof, before the baillie burst through the door. I did not understand him at first; I thought he had lost his senses.’ The scene was being replayed in his mind. ‘“Jaffray, they are coming. Cover her up. For the love of God, man, they are coming for her!” And before I knew what he was rambling about, the minister and Cardno and a whole mob of them were through the door. They had pushed the lad aside and Ishbel was knocked to the ground. They near trampled the baillie underfoot till they got to me and stopped. They commanded me – the minister did – to leave off my examination and give them her body. I refused. I told them my work was none of their concern and to get out of my house. And then they pushed me aside too. The mob would have had their hands in her very entrails had the minister not started shrieking at them to leave off, lest they be tainted with the witch’s blood. And then at last, I understood. It was the witch-hunt, and the baillie had come to warn me of it. It was over in moments. They had smashed the place up and taken her naked body from the slab and were gone, and the baillie had gone too, to take horse for Boyndie, where the presbytery was meeting, and the moderator, to try to stop them in their madness. And then you came and we were in the state that you found us in.’ He was breathing hard now, and his hands were shaking. The stable boy came in with the kindling for the fire and I saw the bruise on his face from where he had been knocked aside the night before.

‘Will you bring the doctor some of his port wine?’ I asked him. ‘And Adam?’

‘Yes, Mr Seaton?’

‘Are you all right yourself now?’

The boy blinked and bit his lip. ‘Yes, sir. I am fine.’

‘Who was it that hit you?’

‘It was Lang Geordie.’

The same Lang Geordie who had warned Janet and Mary Dawson away from Banff. ‘The beggar man? What had he to do with it all?’

The boy looked at me in surprise. ‘It was him who was first through the door, sir. After the baillie and before the minister. They say in the town that it was Lang Geordie who first set up the cry of witch.’

After he had come with the wine and gone again, I asked Jaffray something that it shamed me to ask, but which I had to know.

‘Do you think she was, James?’

‘What?’

‘Do you think Marion Arbuthnott was a witch?’

He got up heavily and stood looking out through the window to his garden. ‘No. She was not a witch: she was a young girl with a knowledge of herbs and flowers, who was prettier, and more intelligent than most of the girls of her age, and who did not care to waste her time on mixing with them. She was the companion and friend instead of the wife of the provost, and she took up with a boy who had been here and left to travel to mysterious lands. And that was more than this town would allow.’

Yet still I could not leave it. ‘But why then did she go to the wise woman of Darkwater? Not only with Patrick Davidson, but alone herself, after he was dead?’ A silence hung where there had never before been silence between us.

‘Did you get her to speak to you, James, after his death?’

‘Yes,’ he conceded at last. ‘Just the one time, she spoke to me, but there was nothing she said that touched on our business or Charles’s.’

I had never seen him like this before, and was not convinced that he was not keeping something from me. ‘What did she tell you, James?’

The doctor did not turn to look at me when he replied. ‘There are things that are no longer of this world – that it is only for the dead to know.’

It was with heavy steps and a heavier heart that I climbed Strait Path to the Castlegate where the provost’s house was to be found. He had left word at the tolbooth that he could not wait longer on me there and had to go home to his wife. I had little inclination now to waste further time and effort on his errands, and little interest, if truth were told, in the question of his nephew’s maps and papist plots. There were greater dangers, greater evils being made manifest before us as we woke and walked and slept in this very town than anything that threatened from without or in the future. And horrible as the death of Patrick Davidson had seemed to begin with, it was worse now, and perhaps there would be worse to come. What Charles had most feared had come to pass. Marion Arbuthnott was dead and that death was part of the chain that had begun with that of Patrick Davidson.

The burgh, as far as I could see, was returning to its usual state and rhythm of life, the only sign of last night’s debauch being the whiff of smoked wood the wind carried with it. But perhaps, as Gilbert Grant had hinted, such perversions had always been lurking in the hearts of my fellow townsmen, never far beneath the surface of their neighbourliness and godliness. How easily the good neighbours had taken up the call of Lang Geordie, an idle beggar, a masterless man, usually feared and reviled. How ready they had been to follow the lead of one they would gladly otherwise have seen hounded from the burgh. I banged on the door of the provost’s house, the noise loud and echoing in the empty street.

Walter Watt himself opened the door to me. He had a dishevelled air and his eyes were shot through with redness from lack of sleep. He also carried with him the smell of smoke from last night. I realised the man had not yet been to his bed, and I felt a little shamefaced.

‘I am sorry I did not come to meet with you at the appointed time.’

He waved away my apology as he left me to shut the door behind myself. ‘I would not have had the leisure to see you much earlier than now anyway. I have been busy with the baillie and the dean of guild most of the morning.’