Shona MacLEAN - The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

‘The baillie is recovered, then?’ I asked in surprise. I had not thought to ask Jaffray about his patient of last night.

He eyed me shrewdly. ‘The baillie is a man driven. Where others would have buckled and collapsed, he sustains himself on a determination not of woman born. I would have no fears for the baillie.’

‘The dean of guild, last night, I did not notice …’ again my voice trailed away. I did not know which side the leader of all our burgh’s craftsmen had taken.

The provost took my meaning straight away, though. ‘He was with us, thank God. If he had not been, we would be in a worse case than we are already in.’

I thought of the quietly industrious burgh I had passed through that morning. ‘You think the commerce of the town will suffer?’ I said.

He smiled at me, but there was no humour in his eyes. ‘You are a man of learning, Mr Seaton, but a craftsman’s son also. You must know that nothing passes within the burgh that does not in some manner affect trade and good government. And, I would suspect, your mind was much on other matters this morning. Did you, for instance, pass the coopers’ yard?’

I confessed that I had not.

‘How many of the baxters were calling their wares in the marketplace this morning? And were you, by chance, out by the tannery? Can you smell them?’ Sometimes, with the wind blowing from the west, the nauseating smells of the tanners’ work were wafted down to the burgh itself, and could be caught in the air and in the throat. But not today. The provost was watching me and saw that I began to understand.

‘Half the tanners are in the tolbooth. With three of the baxters. Master and apprentice alike. Most of the coopers, along with the chandlers and God knows how many of the domestic servants in the burgh, as well as two or three merchants whose names would surprise you, have been parcelled out between the laird of Banff’s strong room and the castle dungeon. Had the moderator and his brethren been half an hour later, the back of the burgh would have broken under the strain. It was curbed with scarcely more minutes to spare.’ He looked at me and spoke with a coldness that sent a shiver through my body. ‘They were at the point of going after the living as well as the dead. Your friend Charles Thom would not have survived the night, had their madness been allowed to grow. And then we would have had more murderers on our hands than all the dungeons in Banff can hold. The town is quiet today, yes, but it is not at rest.’

‘And how will you act?’ I asked, for it was plain that no other man in Banff could guide the affairs of the town out of the morass they had fallen into.

He rubbed a wearied hand across his brow. ‘Oh, the most of them will come before the baillie court in the morning. There will be fines to pay, and reparations to be made – to the doctor’s house, and the marketplace and other things damaged last night – though God knows nothing can be done for Arbuthnott himself. Then they will be passed on to what remains of the kirk session, for more fines and public penance, and then they will be left to go about their work. No good will come of creating more resentments.’

I had hoped for better revenge than this for Marion Arbuthnott and her father. ‘They would have got worse for stealing a pig or slandering a shrewish wife.’

The provost took little offence at this remark. ‘Oh, do not misunderstand me, Mr Seaton: the ringleaders will be appropriately dealt with. According to their crime and to their place, they will be dealt with. The minister will be put out of his pulpit. He will never preach within the bounds of this presbytery again. He will answer to his brethren, and there can be no doubt but that he will be deprived.’ It was evident that the thought gave him no little satisfaction.

‘And the session clerk?’ He gave a shallow laugh. ‘James Cardno? Cardno also is finished. The doorkeeper who guarded him last night tells me he has near lost his wits.’ That I could well believe: the man I had seen inflaming the mob last night had been on the very brink of insanity. ‘Cardno is very like to find himself banished the burgh. Aye, and then the session will be broken,’ continued the provost. ‘The power of the minister and session in this burgh will not again challenge stability and order as it did last night, and as it has threatened to do many times before now.’

And that, I now understood, was what mattered to him, what had mattered to him last night. What had driven him last night was not sentiment, man-made or God-given, for Marion Arbuthnott or her father, but for the burgh of Banff itself.

‘And what of the baillie?’ I asked. I knew he would not be sorry to see the back of the Reverend Guild, but the provost hoped for too much if he thought this would be enough to make the baillie quiet in the matter of kirk discipline.

‘The baillie is immovable, you are right; but yet his hand might be weakened long enough, the complexion of the session and council changed enough at the outcome of this business, that it will not matter.’ The provost spoke these last words to himself almost as much as he did to me. I wondered how many years he had waited for this moment, for the day when he would truly wrest control of the burgh of Banff from those who claimed to be the magistrates of God.

‘And what of Lang Geordie?’ I asked.

The provost looked at me quizzically and repeated the name.

‘The beggar. The big, bearded cripple. He is the head of all who inhabit the codroche houses at the far side of the burgh, near the Sandyhill Gate.’

‘I know who he is,’ said Watt. ‘But what has the beggar man to do with the matter?’

I told him of Lang Geordie’s part as I had heard it. The provost’s expression became a little more thoughtful. ‘I had not realised; I had not seen him at the burning.’ I realised that I had not either, but there was no reason to doubt the truth of the stable boy’s tale. The provost was nodding. ‘It may well be that he was used to rouse the rabble, to add the fear of violence to whatever the minister and Cardno fermented with their words, but I think he was of little moment in last night’s proceedings. He could be fined, but where would be the point in that? He has nothing to pay a fine without he steals it from another. Lang Geordie, as you said yourself, is the leader of all the shiftless, worthless, idle and debauched creatures in this burgh. He knows he – they – are here on sufferance, and that if they come too often to the attention of the authorities they will be suffered no more. So, they go about their shiftless business with a sort of discretion, within rules that they and we understand. They are whoremongers and thieves, I grant you. But they are our whoremongers and thieves, and they will do much to protect their position and their privilege. We have no need to fear incoming hordes of sturdy beggars as long as Lang Geordie and his crew are in the town.’ I saw then that there was a balance in everything, seen and unseen, in the daily life of the burgh, that there was a place for things that might seem to have no place. Still I was not satisfied, but I said no more to Walter Watt of Lang Geordie.

We were in that same hall of the provost’s house that the corpse of Patrick Davidson had briefly rested in just six days ago. It had been a sombre enough place then, but it was worse now: a dead and empty place where a great man paced the floor alone. ‘How is your wife?’ I asked him. I had heard from Jaffray and in Mistress Youngson’s kitchen also that Geleis Guild was disconsolate over the death of her friend and helper, and that the treatment meted out to the corpse of Marion Arbuthnott was feared to send her from her senses. The children had been sent already to the home of the provost’s sister in Elgin for fear of what they would see or hear next in our burgh. How the young woman would have taken her brother the minister’s involvement in all that had passed, none could guess. The provost’s eyes were empty as he answered me.