Shona MacLEAN - The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

Charles looked down at the floor. ‘Aye, the once. But I would not have had it so; I would not have had him see me in that place. It was enough to know he thought of me – would have known that without all the baskets he sent up.’ There was a great sense of failure, of having disappointed, in his voice.

‘Charles, Jaffray has seen and suffered much in this life. He has few illusions about what fate can do to those who do not deserve it. You surely did not expect him to rest until he had seen you? He will not rest until he has seen you free and justice done.’ I hesitated, unsure how best to say what had to be said. ‘Whatever justice there can be done, now.’

Charles set down his empty bowl upon the hearth, and traced his finger a moment in the ashes. ‘What justice can be done? How can any justice be done in this life for Patrick Davidson or for Marion?’ He gave off his tracing and lay with his head back in the chair, his eyes tight shut. When they finally opened I could see they were filled with tears. I had nothing to comfort him and he was right: there was no justice; there could only be retribution. But Charles was not a man with a stomach for retribution, and he would only turn his back further on the ways of this barbaric world.

‘Do you think it is over, Charles?’

‘What is over?’

‘The killing,’ I said.

He pushed the hair back over his forehead in a gesture I knew well. ‘Killing or dying? I do not know. Patrick was murdered, no one doubts that, I know. But,’ he took a deep breath and swallowed hard, ‘Marion … they tell me she died by her own hand.’

I thought of the confusion of last night. Surely Jaffray had told someone, some authority other than just myself. I lowered my voice further still, conscious as I was of the baillie’s even breathing on the other side of the door. ‘Charles, has no one told you? Marion did not die by her own hand, Jaffray is adamant on that. He swears before God that she died by the same hand, and in the same manner, that killed Patrick Davidson.’

What colour there was drained from Charles’s face. ‘Then the killing has not stopped,’ he said.

I watched him intently, watched for any flicker, any sign that would tell me something. ‘Charles, is the baillie right? Do you know something?’

He bit his lower lip and shook his head slowly. ‘I know nothing, Alexander, nothing. I would to God that I did. Since Marion’s death, the baillie has been at me night and day, as he was at Marion before it. But I know not even what manner of knowledge he seeks. He is like a dog worrying at a burrow from which the hare has only one escape. He will not let up, and I can tell him nothing.’ He looked away at the slowly dying embers in the meagre fire. ‘It is as if he knows very well what it is that he seeks, but he must have another say it for him.’

A thought was now becoming more formed in my mind, a thought that had been taking shape for some days now. ‘Do you think it possible that what the baillie seeks to establish is not what you know, but whether you know? You remember what you told me of Marion’s behaviour on the night of your search together for Patrick Davidson: she was almost as determined that no one should guess she had confided in you as she was to find Davidson. She feared as much for you as for him. She knew that the very suspicion that you had knowledge of what Davidson was about would put your life in danger. Who can say now that she was wrong? She paid that price herself.’ I could see, from Charles’s face, that my point was not lost on him. ‘You say, and I have had it from Jaffray also, that the baillie rarely left off his questioning of her, and now, since her death, he has taken you into his own charge.’ The coldness I felt was little to do with the bare and cheerless room in which we sat. ‘Charles, you must continue to play the ignorant; you must continue to hold fast that you know nothing.’

He looked at me with exhaustion in his eyes, exhaustion of the soul. ‘That will be no great triumph, no great achievement, for truly, Alexander, I know nothing. If you will not believe me, how should I convince the baillie? But Marion confided nothing to me but her certainty of danger itself. Had it been otherwise I would have told him by now. I have not your resolve.’

‘And I have not your humanity.’ I thought of Marion Arbuthnott, of the girl who had always been distant, detached, content in herself, until Charles had been able to draw from her some of the warmth of friendship. I wondered again where that might have led, had not Patrick Davidson come soon after, and with him the first experience of love.

Charles broke the silence. ‘Whatever burden Marion carried after Patrick Davidson’s death, she carried it alone. I could not help her, for I was never allowed to see her after they found him, and I do not think she even tried to go to the tolbooth to see me.’

‘She was lost in herself by then, Charles. No one could reach her save the children, Geleis Guild’s children, but she wanted no further human contact, nor comfort either, I think.’

‘But that is it, of course! There is one in whom she might have confided. Not the baillie, certainly, for she feared him. No, but in Geleis Guild. I think it possible she did, for she – the provost’s wife – came to see me once, in the tolbooth. The guards dared not prevent her. It was three days ago. She also was watchful, anxious to evade the baillie’s surveillance, I remember that.’

‘Why did she come to see you?’

‘I do not know,’ he said. ‘I was so glad at the time to see a kind face that I did not question it. She told me she gave no credence to the notion that I could have murdered Patrick or anybody. She spoke of her anxiety to see Marion again, alone, for they were companions, and she knew how hard all these things would be on her. I think in truth that Marion was her only friend. She was anxious to see her, but she could never escape the baillie’s watchful eye, still less get past him at the apothecary’s door. I hope to God she did not get to see her, or she will be in danger now herself.’

‘I would have little fear on that score. I think the provost’s mind is bent upon protecting his wife from whatever there is yet to come.’

‘I think, then, that he is a wise man,’ said Charles, quietly. ‘You will ask Jaffray about it, though?’

‘I will,’ I promised him. Charles was greatly wearied and looked ready to sleep. I would not tax or question him further. As his eyelids flickered and then closed, I moved quietly from my chair. I had never wondered about the baillie’s home, never considered him as a private person, for the life of the individual was always to him a thing of wickedness and impiety, an offence to God and a threat to the commonwealth. There was little comfort in this room, and little more, I suspected, in the small chamber leading off from it where he had gone to wash and where he now slept. William Buchan was a merchant who carried out a steady trade; he must have been a man of some wealth, yet there were few – if any – signs of it here. There were no wall hangings, such as even in Banff could now be found in the homes of some of the wealthier merchants, but one simply embroidered canvas above the door to the baillie’s chamber. Each corner was adorned with a small symbol of the seasons of the year – a lamb, a cornflower, a russet apple, a sprig of holly – but it was the wording in the centre that caught the eye. I knew, without the neat legend beneath it, that it was taken from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians; it was a verse I had pondered often myself: But I would have you without carefulness. He that is unmarried careth for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord . At the very bottom corner, in tiny lettering, were the initials HB and the date 1610 . I had, in my lifetime, seen many verses from the Bible rendered in thread and canvas, but I had never seen one such as this. Was this then what drove the baillie, what lay at the heart of his inhumanity? Was it that his own mother had set him on this course of coldness towards his fellow man in some supposed pursuit of godliness? I could think of no other who could have done so.