Shona MacLEAN - The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

‘If it is not the Devil’s apprentice,’ he said at length, with a hoarse laugh. His followers also laughed, some of the hostility in their eyes being replaced by a ready mockery, but only some. The young men continued to watch me with a clear and studied intent. ‘What do you want of me? Are you here for the whores? The word on the roads is that you prefer a higher class of siren in your bed.’ Again a laugh, more real now, from the gathering.

So I had made Katharine the talk of the beggars and the thieves on the roads and hovels of the north. It was little wonder her friend Isabella Irvine despised me. I made no response to the jibe. ‘It is yourself I am here to see.’

All jocularity was gone now from Lang Geordie’s face. He was studying me carefully, weighing me up. I think he had some notion then of what my business was. He uttered something in the cant to his people and they dispersed slowly to the places from which they had come, all but two of the younger men who continued to stand near him, on either side of the only door of the hovel. Lang Geordie gave them some instruction, too and then looked at me again. ‘Then come in, Mr Seaton, come in.’ I went carefully past the dogs and in between the two guards, stooping low, although not as low as Lang Geordie. Once inside, my eyes could scarce make out a thing. The door had been shut behind me and the only light came from the round smokehole in the middle of the roof and from the open fire itself. As my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom I could discern figures, shapes, huddled in various parts of the one long room that constituted the whole dwelling. A young woman stirred a pot of something – some broth of seaweeds – over the fire; an older woman, coughing as she did so, sang in an alien tongue to a baby in dirty swaddling; two small children scrabbled after something in a corner – a mouse or a rat. On a trestle bed at the far end of the room lay another woman, also coughing. The floor was beaten dirt and I knew not what I would find when I set one foot in front of the other. The stench and squalor were beyond my experience: even the tolbooth jail could scarcely compare with this. Lang Geordie ordered the woman up from the bed – the dwelling’s only furnishing – and as he took his seat there himself I saw that she was not a woman, but little more than a girl – fourteen, perhaps. She was wearing a tattered dress that I knew I had seen before, too large by far around the bosom and the hips. A whore’s dress; Mary Dawson’s dress. The vagabond chief saw me looking at the girl. ‘You can have her for a price – after our business is done,’ he said, very steady, with no insinuation.

‘I do not go with children,’ I said.

‘She is a child no longer,’ said the woman at the pot, bitterly. Geordie spat some reproach at her and she said no more.

The two sentries were inside the hovel now, still keeping guard of the door. I lowered my voice, for I had only business with Geordie himself, and it was business he might not like known amongst his followers. I kept my voice low. ‘I have money,’ I said, ‘not for whores but for information.’ He was sizing me up, waiting to see what the offer was, what the terms. He had played this game before and he would wait as long as he needed to. There was nothing for it but to come straight to the matter. ‘Who paid you last night?’ I asked.

He continued to fix me with his prophet’s eyes. ‘Last night? Now, what might have happened last night?’

‘You roused the rabble, the witch-mongers. You led them to the doctor’s door, to lay hands on the body of that poor murdered girl.’

He continued to watch me in the same manner, a little pleased with himself. ‘I? I did not rouse that rabble, Mr Seaton. Your godly minister and session clerk had that well in hand; they had no need of a poor beggar man.’ He held his hands out self-deprecatingly, and smiled, almost engagingly, as he said it. I would gladly have knocked the last teeth from his head.

‘You led them,’ I said. ‘It was you who crossed the door of an honest man’s house when it was barred to you, you who knocked the stable boy to the floor. You gave the beast its head. You with your crutches – all the way down into the town. A great exertion it must have been for you. Do you tell me it was not done for profit? For what else would you have done it? Since when have you concerned yourself with witches?’

The amusement, the playfulness departed from his face. The prophet’s look was gone, too. His eyes were of stone, his voice a low rumble. ‘Since I watched my mother burn.’ He was looking into the past somewhere. ‘A hen had stopped laying; a child had grown sick; the water in a burn had gone bad. My mother had called at the house before, twice, desperate for succour to feed her bairns: she was given none.’ He paused and there was near silence in the dwelling. Even the children in the corner seemed to have stopped their playing. ‘It was thirty years ago and I can still hear her screams.’ He pulled himself suddenly to his feet, towering and cold in his anger. ‘So that is my concern with witches, Mr Seaton. They had started to talk of witches in the town – the storm, the fishing boats wrecked, the poisoning. And who do you think they would have turned on first, the good burgesses of Banff? I went for them before they came for us!’ He was taken by a coughing fit and the woman at the hearth brought over to him a ladle of water. She calmed him and got him to sit down on the bed again. The look I caught from her as she returned to her pot was one of covert fear. His breathing subsided and he let go his crutch, which I had thought he was going to strike me with. ‘And that girl, she was dead. What did it matter? Are we not all dust? It could not hurt her, and it gave them a corpse to work out their passions on, instead of a living man or woman. Now, get out of my house, and never let me see you back here, unless it be to stay,’ he added with menace.

There was little more I could do. I believed him, and I did not. He had known, I was certain, that I had come up here about the business of the murders, but he had not expected me to ask about the witch-hunt. So what had it been? He called something to the two guards. One opened the door and, giving me a look potent with threat, jerked his head towards it. The other came over and stooped down to Lang Geordie, who murmured something in the cant. I caught the last words though – Mary Dawson. The man pulled me up by my collar and pushed me through the darkness towards the doorway.

Outside the dogs were waiting for me, snarling low. I avoided their eye. My elbow was caught as I stepped forward. ‘You were in Aberdeen, Seaton. Is Mary Dawson there?’

‘No,’ I replied with conviction, ‘she is not.’ So that was it; he had thought I had come to question him on the warning off of the Dawson sisters, or that I knew something of what they had known. It was with great relief that I finally reached the road leading back to the town from the Sandyhill Gate. The dogs had shadowed me all the way down from the settlement, stopping twenty yards from the roadway. I could feel them watching me for as long as the road remained in their sight. I did not look back. I was glad to win back to the schoolhouse, and glad of the few hours to myself to order my thoughts, between now and when I must appear at the doctor’s door.

It was a pleasant walk to Jaffray’s. At last a little warmth was being carried on the air, and the evenings were growing lighter – the sky was a mellow golden rose reaching over the firth to the mountains of Sutherland. The storm of last Monday night and its attendant horrors could almost have been a distant memory, consigned to the last throes of winter, had it not left its bitter legacy everywhere I turned.