Shona MacLEAN - The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

Charles spoke quietly, looking directly at no one. ‘Do you think there will be an invasion?’

Jaffray came to himself a little. ‘I do not know. I think it very likely though, and likely too that Walter Watt’s nephew was up to his neck in the plotting of it. What did Straloch say to it, Alexander?’

‘That the work was well done, extremely well done, and would have done very well for a foreign army landing at our shores. But he denied knowledge of any commission to Patrick Davidson or anyone else for such work, and denied any knowledge of any plots of the sort.’

‘Then he is surely cut off from his master,’ said Charles, ‘for since when did the Marquis of Huntly not plot?’

‘Indeed,’ said Jaffray. ‘But Straloch is a good, honest man. Did you not find him so, Alexander?’

It was a more difficult question than I had bargained for, or at least an honest answer was more difficult to find. ‘I think … I do not know, James. I think Huntly has some business afoot. My old friend, Matthew Lumsden, whom I met with in Old Aberdeen, is in Huntly’s retinue. He was to ride that day on business for the marquis, and Matthew is not a man you would use for diplomacy. Straloch himself rode early yesterday for Aberdeen and then Edinburgh on Huntly’s affairs, yet I heard horsemen leave the place in the night, and I would hazard they were bound for Strathbogie. What need could there have been for night-riding, what sudden urgency but information I had brought myself?’

‘Then we must be vigilant,’ said the doctor. ‘Now though, did you get Cargill’s notebooks? For that is the matter we must attend to here. Charles …’ But Charles Thom had fallen asleep in the chair to the right of the doctor’s fire, his stomach full and his heart something less heavy. Jaffray watched him sleep for a few moments, then quietly got up and signalled me to follow him over to the table, which Ishbel had long since cleared. I laid the book out and the doctor began to examine it, turning each leaf over carefully, and marvelling in a low voice at the quality of the drawings and the insight of the annotations. We had not yet reached the page I was sure the colchicum was sketched upon when there came a loud knocking at the doctor’s back door. Charles Thom was startled out of his sleep, and the doctor got to his feet. In a moment Ishbel was at the parlour door; Edward Arbuthnott, the apothecary, close behind her.

‘I am sorry, doctor,’ she said, ‘I–’

‘I am not here for the doctor, but the music master,’ he said, brushing past her with little ceremony. Charles, still not fully wakened, shambled to his feet. I took a step towards him, but Arbuthnott was in front of him before me. ‘Charles Thom, for all that you owe my family, who took you in and gave you food and lodging, and for the love you bore my girl, you will sing for her, you and your scholars, at her lykewake, will you not?’

Charles blinked stupidly, not yet come to. ‘Her lykewake? Aye … aye, of course.’

The look on Jaffray’s face told what was in my mind also. ‘Edward,’ he said, ‘you cannot be thinking of–’

‘Aye, but I am.’ The apothecary was defiant. ‘Why should my girl, my only child, be put to her rest without what others so much less worthy have had? She will have a lykewake and all the town will know what it has lost.’ He turned again to Charles. ‘So you will play at it, and your scholars too?’

‘Aye,’ said Charles, sitting back down now, discomfited. ‘I will.’ The apothecary nodded briskly, satisfied, and bade us goodnight.

As the back door banged again and we heard Ishbel put the bolt up, Jaffray looked at me warily, but I said nothing. Charles looked at me, too. ‘I know you do not like them, Alexander, but it is not for the money, this time, but for Marion herself.’ We had argued often about it, I from the heart and he from the head. The lykewake, the festival of watching over the dead before they should be interred, their body making its final earthly journey as its soul began its own wanderings in the afterlife. A manifestation of how far the people were still steeped in the superstition of Romanism, if not paganism, which the Kirk would have given much to have eradicated from the burgh. But the people clung tenaciously to it. The civic authorities did not like it either, but so far they tolerated it. At the lykewake the master of the song school and his pupils would sing and play – that was where Charles made a good part of his money, and why he was loath to give it up. The council knew that if they banned their music master from performing at such gatherings, they would have to compensate him for his loss, and that they were not inclined to do.

What they did not like, and the session fulminated against also, was the lavish entertainment laid out by the family of the deceased and the consequent over-indulgence of the mourners in sweetmeats and strong drink and substances that alter men’s minds. As the night wore on – for these celebrations were usually at night – the singing and the music would grow louder and less godly, until, when the song schoolchildren had most of them gone home, it would become utterly profane. Dancing would grow wilder, and lascivious behaviour would increase before the very eyes of the magistrates and the session. Few would be fit for their proper work the next day. Baillie Buchan and others of his ilk had fought long and hard to have the holding of lykewakes forbidden by the town, but to no avail, so far ingrained in the memories of the people were they. I would not argue with Charles about it tonight, though. ‘You must do as you think right, Charles. And I know it will not be for the money.’

‘I think I will go to my bed now,’ he said. ‘It has been a long and strange day.’

‘Take care you do not scald your feet,’ the doctor told him. ‘Ishbel will have put a warming pan in your bed. If not two, indeed, for now that you are here I should not be surprised to learn that mine is in there as well. I will be left to shift as I may without one, and no doubt freeze to death. Ah, the ingratitude of the young.’ The doctor was happy: all was once again as it should be in his life.

Charles looked a little bashful. Taking up his book of Craig’s poetry, he bade us goodnight and made his way towards the kitchen, where Ishbel would not yet have finished her night’s work.

We returned now to the table, and the examination of James Cargill’s notebook. The script was small and neat, the Latin perfect, but the drawings themselves were of an exquisite nature, beyond perfect. I looked at them in wonder for a few moments, as my older companion silently read. A bright yet distant look was in his eyes. I had seen this look on him before. He was transported to another time, another place. Alpine meadows and the valleys of the Pyrenees. A group of young men, running, climbing with all the sureness of foot of mountain goats, and stopping, every so often, to hang on the words of their teacher, as he told them of every property, pointed out every small and fine detail, of some tiny plant or flower. ‘They were good times for you, James,’ I said.

‘Aye,’ he replied, ‘they were. But it is to the present that we must turn our eyes and our minds. You say you think you have come upon the flower?’

‘I cannot be sure, but it is the name that you told me.’ I took the book from him and then leafed through its pages until I found what I was looking for. I turned the book back towards him. ‘There,’ I said. ‘Is that it?’

He nodded slowly, his eyes keen. ‘Aye,’ he said, ‘it is.’ He traced a finger beneath the outline of the flower, and began to read out the words. ‘“Petals the grey-blue of the northern sky after it has snowed. Calyx of deep purple sepals below, small, pale green bract. Stigma and anthers yellow, the colour of straw in September. The whole forming a large goblet on a slender white stem. Basal leaves, long, dark, glossy green straps, emerging after blooms. One corm will produce 6–8 blooms on 3–5 leaves. Unlike its benign relatives, flowers not in the autumn, but the spring.” Aye, that is it, that is it; it is quite different from the other colchicum , you know,’ he said, growing excited. He read on, using terms and talking of properties I did not understand, until his voice, slow and deliberate, with great emphasis, intoned, ‘“corm has the look of a small, elongated and blackened onion. Utterly and almost instantly lethal if ingested.”’ There was more, about where the plant was to be found, the difficulties of cultivation, the lack of any known beneficial medicinal use. Then words not in Latin, but in Cargill’s own native tongue and ours. ‘The Salome of all flowers: beautiful, and deadly.’ Jaffray gave a short, humourless laugh. ‘Little wonder he never married. Every beautiful woman must have called to mind for him some botanical instrument of death. But this is it, Alexander, this is the flower we seek. Through the vomit, the chicory scent could still be got in their hair.’