Shona MacLEAN - The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

‘It is not madness, doctor, but this thing has taken hold of me, and I fear it will lead to some madness, or despair, if I do not finish it. I do not think there is a choice.’

It was as if I had not spoken. ‘Alexander, I beg of you not to go; it will do no good and may bring you harm.’

I would have made a reply, but the schoolmaster’s wife was there before me. There was a coldness in her voice which, despite the hundred lectures of disapproval she had found fitting to give me, I had never heard before. ‘You must not go, Alexander. You will bring down upon your head and your soul things that cannot by man be lifted.’ Had I known her less well, I might have believed myself cursed.

‘Have no fear, mistress. My faith may be weak and my calling lost, but the Devil shall not yet have me for his own. And as to the world of men, be assured I will have a care to bring no trouble to your door.’

Her response was softly spoken and it pierced my heart. ‘My door has opened many times to your troubles, Mr Seaton. I have no fears on that count.’ She turned back down the stairs. I felt shame at the sight of the old woman’s retreating back. How many times could I throw my ingratitude in her face? Jaffray lingered a little longer, but soon also left, his face leaden with disappointment.

The town I passed through was quiet still, and there was menace in the quiet. So many still lay shut up in the tolbooth, or out at Inchdrewer, or in the castle dungeons, awaiting the sheriff’s judgement. They would not have long to wait. Surely the sheriff must return soon. It was reported that the witchhunt had begun again in Fife, and in Ayrshire, too. It was spreading, spreading with its own fire, and its flames left behind only the charred remains of men’s souls. The loud madness of the mobs at the pyre was as nothing to the quiet madness in a man’s mind as he desperately sought to save himself by damning another. The outbreak at Banff must be contained and then the burgh made safe against incursions of the hunt from outside. No one mentioned the fear, the fear of neighbour of neighbour, of accusations false or fancied, the dark twisting of the mind. To mention it would have been to call it down upon us.

The silence that had begun to weigh on me was broken by the clear tones of Thomas Stewart as I neared the top of Water Path on my way towards the Boyndie Road. ‘You shall have your fee when the work is done, not a moment before.’

Reply was made in a coarser voice. It was George Burnett. ‘Let the council be damned. I was to have payment at Whitsun. The work cannot be finished if I am not allowed to continue with it.’

The notary was little perturbed by the curse. ‘The work should have been finished by now, and you would have had your money at Whitsun. But it is there for all to see – the ground is scarce cleared enough in places for the founds to be properly dug. The town will bear no further expense for a new manse until the matter of the minister is resolved.’

‘Let him be resolved to Hell, for all I care. I have wages to pay.’

‘Then have your men do their work on time,’ answered the notary, ‘but there is to be no more work on this land until the minister’s fate is declared by the presbytery, and a new minister found.’

‘Aye, and it may be long enough before another blathering half-wit is forced to bleat from our pulpit.’ Having no further response, George Burnett, master mason and father of Sarah Forbes’s bastard child, swung his great bulk away from the notary and strode past me down the Water Path. The acrid brute smell of him caught in my throat as he passed, and made me want to vomit. He did not notice me, and I hoped never to see him again. By the time I had recovered myself, Thomas Stewart had gone, the great front door of the provost’s house shutting firmly on his shadow in the early-morning glow.

No one seemed to notice me as I made my way across the Castlegate and up Boyndie Street. The watch on the burgh gate only questioned me briefly as I sought to leave the town, and within a quarter-hour of leaving the confines of the schoolhouse, I found myself again, gladly, on the open road.

I had determined that the two or three hours my walk might take me would be spent in the ordering of my mind. I would apply the Ramist principles of one of my early regents at college, distilling the essential questions, dealing with them in their parts and setting the individual conclusions into clear and consequential schemata in my mind. But my thoughts would not permit themselves to be marshalled in such a way. Where I had hoped for clarity, confusion reigned. Faces, words, phrases, came wandering, sometimes staggering, to the forefront of my mind, dragging with them suspicions of spying, witchcraft, poisoning, papists, love, fear, jealousy, hate. Strange couriers in the night, calling Jaffray out of town, riding from Straloch, on the heels of Mary Dawson, fled now across the sea because she knew – what? Frantic searches for a dead man while he still lived, because of what secret knowledge? Flowers not known but known, by myself, by the doctor, by the apothecary, in a notebook, of the dead, but in another place too, and by another. ‘James and the flowers’. James Cardno? James Jaffray? James Cargill? Who?

As the miles went on, my thoughts meandered so far from where they had started, I scarcely knew what the questions were. How would Sarah Forbes and her child fare in Aberdeen? What had I brought into the lives of William Cargill and his wife and their unborn child? Would the children be natural companions, or would they grow up to dislike and envy one another? Does a man choose his friends, or are they chosen by God? What would my life have been without Archibald Hay? What would he who had such a big life, who had known the world and died in it, think of me now, and the smallness of my life that had taken me nowhere? Where was his sister now? Had she told all to Straloch’s niece, who hated me so? Was Straloch to be trusted? Had Patrick Davidson truly been a spy? And so, without resolution or clarity, insight or enlightenment, I went on. By the time I came to the fork in the road where my choice was to make for Fordyce by one route or Sandend by the other, I could almost have believed that the brethren were still there, gathered at Fordyce, waiting for me to come and present myself before them, to meet my last trial, once again, for the ministry.

The damp air around me took on a chill as I left the Cullen road and turned off to my right, towards the sea once more, and the cliffs from which Findlater glowered over to the mountains of the north. By the time I crested the hill at Brankanenthum and began the descent towards Findlater on its neck of rock, the haar had begun to creep in from the sea. It crawled ashore and up the rock, enfolding all it passed in a blanket of impenetrable grey fog. Halfway up the cliff-side, forty or fifty feet or more, the castle grew straight up, a stately palace from the rock. Gradually, the haar took it too, till all that remained was a ghostly shadow of what once my eyes had seen. I grew uneasy. It might be hours, or days even, until this fog lifted, and I must not stay long from Banff. For all that I misliked and feared the superstition and the excess of the lykewake, I was determined that Charles should not be exposed to the risks there alone. I must win back to Banff before tomorrow night, come what may.

As Findlater evanesced before my eyes, I wondered what an invading army, were it to land today, would make of its first footfall on Scotland, a grey pall of wretchedness laid over this land for which they risked their lives. And what defence should they find here, should they arrive today, to claim Scotland for their popish realm? A failed minister on his way to consult a witch. I uttered a prayer that should the day come when the Spaniard set the prow of his boat on Darkwater beach, God would send down all the haar of the oceans in his path.