Shona MacLEAN - The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

I had no memory of my last visit here, save for when Jaffray had come to take me home. I had been here only once before that, many, many years ago. It had been a holiday, when my mother and Jaffray’s wife, one startling summer’s day, had taken me with them early in the morning from my bed, and brought me to this wonderful, secret place, to play and swim for hours. I had little memory of them or how they had passed the time that day, so taken up had I been with my own childish pleasures. What was certain was that the paths I had run down, the dunes I had tumbled on at the age of six or seven on a warm summer’s day, were blasted and wind-blown and so altered in this mist I was in hazard of broken limbs with almost every step. More, if I fell here, from this precipice ninety feet above the strand, I might never be found, or if found, I might never survive to tell the tale. Jaffray’s pleas of the morning and of last night came to me through the mist, but it was too late now to heed them.

A few stumbling steps forward and I came to a halt. I could not see my foot in front of me; every step might bring me closer to death on the rocks. The heavy mist obscured the sounds of the sea, the birds of the air, everything but the noise of my heart thumping in my breast. All around me was an eerie, grey silence. Yet through it, through the impenetrable haar, I knew I was being watched. Further movement was not possible: I froze where I was, and it came. An arm caught me, a wizened, bony hand, coming, it seemed, from the ground and clamping itself around my wrist. ‘Do not move, Alexander Seaton. If you value your life, do not move a muscle.’

I waited, scared almost to breathe. It was a voice I knew, but from where I could not tell. Another hand appeared from below, bearing an amber torch, glowing through the mist, and then hair, grizzled, grey, unkempt. Slowly the head rose towards me and I saw myself looking into the yellowed eyes of the wise woman of Darkwater. She might have been any age from forty to seventy. Her teeth were nearly all gone, and there was no humour and, I thought, little humanity in her face. Her eyes searched mine for a moment, and she seemed satisfied. ‘Step backwards three paces, and then turn to your left.’

I did as she said, for want of an option. Once I had done so, she moved past me with scarcely a disturbance of the air. I saw her a little better now. Even without her stoop, she would have been little over five feet tall. Now I saw behind her, by the light of her torch, a steep drop through a crevice in the rock; I had been a few inches from falling to my death. As I struggled to master my tongue, she appraised me more fully. I felt I did not meet entirely with her approval. ‘Like your mother still. I wondered when you would come.’ She turned to her left. ‘Follow in my footsteps – precisely, mind – and do not deviate. This is a bad path you have taken.’ It took twenty minutes, twenty silent minutes apart from the occasional ‘mind your foot there; keep to the right; no, not that stone,’ from the crone before we had made our way safely onto the sand. Once there, she did not stop, nor turn to address or question me; she simply walked on, and I knew that I was to follow. I could hear the sea now, lapping gently onto the shore, but I could not tell how far from me it was.

We walked the length of the beach and at the end of it she started to climb again, up the dunes and towards the far headland. Then it seemed to me that she had disappeared; I followed in the direction she had gone, for a moment seeing nothing but a vague impression of the hillside. Then – though I do not know whether it was a glimpse of flame or the smell of smoking wood that drew me – I at last discerned just ahead of me the opening to a cave in the side of the headland.

‘Well, come in then, and pull over that board behind you, or we will both die of the damp and the cold.’

To my left there was a double lattice screen covered in stretched hide, higher than myself and broader than the cave opening, which was wide enough to let two men pass. I pulled it along on wooden runners and lashed it by leather thongs to bolts of iron hammered into the wall. To my surprise, the cavern was warm and dry. The crone had thrown driftwood onto the fire and it blazed well. The floor was covered in rush matting and knotted rugs, which looked to be made of rags, oddments, knotted and woven together. A table, a chair, a bed and shelving had all been fashioned from what the sea had brought to the shore of Darkwater. Wrecks and rubbish from boats on the firth and further afield had served the woman well. A pulley hung overhead, suspended from huge hooks of iron chiselled into the rock, and from it hung a myriad of drying plants, only some of whose names I knew. She followed the line of my vision and lowered the pulley, taking down some specimens and setting them on the workbench behind her. She spoke almost absent-mindedly to me.

‘Lesser celandine. For the piles,’ she said with a grim smile. ‘Sweet violet – but you, I think, have no trouble with your breathing. Common chickweed – for the skin. You are pasty of face, but healthy enough. Coltsfoot – you will be needing that should you return to Banff in this – you will be in bed with the fever for a week. But this, perhaps, this is what you need.’ She held out the long stems of a plant crowned by clustered heads of small, pale pink flowers. ‘Valerian. It will relieve the insomnia, allow sleep, help with the tensions in your head.’ I knew the plant well. My mother had often taken it in simples and decoctions that I had fetched her from Arbuthnott. I did not want to remember these things.

‘I am not here for your medicines or healing,’ I said. ‘There is something I need you to tell me.’

She put down the flowers and looked at me cautiously. ‘Three times in as many weeks I have had a visitor from Banff who has spoken these words to me. The first is dead, the second also. I have saved your life three times now; I would not have you the third.’

Three times? I thought the old woman wandered in her mind. ‘I would be fodder for the gulls by now had you not steadied me out on the cliffs.’

She looked at me with what might almost have been contempt. ‘Hmph. You would be fodder for nothing. You would not be here at all, nor anywhere else in your life gone by. Time enough for that. But tell me why you have come, what it is you think I can tell you.’ I was not certain that she was speaking of last summer, but she was evidently in no humour to go into our past relationship in greater detail and I had other business in mind, so I left it. She indicated a place behind me, and I sat down on a mattress of sorts, covered by a fleece. A sheep wandering away from the flock, tumbling over the edge of the cliff as I had almost done, would have been a fine treasure trove to the old woman. I scanned what I could of the cavern, but nothing in it was familiar to me. The fruits of land and sea had not been wasted here. I wondered at the struggle some men have to gain riches in a world where God so easily will gift them. By the time I had settled myself, she had taken off the long cloak of sealskin that had protected her from the elements. Shapeless layers of unbleached wool and a tunic of rabbit skins protected her against such elements of cold as found their way into her home. She gathered a mortar and pestle from a niche in the cavern wall and continued with her work, never looking at me. ‘Go on then,’ she said. ‘Tell me your business.’

‘These visitors you had. Were they Patrick Davidson and Marion Arbuthnott?’

She paused in her work, her back still to me. All movement was stopped. ‘Are you here on the baillie’s business?’ she asked.

‘I am here on my own,’ I said. ‘Will you answer my question, for all that?’