Shona MacLEAN - The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

She considered. ‘Have you no fear of death too, then?’

It was a question I fought with now almost every night, a question that had stolen from me many hours of sleep. ‘I have fear of the judgement that is to come and of those last waking moments when I cannot deny a wasted life. But they will come at their time, and it is not in my power to say whether that time is today or sixty years from now.’

She recommenced her grinding. ‘That is perhaps for the best. Those who seek to have power over the time of their death waste the days of their living in worrying about it.’

‘And were Patrick Davidson and Marion Arbuthnott amongst them?’

She ladled water from a barrel into a small pot hanging over the fire. She was very precise as to the number of ladles full, and did not answer me until she had finished. ‘They wished for the power over life, and the knowledge of death.’

‘I do not understand you.’

She sighed and at last sat down opposite me, on the other side of the fire, the simmering pot between us. She looked directly into my eyes, did not blink.

‘Alexander Seaton. I knew you before you were born, before you were of this world. I knew you before your father knew you. Your mother came to me as many others have done – it was the doctor’s wife that took her.’

‘Jaffray’s?’ I interrupted.

‘Aye, Jaffray’s. She had been here to me before, Jaffray’s wife. In a desperation that I could save her bairns, give her some compound, some infusion, some charm even, that they should live. But it was beyond my power or knowledge, as it was of her husband’s, to effect such a thing. We fed her carrots to promote conception, had her drink decoctions of salted sage juice to stave off the miscarriage, and gave her savin. She took the wild, stinking arrach to cure her womb. She even slept with an empty cradle at her bedside, although her husband did not like this – he feared it was charming. And still they died, every one, scarce afore they had drawn breath. And then she took your mother here.’

‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Was she too in fear of losing a child?’

She spat to the side and looked at me again. ‘No, she was in fear of having one. You.’

All sound stopped in my ears, and in the middle of its roar, I knew what was coming next. I had no wish to hear it from this hag. I uttered the words myself. ‘She wanted something from you to help her cast me from her womb.’

She nodded slowly, evidently taking little pleasure in the conversation.

‘But what you gave her failed, just as what you gave the doctor’s wife to save her bairns failed.’

‘No,’ she replied, emotionless, ‘it did not, for I gave her nothing. Do not misunderstand me, Mr Seaton. There are many ways to help a woman rid herself of a child – it is not difficult. Many women have come to me in distress with the same request and I have helped them, but not all, and your mother was one whom I refused.’

The crone pulled back the lattice screen a moment, and the fog seeped into her dwelling. Nothing of the outer world could be seen. Inside the cavern, all save the fire and the pot now boiling above it was silent and still. I had returned to the place where the fact of my life had been decided. Jaffray had known what I would learn here, and that was why he had tried to stop me.

‘Why did you refuse her?’

She stopped watching me and returned to her pot. ‘Because I knew she would regret it. She did not truly want it. She wanted her life to be other than what it was and it could not be if she was tied to you. It was your father, or his world, she did not want. She wanted back to her own place, and her own like, but she could not go with you, so she sought to lose you, to dissolve the thing that would bind her here. I did not let her. There are choices that a woman must live with, and your mother had to live with hers. To the end of her days. It was not spite on my part, mind, but I knew she did not really want it. She could have effected the thing herself, if she had truly had her heart in it. There were many things she could have done, many things she could have taken. She could have taken dog’s mercury, or the wild carrot. She could have drunk a strong tincture of tansy, or wallflowers, or juniper berries. She could have used nutmeg; it is known.’

‘My mother would not have known of such things,’ I said.

She smiled a bitter smile. ‘You think not? I think she had such knowledge: she knew of the darkness. The doctor’s wife could not see it though; she had thought your mother wished to be taken here for help with conceiving a child, not losing one. The deceit was great – a great and cruel betrayal. I have not known many women who could have trampled in that way over the heartbreak of a friend. But God has his reasons, although I cannot fathom Him.’

‘His reasons?’ My senses had been obliterated by the shock that my mother had not wanted me to draw breath, and I was not really following the crone now.

‘Aye. His reasons. For blessing the one and torturing the other.’ She looked up at me with keen eyes. ‘For it is a torture, you know, to have the love within you for a child that will not be conceived, or if so, not born living. I have known many women who are mothers in their hearts, in their souls, but who never yet conceived or bore the child they carried within them. I have known women go through life with a broken heart for the loss of a tiny scrap of humanity that was all the world to them. They say Jaffray’s wife, and the provost’s wife too, Helen, the first one, died young because they were worn out with the constant burden of the children they carried and lost. They didn’t: they died of despair.’ She breathed a deep sigh. ‘There is a despair that leads to distraction. The last time I saw Helen Black she was fearful, on the edge of losing her mind through grief, in such desperation for a living child as if she could go on no more without it. And yet there have been many more, like your mother, who came to me that I might cast off the bairn within them. But one woman at the edge of her wits does not see what another suffers.’ She looked into memories in the flames. ‘It was a warm autumn day they came, I remember. But their journey homeward must have been cold as December, your mother full of her resentments and regrets, and the doctor’s wife abandoned to her devastation.’

These were not the women I remembered. ‘You are wrong,’ I said. ‘They were friends. They even brought me here one day, I am sure of it.’

Something nearly approaching a smile crossed the old woman’s lips, and there were images in her eyes. ‘Aye, they did bring you. The coldness between them passed when you were born, for your mother took you to her heart with joy the moment she saw you. She recoiled from the knowledge of what she had almost done. She was filled with remorse. Elizabeth, the doctor’s wife, could not carry hatreds against other of God’s creatures, and so they were reconciled. They brought you here on your sixth birthday, that I might see what I was to be thanked for. That is how I knew you, when I found you last year, stumbling in your delirium on the road from Sandend. You are still all your mother’s son.’

I almost laughed. ‘But that there were twenty years between those times.’

She stirred her pot and looked up at me. ‘Had it been forty I would have known you. You have the same eyes, and the same soul. A man cannot change his soul.’

‘But he can lose it,’ I said.

She narrowed her eyes quizzically. ‘Are you turned papist, then?’

‘No,’ I was emphatic, ‘never that.’

She sniffed, tiring of this line of conversation. I myself did not wish to pursue it: she had been leading me further away from what I wanted to know. ‘What did you mean,’ I began cautiously, ‘when you said Marion Arbuthnott and Patrick Davidson sought the power over life and the knowledge of death?’ I was fearful now, sitting here in this cavern, surrounded by herbs and plants and animal skins. In my head, the cries of the witch-mongers began to sound.