Shona MacLEAN - The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

The crone had finished her work and had gone about some necessary business in a place she had shown to me deep into the back of the cave, and I was still reading, lost in another time, my father’s voice resonant in my ear. Even after she had put out the lamp and laid herself out to sleep on her trestle bed, the words echoed in my mind through the darkness from fifteen, twenty years ago. The ballads, the lusty drinking songs, the comic ditties on court life, all had come to life again in my head, and had brought warmth to me. But now, in the darkness of this cavern, with the haar seeping through the silent black, my father’s sonorous voice at last spoke the words that had ended all those evenings, and sent me to my sleep in fear: timor mortis conturbat me . The fear of death disquiets me. It was the only certainty I had now to hold on to: the certainty of death. And the knowledge of death was everywhere in this place where three times now I had been accorded life. I prayed for sleep, for peace, and, many hours into the night, it came.

I was awakened by a blast of fresh air on my face. My eyes sought in vain the familiar objects of my own chamber in the schoolhouse until I remembered where I was. The crone had gone outside. I followed the passage of light to the cave entrance and pushed back the partition myself. Sunlight pierced my eyes. The haar had lifted. A clear, fine spring day spread out the beauty of the firth before me. With little conversation, the old woman busied herself about making some breakfast, and while I ate she worked once more at her potions. As I finished my porridge and rose to gather my few things she turned. ‘Wait. It is not quite ready.’ Without further explanation, she went back to her work, and spent some minutes checking on jars and bottles, finally selecting two small vessels into which she poured different liquids from the concoctions she had been making the previous night. She handed me the bottles. ‘This,’ she said, indicating the one containing a murky, yellowish treacle, ‘you are to give to Baillie Buchan. It is the remedy he seeks.’ I opened my mouth to say something but she silenced me. ‘You know all you need to. Give it to him.’ The other bottle contained a clear, almost blue tonic. ‘This you will take for yourself. One spoonful at night. You will sleep more easy, and the dreams will not bother you.’

‘Did I speak my dreams last night? Did I call out?’ Sometimes lately, I had woken in the night at the sound of my own cry.

‘I know your dreams of old,’ she said, ‘and have banished them before.’

And it was because of some preparation such as this, I guessed, that I remembered nothing of my last stay here, less than one year ago. ‘I have no money,’ I said.

‘I look for none,’ she replied. ‘Take them, and do as I say. May God go with you.’ As I stepped out of the cavern she spoke to me for the last time. It was as if she had been considering whether to tell me or not. ‘The girl, Marion Arbuthnott, asked me if I knew what the flower looked like, this flower that you seek. As I told you, and her, I have never seen it, but I saw a picture of it once in an old herbal, under poisons. I was able to describe it to her, for she had a good knowledge of plants and their parts, and she pictured it well. She knew it from somewhere; she had seen it. When she left here, I have a mind she was going to seek it out.’

‘She found it,’ I said, ‘and it killed her.’

The old woman nodded. ‘I feared it might, in some fashion. I believe that you too have in mind to find it. Take care that you do not follow her too soon down death’s dark passageway.’ She turned away from me and retreated into the shadows of her dwelling. I left the cavern gladly and set out for home.

It seemed a shorter journey back to Banff than that I had made yesterday. Such was my purpose I scarcely noticed the miles disappear behind me. It was not yet noon when I headed the Gallow Hill and saw set out before me the old burgh. As I descended the road into town I could see before me those blue flowers, just as Marion Arbuthnott had done, falling, falling. I could almost touch them.

The door of my chamber had only just closed behind me when I heard the voice.

‘Hello, Alexander.’ I spun round and saw him sitting there, in the dim light in the corner of the room: Thomas Stewart. ‘You have been gone a long time.’

‘Not so long, really,’ I said, removing my hat but staying standing. ‘I had not expected a visitor.’

Though he smiled, his face was troubled. ‘You will be weary after your journey, but I must speak with you now. It would have been better if I had spoken before.’ There had been a strange silent watchfulness in the town as I had made my way down through it; those whose eye I had caught had not held my look, but had quickly turned away. And now I felt unaccountably frightened to see the notary sitting there in my room. The fire had not been lit for two days and all was coldness and emptiness.

‘Ask me what you will, Thomas,’ I said.

He shifted uneasily in his seat. ‘I am here on a matter of formality, Alexander, and I wish you to understand that it is the office and not the man who sits before you here. It is the only safeguard for friendships that I know.’ I understood, now. I understood who it was that the messenger had been despatched to by the watch on my return to the burgh by the Boyndie gate less than an hour ago, and I understood that this visit augured nothing good for me. He shifted again on the bench and at length got up and began to pace the room. ‘I have come to ask you questions, yes, but to caution you too.’

‘To caution me?’

‘Yes.’ He stopped pacing and stood halfway down the room, facing me. ‘It is rumoured throughout the town that you went yesterday to Findlater and to Darkwater, and that you passed the night in the dwelling of the wise woman, the crone there. Is there truth in this?”

‘From whose mouth have you had it?’

‘From one that is not to be doubted.’

‘Then you know that it is true,’ I said.

‘I had hoped it might not be,’ he said quietly. And then he turned on me with exasperation. ‘Why must you court controversy, Alexander? Have you any idea of the dangers you expose yourself to?’

‘What? By visiting an old midwife, and sheltering a night in her cave from the fog? Would it have been better for me to have hazarded my life in the haar on the cliff tops?’

‘It would have been better for you not to have gone at all,’ he said with some vehemence.

‘Thomas,’ I said, ‘she is not a witch, but an old woman who tired of this world and its fancies and furies.’

‘Do you think it matters, Alexander, whether she indulges in the black arts or does not? In the minds of some of the townsfolk she is already condemned as a servant of Lucifer, and you by your association with her. Be she utterly without blemish, once that idea is firmly fixed in the minds of the people there will be nothing to save her, or you. The witchhunt has broken out of the south-west and has spread to Fife. What happened here was not the end of it, only the start.’ He looked at me for a moment, making a decision. ‘Though Jaffray would never say, there are those who believe you spent your,’ he searched for words, ‘your lost days, last year, in the care of the crone.’

‘Then they are right,’ I said, ‘though I remember nothing of it.’

‘And why should that be, Alexander, if not that she cast some charm upon you, to make you forget? How then can you know what you had done, or been, those lost days?’

‘I was a man, Thomas, just a man. Not bound then to God or the Devil, but to my own self, and it is that that she tried to help me forget. Her charm failed me, I think.’