Shona MacLEAN - The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

The notary turned to Jaffray. ‘Doctor, how did she die?’

Into Jaffray’s eyes came an image of eight years ago, and of two weeks ago, and of four days ago. His words were slow and deliberate, as the revelation came to him. ‘She died quickly, and in agony, of a sudden vomiting through which she had not the strength to crawl. That is how it was described to me, for I came too late.’

‘You were not there?’ I asked.

He closed his eyes as realisation took him. ‘I had been making my summer visit to Glenlivet, to the mountain people. I was away from Banff longer than I had planned to be, for on my journey back to the town I was waylaid perhaps twenty miles from home by Lang Geordie and his crew. They begged that I would treat their needs – and indeed they were many – before I returned to the burgh, for at that time they were not allowed to show their faces in the town. I was with them two days.’ Jaffray lowered his voice and spoke almost to himself. ‘And that was the only other time I saw Walter Watt shaken as he was two weeks ago. Both times I thought it was for grief.’ He sat down on the end of the bed, his head in his hands. I could not lift my arm to comfort him.

‘He has played too easily upon your goodness, doctor. Hold fast to the good you have done, not to the evil that was beyond your power to change.’

Jaffray looked up wearily at the baillie. ‘And have you not spent your life in fighting evil, William Buchan?’

‘It is my calling,’ was the simple answer.

The notary put down his paper. ‘There is something here that I do not understand. You are telling us, if I have the thing to rights, that Walter Watt murdered his first wife, poisoned her in fact, and that it was because his nephew discovered this and confronted him with the knowledge that he too was murdered?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That is what I believe.’

‘But he loved Helen. He grieves for her yet; I know it, for I have seen it myself in his unguarded moments. I cannot believe that he could have killed her. Why would he ever have done such a thing? What did her grief over her children signify in this?’

There was a silence in the room. I could guess the answer, and I understood now that the other two knew it also. It was a cold, sharp answer, and across the room I saw it cut into old wounds. It was not for me to respond to Thomas Stewart. ‘He killed her,’ began the baillie, ‘because she could not give him a dynasty. And so she knew it, and spent the last months of her life in terror and despair.’ His voice fell away. ‘He killed her because he did not love her enough.’ There was a complete silence in the room, and through it the baillie’s words echoed to a time and a place long past, and to a love long dead. His head fell forward on his chest and his shoulders heaved as he struggled for breath. The doctor went to him and kneeling before him grasped both his wrists in his own two hands, counting the breaths with him until the struggle subsided. I knew now who the H.B . was that had lovingly stitched the hanging on the baillie’s wall, so many years ago. I cursed my stupidity that I had not realised it before.

The sound of horses and wheels on the bumpy track broke into the rhythm of the breathing and gradually thundered over it as the new arrivals came closer. A clatter of hooves in the courtyard was soon followed by a shout for the doctor, and assuring himself that the baillie’s crisis was over, Jaffray got up and made for his next patients. I studied William Buchan, unnoticed, but what his thoughts were at that moment I could not tell. Thomas Stewart pulled up a chair at the side of my bed, and spoke in a low voice. ‘Tell me again about these flowers you spoke of, and how they told Patrick Davidson of his uncle’s crime.’

I tried to sit up a little, the better to get my breath, and to speak. ‘You know the portrait of Walter Watt and Helen that hangs in the great hall of the provost’s house?’

The notary nodded. ‘I have often seen it, but never taken great notice of it.’

‘In that painting, Helen is holding flowers in her hand – are a symbol of her hopes, her children. But the flowers are falling from her hand, and many lie already crushed on the floor.’

‘Her lost babies,’ said the notary.

‘Yes. Jamesone himself told me, if I had had the wit to listen properly. The point is, those flowers are not – or were not – grown in these parts. The laird of Banff tried many years ago, and failed to cultivate them after bringing some specimens back from his travels abroad. But another did not fail. Walter Watt did not fail. And Walter Watt knew, probably from the mouth of James Cargill himself, that these plants were utterly lethal in all their parts. I believe he grew them at first for love of their beauty, and that is why they are there in the painting, as something beautiful. But when, sometime afterwards, he could no longer stand the strain of his wife’s repeated losses of their children, when he came to realise that this woman, whom he is acknowledged to have loved, would bear him no heir, he took the roots of that same plant and poisoned her with them. He was safe until the day someone else came and looked upon that portrait and saw the flowers for what they were.’

‘His own nephew,’ said the notary, understanding now. ‘And he never thought to take the painting down? He did not think discovery possible? Truly, the man’s arrogance was monstrous.’

‘Monstrous, yes, but I think also, in spite of all he had done, he loved her still. And just like Walter Watt himself, all that Patrick Davidson saw when he looked at that portrait was his beloved aunt’s face. It was not until he had been to Darkwater, and considered the wise woman’s words, that he questioned his aunt’s state of mind before her death, and that led him back to the picture, painted in her last weeks on this earth, and the flowers that she held in her hand. I think he confronted his uncle with his suspicions, but where he intended to take the matter from that point, I do not know. Perhaps he did not know himself. In the end, it was immaterial: he died because of it.’

He pressed me further. ‘How do you think the thing was brought about?’

‘That I cannot tell you,’ I said.

‘Perhaps there is someone else who can,’ murmured the baillie, who had been listening throughout. ‘No matter, though. Continue, Mr Seaton.’

I reached for another sip of water which Thomas Stewart helped me to. ‘I do not know that there is anything left I can tell you,’ I said.

The notary, though, had more he would know. ‘Do you think Patrick Davidson revealed his knowledge to Marion Arbuthnott?’ His line of thought was logical; it was what Marion had feared and what Charles Thom had soon come to understand – that the possession of this knowledge would be as a death warrant to whoever came to own it.

‘No,’ I replied, ‘I am certain he did not.’

‘Why not?’ asked the notary.

‘Because she would not have kept on searching if he had.’ It was the baillie who had spoken. He had got up from his chair and now began to pace the room. ‘She would not have needed to continue searching for the truth of his death if she had known it already.’

He had said exactly what I had been thinking. ‘That was why she went back to the wise woman of Darkwater after his death,’ I said. ‘Because she still did not know. The crone told me that. That Marion had gone back to her, asking about the colchicum , and she, the old woman, had been able to describe it to her. She had described to her the flower that, in the course of her duties as nursery maid to Geleis Guild, the girl must have seen, captured in oils on canvas, a dozen times a day. And now Marion is dead. She, too, must have confronted the provost.’