Shona MacLean - A Game of Sorrows

At the age of twenty-eight, it was a long time since I had been called boy, and never before by Dr Dun. The warmth unlocked my seized tongue. ‘Aye, Sir, I will go.’

There was much to be done and less than two days to do it in. By midday on Thursday, I would be aboard a merchant ship and bound for the Baltic. Many had gone before me, to increase and pursue their learning, to better master their trade, to escape present drudgery in the hope of a new and better life. I was not to be embarking upon the journey of a new life, but I felt that what the next few months would bring would change the life I had to come. There were letters to write, bills to pay, and farewells to make. It would be another week before the students began to arrive back in the town after their long vacation, and Dr Dun already had the matter of my temporary replacement in hand. I almost flew to my own chamber on leaving the Principal’s study, taking the granite steps two at a time and nearly knocking over the old college porter as I did so.

‘You’re as bad as the lads, Mr Seaton. I swear before God this place will be the death of me yet.’

‘You’ll be here when the sky falls in, Rob,’ I said, and ran on. The bare little chamber at the top of the college, looking out over the Castle Hill to the North Sea that would soon transport me to unseen lands, was all my own: I was not, like some of the younger unmarried teachers, constrained to share, and the solitude and simplicity had suited me well these last two years. The stone walls were unadorned, as was the floor. The only colour in the room came from the subtly hued books along the shelf, and the brightly coloured bedding which every married woman of my acquaintance deemed herself obliged to furnish me with. My unmarried state was a matter of great concern to all save one of them, and that one, the wife of my good friend William Cargill, had, I believed, guessed my secret. I had resolved in these past few weeks that it should remain a secret no longer, and was determined that what business I had to transact before I left for the eastern sea would be done with by tonight, so that I might devote tomorrow to persuading Sarah Forbes, servant in William’s household, mother to the beautiful, illegitimate son of a rapacious brute, that I truly loved her and that she must become my wife.

The remainder of the afternoon was spent on the necessary preparations for my departure, but by six o’clock most had been done and, as was my habit on a Tuesday evening, I threw on my cloak and went down through the college and into town, to William’s house on the Upperkirkgate. I did not go in by the street door but went instead by the backland. As ever, I was greeted first by Bracken, William’s huge and untrained hound, bought in the mistaken belief that he might one day again hunt as he had in the days of his youth. As he had learned, a busy young lawyer with the demands of wife and family hunts only in his dreams. The huge dog pressed me against the wall with his paws, and administered a greeting more loving than hygienic. I pushed him off, laughing, to attend to the other urgent greetings taking place around my knees. Two little boys, one as fair as the other was dark, clamoured loudly and repeatedly for my attention. It was little effort to sweep both of them up in my arms.

‘Uncl’Ander, Uncl’Ander,’ insisted James, the white-haired, two-year-old joy of my friend’s life, ‘make dubs.’ And indeed, the hands which he pressed to my face were covered in the mud the children had been playing with.

‘And what would your mothers say if I was to come into the house covered in such dubs?’

‘No tea till washed,’ said the serious little Zander, shaking his dark head. I kissed the hair on it. How could it be that I felt such love for another man’s child? But I did. I had loved him from the moment his mother had held him out towards me and, without looking at me and almost with defiance, told me she was naming him Alexander, Zander, after me. The child of a rape, the son of a filthy, bullying brute of a stonemason. It had been she, and not he, who had been banished the burgh of Banff in shame when her condition could no longer be hidden; she who had been sent to a loveless home where she was not welcome. And alongside the stones and the abuse hurled at her as she had crossed the river had been me. I had not known it then, I am not sure when I did finally know it, but at some point on our silent, reluctant journey together that day, she had utterly captivated me. Bringing her to the home of William and Elizabeth had been the best thing I had ever accomplished in my life, for them, for her, for her child, and for myself. But two years had been long enough; too long, and I was determined that on my return from Poland Sarah and Zander would leave the house of the Cargills and make their home, for life, with me.

The boys were wriggling down and began tugging at my sleeves to pull me after them into the house for supper. I stopped them by the well and we all three of us washed, although in truth my hands were dirtier after cleaning the two boys than they had been to start with. I steered the children past the still bounding dog, through the back door, and right into the kitchen. Lying in a large drained kettle on the table was a huge salmon, freshly poached and cooling, its silvered scales dulled and darkened, its flesh a wondrous pink, full of promise. It must have been one of the last of the season. I would relish it, not knowing what manner of food I might have on my travels to come.

At the other end of the table, bent over her flour board where she thumped with an unnatural venom at the pastry for an apple pie evidently in preparation, was Elizabeth Cargill. Instead of putting down her rolling pin and coming over to greet me by the hand as she would usually have done, she looked up tersely, gave a pinched, ‘Well. Mr Seaton,’ and returned with increased vigour to her thumping. Davy, William’s steward, sat in a wooden chair by the fire, plucking a bird. I looked to him for some explanation but was rewarded only with a narrowing of his thunderous brows and a muttered quotation from the book of Deuteronomy. The boys themselves seemed taken aback at my reception, but before we could make any sense of it, I heard the soft familiar brush of Sarah’s habitual brown woollen work dress against the flagstone floor. I turned to look at her, and she stopped stock-still where she was, her eyes those of one in shock. Her lips started to form some words and then she drew in a deep breath and stepped resolutely past me without a word.

I had had this treatment, or the semblance of it, before on occasion. One such incident had arisen from my failure to notice a new gown for the Sabbath, of a rich black stuff with white Dutch lace at the collar, sewn by Sarah’s own hand of gifts brought back to the family by William after a trip to The Hague. My protestation later to Elizabeth that Sarah was always beautiful to me had been to no avail, and the thaw of the women had been near two weeks in the coming. Another time, worse in that I knew it truly affected her more deeply, and that she had cause, was when Katharine Hay had passed through the town, staying a night at her parents’ town house in the Castlegate, on her way to Delgattie. I did not lie when I told Sarah that Katharine Hay, married now and with a child also, could be nothing to me, but I could not pretend that she never had been. This episode had been made all the more difficult by the fact that there had never been – and indeed still now there had not been – any open expression of love, any acknowledgement of expectation, between myself and Sarah. But I did love her, and I could not believe that she felt nothing more than gratitude towards me. I could not, in fact, believe that the desire I felt for her and the conviction I held to that she had been put on God’s earth to be my wife could have the strength they did were she not indeed meant for me. And once I had discussed my plans with William tonight and settled what business I needed him to perform for me, I would come here again tomorrow and tell her so. What this evening’s misdemeanour was, I could not even begin to guess, but I was confident that, as it had those other times, it would be carried away on the wind.