The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

I remembered the contorted features and the grotesque arrangement of the body I had seen dead at my desk, and I did not argue with the doctor. He continued. ‘The plant is grown and its properties well known in the Alps where, despite its beauty, none will touch it. I have seen it only once and at a distance, at a lecture at Montpellier nearly thirty years ago. I cannot pretend I remember it clearly or could describe it accurately. Later, though, I did see some sketches of the flower.’

I was as ignorant of botany as it had been possible for a student of divinity to be. I had always been so taken up with the internal world of man that the external, with all its seasonally changing beauties, had in many ways remained a mystery to me. And yet I was doubtful. ‘And with this knowledge you can identify the root of one small plant?’

Jaffray reached again for his pipe. ‘I cannot be certain I would even have thought of it had not Arbuthnott drawn my attention to the residue in the hair. The root – bulb, in fact – could be from one of several plants, but none with such lethal effect as the colchicum mortis.’ He paused for a moment in thought, sombre. ‘Poisoning is an act of veiled and contemptible cowardice, born in the blackest region of a man’s heart. It admits of no possibility of the victim fighting back. And yet …’ he hesitated.

‘Yet what?’

‘I do not think, in the end, that the murderer was able to fully conceal his crime from the boy. The colchicum should have no taste, but I believe that in his last minutes, Patrick Davidson knew he had been poisoned. Death did not come quickly enough for either of them.’

There came a searing flash in my mind again of a man calling out to me, a man falling, trying to get up, calling to me for help. A wave of nausea ran through me. Mine had been the second face that night to condemn him to death. I did not want this to be true.

‘Why do you think so, James?’

‘The grass. A dog eats grass to make itself sick. There is no briony to be had at this time of year, for that would have done the trick, so in his last conscious moments in this world, Patrick Davidson resorted to the behaviour of a dog in an attempt to save his own life. He tried to make himself vomit because he knew he had been poisoned.’

‘How long would he have suffered?’ My voice could barely hold the question.

‘Longer than he should have done. Fifteen, perhaps twenty minutes.’

And when, in those fifteen or twenty minutes, had I seen him? How near to death or to the possibility of salvation had Patrick Davidson been when he had made his desperate, hopeless appeal to me? ‘And Arbuthnott is of your view?’

‘I did not discuss that point with the apothecary. I trust him implicitly on the matter of plants and compounds, but the human psyche is beyond his expertise.’ He smiled mischievously. ‘Else he would not have married him such a wife.’

I could not help but smile myself, grave though the present matter was. The doctor had seen greater tragedies and greater evil before, no doubt, and it was only his humour that allowed him to bear it day after day. He called his humour a gift of faith, a grace. It was a gift greatly misunderstood by some of the narrower minds in our community, those whose chief delight in life was to cast withering glances and utter words of reproach. Those such as Baillie Buchan, James Cardno and even, I sometimes thought, my landlady, Mistress Youngson. ‘What does Arbuthnott have to say about the provenance of the root? Was it taken from his shop?’

Jaffray shook his head. ‘He has never had nor would ever have it. There is, he claims – and I do not disbelieve him, for I know of none myself – no use in medicine or hygiene for the root of that variety of the species. I checked every shelf and every drawer in that shop today – there is no poison under the apothecary’s roof that is not on the permitted list.’

‘Then was it grown here?’ I knew that many plants native to the Alps had become favourites in the gardens of landed and professional people who had returned to our shores after study abroad. Some grew them for further study, but many, I knew, simply for the joy of it.

Again Jaffray was doubtful. ‘That was my own next thought. I know little enough about the cultivation of flowers myself – it is Ishbel who tends to Elizabeth’s garden – so I went and enquired of Gilbert Jack.’ As ever, the doctor had seen to the heart of the matter: if any man in Banff knew of the flower, it would be the laird of Banff’s gardener. The laird’s palace gardens ran down opposite the kirkyard and towards the Greenbanks, taking in much of what had once formed the yards and gardens of the Carmelites in the burgh. Three generations of gardeners – Gilbert Jack’s father and grandfather before him – had redeemed what was best in those gardens: the herbarium, the kitchen garden, the orchard with its many types of apple, plum and pear, and had created a garden that was the glory of the north. If Gilbert Jack could not grow something in Banff, it probably could not be grown here at all.