The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

This much, or the gist of it, William Cargill had known, or guessed. Knowing of old of my feelings for Katharine, he had known what Archie’s death would mean for us. The whole of the North knew of my humbling, my great fall, at Fordyce. But if my humiliation had been public, Katharine’s was worse. What was not known was guessed at, and whispered on the roads, in the inns, in the great halls of castles and at the firesides of hovels. Her name was bartered by those who were not worthy even to look on her face. Many wild theories abounded, until the people had some new scandal to keep their tongues active and their spirits content, but I had destroyed what I most loved, and Katharine, banished to that cold marriage bed, could never come back to Delgatie again.

William and I had never spoken of it before last night. ‘And for this, for what many men have done, ministers among them indeed, you were cast out from your brethren and they will never let you become a minister? Alexander, it is hypocrisy, and you should not bend to it. Why, Delgatie himself was a notorious adulterer in his younger days.’

I had heard this argument before, from Charles Thom, who had also guessed aright at the heart of the scandal. Jaffray had not argued in such a way, for he knew me better. ‘No, the hypocrisy has been mine, William. My Lord Hay is the head of a family, a magnate, a soldier, a leader of men. What he does in his bed or any other is of no consequence. Yet I sought to be a minister in God’s Kirk, to lead people from the path of damnation to the blessed assurance of righteousness. I knew what I did was wrong. And such was my arrogance in the face of God that I thought it did not matter because it was I who did it. And …’

‘And what?’

‘It was a betrayal. And my every memory of my whole life up to that point is coloured now by the knowledge of that betrayal. There is nothing in me that is not rotten.’

William would not allow this. ‘No, I will not have it. You did what other men, worse men have done. You loved the girl and she you. God in his Providence decreed she should not be your wife. In that at least, you may be wretched, but you are not rotten, for it was no work of yours that killed Archie and took Katharine from you.’

If this had only been so, I might have found myself a more tolerable being. But it was not so. William did not know it; no one knew it, save myself and Katharine. I had had a chance, only a chance, to hold onto the shreds of my life and to make of it something new. But I had rejected it, left it in the gutter. For, on the day of my fall at Fordyce, Katharine too had ridden from Delgatie. She had taken the finest horse left in the stables and she had ridden as no woman before her could have ridden. It availed her nothing. She could not catch her father’s party; she could not overtake him or plead my cause before the brethren as she had sworn to her mother she would do. By the time she arrived at Fordyce the kirk and kirkyard were empty and the brethren gone. She asked all about, but no one could tell her where I was or which way I had gone. Eventually, she came across a pedlar who had seen me on the road to Sandend. It did not take her long to find me then. I was on foot, and my form as well known to her as her own. We had not seen each other since that early morning in her chamber at Delgatie. How often since then I had meditated on the words, taken from the book of Proverbs and painted on the beams of that room’s ceiling: ‘If thou does labour in honesty, the labour goes, the honour bides with thee. If thou does any vice allow, the shame remains when pleasure is ago.’ The shame was burning now into me, burning my eyes so I could scarcely see. And the shame engendered in me a kind of madness, I think. There on the road she slid from her mount and took a step towards me.