The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

‘Have you found any answers, after the events of last night?’

I shook my head. ‘I have questions, more questions, but few answers.’

He broke a piece of bread from the loaf on the table and smeared some butter on it. ‘You have no idea who it might have been that the women saw as they carried Patrick Davidson to the schoolhouse?’

‘None. Well, no. That is a lie. I am over-laden with ideas. By the time the clock had struck four this morning there was not a soul in Banff I did not suspect.’

William smiled. ‘Aye. For all my exhortation of you to tell her nothing of all this, I was hard put myself not to waken Elizabeth and ask her her views on the matter. For the whores to be tolerated so long and only now to be banished, forced to flee for fear of their lives, can have little to do with the nature of their profession. They must indeed have seen the murderer – and been seen by him. But who could take the risk of sending a warning message to them by a known vagrant?’

‘I do not know, but I suspect it may have been Lang Geordie, or one of his band, who was used to call Jaffray away to Findlater on the night of the murder.’

‘I think you are right,’ said William. ‘Unless it was the beggar man himself who killed the apprentice?’ He said this more in hope than expectation, and offered no argument when I disagreed with the idea.

‘Poison would not be Lang Geordie’s style. A knife in the back in a dark alleyway, and then being left to bleed in the gutter – that would have been Patrick Davidson’s fate at the hands of Lang Geordie or his men.’

‘Aye,’ said William, ‘the poison is the thing. And then the maps, and Marion Arbuthnott’s prescience of some evil to befall her father’s apprentice.’ He rubbed the heels of his hands into his eyes, as if to gouge the confusion from them. ‘What sense is to be made of it all?’

I swallowed the last spoonful of my porridge. ‘I do not know. These questions and others have been troubling me the whole night. But I mean to make sense of them, to make a start at least. You have business this morning?’

He nodded. ‘Yes, but I shall be here before twelve, and then we can walk up to the King’s College to take our dinner with John and Matthew before you must go to your appointment with Principal Dun.’ He paused. ‘You are still happy to meet with our friends again?’

When William had first received my letter telling him of my plans to make this trip to Aberdeen, and asking if I might lodge with him, he had taken it as a sign that I had emerged from the great black tunnel of despair that I had hidden myself in since my disgrace. He had written back to me almost instantly, suggesting that we should seek out some old friends of our student days who were to be in the Old Town at the time of my visit. My first impulse had been to say no, I could not face it, but Jaffray had dissuaded me from being so hasty. Now the meeting no longer filled me with dread. Indeed, the thought of seeing those friends again gave me some pleasure. ‘I will be glad to see them,’ I said. ‘But as for the morning, I mean to use it to examine your uncle’s notebooks. Jaffray is sure that if the flower used to poison Patrick Davidson is to be found, it will be found there.’

‘Then you must use my study. The light there is the best in the house, and it is the room furthest from the kitchen, so you will have peace. What these women find to gossip and cackle about the whole day long, I do not know. I am sure old Duncan only pretends at deafness to save himself having to listen to them. Is that not right, Duncan?’

‘I could not tell you, master. I have the deafness in one ear,’ said the old man, with a sly smile. ‘I’ll have the girl set a fire in your study for Mr Seaton here. The room will be cold at this hour of the morning.’ And he went off in search of the kitchen girl, who was still out at the goats.

‘You are a good master, William,’ I said to my friend. ‘Your servants are fond of you, and would do much for you, I think.’

‘I am very fortunate. But it is beyond even Duncan’s power to keep Elizabeth at rest. He and the girl do all they can, but the time is soon coming when she will need more help, and I fear she will not take it.’

‘Do you really fear so much for her?’

He sighed and put down his bread. ‘Aye, and with cause. She was ill, early this winter past, very ill, with a fever. She hardly swallowed a morsel – a bit of thin soup, little more – for nigh on three weeks. Sometimes she was so far in the fever she hardly knew my face. Dun had done all he could for her and I was on the point of sending for Jaffray when, thank God, she started to mend.’

‘But she is well now?’

He gestured helplessly. ‘She was never strong, and she has not the strength even that she had before her illness. The pregnancy is hard on her. I pray God morning and night that she will survive the birth.’

‘And the child, too.’

He looked at me sharply. ‘Oh, do not mistake me, Alexander. I love that child in her belly already, but at what price might I become a father? And then she insists she will feed the bairn herself. She will not listen to sense on the matter, Alexander; but she will not have the strength or the milk to nurse her own child. I am at a loss to know what to do with her.’