The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

As I approached the huddle of shacks a trio of mangy, hungry dogs came towards me, snarling quietly. A small, filthy child, a girl perhaps, in thin rags, ran into one of the houses from the hen house where she had been gathering eggs. A young man – it might have been her father – soon emerged, a large stick in his hand. I did not know him. He did not call off the dogs. ‘What do you want?’ he asked.

‘I am here to see Lang Geordie,’ I said.

His suspicion was all the greater.

‘Lang Geordie sees no one. What is your business?’

‘None of yours.’

I kept my face steady but my heart was pounding and the dogs knew it. They crept closer, and at any moment, at a word from the beggar man, they would be at my throat. More figures had emerged from the houses, two or three other young men, little more than boys, a gaggle of dirty children, a young woman holding a baby, another big with child. Perhaps a dozen pairs of eyes fixed me with cold hostility. The closest dog let out a long growl and was about to spring when a low snarl in some tongue, some vagabond’s cant I did not understand, came from the doorway of the main shack. The dog cowered back with a yelp, as if struck, and then slunk away with its companions. The gathering of people at the doorway parted and surveying me, as he supported himself on two crutches, was Lang Geordie.

The man must have been nearly seven feet tall, a giant almost. He had the wild hair and beard of an Old Testament prophet. The brandings on his cheek, marking him out as a ‘sturdy beggar’, repulsed on pain of death from some other town, only served to inspire greater fear in those who came upon him. I stood there, my chest still heaving from the encounter with the dogs, and waited.

‘If it is not the Devil’s apprentice,’ he said at length, with a hoarse laugh. His followers also laughed, some of the hostility in their eyes being replaced by a ready mockery, but only some. The young men continued to watch me with a clear and studied intent. ‘What do you want of me? Are you here for the whores? The word on the roads is that you prefer a higher class of siren in your bed.’ Again a laugh, more real now, from the gathering.

So I had made Katharine the talk of the beggars and the thieves on the roads and hovels of the north. It was little wonder her friend Isabella Irvine despised me. I made no response to the jibe. ‘It is yourself I am here to see.’

All jocularity was gone now from Lang Geordie’s face. He was studying me carefully, weighing me up. I think he had some notion then of what my business was. He uttered something in the cant to his people and they dispersed slowly to the places from which they had come, all but two of the younger men who continued to stand near him, on either side of the only door of the hovel. Lang Geordie gave them some instruction, too and then looked at me again. ‘Then come in, Mr Seaton, come in.’ I went carefully past the dogs and in between the two guards, stooping low, although not as low as Lang Geordie. Once inside, my eyes could scarce make out a thing. The door had been shut behind me and the only light came from the round smokehole in the middle of the roof and from the open fire itself. As my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom I could discern figures, shapes, huddled in various parts of the one long room that constituted the whole dwelling. A young woman stirred a pot of something – some broth of seaweeds – over the fire; an older woman, coughing as she did so, sang in an alien tongue to a baby in dirty swaddling; two small children scrabbled after something in a corner – a mouse or a rat. On a trestle bed at the far end of the room lay another woman, also coughing. The floor was beaten dirt and I knew not what I would find when I set one foot in front of the other. The stench and squalor were beyond my experience: even the tolbooth jail could scarcely compare with this. Lang Geordie ordered the woman up from the bed – the dwelling’s only furnishing – and as he took his seat there himself I saw that she was not a woman, but little more than a girl – fourteen, perhaps. She was wearing a tattered dress that I knew I had seen before, too large by far around the bosom and the hips. A whore’s dress; Mary Dawson’s dress. The vagabond chief saw me looking at the girl. ‘You can have her for a price – after our business is done,’ he said, very steady, with no insinuation.