Crucible (23 page)

I was still trying to find a response when the parlour door opened once more, and Sarah entered along with Elizabeth and George Jamesone’s wife, Isabel Tosh. Sarah stood next to me and I felt an old thrill, as in the days of infatuation, as her fingers played their way into my hand. ‘It is good that you are here, Rachel,’ she said. ‘We should have been friends before now.’

‘The fault lies with me.’

William’s voice travelled across our heads to his wife, who was in conference with Isobel Tosh. ‘Are we all here now, Elizabeth? Should we take ourselves to table?’

‘We wait only on John Innes and Andrew Carmichael.’

It was not long before Elizabeth’s expectations were shown to have been in vain. A knocking on the door downstairs was answered by William’s steward’s slow trudge and in a short time Andrew Carmichael stood before us, alone, his hat in his hands and his boots dusty from the walk down from the Old Town. ‘He would not be persuaded. I had the Devil’s own job to get him to open the door to me.’

‘Is he still as bad?’ I asked.

Carmichael rubbed a hand over tired eyes. ‘Worse,’ he said. ‘He has not taken a class in days, and I do not know that he has eaten in as long either. Principal Rait is concerned about him, and I think his patience is close to wearing thin.’

‘Has he seen a physician?’ This from Jaffray.

‘He will let no one near …’

‘I have been to see him,’ said Richard Middleton. ‘But I have not been able to go to the Old Town since the night of Matthew Jack’s attack. Rachel will not let me out of her sight.’

‘And quite right she is,’ said Jaffray. ‘Have you let anyone else have a look at that wound?’ Even in the candlelight, Richard Middleton was as white as alabaster, and the short journey from his home to the Cargills’ had evidently exhausted him.

‘Dr Dun has been over to the house every day.’

‘Then I shall not meddle in his treatment of you, but mind what your wife says – the King’s College would be too long a walk or ride for one in your condition. As to John Innes, I do not like what I hear. I know enough about young men who shut themselves away in their rooms with a mind to have no more to do with the world. You will take me up to him tomorrow, will you not, Alexander?’

‘Gladly, once my morning classes are finished.’

The last of the introductions were made – Jaffray had met Andrew Carmichael once or twice before, at William’s house and elsewhere, but Carmichael and the Middletons
did not know each other. We were soon seated around the long refectory table to which a great quantity of food had been brought. There was the commotion usual to such gatherings over the matter of seating, although I knew from experience that Elizabeth would have a firm plan in her mind which we would all eventually be brought to adhere to. However, her plan on this occasion was set awry at the last minute by George Jamesone, too busy running an eye over a majolica bowl William had lately bought in Edinburgh to pay proper attention to where he sat. ‘You have taken Sarah’s seat, George,’ Elizabeth gently chided him.

‘Oh, have I?’ he said in his good-natured, absent way. ‘You know, this really is a marvellous bowl.’ He continued to turn the piece in his hands and unconsciously settled himself all the more in the place where my wife should have been seated.

Elizabeth opened her mouth to remonstrate with him more firmly, but Sarah, sensing that the issue was already drawing more attention than was comfortable, indicated by the slightest movement of her hand that she would take the place that should have been Jamesone’s. I felt the familiar hard tug in the pit of my stomach, that I had so promised myself I would master, to see her sit down at Andrew Carmichael’s left hand.

The first course was dealt with with some gusto, and before we set to the fish, Elizabeth handed round a tray of sherbets.

The doctor beamed like a child. ‘Truly, Elizabeth, you
turn the simplest of fruits into something beyond my powers to describe. You are an alchemist.’

‘I am but a mere housewife,’ she said. ‘It is Dr Middleton here who is the alchemist.’

Interested, Jaffray shifted his attention to the young man directly opposite him. ‘Is it so? Do you follow the method of Paracelsus?’

‘Certainly, as a physician, I employ the method of Paracelsus where I can.’ He leaned forward, that Jaffray might hear him better, and winced as a dart of pain shot through him.

‘Please, do not trouble yourself,’ said the old doctor.

‘No, no, I am fine,’ Middleton replied, ‘and it is pleasant to talk on matters that interest me. Rachel has forbidden all mention of my old interests until I am recovered …’

‘See the pass they have brought you to, these “old interests”, your “fraternity”,’ said his wife with more scorn than she may have intended. ‘You and others.’

Jaffray feigned an ignorance I knew he did not have. William had apprised him fully of the nature of Robert Sim’s activities and interests before his death. He could play the part of the old man well, when required. ‘A fraternity – I well remember some of the fraternities at Basel and Helmstedt. I could not stomach half the food or a quarter of the beer now that we did then, and it seems to me looking back that we did not sleep at all. Your wife is right, Dr Middleton: such fraternities are not good for your health.’

‘It is quite another fraternity of which my husband has been part,’ said Rachel quietly. She looked around the table. ‘I would ask you to join with me in begging him to have no more to do with the activities at my late brother’s lodge that have already led to the deaths of Robert Sim and the weaver Bernard Cummins.’

George Jamesone looked up from his meat, frowning. ‘Your brother the stonemason? I had thought the lodge disused.’

‘It had been so, for years,’ said Middleton. ‘But last winter I uncovered some signs of what I suspected were its ceremonial uses from the time when my brother-in-law lodged his workers there. The discovery reawakened my interest in Hermetic knowledge, and I was not long in finding others of a like mind. We began to pursue our studies together, rather than individually. The lodge made for an appropriate meeting place.’

Jamesone shook his head. ‘For the pursuit of secret knowledge. No, secret places are not where secret knowledge is to be found, but in the open. Take yourself to the Castlegate on market day, to the kirkyard after the sermon, to the harbour when the merchants are waiting for their cargoes to come in. Look in the faces of men and women – watch their eyes, the glances, the small movements of their hands. Who do they hate, fear, love? I tell you, you need not an alchemist’s laboratory or a hidden lodge – this town is a crucible of secrets, and those secrets are to be found in the faces of the men who keep them.’

‘You misunderstand me,’ said Middleton. ‘The alchemist seeks to isolate the essence of the object of his study, so that by knowing the essence, he may also find the agent of change, which will redeem corrupted matter and restore it to what God intended it should be.’

‘I think we take too much upon ourselves,’ said Andrew Carmichael quietly, ‘if we claim to know the intentions of God. The wrong agency, the wrong element, will corrupt just as the true one will redeem.’

‘Indeed,’ said Jaffray. ‘But you and I will talk of this again, Dr Middleton, for it is an interesting subject, and I would know more of how you have been able to apply your findings to your work.’ He turned kindly to Rachel. ‘Your husband and I can have our talk some time when you are not present, my dear, for I see the subject has set you ill at ease.’

‘It is just that I have heard too much of this talk already, from Richard and from Robert, too, and I fear that that talk has already cost them much, or will call attention on us that will do us little good.’

It was a little after this that Jaffray inclined his head towards me and muttered, more audibly than I felt was comfortable, ‘That fellow is giving me the evil eye.’

I held my glass up to the side of my face and brought my own voice to a considerably lower level. ‘Who? Middleton? Carmichael?’

‘What?’ He frowned in exasperation then suppressed a rumble of laughter. ‘No, not them, the fish. That fellow
there on the wall,’ he said, helping himself to another slab of salmon from the platter in front of him. ‘I feel he is threatening revenge on my every mouthful.’

In the dim candlelight, I had not noticed the painting on the wall opposite me. Everyone now looked to see what the doctor was talking about.

‘Oh, that!’ Elizabeth spoke with disgust. ‘I can scarcely look at it – that is why I have the room so badly lit on that side.’

I could not but agree with her that the painting, however fine the brushwork, was indeed an ugly thing. The carcass of what had once been a trout lay, butchered, on an earthenware platter. On the slab beside it were two smaller fish and fresh cut slices of raw salmon. Hanging on hooks above the grisly tableau were ready-gutted flounders. The baleful dead eye of the trout did appear to favour Jaffray, and it would not have shocked me greatly to learn the next day that he had been ill half the night.

‘To think,’ Elizabeth continued, ‘of all the times you have travelled to the Netherlands and I have pleaded with you to bring back something pleasing, some study of fruit and flowers – for Isobel tells me they are much in vogue amongst the Dutch – and at last you bring back this.’ She waved her hand in disdain at the gilt-framed canvas on the wall.

‘Mind you,’ said the doctor, ‘I have seen worse. On a window of the St Janskerk in Gouda, in size and colour quite horrible, is depicted the whale disgorging Jonah. I
could scarcely look on the thing. Have you seen it, William?’

A shake of the head.

‘I was never that far north,’ said Carmichael, ‘but I have heard that is a prodigiously ugly beast to be found adorning a kirk.’

And so the evening went on in companionship and increasing good humour, and as was so often the case on such occasions, conversation eventually turned to reminiscence and to tales of William and me in our younger days, a favourite topic of the doctor’s. He recounted fondly the difficulties of William’s courtship of Elizabeth, and the loneliness of their separation for the four years of his law studies in Leiden.

‘Now
there
was a place where such matters were dealt with more efficiently,’ murmured William, passing a bottle down the table. ‘A courtship of nigh on eight years would not be heard of in the Netherlands: there is an anxiety on the part of Dutch mothers to get their daughters off their hands that is altogether commendable.’

And so the company fell to discussing Dutch practice, and the women became more and more outraged as William, Richard Middleton and Andrew Carmichael outdid each other in the telling of raucous tales. Stories from Schermerhorn of the collusion of the community in plying young girls with intoxicating beverages that they might look the more kindly on potential bridegrooms, or Schagen, where the young women themselves paid for entrance to a field where they were enclosed for inspection like cattle at a
mart, were as nothing to Carmichael’s recollection of a night he had spent in the home of a friend on the Frisian island of Texel. We listened with increasing disbelief as he told of the family’s acquiescence in their daughter’s suitor’s breaking into the girl’s bedroom in the dead of night. They had then invited Carmichael to join them in listening at the bedroom door as the lover pursued his quarry. Only when the young man’s ardour became too great would the girl summon her family’s assistance by beating ferociously with a pair of tongs on an iron cauldron set by her bed for that express purpose. Andrew was a born story-teller, and revelled in the telling of the tale, but he could hardly get to the end of it as William and the doctor were by now laughing uproariously, and Rachel and Richard Middleton were not long in joining them.

Then Jaffray began to reminisce, with much embellishment of his difficulties, on his courtship of his own late wife, and as he did so I watched my own. There were no tales I could tell to amuse of the days before Sarah had become my wife. There would be little joy for either of us in my relating the indecision and uncertainty that had cost me two years with her, her visceral grief when she had thought I was dead, and the spectres of that time that I had allowed to haunt our marriage since, one of whom was sitting across William’s table from me, and could have no comfort in his own reflections on courtship. I caught him, in an unguarded moment, looking at her, and then he looked to me, and in that look was a final admission of defeat.

Talk turned then to other strange customs of the Dutch, including the new fashion there for the drinking of tea.

Jaffray shook his head sadly. ‘Indeed. I heard only last week from Webster in Haarlem that it is the foulest concoction of herbs he has ever been forced to swallow, and should be kept for the sick bed and that alone. He has utterly forbidden his wife to have it in the house.’

‘I fear the gentleman will be in the minority, Doctor,’ said Andrew Carmichael, ‘for Dutch matrons have developed a great liking for it, and it is commonly said, “
Buyter en Brae en t’zijs goe Huwsmanne spijs
” – butter, bread and green tea is a good houseman’s food.’

‘Then I can only thank the good Lord that He did not make me a Dutch houseman,’ replied the doctor, shuddering as he swallowed down another glass of wine.

As time wore on, fatigue became more and more evident in Richard Middleton’s face, and despite his protests, the urging of his wife and of Jaffray prevailed. Jaffray promised to visit his younger colleague in the morning, and William helped him on with his cloak. ‘I will see them safe home,’ I heard William say to Elizabeth as the Middletons made their final farewells.

In the brief silence that followed, Sarah yawned and Andrew Carmichael was on his feet in a moment. ‘I too should be leaving. I will hear overmuch about it from the porter if I am not back within the gates of the King’s College soon.’

‘Will you at least not wait until William returns, and have one last drink with us?’

Carmichael smiled his appreciation but shook his head. ‘I fear Alexander’s wife has been tired out by all of this, and I would not be the cause of her discomfort.’ Then he bade us all a good evening, her last of all. ‘Good night, Sarah,’ he said.