Crucible (29 page)

In the college too, it seemed that all might, indeed, be well. Preparations for the graduations gathered their usual pace, and the days passed in a busy haze of heat, nerves and excitement. Dr Dun was evidently intent that I should have not a spare moment for further enquiry or search into the
matter of the murders of Robert Sim and Bernard Cummins: when I was not taking my classes through the revision of their courses, I was charged with every petty task in the arrangements for the laureation that seemed to enter the principal’s head.

Every bench in the Grayfriars’ Kirk had to be inspected by me before and after it was cleaned, every corner of the common school of the college swept under my oversight, lest at the disputations or the ceremony after them some petty laird or aged doctor of divinity might find himself inconvenienced by the sighting of a cobweb. The porter and the other college servants were sick of the sight of me, although their disdain could not match that of the head gardener when I appeared in his domain under instruction to oversee the choice of flowers from the gardens that would bedeck courtyard and kirk. A man who had kept the college garden thirty years needed no advice from one who could scarcely tell a marigold from a dandelion, and he was not long in making this plain.

And so the days passed, and in truth I began to find that the shadow of Nicholas Black fell less and less across my mind. Gone was the jealousy and suspicion of the last weeks and months that had eaten away at all the good things that had come in to my life since I had met Sarah, and I saw clearly now what I had risked losing. The knowledge terrified me. Once Dr Dun or Jaffray or William Cargill had seen me into my own courtyard at night, my world was there and I had no wish to sully it by thoughts of other things.

‘I do not know how you have put up with me,’ I said to her one night.

‘No more do I,’ she replied, without turning from her inspection of Deirdre’s old baby gowns to look at me.

I went to her and put my hands around her waist. ‘I am in earnest, Sarah. I could not have lived with the man that I was becoming, I could not have lived with the bitterness, the changes of mood …’

She turned now. ‘We will leave aside the fact that I had no choice, for whatever happened between us, I had no choice. But had I been a wealthy woman of good family, had I had no children, had I not been carrying your child, I would have stayed anyway.’ She put aside the gown she’d been holding. ‘I did not marry you because I needed a home – I had one with William and Elizabeth, and would always have had one there. I did not marry you because I needed a father for Zander – has the boy not three god-fathers of greater wealth and better standing than you?’

It was true. When Sarah’s son had been born, she had been reluctant to ask any to stand godfather to her bastard child, but the matter had soon been taken from her hands as William Cargill, Dr Jaffray and John Innes had stepped forward to claim that role.

‘And I did not marry you,’ she continued, holding my gaze in a challenge, ‘because no one else would have me.’ I opened my mouth to speak but she had not finished. ‘I married you because I loved you, Alexander Seaton. I knew from the first moment you bent down from your horse to
speak to me that I would love you. From the moment you put your hands at my waist to lift me onto that horse, I knew that I would never let another man touch me. Nothing you have ever done, nothing you could ever say can change that, and if you were to walk out of that door now and never come back, I would die never loving another man.’

‘Nor I another woman,’ I said softly. I bent down to kiss her, and felt the touch of her lips on mine with all the thrill, all the wonder, of the very first time.

All would be well, then. Sarah must have heard what was being said about me, but she never spoke of it – she had heard such things often enough before. My own sense of unease that Matthew Jack was not the man I had sought receded a little in the gathering excitement as graduation day approached. Principal Dun himself became somewhat lighter of spirit, and although he tended Richard Middleton each day, I felt he too would be happier to see his younger colleague gone from our horizon. While his vigilance over his patient did not waver, that which he had so carefully exercised over me began to relax its grip, and I at last found myself able to come and go, unattended, from the college as the occasion suited me.

I took the opportunity, whenever it might arise, to slip out and visit the Middletons for myself, or to find an excuse to go to the King’s College in the Old Town, and call upon John Innes, who, under the care of the principal’s daughter, in the Mediciner’s manse there, seemed to strengthen a little
in mind and spirit by the day. He called less now on his angels, and found some solace in quiet prayer, from the spectres of devils that still beset him in the short hours of darkness. I related to him, in as much detail as I could recall, the experiences of Pilgrim in Comenius’
Labyrinth
, for the book itself had never been found. To my relief, the tale did not add to his delusions, but seemed to have a kind of enchantment of truth and light for him, which had been absent these latter weeks in the dark and stinking hermitage of his college room. He followed the progress of Pilgrim from day to day, and came with him to see the futility of the Rosicrucian dream. At the end of each visit, I thanked God that my friend, this kind and gentle man, had been pulled back from the edge of the abyss.

The last day before the final examinations and laureation dawned, a little hazy, but with promise of great heat. My own scholars, in their third year and with no examinations to face until our return to college in the autumn, had finished their course and been ploughed through it again by myself and John Strachan who had now proved himself sufficiently that he was to have Matthew Jack’s vacant place as regent. As some went happily off to the Links to play golf, and others down to the shops and booths of the Castlegate to fulfil some last commissions for their parents before returning home to the glens of Aberdeenshire and the scattered Highland settlements from which they had come, I too left the college. As I made my way down the Upperkirkgate, I saw, halfway down the street, a young
boy of about twelve struggling out of William Cargill’s door carrying a large and vaguely familiar looking object in his arms. Dr Jaffray was following after him, his head turned towards William’s manservant, standing in the doorway.

‘Days of wickedness – you have it there, Duncan, you have it right. Days of wickedness. When a man such as David Melville cannot be trusted!’

I crossed over quickly, just as Jaffray’s lately bought map was about to fall from the hapless boy’s grasp. ‘What has our good bookseller done to so incur your wrath, Doctor?’ I asked, as I gave the grateful boy his penny and told him I would see to the doctor’s errand.

‘Good bookseller? Was there ever such a thing? A charlatan! A purveyor of fakes!’

‘Come, you know David Melville is neither of those things. You have been buying books from him for longer than I have myself.’

‘That is what makes it all the worse, that after all these years he should so abuse my custom and my trust as to sell me this.’

‘The map?’ I said, holding the thing at arms’ length the better to scrutinise it. ‘But it is a fine piece. There is no fakery here.’

‘The map is wrong, I tell you. It has the Frisian islands too far to the north or Gouda too far to the south – it is one thing or the other.’

I looked again at the map. The geography and topography
of the Netherlands was not entirely unfamiliar to me, and it did not appear to me that anything was amiss.

‘But what makes you think that, Doctor?’ I asked.

Jaffray’s response was lost as a great sound of shouting and commotion reached us from the direction of the Castle-gate. A shadow passed across the doctor’s face; all thought of maps was forgotten as he thrust the object back through William’s still-open doorway and gripped my arm. ‘Come Alexander; I have heard such sounds before and they rarely portend good.’

And indeed, it was nothing good that we learned even before we had breasted the Broadgate. Word was spreading through the streets that Matthew Jack had broken free of his gaolers whilst being transferred from the tolbooth to the sheriff court, and was loose somewhere on the streets. My first thought was of Richard Middleton and his wife, but a guard had been set on the provost’s house as soon as the escape had become known. Every moment Matthew Jack was free, on the run, was a moment more for him to continue spinning out his web of malice. My mind worked quickly. Where was my wife? I could not remember what she had said that morning as I had left.

‘Sarah!’ I shouted. ‘Doctor, is Sarah at William’s house?’

My friend shook his head. ‘I have not seen her there all day. There was something I think about her staying at home – some preparations she had in hand for your students’ supper.’ His face told me instantly that his fears mirrored my own, and for all his sixty years he had turned
and was pushing against the crowd to get back across the street before I was myself.

I must have reached the pend on our lane in less than two minutes. Jaffray, breathing hard, was some way behind me by now. I ran into the courtyard shouting Sarah’s name, and for the second time in recent days found the door to my own house barred against me. Before Jaffray had caught up with me, I had lifted the wooden bench from its place by the wall and begun to ram it against the door. The son of an elderly neighbour came running down the forestairs, shouting, until he realised who I was and joined me in my battering of the door. At last it gave way and I crashed in to find my daughter huddled in a corner, crying for her mother, and Sarah on the floor, lifeless but for the blood seeping from her head. Jaffray spoke quietly behind me. ‘Good God, Alexander, can it be him?’

It was. The thing that crouched over my wife, a knife in its hand was more beast than man, filthy, matted, covered in sores.

‘Have your brat cease its squalling, Seaton, or I’ll skewer it from here.’

As I took a step towards him, the old woman from across the courtyard scurried behind me to sweep Deirdre from the floor.

I turned to fall on my knees beside Sarah.

I heard Jack suck at his teeth. ‘She did not prove as accommodating as I thought.’ He was rubbing at a livid scratch on his face. ‘More feisty than the usual bitch in heat.’ He
nodded towards the scar on my own neck. ‘Does she like to get it rough, Seaton? I can take her rough.’

Before I knew that the animal scream that filled the room was from my own throat, I felt my fist connect with his head. It was only with the first kick of my boot into his ribs that I heard the knife skitter across the floor, only with the second that I felt bone crunch beneath my foot. They had to pull me from him in the end and then they had to drag me from Sarah, where I held to her on the floor.

‘Good God, the place is like a flesher’s yard.’ It was William, downstairs.

‘I doubt it will ever clean,’ came a woman’s voice.

‘They said in the chambers that he had killed him.’

I did not know. I did not know if I had killed him. I did not care. Everything, almost everything I cared about lay, swathed in clean white linen, on the bed in front of me, my marriage bed.

‘Come away, Alexander,’ Jaffray said gently. ‘I must dress your hand.’

I shook my head. ‘I will not leave her.’

‘There is nothing you can do for her. Elizabeth will sit with her, will you not?’

They were treating me like a child. ‘Yes, I will sit with her.’ She smiled. ‘Go with the doctor, Alexander.’ And I went like a child.

I did not recognise the room downstairs in which I found
my neighbour on her hands and knees, scrubbing as if her last days depended on it. I tried to speak but I could not, dazed, not knowing if the blood on the floor came from me, or from him, or from my wife.

William sat opposite me, never taking his eyes from mine as the doctor carefully cleaned and bound my hand. He kept swallowing, as if trying to swallow down the question he must ask. In all the days I had known him, I had never seen my friend, the great lawyer, the master rhetorician, so lost for words. As his eyes brimmed with tears and he reached out a hand to take mine, I knew I had never loved him so well.

‘She lives,’ I managed to say eventually. ‘She lives, William.’

‘And the child?’

Jaffray’s lips were bound tight. It was a moment before he spoke. ‘The midwife is with her. We will know soon.’

Elizabeth sat through the night with Sarah, William, having seen the children safely into the care of George Jamesone’s wife, with me. Jaffray tended to us all with the energy of a man half his age. I drank down everything he gave me, and slept for some of the hours of the night. In the morning, when at last she woke, her first question was of our unborn child.

‘Jaffray and the midwife believe that all will be well, but you must rest. Is that not so, Doctor?’

‘It is. The wound at your temple will heal in time, and
it will not spoil your pretty face, my dear. Though nothing can be done for your senses, I fear.’

‘My senses?’ she murmured dozily.

‘Well, a bump on the head cannot put back what you lost years ago, to put up with this one for so long,’ he said, indicating me with a tilt of his head. ‘But truly, Sarah, you must rest. Elizabeth will not allow you across her door to do work, so you need not think of it, and Isobel Tosh will have Zander and Deirdre until you are well enough.’

‘But they will need to see me, and oh – Deirdre.’

She was remembering now, the scene our daughter had witnessed in the room below.

‘She is fine,’ I said. ‘They are both fine, and I will take them to you this afternoon. Deirdre knows the bad man will never come here again.’

The bad man would never be anywhere again, but the road from the tolbooth to the gibbet on Heading Hill. I had not killed him, William had told me late in the night after he had been out to talk to the sheriff and to see for himself that Jack was safely in chains once more. ‘You didn’t leave many bones in one piece, but you didn’t kill him, more’s the pity. Dr Dun went in there and patched him up sufficiently that they might set a rope round his neck to hang him.’