The Redemption of Alexander Seaton (9 page)

Come my love and live with me
And we shall see the rivers run
With delicate and daintie din
And how my Dovern night and day
With sweet meanders glides away
To pay her debts unto the sea.

I believe I stood a long time there, beneath the gibbet, meditating on those lines, but I have no notion of how long it might have been. I was aware of feeling colder as the haar drifted in from the sea and obscured some of the burgh from my view. Slowly, the sound of a drum brought me from my reverie. The drum that preceded the hangman. I waited, my eyes closed, and the drum came nearer. A hand reached out and touched my neck, a human hand. For a moment, a brief moment, my heart stopped beating in my breast.

‘Oh, Mr Seaton, a mercy, Mr Seaton, please God.’ Before I had opened my eyes and located the voice in my memory, a rougher hand pulled the first away. A rougher voice called out – one of the town serjeants.

‘Janet Dawson. Do not lay your filthy fingers upon any citizen of this burgh. You have been told the judgement of the magistrates – do not pretend ignorance!’

And then the other serjeant began to intone, with evident pleasure, ‘You are to be banished furth of these bounds. A lewd and licentious liver, a whore, a keeper of codroche houses. You and your sister also. You are to be scourged by the hangman from this place hence, and never to return within the freedom of this burgh, on pain of death.’ He turned to the burgh hangman, whose was the rough hand that had pulled Janet Dawson’s pleading fingers from their touch, a gentle touch, on my neck. ‘Strip her to the waist.’

I turned my face away, unable to watch as Janet Dawson, who had had her whore’s dignity, was deprived of the dignity of a woman. I heard the hangman raise his whip and the hurling whoosh as the knotted leather swept towards her bare flesh. It was the punishment, all too readily used, meted out by the burgh fathers to any woman whose honour was questioned and who could not prove herself beyond doubt. But the Dawson sisters’ whoredom was as established as it was notorious. That Janet was now being scourged from the burgh on pain of death should she ever return I could not comprehend. Again I heard the demented whoosh of the scourge. And I heard a voice call out, my own voice; it shouted ‘No!’ The whip crashed down on the woman’s side but was not raised a third time. The town’s officer looked at me. ‘I take no pleasure in it, Mr Seaton.’

‘Then dress her again, and leave her be to quit this place unmolested. You have done the magistrates’ bidding.’ I looked at Janet as, cowering, she pulled her torn bodice over herself and scrabbled in the dirt for her shawl. ‘I will testify to that.’

The officer uttered a harsh ‘Leave her,’ to the hangman, who looked disappointed of his prey. Janet rushed at me all of a sudden, grabbing my collar. The officer made to seize her but I held him away. She spoke desperately to me. ‘A word, a kind word, Mr Seaton. A coin. Any coin. To help a poor woman, a kind word, Mr Seaton.’ I fumbled in my pocket and drew out two pennies – of little use to her as they were. She grabbed them and raised her face to mine, as if she would kiss me. But she did not kiss me. She whispered in haste in my ear, just as they came to drag her off me. ‘“James and the flowers,” Mr Seaton. The last words he ever spoke.’

I stood and watched, as they recommenced the scourging and drove her from the burgh bounds at the beat of their drum.

FOUR

The Maps

The grammar school was held again the next day, after its macabre holiday. Sounds of high spirits and excitement came from Gilbert Grant’s classroom, but my own scholars were more subdued than I had expected them to be. A little before midday, one of Gilbert Grant’s scholars came bursting into my room. He was breathless, and his words tumbled over each other. ‘Mr Seaton, Mr Seaton. You are to go at once to the tolbooth. You and the master, for you are both wanted there. You are to lose no time.’ In the room next door, Gilbert Grant had already replaced his robe with a good thick cloak and confirmed somewhat breathlessly that we had been sent for. The sense of apprehension that had been my constant companion since the previous day grew. I gathered my own hat and cloak and we set off for the tolbooth, leaving word with Mistress Youngson that there would be no school that afternoon.

At the tolbooth, we were allowed to pass without question, and were soon shown with little ceremony through the great timber door of the council chamber. I had entered this room only once before – on the same occasion that Gilbert Grant had taken us boys to the tolbooth jail two floors above, he
had also been allowed to bring us into this hallowed place. I could still remember the words of the old provost, whose name I had now forgotten – another Ogilvie, no doubt – we stood in awe in the oak-panelled room with its huge, finely polished table and its ornately carved chairs. ‘The room above, boys, you must ever strive to avoid. This, this,’ he had repeated with a proprietorial sweep of his hand, ‘is what you should aspire to.’ I never had.

Waiting for us in the room were not only the provost and the baillie, but also Edward Arbuthnott and Thomas Stewart, notary public of the burgh of Banff. For the notary, unlike for Baillie Buchan and James Cardno, the world did not begin and end with the kirk. He was not ungodly, but he was a man of the world, a measured man who understood the needs and failings of his fellow creatures without seeing sin at the root of them all. Where he had been yesterday I did not know, but I was heartily glad to see him today. Stewart did not look up when Grant and I entered the room, engaged as he was on the removal of some papers from the open chest at the far end of the room. The apothecary looked somewhat shaken, ill at ease, but it was the demeanour of the provost that I marked most. His complexion was of a greater pallor than I had ever seen it, and his hand shook so that he had to steady himself by leaning on the back of a chair. He never once took his eyes off Thomas Stewart and the papers.

My companion was the first to speak. ‘We have come, provost, as we were sent for. What business here requires us?’

Walter Watt, scarcely hearing, I think, made no response. It was the baillie who replied. ‘We require your assistance, and that also of Mr Seaton there,’ he nodded towards me in
a perfunctory manner, ‘in the examination of these papers.’ He indicated the chest over which Thomas Stewart was again bent. ‘The notary and I went to Arbuthnott’s this morning with the purpose of examining Charles Thom’s belongings in the hope of finding some evidence of evil intent against Patrick Davidson, since he denies involvement in the crime. I am glad to say – and I pray you would mark this, Mr Seaton – that we could find nothing amongst the belongings of Charles Thom to suggest anything other than a blameless life on the part of that young man.’ The involuntary relaxation of my shoulders and hands must have been noticed, for he continued, emphasis on his next words, ‘However, the absence of evident guilt is not the same as the proof of innocence, and that we have not found.’

‘Nor will find,’ I responded, ‘unless Patrick Davidson arises and tells you the name of the one who slew him.’

The baillie probed me with his long, unflinching gaze. ‘Charles Thom is at liberty to talk for himself, but chooses not to. If his reasons are known to you, you would do well to divulge them. It would go the better for you both.’ His eyes searched mine for a moment, but he returned to the matter in hand. ‘It is not in the case of Charles Thom we require help from yourself and Mr Grant. The papers we wish you to examine belong to Mr Patrick Davidson.’

Now I thought I understood something of the provost’s pallor.

‘What are these papers?’ I asked.

Stewart turned the first of the piles and passed it across the table. ‘That is what we would like you to tell us, although we know, broadly, what they are. What we would ascertain is what they mean.’

I pulled over a chair for Gilbert Grant but remained standing myself. Buchan placed a new-lit candle at the older schoolmaster’s elbow. My own eyesight was far better than my colleague’s. At first glance I saw what the papers were. I would have to choose my words with care.

‘These are maps,’ I said.

‘Indeed,’ agreed Buchan. ‘But have you ever seen such maps before, Mr Seaton?’

I looked again and shook my head. It was the truth. I had seen town sketches, and maps, in my college days. Yet, for all I had seen before, I had never seen such work as this. The maps, perhaps a dozen in all, were not printed copies but original hand-drawn sketches, showing natural coastline features such as bays, river mouths, sandbars and rocks – all annotated and named. The Collie Rocks were there, Meavie Point, the Maiden Craig, the Bow Fiddle Rock, and many more besides. The hills and cliffs that rose above them were named. But there too were the man-made features – the new harbour works at Banff, the harbour at Sandend, the fastness of Findlater above the bay at Darkwater. And roads there were, and bridges, kirks, townships, strongholds. The whole coastline from Gamrie and Troup Head to Findlater and beyond to Cullen was sketched out in a manner which, to one who knew these places, could not be mistaken. At the edge of each sketch an arrow, next to what could only be a roadway, annotated ‘to Elgin’, ‘to Turriff’, ‘to Strathbogie’. It was this last that began to give me the clue, if I had needed it, to the possible significance of the discovery of these documents, and the unrest they caused to those in the room, not least the provost. Gilbert Grant passed me paper after paper. ‘These are astonishing; I have never seen such work.’
He looked towards Thomas Stewart. ‘I had not thought the coastline here to be mapped.’

‘It is – or rather was – not,’ replied the notary. ‘The fishermen have their charts of course, but these are rudimentary and obscure, and can only be understood by those with great knowledge of the sea hereabouts.’

Grant shook his head in wonder. ‘Then where did he get them? Whose work are they?’

‘His own.’ Baillie Buchan’s voice was dry and deliberate.

‘You cannot be sure.’ Again the provost was in a rash of panic. The baillie lost patience and almost spat.

‘Arbuthnott confirms it.’ He thrust a paper towards the provost. ‘Do you deny yourself that it is his hand?’ And then another, and another. ‘Or this? Or this?’ The provost nodded slowly then sat down on a chair, his head in his hands. I picked up the papers he had let fall to the floor. Not maps these, but notes, numbered notes and symbols with their meaning. A symbol for a bridge, for a well, for a mill, for a farmstead, a ferry, a ford. Notes on strongholds and the names of those who held them – Findlater, Inchgower, Carnousie, Delgatie, Rothiemay, Frendraucht – all and many more were there. To my surprise, Buchan seemed to address himself to me rather than to Gilbert Grant. ‘What do you make of these documents?’

I chose my words with care. ‘I have some little knowledge of mapping, but I do not claim great expertise.’

‘And it is taught at neither of the colleges in Aberdeen?’

I considered. ‘No. There is some talk of a mathematics professor at Marischal College, but no man has yet been found to take the post.’

The baillie nodded, satisfied. ‘Mr Grant?’

My elder colleague sighed. ‘I can add little to what Alexander has said. The craftsmanship, the penmanship is of a high quality – but as to cartography, I know near to nothing of that.’

‘And why should you?’ asked the baillie, ‘for maps are scarce the business of honest men.’

Notary Stewart cleared his throat and the provost roused himself. ‘Have a care, Buchan. You might not slander the dead, but you risk great slander of the living. Robert Gordon of Straloch is known to have an interest in the matter of maps.’

Buchan was unbowed. ‘A Gordon is not above suspicion. Straloch may well have a hand in this. Did the boy speak of any commission, any patron in this work?’

Arbuthnott, to whom the question was chiefly addressed, asserted, with some vehemence, that Davidson had not spoken of this work at any time. The provost also denied ever having heard mention that his nephew was engaged on such an enterprise.

The baillie returned to me. His view that maps were not the business of honest men did not, it appeared, preclude a conviction that I knew all about them. ‘What would you say, Mr Seaton, is the purpose of these maps?’

‘I cannot answer that, baillie. Only Patrick Davidson and whoever sponsored him can answer that.’

‘You guess at more than you will admit, Mr Seaton, or you would not talk of “sponsors”.’

The baillie was correct, loath though I was to admit it. I knew more of maps and mapping and their cause and their uses than I wished to say, for Archie Hay had written to me of them. Archie, who had never looked at a map in his life,
had never needed to for the whole of the terrain of the north was written into his very soul, had discovered his great God-given gift when he had left the shores of Scotland for the great wars of the Empire. He had discovered the value, the necessity to the foreign soldier and the foreign army, of maps. It had been with the greatest of difficulty, and relying almost completely on me and my powers of dissuasion, that Archie’s parents had prevented him from throwing up his studies in Aberdeen and going to the war in Bohemia as soon as he heard of the defeat of the Bohemian forces at the White Mountain. The Elector Frederick, newly chosen king of Bohemia, the Winter King, champion of Protestantism against the papist Habsburgs, had suffered ignominious defeat. As Archie had told me, indiscreetly and on more than one occasion, he cared not a jot for the Bohemians or the Protestant cause, but he would die in the defence of Frederick’s queen, Elizabeth Stewart, daughter of King James and sister of our present King, Charles. In 1622, four years ago, Archie had left home, family and country to fight to the death, as he said, in the defence of the Winter Queen.

When he could, Archie wrote to me, a small handful of letters I kept with me still. He wrote of the fighting, of the filth, the privations, the brutality of the Habsburgs and the suffering of the peasants. And he wrote of maps. Archie, who had been hard put to attend one lecture in three in our college days, fell upon the art of cartography with a passion. He learnt the art and its uses from students of the new French and German military schools. He used spies and eventually went himself, under cover of disguise, into enemy territory to chart and learn the lie of the land. At the time I had marvelled at the letters, at Archie’s enthusiasm for this
new type of knowledge, and I had marvelled at the knowledge itself. And I knew what the documents Baillie Buchan was holding out towards me very probably meant. The baillie knew it too, but would have it from my mouth.