Crucible (11 page)

It was a strange admission, but I had not the inclination to pursue her on it. ‘But your husband’s practice does well, does it not? He attends to several patrons of wealth and growing influence in the town.’

‘Oh, yes. But none of them would endanger their own position to help us, should danger come.’

‘What danger are you talking about? Do you believe your husband found out about your adultery with Robert? That he murdered Robert Sim?’

‘No,’ she said, angry, determined. ‘No!’ Her eyes had
filled with tears. ‘Before now, I feared only malice, and that I have faced before and faced down before. But now, after Robert, I do not know. I fear for my husband; we have no one to turn to and no one who will speak for us. Robert always said you were a good man. And that you had courage.’

I could not understand her, and she did not seem to understand why it was that I could not. ‘I fear Robert spoke too well of me, but I will be a friend to you. I can only do that if you are honest with me. You must tell me the truth about your husband and his friends.’

She looked to the ground, biting her lip, the tears spilling over now.

‘The meetings. I know – or I greatly suspect – Robert was involved in some secret society. From what you have told me, I believe it met here, at your house.’

She shook her head.

‘Rachel, you must tell me what you know, or I cannot help you.’

‘I know that, but they did not meet here in the house, it was down there.’ She pointed to the lodge. ‘They would spend three hours there, sometimes longer.’

‘How many of them were there?’

She thought for a moment. ‘Four; never more than four, I think.’

‘Your brother, Robert Sim, John Innes and who else?’

‘John?’ she faltered. ‘How? No, I …’

‘I am near to certain that John was one of their number.
And he is in a state of terror. For his sake, you must tell me the truth. I will tell no one that I had it from you.’

At last she nodded.

‘Was it John who came here to help your husband in the first place, when he was clearing the lodge?’

‘No, it wasn’t.’

‘Then who?’

‘That I cannot tell you.’

‘Cannot, or will not? Mistress Middleton, this man’s life may depend on it.’

‘I know that, but my husband has sworn me to secrecy on the matter, and I cannot go against him. He too is fearful, but I do not know what he is fearful of. And I fear for him, that whatever evil was behind Robert’s death might seek him out too.’

I stretched my hand across the table briefly to touch her fingers. ‘You must trust me. If I am to help your husband, and John Innes, I must know as much as you can tell me. Who is the fourth man? It is not Matthew Jack?’

‘Matthew Jack?’ Her face paled. ‘Not him, no not him. He did come here once, one evening, but he had not been invited and was not wanted. It was the evening of one of Richard’s meetings, and Matthew Jack came not long after Robert had arrived. He knocked only once on the door and then walked right in – and found the three of us seated around the table, having our supper before the others arrived. Matthew Jack demanded to know what Robert was doing here, and what he had in his bag.’

‘His bag? The satchel that he always carried with him?’

She nodded.

‘What did they do?’

‘Richard lost little time in putting him from the house, and telling him that should he ever come back he would have the baillies on him. He has never been back here, but I have seen him around the town, and the way he looks at me sickens me to my stomach.’

‘The way he looks at you?’ She flushed and I realised what she meant. ‘I think you need to be careful,’ I said. ‘If your husband must go to his patients in the night, tell him he is to take you first to my house.’

‘Your house?’

‘My wife Sarah will be there; there will be no scandal. I think you should not be alone at night.’

‘Since the night of Robert’s death, Richard has not gone out to patients.’

‘Have you been in the lodging since your husband and his friends began to hold their meetings there?’

‘Never. He asked me not to go in there, and he took all the keys.’

‘And you have no notion of what it was they found, or of the nature of their meetings?’

She shook her head. ‘They met for study and conversation, fellowship, that is all.’

‘But why then the need for secrecy?’

She looked out over her garden, where bees were busy amongst the marigolds and daisies. ‘I am sorry, Mr Seaton,
I was not privy to their secrets and did not seek to be so.’

I could believe her, but there must have been something. ‘His bag, that Matthew Jack demanded to see. Do you know what was in it?’

She smiled. ‘Now that I can tell you. Books. With Robert, what else but books?’

Books. The books his landlady had seen.

‘Did he ever show you these books?’

‘No, although we spoke of books often. I assumed he and my husband and the others studied these together. Robert had no knowledge of German, and Richard has made it his own.’

‘They were written in German?’

‘Some of them, I think. Others in Latin. There were notes, too, in Robert’s own hand.’

‘Could you tell what these notes were about?’

She shook her head. ‘One of the books, I presumed. I could make out nothing more than the title he had written at the top of one of the pages:
Fama
. That was all I saw.’

Fama.
Now I knew now why John had spoken of fraternity. I swallowed the last of the mint cordial Rachel Middleton had poured for me and rose from the bench, putting on my hat as I did so.

After a brief farewell with a promise that I would come back the next day, I was gone, leaving the strange young woman to grieve for the man who had never been her husband, and fear for the one who was.

ELEVEN
Brothers of the Rosy Cross

I cursed inwardly as I found the library to be locked and was halfway back down the outer stair before I remembered that I myself had the key. It was the third I tried that finally opened the door for me.

It had been only three days since Robert Sim’s murder, but already the place had taken on the musty smell of disuse. I left the door open in the hope that some of what little air there was in the day might find its way in to the room. The register was still in the locked drawer in which I had left it at the end of my last morning’s work in here, beside it the catalogue. I understood Robert’s classification of works on the shelves, but was not yet fully conversant with the system set out in the catalogue itself, and it took me some time to find the entry that I was looking for. I had begun to think Rachel must be mistaken, or that what she had seen was not to be found in the library at all, but at last I came upon it, in Robert’s own hand:
at Cassell, Wessell Presses, 1615
,
Allgemeine und General Reformation der gantzen Weiten Welt. Beneben der Fama Fraternitatis, des Löblichen Ordens des Rosenkreutzes
. I
noted the shelf mark and was across the library floor in a moment, scanning the spines of the books in front of me, and then I had it in my hand: the
Fama
, bound with its sister work the
Confessio
, the proclamations that had set the thinkers of continental Europe alight with excitement and expectation, the great manifestos of the Brothers of the Rosy Cross.

I did not sit at Robert’s desk, as I had done on my last two visits, but in my own accustomed place, beneath the high west window, where the light was better. My German was not of the best, being so out of use since the days when I had still lived in Banff, and Dr Jaffray had taught it to me for, he said, my own edification, but what I suspected was his own entertainment.

It should not have taken me more than an hour to read through what were, in essence, little more than pamphlets – a fable and a call to arms – and yet the memories and images brought to my mind by what was in them kept me there at my desk much later in the afternoon than I had planned. I read the tale, a myth, of a German monk, Christian Rosenkreutz, said to have been dead over a hundred years. Rosenkreutz, it was claimed, had travelled to the East, to Arabia to learn the knowledge of the ancients, the knowledge handed down to man by God in the earliest times, but corrupted through the ages. This knowledge, this key to understanding the book of the universe, had been lost to us in the West, buried under the inventions and encumbrances of the scholastics and the Papacy. Rosenkreutz had studied with the most learned Arabian scholars of the day, before
continuing on to Africa, where knowledge was exchanged and ideas perfected. He had travelled at last to Spain, ready to share these marvellous gifts, the fruits of the great Hermetic quest, with Christendom, to offer the secrets that would unlock the mysteries of Creation and bring to an end illness, famine, war. He should have been feted, welcomed with open arms, but instead he had been mocked and scorned by those who had a greater interest in keeping the world in darkness.

This had not been the end of Rosenkreutz’s tale. According to legend, he had returned to his native Germany, and there gathered to him three others of like mind. This new fraternity, the brotherhood of the Rosy Cross, took it upon themselves to part and travel through Europe, in secret, dressing in the clothing of those whose country they were in, adding to their knowledge and understanding of all disciplines and ministering to the sick. They agreed to meet once a year, in a spirit of brotherhood, to exchange and further perfect their knowledge, and that they should each choose a successor to carry on their work on their death. And so it had gone, but as the first and then second generation of brothers had died out, their successors lost touch with one another, even to the extent of not knowing where the original brothers were buried. And so it might have ended, but now came tidings of great joy, for the tomb of Christian Rosenkreutz had been found, and in it all the treasures, the secrets, the knowledge he had garnered. And at last the brotherhood, the secret successors and custodians of that great treasure, were ready to make themselves
known, and to accept into their fraternity others who would truly know God and understand His universe.

I had been a young scholar at the King’s College when first these pamphlets had become known. They had caused little excitement amongst us or our teachers, other than to afford some amusement at a pleasant story, or words of caution against secret societies promising hidden knowledge: such were the haunts of alchemists, cabbalists, magicians – all suspect. We knew what lay down that path, in our Presbyterian Scotland, with our king safe on England’s throne.

But elsewhere, in the German lands, in Poland, in Bohemia, in England even, the effect of these pamphlets had been quite otherwise. A flurry of writings appeared all over Europe, announcing their authors’ urgent desire to be accepted into the fraternity. Some attacked the brotherhood, accusing them of being Jesuits. Others argued that God had already given us signs of revelations to come: new lands across the oceans had been discovered with peoples previously unheard of, writings long lost had been found again, new stars discovered in the heavens. The time of Revelation was at hand.

There might have been little enough harm in all of this, had not the myth of the brotherhood become enmeshed with the great disturbances brewing all across Europe, where the Catholic Habsburgs and the Papacy sought to maintain control over the Holy Roman Empire, the German lands, in the face of rising Protestant peoples and princes. The Rosicrucian promise became entangled with the belief that Christendom was in the last days of a dark age and
approaching the dawn of a new, that the days of the Papacy, and of the Habsburg Empire, would soon be over, swept away at last. It was proclaimed that the eagle of the Habsburgs would finally be vanquished by the rise of a lion, the Lion of Heidelberg, Frederick, Elector Palatinate, husband to the daughter of our own King James, and briefly the great hope of Protestant Europe.

There had been such hope in those days amongst those who sought the Philosopher’s Stone, that essential element we shared with every other thing in the universe. But those hopes had died at the hands of the Habsburg armies at the battle of the White Mountain, outside Prague, where the Bohemian forces of Frederick of the Palatinate and Elizabeth Stuart, his queen, were utterly crushed, and the Holy Roman Empire, the length and breadth of the German lands, plunged into war, starvation, disease, despair. Such had been the gifts of the Philosopher’s Stone.

And I had lost my friend there, too. My dearest friend Archie Hay, gone to fight for Elizabeth of Bohemia, and dead, with so many others, in her cause. I closed the book and almost laughed, so ludicrous was it that anyone ever had, yet more so that they still should, take seriously this tale of the Rosy Cross, this fable of a dead monk and his buried treasures. But there were those who had, it seemed: the physician Richard Middleton, the librarian Robert Sim, my friend John Innes and some unnamed other had created such a fraternity of their own. And of those four, one was now dead and another driven almost mad with terror. Returning the book
to its shelf in disgust, I took up my hat and left the library.

It was now long past noon, and the sunshine of earlier in the day had gone, leaving behind it an oppressive grey heat. It was as if the absent wind had taken the air with it, too, for I had to labour to draw breaths from the meagre store around me. Faces that earlier had been cheery in the blue-skied morning now looked bothered and disgruntled. I was not at the King’s Port before I felt the first stirrings of a throbbing behind my temples, and I knew without even looking at the sky what weather we were to have.

I had it in mind to stop before I got to the King’s College, at the Snow Kirk, and order my thoughts, set out to myself exactly what I must say to John and what I must ask of him about his brotherhood. I suspected he would be no better in mind and body than he had been when last I had seen him, and feared indeed that he might be worse; whatever words I used must not be wasted. As I was about to turn from the road on to the path that would take me to the kirkyard, a movement at the edge of the kirk itself took my eye. It was Andrew Carmichael. I was about to raise an arm in greeting to him when I stopped, frozen by what I saw. For there was a woman with him. He had one hand on her shoulder, and with the other was tenderly brushing the hair back from her face. My stomach lurched and it seemed that every voice I had ever heard screamed through my head, for I did not need to see her face to know that it was Sarah.