Crucible (2 page)

‘I would not intrude on your time with your family.’ There were still some in the burgh who took pains to remember that my wife had been carrying another man’s child when first I had met her, and Matthew Jack was one of them. He had managed to invest the word
family
with such contempt that I had been sorely tempted to haul him down to the water’s edge and hold his head under the incoming waves. I had settled instead for walking away, but it was too late. He had called after me. ‘But as you already have company – I see John Innes there, and Andrew Carmichael, is it not? – I will allow myself a half-hour’s respite to join them.’

The faces that had brightened in greeting when I appeared on the crest of the dune had fallen notably when they saw who I had brought with me, and within less than an hour Sarah and Elizabeth had gathered up the children – William’s five-year-old son James, our Zander, the same age, and Deirdre, nineteen months, the blessing of my life – and taken them home. I would have left then too, had not Sarah stopped me.

‘Stay. Spend a while longer here. You are too long indoors, out of the fresh air and sunlight, and you see too little of your friends. Elizabeth will not mind William staying, I am sure.’

‘He would only be under my feet,’ her friend had said, not looking up from her work of trying to dry her squirming son. ‘See he does not darken my door until sunset.’

And so they had left us with the wine and what was left of the bread and cheese, by the still-smouldering fire. Andrew Carmichael and John Innes were regents at our rival university of the King’s College in the Old Town, and talk between us soon turned to the poverty of our salaries and the scanty resources with which our scholars were forced to make do. ‘At least we have acquired some new books for our library,’ I said, and told them of the benefaction Robert Sim had been cataloguing that afternoon, and what I knew of its provenance and contents. William remembered having met Dr Duncan once, many years before, when the physician had made a trip home to the
town of his birth. John recalled having heard that he had been a good friend in his younger days abroad of our principal, Dr Dun. Matthew Jack, never to be outdone, claimed to have met him once, at a Scots service in the kirk in Rotterdam. No one had disputed this, for it was well-known that there was scarcely a college or a kirk in reformed Europe in which he had not set foot, however briefly. Both Andrew Carmichael and I were happy enough to confess that we had never heard of him before in our lives.

John, ever the diligent scholar, had pressed me for greater detail of what I could remember of the benefaction, and our discussion moved on to what might be the intellectual merits of its contents. Matthew Jack, as was his habit, had some sniping riposte to anything good anyone had to say about the authors under discussion, or of the late physician’s choice of reading materials. It had been a great relief to the rest of us when he caught sight of two of the Marischal scholars breaking away from their classmates to try their luck with a group of young girls from the burgh. Within minutes Jack was back down on the sand and, having chased the girls away with threats of what he should tell their parents of their behaviour, was marching their two suitors back towards the town and the cold confines of the college walls.

I should then, perhaps, have offered to take Matthew Jack’s place on the beach until his return, but I had a kind of fascination with Andrew Carmichael that would not allow me to leave the conversation of my friends while he
was still part of it. Whether John Innes knew of this, I could not tell. William knew; he watched my every expression, measured my every word, because of it. And Andrew Carmichael himself knew, of that I was certain. I had not realised it until earlier that afternoon.

After we had left the library and the respectable confines of the town to join our wives and children in their picnic amongst the dunes of the King’s Links, William had challenged me to a race. Our rivalry in this as in every sport was long-standing, and our progress from town gates to beach had been one of many misplaced elbows and attempted trips, shovings into bushes and much breathless laughter. By the time we had reached the brow of the dune where we were to meet our families, I was three strides in the lead and ready to crow at my triumph, but the sight I saw as I breasted that hill stopped me in my tracks, so that William all but careered in to the back of me. Elizabeth had taken my daughter and the boys to gather wild flowers amongst the rocks, and there, by the fire at which she had begun to grill some fish, sitting beside my wife, was Andrew Carmichael. The sight of him so close to Sarah hit me like a punch in the stomach.

He stood up, in some confusion, evidently as discomfited as I was.

‘Alexander, I … William. Hello. Good day. You have come to enjoy this fine weather. I will not disturb you in your meal, I—’

‘You will stay and share it with us,’ said William, striding
past me and avoiding my eye. ‘And is that John Innes there with your students? Call him up to do likewise.’ He then poured out and handed to me a beaker of wine from a flask he had had his steward pack. ‘And take care the look on your face does not sour it,’ he muttered to me, under his breath.

Yes, Andrew Carmichael knew. A man of learning, a decent man, a good man, they all said. The man, half the town knew, but none said to my face, who when I had been in Ireland, three years ago, had fallen in love with Sarah, my Sarah, and who was, as I could tell every time I forced myself to look at him, still in love with my wife.

My first reaction on seeing him there had been what it always was in that first raw moment – I had wanted to hit him. But I spoke the truth to Sarah when I told her that, no, it had not been in a fight with Andrew Carmichael that I had come upon my bloodied nose and swollen eye. For after Matthew Jack had left us, and we four remaining had been able to speak freely, I had realised there was indeed much more than our mutual love for one woman that Andrew Carmichael and I might have in common. And with William and John we had talked for hours as the sea below us advanced and then began to retreat again from the shore, turning from blue to green to gold, under a sky whose colours flamed and blazed in mockery of our Presbyterian world.

And so our evening might have ended, had it not been for the commotion that reached us from the beach just as the embers of our fire were grown cold and the wine
finished. The students of the King’s College and the Marischal College, forgotten all by their masters, had taken up a game of football, and as was inevitable, had come to blows. As was the tradition between them, old enmities between colleges, family feuds of many generations’ standing, found expression on the sands. The student who had been left in charge of the Marischal scholars came racing up the dune. ‘Mr Seaton, come quick! Alexander Irvine and William Forbes are in the middle of it. If someone does not stop them, there will be murder down there.’

And well might there have been, had we not between the four of us managed to separate twenty young men revelling in the fights and grievances of their fathers and grandfathers, but not before I had taken an elbow in the eye and an upper cut to the chin from a boy who did not see at whom he had lashed out until the deed was done. Matthew Jack had arrived back from his locking-in and haranguing of the two young gallants from earlier when the fight was at its height and our efforts looking in danger of being overwhelmed. Little affection though I had for him, I could not help but admire the bellow that issued from his throat, and the instant effect it had on those who were subject to his discipline. For a man so mean of frame, his very presence could inspire a great deal of terror. Poor John Innes, on the other hand, could inspire none, and had it not been for the assistance of Andrew Carmichael, their charges from the King’s College might have rampaged long into the night. Eventually the two groups were separated
with an effusion of blood and swollen eyes, but fewer broken bones than might otherwise have been the case.

As the scholars of King’s were led away back towards the Old Town, Matthew Jack had refused my help with our own, and driven them down towards the new burgh, declaring as he went, ‘These wretches will be lucky to set foot outside the college walls again between now and Christmas.’

I refrained from pointing out that the term would be over in little more than two weeks. I also knew that I, with the rest of the college, would be forced to spend an hour of my time on Monday morning in the college courtyard, watching Matthew Jack administer to these boys the beating of their lives.

Sarah listened to all this as she tended my eye and chin. The promised steak had been brought by a servant from William’s house and I had been instructed to apply it to draw out the bruising. ‘William was a little dishevelled looking, but he did not look to have been injured,’ she said.

‘No. His time in the law courts has kept him a more wary antagonist than I am.’

‘And the other two?’ she asked lightly.

I searched her face for some change in expression, but saw none. ‘Andrew took some blows to the shins, and John was winded, but that was all.’

She smiled. ‘I cannot imagine poor John in a fight.’

My saintly friend had been of little use in the fracas. Had
it not been for the assistance of Andrew Carmichael his scholars would have trampled him underfoot. I was not disposed to tell this much to my wife.

‘And Mr Jack has the boys back in the college?’

‘Aye, pity help them, for they will need it.’

‘Will they be all right? Tonight? None of them was injured?’

‘Some,’ I said, ‘although not greatly I think. I doubt whether Jack will rouse himself to check.’ I got carefully out of my chair. ‘I should go and see to it, and make sure that Dr Dun has my report of what happened down there today. Matthew Jack’s idea of the truth isn’t as other men’s.’

Sarah put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Not yet, Alexander. You are in no fit state to go anywhere. You need to sit at rest a while and take a little food, to restore some of your strength. Besides,’ she added with a frown, ‘you cannot go to Dr Dun with ripped hose and a head full of sand, to say nothing of the blood on your shirt.’

‘I must see to the boys, Sarah.’

‘They are near enough grown men, and will come to no harm for your taking half-an-hour’s rest. You staggered in that door; do not tell me it was just the effects of William’s wine that made you do so, although I doubt Dr Dun would think so well of that either. And you do not need Matthew Jack noising it about the town that you are a drunkard.’

And so, given no option, I did as she bid me. I let her finish bathing me and and took some broth and dozed an
hour in my chair. I went nowhere near the college, nor indeed out of my door for an hour or more after I had first intended to. I wish to God that I had done.

THREE
The Scents of the Night

When I did venture out, it was not quite dark yet in the streets of the burgh, the late June light refusing until the last necessary moment to yield to the Sabbath. Nevertheless, lamps and candles were being lit inside homes where the evening light could not reach, up closes and beyond courtyards, through thick stone walls and shuttered windows.

There were one or two other solitary figures still out – I could not tell in the grimy grey who they were, and we none of us glanced more than a moment in each other’s direction – whatever business a man had out in the town at this hour of the night was his and not that of some passing stranger. It was a time when men took refuge in the shadows. Shadows, the word William had used when, on our way home from the fracas on the Links, he had finally broached the subject I had known would come.

‘You have no cause, Alexander, to suspect or mistrust him. He never set out to wrong you. Indeed, he did not wrong you, and you know that.’

‘I know it,’ I said, ‘but do not expect me to be at ease in his company: I do not like to see him close to her. Can you not understand? She is my wife!’

‘Now, yes, she is your wife. But she was not then, three years ago, when you disappeared into the night, taking ship for Ireland and a family you had scarcely spoken of. She was not your wife, nor your anything, and you had had two years by then – two years, when you might have secured her and did not.’

‘You know why – I did not think, I—’

‘You. Always you. But what of Sarah? Mother to a bastard child, servant in another man’s house, holding her head high in the face of all she knew was thought and said about her, and about Zander. You left her without having spoken a word to her. You left a scribbled note and went, and we thought you dead. Andrew Carmichael did not swoop down on her like some bird of prey, or fox in the night. He came to my house seeking my counsel on a matter regarding the law. He came a second time, and then a third, at my invitation, and it came as no great surprise when Elizabeth pointed out to me that he was falling in love with Sarah. Sarah did not return his feeling – she was in such a shock at your sudden leaving, such a certainty that you were dead or had gone to another, that she could not, whoever might have spoken to her. But he did speak, and he spoke kindly, and he listened to her and was a friend to her when you had abandoned her. And yes it was because he loved her and it was not done with disinterest, but who amongst us
has ever loved with disinterest?’ William’s anger was risen now, and I knew it because he kept his voice so low. ‘And I’ll tell you this, Alexander. Had the day come when she had lifted her eyes to him, reached out a hand to him, been ready to go with him, I am not the one who would have stopped her, nor Elizabeth either.’

This stopped me in my tracks, for he, my best friend, had never told me this before. ‘But she never did, and he did not press the matter. He let her understand that when she was ready, he would be there, waiting. And that is all he did, and all she did, which was nothing. And from the day you returned, he stepped back into his shadows, and I do not think he ever spoke to her of it again.’

Yes, Andrew Carmichael was in the shadows, but those shadows were hanging over my life and try as I might I could not shake them off.