Crucible (33 page)

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I know the type. Go on.’

‘Well, after travelling and studying together for three years, we decided it was time to return home. Our plan was to matriculate for our last year together at Glasgow and finally to graduate there. Andrew’s father had died while we were at Frankfurt an der Oder, and so he was free to be reconciled with his grandfather. He hoped to gain the old man’s blessing and help in finding a place aboard ship with the East India Company, or even in venturing to the Americas. I wanted nothing more than to find a regency in one of our own universities, to continue to study and to write, and in time to marry and have a family of my own.’

‘You have not mentioned Franeker,’ I said.

‘No, I have not, for that was not part of our plan, and you must believe me when I say I wish with all my heart that I had never heard of or seen the place. It was in the early summer of 1621 that we were travelling by way of Utrecht to Rotterdam and the ship that would finally take us home to Scotland. Andrew, a little nervous I think at the prospect of presenting himself to his grandfather for the first time, began to think of diversions, occasions for delay in our return, but I had had enough of wandering and was so resolved to return home that I had written to
the shipping office at Rotterdam weeks before we were to arrive there to book my passage home. On the road, Andrew was constantly at me to try just one more town, one more university, one more adventure, to make for ourselves one more tale to tell. And so, as we stood at the crossroads between the routes that would take us to Rotterdam or to Franeker, I finally relented; I agreed to go there with him, to visit the flat Frisian lands.’ He spread out his hands the better to explain. ‘And, in all, it was not an unattractive prospect for me, for there I would have the opportunity to improve my Hebrew under Sixtinus ab Amama and hear the Englishman William Ames, of whose passion and vehemence in teaching and strictness of life I had heard much. My protest that my passage home was already booked was easily overruled by Andrew, who went himself to the shipping office in Rotterdam, and sold my passage home to a fellow Scot, a physician returning home after his studies.’

In that, it seemed, as in other matters, Matthew Jack had not lied.

‘And by these means,’ I said, ‘Andrew Carmichael, the
real
Andrew Carmichael, was architect of his own murder.’

The man who had usurped his dead friend’s name looked at me with incomprehension. ‘Andrew was not murdered.’

I pointed impatiently at the book of theses he still held in his hands. ‘Read it,’ I said. ‘Read how it tells of Andrew Carmichael’s fever, which he finally succumbed to after three months of nursing by his great friend Nicholas Black.’

Nicholas Black shook his head almost in disbelief. ‘How could you think I murdered him? I loved him. I could not have loved him more had he been my brother. He took a fever in January, on a whaling trip he had joined on the island of Fohr. I had remained behind in Franeker to study – I had neither the means nor the interest to see the spectacle in any case. He was brought back to the town, to our lodgings, and I nursed him there until at last the fever broke, but by then the vapours from the cold and damp had descended to his chest and, finally, his lungs.’ He breathed deeply, and I saw that this was truly difficult for him. ‘Although he returned to lectures and to something of his old enjoyment of life, he never fully regained his strength, and when the spring fogs began to envelop the town, they carried off what strength he had left. By the time the first rays of April sun spread over the rooftops of Franeker, he was dead. And so he never did travel to the East, or see the Americas, all for the sake of his curiosity to see a small Dutch town. He was mourned, and missed, and remembered by his fellows in the pages of this book. That was Andrew Carmichael.’

He apparently believed he had told me all I would require to know, and lapsed into some memories in his own mind, almost unaware of me there with him in the now locked library.

‘I see no reason to doubt what you have told me. But if that was Andrew Carmichael, then who is Nicholas Black?’

He regarded me as if beginning to wonder whether I
might be lacking in something. ‘You know it already. Why would you ask it? I am Nicholas Black.’

‘I grant you that. I will not dispute it, and I have racked my brains and can think of no other who might be, but tell me: who
is
Nicholas Black?’

He walked over to one of the cabinets housing the oldest books in the library’s collection and gazed a long time at his reflection in its glass-fronted door. ‘I do not know who Nicholas Black is, any more. But I can tell you who he was. Nicholas Black was the boy, the able scholar held down by lack of means of whom your friend Jaffray spoke only today; he was that scholar in the emblem at Culross with one hand reaching for the heavens and the other shackled to the stone of poverty.’

‘I do not follow you,’ I said.

And so he told me, a tale that had little in it that any might not have guessed, a familiar enough tale of a young man of gifts but few means, the third of six surviving children of a poor stonemason of the town of Lanark and his wife. The boy had been marked out at an early age for a scholar, and through the support of the kirk session had been seen through grammar school to the university at Glasgow where a year’s bursary had been won. At the end of that first year, the fund depleted and no more available to a poor stonemason’s son with few connections, a kindly professor, recognising the boy’s abilities, had written to an old acquaintance at the university of Breslau and secured for him a place in a house for poor scholars there. Many a
poor Scot had travelled the same road and returned home with a lifetime’s cause for gratitude and a determination to do for others what had been done for himself. And so it might have been for Nicholas Black, had he never met Andrew Carmichael or set foot with him in the town of Franeker, had he never stood at that crossroads in Utrecht and chosen the wrong path. But Nicholas Black had fallen in with Andrew Carmichael, had gone with him to Franeker, and there had studied with him, caroused with him, nursed him and seen him die.

‘What happened when Andrew died?’ I asked.

‘There was great sadness amongst our friends, of course. A great mourning and sense of loss.’

‘What did the college authorities do?’ I said, trying to keep my voice level, conscious that I should not push him too far beyond what he was prepared to tell me.

‘When it was understood that Andrew’s closest living kin was a grandfather he had never met, it was decided that I should be the courier who brought news of his death, and his belongings, back to his homeland. I would not graduate for three months, but there could be little harm now to Andrew or the family he had never known in keeping the news of his death from Scotland until I was able to return there and take it with me. After our graduation, my friends at Franeker pressed me to remain amongst them a little longer – indeed I told you the other evening of my eventful visit to the island of Texel, did I not?’

I nodded. I realised now that it had been that tale, along
with the man we had thought to be Andrew Carmichael’s earlier assertion to us that he had never travelled as far north as Gouda, that had made Jaffray question the veracity of the bookseller’s map. But there it was: the map had been accurate and the man had lied.

‘Anyhow,’ he continued, ‘it was autumn by the time I returned to Scotland. I went first to my own family in Lanark, for I had not seen them in three years, and very seldom before that indeed, since boyhood. I thought to be welcomed, lauded, the great scholar, the first of our family to have been so, having brought honour on our name and the promise of something better for us all. But my homecoming was not as I had expected it would be. I discovered that my younger sister had been dead two winters, my father one. My brother, who had followed our father in his craft had few of his skills and all of his vices – he was more often drunk than sober, and it was I who paid another mason to carve the stone that marks my father’s grave. The family had fallen deeper far into poverty even than it had been in my own childhood. And so instead of being welcomed and lauded, I was scorned, blamed by those who had been left behind. They wanted none of me or my promises for the future, for I had then no calling other than that of scholar, I had soft hands and no skill to turn a stone or work a lathe.’

He looked away from the window and back to me. ‘I do not try to dissemble, Alexander: I had not seen them in many years, had not truly considered what their fortunes
might have been while I indulged myself in my studies and the world they opened to me, but I had held them in my heart, held the memory of my mother’s love, and that of my young sisters, in my heart. My mother had wept for her boy on the day I had left home for the college in Glasgow, and I had thought to see her weep with joy at his return. But it had not been so; she had no tears for the man who had come back in his place. And so it was that within two days of landing at Leith, I learned I had no family, no home, nowhere to go. Nowhere but Skirling, where I still had to discharge my obligations to Andrew’s kin. I took myself on the road south.

‘Skirling was a pretty parish, and I found the house of the Carmichaels with little difficulty; it was a sturdy, sombre-looking place, the kind of place you might imagine an old man to inhabit alone, cut off from son and grandson, surviving them both. It took a deal of banging on the door on my part before it was opened to me, and at first I took the aged manservant who answered to be old Carmichael himself. I began to tell my tale, telling him where I had come from, but on hearing the word “Franeker”, the old fellow began to tremble and to babble almost, so that I had trouble understanding him. And then I knew what he was saying: “Too late, you have come home too late, Mister Andrew, for the old master is dead.” I tried to tell him again who I was, but he would not hear it, repeating over and over in a mournful tone that I was come too late. I should have insisted, I should have made him hear me, and
then turned and walked away, but in my mind all I could see was the emblem I had seen once as a boy, with my father at Sir George Bruce’s house at Culross, and in that moment the chain binding the scholar’s hand to the stone of poverty snapped.’

‘You took his inheritance,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘I had borne the name of one dead man, my father, and seen it marked on his grave in the town of Lanark but two days before, and in that moment, there in that cold hall in the hamlet of Skirling, I took the name and the legacy of another. The house and lands had gone to a cousin of Andrew’s father, not yet arrived from Berwick to take possession of them, but a substantial sum in ready money had been left to the grandson that none in the household had ever seen. I produced Andrew’s testimonials and, with little ceremony and no further questioning, was handed the money. By the time it was in my hand I regretted what I had done, but it was too late, already too late …’

His fists were clenched, the knuckles white, and the agitation in his voice was growing. ‘It was autumn – I have said that, have I not?’

‘Yes, you have said it.’

He nodded. ‘Yes. It was autumn, but winter was coming, I could feel it as I walked away from that house. The sun shone, bathed everything in a golden brown light, but there was a bite in the air from the north that made everything fresh, clean. The branches of the trees were almost bare already, their leaves shed in atonement for the excesses of
the summer, readying themselves to become something new. When winter was past, everything would be new.’

He smiled, nearing the end of his tale. ‘And so I followed the call of winter and turned from Skirling northwards, to where I was not known and where Andrew had not been known, beyond Edinburgh, beyond St Andrews, to Aberdeen, where few from Glasgow, Edinburgh or Lanarkshire would ever have cause to go, and I became the man you have known since. No longer Nicholas Black, for Nicholas Black died at my hands in the hall of Skirling House almost nine years ago, and no one mourned him.’

He had finished, and wore the look now of a man with nothing left to say. I scarcely knew what to say myself. ‘Andrew, this was not a matter to kill over.’

He sat down on the window ledge, his face grey. ‘I know it was not, I know that now. But do you know what I saw, what was the last thing to catch my eye as I walked out of that parish of Skirling?’

I shook my head.

‘It was so brief a glimpse, that I hardly think I knew I had seen it then. But I see it now, so clear in my mind, every night since the death of Robert Sim, as I try to sleep, I cannot tear my eyes from it. I see, to the south, just as I was turning north, the gibbet on the Gallows Knowe. My end was marked from there, I think.’

‘No, Andrew …’

But he did not seem to be listening to me any more. ‘I never intended that anyone should die for the sake of my
deception. And yet when you told us all that day, a few weeks ago on the Links, of having left Robert Sim poring over a benefaction from Groningen, amongst which were to be found printed theses from Franeker, I could not rest until I knew if they numbered amongst them those which would eventually tell my secret. You may think I had little to lose, but that day I believed there was much I might yet lose, some of it even that I did not yet have. I have been happy, you know, in my post at the King’s College, and the companionship of John Innes and the other regents. Even between you and me it seemed there might be some possibility of friendship, if only you could forgive me Sarah, or I you.’

‘You forgive me?’ I was stunned.

‘Yes. For despite everything that I have tried to tell myself since the day I heard you were not dead but returned from Ireland, despite the discipline I have held my feelings under for the last three years, there were days on which I knew I had not yet given up hope. You are well-liked, well-respected in these two colleges and towns, but I know that whatever manner of man you are, Alexander, you do not deserve her, that I would love and cherish her better.’