Crucible (8 page)

I almost laughed. ‘John? What has there ever been that you could not tell me? Am I not your friend? Have I not been your friend these seventeen years? What have you ever done in all that time that you could not tell me?’

He said nothing for a moment, did not turn his gaze from the window.

‘My life has not been as yours, Alexander.’

‘I know that. Which one of us can say our life is as that of another? We are bound together by something more than what we have become. Surely ours is a brotherhood?’

He turned at last, and smiled a little. ‘Yes, Alexander.’ He pressed a hand to his heart. ‘Ours is a brotherhood I will value until the last breath leaves my body. You must promise me you will not forget that.’

‘Of course, but …’

‘No, you must promise me.’

‘You have my promise.’

‘Good. That is a comfort.’ He lowered his voice. ‘But there are other brotherhoods, and …’

He hesitated.

‘You and Robert Sim were in some form of brotherhood together?’ I had heard of fraternities of men, scholars, divines, in the Netherlands and in Bohemia, Germany, but
never in Scotland. ‘Is there some fraternity here? In Aberdeen?’

He turned away again, shaking his head once more, wringing his hands. ‘Forget that I spoke, Alexander. I should not have spoken.’ He looked at me again, desperation in his eyes. ‘For your own sake, forget that I spoke.’

I started towards him. ‘No, John. I am …’ But before I understood what he was doing, he had crossed the floor and wrenched open the door.

‘Go!’ he shouted. ‘Go!’ He pushed me out in to the corridor and slammed the door shut once again behind me. Before I could gain my senses I heard the key turn in the lock and the bolt shot to.

I had never seen John, meek and mild John, act in this way, never heard him talk so wildly. I stood there a few minutes, knocking, calling his name, but to no purpose – I did not hear another word or sound from the room, and in time I had to leave off and turn back towards the stairs, having learned much to alarm me, but nothing of John’s Saturday morning visit to the library and still less to help me understand the killing of Robert Sim.

Had it been possible, I would have gone then to seek out Dr John Forbes, professor of divinity in the King’s College, and for many years mentor and friend to John and me both, but I knew he was away in Edinburgh, on business for his father, the bishop, and so there was no one here to whom I could take my concerns. I went slowly back through the quad, paying little attention to the scholars around me; so
absorbed in my thoughts that I was not looking where I was going, and on turning under the archway that would take me back out to the High Street, walked right into Andrew Carmichael, sending flying the lecture notes he was carrying.

‘Alexander …’

‘Andrew … here, let me help you with these.’ We bent together to pick up the papers. ‘Geometry,’ I said. ‘Perhaps you would like to come down and give my third-year class a lesson. The finer points of Euclid seem somewhat to have eluded them.’

He laughed. ‘And me. Were it not for these dictates of my old professors at Herborn and Franeker I fear I would be lost myself.’

The papers, as I handed them back to him, were now somewhat dusty and in a disorder that would take him some time to sort out.

‘Andrew, I am truly sorry. I was not paying proper attention to where I was going.’

‘You do seem somewhat distracted.’ He waited, and I almost let the moment pass, so that he began to turn away. I made the decision. ‘Andrew, is there somewhere private that we might talk?’

‘There is my chamber, up there.’ He indicated a window in the Dunbar building.

‘Near to John Innes?’

‘Directly below him.’

‘Perhaps that would not be the best place today.’

I looked back towards the quad and then out to the High Street; where there were not students there were townspeople, going about their business from booth to booth, talking with their neighbours in doorways or across dikes, hanging out linens or watching children play on the greens. There seemed nowhere where two men might talk and their conversation not be remarked and overheard. After a minute or so of us both casting around, Carmichael indicated the garden of the Mediciner’s manse. ‘I am sure Dr Dun would have no objection to our talking there.’

Patrick Dun, my own college principal was also, through lack of personnel and as a testament to his own great experience and abilities, Mediciner of the King’s College here in Old Aberdeen, and in virtue of his position had a house and garden from the university. I agreed with Carmichael, and we had soon crossed the street and passed through the ornate iron gates in to the gardens of the Mediciner’s manse. It was a place where I had spent many happy visits since my return to Aberdeen from Banff five years ago. Dr Dun had been the very first, after my marriage to Sarah, to invite me to bring my wife and child to dine at his home, and he had made sure too that everyone knew he had done so. He might as well have stood at the market cross and proclaimed that my wife would be accepted by all in the two colleges or they would answer to him.

Carmichael and I chose a stone bench at the end of the path between orchard and herb garden, far from the street yet far enough from the house that we would not be
overheard by any in it. I knew it to be one of the principal’s favourite places, in his rare moments of rest. Roses clambered over trellises and up the wall behind us, to spill out over the bounds of the manse as if seeking their freedom, and the rays of the sun fell upon a granite dial, the craftsmanship and precision of which Dr Dun took great pride in. Carmichael stopped to admire the piece. He ran his hand over its contours, its edges and grooves. He walked around it, admiring and inspecting its various faces, examining it so closely he might have been trying to measure its angles by his eye alone. ‘The complexity is astonishing,’ he said at last, ‘the execution perfect.’

‘I have often admired it,’ I said, ‘but in truth, I am a poor judge of its function; I know only that it is a thing of great beauty.’

‘Beauty, yes,’ he murmured, ‘but beauty without function is an empty thing. The man who conceived and executed this was a master of his craft.’

‘Are you a student of sundials?’ I asked.

He shook his head. ‘No, but my father was a stonemason. His was workmanship of good quality, but he never produced anything like this. This is the work of a mathematician, a true architect.’

His words recalled me to the reason I had brought him here in the first place.

‘An architect,’ I echoed. ‘Like Vitruvius.’

He took his eyes from the dial and looked at me, a little puzzled. ‘Vitruvius? Yes, perhaps so.’

‘Tell me, Andrew, do you teach the works of Vitruvius here?’

He breathed out heavily and came to sit beside me. ‘A little; I teach his theories: his concept of the architect, of his place at the apogee of all the crafts, of the skills required of him, but as to the architecture itself …’

‘And John Innes? Does he also teach Vitruvius to his students?’

Carmichael frowned. ‘I do not think so. John has the second class. He is too busy trying to impress upon them some semblance of knowledge of Latin and Greek. Why? What is your interest?’

I had come this far, it would have done more to prick Andrew Carmichael’s interest should I retreat from the matter now than if I told him all that I knew.

‘My interest is in why John should have taken the time, on Saturday morning, to go down to the New Town and consult the works of a long-dead Roman architect in the library of the Marischal College, and never to mention to me having done so. He had been in our library on Saturday morning, but did not say a word about it down at the Links in the afternoon, when we were talking about Robert and the new books that had arrived.’

Carmichael frowned. ‘You are right, he did not. It is strange – I have never known John Innes to dissemble, nor come anything close to it. But, you know, he is not well just now, Alexander. He has not been right since we heard of the death of Robert Sim.’

‘Robert’s death. That is what I need to talk to you about, for it seems to have sent John into a terror, to have driven him half-mad almost. I knew they were friendly enough together, and God knows, Robert’s death is a hellish thing, but I did not know them to be close, or to have particular connections to one another.’ I did not know how to say it. ‘Had Robert – had Robert been visiting John here of late?’

I saw a wave of stunned comprehension pass over Carmichael’s face, followed by disgust. ‘You are asking me if there was some unnatural relation between them? My God, Alexander, I thought you were John’s friend.’

I lowered my voice. ‘I am, and that is why I can ask you such a question, for I believe you are too. I must know why John has got himself in such a state.’

‘It is not over the murder of a lover, I can assure you of that. The only times I ever saw Robert Sim here it was in our own library, or at graduation feasts and the like when the student was known to him. I do not know that I ever even saw him in private conversation with John.’

‘And what of John? Has he behaved differently at all of late, in the last six months perhaps?’

Carmichael plucked at some lavender from a nearby border and crushed it between his fingers.

I offered more. ‘Has he spoken to you at all of brotherhoods, fraternities?’

At this he gave off his crushing of the herb. ‘Yes,’ he said, animated now, ‘yes, he has. Perhaps four months ago.’
He looked again at the sundial. ‘And that would explain the Vitruvius, too.’

I moved closer to him. ‘Slow down, you begin to lose me.’ He lifted a hand to stay me while he let the thoughts follow their paths and connect.

‘About four months ago, on a Friday evening, after all our duties were done and the students safely accounted for, Dr Forbes invited John and myself along with one or two others to take supper and have a hand of cards with him. I was glad to go, for the nights were still long and dark and there is little enough entertainment to be had in the evenings, but John declined, citing prior arrangements. Now, as you know, John is not a man to have “prior arrangements”. I noticed that he did, occasionally, leave the college on a Friday evening and return late, but it was not my place to question him on it. Then, after several weeks, perhaps two months of this, he approached me and asked if we might speak confidentially. We went to his room and he began to talk to me about the Hermetic quest: he had become fixated on the idea that there is some secret knowledge of the ancients that will unlock for us God’s great plan of the universe, that will help us find the essence of that universe deep within ourselves, and that the discovery of this essence, this element, will lead to universal harmony, the key to solving all the problems and contentions of the world.’

‘The great quest of the alchemists,’ I said.

‘Yes. And he had been studying the works of Paracelsus.’

‘Which ones?’ I knew of the Swiss physician,
Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, or Paracelsus as he had called himself, from long discussions by the fire of my good friend Dr Jaffray in Banff. Jaffray was a great admirer and follower of Paracelsus’ method in the diagnosis and treatment of the sick, the physical examination of the patient and the application of alchemical knowledge to the diseased element, and he enjoyed recounting tales of the contempt for authority that had seen the Swiss hounded from one university town in Europe to another, but he deplored what he and many others saw as the descent into magic of Paracelsus in his later years.

Carmichael spread out his hands. ‘I don’t know. I believe he had begun with the medical works, but moved on.’

‘And this was the practice of their fraternity?’

‘I believe so. And I expect,’ he continued, ‘that this new-found fascination with what is fundamental to us and to the universe would explain also his interest in Vitruvius.’

‘I see that.’ I knew that the Hermetics venerated Vitruvius and his views on architecture as the greatest of sciences, necessarily encompassing all forms of human knowledge and endeavour. And the greatest architect of all was God, the universe His divine and perfect creation of which each one of us was an interlocking part. We would all come together to realise the perfect vision of His creation, if only the secret behind it could be understood. No more war, no more illness, no more hunger, no more hatred, drought or famine. ‘But what has all this to do with Robert Sim? With brotherhoods?’

Carmichael chewed at his bottom lip a moment. ‘I cannot say for certain that it has anything at all to do with Robert Sim, but as to fraternities – well, at the end of his discourse on the promises of Hermetic knowledge, John asked me tentatively if, in the course of my studies abroad, I had ever come across any who might have been of a secret society of Hermetists, in pursuit of this knowledge. I told him I never had, and that should I have done, I would have counselled them to look to the world they can see, and not try to conjure the secrets of a world beyond their senses.’

‘What was his response?’

He shrugged. ‘He was disappointed, I think. He told me that should I ever reconsider my views, he would be there to listen. At the time I thought he meant nothing more than companionship, friendship; the idea that he meant some sort of actual brotherhood never entered my head.’ He put the lavender down on the bench. ‘Is there such a fraternity here?’

Mindful of John’s evident terror, his pleading that I should forget he had ever spoken of it, I answered Andrew Carmichael as honestly as I could. ‘He has not told me that there is.’ In my mind, however, I was now certain that there was, and that John Innes and Robert Sim had been amongst its number. What I had to do, and what Andrew Carmichael could not help me with, was discover who else had been in their brotherhood, and what danger they might thereby have placed themselves in.

I thanked Carmichael for his time and asked that he keep
a close eye on John’s health and state of mind, and let me know if he worsened. He promised that he would, and we parted at the gate to the Mediciner’s manse, two men now uneasily aware that they might be friends, if the one could forgive the other for having married the woman he loved, and the other in turn forgive him for having loved that woman in the first place.