The Devil's Recruit (15 page)

I looked from the piece of straw to the bed in which my children slept. I aspired to the ministry of the kirk; I knew every word of all the catechisms, every answer a Christian should give, but a question came to my lips that I could not have asked any other man. ‘What is it, Archie? What do you live for now?’

He smoothed the straw with his hand, wrapped it carefully once more in its silken sheath. ‘I live to end it.’

I understood him now, the soldier who had become a spy.

‘And do you see an end to it?’ I asked.

‘There is an end to everything, and there must be an end to this.’

‘But what end?’

He shook his head. ‘I do not know, but even the God of Moses could not have asked such a blood sacrifice as this.’

He seemed weary and almost old. I had never thought I would see Archie Hay old, even had I known him to have lived until now. His fourteen years in the wars had shown him things that I would not see in my lifetime, and despite the kindly light of the fire, the toll of those years showed at this moment in his face.

‘How long ago was it? Bredenberg?’

He did not need to think about it. ‘Eight years.’

‘And in those eight years, nothing has changed. For all you have done, all you have hazarded and lost, nothing has changed.’

‘Much has changed,’ he said, more animated now. ‘The victories of the Swedish king are a memory now. Most of the Protestant princes of Germany have signed the Peace of Prague with the Emperor.’

News of this betrayal of our fellow Calvinists had been greeted with disbelief and disgust in equal measure when it had reached our burgh a few months previously. ‘They have abandoned their brethren, and the cause of Elizabeth Stuart.’

His voice was almost contemptuous. ‘Calvinist, Lutheran. What does a name matter? And Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia? A fading beauty, sitting in the Hague, the widow of a fool and the patroness of a lost cause. Her son will never get back the Palatinate. Europe is full of beautiful
widows dreaming of lost kingdoms.’ He cast his eye to the stairs. There was no sound other than Zander’s breathing at the top of it. He lowered his voice. ‘I saw such a woman in Madrid.’

‘Madrid?’ I put down my glass. ‘What in God’s name were you doing in Madrid?’

‘Alexander, I have told you, I am a spy. I must go secretly in many places. I have sought shady corners in the corridors of the Estoril, sampled the most delicate of pastries within the shadows of the imperial palace in Vienna. I have learned to make myself unseen in plain sight. I have learned to listen without giving the impression of hearing. People will talk in front of me and not realise they have done so.’ He watched me carefully. ‘As they did once in Madrid.’

‘What are you trying to tell me?’

He looked again at the stairs, at my sleeping children. ‘Last year, I was in Madrid. You do not need to know where, or why. I had fallen in with some Irish refugees – half Europe crawls with them, Brussels, Lisbon, Rome – but many still cling to hopes in Madrid. They are of royal blood, they tell anyone who listens, descended from kings and princes, driven from their homeland, vowing always to return. I heard tell amongst them of a Scotsman, a scholar, who had come among them once. He too, they claimed, was descended from Irish princes and kings.’

I felt a dread creep through me, of hearing again a tale I had thought long buried. I did not want to hear it again here, in my own home, from the lips of my best friend. ‘It
is a little late,’ I said, ‘to hear the drunken fables of Irish beggars.’

‘Oh, refugees they may have been, but these men were not beggars, and their tale no fable. They told me of an old woman, Maeve O’Neill, a matriarch of the Irish cause, and of her two grandsons, one an Irishman, another a Scot.’

I looked at him, ready to plead, almost. ‘Archie, I do not want to think of these things. It was seven years ago, it was another world and another life that has no place here. My cousins are dead and my grandmother’s cause lost. Almost all I knew and cared for in Ulster is gone.’

‘Not all though.’

‘Do you tell me my grandmother has fled to Spain? I had thought it would take more than one king’s army to shift her from Ulster.’

Archie smiled. ‘I heard she was a woman of some mettle, your mother’s mother. But no, the old woman, I hear, holds fast to her keep in Carrickfergus, and schemes her schemes. It was another woman I saw in Madrid. And this was no grandmother, but a rare and delicate beauty, like a pale flower of spring amid the gaudy colours of summer. She had with her a son, a boy of five then, who was treated with much honour on account of her dead husband, your cousin Sean.’

‘Macha? She has left Carrickfergus?’ Macha was no pale and delicate flower, but warm, brown and strong. Perhaps the years since I had seen her had wrought a change in her.

But he shook his head. ‘This woman was not called
Macha, but Roisin O’Neill. She claimed herself as Sean’s wife, but there were those that said she never had been. They never said it to her face, though, on account of her lineage. And her child.’ Roisin, the name of the woman from that other world who might almost have kept me there. I swallowed, but could not make myself speak. Archie glanced again at the sleeping children in the bed, Deirdre closest to the wall, her arms wrapped around her little brother. I loved Davy with all my heart and soul, but he had little of me in him: he was the very image of his mother. Archie looked back to me again and fixed me with his gaze.

‘Your son is very like you, Alexander, very like.’

Sleep, when it had come, was filled with images of children. A little girl, bleeding to death in the straw, a little boy, alone, wandering empty marble corridors, looking for his father. I tried desperately to force some noise from my throat that he might hear me. When at last I managed to cry out I woke both myself and Sarah. I sat up, breathing heavily, and she put a hand to my forehead. ‘Alexander, you are ill.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It was a dream, but a dream. A nightmare. I’m sorry to have woken you.’

She didn’t appear to be listening to me. ‘Your nightshirt is drenched with cold sweat. I will fetch you another.’

‘Sarah, I am fine.’

‘You are not,’ she countered. ‘You are shaking and near enough grey. Put that on while I warm you something.’

I struggled into the clean nightshirt and a few minutes later swallowed the decoction of chamomile she had warmed over the embers of the fire Archie and I had left. The drink warmed me a little but, as she drifted back to sleep, I could feel my whole body still trembling.

When the drummer came through the town at six Sarah insisted that I could not go in to the college that day; I insisted that I would. I had little enough time left with my scholars before I would be called to my ministry. That was what I told her, but the truth was that I could not stay in this little house, looking up at the rafters of the roof, and listen to the life of my family go on downstairs as if I was the same man to them today that I had been yesterday.

I thought the morning would never end. When the bell rang for the mid-day meal I knew I could not endure again the questions of concern for my well-being from the other regents and the principal himself, the exhortations that I should go home to my bed. The matter was taken from my hands by Peter Williamson, who had the third class.

‘Wander round an empty schoolroom speaking to yourself if that is your wish – but you will have no scholars this afternoon.’

‘Why not? I am perfectly able …’

Peter silenced my protests. ‘Well, that is a matter of debate. However, even you are not able to teach students who are not there. The loch is frozen inches thick. I have secured the principal’s permission to take the boys curling. You are not permitted to join us. Dr Dun says if you are still within the college walls in a quarter hour he will come and administer physic to you himself.’

The thought of the principal’s concern was too much. I took my cap from the door and pulled on my gloves. ‘You have convinced me, Peter – I’m going home.’

But I did not go home; I could not. I needed some time alone with the thoughts that had been clamouring to be heard all day, and most of the previous night.

The streets of the burgh were as full as ever – more so, for Lord Reay’s men had begun their search for Seoras MacKay. Not a house nor a backland, a woodshed nor a sty was to be missed. For all the civic pride on which the provost might stand, he was, in truth, powerless to stop them, but could only see to it that they were attended in their searches by at least one member of the council or a burgh officer.

It astonished me that a man like Lord Reay, for all that he had grown up in a Highland glen, could think there was any hiding place in the town of Aberdeen. Whatever he suspected of its nooks and crannies, its outhouses and alleyways, I knew it for a warren in which a man might hardly know a moment’s solitude, still less lie undiscovered, captive or at his own will, for nigh on five days. There was to be no turning from the world in our godly commonwealth, no monastic indulgence, no veneration of the life of the hermit.

Not for the first time in my adult life, I questioned whether those who had sought to pass their lives in such solitude could have been altogether wrong. And yet, I realised there was a place where a hermit might find a moment’s peace, even here. I had seen it marked out on a plan four days ago, in George Jamesone’s studio. A pavilion, he had called it, or summerhouse. Not yet built, but I knew there would be somewhere in that garden, if nowhere else, that I might have an hour alone.

There were parties of Strathnaver’s men in every quarter of the town, but I could not see any yet on the Upperkirkgate or the Schoolhill as I made my way by the old Blackfriars’ into Jamesone’s garden. As I pushed back the rusted iron gate, I wondered what the good burgesses would make of the Doric gateways George planned to erect at the entrances to his Arcadia. There were those, I knew, who would not like his pretensions or the trumpeting of his wealth, but a man who had painted the king was unlikely to care.

Somewhere, away towards the eastern wall of the garden, I could hear the sounds of chopping and hewing – the two Frenchmen busy still at their clearing work. I sought instead some hidden corner on the western side, and followed a rough path down a grassy slope to the seclusion of the pond.

The water had frozen completely, and even the weeds beneath it were invisible to the eye under the inches of dull ice. The branches of the trees around me, denuded now of many of their leaves, were powdered white against the grey skein of a sky that promised an early snow. Autumn was barely a few weeks old but already the promise of a hard winter was settling on the town. Looking around me I saw now what I had missed in the night, a moss-covered seat set into the high stone wall. At intervals in the wall, George had already marked where niches were to be hewn out and statues set, but today there were no eyes of stone to watch me. I brushed away the accumulated muck of many
autumns, as much as I could, and doubling my cloak carefully beneath me, sat down in that hidden place.

I shivered, knowing I should be at home in my bed. It had all come to this. One man who had thought he could live the life of two and it never be known, had been shown that he could not. Not half a mile from here, on the Gallowgate, a large and respectable house, its rooms still empty, awaited its new minister. In a cramped cottage even closer to where I sat, a woman who had done me no wrong prepared her family for shifting to that fine house. And here I sat, a fraudulent man who had no place in either house, and should have been somewhere else.

A boy in Aberdeen who carried my name but not my blood, another, in Spain, who thought his father dead and did not know he was my son; two women who deserved better at my hands. And the God to whom I must pray had known this all along. I besought Him to give me the reason, to show me how I should begin to right these wrongs. My head was in my hands and I did not know I begged aloud until I heard a woman speak my name.

‘Mr Seaton.’

I knew the voice but I could not look up. Perhaps if I did not look up she would retreat, back amongst the trees and bushes through which she must have come. But the voice came again, closer, and I jolted as a gloved hand touched my shoulder. The hand was retracted.

‘I am sorry.’ It was Isabella Irvine. She wore a long green velvet cloak, lined with fur, its hood up against the cold.
Her feet had made little sound on the frosted grass, and she stood directly of front to me now, looking at me with an unwonted concern. ‘Is there anything I can do for you? Can I find you some help?’

‘You?’ I could scarcely believe what she was saying to me. ‘You of all people must know I am beyond it.’

She took a step backwards. There was no hostility in her face, and I felt almost sorry for having spoken to her harshly. ‘I am sorry, Mr Seaton, I do not understand.’

I ran my hand through my hair. ‘I think you understand me too well, as you made clear at our first meeting.’

I saw that it gave her some discomfort to remember it, and I wondered what could have occurred in the last twentyfour hours that could have wrought such a change in her demeanour to me.

She was thinking carefully over her words. ‘It was many years ago, and I did not know … you must believe me when I tell you I am sorry for it now.’

I sat up now and looked at her properly, a little startled by this. ‘Now? Since when is the “now”? Since when are you sorry? Not before the day of the trials, when I can assure you you made plain to me that I was as constant in your affections as ever I had been.’

‘Mr Seaton, I …’

I was in no mood to listen to her. ‘Whatever has brought on this change of heart in you, I can assure you it is an erroneous one. For you had me to rights, all those years ago, Mistress Irvine, and would do better to return to your
former views.’ I stood up. ‘You may have the seat: I am taking my leave. No doubt the lieutenant will be here soon, and I fear we three would make mismatched companions.’

My remark had hit home, for I saw a brief panic flit across her eyes. ‘I am not meeting the lieutenant.’