‘Who? Who is there?’ I went to the window beside her.
‘In the close mouth across the street. He’s been there, watching, for the last two hours.’
I was looking at her face, a study in terror, and not out at the window. ‘Who, Sarah?’
‘There,’ she said, pointing, ‘there. The recruiting sergeant.’
I went closer to the window to look, and as I did so, a figure stepped from the close mouth in to the open lane. He wore no cloak but a thick leather buff-coat. His hat was low on his head, but for a short moment he lifted his face, half-covered by the patch over his left eye, to the full light of the moon and slowly raised his arm in salute. He held my eye for a moment after he lowered his arm and then he moved away into the night.
I had not yet removed my boots and was at the top of the stairs before Sarah caught me.
‘Alexander. Stop. Where do you think you’re going?’
‘I’m going after him,’ I said quietly.
‘After him? You cannot! Have you gone mad?’
I lifted her restraining hand from my chest and went past her.
‘Alexander!’ she cried.
‘He has come for me, Sarah. He has come for me.’
A cat from the forestairs next to our house squalled angrily as I disturbed her in pursuit of some prey and I heard my Davy stir in his bed, calling out for his mother as I closed the door behind me, but I did not wait or turn back. I turned right at the top of the pend, in the direction I had seen the sergeant head. At first, coming to the fork of the Netherkirkgate, I could not tell where to go, whether up towards Grayfriars or down to St Nicholas Kirkyard. And then I saw him: he had paused a moment by the wall of Lumsden’s house on the Guest Row, and after making sure that I saw him, he moved off again. A curious, fast, limping gate. The gait of a wounded man who had learned to overcome his wounds, and in that gait I could almost recognise the walk. I quickened my pace and he did his, so that thirty yards of distance remained resolutely between us. He paused again, momentarily, looking over his shoulder at me before crossing the Broadgate and making off in the direction of the Castlegate. I followed as fast as I could, but still I did not gain on him. By the time he had passed in front of the vast edifices fronting the Castlegate – the Earl Marischal’s town house, the tolbooth, the courthouse – and crossed towards Futty Wynd and the gate to St Ninian’s Chapel I no longer
wondered where he was going: I knew. And he knew that I knew it. He was making for the Heading Hill.
I lengthened my stride, and each step took me backwards in time. I thought not, as I had done when a young man, of the gruesome deaths, deserved and undeserved that had been meted out to the burgh forefathers in that place, but of the possibilities, the dream of a future that I no longer had. As the frosted moss gave way beneath my boots, I felt the spring of it in the warm sunshine under my bare heel and sole. The fresh salt smell of a winter sea gave way to the summer scents of clover and thyme. I turned only once to look at the burgh below me, the spire of St Nicholas standing clear in the night sky as it had done then, the new roof of the Marischal College library, restored at last after the fire that had ravaged it.
I crested the hill so that I could no longer see the burgh behind me, only the land to the south and the sea to the north and east. The North Sea, that had called too loud and too often. It was there still, the bank in the hollow that made for a natural hide, and he was there, waiting. I stopped about ten yards from him. He stood up slowly, carefully, and turned to me, the hat laid aside, the needless bandage removed from his eye. He extended his hand a little and opened his mouth as if he would speak. I did not hear him, I could not hear him. The world before me blurred and I could not see him. I fell to my knees and cried.
He was down beside me in a moment and I felt the strong arms around me, the beat of his familiar heart. My whole
body was wracked with shaking, cut off in itself from the cold of the cold night. It seemed the breaths I took would not go to my lungs. I heard the smile in the golden voice. ‘It was always you who looked after me,’ he said. ‘How are we to manage if that has changed?’
The laugh that lurched from my throat helped me to master my own breathing, and I managed to look up into his face at last. A ravaged face. Disease had been there, and shot, the blade of a sword or knife. But a beautiful face still, alive in the eyes that were whole and undamaged, and in the ungovernable curve of the mouth. The face I had last seen fourteen years ago, and which I had thought I would never see again. One word was all I could manage. ‘Archie.’
He smiled again and hoisted me to my feet. ‘Aye Alexander, Archie. It has been a long road home.’
Fourteen years it was since I had last seen Archie Hay. Fourteen years, since that damp, dark morning when we embraced on the quayside of Aberdeen as he was about to embark on the ship that would carry him to Denmark, and sworn, as we had done so often in our young lives, our everlasting brotherhood. It had been three years later that the messenger I had every day dreaded had banged on my door demanding I should make haste to Archie’s home at Delgatie, and his parents and sister, for Archie, he told me, was dead.
For almost two years we had heard nothing, save that he was wounded at Stadtlohn, where Christian of Brunswick’s army, in which he served, had been decimated by the Catholic Imperial forces under old General Tilly. Christian’s army had suffered six thousand dead and four thousand taken prisoner that day, and for long we had persuaded ourselves that Archie had been among the latter. Lord Hay would happily have sold every last stone of Delgatie and the souls of everyone in it to ransom his son, but no such
ransom was ever asked, and then had come the news that it never would be.
News of his death had torn the heart out of his family, and what had come to pass afterwards meant that the woman I loved and the calling I had worked my whole life to attain were lost to me. For I had loved Archie’s sister Katharine, and she me, and we had fondly believed we might marry when Archie returned to take his place as his father’s heir. But on news of his death, my Katharine went from being indulged daughter to the hope and future of her family and their name, and the penniless divinity student who had been welcome as their son’s friend was not welcome as her husband. When her father learned that she had anyway come to my bed, he had banished her to a marriage, far to the south, with a much older kinsman, and denounced me before those who held the keys to my ministry in their hands. Bitterness and despair had been my companions for long afterwards, until the love of good friends, and of Sarah, who was now my wife, had lifted them from me.
And yet, here he sat now, by my side, and even through our clothing I felt the warmth of the blood that pumped in his veins. Archie Hay. A living, breathing man. No ghost, no spirit: I knew the very scent of him. He waited, almost scared to speak, it seemed, as my eyes took in the truth of the sight of him.
‘It cannot be.’ My words were barely audible. ‘They told us you were dead.’
He looked away to the sea before he answered.
‘I was dead. Not as you thought, perhaps. But I was dead to all I had ever been before I went to the wars.’
I did not understand him. ‘But how? We waited … surely you knew that we waited, we would never have given up …’
He shook his head. ‘I know that, Alexander, but the man who was carried insensible from the field of Stadtlohn twelve years ago was dead before he ever saw it.’ He opened a flask of brandy and offered me some, before drinking himself. ‘In a battle, some men desert, others are taken prisoner, or wounded and never found by their comrades. There are those in the field who will not hear the drummer beat the retreat, or will not see their comrades through the smoke and dust: they will be left behind. At Stadtlohn, I was one such. The last thing I saw was the cannon ball that had taken half my knee take the heads off six of my men. After that, I remember nothing until I woke to find myself in the barn of a kindly German peasant who had found me close to death after the rest of my regiment was long escaped into Holland. His old wife nursed me several weeks, in memory of their own son who was lost to them in some other war many years before, and when I was recovered, they urged me to go home.’ He smiled. ‘I told them I would, for their sake, for their son’s. I knew that I never could. I found my way to Mansfeld’s army, and heard news of my own death from an English officer there who did not know who I was. And so, one freezing winter’s night with little food and less pay, Captain Archibald Hay of
Delgatie died and Sergeant John Nimmo, whose family were of no account and who was not given to seeking promotion, was born.’
‘Nimmo?’
He shrugged, the old grin on his face. ‘It was the nearest I could get to Nemo. I did listen to old Gilbert Grant in that schoolroom in Banff sometimes, you know.’
Nimmo. Nemo. No one.
Still I did not understand. ‘But why? Because you were rumoured dead you thought you could not come back alive? Good God, Archie, your parents …’
‘My parents would not have known the man who returned to them, and neither would you.’
‘But however bad your wounds …’
‘Will you
listen
, Alexander? The wounds you see are but the outward show of something worse, something that does not heal. What I had seen even in those two years before Stadtlohn rendered me something else. I had thought I was ready for the bloodshed, the brutality, all in the name of honour. But I knew nothing; I was ready for nothing.’ He took another drink from the flask. ‘Do you know what happens in a siege?’
‘Of course I know what happens in a siege.’
He shook his head. ‘No you don’t. You don’t know what happens to the people of a town that is held as a stronghold by one army in the face of assault by another.’
‘I know that eventually, when there is no food or water left, and no sign of relief, the commander of the town will
surrender, or the opposing forces will undermine or storm the walls.’ He was listening to me with almost dead eyes that registered only disappointment. ‘Archie. I’m not a fool. I know you will have lost comrades, seen men maimed …’
‘Oh, I have,’ he said. ‘I have. But it is not that that I am talking about, for you expect that in war. What I had not expected was the sight of the inhabitants of a town we had just stormed or relieved. The first time, you know, I expected gratitude, a joyful welcome from the people we had liberated. I found instead creatures who could hardly stand up, near-skeletal mothers guarding the graves of their dead babies for fear they would be removed from the earth by others near starvation.’ His voice was relentless, as if he had forgotten he was talking to me. ‘I have, with my comrades, dug mass graves into which we threw a hundred bodies because there was no one else to bury them, and we had not the time to give them any more honourable a service.’ Then he came to himself and looked up at me. ‘Do you know, after the Swedish forces took Frankfurt an der Oder, it took six days to bury the dead? Six days.’ His voice dropped. ‘The worst were the times when the defending commander would not agree to terms.’
I did not want to know, but I knew I had to ask the question. ‘And if he did not?’
‘Then Hell was made real on earth. No quarter. For garrison or citizenry alike. Men, women, children slaughtered. Homes ransacked for every last thing of any worth
that could be carried away. I have seen commanders powerless to stop it as their men turned to beasts before their eyes, young girls violated alongside their mothers, houses and churches burned.’
I could say nothing, and he continued. ‘I have marched in armies from Prague to the Netherlands, from Sweden to Bavaria, Poland, to the very doors of the Habsburgs. I have looked on at the councils of kings. Nowhere is the soldier wanted, not by the townspeople they have come to protect or relieve, not by the peasants on whom they are quartered or whose lands are stripped bare that one army might have food and deny it to another. And I
am
a soldier. How could I have come back here? “With wolves we learn to howl and cry.” That is what my commander said as he ordered one of our regiment shot for the rape of a Saxon farmer’s daughter. He was right: every day we must guard ourselves against descending to the brutality of the beast. Every day. And the man who every day has to remind himself of that is no fit person to return to the society of friends and the love of the family into which he was born.’
I forced him to look at me. ‘I do not believe that of you.’
‘I think you must.’
‘But Archie, you do not need to continue on that path. I know.
I know
that with God’s help and the love of friends a man can put behind him the worst of himself.’
He said nothing, and I heard my voice rise in frustration. ‘And so you just continue in that life? And you go with Ormiston to entice others in the same way?’
He sighed. ‘No, Alexander, I do not. Not as you think it, anyway. I am as good a soldier as the next man, better than many. But the John Nimmo that I have become does not seek promotion. There are times when an anonymous man is of greater use to an army than a platoon of pikemen. I am a spy for my masters. The greater the intelligence I can bring them, the more I can misinform the enemy, the sooner this conflict will be brought to a close. I fight with my mind and my tongue now, not with my sword. Unless I have to,’ he added in a way that gave me to understand this was not a rare occurrence.
‘So why are you here with Ormiston?’
He shrugged. ‘Chance. I have met in with him from time to time, in the course of my travels. However you might dislike him personally, he is a good soldier – driven.’
‘How do you know I do not like him?’ I asked, with an uneasy laugh.
‘Hah! Because I know you, and I know the more the likes of Ormiston seek to please those around him, the less they will please you. And’ – he cleared his throat – ‘I was in Downie’s Inn the other night and was able to witness your civility in making the acquaintance of the dashing lieutenant. It was all I could do not to cheer you on, so pleased was I to see how little you have altered. You are still the Alexander of old, and it is a long time since anything has warmed my heart so much as that.’