‘It was the finest piece he ever made,’ I said, ‘and there was love for you in every beat of the hammer, every mark of the graver.’
‘I know it,’ he said. ‘And they will have to kill me more than once to take it from me. But I’ll tell you this,’ he said, jerking his head in the direction of the stairs, ‘blood or no, your father would have loved that boy.’
I knew this myself; I had thought it often. Zander was everything my father would have had me be. He had a spirit and a will to work and a zeal for adventure that I had never managed to muster. He would have served Archie as my father thought I should have served him: to the death. I knew also that if we had allowed it, Zander would have gone into the night and whatever might come with that
man whose very name, but an hour before, had been unknown to him.
Sarah knew it too, but all apprehension on that score had gone from her – I looked at her face: Archie had won her also, utterly and absolutely. In another time, I was not sure I could be certain that she too would not have left me, without a backwards glance, for my best friend.
Sarah, I knew, had always thought of Archie as first the brother of Katharine Hay, and only second, a distant second, my friend. Within a few minutes, the utter lack of arrogance, the genuine warmth in his voice, his eyes, had changed that completely. Within less than an hour, they were easily familiar, as if they had known each other their whole lives.
‘And how did such a length of misery as Alexander Seaton ever persuade one such as you to marry him?’ he had asked her after Zander was gone to his bed.
‘He promised me a fine manse and a seat at the front of the kirk,’ she said, sweeping away bowls that were empty.
‘Hah!’ he laughed. ‘He promised me a seat at the front of the kirk, too, but mine was to be a stool with three legs on it and a coat of sackcloth to go with it. Little wonder I fled to the wars.’
They had bantered a while about me and my many shortcomings, about Archie’s trials in attempting to make a gentleman of me, and his eventual, evident failure. As Sarah was making ready to leave us for the night, he took her hand. ‘He is the best man I know, and I could never have seen him happier, with anyone. You understand?’
‘I understand,’ she said at last, and his manner lightened again.
‘But while he offered you a manse, I would have offered you kingdoms.’
She smiled at him. ‘Too much has been lost already, I think, by women in search of kingdoms. Good night, Sir Archie.’
‘Goodnight, Sarah.’
We watched her go up the stairs, the unconscious sway of her hips, the final, light touch of her hand on the banister. ‘And to think she was only a few miles from Delgatie, on her uncle’s croft. A woman like that might have kept me from the wars.’
I went to the sideboard to fetch the flask of brandy. ‘Nothing could have kept you from the wars.’
‘Do you think not?’
‘I know it.’ I poured him out a measure, and one for myself. ‘You were always too restless. The best adventure was always the one yet to come. And you would never have settled with one woman – the minute you had won her you would begin to lose interest in her.’
‘But perhaps the right woman … a life like this.’ He looked around the room that served us as kitchen and parlour, with my two youngest children sleeping, warm and oblivious, in their box bed in the wall.
‘This would have been too small a life for you, Archie,’ I said, remembering his restless energy in the finest of castles, his lust to go ever further, ever faster on the hunt,
his determination at the end of a night on one more song.
‘Do you think so?’ He was silent a moment, thinking, or remembering, it seemed, and for a while the room was filled only by the crackling of the logs in the hearth and the breathing of the children. ‘And yet it is not too small a life for you.’
I was about to say that no, it was not. To tell him again of the kirk that was to be mine, the house on the Gallowgate, where there would be many rooms, and my children would not have to eat, sleep, live in the one. But he knew all that, and that was not the life of which he spoke. He was asking me about the life I had never lived.
‘It … sometimes I wonder how it might have been, had I heeded Jaffray.’
He was surprised. ‘What, turned away from your calling? Gone to further studies overseas?’
I played with the half-empty tumbler before me. ‘I would have seen the world that I will not now see. The seas the merchants sail to, the towns and peoples other scholars come back so full of, felt the heat of the sun on my face.’
‘And the frost that would take the toes from your feet. I have been as far to the south as Naples, as far east as Muscovy. I have seen men poisoned by snakes and mauled by bears. I have set light to libraries filled with more knowledge than a thousand years could garner, and I can tell you, at the end there is only what you always tried so hard to tell me.’
‘What is that?’ I said.
‘Man. Fallen man. The world over. You might travel a thousand miles and never again find what you have here, Alexander. Think of it no more.’
We drank more of the brandy and then I changed the subject. ‘When did you meet Ormiston?’ I asked.
He smiled. ‘Now that is a story.’ He put down his glass. ‘I told you how after Stadtlohn I had travelled eastwards, deeper into Germany, until I met in with Mansfeld’s forces? I fought under Mansfeld for over two years, as he trailed around the battlefields and towns of Europe, always too little and too late. I was with him when he attempted the relief of Breda, and there to see that city fall. I was with him at Dessau, when Wallenstein defeated us. Half our number went over to the Scots and Irish Catholic forces under Daniel Hepburn. I stayed, like the fool I was. I had done better to go with them. Then I would never have seen Weisskirchen. Dessau was in April of ’26. In June of that year, I was at Weisskirchen.’
He did not need to tell me of Weisskirchen; all Europe knew of it: Imperial musketeers had garrisoned the town, refused to give entry to Mansfeld and his Protestant troops, who had, after being once repulsed, forced entry on the second attempt. For two hours, they had slaughtered every man, woman and child they could find, and then they had pillaged for two days.
Archie’s hand, gripped around his glass, was shaking. ‘I cannot describe it. People, human beings, utterly butchered.
Age, nor sex, nor creed mattered. I can smell the blood yet.’ He pulled back the cuff of his left arm to reveal a thick purple gash. ‘It was one of our own soldiers gave me that. With an axe. He was holding it over the head of a young woman, and I tried to take it from him.’
It was a wonder he had not lost his hand.
‘And the woman?’ I asked eventually.
He shook his head. And so, disgusted, he had walked out of Weisskirchen and sought better comrades and a better master. By the time Lord Reay’s troops had landed on the Elbe, and then found service with the King of Denmark, Archie had already taken on his new identity: John Nimmo, the Scottish spy. There were Scots in the armies of both sides of the great struggle for the mastery of the German lands, the broken Holy Roman Empire, that raged to the very boundaries of Europe, and Archie had found no great difficulty in flitting from one place to another without drawing too much attention on himself.
‘But did you not fear detection? John Gordon and Walter Leslie would have known you in a moment.’
Archie laughed at the mention of two old acquaintances of ours who had found their way in to the armies of the Catholic Imperialists. That they would not have recognised him was inconceivable. ‘They are risen so high in the Emperor’s service he has rewarded them with lands, titles, and money. Such men do not notice a humble pikeman who keeps his head down and does not draw attention to himself. But Alexander, you should know …’ His voice
was low now, but the burst of his laughter had woken Deirdre, and she cried out, frightened to see the stranger in her home in the night.
I soothed her until she at last went back to sleep. Archie said nothing all this time, but only watched us. There was a sadness in his eyes I had never seen before in all my long years of knowing him.
Fearing our evening was almost at an end, I added more coals to the fire, hoping the warmth and comfort of my home might persuade him to stay a little longer. Finally, after a long silence, he spoke. ‘I had a daughter, once.’
I stopped on my way back to the table, not sure that I had heard him right.
‘It is true,’ he said. ‘My Magdalena.’ A half-smile came to his lips. ‘You should have seen her, Alexander. There never was such a child. Eyes as blue as the brightest sapphire and hair in locks of ebony. Three years old, but she could sit a horse as well as I could myself. She pattered away in German, of course, but she would have done as well in the streets of Banff, for I taught her Scots and she was so quick and clever – cleverer than you, even. She would have been Queen of Delgatie.’
‘What became of her?’ I asked quietly.
‘Dead,’ he said. ‘Dead.’
I hesitated. ‘Her mother?’
‘She too. All dead.’ He swallowed some more of the brandy and, staring past me into the fire, told me. ‘Her mother was a beauty, a Bohemian beauty. A burgher’s
daughter from Pilsen, wild as they come. I was quartered on her father’s house, and well,’ he grinned, ‘as I said she was a beauty, and wild. I was never sorrier to leave a
dorp
than I was that one.’
‘You took her with you?’
He shook his head. ‘It was time for my regiment to move on, and I to move with them. I left Anna with an idea that I might return some day if God so willed it – for I still thought God took an interest in my affairs in those days – but that if He did not, then so be it. I marched with my comrades northwards, to Hesse and then to Brandenburg. After a while, I gave little thought to Anna, and lived for the concerns of the day, the hour.’ He looked at me directly. ‘You see, Alexander, a soldier never knows when he lays down his head at night, whether he will wake in the morning, or when he awakes, whether he is seeing his last dawn. There can be little time for regrets. But it seemed I had left Anna with more than a smile and a half-meant promise. I had left her with child.’
‘She found you?’ I said, astonished.
‘Oh, she found me. Hundreds of miles from her home, beleagured in a field in Brandenburg, my Anna with her six-month belly found me. Her father – an old Hussite – had put her from the house, and I could hardly send her back to him, so she stayed. She joined with the other soldiers’ wives, and when the time came for me to move, I found her a place in the service of my captain’s wife, a German lady of means. Magdalena was born while I was
at Breda, and already three months old by the time I first saw her. But I knew the moment I clapped eyes on her that she was mine, and that I would never love another as much in my life as I loved her. Nothing has ever had such a hold on my heart, Alexander, nothing, as that little girl.’ He rubbed his fingers over his right palm and then clenched it tight. ‘I can almost feel her hand in mine still.’
‘What happened?’
His brow furrowed, as if he could not yet believe it himself. ‘I returned to Brandenburg whenever I could, but the truth is, I saw them less than a dozen times in those three years. I remember when I heard the news that plague had visited their town. I rode hard for two days until I found them. My captain’s wife had succumbed to the pestilence, and more than half the household too, but Magdalena and her mother were strong, and somehow – you would call it the grace of God – it did not touch them. But I could not leave them in the town and so I sent them to Bredenburg, a small but sturdy house in Holstein, garrisoned by some companies of MacKay’s regiment under a Major Dunbar. I knew they would be cared for there by my countrymen until such time as I could return for them.’ He swallowed down more brandy. ‘The castle guarded a pass of no great consequence, and yet Gustav Adolph feared it might be used by the Imperialists, and so he ordered Dunbar to hold it come what may. And what came was Tilly.’
Johan Tserclaes, Count Tilly, General of the Armies of the Catholic League and greatest soldier of the Holy Roman
Empire. Died three years since of battle wounds, leading his army still, at the age of seventy-two. Everyone in Europe knew the name of Tilly.
‘It was folly,’ Archie continued, ‘suicide. Tilly sent a trumpeter to Dunbar, demanding the castle’s surrender. It was refused. The Major feared more the wrath of Gustav Adolph than he did the ten thousand men who surrounded him. Three hundred men, he had, and a house filled with peasants – old men, women and children who had come in from the countryside for their safety. That garrison of three hundred held Bredenberg six days, and then Dunbar took a bullet to the head – I would have put it there myself had I been there. His officers, not daring to surrender what he had refused, swiftly followed him through the gates of eternity, and the enemy broke through at last. Their offer of parley having been refused, they had lost almost a thousand men in the assault. They gave no quarter, to man, woman or child. The whole court and lodgings of the place ran with blood.’ He was hunched over now, like an old man trying to keep warm. He looked up at me. ‘It can be seen to this day you know, on the walls, on the paving stones beneath your feet. Five or six souls escaped with their lives. Anna and Magdalena were not amongst them.’
Though I stood by the fire, I was chilled to the bone, and could feel my body trembling. ‘But surely, you cannot be sure? Perhaps in the confusion, the panic …’
He shook his head. ‘I buried them myself. I had made for Bredenberg as soon as I heard Tilly’s forces were
marching that way. But I was too late. By the time I arrived, Dunbar had given his answer and the fates of those within the walls were sealed. I tried to find a way in alone, and got this for my pains.’ He pulled down his shirt front and I saw the scars of a huge burn that travelled from his neck down the side. Oil. ‘When I finally gained the castle, in the wake of the attackers, I found them, huddled in the corner of a stall in the stables, in one another’s arms, the straw beneath them red, red.’ He pulled from his pocket a small leather pouch and carefully removed from it a packet wrapped in silk. He unfolded the silk and placed it on the table before him. Wrapped inside it was a single blade of straw, stained brown. ‘I keep it with me always, that I might remember what I live for.’