*
We travelled with Seoras’s body slowly, back across the mouth of the Dee. Hugh Gunn, Scots speech only slowly returning to him, sat on the bench beside me, shivering in the shock of what we had all just seen, and what he now remembered. ‘Once we were out of the inn, there was nothing for it but Seoras would cut through the garden. I should have stopped him, but I was fed up and wanted nothing but my bed, so I gave in and went in after him. We weren’t in there two minutes when we were set upon. I knew straight away they were soldiers – the way they were armed, the way they spoke. They asked which one of us was Lord Reay’s son. I warned Seoras to shut up, but of course he was having none of it and would stand on his dignity: he was and what of it? That was when they went
to lay hands on him. They told me to keep out of it and I would not be harmed but well …’ He did not need to explain. His whole life he had watched out for Seoras – he would not walk away then, in the face of a pack of armed men in the night. ‘We gave a good reckoning for a while, but they were too much for us in the end. I remember nothing else until I saw them hauling him up on that tree, and I could not move or speak, because of the thing they had on my head. I don’t even know how we got there.’
‘Nor I,’ said Lord Reay, ‘for there is a watch at the harbour, with a special regard to that ship, every night.’
‘I don’t think they were taken there by boat,’ I said, ‘but overland, round by the Brig o’Dee and Tullos.’
‘But how?’ said Hugh. ‘We were neither of us fit to walk.’
‘You didn’t have to walk. I think they had you strung over the back of a horse.’ The horse that had been stolen from Davy Durno at Woolmanhill that night, and found wandering and terrified out of its wits, with a cut rope round its neck, near Nigg Bay the next day. ‘The watch at the port of the Brig o’ Dee would have thought nothing of a packman leaving that town with an old horse heavy-burdened. Especially if he was given a handful of coins for his trouble. They must have rowed you back to the town much later, further up the river out of sight of the watch and brought you in somewhere near the Putachie Burn, where you were found.’
‘But why did they not just kill me too?’
I could not say it in front of Lord Reay, but then he said it himself, Seoras’ father said it. ‘Because Ormiston has a kind of honour, boy. My son for his brother. An eye for an eye. No less, no more.’
*
There had been too much death in our town of late, and few watched as the bier bearing the body of the missing student Seoras MacKay was brought ashore and carried up to the college, to lie in the Grayfriars’ kirk, where Dr Dun, Peter Williamson and all the other black-robed teachers of the college, along with Seoras’ classmates, waited to receive it. Jaffray, who had railed against me taking part in this expedition in the first place, urged me to go home and rest, but I wished to join my colleagues in the church for a while. ‘And perhaps,’ I said, ‘I will be able to reflect on God’s purposes with us.’
After prayers had been said, and psalms sung, the college began to troop out of the kirk, their respects paid to the memory of a boy who would soon be forgotten by them. And yet still I could not make myself come away. There was something not right, something that kept me there, watching, with Ossian and Lord MacKay and Hugh, and John Leslie too. It was Ossian who finally voiced the question that must have been on all our minds.
‘What I do not understand,’ he said, ‘ is why, if Ormiston’s men cut Seoras down and set him behind that grave, his body was found so far away, amongst the rocks on the shore.’
I raised my head slowly to look at John Leslie. The minister, understanding it all at last, mouthed a silent ‘Yes’.
Seoras had not been dead when they had cut him from that tree, nor dead when they dumped him down the steps of an old well behind the grave. I saw again, I almost smelled, the animal lair William Cargill and I had come upon that day down the steps of the Lady Well. Whenever he had come too, he must have drawn sustenance from the water. Five days, until, half-starved and delirious, he had managed to haul himself back up those steps in search of help, nourishment, the way home. It was Seoras’ misfortune that in his ragged and desperate, scarcely human state, he had come upon a man whose mind was only beginning to piece itself together after the madness and ravages of drink. John Leslie had seen not a fellow creature in need of help, but a diabolic vision from the mouth of Hell. He had run back into his church, his mind again deranged, and Seoras MacKay, helpless, had staggered to the shore, to die alone with seaweed in his mouth.
Aberdeen, November 1635
William sat in his old steward’s chair by the fire, his head in his hands. Elizabeth stood at the kitchen table, her palms pressed hard on its smooth pine surface, as if she might go through it otherwise.
‘Alexander, I am begging you,
begging you
, not to do this thing.’
‘Elizabeth,’ I began.
‘What? Will I go down on my hands and knees? Is that what you want?’
‘No, Elizabeth, please, I …’
But she would not listen. She rounded on her husband. ‘Have you nothing to say? Nothing?’
He lifted his head wearily. ‘I have tried. ’Till I’m hoarse. And Jaffray too. He will have none of it. There’s nothing more we can do.’
Her face was a picture of disbelief. ‘What? Is there no recourse to law?’
In spite of himself, William laughed. ‘Law? What do you think he is doing, woman? There is no law of this land that says a man, a teacher, a minister of the kirk, for God’s sake, cannot take his own children and live where he wishes, if that town will have him.’
‘Town? Is it even a town? What manner of town is it? He will take Sarah’s children to live amongst savages? And Zander, that I have known since the moment he first drew breath …’
She crumpled at last to the bench, the tears that she had been trying to deny beginning to roll down her cheeks.
I went over to her and put my arm around her. ‘I cannot stay here. I cannot live in this place without her, see her shadow everywhere and not be able to touch it. I will go mad, Elizabeth, if I stay here.’
Mad with grief, mad with anger, mad with guilt. I could not tell her that last, that it was that above all that drove me from this place.
She looked up at me, the anger gone, her eyes red and swimming. ‘But the children …’
‘I cannot leave them. They are my all, and I must take them with me.’
William cleared his throat and raised a subject I had known must come since I had told him two days ago of my decision to accept Lord Reay’s offer.
For a man much used to making speeches, arguing his case, the words would hardly come out. ‘But surely,’ he
said eventually, ‘would you not think of leaving Zander here with us?’
‘William …’
He rushed on, refusing to let me have my objection. ‘He is James’s brother in all but blood and name, and this has been near as much his home as your own.’ His eyes beseeched me. ‘We would love him as much as any parents could, and your names would be on our tongues every day. He would still be your son …’
‘I know that, my dear, good friend. But Zander was the beat of her heart, and since I first felt him move in her belly I have been bound to him as to my own blood. More.’ I took a breath. ‘I will not part from him.’
Ever since Sarah’s death, words spoken to me in St Ninian’s Chapel in the Gaelic tongue by Hugh Gunn had repeated themselves over and over in my head.
Cha buin me an seo
. ‘I don’t belong here.’ This was no longer my place, and I could not see that it ever would be again. ‘I have not the fight for it,’ I said. I could not live like Katharine Forbes, Lady Rothiemay, a prisoner now in Edinburgh, or William Ormiston, forever a fugitive from his own land, living only on their dreams of a just vengeance. I could not walk the streets of this town, where I had had to denounce Matthew Lumsden, one of my oldest friends, for the murder of a young girl, listening for the echo of my wife’s dead footsteps. I was thirty-five years old. I might die in forty years’ time, or be called to my maker before dawn, but whatever life I had left to me
could not be lived in the mausoleum to my past life that this town had become.
I would go north, far to the north of this web of intrigues and old resentments. I would go further even than the mountains and straths where Guilluame Charpentier still roamed free, as was thought, spreading the doctrine of his priesthood, and winning succour from strangers for a son in Spain I would not see.
‘Run from us, run from your memories if you must, Alexander,’ Jaffray had said to me before he had heaved himself on his horse and set off wearily back to the town of Banff, ‘but you cannot run from He who knows all.’
‘I will take that burden with me,’ I had said, ‘and seek a better way that I might carry it.’
And so it was that little more than a week after Lord MacKay, Hugh Gunn with him, had begun their voyage home, taking Seoras to his rest, that I, with my three children, and all our worldly goods, boarded the ship that would take us to those far northlands of our country and the old collegiate church of Tain, on the edge of the Dornoch Firth, where we might begin again.
The foregoing story is a work of fiction, but many of the events, locations and characters are based on fact. As indicated at the beginning, Scots fought in the Thirty Years’ War in their tens of thousands. One of the largest recruitment drives was that undertaken in 1626, and built upon in subsequent years, by Sir Donald MacKay of Strathnaver, Lord Reay (d.1649). The first consignment of troops in his ‘Scots Brigade’ sailed from Cromarty on the Black Isle for Gluckstadt on the Elbe in 1626. They served first in the armies of Christian IV of Denmark, and from 1629 in the armies of Gustav Adolph of Sweden (d.1632) and his daughter, Queen Christina. Lord Reay, on a recruitment drive for troops to serve Sweden under the Marquis of Hamilton in 1631, was imprisoned in the Tower of London for having passed on to the king rumours of treasonable activity on Hamilton’s part. The details of this episode have never been fully explained, but the experience ruined MacKay financially, and he never returned to the wars. Following heavy defeats for the Swedish forces in 1634 and
the Peace of Prague in 1635, the remnants of MacKay’s Scots brigade joined Sir John Hepburn’s ‘Hebron’ regiment in French service, again against the Habsburgs. While MacKay is a real historical character, his ‘son’ Seoras and the events in Aberdeen involving him in this book, are entirely a work of fiction.
While Lieutenant Ormiston is a fictional character, he was of a type who could make his fortune in foreign service, and recruiting parties were a familiar feature of Scottish life. Parents of students in Edinburgh complained to the Privy Council about their sons being enticed away from college to the wars, and in 1637, during a storm in the night, four ships anchored on the Dee off Aberdeen broke their moorings and many new recruits bound for Sweden were drowned, their bodies subsequently being washed up along the coast.
Some of the episodes recalled by Archie Hay in this book are based on the experiences of Colonel Robert Monro of Obsdale in Easter Ross in his 1637 work,
Monro, his Expedition with the Worthy Scots Regiment called Mac-Keys
. Specifically, the fall of Bredenberg Castle in 1627, the details of the siege of Stralsund in 1628, and the ‘making merry’ together of Scots officers from opposing armies at Freistadt in 1632, are all adapted from Monro’s account. The story of Ormiston’s brother is based on Monro’s account of an incident at Stralsund. Three soldiers, forced to sleep out on the streets of the besieged town for four nights, were condemned by the Danish commander Holck, on the
drawing of lots, to hang as a punishment for some of their company having gone to the home of the town’s mayor and demanded quarters from him. Of the three, one was a Dane and two were Scots. On the intercession of their officers, Holck conceded that only one should hang. As Monro notes with a certain grim satisfaction, it was the Dane who eventually drew the paper marked with a gallows.
There is a vast literature on the Thirty Years’ War. The best starting point for anyone interested in Scottish involvement in these wars is Steve Murdoch’s
Scotland and the Thirty Years’ War
(2001). The involvement of Scots in the military, diplomatic and religious interests of the Habsburgs is dealt with in David Worthington’s
Scots in Habsburg Service
,
1618-1648
(2004).
Aside from those related to the war, other characters and events in the story are also based in fact. Katharine Forbes, Lady Rothiemay (c.1583–1653), was a kinswoman of Sir Donald MacKay of Strathnaver, and did found a girls’ school in Aberdeen (although not until 1642). Lady Rothiemay was a truly remarkable and formidable woman. Married to William Gordon of Rothiemay, with whose family her own was periodically at feud, she was widowed in 1630 when her husband, a former Justice of the Peace, was killed by one of his family’s Crichton enemies while resisting arrest by the Sheriff of Banff. A few months later, her eldest son, along with a son of the Marquis of Huntly and other young kinsmen, was killed in a fire in a tower house belonging to
the Crichtons while their hosts looked on. Her castle and lands were plundered by relatives and her younger son removed from her care, but Lady Rothiemay was unbowed and relentless in her quest for vengeance. In 1635, the Privy Council of Scotland declared that ‘in all the disorders and troubles quhilks hes of lait fallin out in the north pairtes of this kingdome Katherine Forbes, Ladie Rothiemay, hes had a speciall hand’, and ordered her arrest. Only in February of 1637 did the king ordain she should be released from her imprisonment in Edinburgh. Despite her vicissitudes, she remained staunchly royalist throughout the Covenanting Wars, and her daughter married a son of Robert Gordon of Straloch. After the wars she appears to have lived relatively quietly, strongly suspected of being Catholic and staunchly ignoring the censures of the local presbytery.
Lady Rothiemay’s host in my story, Baillie Lumsden, is also a real historical character. I have avoided using his Christian name – Matthew – to avoid confusion with his fictional nephew whom I thoughtlessly named Matthew Lumsden in the first book in this series. The real Matthew Lumsden (d.1644) was a much more respectable character, a successful burgess, baillie of Aberdeen and parliamentary representative of the burgh. Despite suspicions of crypto-Catholicism, Lumsden actually supported the Covenanting cause in the town. His home on the Guest Row, now known as ‘Provost Skene’s House’ after a subsequent owner, was one of the few sixteenth-century buildings in New Aberdeen to escape the civic vandalism of
the 1960s. It is now in the care of Aberdeen Art Galleries and Museums, and it, and its mysteriously painted Long Gallery, are open to the public, free of charge.