I sat down, hurt and perplexed. ‘Granted, Matthew is no good example, but I talk to Zander of Archie because it pains me more than anything else in life that he will never know him. And I doubt if there is a boy in Aberdeen who does not dream of being a soldier, who has not been down to look at the troop ship, seen Ormiston and his officers in their fine coats with their swords at their belts and their
scars of honour, and wanted one day to be like them. What else should they want? A life of drudgery and toil such as they see about them here every day? Let him have his childhood dreams; when he comes to manhood he will better see the truth of it, and if he does not, it will be because God has called him to be a soldier and it will not be ours to question it.’
Her face crumpled, all the defiance, all the rage, gone, and her eyes filled with tears. ‘But what if they take him, Alexander? What if they take him on to their ship, and we never see him again?’
‘Sarah …’ I leant towards her and took her two hands in mine. ‘They will not take him. What Ormiston wants is good officers, men who can be relied upon and who can lead, and soldiers strong enough to carry a musket, wield a pike. He has no interest in boys of nine.’
She sniffed and nodded, but I was not sure yet that she was convinced. She released her hands and picked up the drumsticks that I had set back down on the floor. ‘I broke them,’ she said. ‘After William had left with James. Zander knew he would get no supper. He did not seem to care. He said a soldier had to learn to march on an empty belly, and he went and got his old drum out of the chest there. He beat it up and down the room, up and down the stair, until I could take it no more. I took the sticks from him and I snapped them in two.’
I closed her hand over them and kissed her on the forehead. ‘I’ll make him some more.’ I went over to the recess
in the wall where Deirdre, clutching her doll, was pretending to sleep. I kissed her too, and leaned across her, a finger to my lips, to rub the sleepy head of our three-year-old, Davy. The mischief in the smile he gave me told me that he would tax his mother’s heart more often even than did his brother.
Upstairs, Zander was waiting, his bottom lip protruding a little, and his eyes fixed on the stairhead in a determination not to cry. He moved sideways a little to make space for me as I sat down beside him. ‘Your mother is very sorry about the drumsticks. I will make you some new ones.’
He nodded, the tears threatening to brim over. ‘It is because she is worried. She is scared you will go away with Lieutenant Ormiston, and that she will never see you again.’
‘We did not want to go away, yet. We only wanted to look at the ship.’
‘And did you get a look at it?’
‘Yes.’ Sullen still.
‘Tell me about it.’
‘It is a Dutch merchantman, a hundred feet and five hundred tons.’ His face was brightening and his voice becoming more animated as he went on. ‘And we saw the soldiers, the recruits, at their exercises. And they say they took on boxes of pistols and muskets at Dundee, and gunpowder, and that they are bound for Gluckstadt.’
‘I hope they will have taken on plenty of hides and barrels of dry biscuit.’
‘I did not see any of that.’
‘Oh,’ I looked at him ruefully. ‘Then the soldiers will be very cold, and very hungry, for they will sleep out in the open fields, and find very little to eat as the winter takes hold.’
He thought about this a while. ‘Will I get any supper tonight?’
I shook my head. ‘Perhaps the next time you will think of your mother at home and waiting for you. Now you go down and say you are sorry, and get off to your bed.’
He turned towards me as he set his foot on the third step from the top. ‘Do you think we should tell the sergeant? About the biscuits and the hides?’
Something, some indiscernible fear crept into my chest and stomach. ‘The sergeant?’
‘Yes. He is always there, watching. He keeps to the dark corners. The boys are all afraid of him. He has a bad leg, but he can limp as fast as others run, they say. His face is covered in scars, but no one sees it – he keeps his hood up. And he has a patch over his eye. James said the right, but I knew it was the left. I was right and now he owes me a penny.’
The fear tightened. ‘How do you know you were right?’
He looked surprised at my question. ‘Because I saw it. All the other boys ran away when he came towards us. James wanted to too, but I called him a coward, so he stayed. Some of the boys had said the man was a Spaniard, because of his skin. But he speaks Scots, and we could understand him.’
‘He spoke to you? What did he say?’
‘He asked us our names, and when we told him, he asked us who our fathers were, and then he smiled and went away. His face did not frighten us so much when he smiled.’
I lowered my voice. ‘Zander, did you tell your mother of this?’
He shook his head, the sullen look returning. ‘No. She did not let me speak.’
‘Don’t tell her. You promise me?’
‘I promise,’ he said, in the manner of a little boy well-used to the giving of such promises. ‘Can I go down to the ship again? If I tell you first?’
I looked at the child who had filled my heart for nine years, the bastard son of another man, and I felt my nails press into my own palms. ‘No,’ I said. ‘You cannot.’
William shook his head as he mopped the last of the stew from his bowl with a hunk of the bread we had shared. ‘I do not think it is anything to be concerned about. The poor fellow must be so used to children running at the sight of him, he would have been intrigued by two who did not, and probably said the first thing that came into his head.’
As ever at this time of day, the cookshop was filled with advocates, notaries and clerks. I usually took my mid-day meal in the college, but the principal had given me business to do out in the town this afternoon, so I had taken the chance to spend a half-hour with my lawyer friend William Cargill here instead. I had drawn William aside from his favoured table by the fire, to a bench where we might talk more privately.
‘Have you seen him?’
‘The recruiting sergeant?’
I nodded.
‘I don’t think so. I have seen Lieutenant Ormiston and
the other officers, but the sergeant has never taken my notice. I think that is the way he prefers it. I have heard he has been greatly disfigured by his injuries, and rarely shows himself ashore.’
‘He comes out at night,’ I said, ‘when they make their tour of the inns and alehouses. He’s Ormiston’s watchdog. The innkeepers and brewsters are always glad when he has gone from their place. He has not his master’s power to charm, it seems, and does not encourage conversation, but I suspect they are two halves of the one coin.’
William signalled for the cook’s boy to bring us more ale. ‘You are not much taken with the lieutenant, are you, Alexander?’
I did not see any need to deny it. ‘It takes more than a studied manner and a fine cut of clothing to endear a man to me,’ I said. ‘And I do not like his pretending to know more of me than he does.’
William looked at me pointedly. ‘How many of your own scholars have taken ship for the wars when their college days were done?’
‘Too many,’ I said. ‘Many more than will come back.’
‘Aye,’ said William sombrely. ‘But those who have gone will speak of old teachers, fondly remembered. There is nothing sinister in Ormiston knowing your name, or in his sergeant taking a moment to speak kindly to the only two boys in the town not to run away from him.’
I conceded that William might be right, and our conversation moved on to other things – the unwelcome interest
of English archbishops in the affairs of our kirk and the king’s ill-judged meddling in the business of our burgh council. William kept his voice low. ‘Can Charles truly believe we will allow interference from Whitehall that we would not take from his father in Holyrood? This will not end well.’
‘Hmmn, I fear not,’ I said. ‘And I am to go to Baillie Lumsden’s house later today.’ Despite his wealth and influence, the baillie was strongly suspected of sailing too close to the wind in matters of religion and politics. He was also the cousin and namesake of Matthew Lumsden, the old student friend of William’s and mine whom Sarah had decried the night before, and who was openly and defiantly Papist.
‘Oh?’ William was interested. ‘What is the college’s business there?’ We had finished our meal and were stepping out on to the street.
‘I don’t know yet. Dr Dun said Lumsden would explain it to me, but I am not altogether at ease about it. I noticed a power of armed men at the baillie’s door as I passed by his house this morning.’
William raised his eyebrows in surprise. ‘Yes, but those are there for …’
‘For what?’
A mischievous smile had come upon his face. ‘Truly? You do not know? Well, I daresay you will soon find out.’ He slapped me hard on the back. ‘Courage, my friend. Courage!’ And he was still laughing as he disappeared from view into the depths of Huxter Row.
It was with some trepidation, then, that I approached Lumsden’s residence on the Guest Row. With five storeys of towers and turrets, it was better proportioned than many castles I had seen, and one of the grandest houses in the burgh.
The armed men I had seen in the morning were still there, and I had to have one of Lumsden’s servants vouch for me before I was allowed in. I was directed up the west turnpike to wait upon the master in the small parlour there. As I reached the head of the stair, a maid went past, carrying a tray of wine and cake in to the great hall, leaving the door slightly ajar behind her. I had my hand on the handle to close it when a voice from inside rose above the soft female murmur that had been coming from the room.
‘Isabella, shut the door for the girl before we all freeze to death! I never knew a house of such draughts.’
I placed the voice at the same moment as my eyes fixed on the young – perhaps not so young now – woman who had risen to close the door. I had not seen her in nine years, but I knew her instantly. Isabella Irvine, niece to Sir Robert Gordon of Straloch, friend to Katharine Hay whom I had loved and abandoned before I properly knew what love was. Isabella Irvine who, on our one and only meeting all that time ago, at the house of her uncle, had made it clear to me that she despised me more than anyone else on earth.
The shock on her face matched my own, and a small, surprised ‘Oh!’ escaped her throat before she recovered herself sufficiently to continue the process of shutting the
door in my face. But she had not moved quickly enough, for again came the commanding voice, a little more forceful this time.
‘Wait! Mercy, girl, is that not Alexander Seaton you are about to disfigure? Mr Seaton? Are these the manners the town of Aberdeen has taught you? Show yourself, man!’
And so I stepped into the room and found myself in the presence of Katharine Forbes, Lady Rothiemay, fifty years old, five years a widow of the murdered William Gordon of Rothiemay, mother to his sons, one of whom had been burned to death in a tower, the other, a child of nine, who had been forcibly taken from her care by a kinsman seeking to control her lands. In her grief and fury, beyond the power or inclination of the law to assuage, Katharine Forbes was at feud with more interests than I had friends. No longer the sylph-like sacrificial bride she had been thirty years ago, she was nonetheless slim and striking still. There was scarcely a grey hair among the chestnut folds on her head, and a little faded though they now were, her startling blue eyes could put the fear of God and the love of woman into any man in the North.
‘Your Ladyship,’ I made my long-disused bow, ‘I had not realised …’
‘No doubt you had not. Your head was rarely out of a book. But you must be the only man in Aberdeen who didn’t know I was in residence here with Lumsden.’
‘The guard …’
‘Indeed. Would that others had as little interest in my
movements as yourself, Mr Seaton. But enough of that. Tell me, when were you last at Banff?’
‘Three months ago, in the summer.’
‘And all is well with the good doctor?’
I knew my friend Dr Jaffray had several times tended to Lady Rothiemay and her children when their own physician from Huntly could not be got. ‘All well.’
She nodded, satisfied. ‘Good. Tell him he must visit me the next time he is in Edinburgh. Tell him to bring with him a deck of cards. He relieved me of twenty Dutch florins the last time I saw him, and I would win them back.’
I glanced briefly at Isabella Irvine. ‘You are going to Edinburgh?’
It was Lady Rothiemay who replied. ‘Aye, that cesspit of ministers and politicking. My enemies are busy, defaming me daily before the Privy Council, and it will not be long, I’d wager, until they have me on the back of a cart headed down to one of the castle jails.’
This was enough to rouse Isabella at last. ‘No, my Lady, your friends …’
‘My friends can only do so much without they set a noose around their own necks.’ Her voice softened and she smiled at the younger woman. ‘You have surely seen enough of the world by now to know that. Anyhow, I doubt Mr Seaton takes any great interest in our affairs.’ Living as I was in a town constantly agog at the depredations said to have been visited upon her foes by men loyal to Lady Rothiemay, I did not demur. She turned slightly to address me
once more. ‘I hear you are still regent at the Marischal College. Can no place be found for you at King’s?’
The lady was suspected of strong sympathies with Rome, and I judged it best not to mention to her my forthcoming call to the ministry. ‘I am content at Marischal, your Ladyship.’
‘I am sorry to hear it. I will get Dr Forbes to work upon you.’
I took this opportunity to turn the conversation away from myself. ‘Dr Forbes tells me your son does well in the schools.’
She softened further. ‘Aye, he does. And he is to bring him here to me tonight. Only God knows when he might see his mother again.’
‘I will pray that it might be soon.’
She inclined her head a little. ‘Thank you, Mr Seaton, but I begin to wonder if God listens to prayers when the name of Katharine Forbes is mentioned. And your own boy does well with Mr Wedderburn here?’