‘Primroses,’ he said. ‘Autumn primroses. In the midst of decay they come to life and brighten the desolate garden.’
‘You told me I must learn to know the difference between what is dormant and what is dead. Do you remember?’
He nodded. ‘I remember.’
‘Well I have learned it now. Too late.’
After George, they persuaded me to sleep a while. There was more food in front of me when I woke, darkness encroaching on the town. I managed to eat a little. And William, whose eyes were dark hollows and who looked as if he had not slept in two days, and probably had not, at last went home.
It was an hour or so later – I may have been dozing, for
Jaffray seemed to ply me with nameless concoctions every time I opened my eyes – that there was a quiet tap at the door. The doctor gave a sigh of mild impatience and muttered that it was over late for visitors, but he went to the door all the same. The voice I heard was something familiar to me, although I could not quite place it. After admonishing him to stay no more than ten minutes, Jaffray stepped aside to allow the caller in. If I had taken a moment to recognise his voice it would have taken me longer to know the man himself. Fresh-shaven and clear-eyed, his hair cut and his sober suit of dark clothing clean and pressed, John Leslie stepped into the kitchen something like the image of the new young minister I remembered from eight years ago, and some distance from the husk of a man William and I had found at St Fittick’s Kirk only a week earlier. He walked straighter, and he had begun to lose the look of a man haunted.
I got up to take his offered hand. ‘The world has turned with us, John,’ I said.
‘And I grieve with you for it.’
I felt unsteady and sat down again. ‘But I am glad to see you well, again.’
He nodded. ‘I feel God’s forgiveness, Alexander. What our brethren on the presbytery will say, I have yet to learn. But I have my Father’s forgiveness and that is enough.’
He sat, awkward a moment, and I began to think he had not just come here to console with me. ‘What is it, John?’ I asked eventually.
He glanced at Jaffray, who was busy at the table, writing, but who I knew would be following every word.
‘You may speak freely in front of the doctor,’ I said.
‘Indeed,’ agreed Jaffray, ‘for I am as deaf as a post.’
John Leslie smiled hesitantly, and then began. ‘I would not have disturbed you, Alexander. I would never have intruded. I wanted to see William Cargill, but he has been called up to the tolbooth – there is much legal business to be set in hand with the shipwreck.’
‘The boy should be at home in his bed,’ muttered Jaffray.
‘That was his wife’s opinion too. I went up to the tolbooth, but I couldn’t get near the advocates, there is such a press of people. And so, I’ve come to you.’
I had hardly the energy to listen to him, but I waited while he sought the best means of continuing. ‘You see, I think you believed me, did you not? You and William Cargill – you knew it wasn’t drink or witchcraft, what I saw.’
‘Yes, we believed you. Although you said many foolish things before your session.’
‘I know it, I know. That’s why I cannot go to any of them.’
I leaned forward a little, as if being closer I might understand him better.
‘You see, a body was washed up at Nigg Bay.’
I sank back in my chair. ‘John, there are bodies lying all along the coast, they tell me. There will be bodies washed up for days to come.’
‘No, but you see, there should not be any at Nigg. The tides – the tides were wrong. There is only one. This one, and …’
Just then, there was a rap on the door, louder and more confident than that of the minister had been.
‘For the love of God!’ fumed Jaffray, stomping over to the door and pulling it back with little ceremony. Words were spoken and Jaffray’s frustration grew. ‘I cannot understand you, man.’ He opened the door wider. ‘Alexander, do you know this boy? I cannot make out a word he says.’ Standing there, in the darkened yard, was Hugh Gunn, one of MacKay’s men at his side.
‘Uisdean,’ I said, speaking to him in Gaelic now out of habit. He was even more the Highland soldier now than he had been when I had last seen him at his vigil in St Ninian’s Chapel four days ago. The colour had returned to his cheeks and the terrible gauntness was gone. He stood more upright and no longer looked like one in need of the support of others. All trace of the young scholar was gone, and it was difficult now to picture him in the cap and gown of our college. He was again the favoured foster son of a Highland chief, and he was ready for war.
‘You are leaving us,’ I said.
‘Aye,’ he replied. ‘Tomorrow I march south with the others for Dundee. We take ship for Sir John Hepburn’s regiment in France.’
‘May God go with you.’
I was turning to introduce him to Jaffray and John Leslie,
and to explain the matter of his speech, when I saw the minister of St Fittick’s rise from his seat with an expression of dawning horror on his face. Hugh saw it too and took an involuntary step backwards.
‘I … I am sorry,’ he said, ‘I didn’t mean to disturb you.’
‘It’s all right,’ I said, still looking at John Leslie. ‘It is no disturbance.’
But John Leslie’s balance had gone and he was stumbling back down into his chair. ‘The tongues,’ he said, staring at Hugh. ‘You speak in the tongues.’
And then I knew. I heard again what he had said to us in that day of ranting and delusion in the kirkyard by Nigg Bay.
‘Dear God,’ I said, also staring at Hugh. ‘It was not a woman at all.’
Jaffray had ranted and raved, but when he saw that I would not settle otherwise, he had at last consented to it, on condition that a horse would be made ready to take me from the ferry landing to the kirk. The crossing was made at first light, Lord Reay’s men rowing in silence across water as still as a mirror, that only three days ago had been a monster of unanswerable fury.
The church was cold and still, the sea outside coming so quietly to shore, as if it feared to wake him. But there would be no waking Seoras MacKay now. They had laid him on a trestle before the altar, and covered him with the best mortcloth they could find. The session clerk nodded respectfully to his minister as John Leslie led us slowly up the aisle of St Fittick’s Kirk. The clerk made as if to lift the cloth, but with the merest nod Ossian stayed him and, gently, did the job himself. There was no drawing in of breath, no shock: we had all known it would be him – there was no need to turn to Lord Reay and look for confirmation that it was his son who lay there dead before us.
Ossian folded back the rest of the cloth and placed it aside, to reveal to us what the sea had washed clean.
The low sun of the winter morning found its way through the thick glass of the kirk window and lighted on the dead boy’s face. Lord Reay put out his hand and stroked his son’s cheek. ‘You are cold, my boy, so cold.’ I saw the desolation in the old soldier’s eye and I looked away. I could not face the grief of another. A groan, more than a groan, a great sob wrenched from somewhere deep within him came from Hugh Gunn’s throat and he went down on his knees beside the body of his friend. ‘Seoras, I never meant to leave you.’
MacKay took hold of the boy’s shoulder and held it firm. ‘You never would have done. Do not blame yourself for what you could not help.’ His face was grim. ‘And I was the fool that trailed round that ship after Ormiston, Seoras hidden there all that time.’
I knew he must be wrong, but it was Ossian who said it. ‘I don’t think he was ever on that boat, your Lordship.’
‘What do you mean?’
Ossian murmured something to Jaffray and Jaffray nodded. ‘I have seen many men drowned and Seoras did not drown.’
I looked down at the face of the boy I had last seen two weeks since; there could be no doubt of it, and Lord Reay must have known it too, for the body was not bloated, neither eyes nor flesh harvested by creatures of the sea.
They had found him on rocks at the foot of the Girdle
Ness, at the extreme north edge of the bay, where the waves rarely reached.
Jaffray spoke gently. ‘I think he must have lain dead there some time, his body preserved in the frost, before the storm of Friday night brought the sea crashing up onto the land. He had been beaten, and soaked and frozen, but he did not drown.’
To my surprise, John Leslie leaned forward and carefully pulled the hair back from Seoras’ neck. ‘No, he did not drown,’ he said, his voice dull. ‘He was hanged.’ And indeed the marks of the rope by which Seoras MacKay had been hanged from the tree in St Fittick’s kirkyard were still there plain for us all to see. Leslie let the hair fall back and touched for a moment the sodden and torn plaid that covered Seoras’ thighs. He almost whispered to himself, ‘And I thought it was a woman in her skirts.’ He turned suddenly to Hugh, who was staring now at him, his face contorted in an effort to understand. ‘Don’t you remember, boy? You must remember.’
Hugh started to mouth something, but stopped, the words still eluding him.
Leslie was determined, the old, half-mad look back in his eye. ‘You
must
remember. Come, see.’ He put a hand round Hugh’s arm and pulled him up from the floor. Ossian made to stop him, but Lord Reay held him back. ‘Wait,’ he said, as Leslie took the stumbling Hugh down the aisle with him towards the church door. Jaffray and I went after them, and as soon as I saw what Leslie was pointing at, I began to understand.
‘The branks, boy, the branks,’ he kept repeating, desperate almost. ‘Don’t you remember?’
And as Hugh looked at the iron head-piece, chained to the wall by the kirk door, I saw that he too began to understand, or at least to remember. He reached out a hand towards the contraption, but pulled the hand back without touching, as if fearful of being burned or bitten. Then he brought his hand up to his own face, worked his own jaw until he got to the mouth. He swallowed uncomfortably, tested his tongue with his teeth, as if there were no place for it to settle in his mouth.
The branks. They had chained Hugh to the wall, fitted the iron guard over his head and clamped his tongue with the iron gag used to punish scolds and gossips, to punish those who talked when they should not. To silence him. When John Leslie, in his drink, had heard Seoras MacKay call out in terror in his native tongue as Ormiston’s men set a noose around his neck, when he had heard Seoras’ strangled cries as the horse to whom the rope, slung round the branch of the tree, was tied, had been whipped and goaded into a panicked canter, Hugh Gunn had been forced to watch all in helpless silence.
Hugh looked from the branks, to John Leslie, to the tree. He spoke in Scots for the first time in two weeks. ‘It was you. You came from the church.’
John Leslie nodded. ‘May God forgive me, for I did not know what it was I saw.’
‘What happened when the minister came from the church?’ I asked Hugh.
He narrowed his eyes, remembering more now. ‘He was screaming. I’d seen him and they had not, but then they heard him. He turned and ran back into the church, and before they went in after him, they began to shout amongst themselves about what they should do. Eventually, they cut Seoras down and they carried his body somewhere over there.’ He pointed in the direction of Jessie Goudie’s grave. ‘Some ran into the church after the minister but they couldn’t find him. They argued a minute about what to do with me: some were for killing me too, but another said no, that it had only been Seoras the lieutenant had wanted dead – I was to be freed. And then they broke open that thing,’ he indicated the branks, ‘and dragged me away with them. I remember nothing else until I was found back in the town.’
Lord Reay was at an utter loss. ‘But Seoras? Why in God’s name did Ormiston want Seoras dead?’
The words of Isabella Irvine came back to me. ‘His wounds will not heal until he has avenged his brother’s death.’ I spoke to Lord Reay, but could not lift my eyes to look at him. ‘Because he was your son, and I had told him that very night that he was your son.’
If I could have returned to that night two weeks ago, and been put in the branks myself, lost the use of my tongue before I could have told the lieutenant that, I would have thanked God for it. I remembered now, and I could have
ripped my own tongue out. I remembered how ready Ormiston had been to have the signature of Hugh Gunn, until I had warned the boy what Seoras’s father in Strathnaver might do.
‘What difference should it make, that Seoras was my son?’
I was not yet fit to stand so long, and Jaffray insisted we go back inside the church, that I might sit. Our breath in the cold air was in front of our faces. It seemed a long way, a different world, from the heat and the filth and the smell of that inn, and yet the simple trestle table in this ancient church was where Seoras MacKay’s evening there had led him to.
And Lady Rothiemay, who must have heard the true tale of Ormiston’s brother’s death from Isabella, had suspected it, because she, unlike the rest of us, could truly understand it. ‘Vengeance,’ I said. ‘Since Stralsund, the lieutenant had lived and fought for only one thing: vengeance.’
MacKay did not understand. ‘But I was not at Stralsund. I should have been, but I was held up with the raising of new recruits in Scotland. Good God, we spoke about it at dinner, aboard Ormiston’s ship, that things would have been managed differently had I been there. I told him so myself.’
‘And that is it, exactly. If you had been at Stralsund, his brother would not have died.’
Still MacKay did not follow. ‘Men die in battle. Ormiston is a soldier. He knows that.’
‘He also knows that not all men are condemned to be
hanged by their own commander for asking for a roof over their heads.’
And then at last I saw the truth begin to dawn on Lord Reay. ‘Oh, dear God … do not tell me Ormiston’s brother was one of those …’
I nodded my head in affirmation. ‘Duncan Ormiston was eighteen years old when he was hanged with two of his comrades, on the instructions of the Dane who held command in your stead, for asking a bed for the night from the burgermeister of the city of Stralsund. The lieutenant has never forgiven it, and has dedicated his life since to avenging his brother’s death.’ I looked to the boy lying cold and motionless in front of us. ‘Seoras is his vengeance.’