The Devil's Recruit (Alexander Seaton 4) Read online

  ‘I see.’ I knew what he said to be true.

  ‘And you see that one there?’

  ‘The man who scratches at his arm?’

  ‘Scabs, left by manacles,’ said Ormiston. ‘He has been out of the tolbooth three days – a minor offence, but he has lost his employment and the roof over his head. What should he do? Throw himself, able-bodied as he is, upon the charity of the good burgesses of this town? You know how that would end. They will both be aboard my ship by the end of the week.’ He refilled his own glass. ‘I offer a life to those who would run from what they have, or who have nothing at all.’

  ‘Hugh Gunn is only seventeen years old; his life is hardly behind him.’

  ‘That is the student we both so offended?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You are right, I had not expected to find one like him in here. He is in the other category, a younger son of a younger son, beholden to the good graces of his chieftain. That’s why I wanted him rather than his drink-sodden, whore-mongering friend. He will make a fine soldier, a good officer, one day.’

  I suspected he would be proved right, if the boy could learn to master his temper better. ‘And yet you let him go.’

  He sat back and smiled and I realised this was what he had been waiting for. ‘I did it as a favour to you, Mr Seaton.’

  ‘You don’t even know me.’

  He watched me a long moment. ‘Do not be so certain about what I know.’ Some movement at the top of the stair seemed to catch his eye. I looked up but could see nothing in the gloom. The lieutenant shifted slightly in his seat.

  ‘My past is old news in this burgh, lieutenant,’ I told him. ‘You’ll find there is little capital to be made of it now.’

  ‘Oh, I very much doubt that, Mr Seaton, but it is late already and I daresay you and I will meet again, and so further our acquaintance. For the meantime, I hope you will rest easy on the matter of Hugh Gunn – I will not be enticing him aboard my ship.’

  If he expected my thanks, he was disappointed. I gave him no answer at all, and was glad to get out of the place whose foul air was filling up my throat. The Frenchmen, I noticed, had already abandoned their bowls of inedible stew, and left the place before me.

  *

  The inn was on the edges of town, beyond Blackfriars where it met the Woolmanhill. It was a fitting night-time haunt for vagrants, criminals, those who did not want to be seen or found. My shortest route home would take me past the back of the fleshers’ yard, and I knew that the gutters there would be overflowing after the torrents of recent days. I had no wish to bring the smell of the charnel house with me to where my family slept, so I elected to take a longer route, one that would bring me past the near end of the loch and up by the old public garden that backed on to George Jamesone’s house.

  George had fulminated often against the dilapidation of the walls that allowed all sorts of the burgh’s displaced humanity to live out their debauches there in the night within hearing, and sometimes sight, of the back windows of his own fine residence. The garden where once plays profane and godly, music and dancing, trysts of love and childhood games had had their moments was now abandoned to tangles of thorns, feral creatures, and those who could find their pleasures in no lawful place. It was not somewhere any God-fearing person would wish to find themselves alone under cover of darkness. A happy Eden once, turned by the fears and prohibition of our Calvinist kirk into a den of ungovernable vice and iniquity.

  I had just passed the rusted gate that led from the overgrown gardens out on to the long vennel to Schoolhill when the sounds of a disturbance came to my ears. It was evidently coming from somewhere in the gardens – there were muffled shouts and cries, the sound of blows being exchanged. My first thought was of Hugh Gunn and Seoras MacKay – the place was a favoured short cut for scholars making their way back to the college in the hope of not being seen. I doubted that Peter Williamson, even in his haste to get to the warmth of his bed, would have taken the chance of cutting through here alone. Nevertheless, unsheathing my knife, I doubled back and entered the garden.

  I could have wished for a light for the moon was clouded over, and I had to trust to my senses and my memory. Rather than go right out to the middle of the gardens, I judged it safer to keep to the walls surrounding it until I came upon the old middle path that led to what had once been a stage. Formerly used by mummers and actors in the Mystery plays, the amphitheatre was now the favoured haunt of the sturdy beggars and masterless men who roamed this place by night. I strained to listen for noises that would give me better direction, but the sounds of the scuffle were becoming less frequent, and after two long, low cries they ceased completely. I should have turned for home then, but I was already regretting allowing Hugh to take Seoras back to the college alone – the boy in the state he had been in would be handful enough for two men, let alone one. And so I pressed on. The further into the garden I went, the deeper the darkness became, to the point that I knew to continue would be folly. I began to turn, thinking somehow to retrace my steps, when my foot struck the unseen root of a tree and I found myself tilting headlong towards the ground. I put out a hand to stop myself and felt my flesh tear on a low branch of hawthorn. Before I could wrestle my way out of it, a figure had launched itself at me from above and pressed me to the ground. I attempted to raise my head as surprisingly strong hands bound my wrists behind my back. My head was instantly thrust back towards the ground and I tasted dirt, then blood, from my own lower lip. My assailant told me in no uncertain terms that another such attempt would cost me an ear. For all the shock and discomfort of the moment, my overriding sensation was of incomprehension, for the voice was one I knew very well.

  2

  Tales of the Missing

  The principal regarded me with utter disbelief. ‘George Jamesone? George Jamesone did this to you?’ he said, circling me closely to inspect the swollen eye and cut lip to which my artist friend had treated me late the previous night. My head ached already, not much helped by a sleepless night occasioned by the discomfort of my injuries and the outraged amusement of my wife. Her words had prefigured Dr Dun’s almost exactly.

  ‘George Jamesone did this to you? I do not believe it. Why would George ever do this to you?’

  ‘Because,’ I had said, wincing as she helped me remove my torn and filthy coat, ‘he thought I was one of the ruffians who has been running rampage in his gardens recently, and the constables’ response being unsatisfactory he had decided to take the defence of his property into his own hands.’

  Even in her sleep, I could have sworn Sarah’s mouth twitched occasionally in amusement. This morning, however, I was anxious to get beyond the matter of my own misadventures because what I had to report to the principal made me very ill-at-ease.

  It was not the first time I had had to tell him that a student had failed to turn up for the morning lecture, or that on further enquiry it had been found that he had not been seen in the breakfasting hall, nor his bed slept in either. That on this occasion it should be two students rather than one made me less alarmed for their well-being, and yet Dr Dun took the news very badly.

  ‘You are certain of this, Alexander?’

  ‘The porter confirms that no one came in by the gate after Peter Williamson returned.’

  ‘And why, in God’s name, did Peter not check that they were back in their chamber before he retired to his own for the night?’

  There was little I could say to defend my colleague, only the truth. ‘Because I do not think he trusted himself to deal with Seoras MacKay as a regent should with a scholar. Peter wears his heart on his sleeve and that has made it too easy for Seoras to bait him. He mocks him for his lack of means – for Peter let slip one day that he would be away to study medicine if only the money could be got to support him. Seoras makes great play of the Williamsons’ supposed subservience to the MacKays.’

  ‘I did not know of this. Peter Williamson should not have to put up with such treatment from a student.’r />
  ‘No,’ I agreed. ‘Seoras shows his contempt for him at the best of times, but in drink he is thoroughly obnoxious, and he was last night. Had it not been for Hugh Gunn there would have been trouble in that inn, real trouble. I had planned to have them both up in front of you this morning.’ Though I knew I could speak freely with the principal, I hesitated. ‘To be honest, Patrick, I will not be sorry to see the back of Seoras; the deeper the trouble the better he likes it, and somehow, when all is laid bare, nothing redounds to him.’

  Dr Dun sighed. ‘Well, it is about to redound to us.’ He pushed towards me an opened letter which had been lying at his elbow when I first came in. The red wax of the seal attached showed a short sword clenched in a right hand, the words manu forti just legible beneath. It was not a crest I recognized. ‘What is this?’ I asked, picking it up, but unwilling to unfold so impressive-looking a document.

  ‘A communication that arrived yesterday afternoon, from Sir Donald MacKay of Strathnaver, Lord Reay.’

  ‘Seoras’s father?’

  ‘The same. He is good enough to inform me that he’ll be passing this way – his very words – with forty of his best Highlanders, en route for Dundee, at the end of this week. Not only will the town be obliged to entertain his Lordship and his men, but I strongly suspect he will be expecting us to produce his younger son.’

  Lord Reay’s name was known not only from here to his clan’s Highland heartland in Sutherland, but throughout the battlefields of Europe, where the regiment he had raised in defence of Protestantism against the depredations of the Papist Habsburgs had fought first for the Crown of Denmark, and then of Sweden. Thousands had followed his call to the defence of Elizabeth Stuart of Bohemia, sister of our own king, and all that she stood for. He was not a man who would take kindly to the mislaying of a son.

  ‘Not just a son, but a foster son also,’ the principal reminded me. I had forgotten that Hugh Gunn was more than just a servant to Seoras MacKay. ‘I have heard it from more than one quarter that MacKay has more affection for his foster son than for his own. If those boys haven’t turned up by the time he gets here, all Hell will be unleashed on the streets of this town.’

  *

  Hell seemed a place far distant when, little over half an hour later, I pushed open the rusting gate in the east wall of the old burgh gardens behind George Jamesone’s house. It was a cold, bright October day that showed the town at its best. In the garden, fallen leaves formed a soft carpet under my feet as I picked my way over old pathways between overgrown bushes, where much of the light was obscured by the dark branches of beech and chestnut overhead. Blackbirds and sparrows squabbled over treasures in the rowans and among the last of the brambles.

  I stifled an oath as I caught the sleeve of my coat on the thorny outcrop of an old rose. George had told me last night of his plans for the garden. The council, a few months since, alarmed by the outrages reported to have been committed in this place around the forbidden Midsummer bonfires, had allowed George’s petition that the gardens be granted to him for his personal use during his lifetime, to be gifted back to the burgh on his death. In the meantime, he would remake its walls, secure its gates and put right the drainage that saw the spa well of Woolmanhill turn the bottom corner of the field into a bog. He would also, though this formed no part of the magistrates’ stipulation, restore it to its former beauty. In the wake of many apologies on his part, I had promised him last night, after we had dusted ourselves down and parted, still laughing, at his street door, that I would call on him soon to see his plans. The disappearance of Seoras MacKay and Hugh Gunn had led me back to the garden earlier than I had intended, to search for signs of them there.

  In the cold brightness of the late morning it was a place quite different to the black tangle of thicket and broken wall that I had stumbled through last night. And yet, it retained the sense of a place not quite at peace with itself, a place that was not quite safe. After a few minutes and not a few more scratches, I was glad to come to a clearing in a hollow which I thought must be the arena of last night’s scuffle. And it was an arena: the grassy slope that descended from the Woolmanhill came to rest in a row of moss-covered stone benches that fringed what had once been a stage. I sat down for a moment, and tried to imagine the scenes that had been played out here, decades before I was born.

  Staring at the past would not help me find Seoras MacKay or Hugh Gunn. I got up from my stony seat and began to examine the ground of the stage area. It had been raining hard for two hours by the time Peter Williamson and I had made the final check of our rounds last night, at Downie’s Inn. By the time I had left, the rain had stopped, and as the night wore on, a hard frost gradually set in. It had never lifted, and sculpted into the mud were what looked to me to be the signs of a recent struggle: footprints at crazed angles to one another, an indentation where perhaps someone had fallen, a furrow in the hardened ground, as broad as a man’s back.

  As I bent down to examine the marks more closely, voices reached me from the path off to my left. I straightened myself and a moment later was greeted by Louis Rolland, the young master of the town’s French school, and two men it took me a moment to recognize as the Frenchmen who had been in Downie’s Inn the night before.

  As ever, Rolland was dressed in a blue coat of good quality, though worn now in places and starting to fray, and a frilled shirt which, while clean, was of similar vintage and a worsening state of repair. Like all the town’s schoolmasters, it was expected that he should maintain the appearance of a certain standard of living without having any adequate means of sustaining it. Unlike most of his fellow schoolmasters, Louis seldom grumbled at his lot, although I knew he had harboured hopes of something better. He had been a student of mine not so long ago, before leaving with his young sister to spend a year in his Huguenot mother’s homeland. The sight of me in the clearing surprised him.

  ‘Mr Seaton, do not tell me George Jamesone has you working in here too?’

  ‘No doubt he would have, had Sarah not made plain to him my ineptitude with a hoe.’

  ‘Ah,’ he smiled. ‘I see.’

  I glanced at the two men behind him, and Louis apologized. ‘Oh, yes – I should introduce to you George’s new gardeners: Guillaume Charpentier and Jean St Clair.’ Charpentier, a well-built, handsome man with fair hair and warm hazel eyes, smiled and nodded towards me. St Clair, small, dark, restless-looking, did not. ‘Guillaume here has a little English and a very little Scots; Jean none at all. For which you may be thankful,’ Louis added, under his breath.

  I raised an enquiring eyebrow, but he did not elaborate.

  ‘You are here to put right the garden, then?’ I asked the more genial of the two.

  He pushed out a bottom lip, considered my question. ‘We begin, only. But we begin.’

  ‘It will be no small task,’ said Louis. He waved an arm around us. ‘You can see the state of the place, but Jamesone would have it an arcadia by next spring, or summer at the very latest. How they will even break the ground with a shovel today is beyond me.’

  ‘We cut. Today we cut,’ said Charpentier, golden eyes crinkling in the sunshine as he brandished a lethal-looking axe.

  ‘Then I will not keep you any longer,’ I said.

  He dipped his head to me and to Rolland, before following after St Clair who, evidently bored by our encounter, was already striding away, axe twitching in his hand, towards an impenetrable-looking thicket by the north wall.

  ‘You study their conversation?’ I said to Rolland once the two men had disappeared from view.

  ‘Not quite that. George Jamesone’s own French is passable enough, but does not extend to matters horticultural, and so I, and sometimes Christiane, am called upon to translate. To tell the truth, I suspect much of our work will involve explaining to George, as diplomatically as we can, why much of what he wants done cannot be done. Why other ideas would be better.’

  I laughed. ‘I do not envy you the task. I hope he is paying you, Louis.’<
br />
  ‘Very well. And we have Guillaume and Jean lodged with us too. It is more comfortable for them, I think, and Guillaume’s conversation has enlivened our evenings. I suspect, in fact, that Christiane may be a little smitten with him.’

  ‘A strong arm, a ready smile and a twinkling eye – it would be a wonder if a young girl like your sister was not. And I doubt he finds his companion any great rival for her affections.’

  ‘Nor mine, either. I have seldom come across such a taciturn, sullen fellow. There’s scarcely a word to be had out of him. But Guillaume says he is a worker, and knows his plants, so if George Jamesone is prepared to pay for him I must be prepared to put up with him.’

  A thought struck me. ‘Have you been all round the garden with them today?’

  Louis sighed and indicated his muddied shoes and spattered stockings. ‘A great deal more of it than I could have wished. Guillaume has been making notes of what will need to be cut down, or back, and what can be kept. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Because I am here in search of two students of mine who have not been seen since they left Downie’s Inn last night. I think they might have cut through here on their way back to the college and fallen to fighting among themselves, or been set upon. I had been half-hoping they would be discovered, insensible, in the bushes.’

  Rolland shook his head apologetically. ‘I have seen no one, I am afraid. Who are they?’

  When I told him it was Seoras MacKay and Hugh Gunn who were missing his expression changed from interest to real concern. ‘Seoras and Hugh? No.’

  ‘You know them?’

  ‘They are both private pupils of mine, have been these past months. It was only yesterday afternoon that I had a lesson …’ The bell of St Nicholas began to toll the hour and Louis muttered something in French. ‘I am sorry, Mr Seaton, I have some pupils due at twelve and it looks like I am already late. But we must talk of this further. Will you send word when they are found?’